“Bolan!” It was clear from Jean-Paul’s stupefied voice that the name meant plenty to him. He fell back a pace, half releasing his grip. As he opened his mouth to speak again, a long, shivering tinkle agitated all the china on the chimneypiece behind him.
The air in the room trembled. The ground shook.
There was a continuous, low rumbling roar that crescendoed in a distant explosion. It was followed by another.
The volcano on Stromboli was flexing its muscles.
For a moment there was silence in the big crowded room. Then everyone began to speak, some denouncing Bolan, others concerning Antonin, most of them scared by the eruption.
Coralie Sanguinetti ran in from the servant’s wing. “Papa,” she said breathlessly, “it’s spitting fire up there. There’s a huge cloud of black smoke, with sparks and flames underneath. Maria and Giancarlo and the others are frightened; they want to go back to the village.”
“Let them go...” Bolan had not noticed the industrialist before: he was sitting in a cane chair by the windows “...they should be familiar enough with Stromboli by now: no harm will come to them.”
The brunette stared at him for a moment, glanced briefly at the tableau that had Mack Bolan as its centerpiece and then left the room.
“Well, Bolan? If that is who you are?” Jean-Paul resumed as though there had been no interruption. “Like I said: I want an explanation.”
He stepped forward and struck the Executioner viciously across the face, backhand and forehand, with the full sweep of his arm. The blows were strong enough to rock the big guy’s head on his shoulders and leave livid welts marking his cheeks. But he remained rigid in the grip of J-P’s two goons, staring unflinchingly and expressionlessly at the gang boss.
“I don’t like people who try to make a fool out of me,” Jean-Paul growled. “That’s something you’re gonna regret for sure. But before you suffer, believe me, you’re gonna sing.”
At Bolan’s ear there was a shrill, infantile giggle. “He’s gonna sing for his suffer!” Raoul sniggered.
“I insist this paid killer be handed over to me,” Antonin’s thickly accented voice cut in. “We have old accounts to settle. His life is forfeit ten times over... but that is a matter I intend to deal with personally.”
“Very well.” It was clear that Jean-Paul was struggling to master the anger that had swept over him at the discovery of “Sondermann’s” double deceit. “But first there must be explanations. And quickly. We have more important things to discuss than traitors.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Bolan said evenly. “I’m sure you won’t like the explanations.”
He had long ago decided on the strategy he would employ if his true identity was discovered. And it had occurred to him that even if the worst arrived, it could still be turned into a plus.
“We are waiting,” Jean-Paul said harshly.
Bolan could see his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, symptoms of that nervous instability Bolan had several times filed away mentally as being potentially useful. He was determined to play on it now.
“I am Mack Bolan,” he said.
“The Executioner?”
“Some call me that.”
“What the hell are you doing here, passing yourself off as Sondermann?”
“Sondermann was killed in a freeway pileup on his way down here. Like the man said, there’s a resemblance. It seemed an idea to take his place.”
“Why? Whose idea? What was the point?”
“I was put in,” Bolan said truthfully, “to find out what was brewing and why four capos had been killed... and then to mix it so that your big deal with the colonel here fell through.”
“What!” Antonin roared. “There! You see! The man is a spy, a renegade, a cheap mercenary. Let me...”
“Easy, Colonel,” J-P interrupted. “Your turn later. Let me handle this my way first, okay?”
As the KGB man lapsed into angry mutterings, Jean-Paul turned back to Bolan and asked, “You said you were ‘put in.’ That means you’re not working on your own, that you are, as Colonel Antonin says, a hired man. Who are you working for?”
As long as he avoided any mention of Telder or Interpol, Bolan could still use the situation to confuse matters and sow even more discord among the mobsters.
Instead of admitting that he was working for a law-enforcement agency, he would land the shit squarely in the fan by implicating another mafioso. The hell with denials and proofs and counterclaims: once the accusation was made, doubts would remain.
Bolan’s choice was based on the fact that, on the features of a man taken completely unaware, bewilderment, stupefaction and guilt leave much the same pattern.
That and the electric tension that was almost tangible.
“Who hired me?” he repeated. “Renato Ancarani.”
The effect of his words was more dramatic than he had anticipated, the result more spectacular than he had dared hope.
A sudden stunned silence followed by a chorus of angry shouts. Then Jean-Paul’s voice, shuddering with fury: “Ancarani! Come in here, you double-crossing twister!”
The Corsican was in fact still outside on the patio, talking to a group of hardmen. He had taken no part in the heated discussions that followed the arrival of Scalese and the man with the bandaged throat. Now he pushed his way through into the room. “Who’s calling names?” he cried angrily.
“Silence, you goddamn Corsican traitor!” Jean-Paul’s voice was again trembling with wrath. “Your hired man sold you out. What made you think you could get away with it, you sonovabitch — planting a fucking mole on me, putting in this Bolan to wreck our plans from the inside?”
Ancarani’s eyes widened at the stream of accusations. His jaw dropped. His hands made ineffectual gestures and although his lips moved convulsively, no words emerged.
Bolan was right. Taken totally by surprise, he looked in his stupefaction to be the picture of guilt.
Jean-Paul drew a Colt Python from under his jacket. “You slimy bastard!” he snapped. And before anyone could stop him he had fired the .357 Magnum revolver twice.
The two 158-grain hollow points drilled into Ancarani’s chest before he could get out a word of denial. He choked on blood and fell, his monogrammed silk shirt already a scarlet ruin.
The sharp crack of the shots in the room was echoed by a volley of explosions from Stromboli’s distant crater. Once more the flagstones drummed beneath their feet, the porcelain shivered on the chimneypiece. Outside among the lemon trees the short Mediterranean twilight was brightened by pulses of crimson.
Inside the villa there was uproar. Not all the mobsters were for Jean-Paul. Ancarani had his followers, and even the neutrals were yelling their disapproval of the killing.
Young Scalese was shouting loudest of all: the hell with the damned Corsican and what about the raid on his father’s house? What about this bastard Bolan and the goddamn baron?
Jean-Paul snatched Bolan’s Beretta from Smiler and jammed the muzzle against the big guy’s solar plexus. Bolan knew he was once again near death. The mobster’s whole body was shaking with rage now.
“I don’t get it,” he snarled. “You were working for Ancarani? And now I am hearing that is was Etang de Brialy who put you up to it?”
Bolan had once written, “I am marked for death. I am as condemned as any man who ever sat in death row. My chief determination is to stretch that last mile to its highest yield, to fight the war to my last gasp.”
Now, when that grim prophecy seemed about to come true, the warrior clung to that resolve: he would inflict the maximum damage possible while there was still breath left in his body; he would wreak as much havoc as he humanly could among the slime-bucket hordes surrounding him.
The hell with those denials: he had laid a hot enough trail for his story to leave at least some suspicions and doubts.
“Yeah,” he said calmly. “It was the baron who picked up the tab.”
Bolan was used to surprises, but the next move in the game floored him. Jean-Paul turned to the Parisian boss. “Well,” he barked, “what do you have to say to that?”
The Executioner couldn’t believe his ears. Etang de Brialy said: “Quite correct. I planned the raid and paid
