was sharing a bottle of beer with the janitor.
Recognizing the car, he moved toward the lever that raised the barrier... and then, seeing Bolan at the wheel and the inert figure slumped beside him, he leaped for the doorway of the cabin, reaching for the revolver holstered at his waist.
Bolan was out of the car before the guy had time to draw his weapon. The Executioner fired two shots from the Beretta — deliberately high, above the heads of the two men, shattering the glass, wrecking an electric clock on the cabin wall.
“On the floor,” he snapped. “Both of you, if you want to stay alive. Facedown. Hands above your heads.”
The two men complied and Bolan plucked the guard’s gun from its holster and sent it skittering away beneath the parked cars. While the two men quaked on the floor, he yanked the lever operating the barrier and ran back to the Jaguar. The big rear tires laid rubber on the ramp as he took off.
The warrior was satisfied how everything had worked out so far. The interrupted call to the police, added to the assault on the guard and his friend, who would have seen the lawyer’s unconscious body in the car, would strengthen the abduction scenario. Bolan spoke into his transceiver.
Chamson and Telder’s undercover operatives took Delpeche ten miles outside the city limits. “Keep a close watch on this one,” Bolan advised. “He’s tricky. Doesn’t believe a thing he’s told. If he still doubts the story when you guys fill him in... well, I guess that’s just his bad luck!”
The Jaguar was abandoned near an unused gravel pit filled with stagnant water. Police frogmen would be dragging it for Delpeche’s body within twenty-four hours.
There was blood, Delpeche’s, on the Jaguar’s beige leather seats. The lawyer’s nose had been bleeding when Bolan put him in the car.
Beneath the seats, the investigators would find three more spent shells — Bolan had fired a burst into the air — that matched the two outside the cabin in the basement parking lot.
If that didn’t add up to a prima facie case of kidnapping and murder, Bolan reflected grimly, nothing would.
12
Bolan was wearing a white coverall when he approached the police line with Raoul, the stockier of Smiler’s henchmen.
Raoul was similarly dressed. He was carrying a canvas case and there was a short aluminum ladder supported on his left shoulder. Bolan’s hands were weighed down with two five-kilo cans of anticorrosion paint that had already been opened and partly used. Paintbrush handles projected from the knee pocket of his coverall.
The avenues were not lined with police the way they would have been if the convention had involved visiting diplomats or French senators. But three gray armored trucks, used to carry anti-riot squads, were parked off the traffic circle, and there were police details on each sidewalk of all five approach roads. Gendarmes with slung SMGs guarded the entrance to the school complex. More men patrolled inside.
Bolan and the mobster were stopped before they reached the side street. “Where are you going?” one of the cops asked.
“Number three,” Bolan said, jerking his head toward the street. “The guttering above the arch is rotted; the tenants complained that it leaks. So the landlord finally decided to have it fixed.”
“Your papers?”
They produced them — dog-eared folders that identified them as workmen employed by a local contractor; in Bolan’s case a residence permit, also, stating that he was an immigrant of German origin. Jean-Paul was good at that kind of detail.
“What’s in that case?” another cop demanded.
Raoul unzippered the canvas bag. Inside were more paint brushes, a can of thinner, cotton waste, a coil of rope, a plastic bottle of cheap red wine and two ham sandwiches wrapped in cellophane.
The first cop handed back the papers. “Go ahead,” he said.
Bolan glanced across at the armored vehicles. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Just routine. A stack of bigwigs meeting in the school over there.”
“Some people have all the luck,” Bolan said. “We never got police protection when
The cops laughed and waved them on.
They walked unhurriedly to the third house in the street. On the inner side of the arch they found a painter’s scaffold that had been suspended from booms projecting from the roofline above. They stepped into the wooden lift and Bolan checked the hook, shackle and swivel assemblies on the end of each hoisting cable. When he was satisfied he nodded and they began to haul on the ropes that ran over pulleys on the outer ends of the booms. The cradle jerked upward, accompanied by the squeak of the pulley wheels as they revolved.
Braking the cradle below the guttering, they began slapping the anticorrosion paint on a section that stretched from the arch to the corner of the yard.
It was almost midday. White continents of cumulus cloud moved slowly across the blue sky, hiding the sun from time to time. But right now it was hot as hell, and the steep roofs above shut them off from the breeze. Soon Bolan and his companion were dripping with sweat.
“Shit,” Raoul complained, leaving his brush dipped in the paint can and massaging his right arm. “My goddamn shoulder is aching. Why the hell do we have to waste time horsing around in this elevator, anyway?”
“You know why,” Bolan said. “The cover has to be perfect.”
“I don’t see why we need two guys. You could handle the whole deal. I can’t help you press the goddamn trigger, after all.”
“Painters work with a mate,” Bolan said. “Anyway, that’s the way J-P wanted it. He figured I’d need a good backup man.”
In truth it was Bolan himself who had insisted that someone the gang boss trusted should come with him. Raoul’s report of what he had seen Bolan do was vital.
The mobster was not soothed by the implied compliment. He spit over the side of the cradle. “It beats me,” he grumbled. “I coulda been helpin’ Smiler work over that creep who owns the cafe in the Old Port. The asshole won’t come across with his insurance payment.
“You like that kind of work, don’t you?” Bolan asked, concealing his revulsion.
“Sure. I’d rather be in the contract line, though. Like with Smiler the other day...” An ugly smile cracked open the hood’s blue-jowled jaw. “I’ll never forget the look on Frankie Secondini’s face when we told him! We were on this train, see, and I had this length of steel...”
“Yeah,” Bolan said curtly. “I heard.”
At midday the sun disappeared behind a cloud and a factory whistle sounded in the distance. The convention was due to remain in session for another hour, breaking for lunch at one o’clock.
“Okay,” Bolan said. “We’re on our way.”
He drew on rubber gloves and fished plastic-wrapped packages from beneath the paint in each can. Inside one was a small but powerful pair of Zeiss binoculars which he handed to Raoul. The other contained a dayview Balvar X5 sniperscope, similar to the one Bolan had used in Corsica but without the Triphium IR light source. He placed this in his knee pocket and extended the ladder so that it linked the cradle with the roof.
Followed by Raoul, he climbed to the roof. They were wearing rubber-soled sneakers. Carefully, crouching just below the line of the roof, they circled the block above the courtyard until they came to the modernized sector opposite the archway. From here they looked over a row of lower buildings to the nearest avenue and the school beyond. The sidewalks were crowded now with office workers and clerks from the stores hurrying to lunch.
In the center of the flat roof a rectangular structure eight feet square and ten feet high housed the mechanism at the top of an elevator shaft. Between this and the roof parapet on the side away from the courtyard half a dozen zinc ventilator outlets from the air-conditioning plant projected. Bolan consulted his watch. “Three minutes,” he said.
