He closed the door behind him, then unlimbered the Browning hi-power from its hip holster. Bolan kept to the wall and moved toward the lighted doorway.

When he was three feet from the doorway, he heard sounds.

A man, a Libyan outfitted in servant's attire, emerged from the room at a leisurely pace. He was still munching the remnants of a sandwich.

The servant saw Bolan. His eyes and mouth widened in alarm.

Bolan stepped forward and chopped the guy hard with a downward snap of the Browning's butt. The step and the chop were one and the same movement. The blow connected at the base of the man's neck.

The Libyan fell to his knees. His eyes rolled back in his head as he pitched forward onto the floor. He did not move. His breathing was an uncertain rattle. He would be out for at least half an hour.

Bolan frisked him. The guy was unarmed. So Bolan would not kill him.

The Executioner grabbed the unconscious figure under both arms. He dragged the servant back to a walk-in closet next to the door. He laid him out on the floor of the closet, then closed the door and walked on.

It took him all of eight minutes to give the sprawling two-story residence a thorough search.

Lenny Jericho was a man who apparently lived in luxury wherever he went. His home in the desert was a living museum of exquisite tapestries, rugs and furniture in various Mediterranean and African styles.

Evidently the servant was the only one home.

There was no sign of Eve Aguilar. There was no sign of any part of the house being used as a place of detention.

Damnation.

Bolan exited the house by the same open door near the unconscious servant.

He hoped that Teckert would assume by now that Rideout had been assigned some other duty during his time below the parapet.

He kept to the shadows and eased out from the corner of the private residence to the rear wall of a one-story building that formed part of the villa's square courtyard.

Bolan's finger stayed curled around the trigger of the Browning hi-power. His senses scanned the darkness around him as he stayed close to the wall, stealthily moving toward another single lighted window.

He bent his knees slightly when he reached it, and edged an eye to the lower corner of the window. He looked in.

The room was an office.

Kennedy and Doyle stood near the office doorway. They were earnestly discussing something that Bolan could not hear. The windows had been double-glazed to facilitate the air conditioning.

Bolan watched.

Doyle snapped a curt salute at Kennedy. The subordinate left the office. When the door was closed, Kennedy turned and crossed over to the window through which Bolan was looking.

Bolan ducked down out of sight. He took care to prevent the barrel of the Galil from poking out over his shoulder.

As he crouched against the cool brick of the building and looked up, he had a good chance to study Kennedy's features.

The merc honcho stared out above him into the blackness.

It looked to Bolan as if Kennedy had plenty on his mind. The merc's too-perfect good looks were intact and unruffled. But Bolan was close enough to see that Kennedy's eyes were not as clear as before. They were heavy lidded, as if important matters were weighing on Kennedy's mind.

Close to two minutes passed before Kennedy turned from the window. Then Bolan took another chance and peered into the room.

Kennedy was locking the office door. Bolan watched him cross to an empty niche in the wall across from the window.

Then Kennedy stooped and pressed the floorboard. The wall slid open.

The head merc stepped briskly into a secret passage. The sliding panel closed shut behind him.

Now what was this?

Bolan straightened from his crouch. He tried the window. It was latched shut.

He used his elbow to tap it with just enough strength to crack the glass, not enough to shatter it. He pressed his fingertips along the crack in the glass. It gave way and fell onto the sill inside, with nothing more than a soft, dull thud.

Bolan reached in with his free hand and swiftly unlatched the window. He pushed the window up, then swung his leg up and over the window ledge, fanning the interior with his eyes and pistol.

It was not a trap.

The office was empty.

Bolan strode without hesitation toward the bare niche in the wall.

The Executioner was going after Kennedy, who would take him to Eve Aguilar.

Before it was too late.

9

Bolan pressed the floorboard.

The wall panel slid open — powered by some soundless automatic mechanism — exactly as it had for Kennedy.

Bolan's pistol was raised and ready for anything that might come out at him. He moved into the opening. He was one and a half minutes behind Kennedy. The panel slid back into place behind him.

He was enveloped in silence.

Low-watt light bulbs were evenly spaced down the angled ceiling of a narrow stairway. At the bottom, the stairway fed into a corridor that bisected the house from Bolan's left to right.

He eased down the stairs toward the shadows at its base. The air was dead and cold. It penetrated his bones. He could hear nothing.

The man he was tracking seemed to be long gone. Seemed to be.

When he reached the second-from-the-bottom stair, Bolan paused again, his pistol up. He stole a look around the corner of the stone wall.

He could see no beginning nor end to the tunnel that stretched away in either direction.

More light bulbs had been installed here, but long distances apart so that patches of stygian gloom gave the passageway an eerie, menacing reality.

Bolan slid around the corner and kept low. He started off down the tunnel to his right.

A cool but barely discernible draft brushed the hairs on his arms. It originated from far up ahead.

He held the slung Galil assault rifle in close against his body to prevent noise from the weapon bouncing against him.

The curved stone ceiling of the passage barely accommodated his 6'3" height. After several hundred yards, the tunnel made a sharp incline. Deeper still.

Then Bolan saw light, faint light, coming from the cracks of an ill-fitting door some ten yards ahead. Surely this was the source of the moving air he had noticed.

He pressed himself against the curving stone of the tunnel. He paused when he was still several feet from the door. He listened intently. There was a room of some sort beyond that wooden door, but it would be empty — Bolan heard no sounds from within. Or... it could be a trap.

He stood against the wall at the very edge of the doorframe. He extended his right foot and gave the door a slight nudge. The door was unlatched. It swung inward.

Bolan looked inside cautiously. The Browning hi-power panned the room, simultaneously with his eyes.

The floor was earthen. It was a storage room, with a door on the opposite wall. A candle emitted the light that had drawn Bolan.

Two people were in the room. Libyan civilians: an old man and a young woman. They were tied to kitchen chairs. Tied and gagged. They were alone in the room. Their eyes watched with puzzlement — and fear — as Bolan stepped toward them.

The man could have been fifty or a hundred years old. He wore a dark robe and white headcloth. The snowy white of his beard was in stark contrast to the dark of his Arabian skin.

The woman was a girl. Bolan judged her to be sixteen, if that. But she was already budding with the sensual-eyed, lush beauty that Bolan knew to be the birthright of the sisterhood of Islam.

He ungagged the girl, then the man.

The girl was fooled by the leathery brown of Bolan's skin hue, which had been acquired over an adulthood of missions to every hotspot under the sun.