Sudden Death Read online

  The present director was Wilhelm Friedekinde, the founder's son. He was a graduate of USC, MIT and Harvard Medical School. Under his leadership, the work of the foundation was now directed more toward a scientific search for the underlying causes of delusions, persecution mania and hysteric amnesia.

  Clinical experiments were monitored under the supervision of Professor Otto Schloesser; laboratory work was headed by Dr. Paul Hansen.

  Bolan took notes, committed them to memory, tore up the paper he had used and fed the pieces into a waste disposal bin.

  He had looked up the meaning of the French word sigle.

  The dictionary gave the meaning "abbreviation."

  Okay. Three Fs were an abbreviation of the clinic's full title — although, not making a pronounceable word such as UNO or NATO or SALT, they could hardly qualify as an acronym. But there was certainly a logo or trademark, as Fawzi had said. The medical directory reproduced it.

  The symbol was in fact a monogram — three overlapping capital Fs arranged clockwise, one after the other, in a circle.

  The whole device bore a curious resemblance to a swastika with six arms instead of four.

  Bolan stared at the printed page.

  You'd have to be crafty, but if you could get around Friedekinde…

  Those words, Wally Boardman's suggestion for an approach to identify the men behind the new terrorism, had been almost his last.

  What had he said after that?

  The quote about "the old triple-F."

  After all, it was from their work, their labo…

  And the sentence had died in his throat as the gunmen had opened fire.

  Was the word going to be… laboratory, not labor?

  He returned the reference books and decided to go to the Val de Ruz, near Neuchatel, in Switzerland.

  14

  The route passed via the information room of the American embassy and Hal Brognola. Bolan chained Fawzi Harari's Honda scooter to the railings surrounding the courtyard, joined the trickle of tourists filing in from the Place de la Concorde, the Rue Royale and the tree-shaded length of the Champs Elysees and told the uniformed U.S. marine at the top of the steps that he had an appointment with Colonel Pforzheimer.

  This coded request, used by field agents from all the U.S. intelligence services, got him past the security checks at the entrance and the reception desk in the embassy lobby and up the gracious curving stairway to a plainclothes Fed installed behind a smaller desk on the mezzanine. The man was trying hard to look like a minor diplomatic official.

  The fictitious colonel's rank changed each month: when he had made major general, he was demoted to lieutenant and started over. Just like in real life, Bolan reflected wryly as he asked the Fed the second, failsafe question, in a different code, that would oblige the embassy cypher section to put out an all-countries emergency call for Brognola to call in.

  Luckily the presidential liaison was in Rome, attending an antiterrorist seminar called by Interpol chiefs in the wake of the latest wave of assassinations. He could be in Paris within three hours.

  Bolan waited impatiently in a small anteroom that looked out over the Avenue Gabriel. Half a mile away, beyond the summer crowds strolling under the chestnut and plane trees in the Tuileries gardens, beyond the neoclassical facades of the Louvre, wreckers and salvage crews were still sweating to extricate the bodies of victims from the bombed department stores. The death roll had now risen to thirty-one.

  * * *

  Hal Brognola looked harassed. His white seersucker suit was more creased than usual, his hair mussed, the cigar jutting from his grim features unlit. In one hand he held a strip of paper torn from a teletype machine. When Bolan had reported on the mission so far, he handed it over without a word. Bolan read:

  FLASH

  COPENHAGEN, THURSDAY (AP) — TERRORIST BOMB EXPLODED EARLY TODAY IN UNDERGROUND GARAGE ERIKSSON DEPT STORE NEAR TIVOLI GARDENS COLLAPSING STREET-LEVEL SALES FLOOR INTO FIRE STARTED AMONG PARKED AUTOS CASUALTIES FEARED HEAVY MORE LATER.

  "More later!" Brognola quoted, tapping the wire service's sign-off slug with a furious forefinger. "How many more, for crying out loud. How much later? Striker, this has to stop."

  "It will," the Executioner promised grimly. "But it will take time. You know that."

  "Sure, I know it. But how much time do we have until the panic spreads? Last night, a couple of hours after the bomb down the road was detonated, a perfectly innocent Algerian laborer was beaten to death in the Place de la Bastille — just because he had Arab features. How much time do we have before the whole damned continent goes up in flames?"

  Bolan spread his arms and sighed. He made no reply.

  Brognola continued, "Word is that this latest terror wave is the work of dissident extremist splinter groups — the same unrelated groups bugging us for the past five years. The story comes with the rumor that, this time, they're getting no help from Ivan. According to the latest intel from Stony Man, the first part just isn't true."

  Bolan nodded. "I know it," he said.

  "The Company penetrated the so-called Red Army Faction in West Germany," Brognola said. "Their man was blown. His body was found in a suburban gutter in Munich last night. A hit-and-run accident, they said." He snorted his disbelief. "But he got through a final message before they wasted him. He said neither the RAF nor the French Action Directe fanatics they're in cahoots with had anything to do with the latest hits. He said they had specifically been warned to lay off. He said Abyll Abu Hamad's Palestine Liberation Front had been given similar orders. And we know ourselves that the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction has been inoperative since the head man, George Abdallah, was jailed by the French. There's no evidence that the IRA, the Armenians, the Basques or the Corsicans are involved."

  "I know all that," Bolan said. "You told me. They're using pros, working to a definite plan. And whoever the guys giving the orders are, they're big."

  "Tell me something I don't know," the Fed grunted. "But they've got to be identified, tracked down. Terminated, as the boys say, with extreme prejudice before any more damage is done."

  He crumpled the teletype message into a ball and tossed it into a wastebasket. "And no crap about public trials with smart-ass lawyers to get them off. No prison sentences that will trigger another set of skyjacks with their buddies bargaining innocent lives as hostages against their release. Politico-diplomatic expedience, cynical self-interest and plain rule-book inefficiency has stopped the governments of our world from cleaning up this garbage," Brognola shouted. "Now it's up to you to do it for them. You got me?"

  "Uh-huh," Bolan said gently.

  "I'm sorry, Striker." Calming down, the big Fed became contrite. "This thing is getting me down. Now… I guess you're in need of help. So tell me why I just left a good lunch and flew eleven hundred kilometers in an uncomfortable army jet, okay?"

  "Intel," the Executioner said. "Friedekinde, Wilhelm, an Austrian national living near Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Anything known. Ditto the Friedekinde Foundation clinic. Nasruddin, Max, nationality unknown. Cool and ruthless, rotten through and through. Seems to be some kind of organizer. A pro contract man known as the Marksman. Schloesser, Otto, and Hansen, Paul, both doctors in Switzerland. Anything and everything on all of them."

  "You'll have it," Brognola said. "We'll go down to the cypher room now and borrow a satellite."

  In the long basement corridor, they passed a stiff-backed man of about fifty with gray hair and a clipped mustache. He was wearing a chalk-striped worsted suit with a Brooks Brothers necktie and a button-down shirt.

  The hand he raised in answer to Brognola's greeting was barely high enough to be polite, and the glance he shot at Bolan was positively resentful. Neither his eyes nor his mouth smiled.

  "Assistant military attaché," Brognola explained. He grinned. "They hate us here. Free-lancers and wildcat individualists decidedly unwelcome. For them, anything that isn't Company business, fed through the Paris resident, is practic
ally a violation of the Constitution."

  "Tough," Bolan said. "Well… if I fall down on the job, I can always plead the Fifth Amendment!"

  "Don't even think it, guy!" Brognola said.

  The Stony Man computer complex wasn't able to offer much. The check run on Friedekinde and his clinic via the linked CIA-FBI-NSC-Interpol data banks came up with nothing. The two Swiss doctors were clean also.

  Max Nasruddin was Lebanese. Twice jailed for falsification of documents and attempts to defraud the government. He had been commandant of the terrorist training camp at Barandak, near Teheran; technical advisor at the guerrilla camp of Fakilabad, near Meched, where two captured Boeings, a 707 and a 727, were used to "educate" future hijackers in the niceties of piracy in the air; and chief lecturer at Mandharia, where Islamic children were indoctrinated, from the age of eight years, in the use of modern arms and explosives against the infidel.

  Supplementary intel concerned conflicting underworld rumors about the killers of Sean Riordan, Alonzo and the Swiss diplomat. A final addition to the coded signal read:

  These are considered small-timers compared with the hit man code-named Baraka, who is supposed to be under wraps until some spectacular (but unspecified) outrage planned for later this month. Will advise if supplementary material feeds in. Warning meanwhile: this man is reputed to be deadly, repeat deadly dangerous.

  Bolan sighed. "So, Baraka again," he said. "I have to flush out this character, that's for sure. I have a hunch that if I find him, the whole deal will disintegrate."

  "Let's hope you're right," Brognola said. "Where do you aim to start, now that the Graziano thing has burned out?"

  "This clinic. I know it's zero-rated by the Stony Man analysts, but it's the only lead I have. Boardman seemed to figure it as the key. The girl knew about it. And if she knew from her cousins, then it has to be connected in some way."

  "Okay, Striker. You're in the driving seat. Is there anything I can do?"

  "Yeah," Bolan said. "Could be the local law has a warrant out for me in connection with Graziano. This creep Nasruddin certainly implied that the whole setup was faked with that in mind. So I want to get out of town — and into Switzerland — unseen."

  "I don't think I have the power to ask the police…"

  "I don't mean that. I want you to get me some clothes, a shirt, the nearest thing you can find to my combat blacksuit — a one-piecer in black, covering me from wrist to shoulder and neck to ankle in lightweight cling material. And black sneakers. And a biker's crash helmet — in black also."

  "The rest was window dressing, wasn't it?" Brognola growled. "You knew damned well there'd be no additional hard news on those bums. You had me come all the way here from Rome just to do your shopping, right?"

  He punched Brognola on the shoulder. "Don't be sore, Hal. It may sound like a chicken-feed operation to you, but these few things could get me out of trouble, and you're the only guy I can trust to do it in secret, and remain silent afterward. Like I need your help, see. Isn't that what 'liaison' means?"

  "I still don't see what good they'll do you," the Fed complained one hour later when he returned with the stuff the Executioner ordered.

  Bolan held up his black sweater. "I'll use this to hide the hardware," he said. "As for the rest — what could be more anonymous, more difficult to identify during the summer vacation, than a guy riding two hundred and fifty miles on a scooter with his face hidden by a regulation crash helmet and visor?"

  15

  Each time there was a revolution or a change in the system of government during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many French aristocrats and rich bourgeois families would flee across the border into Switzerland, together with their gold and jewels. It wasn't surprising, then, that Neuchâtel was said to be more French than any town in France.

  Certainly, Mack Bolan thought, as he navigated the crowded city center on the Honda scooter after his long and exhausting ride, the atmosphere of the place was more Gallic than Swiss.

  There were no Alps near Neuchatel. It lay at the northern tip of a narrow twenty-mile-long lake, with rolling pastureland on one side and the wooded crests of the Jura Mountains on the other.

  Lanes twisting between the tall medieval houses around the twelfth-century château were redolent of the smells Bolan always associated with France — rich, gamy odors, the savory aromas of cooking done in wine, the sugary warmth issuing from pastry shops, the hint of coffee and the acrid tang of black tobacco.

  There was a waterfront with a wooden-decked jetty from which the lake steamers took aboard passengers for Colombier, Concise and Yverdon. Was it here, in this quiet country town, that the destruction of Europe's social order was being planned?

  The Friedekinde clinic, Bolan discovered, sipping a beer beneath a striped umbrella at the pierhead café, was well-known. It was two or three miles out of town, the waiter told him, on the road that led north to the village of Valangin.

  It was a restful location for the mentally disturbed, the Executioner thought, riding past the place a half hour later — wildflowers by the roadside, cattle browsing knee-deep in meadows, the summer sun gleaming on a distant triangle of lake water glimpsed through a gap in the trees.

  Old man Friedekinde must have been loaded, too, he thought. The ten-foot brick wall topped with broken glass enclosed between twenty-five and thirty acres of woodland and park.

  There was a stone gatehouse flanked by tall, gold-tipped iron gates with the triple-F motif worked into the scrollwork. Beyond them, the entrance driveway curled off between dense cypress hedges, hiding the house.

  The waiter, happy to linger gossiping on the sunny quayside, had told Bolan that it was modeled on a Moorish-Venetian palazzo built on Cap Ferrat for Beatrice de Rothschild in 1905. He had never seen it himself, but deliverymen said it was a real crazy pad.

  They were dead right. From the fork of a lime tree on the far side of the country road, Bolan was able to focus his binoculars on the clinic and the formal gardens surrounding it. He saw a symmetrical two-story facade in terracotta stucco, with white sandstone facings and two wings enclosing a center section pierced by Moorish arches on slender pillars. The shallow, shingled roof was surmounted by a white balustrade.

  At right angles to the wide terrace in back, a hundred-foot rectangular ornamental pond led between rows of tropical shrubs to a domed pavilion. Fountains played at ten-foot intervals down the center of the waterway, which was dotted with islands of lotus in bloom, lending the place the air of a Mediterranean Taj Mahal.

  There was a stable block in back, and beyond its clock tower, Bolan could see the slanted glass roofs of workshops and laboratories.

  Very interesting.

  A sanctuary for the insane rich or a front for terrorists?

  The problem was to decide on an approach, a way of getting in there to find out. Bolan wondered whether he should use a direct tack, posing as a newspaperman hoping to do a photo story on the place. Or perhaps a ruse, pretending to be a fellow medic in search of technical information on their discoveries.

  The other route, of course, would be illegal entry, with the hope that he could stay undetected long enough to unearth some intel that would give him a lead, one that would help, in Boardman's words, "to get around Friedekinde."

  The big question was: did Friedekinde himself know of the terrorist conspiracy or was he in some way an unwitting accomplice? Assuming that the conspiracy and the clinic were related.

  There was no way he could answer the question, Bolan decided, before he had a chance to find out more about the clinic and the way it worked, and before he had a chance to check on the Foundation's director and make up his own mind about the kind of man he was.

  Because there was always a possibility — faint but not to be ignored — that he was the victim of a chain of coincidences, that Boardman had been mistaken, that Fawzi Harari had known of the place in a different context, that the clinic, in fact, was no more and no less than what it prete
nded to be.

  A soft probe, then.

  So it was frontal approach, negative. If the personnel really were innocent, how could he be sure the front wasn't just a cover-up to hide guilt? Equally, if they were guilty… well, they would feign innocence, and they would be forewarned that Bolan was on their track.

  He decided on a covert entry.

  He scanned the house, the gardens, the surrounding park, as closely as he could. No sign of dogs.

  Focusing the high-powered field glasses minutely, he examined the ground, concentrating on the spaces between stonework and shrubs, between a yew hedge and a line of statues at one side of the pond. He couldn't see any signs of trip wires, video scanners or the short posts on which sensors were customarily installed. That didn't mean there weren't any, but it was an indication.

  He climbed back to the ground, remounted the scooter and rode around the property. The lane bounded two sides of the area; the remainder of the circuit was rough ground, through the woods that stretched back along the Val de Ruz to the Jura foothills and the fourteen-hundred-foot peak of the Tête de Ran.

  Scaling the wall, with its razor-sharp shards of glass embedded along the top, was no sweat for a man of the Executioner's experience and agility, especially if there were no snarling Dobermans or German shepherds on the far side.

  He made it just after dusk, in the most likely — and therefore unexpected — place, fifty yards from the entrance gates, figuring that the sections of wall that ran through the wood were more likely to be closely watched, especially since there was no rear entrance to the stable block.