Assault on Soho by Don Pendleton

softly under her breath. Bolan was lying back in a tub of steaming water, seemingly utterly relaxed and half asleep in a sea of suds, but half-closed eyes were watching the girl's every movement.
    She maneuvered a low stool alongside the tub and set the tray on it. Her eyes found the Beretta, jammed into a towel rack within Bolan's easy reach. Whimsically, she said, "I've heard of
sleeping
with one's pistol, Mr. Bolan, but isn't this a bit ridiculous?" The comradely tone was gone, Bolan noted, replaced by the earlier tense nervousness.
    "Survival," he replied, his speech slurring a bit, "is never ridiculous."
    Her eyes fell and she said, "Of course you would know more about that than I. Well," she added, with a forced perkiness, "I have bere coffee and muffins, which are also a matter of survival. Shall we break bread over the tub?"
    Bolan grinned and reached for the coffee. She placed the cup in his hand and asked him, "How long since you've slept?"
    He carefully sipped the coffee, then replied, "I forget."
    "Then it's been much too long." She knelt on the floor beside the tub, broke a muffin, and held it to his lips. He ate, realizing that it had also been some time since that event. She told him, "You are an unusual person, Mr. Bolan."
    "Not really," he murmured. "I'm an ordinary person in unusual circumstances. Are you still afraid of me?"
    She hesitated, then whispered, "As a person, no, I suppose not."
    "I'm afraid of you," he told her.
    Another pause, then: "I don't find that particularly flattering."
    Bolan sighed. "It's the survival instinct," he explained, grinning tiredly. "I have to suspect the very worst in everybody."
    "Then why survive?" she asked dully. "I mean…"
    After a brief and almost embarrassed silence, Bolan said, "I know what you mean." He had asked himself the same question, many times. Though Ann Franklin apparently could not, some thinker had long ago expressed her idea rather well: when love and trust are dead, then the man himself is dead and awaiting only official notification of the fact. Yeah, Bolan had considered the idea. And rejected it. He told the girl, "I have a job to do. I live to do that job. That's what survival means to me."
    Small-voiced, she replied, "You're speaking of your job as executioner."
    He sighed. "Yes. That's the job."
    "You live only to Mil."
    "That's about it." He finished the coffee and returned the cup to her hand.
    "I simply cannot believe that," she told him.
    He shrugged. "Then don't."
    "If you came to believe that I were your enemy, you would kill me?"
    He smiled faintly. "Are you my enemy?"
    "No."
    He said, "I've never killed a friend."
    She gazed at him with sad eyes, then got to her feet with a loud sigh. "You have no
true
friends in England, Mr. Bolan. I suggest that you simply slaughter the entire population straightaway, and leave as quickly as possible."
    She went out, lightly closing the door behind her.
    Well hell, Bolan told himself. She'd been trying to get him to open himself up, to give her something to admire, perhaps something to pity. For what? Games of conscience. She was mixed up in something she did not like, and she wanted someone to tell her it was all worthwhile.
    Well, she would not get it from Bolan. He had a hard enough time keeping himself convinced. Right now, for example, it would be so easy to simply slip beneath the warm water and give it all up. No more fear, no more pain, no more blood, just blissful euphoria and quiet oblivion in the soothing warmth of Ann Franklin's bath. Why not? After all, who the hell was Mack Bolan to appoint himself physician to a sick society? So what if the Mafia cancer was spreading into vital tissues?—weren't there other surgeons around who were better equipped than Bolan for the job?
    Wasn't it sheer ego that kept him on the job? They'd called him a Quixote in the press. They should have called him a cockalorum—yeah, that would be more like it—Sergeant Self-importance, self-appointed Saviour of