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 whenIwent to school!”
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.
Raoul sank gratefully with his back against the elevator housing. The sun was shining again, and the tarmac surface of the roof was softening in the heat.
Bolan stared over the buildings below them to the far side of the avenue, where the near-vertical slopes of the assembly-hall glinted in the bright light.
He looked at the sky. Another bank of clouds was drifting across from the west. Soon the sun would be hidden once more.
Two minutes later he walked to the ventilator nearest the elevator housing. Seizing the conical cap that shielded the opening at the top of the twelve-inch metal tube, he twisted left and right until the cone and its stays loosened.
He lifted off the cap, glanced again at his watch and held his hand out to Raoul. The hood handed him the coil of rope.
One end of it was spliced around an oval eyelet lined with lead. Using this as a sinker, Bolan fed the rope slowly into the ventilation shaft, playing it out until he felt it slacken in his hands and there was a definite tug from far below.
The janitor — one of the people on whom Jean-Paul could use a “lever” — had been instructed to wait at the foot of the shaft at precisely twelve-fifteen.
Bolan waited until he felt three tugs on the rope and then began hauling it up again. It was much heavier this time. Carefully and evenly he withdrew the rope until the object tied to it appeared at the top of the vent.
The Executioner held the Husqvarna 561 in his hands.
He untied the rope and left it coiled by the shaft, then took the scope from his pocket and fitted it to the gun. Crouching low now, he moved to the corner where the parapet ran into deep shadow cast by a multiple stack of chimneys above the next-door building.
Kneeling behind the parapet, he rested his elbows on the coping and raised the butt of the rifle to his shoulder.
The school was due south of them, and the sun was almost directly above the assembly hall’s serrated roof. The north-facing glass, four floors below Bolan’s vantage point, was in shadow, but the glare from the sky allowed him to see through.
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.