The pool became a maelstrom of foam and thrashing limbs. Bolan had the advantage of surprise and superior strength. The guard was holding a gun, but right now his overriding desire was for self-preservation... his need for air, to feed his bursting lungs.
Bolan found his wrist, applied a nerve grip, forcing him to drop the weapon. Remorselessly he forged through the water, shoving the drowning guard toward the deep end.
Finally Bolan maneuvered the hardman to the side, where a ladder led back up to the flagstone patio. He hooked his arms over the top of the ladder while he thrust down with his feet to keep his victim submerged until at last the frantic struggles weakened and then ceased.
Bolan left the body floating facedown in the pool, recovered the Beretta from where he had dropped it on the terrace, and hurried back to the house. He turned another corner and looked across sloping lawns to a hedge over which the distant lights of the city made a faint glow in the sky.
The ground rose here, leaving a railed area circling the building. Bolan looked down through the top half of tall windows to a large paneled room in the center of which eleven men sat around a boardroom table. He caught his breath. So, this must be the “important” meeting.
Crouching, he saw that the room was surrounded by a gallery. A short flight of steps led to a door that was clearly an entrance to this gallery.
At the top of the stairs he tried the door. It was not locked. A fraction of an inch at a time, he eased open the door, waited, pushed lightly. The door swung silently inward and he slipped through.
Carved wooden balusters railed in the gallery, which was in deep shadow. The room below was lit by three green-shaded lamps that hung, poolroom style, over the vast table. Bolan lowered himself to the floor and peered down between two balusters.
A big ornate chair at the head of the table was empty. Sanguinetti, the owner of the property — Bolan recognized him from newspaper photos — was installed at the foot. The other ten men were ranged five on either side.
They were talking among themselves. Bolan could make out no individual words, could hear no names. But he did not have to. He realized he was looking at ten of the most powerful men in the world.
And the most evil.
Facing him beneath the low-hanging poolroom lamps, Bolan saw the rock-hard features of Vincente Borrone, whose family controlled docks and transport Stateside; Luigi Abba, the undisputed boss of Vegas and the West Coast; the Unione Corse capo, Renato Ancarani; Arturo Zefarelli from Sicily; and Pasquale Lombardo, who ran the Mob in Toulon.
For a while Bolan was unable to pinpoint the crime emperors with their backs to him, but the conversation around the table was animated, and eventually each had turned toward a neighbor sufficiently for the Executioner to pedigree the other five.
The first he recognized was Girolamo Scalese, king of the Camorra in Naples.
Next to him was the Baron Etang de Brialy, a small gray-haired Frenchman with gold-rimmed eyeglasses, who was the Mister Big behind all organized crime in Paris. Between this couple and Sanguinetti were two hoods whose names Bolan could not remember but who controlled, he knew, the Mafia in Chicago and Detroit. The quorum was completed by Jean-Paul.
It was the first time Bolan had seen the Marseilles gang leader in the flesh, and he looked at the man with interest.
J-P was impressive. He was a big guy, almost as tall as Bolan, and appeared to be in his early forties. He was trim, bronzed, the sharp planes of his face etched with laugh-lines, his head unexpectedly capped with thick white hair.
Bolan smiled wryly. If he had known his future “employer” would be at the meeting he probably could have entered the fortress openly and even been invited as a guest. As it was, he would have to get out fast before the absence of the two men he had killed was noticed. He couldn’t afford to have Sondermann associated with that.
But first, he wanted to find out the purpose of the meeting. Nothing was happening right now: the eleven men appeared to be waiting for something. Or someone.
A few minutes later, Bolan heard the clattering whine of an approaching jet helicopter. The noise increased and then it subsided as the chopper landed somewhere on the far side of the pool.
A whistle sounded. Almost immediately the aircraft took off again and flew out to sea.
As the rotor whine faded in the distance, conversation in the room below the gallery dwindled too. A door opened; a voice made an announcement.
A thickset man with a shaven skull marched into the room, nodded briefly and took the vacant chair at the head of the table.
Bolan choked back a gasp of astonishment.
The man was in military uniform; he wore the insignia of a Colonel in the Red Army.
His name, Bolan knew, was Dimitri Aleksandrevitch Antonin. And the last time they had met, Bolan had shot him in the shoulder and left him for dead. So, the liaison between the KGB and the Soviet military intelligence agency, the GRU, was still alive.
4
Bolan didn’t get it. On one of his daring one-man raids into Soviet Russia, Colonel Antonin had been in charge of the manhunt ordered at all costs to stop him from leaving the country with a defecting scientist.
At that time, Antonin had been assistant to Major General Greb Strakhov, the evil genius of the KGB responsible for the frame that had outlawed Bolan. He wondered now if Antonin had taken Strakhov’s place as head of the KGB’s “wet affairs” death squad. Or if he had returned to his original post as KGB-GRU liaison under the department’s Third Chief Directorate.
Moscow was a hell of a long way from Southern France. And what was he doing here chairing a meeting of international racketeers?
Whatever it was, the Executioner knew, it would be something as corrupt as it was illegal.
He craned his neck trying to hear every word exchanged around the long table below. The conversation, which had been in French, had now lapsed into an English with more varieties of accent than Bolan had ever heard in one place.
“You know why I am here,” Antonin said curtly. “It is a matter for you to decide among yourselves — here, now, and I want a decision before I leave — whether you are prepared to accept my offer.”
Bolan’s eyes opened wide. He was eavesdropping on some evil scheme that the KGB was anxious to promote, that was clearly going to link crime with sedition.
“Very well, Colonel,” Jean-Paul was saying, “we are aware of the general strategy. Now let us hear the details.”
“They are not complicated,” Antonin replied. “You and the elements you represent are locked in permanent combat with the law, both nationally and internationally. Is it not so?”
He paused. “I am not,” he continued, “concerned here with questions of so-called morality, with the bourgeois-imperialist concepts of good and evil, right or wrong. In my country we subscribe to the doctrine that victory goes to the strongest, that might, as you Westerners have it, is right. I make, therefore, no value judgments in assessing your particular role in your society. I view it objectively.” Another, longer, pause. “And objectively speaking, you are weak.”
Several of the mafiosi shifted uneasily at Antonin’s words. Weak? That was the last term they would apply to themselves. They were the emperors of crime, and people lived or died according to their orders.
Scalese, the Camorra boss, muttered something under his breath to Renato Ancarani. The New York capo, Borrone, scowled and only just managed to check a heated reply that sprang to his lips.
“You are weak,” Antonin repeated, thumping the table, “because you are always in an inferior position relative to your lawmakers. However important the scale of your operations, you are scared of the law.”
He held up his hand as the murmurs of dissent around the table rose to an angry climax.
