Читать книгу Splinter Cell - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

Only a highly trained soldier, cop or intelligence officer would have been likely to notice the differences. Tiny differences, like the fact that his bearing was slightly more erect, that he exuded more confidence than the average man. Or that the set of his jaw was a little firmer. But it was his eyes, he knew, that would have really given him away had he not taken great pains to keep anyone from staring into them. In those eyes other warriors could see that he’d seen hell, and lived to tell about it.

On the surface, however, Mack Bolan looked little different than any of the other men flying first class from New York. He wore a well-tailored gray pin-striped suit much like bankers, gem dealers and other businessmen wore when visiting Amsterdam. His passport claimed his name was Matt Cooper instead of Mack Bolan, or the more mysterious, and descriptive, appellation by which he was also known—the Executioner.

Bolan shifted slightly in his seat. He had felt tension in the air aboard the 747 ever since boarding. He had sensed that something was wrong ever since the plane had left the runway. Who knows how he knew—he just did.

The soldier leaned back against his seat and glanced to the man at his side, next to the window. The danger that filled the air was not coming from John “Brick” Paxton. Paxton had boarded the flight with the Executioner as his confederate rather than an adversary. Granted, accompanying Bolan had not been the former Army Ranger’s idea; Paxton had made plans to rescue his younger brother, Phil, on his own. Just prior to boarding an earlier flight to the Netherlands, he’d been detained by representatives of Stony Man Farm, America’s top-secret counterterrorist organization. The Farm’s operatives had whisked Paxton away to a secluded safehouse while a secret meeting took place at the White House.

Bolan had been present at that meeting.

“There’s no way to stop Brick Paxton from going after his brother short of throwing him in jail,” the President told Hal Brognola, Stony Man Farm’s director, as well as a high-ranking official at the Justice Department. “And I’m going to look like hell in the press if I jail a guy who’s won two Silver Stars and is currently up for the Medal of Honor for his actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The Executioner watched as the Man nodded his way before concluding with, “So the best thing we can do is let him go after his brother. But I want Bolan with him.”

Brognola nodded his agreement. “And I’d suggest sending them immediately, Mr. President,” he said. “All of our intelligence at the moment indicates that the terrorists picked Phil Paxton at random, just because he was American. But sooner or later, they’re going to find out just what a prize they’ve stumbled on to.”

None of the three men had thought it necessary to further identify that “prize.” They were all fully aware that Brick Paxton’s younger brother was one of America’s top nuclear engineers.

And a man who could build nukes for America could be forced to build them for America’s enemies, as well.

The Executioner glanced out of the corner of his eye, studying Brick Paxton’s face while he continued to review the past few hours in his mind. The Army Ranger’s eyes were closed, but it was impossible to tell if he was asleep or not. He’d been against going with Bolan from the moment the idea had been presented to him, and had only agreed when it had finally become clear that the President would find a jail cell for him somewhere if he didn’t.

Bolan turned back to the seat in front of him. The chain of command still wasn’t fully clear in Paxton’s mind. That might become a problem sooner or later. But the problem on the Executioner’s mind at the moment came from somewhere else on the 747.

Dinner had been served aboard the plane a half hour earlier, and the remnants were still on the first-class passengers’ trays. Lifting his plastic beverage glass, Bolan drained the contents, then he took the plastic fork and spoon from the table in front of him with his other hand and dropped them into the inside pocket of his jacket.

The ice at the bottom of his drink rattled as Bolan set the glass back down in the circular depression on the tray.

The flight attendant came quickly to his side. “Another Seven-Up, sir?” she asked with a suggestive smile. Her name tag read Margie.

Bolan’s return smile was noncommittal. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“And your friend?” Margie added.

Brick Paxton’s eyes opened at the cue. “Sure. One more can’t hurt.”

Bolan sat quietly as Margie turned and disappeared into the galley between first class and the pilot’s cabin. He had studied Brick Paxton’s U.S. Army personnel file the day before and, among other things, learned that Paxton had a penchant for the bourbon. But nothing in the file suggested that he couldn’t control his drinking, or ever drank to excess.

The flight attendant returned with another miniature bottle and a fresh glass of ice water. Placing them in front of Paxton, she removed the dinner trays in front of both men and disappeared into the galley once more.

Approximately fifteen minutes later, the man sitting directly across the aisle from Bolan unbuckled his seat belt and stood up. He had the dark skin and sharp features of a Middle Easterner. He reached up and opened the overhead storage compartment, then pulled down a black attaché case before closing the compartment.

Bolan had pinpointed the source of the tension that filled the air of the 747’s first-class cabin. He watched the man out of the corner of his eye. It was not his race—the Executioner had worked with many men of Arabic origin in the past and knew that, as held true with any people, the good Arabs far outnumbered the bad. Nor was it the dark-skinned man’s manner of dress that now caught Bolan’s attention. It was not even the look in the man’s eyes as he glanced quickly at Bolan before sitting down again, the attaché case on his lap.

Still, Bolan suddenly knew.

Bolan glanced over his shoulder. The curtain between first class and coach was drawn, but through the opening he could see that three other men—all looking to be of Middle Eastern origin like the man across from him—stood in the aisle. They had also opened the overhead storage compartments, and the Executioner watched as each pulled down a black attaché case identical to the one now in the lap of the man across from him.

Bolan felt his abdominal muscles tighten in anticipation. Four men. Four identical black attaché cases.

It was far too much to be coincidence.

The Executioner glanced to Paxton. The former Ranger had just unscrewed the lid from his plastic shot bottle. But he had noted the man across from them, too, and while he couldn’t see into the rear of the plane from his window seat, he’d caught the expression on Bolan’s face.

“How many more?” Paxton whispered as he screwed the cap back onto his bottle of Wild Turkey and dropped it into the front pocket of his navy blue blazer.

“Three,” the Executioner murmured. “All in coach. Same cases.”

Brick Paxton nodded. He flipped his tray back up and out of the way into the seat in front of him, then began untying his right shoe.

The Executioner didn’t have to ask what he was doing.

Bolan reached inside his jacket and felt his fingertips touch the tops of the plastic fork and spoon he had placed there earlier. He would have preferred to have his usual weapons—the Beretta 93-R and .44 Magnum Desert Eagle—but that had not been possible. Knowing that the enemy he would face once he reached Amsterdam closely watched incoming private flights, he and Paxton had chosen to fly commercial and were, therefore, unarmed.

At least conventionally unarmed. A man like the Executioner was never completely without weapons.

Leaving the plastic fork where it was, Bolan withdrew the spoon. Glancing casually across the aisle to make sure the man with the attaché case wasn’t watching, he saw that sweat had broken out on the man’s forehead. Dropping his hands beneath the table still in front of him, the Executioner twisted the head of the spoon until it broke off at a sharp angle. Discarding the rounded dipper end, he replaced the now sharp piece of plastic in his jacket.

By now Paxton had removed his right sock. Retrieving the Wild Turkey bottle from his blazer pocket, he dropped it into the sock and tied a knot just above the small container.

Bolan folded his tray back up and pulled one of the in-flight magazines from the holder in front of him. Starting at the binding, he began rolling the periodical into the tightest tube he could fashion. Every few seconds, he used his peripheral vision to check on the man across the aisle. But the man with the attaché case was paying him no attention. He was far too engrossed in his own thoughts, and what he was about to do.

When the Executioner had finished rolling the magazine up, it was almost as hard as a length of wood. Pulling a pair of rubber bands from his pocket, he twisted them around the ends of the homemade bludgeon to keep the pages in place, then hid the club in the other inside pocket of his jacket, across from the fork and broken spoon.

Paxton’s makeshift sap was finished, too, and the Army Ranger glanced across the aisle before slapping the sock-covered bottle into the palm of his opposite hand. Satisfied, he tied his shoe back onto his bare foot.

“We don’t know what’s in the attaché cases yet,” Bolan whispered. “Maybe guns. Maybe a bomb. Maybe both.” He let out a breath. “Our only chance is to get the jump on them.”

“And if they turn out to be just four Arabic businessmen who happen to have the same kind of briefcases?” Paxton asked.

“We’ll apologize,” Bolan said. “And offer to pay the hospital bill for them.”

Paxton chuckled, low and deep. “That’s not going to be the case, though, is it,” he said in a tone of voice that made his words a statement rather than a question.

“No,” the Executioner said. He unbuckled his seat belt. “I’m heading to the coach cabin. You concentrate on the man here in first class.”

Paxton’s eyebrows lowered. “You’re gonna take out three of them?” he said. “No, I’ll go with you. We’ll get those three, then—”

“We don’t have time to argue,” Bolan ordered. “If we’re both in the back, and this clown across from us has a bomb, he’s only a few steps from the pilot. And he’ll get plenty of warning if there’s a scuffle behind him.”

Paxton saw the logic in the Executioner’s plan. He nodded.

Bolan stood up. The man with the attaché case had glanced at his watch twice before Bolan could even turn down the aisle away from the cabin.

Whatever the four men were planning was about to go down. Soon.

The flight attendant seemed to appear from nowhere as Bolan stepped through the door from first class to coach. “Oh, sir,” Margie said, bumping into him. “I’m sorry.”

“No problem,” said the Executioner, and started to step around her.

“Sir, where are you going?”

“Restroom,” Bolan said, again trying to step to the side in the narrow aisle.

“But there’s a much better one in first class,” Margie said.

“It’s taken,” Bolan said. Beyond the flight attendant, he saw sweat and tension on the faces of the other three men who had pulled the attaché cases down from the overhead compartments. As the nervous man in first class had done, they all glanced at their wristwatches.

Then three hands moved to the latches on the cases.

Bolan shoved Margie to the side and sprinted down the aisle. Whatever was about to happen was no longer about to happen soon.

It was happening now.

THE THREE Arabs all looked up at the big man running toward them, and Bolan was reminded that the almost supernatural sense of danger was never limited to the good guys. Criminals, terrorists and other miscreants developed it just like good soldiers, cops and other warriors.

A glint of fire suddenly appeared in the eyes of the three men. They stood up as they opened their cases.

Bolan continued to run down the aisle past the curious faces of the other passengers. He still didn’t know what was in the black attaché cases. But it was a good bet that it would be either guns, bombs or both. Neither did he know how the terrorists had gotten the cases past security and on board the plane.

But that hardly mattered now. The reality of the situation was that they had gotten the cases onto the plane, and he would have to deal with that reality as it stood. If guns were their only weapons, he stood a good chance of saving the hundreds of people on board the 747. But if there were four bombs on the plane, not even the Executioner would be able to get to them all before at least one was detonated.

Bolan didn’t break stride as he drew the broken plastic spoon from his pocket and drove the sharp point into the dark-skinned throat above the SIG-Sauer pistol his adversary had pulled from the attaché case. A chortling sound issued forth with the blood that shot out of the man’s jugular vein, staining his white shirt and beige suit. The Executioner reached out, grabbing for the SIG-Sauer.

He was a split second too late.

Waving his arms wildly in the throes of death, the would-be gunman released the SIG. It flew out over the passengers and fell somewhere behind Bolan.

The black attaché case dropped to the deck of the plane, open. Two shirts and a pair of slacks flew out from between the sides. But no bomb.

The terrorist in the beige suit fell to the floor on top of the mess.

Bolan leaped over the still-convulsing body and continued down the aisle, jerking the tightly wrapped magazine from inside his jacket as he ran. By now, the second man—wearing a light blue suit and darker blue necktie—had pulled a Glock from his attaché case. His hand shook nervously as he tried to steady his aim on the Executioner.

Bolan ducked low, praying that like most nervous men, the would-be hijacker would shoot high. Not just high enough to miss him, but high enough to miss all of the seated passengers as well.

His prayer was answered.

The Glock exploded with an almost deafening roar in the tight confines of the cabin. More screams threatened to burst the Executioner’s eardrums. But Bolan could tell by the angle of the barrel that the shot had gone to the ceiling and exited the plane. The hole it made was far too small to affect the cabin pressure. But too many of the passengers had seen movies where such tiny openings sucked everyone out into the sky, and more panicky screams added to the chaos around Bolan.

Bolan didn’t give the man with the Glock a second chance. With a sudden leap, he reached the terrorist and swung the rolled magazine like a short billy club. The hardened pages caught the man in the Adam’s apple and crushed his larynx. Bolan followed through with a left hook, connecting with the man’s temple with the force of a jackhammer.

The Glock fell to the seat behind the terrorist. The man’s lifeless body began to fall backward on top of it.

Bolan reached out, grabbing the second terrorist by the shoulders and throwing him to the other side of the aisle, out of the way. But when he looked down to the seat for the Glock, it was gone.

But the Executioner had no time to waste. Rather than go searching for the Glock, the Executioner continued down the aisle until the final terrorist in coach class shouted in heavily accented English, “Halt! Stop now, or I will blow up the plane!”

Still a good twenty feet from the man, Bolan could see the arrogant smile on his face. He wore a black suit with light pin-stripes. He had opened his attaché case and turned it to face the Executioner.

Bolan stared into the open case. This man had no pistol for him to worry about.

What he did have, however, was a bomb.

The Executioner stood motionless as the terrorist had ordered. “What is it you want?”

“First,” the man with the bomb said sarcastically, “is for all of these swine to…shut up!” He shouted the last two words at the top of his lungs. And they had the desired effect. The last of the screaming, moaning and crying turned to an eerie silence as the passengers quieted, frozen in fear.

“All right,” Bolan said, standing upright in the center of the aisle. “You got your first wish. Now what?” He stared into the open attaché case, trying to make out the details of the bomb under the shadows created by the lid. He couldn’t be sure but it looked as if the case contained a substantial amount of plastic explosive—probably Semtex. The shiny, polished steel of what had to be a detonator flashed at him. The item most easy to see and recognize was a common digital kitchen timer.

There didn’t look to be anything high-tech about the explosive device. It was simple. Very simple.

But still lethal.

Satisfied that Bolan had seen what was in the case, the terrorist in the black suit now closed it partway but kept his left hand inside.

The Executioner gauged the distance between him and the terrorist. If he had judged the design of the bomb correctly during the second or so he’d been allowed to view it, it should be easy enough to defuse. If he could get to it before the man in the black suit set it off.

But that wasn’t likely. The same simplicity that made it easy to neutralize also made it easy and fast to detonate. The timer was electronic, and made no ticking sound. So it was impossible to determine if it had been set or not. But that made little difference, either. All it would take to override the timing device would be to touch two wires together, and Bolan could see by the way the terrorist’s hand was positioned that he held one of those wires inside the half-closed case even now.

The man with the bomb had not replied to Bolan’s question, so the Executioner repeated it. “What do you want now?” he said in a louder voice.

“I want you to sit down,” said the dark-featured man.

“This has got to be a give-and-take negotiation,” Bolan said, speaking for all of the passengers. “What do we get in return?” Bolan asked, playing for time.

He continued to stare the terrorist in the eye. If he was to have any chance at all of reaching the attaché case before the bomb went off, he needed the terrorist in the black suit to be distracted in as many ways as possible.

He was about to speak again—simply to buy more time—when he felt a light tapping on his left hip. Slowly glancing down to his side, the Executioner saw a little girl who could have been no more than eight years old. She wore a frilly pink-and-white dress, white anklets rolled down and black buckled shoes. Her sandy-blond hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail.

On the little girl’s face, Bolan saw terror. In her left hand was a Barbie doll with hair that matched her own.

But in her right hand was the barrel of the Glock.

Whoever had come into possession of the pistol after it had been thrown over the seats had determined that Bolan was on their side. The gun had been passed clandestinely to the passenger nearest Bolan, and that had been the little blond girl.

Bolan felt the hard plastic Glock in his fist as the little girl released the barrel.

“You saw what happened to the other men back here in coach,” the Executioner said to the terrorist. “But don’t you wonder about the man you had in first class?”

Bolan wondered, too. But it appeared that Paxton had taken care of the terrorist who had first given himself away to the Executioner. At least there had been no shots fired from the front of the craft. And no explosions.

As soon as the words had left the Executioner’s mouth, the man with the bomb glanced past him toward first class.

Bolan knew it was the best distraction he could pull off.

He brought the Glock out from behind the seat and snapped it up, pointing the barrel as if it were his finger and depressing the trigger at the same time. He saw the red hole appear in the forehead of the terrorist. At almost the same time the back of the man’s head blew out.

The screams, cries and moans returned as Bolan sprinted forward. The attaché case had fallen to the middle of the aisle, and now he dropped to one knee to look inside. His heart fell to his stomach when he saw that what had looked like a simple device from a distance was actually somewhat more complex.

At least a dozen wires—all in different colors—from the Semtex through the detonator to the timer. Most would be dummies that would have no effect at all if cut. But one would be an instant detonator that would override the timer and set off the plastic explosive immediately.

None of which would have been a problem if the timer wasn’t set. Bolan could simply fold the attaché case back up, take it to his seat and turn it over to Dutch authorities when they landed in Amsterdam.

But all hope of such a simple end to the problem flew from the Executioner’s thoughts as he looked at the timer. It had been set.

And the bomb was going to explode in 43 seconds.

THE EXECUTIONER REACHED down and lifted the kitchen timer in his hand, taking a long shot and simply pushing the start-stop button. As he’d suspected, it changed nothing. It had obviously been disconnected somewhere inside because the seconds continued ticking away.

By now, many of the passengers had recovered from shock. Questions assaulted him from all sides. Several of the passengers had unbuckled their seat belts and were starting to rise, curious to see what was inside the attaché case and what the Executioner was doing.

“Sit down! Everybody!” Bolan called out in a loud, authoritative voice that caused the men and women to drop immediately back down into their seats. As he turned back toward the front of the plane, he saw both Paxton and Margie running down the aisle to meet him. Paxton had another SIG-Sauer jammed into his belt, which could only mean that he’d successfully neutralized the first terrorist they’d spotted in first class.

Margie looked puzzled. But Paxton took it all in immediately. “How long have we got?” he asked.

The Executioner glanced back down to the timer. “Thirty-eight seconds,” he said. Turning his eyes quickly to Margie, he said, “Tell the captain to unlock the master lock to the main door in first class.” Margie started to turn.

“And tell him to slow speed to the bare minimum,” the Executioner added.

The woman nodded as she ran back in the direction from which she’d come.

“You’re going to try to throw that thing out the door?” Paxton asked incredulously.

“That’s the plan.”

“You open that door at this speed and altitude and you’ll get sucked out of the plane,” Paxton warned.

“That’s why I told her to have the pilot slow down,” Bolan said.

Paxton and Bolan sprinted back through the coach cabin into first class.

Bolan addressed the six men who were still seated there, their eyes wide in fear. “Quick! I need you to take off your belts and give them to me.”

Immediately, the men unbuckled themselves and began sliding their belts out of their pants. While they were so engaged, the Executioner turned back to Margie. “Get on the phone and tell the captain to drop the oxygen masks. It’ll give the passengers something to do,” he explained.

When the Executioner had gathered all six of the belts, he tossed three of them to Paxton. The Ranger had figured out what he had planned and he buckled one strip of leather through his own belt, then began linking the others together. Bolan did the same with the three belts in his hands, hoping the buckles and any other weak spots in the leather would hold.

The Executioner linked his last belt to that of Paxton’s, then turned to the cabin door. He had just enough length in the makeshift retention straps to reach the handle. Swiftly twisting it, he heard the whir of a million bees’ wings as he slid the door open. At the same time, he felt himself suddenly pulled forward. His own belt, attached to the leather chain, threatened to cut him in two the waist. He swallowed hard, trying to equalize the pressure in his ears as the atmosphere suddenly changed. Glancing downward, he saw that he had eight seconds left on the timer. He swallowed hard again. Even if the bomb didn’t explode, it felt as if his eardrums would.

Taking a final look down at the timer, the Executioner saw only the number 4. Before it could turn to 3, he leaned forward, assisted by the vacuum, and pushed the attaché case through the opening.

A second later, a barely audible popping sound issued forth through the galelike wind outside the doorway. The sound was so small—so seemingly insignificant in the distance—that it was almost an anticlimax to the near destruction and deaths it had almost caused. Bolan closed the door.

The threat was over. For now, at least.

But as the Executioner walked back and dropped into his seat, he knew that while his actions had saved the lives of the several hundred people on the plane, he had been unsuccessful in at least one way.

He and Paxton had flown commercial to keep a low profile upon entering the Netherlands. There was no chance of that now. By the time they touched down in Amsterdam the pilot would have radioed all that had happened aboard the 747 to the tower. There would be long interviews with police, which took time away from the mission. But worse than that, the airport would be a carnival of newsmen and-women shouting questions and popping flash in their faces.

Bolan and Brick Paxton would not go unnoticed, they’d be celebrities. Their pictures would be on the front page of every newspaper in Europe and quite possibly the rest of the world.

The Executioner leaned back against his seat, shut his eyes and frowned. Then, slowly, the corners of his mouth began to turn upward as a plan took shape in his mind.

A LIGHT SNOW HAD BEGUN falling over the city of Marken by the time Abdul Hassan slid his heavy overcoat over his navy blue blazer, placed the woven tweed fedora on his head and wrapped his muffler around his neck. He descended the back stairs of his hotel to avoid having to speak to the desk clerk but, as luck would have it, the hotel manager was sweeping the stairwell near the rear door when he reached the ground floor.

The manager looked up in surprise when he heard Hassan’s footsteps coming down the last flight of stairs. But he smiled. “It is not that cold outside,” he said in Dutch as he dumped the contents of his dustpan into the large rubber trash can he had rolled into the stairwell along with the broom. “You will soon be sweating.”

Hassan forced a laugh. He didn’t like surprises like this, didn’t like being noticed at all when he was in Marken. Which was why, while he lived only a few short miles away in Amsterdam, he always came to town the night before he was to meet his contact. And why he never stayed at the same hotel. But such coincidences were sometimes unavoidable, and he had his cover story ready, as always.

“You seem to forget,” Hassan replied in Dutch, “that I come from a country where 120-degree temperatures are not unusual. To me, it is freezing out there.”

The two exchanged another short, polite round of laughter. As Hassan reached for the door, the manager’s eyebrows lowered in either concern or curiosity—Hassan wasn’t sure which. But he expressed concern.

“You should use the front door,” the man said. “Marken is not a violent town like Amsterdam. Still, there is crime, and the alleys are not safe.”

Hassan shrugged. “I suppose you are right,” he said. “But I am only out for a short walk. And it is only a few steps down the alley from the door to the street. I will be all right.”

Now it was the manager’s turn to shrug. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But I will watch you from the door until you reach the sidewalk.”

“Thank you,” Hassan said and opened the door.

The manager had been correct—it was not cold enough outside for the way Abdul Hassan had dressed. He guessed the temperature to be only slightly below freezing, and the wind was light. Still, it chilled his face and hands as he stepped outside. His footsteps echoed hollowly along the bricks of the narrow alleyway, and he could see the light from the open door to the hotel reflecting off the walls to both his sides. It illuminated his path, and for that he was grateful.

He glanced behind him and saw that, as promised, the hotel manager was still watching him.

He walked casually along the pavement. He would take a roundabout route through the downtown area of Marken, doing his best to appear to be nothing more than his cover story claimed he was—an exporter of Holland’s wooden shoes to the Middle East. He was in town on business and bored in his hotel room.

The real reason for his walk, however, was to look for a tail. He had begun his relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency nearly three years before, which was a long time for such a relationship. He was only human, and he knew he had made many mistakes in the past that could have given him away to the more fundamentalist Muslims who had infiltrated Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands. What was even more frightening was the fact that he knew he had to have made countless other mistakes of which he was not even aware.

Perhaps it was time to get out. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he could do that. He felt a tremendous responsibility to stop the terrorism his misguided fellow Arabs perpetrated. It gave everyone with the sharp features and dark skin of the Middle East a bad name, and made men and women suspicious of everyone who fit the profile.

Hassan didn’t even glance into the shoe-shop window as he passed. If someone was following him, he didn’t want the man remembering him as having any interest in the shoe shop at all. Tomorrow, he would leave through the same door to the alley by which he’d exited the hotel tonight, then follow a labyrinth of other alleys to another back door into the shoe shop.

There, he knew, he was to meet two new men.

The snow began to lighten as Abdul Hassan walked on, stopping occasionally to window-shop at businesses that had nothing to do with his work, and glancing casually behind him. He did the same at street corners as he waited for traffic lights to change, and turned randomly right and left whenever the mood struck him, or when he thought he’d seen a familiar figure behind him more than once. Each time, the men or women who had caught his attention eventually disappeared. Which meant that he was left wondering if he had simply imagined them following him, or if they might have turned the surveillance over to another agent.

Yes, Abdul Hassan nodded to himself as he finally turned back toward his hotel. Paranoia was definitely beginning to get the better of him.

But by the time he was within two blocks of his hotel, his mistrust had all but evaporated. He had seen no one on the way back that he had seen before, and he felt a sudden relaxation come over him. Either no one was interested in him, or they were so good at what they did that he would never spot them. If the latter was the case, there was nothing he could do about it. They would eventually kill him, and that would be that. Strangely, this realization brought on a certain calmness. He had done everything he could do.

Hassan slowed his pace, actually enjoying the walk now that he had given up his own counter-surveillance and warmed up. He stuffed his hands deeper into his coat pockets and felt the hilt of the pesh kabz dagger. The T-shaped blade was always reassuring to him. Even though it was of Persian and Northern India origin and he was not, he had chosen it because its original role had been to penetrate chain mail.

He assumed it would work just as well in penetrating the thick clothing worn against the Netherlands cold. He always carried the dagger unsheathed, letting the heavy wool of his coat and the other layers of clothing beneath the garment protect him from both the point and edges.

Hassan wrapped his fingers around the grip of the dagger as he walked on. There were two reasons he had left Syria for the Netherlands. The first was to escape the influence of the fundamentalist Muslims who insisted on restricting behavior to that more befitting the twelfth century than the twenty-first. The second reason was the heat. What he sometimes questioned, however, was why he had allowed himself to be recruited by Jim Campbell, who had been the CIA chief of station in Amsterdam when he’d first arrived. What was even more puzzling was why he’d stayed on after Campbell had been transferred and he’d been turned over to the ambitious man’s lackluster replacement, Felix Young.

Hassan thought of the man who had taken Campbell’s place. He rarely left his office, wherever that was—Hassan had to assume it was at the American Embassy after the fashion of all intelligence services the world over. The bottom line was that Hassan had done more work, accomplished far more, during the six months he’d worked for Campbell than in the two and a half years since his recruiter had been replaced.

The light turned and Abdul Hassan walked on. He could see the sign above his hotel ahead. Soon he would be inside and warm. He would get a good night’s rest, then meet with two new men from some other agency to which the CIA was turning him over. He hoped they would be more ambitious than Young, and that he would actually do some good in changing the way the world looked at Islam and Arabs at this point in history. As his heels clicked against the concrete, he thought of his own feelings of religion. He was hardly a man without sin, and he had always been especially susceptible to one sin in particular. His was a major sin for which he not only felt guilty but for which he might fall victim to death just as fast as he would if the terrorist faction in the Netherlands ever found out he was an informant for the Americans.

This thought not only sent guilt coursing through Hassan’s veins, but also it brought fear. And it was right in the middle of this fear that an arm suddenly reached out from a darkened doorway fifty feet from his hotel and jerked him off the sidewalk into the darkness.

Hassan smelled the strong odor of curry on his assailant’s breath. “Die, you bastard!” he heard a gruff voice say in Arabic.

A split second after that, something pushed hard against the side of his coat. Then it felt as if a pin or needle had pricked the bare skin beneath his garments.

Instinctively, Hassan drew the dagger from his coat pocket in a reverse grip. He could feel something still tangled in his overcoat as he reached up and wrapped his left arm around the back of his attacker’s neck. The Persian dagger rose high over his head, then came down with all of the force he could muster from his arm and shoulder, penetrating the other man’s clothing, skin, and burying itself deep within his heart.

Fear, anger and adrenaline now mixed in Abdul Hassan’s soul as he withdrew the dagger. He brought it up into the air once more, then thrust it down again as close to the same spot as he could. The man who had tried to kill him went limp in his arms, then slumped to the ground inside the doorway.

Hassan knelt, grabbed a sleeve of the man’s coat and used it to wipe the splattered blood from his face. His heart still beating like a kettle drum inside his chest, Hassan stood back up. He knew his coat would be soaked in blood so he would use the same side entrance to the hotel, secure in the fact that since the manager had already swept there it would be vacant now. He peered out from the doorway, looking quickly up and down the sidewalk.

There was no one else in sight.

Pulling a small penlight from the inside breast pocket of his overcoat, Hassan shone the tiny beam onto the dead features of the man he had just killed. The man’s eyes were open, staring lifelessly back at him.

But Hassan didn’t recognize the face. So he had no idea whether the attempted murder had come from his association with the CIA or from his private sin.

Using the penlight now to check himself, in addition to the blood Hassan saw that the hilt of a broad-bladed dagger still extended from his coat just beyond where he had felt the pinprick. He pulled out the knife and saw only the tiniest drop of blood on the tip. The wide, leaf-shaped blade had been a poor choice for assassination through heavy clothing.

It was not the kind of weapon a professional killer would choose on a cold night when men wore heavy layers of clothing. Which led him to believe the would-be assassin was an amateur, and that, in turn, answered his earlier question.

His relationship with the Americans was still secure. This attack was directly related to his personal sin rather than his work for them.

The man lying dead in the doorway had come to kill him for reasons personal rather than political.