The funnel fell from the Executioner's mouth. Cognac splashed over the sheets as the bottle spun from the attacker's grasp. The beam from the flashlight swung crazily across the ceiling.
For the moment there was a frenzied tangle of limbs on the alcohol-soaked bed.
Then Bolan had thrown off the two intruders and was crouched by the night table, ready to spring. He feinted toward the first hood, who was still sprawled on the pillows with the gun beneath him... and then swung violently the other way.
He seized the hypodermic, tore it from the hardman's grasp and plunged the needle with lightning speed into the guy's left eye, ramming the syringe home with the heel of his hand.
The deadly point punctured the eyeball, pierced the cortex and penetrated the cerebellum. The hardman cried out once and fell, clawing at his face. He twitched and then lay still.
Bolan was already on the other guy.
They rolled from the bed to the floor.
Anger and surprise and perhaps some extra stimulation from the liquor he had been forced to swallow lent Bolan a manic strength. His powerful shoulder muscles rippled as he heaved the attacker facedown onto the bed. An instant later he was kneeling on the guy's calves, hauling the top half of his body upright and jamming a forearm across his windpipe and beneath his chin at the same time.
The hood writhed, choking. The point of his elbow rammed backward into the Executioner's solar plexus, but Bolan held on grimly. A hand scrabbled for the soldier's groin. He slammed his hips against the killer's buttocks.
And now the palm of his free hand was cradling the back of his victim's head. Sweating, he exerted pressure.
On the rumpled bed, their distorted shadows thrown across wall and ceiling by the flashlight, which had rolled to the far corner of the room, the two men remained locked in motionless, almost noiseless, combat. Only their harsh breathing, an occasional creak from the bedsprings as one or the other minimally shifted position, a barely discernible click from tortured sinew or tendon, broke the silence.
Beads of moisture stood out on Bolan's forehead. His opponent's breathing grew more labored and hoarse as the pressure on windpipe and neck inexorably increased; his struggles weakened.
And then abruptly Bolan summoned a supreme effort an upward jerk of the forearm coupled with a sudden titanic thrust with the palm of the other hand. A dull crack echoed in the room.
The hood's body went limp in Bolan's grasp. He allowed it to slide to the floor.
He clambered off the bed, breathing heavily, and examined the two bodies.
Both men had been rough, muscular, evidently hard living. But that was about all he could deduce. They could have come from anywhere in the northern half of Europe. A search of their clothes yielded nothing. They were wearing anonymous gray combat fatigues. No labels, no insignia, no papers in the empty pockets.
Certain things, however, were clearer to Bolan now.
Like the planned scenario for this nighttime visit.
Gingerly he extracted the hypodermic syringe from the first attacker's eye socket. Over the hand basin in the bathroom, he examined the contents, squirted out a second sample. The almond odor was enough to convince him.
A derivative of prussic acid.
Muscular contractions followed by immediate cardiac arrest.
By the time the hotel staff realized that the occupant of room 321 wasn't going to require any breakfast probably not until noon the following day the muscles would be relaxed, the poison itself would have been dissipated. Symptoms, therefore, of a classic heart attack.
Bolan could follow the reasoning imposed on the police. A killer in town, a man wanted by every security agency in the Western world. He drinks too much, in a local restaurant.
Afterward he runs amok in the street, kills two innocent bystanders and then goes back to his hotel and drinks himself to sleep. A massive coronary following such excesses would be a believable sequel. Alerted by the remaining fumes of brandy, stronger and more distinctive than aquavit or Brennivin, the police surgeon and the autopsy doctor would look no further.
Very neat.
There were two other conclusions that Bolan could draw from the night's events.
One, whatever it was that the hoods boss or bosses were trying so hard to keep under wraps must be very important indeed important enough to mount a team operation that had already cost them four soldiers, even if Bolan hadn't winged a fifth in the Mercedes at the airport.
Two, it must be the kind of thing that those bosses, knowing Bolan, would expect him to be interested in destroying.
That narrowed the field some, but it still wasn't exactly specific.
The Executioner was intrigued. What could be going on in Iceland that the bad boys thought he had been sent to stamp out?
Just to satisfy his curiosity and because he was becoming goddamned tired of these continual attempts on his life he determined to do his best to find out.
He wasn't necessarily going to do anything about it when he had found out. Unless, of course, it was the kind of thing... but it would wait until he knew more.
Meanwhile, before he continued his vacation, he would offer himself, knowingly this time, as a decoy. Maybe if he could get close enough to talk, he could convince them that he was not interested at all in their conspiracy, whatever it was.
But first, there were two bodies to dispose of in some way that would leave no finger pointing in his direction. The police, especially after the fray outside Nielsen's, were the last people he wished to complain to, explain to or wise up to the unsuccessful attempts on his life. He would handle that one himself.
The guy with the broken neck was not too difficult. He was a burglar, wasn't he? There were skeleton keys in his pocket to prove it or there would be as soon as Bolan had removed them from the lock of his door. Too bad the guy missed his footing and fell to his death in the area from a third-floor balcony.
Bolan opened the double-glazed windows, heaved the body onto his shoulder and stepped out into the cold predawn light. Bending over the balcony rail, he lowered the corpse to the full extent of his arms, swung it left, right, left again... and then, gasping with the effort, relaxed his grip and let the corpse sail away to one side and down.
The inert body landed below the balcony of the next-door room with a thump and a clatter that seemed to the Executioner as loud as a peal of thunder in a tropical storm. But no window in the hotel facade was thrown open; no questing heads and shoulders appeared; no angry voice shouted. After a minute he went back into his room and drew the drapes. Let the cops work out why a man with skeleton keys that would open doors inside the building should have fallen from a balcony outside it.
The second body posed more of a problem. With a bloody hole where one eye should have been, it would be difficult trying to pass that one off as accidental death.
Soft footed and in his trousers now, Bolan prowled the corridors until he found what he wanted a small room beyond the elevators and the stairwell, where the hotel service personnel stored bed linen and cleaning materials. A sliding panel on one wall opened onto a laundry chute. He dragged the body along the passageway and stuffed it headfirst down the chute.
If it slid freely the whole way to the basement, there would at first be no way of telling which floor it came from; if it became jammed someplace... well, with luck the chambermaids would not change the bed linen in vacated rooms much before ten-thirty.
And Bolan would be long gone before they discovered the chute was blocked.
He returned to his room, wiped the attackers' fingerprints from door handles and anything else the attackers might have touched, and then washed out the syringe and threw it down toward the body in the area.
3
By eight o'clock he had checked out. Ten minutes later he was on the far side of the square, mending an enforced cognac hangover with strong black coffee in the breakfast room of the Hotel Thor. At nine-fifteen he arranged to rent a car with the help of the clerk behind the information desk at the Hotel Loftleider, half a dozen blocks away.