Whipsaw (5 page)

For the third time her hand snatched at his sleeve, and again he followed her, bending low to avoid another crack in his skull. His head throbbed from the previous collision, and every step seemed to split the bone a little wider. He rubbed his forehead just below the hairline and found a lump the size of a robin's egg. His fingers came away sticky.

They rattled down a stairwell, the woman pulling him like an angry mother dragging along a wayward child.

He wanted to ask where they were going, but her pace was picking up and he had to concentrate on keeping up with her. Running in the darkness, he felt as if he couldn't breathe. He was getting tense, wary of slamming into another obstacle he couldn't see, and the anxiety helped to drain his reserves of energy.

Reaching out with one hand, he brushed his fingertips against what seemed to be a rock wall, likely raw stone cut into rough blocks. Dampness trickled down over the stone, and something soft, probably moss, filled the seams. He still hadn't seen a glimmer of light, and marveled at the woman's ability to move so quickly in such impenetrable blackness.

They were far enough away from the shop that he could hear nothing but his feet on damp earth, his steps drowning out those of the woman ahead of him. His throat felt raw, and his breathing rasped in his ears like a swarm of flies. His mouth was dry, and it felt as if his tongue were growing thick between his teeth.

Just when he was about to call for a break, she began to slow down, and he stumbled to a halt. He leaned over and breathed deeply.

"Where are we?" Bolan asked.

"Does it matter?" she responded.

"You've got a point," Bolan said. "Will you at least tell me who you are?"

"You don't need to know that, either. Not yet."

"You're a regular gold mine of information," Bolan commented.

She ignored the sarcasm. "When you need to know, you will know. But not before." She stepped close to him and hissed, "Shhh!" Even though he couldn't see her in the darkness, he knew she was suddenly straining to hear something.

Bolan held his breath. He, too, thought he could hear something. It was distant and muffled. It came from some distance behind them, but he couldn't tell whether it was all the way back at the shop or closer.

"What is it?" he whispered.

"I'm not sure. But we'd better go."

Bolan nodded. Then, realising she couldn't see him, he whispered, "Okay."

Again she reached out to grab his arm, but the tugging was more gentle, as if finally satisfied that he would follow her lead without argument.

They had gone no more than fifty feet when she slowed again.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing. There is a door here. Wait while I open it." He stood stock-still, listening to her work a latch in the darkness. There was no fumbling. It was almost as though her fingers had eyes. Smoothly the lock opened, and she pulled the door back. "Go on," she prompted.

Bolan brushed against her as he stepped through the door. He stopped on the other side and waited for her to close and relock the door. A thunderclap echoed through the darkness, and Bolan heard her gasp.

"They broke through," she said. "We must hurry."

The words were no sooner out of her mouth than a wall of air slammed into them. The concussion knocked her to the floor, and Bolan heard her moan. He knelt on one knee and groped for her in the darkness. His fingers found rough cloth. It felt like denim, and he let his hand follow the seam of her pants to her hip. Her hand closed over his.

"Help me up," she said. "I have to close the door."

"Are you all right?"

"Never mind, just help me up." She pulled on his arm, trying to haul herself to her feet.

"It's easier for me," he said. He yanked her up, apologizing for his roughness. She ignored him, and he could hear the whisper of her fingers on the damp stone as she looked for the door frame. Thudding feet sounded far down the passage, and the shouted commands, distorted by the distance and the narrow tunnel, blurred into a meaningless babble.

He was about to offer his help again when he heard the hinges squeal, and the heavy door slammed shut, blocking out the approaching thudding of booted feet.

"Don't you have a light?" he asked as she threw a heavy bolt home. Before she answered, he heard two heavy thumps. He realised she must have been dropping bars into place across the inside of the door.

"I don't need a light," she said. "Come on." She slipped past him, her body brushing against him in the narrow passage. Once more he felt her hand close over his wrist, and she pulled him along after her.

Bolan could tell by the unevenness of her stride that she had been hurt by the fall. She seemed to be limping. Far ahead, like some geometric hologram, a rectangle of brilliant lines began to glow. It grew larger as they ran, and Bolan realised they were approaching another door, be yond which there was light.

"Not much farther," she said through teeth clenched against the pain.

Bolan could tell when to stop, and he waited impatiently while she fumbled with the door. It swung open without warning, and the surge of white light hurt his eyes. He turned away, squinting to protect his eyes, and barely avoided tripping down a pair of steps.

Behind him, she slammed the door, rammed the last bar in place and turned to him. Her lips were set in a straight line. Her face was as nearly expressionless as any face he'd ever seen.

"Now that we can see again, you can go back to feeling superior," she said. "You can lead the way." She stretched out a bronze hand, her long, delicate fingers quivering like the fronds of a water plant swaying in the current.

Bolan closed his huge hand over hers and patted her on his forearm. "You tell me where to go," he said.

"Don't tempt me," she stated. She shook her head slightly, then pointed to the wall behind him. "Through that door."

"Are you willing to talk to me now?"

"Nothing has changed," she said. Her lips returned to their rigid set as Bolan scrutinised her. He had been right about her height if anything, perhaps an inch too generous. Her hair was as black as the tunnel they'd just left behind, and was piled on her head and held in place with simple combs of ivory or bone. An exquisite face hovered under the jet-black cloud like a coppery mist, broken only by a hint of pale lipstick. She wore jeans and a green work shirt, neither of which did much to conceal the generous figure.

"You're lovely," he said matter-of-factly, surprised that the words had come out of his mouth.

Despite her seeming toughness, there was something innocent about her.

But she misunderstood. "And you're wasting time," she said with just the suggestion of a smile.

Not bothering to explain, Bolan shrugged before turning slowly. She moved after him, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder now. He opened the door she had pointed out and stepped through.

"No need to lock this one," she said as she followed him into the next room.

"Where to now?"

"Straight ahead."

Bolan nodded, then said, "All right." They were in a large, empty room. Its ceiling was thirty feet above them, composed of corrugated tin over rusting girders. It appeared to have functioned as a warehouse at one time.

"Go all the way across," she prompted.

"Don't we have to worry about them blowing through the other doors, just like they did the first?"

"That's been taken care of," she said.

He didn't know whether she meant it to sound cryptic, but it had that effect.

As they neared the center of the huge room, her hand slapped him on the shoulder. He stopped, thinking he had been going too fast. He turned to wait for her, and realized she was deliberately backing away from him.

"What's the matter?" Bolan asked.

She shook her head. "Nothing." He took a step toward her, but she held up a hand. "Stay right there," she hissed.

He heard a rustling sound and turned toward it.

Four men, each carrying an automatic rifle that was trained on his midsection, stood in a semicircle.

"You are in no danger," she assured him. "I'm sorry, but it has to be this way. You will understand soon."

At a gesture from one of the men, Bolan raised his hands. He thought, for one fleeting instant, about reaching for the AutoMag. But it was hopeless. They would cut him in half before he got his hand on the butt of the big .44.

They stood there in a motionless tableau for a long moment. Bolan examined the men in turn, and shook his head. They were cut from the same cloth. All small, wiry and dressed in faded camous.

The only way to tell them apart was by the four different mustaches.

One of the men split off from the others and advanced on Bolan from the right side. He kept his rifle, an AK, at the ready until he slipped in behind Bolan. Quickly the Desert Eagle and the Beretta were lifted. The man knelt for a moment to pat him down. When he was satisfied, he tugged Bolan's hands down behind him and clicked a pair of handcuffs in place.

"Too tight?" the man asked.

"Not if I have to wear them at all," Bolan said.

"Sorry, Senor Belasko. But we have to take precautions. We mean you no harm. You will see."

Bolan flinched when the blindfold was looped over his head. It happened so suddenly that he thought the man meant to garrote him, and sighed when the cloth was positioned over his eyes.

"Who the hell are you people?" Bolan demanded.

"All in good time, Mr. Belasko. Please, be patient." It was the woman who spoke.

He felt her hand on his arm again. She simply squeezed reassuringly, then let her hand fall away. Bolan heard a heavy door rolling on a metal track, and the rumble of an engine. It sounded like a van or small truck. He thought immediately of the van that had charged him from the rear, and wondered whether it was the same one. Then, realizing that under the circumstances it didn't much matter, he pushed the thought out of his mind.

The vehicle approached, stopped nearly in front of him, and hands pushed him forward.

"Step up, a little higher," one of the men said. He was helped into the van and heard a door close. He sensed someone present and, as if in answer to his unspoken question, the woman said, "Don't worry. You are not alone." Not much, Bolan thought.

Bolan tried to plot the course of the truck in his head. He quickly gave it up when he realized he had no idea of his starting point. They had run so far and so long in the tunnel that the warehouse could have been anywhere. And because of the motion of the truck, it was impossible to gauge direction from inside. The truck rocked and rolled heavily, making it difficult to tell when they turned and when they had merely rolled through a particularly large pothole or around an obstacle in the road.

He had tried to engage the woman in conversation, but each time, she turned him away with a single syllable. After the third time, he gave up.

If she had anything to say to him, she would say it, he decided. So far she hadn't.

They had been traveling for nearly two hours, and his shoulders were sore from slamming into the sides of the van. No matter how he positioned himself, a sudden jolt would dislodge him and send him pounding into a steel wall or tilt him over onto the floor.

Finally he lay flat, wedging himself into a corner, and let gravity do what it could to protect him. With his hands cuffed behind him, it was far from comfortable, but at least he would spare himself the worst of the bumps and bruises.

Resigning himself to his situation, he tried to sleep but found, paradoxically, that it was too dark.

He thought of what it was like to lie in bed and watch the play of light and shadow on the ceiling: the glare of passing headlights, the gradual passage of the moon, the winking blue or red of neon outside a cheap hotel window, all the things that conspired to prevent the darkness of the night from being perfect.

He sighed in exasperation, and she must have realized what he was thinking. "There is nothing quite like it, you know."

"Like what?" Bolan asked.

"Like being hostage to someone's whim, simply because he has a gun..."

"I'm sure," Bolan replied, not knowing what else to say, but feeling the need to say something to keep her talking.

"I'm almost used to it." Her voice sounded uncertain. It echoed hollowly off the walls of the van. "No, I'm not, actually. I don't know why I always say that."

"Maybe that's the only way you can deal with it."

"I suppose."

"How long have you carried a gun?"

"A year. Almost..."

"What drove you to it?"

"Never mind. I don't want to talk about it." She lapsed into a silence that sounded as if it were meant to be permanent.

They rode without speaking for a quarter of an hour.

Bolan found himself trying to visualize her. It had been just a few hours since he'd seen her, but he was unable to do it. Her face kept drifting in and out of focus. It hovered there, just beyond the reach of his mind, fluttering like a phony ghost at Halloween.

Every time he pushed toward it, it slipped away, teasing him with its impermanence.

When the silence was broken again, it was she who broke it. "What is Charles Harding to you?" Her voice was so soft, he wasn't sure he had understood the question.

"Did you say something?" he asked.

"I asked you what Charles Harding was to you." She snapped it precisely this time.

"Right now, a question mark in an empty box. Why?"

"You tried to help him at the airport. I was just wondering why, that's all."

"Actually I wasn't. If I was trying to help anybody, it was a thousand innocent people who were walking into the middle of a terrorist attack."

"I don't believe that, you know. I just don't."

"Believe what you want."

"You really should tell me."

"Why should I tell you anything? You know my name and I don't know yours. You know a lot more about me than I do about you. And I'm not in the habit of sharing my life story with total strangers, kidnappers or not."

"You're not being kidnapped. Don't be so melodramatic."

"What do you call it?"

"What difference does it make what I call it? Labels don't mean anything, anyway. And my name is Marisa."

The truck hit a particularly rough bump, and he landed hard on his tailbone as the truck bed twisted and bounced. Bolan groaned and wriggled around to lie on his side.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"I've been better."

"I'm used to it, I guess. Lying in a truck in the dark, I mean. I can control my body. It's almost as if I know where the bumps are before we hit them."

"Bully for you."

"Don't be bitter."

"Whatever you say."

Bolan's jaw slammed shut like a mausoleum door.

He heard her shift position, and a moment later he felt her hands groping past his hip. He didn't know what she was after until the handcuffs clicked.

"I really shouldn't have done that..."

"I'll never tell," Bolan said.

"No, I mean it. You have to promise you won't try to get away."

"I'm not about to jump out of a speeding truck in the middle of the night, if that's what you mean. Other than that, I'm not making any promises."

"I have a gun, you know."

He reached up to take off the blindfold. "What do you mean?"

She seemed genuinely puzzled. She levered a shell into the chamber of an automatic pistol, and Bolan didn't need to see her to know it.

"Look, I..." He stumbled to a halt. It seemed as if he couldn't say anything without tripping all over himself. There was something about her that mystified him. "Funny, isn't it, how much we take power for granted? I mean, we refer to it constantly. We use it interchangeably with privilege as if they were the same thing." She seemed completely unruffled. Her voice was serene, almost narcotized, and nearly hypnotic. "But they aren't the same thing at all. Right now, I have a kind of power that you don't. That makes me privileged, compared to you."

"How so?"

"If I say jump, you will ask how high. All because I have the gun."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

She ignored the implicit disagreement. "But that's not all. It makes us different, having power. It also puts you on the defensive, the same way knowledge does. Knowledge, too, is a kind of power."

"You think so?"

"I know it. Take the fact that you really don't know why you're here. Not the truck I don't mean that. I mean Manila. The Philippines. I think maybe that's why I took off your handcuffs. You are a kind of innocent. You're like a child, somehow. Most things are so simple for you, and yet some things are so complex you don't even try to understand them. But you don't care. For you, they amount to the same thing. You see something in black and white, or you don't see it at all. And you don't even realize that."

Bolan listened to the laboring engine for a while. He could feel it throbbing through the floorboards. From the strain, and the slight imbalance he felt, he assumed they were heading uphill now, and had been for a while. Slowly, perhaps, but certainly.

Finally he took up the gauntlet. "If you understand so much, why don't you explain things to me? Show me where I am wrong and you are right."

"You think I can't, don't you?"

"I don't think anything. Just do it, if you can."

"All right... let me tell you about your Mr. Charles Harding. How about that for a beginning?"

"Good a place as any, I suppose."

"Do you know why he's here, in the Philippines?"

"No."

"Is that why you were following him, to find out?"

"Who said I was following him?"

"Mr. Belasko, don't try to obscure the obvious. I know what I know. And I know you were following him. I know you came here from Los Angeles, just like Mr. Harding. But, unlike you, I also know why he is here."

He kept calculating the odds on overpowering the young woman, but they never changed, and he didn't like them. And he was getting interested, in spite of himself.

"Go on," he said.

"How much do you know about my country?"

"Enough."

"You remember the Huks? Hukbalahap? You don't seem old enough."

"I know of them, yes."

"And the New People's Army? You know of them, too?"

"Yes."

"You know why they existed, the Huks, the NPA? Because of people like your Mr. Harding."

"Stop calling him that. He's not "my" Mr. Harding. I don't know who the hell he belongs to, but it sure as hell isn't me."

"That's the American way, isn't it, Mr. Belasko? Let people be exploited, reap the rewards of that exploitation and disavow its architects. As long as you have two cars and three televisions, who cares about people who have to walk and who have no radio? "Fuck 'em," isn't that the American attitude?"

"Lady, if there's an attitude around here, it's yours, and I'm sick of it. You don't know jackshit about me. Talk about black and white. If there's a blacker black and a whiter white than the colors you're seeing, I don't know where the hell they might be."

"Of course, I knew you'd get around to that, sooner or later. The oppressor always blames the oppressed. Resentment is the privilege of the overclass..."

The truck lurched suddenly, but she pushed on.

"You always..."

"Stop it!" Bolan snapped suddenly.

"You..."

"I heard something. Be quiet!"

The truck was leaning perilously, and the growl of the engine gradually disappeared under an increasingly louder thumping, like that of approaching thunder.

"A flat tire," she said, "nothing to worry about. It happens a lot up here."

"No, before that. It was sharper. I heard it twice, no more than that."

"Maybe..." The truck crashed into something, and Bolan was thrown forward, slamming into the front wall. The woman landed on top of him, and one elbow caught him in the temple. He saw a flash of bright light for a second, then felt the throbbing of his head.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

She didn't answer him immediately, and he shook her by one shoulder as he squirmed out from under her. She must have been stunned for a few seconds. But as he extricated himself, he felt the cold, round mouth of the automatic press against the back of his neck.

"Don't move," she ordered.

He smelled gasoline and pounded on the front wall of the truck. "We have to get out of here," he said. He beat his fist on the wall, but no one responded. Then, off to his left, he saw the first orange flash. It flickered and vanished, like a serpent's tongue.

"Fire," he said. "We better get out of the truck. Now!"

"Don't try to fool me. I may be a woman, but I'm not stupid."

"Listen, we have to get out of the truck. It's starting to burn. If the fuel tank goes up, we won't have a chance in hell."

Something changed her mind, maybe the tone of his voice or perhaps she smelled the gasoline or the scorched vegetation wafting into the truck. For the first time since he'd met her, she seemed genuinely frightened. Her voice broke when she said, "It's locked. From the outside."