Splinter Cell

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.

2

“They told me you speak Dutch and Arabic,” Bolan said to Paxton as he grabbed the man’s elbow and pointed him toward the passenger terminal’s freight reception area in the distance. They had excited the plane through a hatch that led to the cargo hold, where they donned the overalls that baggage handlers wore.

“More Dutch than Arabic,” the Army Ranger said. “I’m not exactly what you’d call fluent in either. But I can hear enough Dutch right now to know that everybody—cops, reporters and airport officials—are all looking for us. The passengers are keeping their word and covering for us, saying we’re getting off last.”

“That should give us some time, then,” the Executioner said. “Come on.”

They quickly reached the freight area, where they passed several other men dressed in similar coveralls. The men didn’t give them a second look. Ducking into a stairwell to the side of the large room, Bolan led Paxton up the steps to the next landing and peered through a window in the door. What he saw looked more like a freight expedition area than what he wanted, so he said, “Let’s try one more level.”

The two men jogged up the next flight of steps, taking them two at a time.

This time, the Executioner looked through the window and saw what appeared to be a boarding room. Quickly stripping off their coveralls, he and Paxton dropped them in the stairwell and stepped out onto the carpet.

The excitement created by the attempted hijacking hadn’t seemed to reach this level of the terminal yet, and Bolan led the way past a duty-free shop and several ticket desks to a sign that read Passport Control in a variety of languages. He waited as an elderly couple got their passports stamped, then stepped up to the desk and pulled his own small blue book from inside his coat.

The uniformed man behind the counter glanced at the picture in the American passport, then Bolan’s face, and asked in English, “Business or pleasure, Mr. Cooper?”

“Primarily business,” Bolan answered. Then he smiled. “But I’ve never been to Amsterdam without having a good time, either.”

The uniformed official chuckled under his breath, stamped the passport and handed it back. “Have fun,” he said.

Bolan waited to the side as Brick Paxton handed the same man the passport Stony Man Farm had come up with for him. He was traveling under the name John Henry McBride, who was a general building contractor. The Executioner had learned that Paxton had worked construction during the summers when he’d been in high school, and had more than a passing knowledge of the business. So that was to be both men’s cover from now on. If anyone asked, they were in the Netherlands to check into both commercial and residential construction for the Brown Realty Holdings Company, out of Chicago, Illinois.

As soon as “McBride’s” passport had been stamped they were waved quickly through customs. They didn’t look like drug smugglers, but it wouldn’t have mattered much if they had in a country where most drugs were legal. The nonchalance shown by the Dutch customs officers reminded the Executioner of an old saying among drug abusers: “Taking your own dope to Amsterdam is like taking your wife to Paris.”

An elevator took them back down to the ground level, and they stepped out through the revolving doors of the terminal. Two minutes later Bolan had flagged down a cab. The cabbie took one look at the two men and immediately sized them up as Americans. “No luggage?” he asked in a thick Dutch accent.

Bolan shook his head. “We shipped it ahead of us.”

The cabbie wore a plaid driving cap with a short bill as he got back inside behind the wheel. “Where to?” he asked.

“The American Embassy,” the Executioner said.

The driver glanced up into the rearview mirror, the fact that he was impressed evident in his eyes. Without another word, he threw the cab into Drive and took off at breakneck speed, dodging in, out and around other vehicles with the daring for which certain cabdrivers are known the world over.

Forty-five minutes later they came to a screeching halt beneath an American flag mounted atop a pole sticking up out of a thick concrete wall. It waved in the breeze as if welcoming them as they got out.

Two U.S. Marine Corpsmen stood guard at the gate. Bolan and Paxton showed the men their passports. One of the Marines checked the list on the clipboard in the guard cubicle just inside the walls, then opened the gate and waved them in. The other Marine escorted them up a set of steps and into the building. He knocked loudly on a first-floor door at the rear of the embassy and waited for it to be opened.

When the door was answered, a short, overweight man chewing on one of the earpieces of a pair of reading glasses stood just inside the office.

“Mr. Cooper and Mr. McBride,” the Marine said. Then, with a stiff salute, he pivoted away from them and marched back down the hall.

“Come in. My name is Felix Young,” the short man said with one of the least enthusiastic tones of voice Bolan had ever heard. He was dressed in brown slacks below a pale blue sweater vest, with white shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The knot of his necktie had been pulled down almost to the end of the V in the vest, and his general appearance was one of slovenliness. The office was in a similar state, with stacks of paper cluttering his desk, several tables and the tops of a half-dozen filing cabinets. Ashtrays scattered throughout the room overflowed with cigarette butts, and the stale smell of smoke hung in the air like the fog of a London morning.

Bolan’s eyes fell to a stack of luggage in the corner of the office. The suitcases and other bags were the only items in the office not covered in a thin coat of gray ash—which meant they couldn’t have been in the room very long. They likely contained Bolan’s and Paxton’s clothing and other gear, including their weapons, all of which had been flown over from America in diplomatic pouches.

Felix Young dropped into his seat behind the desk. Bolan and Paxton both looked around, but the chairs in front of the desk were as cluttered with paperwork as the rest of the furniture so they remained standing.

“I don’t know exactly who you are,” Young said in a tone that had only slightly more character and inflection in it than had his self-introduction. “And I don’t know exactly why you’re here.” He opened the top middle drawer of his desk, retrieved a crumpled package of unfiltered cigarettes. When he’d lit a cigarette, he went on. “And I’m not sure I want to know.” He drew in a lungful of smoke and looked up at the ceiling with complete uninterest.

Bolan was quickly tiring of the listless bureaucrat. The man was CIA—that much he knew because Hal Brognola had told him. As to any further information about Felix Young, the Executioner could only guess that he was nearing retirement, had lost all enthusiasm for his work and would be happy as long as the two men standing in front of his desk didn’t create any extra work for him.

Young more or less voiced those thoughts himself by saying, “Keep in mind that whatever you do here, we’re going to get blamed for it.” He looked down from the ceiling but met Bolan’s eyes for only a second before turning his gaze to a wall. “CIA, CIA, CIA,” he breathed out with another chestful of smoke. “The whole world blames everything that happens on the CIA.”

Paxton was losing patience with the man, too. “I don’t see how they could blame too much on you,” he said.

Young merely pointed toward the luggage. “All of your stuff is in the corner there,” he said. “So just take it.”

Paxton moved toward the bags but Bolan stayed in place. “I believe you have something else for us,” he said.

Young frowned. It was obvious his mind had already moved from Bolan and Paxton to something else. “Oh,” he finally said. “Yeah.” Opening the same drawer where he’d found the cigarettes, he pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper and spread it out on the desk. Pushing it down with both hands in an attempt to flatten it, he finally lifted the paper again and handed it across the desk to Bolan. “Here. Try not to burn the guy, okay?”

Bolan stuffed the rumpled page into his pocket. He couldn’t see how burning the informant Young was turning over to him would have much effect on the listless CIA man one way or another. It could get the snitch killed, of course. But it didn’t appear that the man behind the desk planned on using him any more than he had to. Or doing anything else that required any effort, either.

Without further words, Bolan joined Paxton and the two men lifted the various bags from the corner of the office and left. The Executioner felt both disgust and relief as they walked back down the hall. The disgust came from seeing a man like Young who had lost all enthusiasm for his work and now did nothing but punch the time clock while he waited for retirement. But the fact that the CIA officer didn’t appear to have any plans of interfering with what he and Paxton were about to do was a relief.

THERE HAD BEEN no euphoria left in him by the time Phil Paxton awakened.

Only terror.

Phil looked around the semilit room as he came to his senses and wondered if he might not still be asleep. Was this a dream? He closed his eyes once more, hoping it was. But the reality of the situation, and the memory of what had happened, came flooding back to his mind and forced his eyelids open again.

The undisputed realization that the room he was in was a cell hit him between the eyes like a two-by-four. The walls were made of jagged stone, and overhead he saw rough-hewn wooden beams. It looked like something out of a horror movie, a place where Frankenstein’s monster might live, or where Dracula might keep his coffin to sleep in during the daylight. Maybe where the Wolfman would chain himself up during full moons in the hope that the chains might prevent him from ripping people apart with his long teeth and fangs.

The thought of chains led Phil Paxton to look down at the steel handcuffs encircling his wrists. The chain between the two cuffs was attached to another chain that ran around his waist. That restraint, in turn, was secured by a large sturdy padlock.

Phil Paxton’s back and legs felt as if they were in ice packs. Looking down, he saw that he was seated on the smoother stone of the floor. A painful twist of his cold and stiff neck told him his back rested against the wall, and condensation glistening off the stones had soaked through his shirt. For some reason, that sudden knowledge—that his shirt was wet and likely to remain that way—caused him to shiver more than any other of the morbid details that were just now registering with him.

As Phil continued to shake with both cold and fear, his mind began to race. Where the hell was he? He had been kidnapped, he remembered, as the events that had taken place before he lost consciousness suddenly flooded back into his memory. The taxi. The alley. The lights from outside and suddenly being jerked out of the vehicle. The hood coming down over his head and then the needle in his arm, which brought on elation and then oblivion.

But who had kidnapped him? And what did they want?

In the back of his sluggish brain an alarming possibility began to take shape. Phil repressed the thought as long as he could, concentrating again on his surroundings. A thick wooden door that looked centuries old—and added to the Saturday-afternoon horror-film atmosphere—stood a few feet away, to his left. A small window had been cut in the upper part of the door. The opening was too small for a man to even get his head through, but for some reason the builders had still seen fit to equip it with tiny iron bars. The bars were red with rust and looked as if they had been in place for centuries. Through this small window came what little light illuminated the cell. And with that light came the minute amount of hope that was still in Phil Paxton’s soul.

The chained man stared at the door. In the silence that surrounded him, he could hear his own breathing. But now and then, as if far in the distance, he caught the sounds of a few words being passed back and forth between different voices. How many voices, and how many men, he couldn’t tell. But it sounded as if they were just outside his cell, whispering. Phil almost laughed out loud in his near hysteria. Why would they bother to whisper? Were they afraid he might overhear something they didn’t want him to hear? Maybe some magic formula with which he could break free of his bonds and escape? The whispering didn’t make sense—particularly since it was in a language he didn’t understand.

But a language that suddenly, either by instinct or having heard it spoken somewhere before, he knew was Arabic.

Now the possibility he had so far suppressed bulled its way to the front of his brain with the force of a freight train. Again, he felt as if a large board or baseball bat had struck him between the eyes. The men who had snatched him out of the cab were Arabs, and the accent to which the cabdriver had changed when he’d threatened to shoot him had been Middle Eastern, too. He had been kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. Exactly which faction they represented, he didn’t know.

Phil Paxton’s shoulders shivered even harder now, as if he were doing the jitterbug or some other strange dance. The Netherlands, he knew, was awash with Middle Eastern terrorists these days. They had murdered Dutch officials, set off suicide bombs in government buildings and other sites, and kidnapped tourists to hold for ransom.

And Americans, as always, were their number-one choice for kidnapping.

Phil leaned forward in an attempt to stop shaking. He knew from news reports that even when the ransoms were paid, most of the victims—and always the Americans—were still murdered. Some had even been shown being beheaded by huge swords on the Internet.

Now the chill spread from Phil’s back and shoulders through the rest of his body. He felt as if the blood in his veins and arteries had suddenly frozen to ice from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet.

But even being American, he realized, was not his biggest liability. He was a very special kind of American—different from the men and women from the U.S. who had been the victims of terrorist kidnappings before him. They had been taken at random without regard for their professions. They had been simple people—businessmen, housewives, low-to mid-level government employees, men and women with no particular talents or expertise that could benefit the terrorists.

Phil Paxton didn’t fall into that category, and he knew it. But did his captors? Did they know what he did for a living? Had he been snatched up indiscriminately, simply as a target of opportunity like the others, or had he been kidnapped on purpose for the expertise he could provide? And even if the men who had imprisoned him didn’t now know who he was and what he did for a living, would they find out? And when they did, could they force him through torture to do their bidding?

A collage of horrifying images suddenly filled his brain. Phil saw pictures of Janie wearing her engagement ring, then himself being beheaded while millions of people watched on the Internet, then Janie wearing black and attending his funeral. He saw his brother, Brick—wearing camouflage clothing, his face blackened with nonreflective makeup—firing a rifle and mowing down the men who held him prisoner. Then he saw himself in a rude, makeshift laboratory, working on a crude device on a table while heavily bearded men wearing the long flowing headdresses known as kaffiyehs stood to his side, aiming guns at his head.

For a moment, Phil thought he would scream. Then he felt his brows furrow into a frown as he did his best to break through the freezing terror and bring himself back into the rational realm that was his room. If he was to survive the situation in which he now found himself, that survival could only come by getting a grip on himself. He would have to control—even ignore—the fear and these fear-induced images.

Phil forced himself to close his eyes and concentrate on his breathing. He rolled his eyeballs back in his head, then tightened his abdominal muscles. It was an ancient warrior trick he had learned from Brick. While it didn’t drive all of the fear from his soul, it relaxed him enough to begin thinking logically again.

Phil Paxton couldn’t reach the back pocket of the jeans he was wearing where he kept his leather passport case. But by rolling onto his hip, he was able to determine that it was gone. That was to be expected. The terrorists—from whatever Islamic fundamentalist group they were from—would naturally have taken it. And in addition to his passport, they would find the other items he had transferred from the billfold he usually carried when he was at home.

But had his U.S. government ID been in his passport case? He couldn’t remember now if he had brought it along. Which meant he had no way of knowing whether the men who had kidnapped him knew he was one of America’s top nuclear scientists. And that he was more than capable of building either nuclear bombs or putting together “dirty bombs” if they didn’t have all of the components necessary to produce a real nuke.

The shivering returned to his shoulders, and Phil rolled his eyes back and concentrated on his breathing again. He supposed he would find out what his kidnappers knew, and didn’t know, before long. But he wondered now who else knew he had been taken captive. Did Brick know? If he did, nothing here on God’s green planet would keep his Army Ranger brother from coming after him.

For a moment Phil Paxton allowed himself to slip into a comforting fantasy of Brick Paxton blasting away with a machine gun before kicking in the door to his cell. Brick then shot off the padlock that secured the chain around his waist—Phil didn’t know exactly how he did that without killing him in the process, but this was a fantasy after all, and he could take it any place he wanted.

He was jerked out of the daydream, however, when the door suddenly opened for real.

The brighter light that entered the cell almost blinded Phil Paxton. But he was able to make out the forms of two men in traditional Islamic robes and headgear dragging another unconscious man into the room. Rifles were slung over the men’s shoulders. Phil couldn’t remember what such rifles were called but he knew they were Russian. Brick would know. And Brick would know how to use one. For a moment, every fiber in Phil Paxton’s body wanted to see Brick standing in front of him with just such a rifle, filling these bastards in the robes full of bullet holes.

Phil watched helplessly as the man being dragged was thrown facedown on the floor, then rolled up into a sitting position next to him. Phil kept his eyes almost closed, praying that his abductors wouldn’t notice he was awake as another set of handcuffs and another waist chain were applied to the new hostage. Then the men in the white robes left without speaking and the door creaked closed again. A second later, Phil head the sound of a lock sliding into place.

Phil turned to look at the man next to him. He was young—maybe midtwenties—and had obviously been drugged just like Phil had. Perhaps when he awakened, he would have some bit of information to add to what Phil Paxton already knew. Something that might help them escape.

Until then, Phil would be alone with the two most terrifying nightmare possibilities he could dream up. The second-to-worst possibility was that he would be killed.

The worst was that he’d first be forced into responsibility for the deaths of hundreds, thousands or perhaps even hundred of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

CABS LINED THE STREET outside the American Embassy in Amsterdam. Bolan and Paxton took the one nearest the curb as they walked back out through the gate and nodded goodbye to the two U.S. Marines against the wall. The two men saluted, then stood back at attention without a word.

Their driver huffed and puffed as he helped them lift their luggage into the trunk of the vehicle, looking up at Bolan in wonderment at the weight of some of the bags. Bolan smiled at the man but offered no explanation.

Behind the wheel, with his two customers seated in the back, the driver said, “Where to?” in almost unaccented English.

“The Hotel Amstel,” Bolan told him.

The driver didn’t bat an eye at the name of one of the top hotels in the world. He was obviously used to taking visiting American dignitaries from the embassy to the Amstel, and he turned the key and started the ignition.

Bolan sat back against the seat as they pulled away from the curb. Amsterdam was one of the most colorful cities in the world, and he watched through the window as they passed seventeenth-century seven-gabled houses, historic churches and elaborate stone towers. The site was actually an inland port that boasted fifty canals and more than six hundred spectacular bridges. Two of the more renowned sites were the Rembrandt House, where the famous painter had lived from 1639 to 1658, and the home where Anne Frank and her family had hidden behind a secret passageway during the Nazi occupation.

It was early winter and despite himself the Executioner allowed images of tulips, for which Holland was famous, slip into his mind. Along the streets and sidewalks, he imagined baskets of flowers hanging from the eves of houses, office complexes and other buildings.

He sat back against the seat, pondering this cosmopolitan city. Amsterdam was no better or worse than any other midsized city. Hidden behind the freshly scrubbed and smiling faces he saw as the cab raced down the streets was the same dirty underbelly found in all large centers of population. Behind the clean streets were the back alleys filled with drugs, prostitution, murder and mayhem.

And, of course, terrorism.

THE CABDRIVER PULLED UP in front of the Amstel Hotel, and Bolan and Paxton both got out of the backseat before the cabdriver or bellman had a chance to open their doors.

The cabdriver opened the trunk, and then an almost humorous competition ensued between the two men to see who could pull out the most bags in the shortest period of time. By the time it was over, a second bellman had come down a concrete ramp with a rolling luggage rack, and all three began piling Bolan’s and Paxton’s bags onto the glistening stainless-steel bars.

The Executioner paid the driver, adding a tip sufficient enough to bring a smile back to the man’s face. Then he and Paxton followed the blond bellman up the steps to the Amstel’s front doors. Bolan didn’t like letting their luggage out of his own control, but he could see no way around it at this point. Besides, he reminded himself, each suitcase that contained “sensitive” items was secured by a sturdy padlock. There was no reason for the cabdriver, the blond bellman or the other uniformed man who had brought the cart down the ramp to suspect their luggage contained anything more lethal than adding machines and laptops.

Once inside the lobby, the blond bellman escorted them past a grand staircase and into the Amstel Mirror Room lounge. The walls were, as the name of the room suggested, covered in reflective glass, and men and women in tuxedos, white ties and tails, and the most elegant of evening dresses were using the mirrors to their fullest, showing off their finery.

“I gotta tell ya,” Brick Paxton whispered out of the side of his mouth, “this beats the hell out of being covered in talcum-powder sand all day and taking a bath with baby wipes in Iraq.”

Bolan just nodded as the bellman ushered them to the front check-in desk, then stepped back and bowed. “Mr. Cooper and Mr. McBride,” he said, “Pietre is already taking your luggage to your suite.” His smile widened as he stood motionless in that practiced way that bellmen at finer hotels all over the world developed. It was Bolan’s cue for another tip, so he reached into his pocket once more.