Splinter Cell. Don Pendleton

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