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.
23
Bolan stared at the map for a long moment, leaning closer and reaching out to touch it. Small red circles peppered the center of Manila. A quick count showed thirty-three. All but five had been crosshatched by a makeshift star or crude asterisk. None of the locations meant anything to Bolan, who did not have that comprehensive a knowledge of the city.
Pinned to a corkboard by a half-dozen pushpins, the map appeared to be standard issue. Nearly three feet long on each side, it was creased in several places, indicating a regular fold, almost like an American road map, but the segments were twice the size. Bolan jerked the pushpins free, one by one, then folded the map carefully. He backed out of the of flee and climbed the stairs to the first floor.
He dialed in a hurry, then waited for someone to pick up. The phone rang several times, and Bolan impatiently waited for Marisa to answer.
Finally the receiver on the other end rattled out of its cradle.
"Bring Carlos," he said, "quickly. You know where. I'll meet you out front." Bolan slammed the phone down and moved toward the front door. It was far too late to worry about caution. He stood in the front hall, pulling a plain cloth curtain aside and tucking it behind the doorknob so he could watch the street.
It was quiet out there, almost too quiet, but he couldn't afford to worry about that, either. He killed time by committing the ammo from both AK's into one magazine, then tossed the empty into a brown metal wastebasket next to a small utility table.
His arm was beginning to throb again, and he wished he had some painkillers. He squeezed the thickly bandaged wound, trying to shut out the stabbing ache. While he waited, he considered his options. They were few and unattractive. The first image of the map kept floating into his mind's eye like a dust mote and darting away every time he tried to stare at it directly.
Without a timetable, he had to assume the worst.
There was no doubt at all in his mind that the red circles were significant. If Cordero was in the picture, and Bolan was certain of that, he could guess just what that significance was. But it wasn't something he could handle by himself. Even if he, Carlos and Marisa split up, they had eleven sites each to cover. But where would they begin to look without quite knowing what to look for?
On a hunch, Bolan dashed back up to the third floor without using a light. Kneeling in front of the single window in the center of the front room, he eased the shade up a fraction of an inch, then leaned forward with his chin on the sill. Despite the darkness, the sky made a decent backdrop for the broken line of rooftops across the narrow street. The buildings lay hard up against one another, allowing a determined man to make his way the length of the block by way of the roofs.
Bolan started at the corner, twisting his neck to see the building all the way on the left. One by one, he checked each roof, letting his gaze linger a minute or so. He didn't know what he was looking for, or even if there was anything to see, but there was no point in being careless.
He'd checked the first eight buildings without noticing anything out of place. The ninth, too, was still. His eyes were adjusted to the gloom, and the slight blue cast of the sky seemed brighter behind the stark black of the shadowy buildings. The tenth was almost directly across the street, offset by half its width. Like the others, it had a low parapet extending the front wall a couple of feet above the roof. But it, too, seemed lifeless.
A bright glare off to the left distracted him, and light washed up and over the storefronts as a vehicle entered the street a block away. It was moving slowly, and he was still unable to see it when the light went out for a moment, then flashed back on. Bolan moved to the edge of the window, trying to get a fix on the vehicle, but it seemed to have stopped on the far side of the cross street. The lights went out, and a door slammed.
For three minutes he heard nothing more. He went back to scanning the roof across the street. His eyes had to readjust after the brightness of the headlights. He thought he saw something that hadn't been there before, but he wasn't sure. Blinking to wash away the lingering effect of the light, he squeezed his lids down tight and held them there for ten or fifteen seconds.
When he looked back, the thing he'd seen was gone, if it had ever been there. Checking his watch, he realized he only had ten minutes before Carlos and Marisa were due to arrive. He inspected the next building and the next, then darted his eyes back to the eleventh. Something had moved, he was certain of it.
Backing away from the window, he started to run, slowing only when he sensed the door frame. He reached for it, brushed it with a hand as he went by and clicked on the flas
hlight as he reached the head of the stairs. Taking the steps two at a time in the pale tangerine wash of the dying torch, he made the turn, sprinted down the second-floor hall and headed into the last just as the light died altogether.
He found the back door locked with one of those double-key affairs. Bolan moved to the nearest window and ripped the curtain aside. The window was barred, but the lock didn't look all that secure.
He raised the sash, planted a foot on the widnowgate and shoved. The gate popped out of its channel, but didn't give.
Pushing again, he felt it spring back and forth like a trampoline under his foot, but he wasn't getting enough leverage to force it loose.
Using his foot again, he forced the gate out far enough to slip the AK between it and the sill.
Handling the Russian rifle like a crowbar, he managed to get the latch twisted out of shape, but it still wouldn't give. He couldn't use the front, and he didn't want to risk too much noise at the back.
Running back up to the ungated second-floor window, he raised the sash and swung out over the weedy garden below. Pushing off with his feet, he launched himself into a clump of shrubbery. The bushes broke his fall, and he untangled himself with just a handful of scratches. Sprinting down the back alley, he reached the corner and skidded into a turn.
A dog barked in one of the buildings as he ran past.
The side street was black and empty as an abandoned mine. A single light burned far down the next block as Bolan reached the intersection.
As fast as he could, he covered the open space to the far side and moved on down to the alley behind the opposing row of buildings. Two doors in, he spotted a fire escape and hurdled a small fence into another garden.
Bolan had to leap to catch hold of the metal ladder and, grimacing at the pain in his wounded arm, grabbed on and hauled himself up to the first landing. He tried to mume the sound of his boots on the metal grating and the stairs leading to the third floor.
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