Sudden Death Read online

  The elevator car jolted to a halt at street level.

  Bolan jerked open the glass-paneled doors. The concertina outer gate was slammed back by someone else. Two men stood in the lobby facing the shaft. One held a small box with an open lid from which a steady, strong beep was audible. The other stepped forward with his hand outstretched.

  "Well, Striker, we found you at last!" Hal Brognola said.

  Epilogue

  It was a clean wound, and the bone wasn't touched. Bolan sat with his arm in a sling and tried to forget that it hurt like hell.

  "He never heard of you, he didn't know you were here, and neither did I," Brognola said, "but The Man sends his congratulations. At least that's one more danger out of the way."

  "A lot of the bad guys got away, Hal," Bolan said. "We won a battle, but we haven't won the war."

  "Don't worry," Aaron Davis said. "Our sights are trained on them now."

  "That's good to hear," Bolan said, "but there are plenty more where they came from." He sighed. There were always more.

  Greg Toledo turned away from the window and the view of the harbor. They were in Brognola's suite in the Hotel de Paris. "There won't be any more Hansens and Schloessers," he said. He sounded almost regretful. "That was a fascinating line of inquiry they started. What the hell. I guess I'll have to be satisfied…" this to Bolan "…with the labor of deimprinting all the stuff they planted on your subconscious, and then trying to reimprint you with your original conceptual standards."

  "Be my guest," the Executioner said. "Start when you like, because they tell me Baraka could still be recalled, given the correct drug dosage, any time until you do!"

  The door opened, and Beth McMann came into the room. The owl glasses were gone. Curvaceous in a low-backed pleated white dress and white high-heel pumps, she looked very desirable.

  Bolan looked from her to Toledo to Aaron Davis. He grinned. "This is too much," he said. "Three freckle faces in the same room. I want out!"

  Beth walked across and laid a hand on his undamaged arm. "You had a real rough trip," she said. "That cocktail I mixed you was powerful medicine. Is there anything I can do to help?"

  "Sure is," Bolan said. "According to those lab reports I copied out of the clinic files, one of the goodies they were shooting me with was called TMA. Can you tell me what the hell that is?"

  She smiled. "Sure can," she mimicked. "It's an abbreviation for Trimethoxyphenyl-Beta-Aminopropane 3,4 and 5. That's the one responsible for those strobo phenomena."

  "I'm sorry I asked," the Executioner said. "It's going to take a hell of a long time to explain that to me. Why don't we go to that little Italian bistro on the other side of the port and start in over dinner?"