Bolan waited until the fringe of the approaching cloud bank passed across the sun.
At once, through the scope’s magnifying lens, he was able to see through and into the hall.
He saw a quarter of a circle of tiered seats crammed with people around and above a high platform at the far end of the huge room. On the platform, eight men and a woman sat behind a long table, each with a microphone positioned nearby.
Three places away from the chairman sat Telder. He was busy scribbling on a pad in front of him. Some refraction in the roof glass was making it hard to define his outline. Bolan moved along the balustrade until he could sight the platform through a different panel in the roof.
The image was sharp and clear now. He took a 3-round clip from his breast pocket and handed it to Raoul. The mobster fed three 150-grain slugs into it and passed it back to Bolan.
The Executioner shifted his position slightly, until he was comfortable and totally relaxed. He maneuvered the Husqvarna until the Bausch and Lomb scope located the platform... the table... the nine experts... Telder.
The cross hairs centered experimentally on the Interpol man’s chest.
The cloud thinned, became translucent. The sun rode out through thin veils of white into a clear blue sky.
The image blurred and vanished. At once it was uncomfortably hot again. Even in the shadowed corner of the flat roof, Bolan sensed the heat beating through his coverall. Sweat ran into his eyes from beneath his hair, crawled along his spine and trickled down his sides. His palms were sticky and his fingertips moist.
Bolan smothered a curse. He rubbed his sleeve across his brow; he wiped the palm of his trigger hand on the coverall pants. He stole a covert glance at his watch. Telder was due to address the convention; he was the last speaker before lunch.
The glass of the eyepiece was filmed with moisture. It was in any case impossible to see through the assembly-hall roof until the glare from the sun diminished.
Bolan looked yet again at the sky. Another mass of cumulus was moving toward the sun, but it would be several minutes before the glare was gone.
Raoul was squinting through his binoculars. “Last thing I saw, your mark was on his feet and talkin’,” he said.
Bolan reached into the grip for a clean cotton cloth and wiped the eyepiece. He mopped his brow, keeping the sweat away from his eyes. He dried his hands for the second time.
Abruptly the heat was withdrawn as the tower of cumulus leaned forward and covered the sun. Bolan clicked the Husqvarna magazine in place and took up his position afresh.
Through the glass now he could see Telder on his feet behind the table, his notes in his hand. The first shot was to break the roof glass; that was essential — to alert the audience that something was happening, to convince Raoul, and to make a clear passage for the second and third.
He squeezed the trigger.
The thunderous report... the shock of the recoil... an impression through the magnifying lens of pandemonium: glass fragments in a frozen cascade, open mouths, men and women starting to their feet, staring upward, the chairman half-risen from his chair. Telder had halted in midphrase, his arms spread wide, an arrested gesture.
Bolan flipped the Husqvarna’s bolt. The cross hairs lowered, shifted sideways, centered on Telder’s chest. While he remained immobile, perhaps petrified with astonishment, Bolan held his breath, took up the first pressure, squeezed again.
The second coughing explosion. A click of the bolt, the glint of a cartridge case, slam the last round in and at once — now!— fire for the third time.
They both saw it — Raoul via the Zeiss prisms, Bolan through the Balvar scope. Telder fell to the back of the platform, his chair flung aside, a scarlet patch already blooming horribly across the front of his pale jacket. He hit the wall and slid to the floor.
Raoul was giggling. Bolan scooped up the three ejected shell cases and tossed them onto the roofs below. Seconds later he was lashing the rope around the rifle, complete this time with sniperscope and empty magazine, using the leather strap to tie on the binoculars. He lowered the gun into the shaft and began playing out the rope.
When three sharp tugs told him that the janitor had safely received the rifle, he let go the remainder of the coil and allowed it to snake down the tube.
While Raoul, still grinning with obscene glee, grabbed the canvas case, Bolan replaced the ventilator cone. By the time the police began any house-to-house search for the assassin, the Husqvarna would be back in its rack in the gun shop from which Jean-Paul had taken it.
In the distance, police whistles shrilled. Soon afterward, Bolan heard the crescendo warble of approaching patrol cars and the siren of an ambulance racing to the assembly hall. He hurried back toward the roof and the ladder.
By the time armored-truck details appeared in the courtyard below, Bolan and the mobster were sitting in the painter’s cradle, eating their sandwiches and sharing the wine from the plastic bottle.
13
For Mack Bolan it was one hell of a situation. Correction: two separate hells.
For starters, Bolan was fighting, or pretending to fight, on the side of the savages. And second, instead of riding the crest of that usual one-man wave, the warrior’s own plan forced him to lie low, working in the dark, using the plotters’ own underhand techniques in order to force them to destroy each other.
It was the only way that he could be sure to provoke a rift in the planned association that would rupture any chance of a worldwide Mafia league and disenchant the KGB’s Colonel Antonin sufficiently to make him throw the whole idea out the window.
This time the frontal assault, the elimination of enemy key men that Bolan favored, would be useless: there would always be others to take their places. No, the Soviet conspirators had to see the Mafia fighting family against family; they must be made to see the alliance as totally unstable... and therefore unreliable. Only then would they withdraw their support.
And, yeah, the Executioner was the only man who could do it.
From his position of trust he had to engineer a series of deceits and apparent treacheries that would split the syndicate apart like an overripe melon.
Okay, that position was now well established. After the disappearance of three men and the public murder of a fourth, Bolan in his role of the German hit man was well in with the high command of the Riviera Mafia.
But it was only now that the really hard part began.
And there were dangers.
The ever-present threat of a confrontation with Antonin.
The fact that now, as an accepted man in the organization, Bolan would be expected to take part in group operations, in crimes that would be difficult to avoid without blowing his cover or faking them as he had done with Telder.
The Telder operation had been impressive: it was Raoul’s reluctantly admiring report, and the newspaper accounts of this and the other three disappearances, that had finally raised Bolan’s stock ace high in Jean-Paul’s book.
The only tough spot, Bolan reflected, was choosing the moment when Raoul’s attention was distracted so that he never got wise to the fact that the magazine Bolan slammed into the rifle wasn’t the same one that the mobster himself had loaded.
The clip Bolan had shoved in — hidden until then in his pants pocket — carried only one live round and two blanks.
The live round shattered the glass roof of the assembly hall, all right. But it wasn’t, as Bolan had said, to minimize the danger of deflection and make it easy for the next two: it was to tip off Telder that the operation was all systems go and alert his audience that something dramatic was on the way.