Don Pendleton - Whipsaw

Harding had stayed offstage, disappearing into the darkness of the wings as surely as the Phantom of the Opera. He had come and gone, leaving nothing behind but blood and ragged bits of flesh. And for what?

To control a country that hadn't been up off its knees in three hundred years. Harding had been obsessed, and he had exploited others who were similarly obsessed though less clever. Men like McRae, who didn't care about anything as long as the pay was good, he bought.

Bolan wanted to get Harding like he hadn't wanted anyone in a long, long time. Seeing a city at night, spread out under the stars as defenceless as a sleeping child, vulnerable as a naked woman, really brings it home just how easy it is to make it wake up screaming.

That was the key to understanding men like Harding and Cordero. They knew how easy it was. They knew, and they loved it. And Mack Bolan loved the idea of taking them down, disassembing them as totally as a child takes apart a house of blocks.

But first he had to find them. There had been enough life left in Don McRae to make him want to trade information for keeping it, but he hadn't been sure where they were hiding. He knew three addresses, and his wallet had yielded a fourth.

Manila was a rabbit warren, a system of tunnels in plain sight. Under a dictator, people learn how to live two lives, to build a city within a city. Under Ferdinand Marcos, the people of the Philippines had done it, and under Corazon Aquino they had seen no reason to tear it down.

The three blocks passed in waves of light and dark, sounds swelling and fading away like waves drifting under a pier. And the first address lay before him. A ramshackle building, three stories of ordinary stone, every window dark, lay beyond a wooden palisade more ornamental than defensive in function.

Bolan scaled the fence easily, then moved close to the building through a neat garden of well-maintained shrubbery. A half flight of wooden stairs led to the back door. Bolan took the steps carefully, alert for the least indication that someone knew he was there. With his ear to the door, he strained but heard nothing.

A second-story window, the only one without bars, lay just out of reach to the left of the stairway.

He had to know whether anyone hid inside, but he couldn't get in through the door without calling attention to himself. The buildings lay in an unbroken row marching off in either direction, and Bolan backed down the stairs. Over the fence, he moved three doors down to a small shop, it's back wall slashed by rickety wooden stairs. He made it over a rusty wire fence and onto the stairs, then held his breath when someone stirred inside an open window.

Soundlessly he took the next flight and crawled over the wooden parapet. Moving back the way he'd come, over the rooftops, he found a skylight in the center of Harding's building. The skylight was locked, but he could slip the lock aside by shoving a knife blade down at an angle. It slid through the rubber melding, but he had to rap the knife handle sharply with the heel of his hand before the latch clicked open.

The skylight came free with a squeak. Inside, it was as dark as the bottom of a well, and Bolan leaned in, squeezing his eyes shut to accustom them to the darkness. When he opened them again, he could see blocks of shade, but there was no way to tell whether any of them were substantial enough to hold his weight.

With a shrug, he grabbed hold of the skylight ledge and dropped down, wincing as the pain shot through his wounded arm. He almost let go for a second, but bit his lip until the pain passed.

After he stilled to ready himself, he let go with both hands and landed lightly on the balls of his feet.

Groping through the dark, he found a wall. Following it to the right, he bumped his knee on something, then found the molding of a door frame. He pressed an ear to the door for a moment, but whatever lay beyond was silent.

He found the knob and tested it. It rattled once, then turned easily. Gently he pulled the door toward him. The darkness was so thick that he couldn't gauge what size area lay behind the door, and he felt as though he were in a cocoon, his senses smothered by layers of cotton wool.

Bolan stopped again to listen. His own breathing echoed distantly in his ears, but he heard no other sound. It was an impossible situation. He'd have to risk using a light. The chance that it would be spotted was no greater than the risk that he'd be heard when he stumbled over a piece of furniture or kicked a wastebasket. He reached into his pocket for the flashlight, then pulled his Desert Eagle.

Pointing both in the same direction, the weapon in his good hand and the flashlight in the other, he thumbed the light on. It seemed blinding after the utter blackness, and he blinked away the glare for a few seconds.

The room was a simple bedroom, the neatly made bed and a nightstand the only furniture. He moved back and trained the light into the room he'd just come from. It appeared to be a small office, one wall full of bookshelves, the other occupied by a wooden desk with a corkboard pinned to the wall just above it. Like the bedroom, it was plain and utilitarian.

He turned back and crossed the bedroom to another door. With his hand on the doorknob, he switched off the light and listened to the darkness one more time. Opening the door, he held his breath before clicking the light back on. This time he found himself staring down a narrow hallway. The plain wooden floor was clean but needed waxing. Its surface was dull, even scarred in a few places from heavy traffic over a long period of time.

He stepped into the hall, pulling the door closed but not latching it. He was almost at one end of the hall.

At the opposite end, a stairwell led to the floor below.

He moved lightly toward it, squeezing the butt of the Desert Eagle in his left hand. He could feel the texture of the grip against his palm, a strange kind of comfort.

Bolan made his way carefully down the stairs, pausing every few steps to listen. The place might as well have been a tomb, for all the sound he heard.

He'd seen model homes that had more life in them.

And with every step, he felt more and more certain that he was bringing things to a head. Harding was within reach now, even if he still kept to the shadows. It was gut feeling, intuition. Information was the least of it.

Bolan had a kind of sixth sense, a radar, that never failed him.

In the dark he could hear the steady beep, beep, beep as the beam swept past a target. The little green blip swelled and died, swelled and died, a light on a dim screen that corresponded exactly to something real and substantial. Harding was that little green light now, and Bolan was closing in.

The next floor was as vacant as the first.

But the little light kept flashing.

Mack Bolan opened the heavy door, not expecting to find anything of interest but hoping he was wrong. He had gone over the first three floors, working his way down from the top. He felt like a novice cat burglar on a milk run. His technique was perfect, his haul nonexistent. With every empty room, his frustration had grown sharper.

He'd had precious little time to begin with, and now he couldn't help hearing every second click away, its sharp snap echoing and fading, only to be replaced by the next one, and the next.

So far, he hadn't found a single thing to connect this place with Charles Harding, nothing except the address muscled out of a frightened man who had nothing to lose whether he lied or told the truth.

And when lying might let you suck air for another thirty hours, why not do it? For that matter, Bolan still hadn't seen anything to connect this dark, empty collection of echoes with a single living soul. It was so neat and so clean that it was almost perfect.