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  Light flashed on the blade as he drew it slowly, almost caressingly, across Rudi's cheek. Instantly the thin trickle of blood from the split flesh over the Done was eclipsed by a curtain of scarlet masking the whole right-hand side of the wounded man's face. Hansie snatched his arm away before the red cascade splashed onto his sleeve, allowing Rudi to slump to the floor.

  He catfooted around behind the bar, wiped the razor on a rag and stowed it in an inside pocket. He poured himself half a tumbler of straight bourbon and drank it slowly. Almost as an afterthought, he took the bottle by the neck and smashed it down on one of the glass shelves. The glass shattered, sending beer tankards and bottles crashing to the floor.

  The song was finished. There was no more music, although the tape spools continued to turn silently. As Hansie walked to the door, the only sound apart from his footsteps was the hoarse sobbing of the man bleeding in front of the bar and the rhythmic gurgle of liquor splashing from one of the broken bottles. He paused at the foot of the stairs, holding the door open with the toe of one fleece-lined boot.

  "Today's Tuesday, Rudi," he said quietly. "You got until midday Thursday. You won't forget this time, will you?"

  It was dark outside. Snowflakes drifted through the pools of light cast by the streetlights. The Cadillac was waiting at one end of the alley. The ancient Opel was at the other, still stalled with one blank headlight. The young driver was in a glass phone booth nearby, stamping his feet to keep out the cold.

  Soon afterward the young Opel driver pushed his way out and the door swung shut behind him. Turning up his collar against the falling snow, he bent over the front of the car. Whatever advice he had been given over the phone must have been good because the dead headlight flickered, then shone brightly almost at once. He slid behind the wheel and drove away.

  His route led back across the canals that fed the waters of the Alster — the lake bisecting the city — into the Elbe River, past the baroque central tower of the city hall, into the aseptic geometry of the post-World War II commercial quarter east of the railroad station. He managed to keep the Opel's engine running as he waited to cross the stream of rush-hour traffic clogging the Glockengeisser Wall. But clearly it wasn't his day: by the time the old sedan had threaded its way through the four lines of honking cars, trucks, cabs and buses, the engine was spluttering. Two blocks beyond the station, in a small square off the Steindamm, it backfired twice and then died altogether.

  The driver clambered out and levered up the hood to expose the carburetor and ignition leads. Snowflakes, falling faster now, hissed into oblivion on the hot exhaust manifold. He flashed a pocket flashlight among the wires and hoses behind the radiator. The little square was very quiet. Fresh snow, thickly carpeting the sidewalks, muted the sounds of traffic on the main streets.

  On the opposite corner, the plate-glass front of a café-restaurant had recently been shattered, and jagged shards littered the trampled slush, glittering like diamonds in the lamplight. Through the gap, a desolation of smashed tableware and splintered wood was visible in the dim radiance of a single low-power bulb hanging from the ceiling. The place looked as thought a grenade had exploded in the entrance.

  Feet crunched across the broken glass. A tall, muscular man wearing a brown houndstooth topcoat walked out of the ruined café and crossed the roadway to a convertible parked outside a church.

  A customized Eldorado with whitewall tires.

  The driver of the Opel straightened quickly and walked to a row of pay phones ranked against the wall of the church. The first stank of urine. In the second the instrument had been ripped from the wall and the handset broken. The third was usable, but the young man seemed to prefer the last, where one of the glass door panels was missing. Lifting the receiver, he dropped in coins and punched the buttons, but kept one finger pressed down on the cradle so that no dial tone sounded in his ear. Then, leaning his back against the door so that it swung slightly open, he listened.

  The Cadillac was only a few yards away. He heard the click as a rear door opened. "What happened?" a voice asked from inside the car.

  "Kraul again," the big man rasped. "Place has been gone over but good. Furniture wrecked, all the equipment fucked over. You never saw anything like that kitchen!"

  "How long ago?"

  "They split around seven. A whole team. We can't have missed them but by a few minutes."

  "Yet there are no rubbernecks? No neighbors? No cops even?"

  "Well, there wouldn't be, would there? They were warned off."

  "What about Becker himself?"

  A snort of laughter. "Not as lucky as Boris! Cashed in this time. Flat out on the deck behind the counter with his skull bashed in. I figure they came on too strong and croaked the bastard."

  "Get in, Hansie," the voice ordered curtly. "Herr Kraul and his gorillas are going too far and I won't stand for it. What we need in this game is a little more planning and one hell of a lot more organization."

  The door slammed, and the big Caddy hissed away along the icy asphalt.

  The young man in the phone booth released his breath. He lifted his finger, punched out another number and spoke into the mouthpiece. "Kriminalkommissar Fischer. Wertheim speaking. Hello, chief? Yes, sir, I did. Subject under observation as instructed, but there's a jumbo-size wrench in the works. I'm speaking from the Becker Café now, and it seems Kraul beat them to it. I think you'd better send a squad car and an ambulance PDQ."

  He listened for another thirty seconds, voiced a brief affirmative and replaced the receiver. The Opel started at the first twist of the key. He drove smoothly out of the square, the even pulse of the engine beating back from the snow-topped wall encircling the church.

  In the far corner a tall man, as tall as Hansie but less fleshy, stood unseen in the shadow beneath a lime tree. Behind him a Honda 70 scooter leaned against a railing. As he wheeled the machine into the roadway, lamplight illuminated a determined chin and cold blue eyes beneath the hood of a black parka.

  Mack Bolan had been an interested witness.

  The Cadillac was running on Frankfurt license plates. Bolan had been tailing Arvell Asticot, the international drug baron, for days. Asticot was the reason the Executioner was in West Germany. And although the voice inside the Eldorado hadn't been Asticot's, the car was the same one that had collected the narcotics boss from his Frankfurt hotel and driven him north three days ago. The hunt was on.

  Chapter Two

  The name of the young woman who had been shot outside the Black Tie was Edwina Mueller. She was a prominent women's lib activist and, at committee level, a leading member of the Hamburg Green Party — the ecologist political party that waged war on acid rain, automobile exhaust, factory pollution and the slaughter of animals for clothes and food. An increasingly powerful force in West Germany, the ecologists infuriated — and exerted growing pressure on — industrialists, farmers, shopkeepers and people in the hotel and restaurant business. They pulled a lot of votes. But a local party worker, Bolan figured, wasn't likely to be set up and then gunned down in the street for her views.

  The police, according to the newspapers, had discovered nothing in her private life dramatic enough to provoke a murder attempt — especially a successful attempt by a professional hit team.

  But Bolan couldn't help wondering if the bullets had been meant for him. If so, who had put out the contract? And how had they known he was in Hamburg? Or why?

  Sure, there was a driver with Arvell Asticot's Cadillac when he followed it north from Frankfurt, but the drug lord didn't normally carry hired help of his own. Being strictly a one-man act was the main secret of Asticot's success: if nobody knew his secrets, nobody could squeal. And although the Executioner had made it to Frankfurt in time to see him leave, at every other stopover he had been one step behind, hitting town after the guy had split.

  Negative, therefore, to the query: had he stumbled on the Executioner someplace along the line?

  Okay, could it simply be that some Ham
burg underworld boss had by chance recognized him, and without any specific intel on his motivation, determined to eliminate him… just in case he might be onto a racket that was especially sensitive at the time?

  It could. But Bolan figured it unlikely.

  But if Asticot had somehow gotten wise to the fact that he was after him, it would be vital for the Executioner to take evasive action, particularly if the drug baron had drummed up local talent to protect him.

  If that talent was acting on its own, if there was a general contract out for him, it was more vital still.

  He decided he needed more information; he would head for the American consulate and set a few inquiries in motion.

  Bolan was working one hundred percent unofficially; he would be disowned and left to the local police if he threatened to embarrass the U.S. government. But certain facilities, equally unofficial, had been arranged by Hal Brognola. And there was a package to be collected that should have arrived at the Bonn embassy in the diplomatic bag, to be forwarded to Hamburg by air.

  Bolan had checked into the Hotel Oper, a tall building on the Drehbahn, not far from the southwestern corner of Lake Alster. For clients wishing to keep a low profile the place had advantages: it was, in fact, a multistory garage and parking lot with a lobby, wine bar and restaurant at street level, and a single penthouse floor of small, anonymous rooms below the roof. Once the chambermaids had fixed the rooms in midmorning, guests were on their own and could use the ramps that sloped between different parking levels to enter or leave the hotel without being observed, by car or on foot.

  The U.S. consul general in Hamburg was comfortably installed on the Alsterufer, a wide roadway that skirted the western shore of the lake. Bolan had driven from Frankfurt in a rented BMW, which he had left on the lowest level of his hotel, ready for a quick getaway. But he decided to walk to the consulate.

  It was no longer snowing, but frozen slush and packed ice, gray with mud, veneered street and sidewalk. The sky was a sulfurous yellow. Bolan passed the wedding-cake facade of the Four Seasons Hotel and strode toward the twin road and rail bridges spanning the lower part of the lake. The air that he breathed was so bitterly cold that it seared his nose and mouth. He wound a woolen muffler around the lower half of his face: as well as filtering out the worst of the cold, it helped make his muscular seventy-four-inch frame less identifiable among the hunched, wrapped-up pedestrians battling against the arctic wind.

  Hurrying, he composed in his mind the open-coded message he would ask the consulate cipher clerk to transmit to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. With the right access group and a for-your-eyes-only prefix, the message would be relayed straight to Brognola's office in Washington without being translated into intelligible words.

  Bolan would ask for the most up-to-date intel on Asticot, with a printout from the Stony Man computer detailing the results of a trace designed to link him with the Hamburg underworld. He would also ask for a separate check on a woman named Edwina Mueller. And finally he would request Brognola to call him back at once by satellite.

  Below the bridges, slabs of dun-colored ice knocked against tarpaulined skiffs moored for the winter by the boathouse cafes. But the narrow northern end of the lake, beyond the consulate, had frozen over completely, and there were children skating between the snow-covered gardens on either side of the ferry dock.

  Bolan was directed to the consulate annex, one block farther north. The message was transmitted at once, but he was told there would be a delay before any reply could be expected. He picked up his package from the dispatch clerk and decided to take it back to his hotel.

  Inside, he knew, would be a waterproof neoprene pouch containing skeleton keys, a glass cutter, a flat-bladed throwing knife in a leather ankle sheath, a wire garrote and — to avoid trouble at frontier or airline security checks — two Beretta 93-R autoloaders with quickdraw shoulder rigs. When he got to the hotel, he handed the package to the receptionist, asking for it to be stowed in the hotel safe. Then he returned to the consulate annex.

  It was colder still when he emerged from the shelter of the modernistic skyscraper at the inner end of the Drehbahn. The wind had dried the top layer of snow into tiny particles that whirled like white sand along the swept flagstones, stinging his face when he came out from under the arches of the Colonnaden walkway. He zippered up his parka and strode toward the lake.

  At the consulate annex he drew a near blank. The trace on Edwina Mueller was negative. Nothing known. Brognola had been called away to some unforeseen security crisis in Hawaii and wouldn't be back in his office for several days. And traffic on the satellite link was exceptionally heavy, the cipher clerk told him; he had no idea how long it might be before an answer to the remaining queries could be expected. There was, however, a sealed envelope that had arrived for Bolan by special messenger.

  He broke the wax seals and slit the flap with his thumbnail. Inside there was an American passport, a press accreditation card issued and signed by the West German foreign ministry in Bonn and letters from the overseas editor of a photonews magazine in Chicago asking for follow-ups to current European political crises — in particular the opening round of East-West peace talks in Berlin. A strip of paper torn from a telex machine completed the package.

  The message read: You might find these useful if you want to be in two places — or be two people — at the same time! Best — H.B.

  The papers were in the name of Mike Belasko, a cover identity the Executioner had used before in places as far apart as Hong Kong and Northern Ireland. At the moment Bolan was using his Mike Blanski cover. It was sometimes wise to have a backup identity, though. You never knew what might happen.

  Bolan figured it might flesh out his newsman cover if he did a half hour of sidewalk interviews, buttonholing fellow countrymen coming in and out of the consulate and asking them their views on the current round of East-West disarmament talks in Geneva and the possibility — for the umpteenth time — of the abolition of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

  He was questioning a group of consulate secretaries flouncing back from their sandwich lunches at the Alsterpavilion when he saw the guy: a tall, rangy character with a blue chin and flinty eyes in a face that looked as if frost had set in behind it.

  Ferucco Lattuada.

  Automatically the Executioner's mind started flipping over the sheets in his mental mug shot file.

  A Syndicate man for starters. Son of Giordano Lattuada, a second-generation American born of naturalized parents who had emigrated during the great Sicilian exodus in the 1890s and settled in Chicago's Little Italy. Giordano had quit school when he was twelve, refused to work in the family pizza bar, led a local street gang and then became a legman for Samoots Amatuma when he was president of the Unione Siciliane in 1925. He was associated with Scalise, Anselmi and Frank "the Enforcer" Nitti in Capone's heyday and later worked as a hit man for Meyer Lansky in New York.

  Ferucco, his son, was born sometime during World War II, which put him on the wrong side of forty. He had been recruited, Bolan recalled, by the Lucchese family soon after his old man vanished as the result of a quarrel with Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Giordano's skeleton was probably still standing at attention forty feet below the surface of the East River with the legs ankle deep in a bowl of concrete.

  Ferucco had succeeded his daddy as the family contract killer and was reputed to have chalked up a score totaling twenty-seven successful hits — about one a year since reaching voting age. He was supposed to have fled to Vegas when Lips Flanagan was run out of the numbers racket in Dallas. He'd been working for Flanagan at the time, and there were rumors that, on account of his Cosa Nostra connections, Ferucco had crossed him up at the instigation of the Syndicate men who'd taken over his pitch.

  The last Bolan had heard, Ferucco Lattuada had rented a Beechcraft to fly him from Nevada to Mexico because he'd been tipped off that the IRS was after his balls on a tax evasion rap.

  So what the hell was
he doing in Hamburg?

  Why would a well-heeled hood with connections be hoofing it past a frozen lake near the Baltic in a temperature of minus two Fahrenheit, when he could be lying on the beach at Acapulco with a rented blonde?

  Bolan couldn't say exactly why, but he decided that question needed an answer. It could be that he himself needed to lay off the Asticot trail for a while, that he had to take a break from the boring legwork that had occupied his time for more than two weeks now. It was possible that he sensed a link between the mob-style shooting outside the Black Tie and the appearance in town of a notorious mafioso.

  Whatever, he determined — since he happened by chance to have laid eyes on the mobster — to follow him for a couple of hours. The guy might of course be in Hamburg on some perfectly innocent business, buying Bundesbank Defense Bonds or visiting his Aunl Giovanna. On the other hand…

  Bolan snapped shut his journalist's notebook, and hurried after Lattuada. The guy headed south, toward the city center. What had he been doing this far out along the lakeshore? He certainly hadn't been paying a courtesy call on the consul general, not with the IRS on his tail. There was a ritzy dining and dancing club, Die Insel, a little way beyond the consulate, but it didn't open its doors until evening. The rest of the property was residential. Bolan shook his head; maybe he would get a clue to where the mobster had been if he could find out where he was going.

  His quarry was wearing a belted sheepskin jacket and a Russian-style fur hat with the flaps pulled down to cover his ears. For several hundred yards, where there were a few walkers negotiating the humped ice along the sidewalk, he was content to keep well behind. But as Lattuada approached the two bridges across the Alster, traffic — on the street as well as the sidewalks — grew more dense and the Executioner was obliged to close up. There were too many fur hats and sheepskin coats around to risk losing the guy down the steps of a subway entrance or crossing one of the bridges as the lights changed to release a flood of cars, trucks and buses.