Whipsaw Read Online Free PDF Page B

closely held secret.
    Not that Aquino was entirely to blame. You don't hold one person responsible for centuries of misery. But the forgotten people were still there, packed into their slums like gunpowder, just waiting for the spark. He wondered if the attack at the airport was the overture of a new rebellion, one to make the New People's Army look like Boy Scouts and the Huks like pacific idealists. The potential was there that was a certainty.
    In the back of Bolan's mind was the faint glimmer, dim as a penlight at the bottom of a mine shaft, that Charles Harding had come with the same notion, maybe to set that spark or maybe to piss on it and put it out. But Harding's background, sketchy as it was, suggested that he was not a disinterested observer in the Filipino political process.
    It was here, after all, that Lansdale had cut his eyeteeth, honing those theories that had gone so badly astray in Vietnam.
    The cab suddenly swerved to the left and rocked to a halt. Bolan looked out at the ultramodern glass-and-brass facade of the MacArthur Hilton. He paid the hack, then eased out of the cab. The clean pavement, flecked with glittering flakes of mica catching the sun, looked as if it had just been laid. He pushed through the revolving door as the cab lurched away, leaving the scent of burnt rubber hanging in the humid air.
    Bolan checked in quickly, and was surprised when the clerk said that someone had been asking for him. Bolan waited, watching the clerk curiously. He expected one of those ubiquitous pink papers with a phone message scribbled on it, but was instead surprised to hear the clerk page Frank Henson.
    He turned to see a man in a rumpled suit making a beeline for the desk. It had to be Henson.
    "Now what?" Bolan muttered.

5
    Frank Henson slipped behind the wheel of his Land Rover and leaned across to open Bolan's door. The big guy climbed in and dropped his bag over the seat into the back.
    "They give you a hard time today?" Henson asked.
    "I've had worse."
    "They say anything about Harding?"
    "Collazo referred to him obliquely, but didn't really give much away. I don't know what he knows, but I don't think it's much. It was more like he was trying to pump me than anything else."
    Henson laughed easily. "Son of a bitch! I'd love to know where the holes are. We're leaking like a sieve. And everybody in Manila seems to know what we know before we know it. Guy I bought this rattletrap from, some damn assistant something or other at the British embassy, told me about Harding two days before I heard his name from anybody else."
    "You think it's on your end or back in D.C.?" Bolan watched Henson carefully while the older man composed his answer. It would be easy to blame it on the other guy. That was the way in any bureaucracy.
    "I wish to Christ I knew," Henson said, laughing again. "I'd like to blame it on Washington. Those bastards are always looking for something to talk about at their cocktail parties. But I just don't know."
    Bolan made a mental note to be circumspect in his dealing with Henson. It wasn't that he didn't trust the man, but if there was a leak in Manila, it could get him killed. In the back of his mind was the not so sneaking suspicion that the airport scene had not been a coincidence. He also had to consider the possibility that he himself had been the target.
    Henson negotiated the traffic with a casual hand, flowing with it rather than trying to outrun it. Like most Far Eastern capitals, it combined the slowest of traditional commerce with the frenzy of blaring horns.
    "I think we can talk more freely at my place," Henson said. "I have it swept a couple of times a week. Had it done this afternoon, as a matter of fact."
    "I'm beginning to think this thing is a lot more complicated than Walt Wilson told me."
    "That's Rosebud for you. Walt's a crackerjack, but he's never liked to tell a guy more than he has to. In this case, I think, probably even less."
    "Tell me what you know about Charles