Bolan eased out of the car and let the door close softly behind him. The alley was pitch-black, and the air was thick with humidity and rich Chinese spices. Ongpin at night was like a piece of China moved two thousand miles and grafted on to a tropical island. As they had every place they'd settled, the Chinese had chosen to isolate themselves, keeping their culture intact, along with its wariness of foreigners.
Ongpin reflected that isolation, but unlike the last time Bolan had visited, the quarter seemed alive. Noise drifted through the open windows and the bright cracks under every door. As he moved down the alley, Bolan heard the melancholy wail of a biwa, its plaintive tune sounding surprisingly like the blues.
Mingling with the music, a different kind of sound drifted into the alley voices in urgent conversation.
Bolan glided cautiously, keeping to the wall.
He had three more blocks to go, slipping along back fences silently, his ears alert for every jarring note. Somewhere ahead, in a nondescript building, Charles Harding and Juan Rizal Cordero polished their plans to unleash a terror on Manila the likes of which it had never known.
Looking back on it, trying to piece it all together, Bolan realized that he had been a blind man in the desert. Walt Wilson had known more than he'd revealed, but not much. Frank Henson, his hooks only barely into Colgan, had a lead, but that must have been Harding's doing. It had been a way to keep tabs on Bolan. And with McRae on the scene, it was as good as having a beeper on him.
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.
And that was what kept him going. Such perfection just didn't exist. No one used three stories of living space without leaving a single sheet of paper out of place, a wrinkle or two on a bedspread, a dirty glass in a sink. It was almost as if someone had scurried ahead of him in the darkness, room by room, with a dust cloth in one hand and a dump sponge in the other. He doubted if a forensic team would be able to pull a single fingerprint.
And that could mean one of only two things. Either the place was supposed to look like that, in which case it was a dummy, some sort of antiseptic front meant to be seen but not used. Or it was used to hide something, and the pristine upper floors were meant simply to discourage the curious, suggesting a wrong turn had been made somewhere back three or four steps. But then the whole operation had been one long wrong turn. Nobody could flit back and forth across the Pacific like some sort of long-distance moth and vanish as completely as Charles Harding had done. Nobody, that is, except a man whose business was not meant to endure sunlight and fresh air.
As the doorknob turned, Bolan held his breath. The tension was almost palpable, and he had to fight against carelessness. How many empty rooms do you have to look in before you expect them all to be that way? Or was that what Harding was counting on?
Bolan groped inside the dark stairwell for a light switch. Neither wall had one. He clicked on his flashlight and played it over the ceiling, looking for a pullchain. The ceiling was flat and empty, and the light showed nothing on either wall.
Bolan found the first step, then clicked off the flashlight as he stepped on through the door.
Feeling his way slowly down the stairs, he kept one hand on the wall to keep his balance in the dark. He nearly stumbled when he reached for another step and found himself already on a flat surface, either a floor or a landing.
One more time he'd have to risk the light. When it lanced out, the darkness seemed to swallow the beam whole. It petered out before finding anything across the floor. He swung it close and played the beam up and down the wall beside him. As it moved away, the perfect circle flattened into an oval, then an open-ended parabola. The wall was completely blank. Cinder blocks, neatly mortared and painted over with a thick, off-white gloss, stretched a good forty feet before the beam played out.
Before moving, Bolan tried to reconstruct his passage down. As near as he could figure, he was looking toward the street in front of the building, but from below street level a good ten or twelve feet, possibly even more. Bolan started along the wall, again clicking off the light and feeling his way with a cautious prodding of one foot then dragging the other up alongside it.
He was starting to feel a damp chill that had nothing to do with climate. About twenty-five feet along the wall, his foot struck something. It sounded hollow, and was probably made of wood. Bolan tried to move around it, but it was too wide for him to maintain contact with the wall. He didn't want to lose the orientation.
The light clicked on again, and seemed dimmer. The light looked pale, almost washed out, and had an orange cast. The batteries were giving out.
Hurriedly he played the beam along the wall and moved around the obstacle, then clicked it off to conserve the power. He made it all the way this time without interruption. His foot struck something solid, then he leaned forward with one hand. Even in the dark he could tell it was a corner. The flat, unyielding thing in front of him was another wall, made of the same cinder block and painted with the same smooth paint.
Bolan flicked the light on one more time. He shone it on the wall in front of him, then started working it toward the left. A metallic click from somewhere off to the left jerked his head around.
Instinctively he shut off the light as he dropped to the cold stone floor.
A small spurt of light flashed, and the slug slammed into the wall just over his crouching body.
He heard the bullet puncture the cinder block and slap like a wet snail against the far side, then rattle down through the hollow blocks for a split second.
A second flash, almost like a powerful firefly, spat at him, and another slug cracked against the brittle blocks above him. Bolan started to roll, trying not to lose his fix on the source of the flame. Using the light was suicide, but he couldn't afford to let the gunman get away.
Bolan stopped rolling as he hit the wooden box he'd had to step around. Getting to his knees, he craned his head forward, turning it slightly to try and get some sense of his surroundings. In the darkness he heard something, a soft whisk like someone sweeping a sidewalk two blocks away.
But the sound was a hell of a lot closer. As he listened, it drew still closer, as if the gunman knew where he was. He pulled the Desert Eagle and waved the gun back and forth, trying to decide where to fire and when. Listening intently, he heard one more rasp of something on stone, then the noise stopped.
Far across the cellar, a wedge of light shone for a second, and someone shouted. The light vanished, and a hollow boom rolled across the dark floor. A door had opened for the briefest instant, then been slammed shut. He'd seen it immediately and felt certain that no one had slipped through. A man would have to be thin as a sheet of paper to manage an entry through that narrow opening.
The shout had come from the gunman, he guessed. But in the renewed darkness, he was no better off than he had been before the door opened. Groping his way past the wooden crate, he kept low and moved as quickly as he could. Something smacked into his right arm, just below the wound, and he groaned involuntarily.
Two quick shots cracked, and he didn't even see any light. Both bullets thudded into the wooden crate, which was just a foot or two behind him.
It had been close, and he knew he was lucky the gunman was content to fire single shots. A spurt of automatic fire would probably find him. The gunman was good. He hadn't missed by much with any of the four shots.
Bolan realised his opponent had some unexplained advantage, and as that fact sank in, the cellar seemed to shrink around him, propelling him even closer to the gunman. The gun barked again, and the report was louder, as if the gunman had drawn closer. Bolan fired twice. One shot pinged off something metal, striking it obliquely then slapping into a solid obstacle far across the chamber. The second seemed to disappear without a trace. No sound of bullet on unyielding wood, stone or metal, no groan from wounded flesh, drifted back to him. It was as if the darkness had swallowed the bullet completely.
Bolan thought about that for a few seconds, and came to the only conclusion possible. Somewhere almost dead ahead of him, the chamber was open. Perhaps the room narrowed into a tunnel, like the one Marisa had taken him through, or maybe an open door let the bullet pass through and find something soft beyond it.
He started to back up, the Desert Eagle in his left hand, his nearly useless right stroking the cold wall. Quickly, he backtracked, stopping only when his butt slammed into the right-angled wall. He knew the stairwell was just to his left, and started inching toward it. As his right hand brushed against the free wall of the stairwell, he groped gingerly with his foot. A misstep might get him killed or, at the very least, alert the gunman to his whereabouts.
As the sole of his boot found the rough stone of the bottom step, all his care was rendered pointless. The cellar flooded with light. He dove straight ahead, just ahead of a hail of gunfire.
As he started up the stairs, he tripped and fell.
It saved his life.
A flurry of shots, this time not from any handgun, punched through the hollow cinder blocks, scattering fragments all over the stairs and raining sharp chips and dust down over his head and shoulders.
Bolan turned, lying on the stairs stiff as a board, his spine straddling three steps. He swung the Desert Eagle around in a two-handed grip and waited, breathing shallowly and ignoring the hard stone digging at his backbone. He heard them coming, their feet slapping the stone floor as they raced toward the stairs.
He didn't have to wait long. Two men, running flat out, jostled one another as they turned the corner and Bolan fired four shots. The Desert Eagle spat ferociously, and the lead man threw up his hands. His weapon, an AK-47, started up, then dropped straight down as it slipped from his grip. He fell backward, a brand new and very ugly hole just over his left eye. The remaining three shots had taken the second man in the right shoulder and in the throat. He, too, lost his weapon as his hand flew up to his neck and closed around the most serious wound. He only had strength for making a horrible rattling sound in his throat.
The lead man, who appeared to be Chinese, was considerably shorter than his companion, and his collapsing body slammed into his partner's knees.
The runner-up, a skinny Anglo built like a stork, all gawky limbs and sharp features, smacked his head on the wall behind as he fell with the weight of the Chinese added to his own. A sharp crack echoed up the stairwell as he hit, and his head sat at a funny angle as he slid the rest of the way to the floor. If the bullets hadn't killed him, the broken neck would have.
Bolan scrambled back a step or two, still lying on the stairs and bumping his vertebrae against the lip of the step as he pushed with his heels. It was suddenly silent in the cellar, and Bolan panted short, sharp breaths. In the confined stairwell, they sounded like sandpaper on soft stone.
He slowly gathered his legs under him before rising. He took one step down, then another.
It remained quiet, but the man with the silenced pistol hadn't been accounted for. The two men lying in an obscene heap in front of him both had automatic rifles.
Bending down, he tugged the AK up by its muzzle, then grabbed the handgrip and picked it up.
He made sure it was operable, and that the magazine was at least partially loaded. Muffling the click of the reinserted magazine, he leapt to the cellar floor and swept the muzzle of the AK in a semicircle, his finger on the trigger.
A man had been caught in the hail of 7.62 mm slugs. He looked at the rip in his stomach with surprise. His right hand dropped an ugly-looking Makarov, hung in the air for a moment, then fluttered toward the dark red stains across his blue cotton shirt. He glanced at Bolan as he fell back and slammed hard into the floor.
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
Behind him, across the stone floor, a door yawned darkly. It was the same one that had teen cracked open briefly. Bolan jerked the magazine from the second AK and started toward the open door.
As he drew close, he realized that yet another door was ajar at the far end of the chamber. It must have been the spot that had swallowed the missing shot. He would have to check it out, but first things first.
Poking into the first door, he swept a palm along the wall. A fluorescent light pinged and flashed on. At first Bolan thought it was nothing more than a simple office.
Then he saw the map.