Terror Ballot Read online

  “It doesn’t matter. Come on. You and I have a long way to go, and I’m going to have to bandage that leg so you don’t bleed out.”

  “For what purpose?” the terrorist demanded. “So you can leave me in the hands of the police? I will not accept this. You can leave me here to die.”

  “Not a chance,” Bolan said. He reached down, grabbed the man by the collar of his fatigues and yanked him upright. The terrorist got his good leg under himself and glared at Bolan.

  “Don’t,” Bolan warned.

  The terrorist’s arms snapped up. He wrapped his fingers around Bolan’s throat and started to squeeze. It was a desperation play, the kind of thing a man attempted when he left rational thought behind and was operating entirely on emotion. The soldier turned, slashed down with his left arm, then brought his forearm down across the man’s elbow joints, breaking his grip. The terrorist flailed and tried to stick his fingers in Bolan’s eye sockets.

  Bolan speared him in the hollow of this throat with two fingers. Hard.

  Choking, the man went down on his back. His hand snaked into his pants, above his crotch. Bolan realized then what he was going for. A weapon hidden next to his groin, where Bolan’s cursory pat-down had failed to detect it.

  The switchblade that appeared in the man’s hand looked rusty and ill-used, but the blade that snapped open was glittery sharp.

  Bolan stomped the man’s neck.

  The effect was immediate. The unrepentant terrorist went limp. The switchblade fell from nerveless fingers. Bolan knelt and, despite his distaste, picked up the weapon, folded it and put it in his pocket. He turned. He would need to search the house, find any weapons left behind.

  While he could pass for a civilian moving through the French countryside, he was unlikely to stay off the radar for long with no adequate means to defend himself. His wallet full of European cash had been taken along with his other things confiscated. He had no phone and thus no means to call the Farm.

  The sound of French police horns caught his attention and, suddenly, Bolan realized his day had gone from bad to worse.

  French police were moving in on the house, their guns drawn, the lights atop their patrol cars bright and spinning. Bolan hit the dirt, hoping that, prone, he could escape detection. They seemed to take no notice of him. He waited a few minutes to make sure and, when the balance of the officers were inside Tessier’s house, he crawled off in the direction of the next property.

  Tessier was probably not classifiable as an innocent, but he was dead just the same. There were so many people who had died thanks to the machinations of Gaston and Levesque. Their plot had been a clever one, a complex one, and Bolan had not seen through all of it immediately. He did not fault himself for that. He was, after all, a soldier, not a detective, and his methods were direct more often than not. But as always, he had come to the truth of it.

  And now the men behind so many deaths would pay.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Outside Marseille

  “‘I’ll find you, Levesque.’ Those were his last words to me.” The terrorist leader looked up at the lovely young woman in the impossibly small string bikini. She was dark and lovely and had a necklace of tiny purple flowers wreathed in her hair. Her eyes were green and striking.

  “Americans and their bravado,” Gaston said. He grinned through perfectly capped teeth. “They never seem to tire of it. I am looking forward to making their President bow and scrape and apologize to me for their lack of discretion on French soil.

  “The fool will be thinking the whole time that he is simply following the prescribed forms of bureaucracy and diplomacy. He will believe that I am the man he wishes in power. A tractable, useful idiot whom he can push around. It will be such a surprise to him the next time France denies American warplanes travel through French airspace.”

  Levesque picked out an enormous cigar from the humidor sitting next to him. The patio chairs, padded for comfort, and the woven-topped tables separating them, were of imported rattan. The pool around which the furniture was arranged was not quite Olympic size, but it was suitable enough.

  The pool area was full of people, many of them business associates of Gaston’s. Quite a few of those were French underworld figures. The rest were some of the loveliest prostitutes the city of Paris and its most exclusive brothels had to offer.

  Gaston had spared no expense to make this unofficial party—the celebration of his now-assured victory in the elections over Deparmond—a success with the people who would join him in his march to power. He had carefully chosen his networks; now he was rewarding those fortunate enough and shrewd enough to find themselves within these webs.

  He saw them as that, too. They were not interconnections among individuals, but a spiderweb of influence, with himself, the “spider,” at its center. The slightest tug on any of the lines radiating outward and Gaston would sense it, could react to it, could control it.

  After all, was that not power?

  Was that not the point of power?

  And was not the further point of power the way it erased the distinctions between the elite and the base, the criminal and the enforcer, the haves and the... Well, the “haves” would always have the advantage.

  He smiled and, as one of the prostitutes passed by in a bathing suit as skimpy as the one on the young woman Levesque had been admiring, Gaston reached out and groped her, lingering with his hand on her body, knowing that she and any with her were his for the taking.

  Paris was one of the most famous and admired cities of the modern world. It had stood for more than two thousand years and was a glittering jewel among the cities of Europe. Known for its contributions to the arts, to education, Paris had been unrivaled in the west until the eighteenth century. Currently the Paris metropolitan area was home to more than twelve million people.

  Into such opulence, such history, Henri Gaston had been born to one of the oldest and most profitable chemical dynasties in the country. Gaston Produits Chimiques was a multimillion-dollar corporation, with cumulative assets closer to half a billion U.S. dollars. The fact that he knew the USD figure for it still galled Gaston, but he knew the worm was turning.

  American domination of the world’s economy was weakening, and it would continue to grow weaker, if he had his way. If he had a new, powerful, aggressive France under his rule, under his thumb.

  If Paris was proud, France itself was prouder. But its power had been significantly diminished over the past three centuries. Once a world power, it was now that in name only, largely thought of as a joke by the Americans and other Western nations.

  Yet Gaston knew that those nations were themselves losing their strength. Years of flagging global economies had taken their toll on all nations concerned, and even the Chinese, seemingly unstoppable on the world stage, were feeling the pressure and deploying various economic acrobatics to combat the downward trend.

  None of that would matter if Gaston had his way.

  He had made certain the drugs and the women flowed freely at this gathering. All guests had been screened thoroughly for listening devices and recording equipment. Phones and cameras were strictly forbidden. There would be no embarrassing footage recorded here, nothing that could be used to blackmail or to harm politically the futures of Gaston or any of his guests.

  And such guests they were! Within the sprawling estate that was his family’s birthright, he counted local law enforcement officials, labor union figures, members of the Parisian criminal syndicates and the bosses of several of Paris’s most feared street gangs.

  Men—who would lunge across a table or a room without hesitation, desperate to wrap their fingers around the neck of a hated foe—became suddenly docile when told that all around them were here to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, to indulge in chemical euphoria and, most important of all, to secure their seats in a ne
w France, with Henri Gaston as its chief arbiter of influence.

  To avoid the appearance of economic improprieties, Gaston had been forced to set up various shell companies and appoint proxies to handle the business affairs of his family’s chemical company. This was not an issue.

  Gaston had been keeping a complex set of double books since being initiated to the family business as a young man fresh from university. He had taken to it immediately and easily. Deception was as natural to him as breathing. It had always been so. And it had helped him to build the empire he was now about to bring to fruition.

  It was in university that he had first realized something about himself was different. Oh, his parents, now deceased, probably saw something in him. But they had not mentioned it to him. Perhaps they thought his behavior would change as he grew older, that he would stop having the odd impulses that had plagued him during his adolescence.

  He had killed three of the family pets. Two were cats, while a third was a dog. Asked by his parents what had happened to the animals, he had told them that he was accident-prone, that he was clumsy. In truth he had killed the pets simply to see what it was like.

  By the time he had choked the dog to death, he had decided there was nothing new to be gained by more animal murders. He had never done it again. His parents probably thought it a phase, and, indulgent to their deaths, they had forgiven him and had hoped to forget these unfortunate incidents.

  Gaston was manipulative, and while at university, he had put this ability to good use. He had built networks of political allies at all levels of the student body, and among the faculty and administration. He did this by being—for each one of these people—exactly what they had wanted him to be.

  He had said what they had wanted to hear; he had expressed opinions they had wished to believe; he had shamelessly flattered all of his targets. Many men would find it difficult to keep up such a charade, but Gaston had learned that he had an endless capacity to change whom he appeared to be when he courted a new member of his spiderweb, as he thought of it.

  He felt no pride, no ego, no desire to espouse his true feelings. He knew only that people responded to those who were as those people wished them to be.

  He could do that. He could be that.

  And so he became popular. Just like that, Henri Gaston was known and liked seemingly by all. In truth, his allies were relatively few, but he picked those in the greatest positions of power and influence: here an administrator whose word was law; there a student admired for his good looks and his acumen at sports; and so on. When word was spread by other scions of popularity that Henri Gaston was one of the most popular people at the school, this was believed. Why would it not be?

  And so Henri Gaston got along well at university, and his parents forgot all about the unfortunate behavior he had exhibited as a child. All children had their awkward phases, their difficult developmental times. Surely this was all Henri’s difficulties had been.

  As he approached his graduation, Gaston realized that he would either have to secure a position of employment outside the family business, or he would be forced to work as a subordinate to his father within the company. Neither possibility appealed to him.

  He had been learning about his family’s chemical business all his life. He felt he belonged there. No other career felt right, and he did not think he would react well to starting from the bottom of the corporate ladder at some external firm.

  His parents would likely approve of him setting out on his own, knowing that they could rescue him from his folly if it did not work out...but he was not interested in pleasing them one way or another. The concept meant nothing to him. Their approval, their feelings, were irrelevant.

  Henri Gaston was aware, of course, that he was an utter sociopath. He was not stupid; he possessed, if not eidetic memory, an advanced degree of recall that pushed his IQ scores to stellar heights. All he had required was a basic psychology class to teach him what his feelings, or his lack thereof, meant to his mental makeup. He felt as little about being a sociopath, however, as he did about having murdered his parents.

  He had been careful; there had never been any suspicion that he was involved. But for Gaston to have what he wanted, his parents would have to go. They were in the way. He, their only child and heir to the family fortune, stood to inherit everything and to have sole control over it, when they passed on.

  Fortunately his parents were also creatures of habit. He had simply waited until they had prepared to take their annual summer holiday through Europe. Then he had snuck into the garage where his father’s touring car was kept. Considerable calculations went into the adjustments he made to the brakes.

  His father kept to a fairly consistent route during his summer trips away from home. It was not easy, considering that multiple routes might be taken, but Gaston sabotaged his parents’ brakes in such a way that the brakes failed while his father was negotiating a particularly dangerous turn.

  The accident had left him an orphan...and a millionaire many times over. He had never regretted his actions for a moment. He was not capable of regret.

  With money came pleas for the giving of that money. Beggars and shirttail relatives crawled out of the woodwork in droves. Overtures were made by local criminal syndicates. Government figures made it known that their pockets were deep and ready for the lining.

  Henri Gaston obliged them all.

  Well, not all. He picked and chose his victims as carefully as he had his allies in school. He bribed those whose loyalties could be bought most firmly with cash. He befriended hoodlums whom he thought could form the backbone of street muscle for his business ventures. He used his underworld contacts to do everything from manipulate labor disputes to influencing elections.

  And it was there that he determined his real passion was to be. He would work his way up in the government, taking his power and influence with him, gathering his elaborate network of allegiances bought and bribed and otherwise bargained for, and he would build a dynasty that would last well past his own life.

  Not that he cared about what came after him. But to enjoy true power in this world, that power had to be so great that it outlasted a single individual. The words of a particularly self-indulgent French monarch came to him. “After that, the deluge!” It didn’t matter what became of Gaston’s empire after he was gone.

  In the meantime, he would live a fine life, taking whatever he wanted. Making the acquaintance of ES had been an especially good move. Levesque and his people were not simply effective muscle—they were the key to influencing public opinion and thus shaping the political narrative Gaston sought to build. For what greater lever was there in today’s world than the threat of terrorism to shape voter behavior? He could think of none.

  As Machiavelli had said, it was better to be feared than loved if one of the two had to be lacking. Gaston thought the idea a bit sentimental. Why rely on the vagaries, the mercurial loyalties, of love, when fear was so predictable? Self-interest, and fear of harm, was the greatest motivator in the world. It had always been so.

  Gaston had been a man of thirty-one when he had committed his first murder of a human being.

  The victim was a homeless man. Gaston had left his home, dressed in plain clothes and wearing a hat low over his head to prevent his recognition by camera or human witness. He had chosen a homeless man from among those in the vicinity of one of Paris’s poorer neighborhoods. He had stalked and followed that homeless man for the greater part of the night, enjoying the game, especially when his quarry realized something was wrong and began actively trying to evade him.

  The indigent, the marginalized among Paris’s street denizens, were accustomed to abuse and mistreatment. They were cunning and suspicious, like feral animals, Gaston thought. He took real pleasure in staying with his prey, running the man down until the poor fellow was exhausted and frantic. By the time their rac
e was over, the homeless man was dead.

  Gaston had attacked the man from behind. He had held one hand over the poor man’s mouth as he had shoved the blade into the man’s kidney.

  Something went wrong during that initial foray into the night. Gaston had difficulty recalling exactly what. His memories were glazed with the excitement of the kill. Somehow it had been necessary to stab the victim repeatedly, over and over again, watching the blade go in and out, studying the blood flow, staring down at the red on his hands and on his clothes and on the paving stones at his feet....

  The memory aroused him. He reached for the humidor and selected a cigar for himself. With a snap of his fingers, he summoned one of the prostitutes, who took a box of matches from the table next to the humidor, bent before him to give him a spectacular view of her assets and struck the match for him. She pursed her lips as she lighted his cigar for him.

  He smiled at her and pictured her lying on the floor at his feet with a knife in her ribs.

  A scientist or psychologist or someone, somewhere, had published a study not all that long ago declaring that psychopaths, or those with psychopathic personality traits, made the most effective politicians, lawyers and people in positions of power.

  Gaston had never understood why anyone could or would believe anything else might be true of power and those who wielded it. He supposed, however, that not all people were prepared to be as honest about the world as Henri Gaston.

  He looked over at Levesque, who looked exceptionally pleased with himself. Nearby, in proximity to the pool, one of the lieutenants attending the party with a local gang leader had perhaps consumed a bit too much alcohol or a few too many lines of cocaine. He was arguing loudly with a uniformed member of the ES, who were providing security for the party.

  Levesque had chosen to clothe his men in striking urban camouflage, without their masks, for the event. It marked them as security forces and made them look exotic. This was the type of attention to detail that Gaston liked in Levesque, and he approved. But as he watched, the gang lieutenant—a dark-skinned man with long dreadlocks, dressed in leather pants and vest with no shirt—began pushing the ES man.