Whipsaw Read Online Free PDF

word, he swiveled back and replaced the phone in its cradle.
    "Where are you staying, Mr. Belasko?"
    "At the MacArthur. Why?"
    Collazo didn't answer him. Instead he remarked, "That's all for today. I'd appreciate it if you'd stop by in a couple of days."
    Bolan shook his head. "Whatever you say, Captain."
    The big man got to his feet and bent to retrieve his small bag. He studied Collazo for a moment, but the captain was already immersed in paperwork on his desk. If he felt Bolan's eyes on him, he didn't show it.
    Bolan opened the door and let it close gently behind him as he stepped into the busy outer office.
    He'd give his eyeteeth to know who had been on the phone and what had been said. Zigzagging through the crowded corridor and across the large, square booking area, he slipped into a tall revolving door and hissed out into the heat.
    The sound of Manila immediately attacked him. The frame seemed endless and immobile. Judging by the din, a permanent blaring of the horn was a Filipino license requirement. He bounced down the steps two at a time and joined a queue at the nearest cabstand.
    Three people were ahead of him, and he waited patiently, turning back to look at the tall, vacant face of the police station. For a moment he had the suspicion that someone inside was watching him, but he shrugged it off. He was exhausted and he needed time to think.
    It seemed almost too perfectly coincidental that Charles Harding would be present in the airport during a terrorist attack. The odds argued strongly that it had not been a freak occurrence. If Harding had been the target, who had done the shooting?
    And why there? But Bolan couldn't come up with a single reason why anyone should go to such trouble to try to kill one man when he could just as easily be taken out some other way, someplace safer for the shooters.
    Unless, Bolan thought... unless it had to look like a fluke to hide the purpose, and possibly the people, behind it. Collazo had told him virtually nothing about the attack. He didn't even know whether anyone had been killed. But even if there had been fatalities, Bolan knew enough about the world to understand that incidental death raised no eyebrows in the pursuit of political goals.
    Not anymore.
    A cab finally arrived, and all three people in front of him piled into it. Bolan didn't have long to wait for the next one. He gave the driver his destination, then settled back in the seat. He hadn't been to the Philippines in so long, and yet it seemed the same. The people were a little happier with Marcos gone, but it seemed like a happiness that was only skin-deep. Everyplace he looked, he saw a guardedness, like trespassers walking through a graveyard at midnight. The peace was fragile, they seemed to say, as fragile as the eggs they all walked on.
    And, like most Third World countries, it was a place where Americans were barely tolerated, at least by a highly vocal minority. Nobody likes a cop, Bolan thought, and when you're the world's cop, nobody on earth really likes you. They want you to be there when they need help, but they don't want to feel grateful for it.
    Bolan watched the traffic slide by as the driver twirled the steering wheel, maneuvering the cab as if it were as thin as a knife blade. He darted through narrow openings without braking, sometimes gunning the engine for an extra burst of speed.
    The streets teemed with pedestrians, and in some respects it looked no different from any other major capital. Westernized to a fault, the residents looked as if they would have been equally at home in downtown New York or the streets of Singapore.
    But there was another Manila, another Philippines. Most Westerners rarely saw it, if at all. It was the Manila of rusting corrugated metal shacks and strings of shanties made of packing crates and tarpaper. This was the Manila that Marcos had made a career of ignoring, and Aquino had built a career making promises to. If any of those promises had been kept, it was a