Dead Easy Read online

  "It is unlikely. The explosion was at four o'clock in the morning."

  Bolan thanked the police chief, then turned his back on the wreckage. That section of the river was shallow; he had no difficulty wading across. It was going to be a hot day. At the head of the valley, the mountains stood bare and brown against the blue sky.

  The town hall, set back between plane trees at one side of a dusty square, was in chaos. Several dozen of the shocked survivors were still being cared for in a schoolroom hastily converted into a makeshift medical center. Anxious teenage villagers carrying sheets of paper scribbled with names and addresses ran between the mayor's office and an antique telephone switchboard.

  But there was no redhead with shoulder-length hair in the schoolroom. And no record of any passenger named Bozuffi being transported to the hospital in Udine, or boarding the bus that ferried the braver to the next railroad station up the line. Nor was there a white leather suitcase among the collection of baggage and effects stacked beneath the plane trees. Bolan went back to join the commendatore.

  By dusk that evening twenty-three more bodies had been located. Many were facially unrecognizable but none of them had red hair.

  Seven had been so badly burned in the fire after the explosions that there was no trace of hair left on their incinerated bodies, but other factors were inconsistent with Suzy's description.

  Bolan hired a cab in the village and returned to Udine.

  Beyond the arched cloisters of the hospital, low-power electric lamps lit the crowded wards. Whispering nuns and interns in white coats moved among the injured, attempting to quiet the babble of voices in the out-patients department where the walking wounded awaited attention.

  Some of the casualties in Out-patients were still in shock, but Bolan found one girl — a blond nineteen-year-old Californian with a ponytail — who had suffered no more than a broken arm. "I guess I was lucky," she told him, flourishing the plaster cast protruding from the ripped denim sleeve of her jacket. "I walked down the train to the John. I was booked in the second sleeper and there were some Dutch guys sprawled all over the aisles. They were going to…" She faltered for a moment, shook her head, blinked and then continued. "Suzy Bozuffi? Sure, I knew her. We stayed at the same pensione in Perugia. I mean we're not bosom pals or anything. Suzy's, you know, kind of ritzy. The leather suitcase, expensive clothes and all that. But she's okay."

  "Did you see her on the train?" Bolan asked.

  "On the train?" The girl wrinkled her nose as she concentrated. "Come to think of it, I don't believe I did. But she must have been there. We checked out of the pensione together, along with a group of kids from… Hey, why all the questions about Suzy? Is she missing?"

  "You tell me," Bolan said.

  He was about to give up when a distraught young man was brought in who had been found wandering on the mountainside hours after the wreck. He had been in charge of the Vienna group, and he had miraculously been thrown clear while most of his charges had died.

  "My God!" he cried. "Their parents… What am I going to say? How can I possibly justify…"

  "Take it easy," Bolan said gently. "Nobody's blaming you. Did you make the block booking for the sleeper?"

  "Yes, of course. But I never imagined…"

  "Suzanne Bozuffi. Was she on that train?"

  The guy knuckled his eyes. His hands were trembling. "Now you mention it…no, she wasn't. She missed the train. I was worried about it but there was nothing I could do. There were all the others to think of, you see. I had to…"

  "So she left the pensione with the others but she never got on the train, right?" Bolan interrupted for the third time.

  The young man pulled himself together with an effort. "But, yes, that's correct. Thank heaven for her it is."

  Bolan checked in to the Albergo della Posta and called Suzanne Bozuffi's father in Turin.

  Michael Bozuffi was an industrialist. He built ships, light aircraft and electronic equipment. He was part-owner of a chemical factory in northern Italy and mining concessions that extended from South America to West Africa.

  Mack Bolan was an outlaw, a dedicated warrior in the battle of right against wrong. He fought the hydra-headed menace of international terrorism wherever he found it, with whatever means he considered best, and for his pains he was himself on the hit list of most of the world's major intelligence and security networks.

  Two men, two lives, two stories. But they had one point in common; there was one place where they converged.

  They had shared a foxhole during the Tet offensive in Vietnam.

  Courage in the face of continuous danger breeds respect, and the two veterans, so different in upbringing and approach, had remained friends ever since the three days of hell they had endured together.

  Right now Bozuffi was hospitalized, recovering from a minor hip operation. Since Bolan was passing through Turin and had stopped to say hello to Bozuffi, he had agreed to check out the fate of the industrialist's only daughter as soon as they heard the news of the train wreck over the radio. But now he felt the investigation was at a dead end.

  "She probably took off with a boyfriend, or simply missed the train," Bolan reassured the anxious father. "I'm sure you'll hear from her."

  "Suzy doesn't have boyfriends. In any case she would have told me. We're very close," Bozuffi said. "Mack, I don't like it. Something smells. I want to find out where my daughter is." He was silent for a moment, then said, "Could I ask you a big favor?"

  "Name it," he said.

  "Would you backtrack for me, go to Perugia and see if you can find out what happened from that end?"

  "Don't worry, Mike, I'll see what I can do," Bolan replied.

  * * *

  The following morning Bolan asked the clerk at the reception desk to help him find a rental car.

  Another American was checking out of the hotel at the same time — a tall, thin character about forty years old, wearing a tweed sport jacket that looked as if it had been made for a heavier man. A cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth.

  After Bolan had left, the thin man spun around the register and scanned the entries for the previous day. Scrawled illegibly on the page he saw "M. Blanski." He called back the clerk and asked to use the telex in the hotel's leisure room.

  At the keyboard he tapped out a message to the Paris bureau of the Chicago Globe:

  PSE SEND SOONEST UDINE POST OFFICE BIOG DETAILS MACK BOLAN AKA THE EXECUTIONER REPEAT EXECUTIONER STOP CONCENTRATE RECENT CAMPAIGNS ANTITERRORISTS STOP METTNER STOP

  Jason Mettner II was the Globe's roving ace foreign correspondent. His nose for news had taken him from Nicaragua to Nanking, from Cape Town to Kabul, from the carpeted quiet of the EEC headquarters in Brussels to the rent-a-mob slums of Khaddafi's Libya. Mettner II had followed in the footsteps of his father, a crime reporter for the same newspaper in the rough-and-tumble days of prohibition and the gang wars.

  Mettner had heard of Bolan and had seen artist's renderings of him. And despite the Blanski name on the register, the features were unmistakable. The guy interested him, partly because he had showed here at the scene of one of those dime-a-dozen terrorist attacks from which the whole of Europe was suffering, and not least because many of the Executioner's victories had been won against the Mafia descendants of those hoods whose shady exploits Mettner's father had recorded.

  But before he followed up Bolan's unexpected presence in this corner of Italy, the newspaperman had work of his own to do. He tore the copy of his previous message from the machine, lit another cigarette and tapped again, squinting to keep the smoke spiraling up from the cigarette out of his eyes.

  METTNER ADD TRAIN WRECK STORY STOP RESPONSIBILITY FOR BLAST CLAIMED BY AFL REPEAT AFL (ACTION FOR LIBERTY) SMALL ULTRARIGHT-WING ITALOTERRORIST CELL ALREADY CREDITED ELEVEN MURDERS MODERATE LEFT-WING POLITICOS STOP WELL INFORMED CIRCLES SUGGEST BLAST STAGED THAT NEIGHBORHOOD AS REVENGE GESTURE STOP PIETRO RINALDI FASCIST FATHER OF AFL CHIEF MASSIMO EXECUTED THERE BY PART
ISANS AT END WORLD WAR II STOP CHECK DETAILS GLOBE MORGUE STOP MESSAGE ENDS

  Before he left the hotel, Mettner thrust a fistful of lire notes across the reception desk and told the clerk, "Look, there'll be more for you if you can find out from your friend at the rental agency exactly where and when Signore Blanski checks in his car. I'll call you tonight and again tomorrow to find out, okay?"

  * * *

  Mack Bolan stood outside the Pensione Estrellita in a narrow alley that wound down to the Via Bartolo in back of Perugia's fourteenth-century gothic cathedral. The stout, motherly Neapolitan woman who looked after the pensione remembered the students leaving. Why wouldn't she? They had been with her three months and it was only the day before yesterday.

  "There were two special buses waiting to take them down to the railroad station," she said. "For the connection to Rome. But what a terrible thing, that bomb! So many dead… so young… How could anybody…?" She dabbed her eyes with a corner of the flowered apron she wore over her black dress.

  "You actually saw them board the buses?" Bolan asked.

  She shook her head. "They were around the corner, by the fountain in front of the cathedral."

  "But you are sure Suzanne Bozuffi was with them?"

  "Certainly. I waved goodbye as she turned the corner, just before I returned to clear up the mess they left."

  "Did she have any… special men friends? Perhaps somebody older, more sophisticated? I believe she was a little more… mature… than the others."

  "Men friends? Not that one." The head was shaken more vigorously. "Except when her father came. A real gentleman; he spoke very good Italian. But otherwise — no, not even among the students. If she went out at all, it was with a crowd. But usually she was studying in her room."

  "Did she ever come back late? I mean, after the others returned?"

  "Suzanne?" The fat lips blew out in a Latin expression of total ridicule.

  Bolan walked down to the piazza in front of the cathedral. Sitting around the three-tiered fountain, and on the cathedral steps old men dressed in black gazed soberly at nothing. All of them had been there the day before. And the day before that. Unless one of them died, they would be there again tomorrow. Most of them remembered the students' buses leaving.

  "Did you notice a girl, a foreigner, with red hair and carrying a white leather suitcase?" Bolan inquired.

  "The red-haired one? Oh, I knew her all right," one of the old-timers replied. He chuckled. "I had looked at her very often. A student. Remarkable."

  "Yes, yes," quavered another. "Beautiful clothes — and always a smile."

  "But did you see her get on the bus with the others?"

  A short silence. And then one man said slowly, "It is curious that you should ask that. I remember now. She was heading for the bus, a little after the others, hurrying. But I think she was taken ill."

  "Ill?"

  "A fainting fit. If it had not been for her friends…"

  "What friends? The other students?"

  "No, no," offered a man who so far had not spoken. "They were already on the buses. Her friends with the car, the ones who took her away."

  "She went away in a car?"

  "But yes," the first man said. "She was passing these three young fellows when she staggered… if they had not caught her she would certainly have fallen. And then of course they took the suitcase and helped her into the car…"

  "Did you see what kind of car?"

  "Of course. It was a Fiat. A gray Fiat."

  "Nonsense!" someone else shouted. "It was a silver color. A Peugeot, I think."

  Bolan left them to it. He started toward the pensione. It seemed clear now that his friend's daughter had been kidnapped. Three men, a waiting car, probably an aerosol spray or one of those KGB-style umbrellas with a needle tip to thrust into the unwary calf. And the Executioner was betting that there would soon be a ransom demand.

  It was a disheartening story to take back to Bozuffi. But Bolan had done all he could. Despite certain disquieting overtones, he felt that such tragedies, all too common in Italy today, were best left to the official police.

  That was the Executioner's reaction until the plotters made the mistake of attempting to thwart his investigation. The irony was that as far as he was concerned it was over, but they did not know that. Three separate and increasingly vicious attempts on his life in the following twelve hours not only convinced him that the affair must be more serious than he had realized; they also angered him to the extent that he determined to stay with the investigation personally until it was resolved.

  The proof that this was something more than a simple abduction came before he even reached the pensione again. Pigeons swooping down from the cathedral roof skimmed the alley, and Bolan, mentally rehearsing what he was going to say to the girl's father, instinctively ducked his head as one flashed close by.

  The stream of bullets from a silenced automatic splatted against the brickwork beyond his shoulder, staining the air with red dust. If it hadn't been for the pigeon, they would have taken the top of his head off.

  Bolan's reactions were honed by years of combat in the hellgrounds of the world. He hit the cobblestones, snatching his Beretta from inside his jacket as he went down. Flat on his stomach, he swung around with the autoloader at the ready.

  But the assassins were on a mission that was strictly hit and run: two figures on a Lambretta scooter at the end of the alley, anonymous in visored crash helmets. The engine screamed and they swerved out of sight before Bolan could fire.

  He scrambled to his feet, decided against a second visit to the Estrellita — the Neapolitan lady was unlikely to have noticed three strangers in a gray or silver car — and checked in to a hotel in the Corso Vannucci.

  He called Bozuffi. The industrialist agreed to contact the police and report his daughter as missing, probably kidnapped. Bolan promised to return to Turin the following day. Despite the attempt to put him out of the way and kill any investigation of the girl's disappearance, he still intended to offer his friend no more than moral support.

  That was before the second attack.

  It happened during the night. Bolan was wearing the skin-tight combat blacksuit, complete with shoulder harness, that had become his personal trademark in the guerrilla wars that ravaged the world. Always a light sleeper, with a catlike ability to wake instantly with all systems go, he was off the bed and crouched in a corner by the old-fashioned closet before the stealthily opened door was wide enough to let in the first intruder.

  The light in the passageway had been switched off, and the guy was no more than a darker blur against the faint radiance of a late-rising moon that filtered through a distant window.

  Bolan waited until the second man glided in, then rose silently to his feet. He saw the dim light glint against steel as they circled to stand on either side of the empty bed.

  An explosion of movement. The two assassins fell to the bed, stabbing viciously downward where Bolan should have been. But the Executioner was behind them. He launched himself into the air and landed astride the back of the man nearest the door, whose shape was more clearly defined. He hooked a forearm beneath the hood's chin and reached at the same time for the second man's head, slamming the two skulls together.

  There were cries of pain and alarm, and the three of them collapsed face downward across the rumpled covers.

  The killers were taken by surprise, but they were tough and they were experienced. A blade sliced through the blacksuit sleeve and traced fire along Bolan's biceps before he could pull over the man who he had in a headlock and use him as a shield.

  As they writhed and squirmed, striving for an advantage, the second man struck again. His arm rose and then savagely fell. But the blade homed on flesh the instant Bolan succeeded in rolling onto his back and dragging his half-choked assailant on top of him.

  The killer uttered a strangled groan. His body arched and then went limp. Bolan hurled the body aside and heaved himself out from under to
meet the knifeman's renewed assault.

  Moonlight on the bloodied blade saved Bolan again. His hand shot out to seize the knife hand before the blade scythed in. The two men knelt face-to-face, their breath hoarse in the night, wrestling for possession of the weapon. Bedsprings creaked. The blademan jerked backward, attempting to pull Bolan on top of him; Bolan blocked the move and twisted to the left. The thug released Bolan's arm and clawed at his face. Bolan skimmed the heel of a callused palm against his adversary's throat.

  Another spasm of exertion and the couple, still locked in combat, toppled from the bed and crashed heavily to the floor. A pottery lamp was dragged from the night table and shattered. Maintaining his viselike grip on the assassin's wrist, Bolan achieved the nerve hold he had been seeking and the knife skated away beneath the bed.

  With manic force, the guy thrust Bolan away and sprang to his feet. He leaped for the open door and pounded down the passage that led to the stairs. Bolan raced after him.

  The sounds of the struggle had already awakened other guests. Doors opened, lights were switched on, querulous voices complained.

  Bolan ran past them all. On the stairway a cool breeze blew from open doors beyond the entrance lobby. He dashed into the dark street. The moon was below the rooftops now but he could make out the figure of the killer, dodging between parked cars on the far side of the road. Bolan sprinted after him.

  The guy ran across the piazza in front of the cathedral, traversed a long colonnade and stumbled out into the Via Rocchi. Halfway down the slope toward an Etruscan arch, Bolan caught up with him and dropped him from behind with a flying tackle.

  Grappling fiercely, they rolled across the cobbled street, elbows, knees, fists and butting heads in the harsh yellow illumination of a streelight.

  Bolan had not figured on a backup. He had assumed the two hotel intruders were the hit specialists who had escaped him on the scooter. But there had been a third man with the kidnap team in the car.

  Now the Executioner's danger sense registered the bellow of the tiny high-compression motor as the scooter weaved in and out of the colonnade arches and into the Via Rocchi.