He had tried to engage the woman in conversation, but each time, she turned him away with a single syllable. After the third time, he gave up.

If she had anything to say to him, she would say it, he decided. So far she hadn't.

7

They had been traveling for nearly two hours, and his shoulders were sore from slamming into the sides of the van. No matter how he positioned himself, a sudden jolt would dislodge him and send him pounding into a steel wall or tilt him over onto the floor.

Finally he lay flat, wedging himself into a corner, and let gravity do what it could to protect him. With his hands cuffed behind him, it was far from comfortable, but at least he would spare himself the worst of the bumps and bruises.

Resigning himself to his situation, he tried to sleep but found, paradoxically, that it was too dark.

He thought of what it was like to lie in bed and watch the play of light and shadow on the ceiling: the glare of passing headlights, the gradual passage of the moon, the winking blue or red of neon outside a cheap hotel window, all the things that conspired to prevent the darkness of the night from being perfect.

He sighed in exasperation, and she must have realized what he was thinking. "There is nothing quite like it, you know."

"Like what?" Bolan asked.

"Like being hostage to someone's whim, simply because he has a gun..."

"I'm sure," Bolan replied, not knowing what else to say, but feeling the need to say something to keep her talking.

"I'm almost used to it." Her voice sounded uncertain. It echoed hollowly off the walls of the van. "No, I'm not, actually. I don't know why I always say that."

"Maybe that's the only way you can deal with it."

"I suppose."

"How long have you carried a gun?"

"A year. Almost..."

"What drove you to it?"

"Never mind. I don't want to talk about it." She lapsed into a silence that sounded as if it were meant to be permanent.

They rode without speaking for a quarter of an hour.

Bolan found himself trying to visualize her. It had been just a few hours since he'd seen her, but he was unable to do it. Her face kept drifting in and out of focus. It hovered there, just beyond the reach of his mind, fluttering like a phony ghost at Halloween.

Every time he pushed toward it, it slipped away, teasing him with its impermanence.

When the silence was broken again, it was she who broke it. "What is Charles Harding to you?" Her voice was so soft, he wasn't sure he had understood the question.

"Did you say something?" he asked.

"I asked you what Charles Harding was to you." She snapped it precisely this time.

"Right now, a question mark in an empty box. Why?"

"You tried to help him at the airport. I was just wondering why, that's all."

"Actually I wasn't. If I was trying to help anybody, it was a thousand innocent people who were walking into the middle of a terrorist attack."

"I don't believe that, you know. I just don't."

"Believe what you want."

"You really should tell me."

"Why should I tell you anything? You know my name and I don't know yours. You know a lot more about me than I do about you. And I'm not in the habit of sharing my life story with total strangers, kidnappers or not."

"You're not being kidnapped. Don't be so melodramatic."

"What do you call it?"

"What difference does it make what I call it? Labels don't mean anything, anyway. And my name is Marisa."

The truck hit a particularly rough bump, and he landed hard on his tailbone as the truck bed twisted and bounced. Bolan groaned and wriggled around to lie on his side.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"I've been better."

"I'm used to it, I guess. Lying in a truck in the dark, I mean. I can control my body. It's almost as if I know where the bumps are before we hit them."

"Bully for you."

"Don't be bitter."

"Whatever you say."

Bolan's jaw slammed shut like a mausoleum door.

He heard her shift position, and a moment later he felt her hands groping past his hip. He didn't know what she was after until the handcuffs clicked.

"I really shouldn't have done that..."

"I'll never tell," Bolan said.

"No, I mean it. You have to promise you won't try to get away."

"I'm not about to jump out of a speeding truck in the middle of the night, if that's what you mean. Other than that, I'm not making any promises."

"I have a gun, you know."

He reached up to take off the blindfold. "What do you mean?"

She seemed genuinely puzzled. She levered a shell into the chamber of an automatic pistol, and Bolan didn't need to see her to know it.

"Look, I..." He stumbled to a halt. It seemed as if he couldn't say anything without tripping all over himself. There was something about her that mystified him. "Funny, isn't it, how much we take power for granted? I mean, we refer to it constantly. We use it interchangeably with privilege as if they were the same thing." She seemed completely unruffled. Her voice was serene, almost narcotized, and nearly hypnotic. "But they aren't the same thing at all. Right now, I have a kind of power that you don't. That makes me privileged, compared to you."

"How so?"

"If I say jump, you will ask how high. All because I have the gun."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

She ignored the implicit disagreement. "But that's not all. It makes us different, having power. It also puts you on the defensive, the same way knowledge does. Knowledge, too, is a kind of power."

"You think so?"

"I know it. Take the fact that you really don't know why you're here. Not the truck I don't mean that. I mean Manila. The Philippines. I think maybe that's why I took off your handcuffs. You are a kind of innocent. You're like a child, somehow. Most things are so simple for you, and yet some things are so complex you don't even try to understand them. But you don't care. For you, they amount to the same thing. You see something in black and white, or you don't see it at all. And you don't even realize that."

Bolan listened to the laboring engine for a while. He could feel it throbbing through the floorboards. From the strain, and the slight imbalance he felt, he assumed they were heading uphill now, and had been for a while. Slowly, perhaps, but certainly.

Finally he took up the gauntlet. "If you understand so much, why don't you explain things to me? Show me where I am wrong and you are right."

"You think I can't, don't you?"

"I don't think anything. Just do it, if you can."

"All right... let me tell you about your Mr. Charles Harding. How about that for a beginning?"

"Good a place as any, I suppose."

"Do you know why he's here, in the Philippines?"

"No."

"Is that why you were following him, to find out?"

"Who said I was following him?"

"Mr. Belasko, don't try to obscure the obvious. I know what I know. And I know you were following him. I know you came here from Los Angeles, just like Mr. Harding. But, unlike you, I also know why he is here."

He kept calculating the odds on overpowering the young woman, but they never changed, and he didn't like them. And he was getting interested, in spite of himself.

"Go on," he said.

"How much do you know about my country?"

"Enough."

"You remember the Huks? Hukbalahap? You don't seem old enough."

"I know of them, yes."

"And the New People's Army? You know of them, too?"

"Yes."

"You know why they existed, the Huks, the NPA? Because of people like your Mr. Harding."

"Stop calling him that. He's not "my" Mr. Harding. I don't know who the hell he belongs to, but it sure as hell isn't me."

"That's the American way, isn't it, Mr. Belasko? Let people be exploited, reap the rewards of that exploitation and disavow its architects. As long as you have two cars and three televisions, who cares about people who have to walk and who have no radio? "Fuck 'em," isn't that the American attitude?"