He was not accustomed to standing on such shifting sand. As if it hadn't been bad enough to travel halfway around the world on the tail of a man about whom he knew next to nothing, he was unsalted to meet someone unknown, who apparently knew a great deal about him.
He kept thinking back to Walt Wilson.
Henson had hinted that there was more to the picture than Wilson had given him. His own suspicions were simmering beneath the surface, but he had nothing to cool them or to bring them to a boil, either. Something wasn't right, and he couldn't avoid the suspicion that he'd been sent into a minefield wearing cast-iron shoes and a blindfold.
Slipping into his jacket again, tugging it down to fit comfortably over the artillery, he headed for the door. As he reached for the doorknob, it turned.
The motion had been slight, no more than a fraction of an inch or so, but genuine. He reached under his coat for the Desert Eagle and flattened himself against the wall.
He stared at the knob for a long minute, but it didn't move again. Straining his ears, Bolan listened for the slightest sound out in the carpeted hall.
He thought he heard footsteps, but the sound vanished almost as soon as it registered. He griped the latch with one palm and turned the lock. Jerking the door wide open, he checked one end of the hall, the Desert Eagle held against his right ear.
Switching sides, dropping the gun to belt level, he checked the other end of the hall. It, too, was empty. Cautiously he stuck his head out to make sure, but the hall was absolutely quiet. He took a tentative step into the corridor.
He heard a snick behind him and spun around just as the fire door at the end of the hall closed.
Sprinting on the thick carpet, he raced to the fire door and pressed an ear against it. He heard footsteps on the stairs and ripped the door open. The steps continued on down, and Bolan plunged into the stairwell just as another door, several floors below, banged shut.
Bolan took the stairs two at a time, knowing even as he raced down the second flight that he was too late. It wasn't possible to guess which door had slammed. Rather than waste time in a pointless search, he continued on down to the ground floor.
Slipping the Desert Eagle under his jacket, he stepped into the lobby. It, too, was empty, except for a clerk behind the bell desk, absorbed in a newspaper.
Outside, the traffic was still fairly heavy, considering the hour, and Bolan checked his watch as he headed for the door. Out in the muggy night, he spotted a cab at once and jumped in, giving the driver his destination even before closing the door. The cabby jerked the lever on his meter and swung away from the curb as Bolan slammed the door.
Without warning, the driver made a U-turn, to the amusement of a traffic cop who was sitting sidesaddle on a Honda scooter. The cabby waved, and the cop waved back. "My brother-in-law," the cabby explained.
Weaving expertly through the tangled traffic, the cabdriver threaded needle after needle. Gradually, as they moved away from the heart of downtown Manila, the only part of the city Western tourists cared to see after dark, the traffic thinned and its character changed. Instead of taxi cabs and fancy limousines, rolling collections of dents and rusted fenders began to predominate. Battered cars, vans and assorted commercial delivery trucks flowed steadily past, like the brown waters of a river slipping by the gunwales of a launch headed upstream.
"Got to make deliveries at night. Too much traffic in the daytime," the driver said without taking his eyes off the road.
Bolan was not in the mood for idle chatter, so he said nothing. The driver seemed to sense his mood, and set his jaw. At the appropriate corner, he pulled over to the edge of the walkway and announced the fare. Bolan paid him and slipped out on the street side.
He had thought it best to cover the last couple of blocks on foot. He'd been set up too often in the past to get careless and make it easy for the other side. The street was lined with shops on both sides, all bearing signs in Chinese ideograms and some also in English. Every window was dark. As he walked past, Bolan's eye caught the whole panoply of Far Eastern trade. Silks and ivory carvings, firecrackers and Japanese cameras, imported foods and homegrown crafts were piled helter-skelter in bins behind every pane of glass.
Twice he hesitated before crossing the mouth of a dark alley. The street was surprisingly clean.
He could just imagine the jungle the street would become in five or six hours, and marveled that not a single scrap of paper stirred in the slight, sticky breeze. Crossing a narrow side street, Bolan glanced in both directions, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. A striped cat darting in among the silent vans was the only living thing he saw.
Entering the last block, he wondered where he was supposed to go. All four corners were dark. He slowed his pace a little more, listening intently for the slightest sound. There was only the grinding of sand on the asphalt underfoot. Halfway down the block, he stopped and ducked into a doorway. His watch read 11:53. He scanned the two corner buildings on the opposite side of the street, but both were dark and closed up tight. Not even a window open to catch a little of the breeze broke the seamless face of either building.
Puzzled, he crossed the street and ducked into another doorway. He had the Desert Eagle in his hand now. He didn't like the quiet. He didn't like the darkness, either. The quiet seemed almost palpable, too perfect and too absolute. It reminded him of countless western streets Dodge City, Abilene, Tombstone in too many western movies. It was the calm before the final shootout, when every window was closed, and somebody peered into the silent street from behind every curtain.
He had the urge to shake things up. His eyes bored into the second pair of corner buildings, each as dark and silent as the other two.
He was getting close to that antsy frustration that assaulted him whenever things were totally out of control.
It was as if someone had handed him a perfectly smooth globe of polished obsidian and said, "Here, open it." In the unnatural quiet Bolan could hear his heart, its rhythm throbbing in his ears. He stared at the shop on the near corner. The English portion of its sign read "Fabrick," but he didn't smile at the misspelling. Like every thing else, it just seemed one more proof that things were out of whack.
He started to look away when something caught his eye. He riveted his gaze on the spot where it had been, but there was nothing there. It had been, or at least he thought it had been, a brief flicker, as if a candle had passed by or a match been struck and extinguished. Then again. It flashed, and he was certain this time.
He waited, aware that he was holding his breath, as if to exhale would kill the delicate glimmer behind the dusty glass. It had become steady, electric light rather than a flame, but it did nothing. Losing his patience, Bolan began to fidget in the doorway. When the light disappeared again, he sprinted across the street at an angle. Pressing his face to the glass, he tried to see inside, past the cascading silks. They tumbled over a rack in thick, almost seamless folds.
He tapped on the window with his knuckles, and the glass rattled in its peeling wooden frame. A chunk of putty fell from the bottom of the pane and hit his foot. He backed away from the glass to look down. He started to lean back in when he saw something behind him, reflected in the glass. He began to turn as the grey blur dissolved. He was halfway around when the window, now almost behind him, cracked.
Instinctively he fell to the ground. He looked for cover, but there was node to be had. He started to move, crabwalking under the window ledge to the corner, when something slammed into the wooden wall just above his head.
At the corner he scurried across the rounded concrete step and ducked in behind the far wall.
Desperately he scanned the silent row of shops across the street. The grey blurbs had seen was gone. In all probability, it had been the gunman. Cautiously he got to his knees, straining to see through the dark glass across the street.