Frankie’s face had blanched. Sweat dewed his forehead. “Look, you guys... please...” Swivelling on his heel, he made a desperate leap for the alarm cord above the window.

Smiler hit him expertly in the belly. He folded forward, retching. The man with the steel bar raised it high and smashed it savagely across Frankie’s scalp.

Frankie went down. Blood gushed from his mouth, nose and ears, but Smiler was ready with a towel he had snatched from the rail beside the bunk.

“Dump him,” Smiler ordered his two companions.

The two killers snapped open the blind and rolled down the wide window. Lights streaked past as the high-speed express rocketed over a crossing and roared through a deserted station. Once it was dark again they pushed Frankie’s body through the gap and let it drop.

The man with the length of steel wiped it on the bloodstained towel and stowed both in his briefcase. Smiler closed the window and pulled down the blind.

Frankie’s body, still traveling at more than 100 mph, hit the cinders, bounced high into the air and finally came to rest, hanging like some obscene fruit from a sapling halfway down the embankment.

His dead eyes stared sightlessly at the red lantern on the last car as the train vanished into the night.

1

“Coincidence?” Mack Bolan said. “Uh-uh. There is a link between those killings.”

“Naturally, there is a link, monsieur;” the Swiss Interpol chief agreed. “All four of them...”

“Were Mafiosi? Sure. But there is something more. I can’t see any connection between the four guys or the territories they worked, but those hits were put out by the same source. Why were they killed within a few hours of one another!”

“We were hoping, Monsieur Bolan, that maybe you could enlighten us,” the superintendent from the French Counterintelligence Service put in. “You have a reputation as the most successful anti-Mafia fighter ever. That is why we asked you to come to this meeting.”