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  Bolan had been quick, but not quick enough to escape detection. Livid flame stabbed the gloom surrounding the Golf, the crack of the shots curiously muffled by the snow. Bullets thwacked through the bushes on either side of Bolan, rattling the frozen leaves and tingling his cheeks with particles of frost. A ricochet whined off the iron railing.

  He flicked the Beretta onto three-shot mode and fired two rapid bursts, aiming just above the flashes in the sedan's open windows. There was a loud cry. Bolan thought he heard a faint scrambling thump, as if one of the gunmen had been slammed back into the body of the car.

  He was hidden from the SMG killer in the parked vehicle, and for the moment there was no more shooting. In the silence he was suddenly aware that the Volkswagen's engine had been quietly idling all this time.

  Voices called out. A rapid exchange in German. The VW began to move. They were playing it the way the Executioner would have done himself if the positions had been reversed.

  The sedan circled away slowly to the far side of the intersection, virtually out of the Beretta's effective range, turned beyond the taxi and began to approach the road that led back to Tondelayo's. At the same time a door slammed and there was a rustling of bushes beyond the railings by the parked car; the guy with the SMG, covered by his accomplices, was installing himself in the front yard across the road from Bolan. Once he was in place he could pin the warrior down while the VW moved in to finish him.

  Bolan glanced swiftly around. Lights had come on in some of the houses bordering the intersection; in one or two windows figures were outlined peering down into the street. But the facade immediately behind him was dark. The window fronting the yard was shuttered and the entrance door was at the top of a flight of stairs — a position where he would provide a perfect target for the submachine gunner if he was to attempt a break-in to escape through the rear of the house.

  From across the street, the SMG suddenly opened fire, shattering the calm with savage violence. The gunner hosed his deathstream right and left across the whole width of the yard, and Bolan only had time to fling himself facedown in the snow before the slugs streaked through the railings, splatted against the ironwork, and screeched off into the sky. Somewhere down the cross street an angry voice shouted from an upper story. The Golf accelerated and began to home in on Bolan's corner.

  He bit his lip, going over the options. He quickly corrected that. There was no choice. He was cornered and the single chance he had was to tempt the opposition to empty their magazines and make a run for it while they reloaded.

  Arguments against that were several: first, he didn't know the make of SMG and therefore the number of rounds in the magazine; second, ditto for the remaining handgun; and third, even if he did, it wouldn't be easy to make an accurate calculation of the number of rounds expended when the gun could have a firing rate of up to fifteen hundred or two thousand rounds per minute. In any case, he guessed the killers were professional enough to keep one gun operative while the other reloaded.

  Bolan realized that this was one of the tightest corners he'd ever been in. Someone must want him out of the way very badly.

  It followed therefore that his line of logic — even if he himself had no idea where it was leading — was taking him too close for comfort to… what? Who? Ferucco Lattuada? The protection racket linking the mafioso with club wrecking and the mysterious Yank?

  Rule out any other answer. He would find out when he had fought his way out of the ambush… if he fought his way out of the ambush.

  That was a big "if."

  But negative thinking formed no part of Mack Bolan's intellectual armory. He would fight his way out. It was just a question of finding the right way to do it.

  The answer was provided by a third party.

  From different directions he heard over the rooftops the bray of two — no, three — approaching sirens. Someone in one of the nearby houses had called the cops.

  There was a shout from the Volkswagen. A final volley from the submachine gun stirred the snow uncomfortably close to Bolan's face. The sedan slewed around in the center of the intersection, engine roaring, wheels scrabbling. A rear door opened and a dark shape tumbled out onto the roadway. The car braked by the railings across the street from Bolan's hideout, scattering snow. The man with the SMG leaped the railings and scrambled in the open door.

  The Volkswagen accelerated away along the cross street, snaking crazily from side to side as the powdered front wheels fought for a grip on the icy surface.

  Bolan had let loose a shot at the gunner as he dashed for the car, another at the Golf itself, careering away. He thought he might have winged the killer — had the guy stumbled slightly before he was dragged inside? — but he couldn't be sure he had scored. He was already out on the street himself and running.

  He hoped to hell Sally Ann was okay underneath the stalled cab: he hadn't heard a sound from her since he'd killed the overhead light. "It's all right," he called. "On your feet and follow me. We've got to get out of here fast!"

  There was no reply.

  Bolan cursed. He couldn't believe she had been hit by a stray bullet: nobody had been firing in that direction. He sprinted past the body of the man thrown from the Volkswagen. Even in the poor light he could see the guy was dead; the lower half of his face had been pulverized by one of the Beretta's 9 mm bursts. "It's all over, Sally!" he yelled again. "Come out and start running!"

  Once more there was no reaction.

  The police sirens were much nearer now. One sounded no more than a couple of blocks away. Bolan skated to a halt in the cab's tire tracks. He dropped to one knee and peered beneath the trunk. Zero. No Sally Ann, alive or dead.

  He ran to the front of the cab. The tracks in the snow told the story as clearly as a video. From the place where Bolan had pulled her out of the vehicle, the girl had crawled back beneath it, the way she had been told, dragged herself along and out between the front wheels, and then gotten to her feet and started running. The footmarks, widely spaced, led straight on from the cab and along the street the driver had been following.

  And none of the killers had fired a single shot at her.

  Bolan took in the rest of the scene with a swift glance. Even the dumbest cop could read what had happened at the intersection. An ambushed taxi, the driver killed, the passengers spilled into the snow. One passenger miraculously escaping, the other taking refuge behind the railings of a front yard. A gunman opposite, probably staked out in a parked car belonging to someone living in the block who was still unaware that it had been broken into. The getaway vehicle, spent shells buried in the snow, and a dead man lying at the crossroads.

  Bolan shook his head. This was the second time he'd been left holding the bag at the scene of a murder. As far as the Executioner was concerned, he had two options: he could haul the murdered cabbie out of his seat and drive the taxi away, or he could run.

  The cab would be quicker, but there were too many problems. Fingerprints on the controls as well as in back of the vehicle, the risk of witnesses, of the cab being identified too soon, the probability that he would be held responsible for the cabbie's death, too, at least until ballistics proved the man had been killed with a different gun. Bolan ran.

  Planting his feet carefully in the wide tire tracks left by the skidding Volkswagen, he headed toward the next intersection, where late-night buses and homebound traffic had already flattened the snow enough to make pursuit of an individual trail impossible. Let the bloodhounds follow Sally Ann's tracks along the residential street if they wanted to play detective.

  Running, as the nearest siren approached the ambush intersection behind him, Bolan wrestled with a single vital question. The ambush had been carefully set up; they'd been waiting for him. And they couldn't have had much time. They must have been tipped off the moment it was clear Bolan was about to leave Tondelayo's. Only two people could have done that accurately. Was it the doorman who called the cab, or was it Sally Ann herself?

  Chapter S
ix

  The Mandrake Root was a cellar club beside the widest of the canals that connected the Alster with the Elbe. There was a simple bar and a couple of dozen tables with chairs. Most of the members at the tables — all of them men — were playing chess or backgammon. The only woman in the place looked like a retired schoolteacher. She was perched on a stool at one end of the bar, staring mournfully into a shot glass of schnapps.

  The doorman was an expatriate Brit who had once been a street performer and then earned a meager living reciting Shakespeare to theater queues. Bolan learned that much just trying to get into the place.

  When he got to the bar, he ordered a beer from a huge Russian with a tiny head and no neck. The chess players were engrossed in their games. The doorman, a short, shaggy man with a blotched red face, came and stood beside Bolan, then picked up a half-finished stein of dark ale.

  Bolan laid a fifty-mark bill on the bar. "I have to contact a blonde, name of Dagmar Schroeder. A dancer. They tell me she comes in here sometimes."

  "Aye," the doorman said. The bill disappeared. "But not in the mornings. You want to try the Nussdorfer Weinstube — or maybe the Kinderplatz, between city hail and the river."

  Back in the open air it was several degrees warmer and the snowy sidewalks had already been trodden into muddy slush. He pondered the doorman's directions. Aside from the bribe, why was he so quick to volunteer information? Bolan knew that in places like these, sometimes no amount of money could pry information if they were ordered not to talk. How had he — or she — known Bolan would turn up at the Mandrake Root?

  The question raised once more the other one that had been bugging him since the attack the night before. How had the killers known with such precision just when his cab was going to cross that intersection? The doorman or the girl?

  If it was Sally Ann, that had to mean she was in with Lattuada, or whoever it was the Executioner was getting too close to, maybe that she had been staked out at the Sugar Hill as a deliberate decoy.

  So how had they known he would be at the damn club? Indirectly through Dagmar? Because she had talked about her work as a dancer and they knew he wanted to locate her?

  So why, in that case, the call for help? And, hell, what was this crap about an audition for a floor show when Tondelayo's didn't have a floor show?

  Bolan sighed in exasperation. Two young women, two mysteries — and everything connecting them was contradictory! Turning up his collar against a cold wind blowing off the Alster, he hurried toward the Nussdorfer Weinstube.

  It was a smoky, low-ceilinged basement near the radio station, crowded with wine-drinking liberals playing the bohemian game — guys with beards in clothes that didn't fit them, women with no foundation garments who looked as if they'd be happier sitting in dirndl skirts around a candle stuck in a Chianti bottle. Dagmar Schroeder, they told him, would be in Willi's Grotto.

  She might have been. Bolan wouldn't know. Press card or no press card, they wouldn't allow him past the door because he wasn't a member. He trudged up the stairs, then asked the way to the Cellar.

  There was no club. It was a cheap restaurant near the railroad station, sandwiched between a sexy lingerie boutique and a bicycle repair shop. The place smelled of french fries and garlic. Most of the tables were occupied by mechanics in blue coveralls from an auto tire shop across the street. Some of the hookers on the early shift were eating there, too, but none of them looked like Dagmar. The owner knew her just the same: she'd been there only yesterday for her morning coffee. He advised Bolan to try a cafe in Altona.

  He discovered it was less than a block away from the café where the girl had run out on him. He also discovered that he now had a guide and mentor. The doorman from the Mandrake Root, surfacing for air, had homed in on a soft touch, seeing him pass again.

  They went to an imitation drugstore near the Four Seasons, drank wine at the Alsterpavilion, switched to coffee at the Fischerhaus and escaped from the Kiss-Kiss Disco without swallowing anything at all. Waiters and barmen at all of them knew Dagmar. But, no, she hadn't been in today.

  They ended up at a dockside saloon near the fish market.

  Bolan was drawn to an argument at the other end of the bar. "Even if it does keep out the local trash," a beefy guy with a red face said angrily, "I don't see why the hell we should permit some goddamn American muscle into our German scene and organize a protection…"

  "Helmut, you have to be realistic," a thin, dark man cut in.

  "Realistic, hell. I'll allow that when you got a District, you got crime. You got the pimps and the pushers. You got the wholesalers. You got the cathouse madams and the villains who want to cut themselves a slice. So then you get the heavies, too. But I don't see…"

  "You don't see from nothing. In a tough world and a tough trade you gotta put up with toughs. But can't you see it's better to have it organized so that, shit, you know where you're at — rather than being at the mercy of any two-bit punk old enough to carry a knife?"

  "Right now I don't see too much evidence of organization."

  "The chorus boys at the Opera tell me it's working out okay. They pay a regular subscription and their supplies always arrive on time. For Chrissakes, that's better than waiting around on street corners, isn't it?"

  Bolan had heard enough. He asked a traffic cop the way to the Kinderplatz and found that it was a courtyard in back of a street market only two blocks away. On the way there he found that the temperature had dropped again. His feet crunched on ice and the freezing air was once more painful to breathe. He stopped off at a men's wear boutique and bought a wool scarf to wind around the lower half of his face.

  At the market the roadway was jammed with housewives searching for the best bargains among the barkers by their barrows of fish and meat and flowers. In between fruit and vegetable stalls lining the sidewalk someone had stalled an ancient sedan. The driver was tinkering with the engine as Bolan pushed his way through the noisy crowd.

  Through the arch that led to the courtyard, half a dozen doorways punctuated the forest of drainpipes climbing the sooty brick facades, and there was a delicatessen at one side of the entrance. He made the round of the doorways. Inside each there were plaques, hand-painted signs, business cards, sometimes even tarnished brass plates fixed to the walls. Bolan was familiar with the scene. On the upper floors there would be sweatshops crammed with guest workers producing cheap garments for the rag trade, film processing laboratories, small-time attorneys' offices, hustling apartments — anything and anybody that went with low rent, one washroom per floor and the odor of bugs and dry rot.

  He drew a blank until he made the fourth door. This one was closed and someone had slapped a coat of yellow paint over the flaking surface during the past few months. Five porcelain bell buttons were set into the brickwork beside the door, and there was a strip of card enclosed in a narrow metal frame under each. The building had clearly been turned into apartments fairly recently. The top card read: D. Schroeder — 6th Floor.

  He leaned on the bell. There was no reply from the interphone grille. He rang again, listening. Nothing. He knocked with his knuckles, as loud as he could. Nobody came. He stepped back a few paces and stared up at the top floor. Three windows under the eaves, all of them closed. He couldn't see anything beyond the glass, just the reflection of gray clouds hurrying across the sky.

  The cold wind and the market noises were making his head ache. Apart from a sausage on a stick at the imitation drugstore he had eaten nothing since before his visit to the Sugar Hill the night before. He decided it was time to fix that. He went into the deli and ordered a coffee and a pastrami sandwich. Sipping and munching, he stared at the elongated reflections on the surface of a silver urn behind the bar.

  Two attenuated market men slid around the curve of metal, flattened into grotesque dwarves as they passed behind him and sat down farther along the bar. The door opened again and a blonde, nine feet tall and thin as a pencil, appeared in the urn. Her deformed head raced across
the surface as she leaned forward to speak to the guy behind the bar.

  "Two on rye to take away, Fritz," she said hurriedly in German. "And a carton of hot coffee. Black."

  Counterclockwise, Bolan spun slowly on his stool. "Yesterday, it was white," he said. "But then of course you didn't drink that, did you?"

  Dagmar Schroeder stared at him with her mouth open. She had good teeth. "Oh, my God!" she said. But the recovery came quick. "I feel so bad. I don't know what to say to you, leaving you in the cafeteria like that."

  Bolan nodded. "They missed you at Tondelayo's last night," he said.

  "Tondelayo's?" If she was acting, she was doing it very well. The penciled brows knitted, the nose wrinkled, the blond hair swung as the head tilted to one side. "What do you mean? I wasn't expected there. I didn't do the audition. Charlie was in the hospital. You know that."

  "They don't have a floor show, either. You know that."

  The man behind the counter finished sharpening his knife and began carving the meat for her sandwiches. "What's this, they don't have a floor show?" Dagmar demanded angrily. "Why else would Charlie ask me to do an audition?"

  "You tell me," Bolan said.

  "Of course they have a floor show."

  "Joe didn't think so. Nor did the waiter."

  "Joe who? What are you talking about?"

  "Joe said he missed your visit. The clients were disappointed."

  She stared at him again. "What are you talking about?"

  "Look," Bolan said. "This isn't getting us anyplace. I have to talk to you. Why don't we go take a drink in some nice quiet club, preferably at street level or even higher?"

  "No!" Her voice was pitched so high that the market men looked up from their hot chocolates.