Temple of Fear by Nick Carter Read Free Book Online

room and took a bottle of Scotch from the portable bar.

Chapter 4
    Very rarely did Hawk call Nick in for consultation on a top level decision. Killmaster wasn't paid to make top level decisions. He was paid to carry them out — which he usually did with the stealth of a tiger and the fury thereof when it was needed. Hawk had every respect for Nick's abilities as an agent and, when need be, a killer. Carter was just about the best in the world today; top man in that bitter, dark, bloody and often mysterious back alley region where decisions were implemented, where directives were finally transmuted into bullets and knives, poisons and rope. And death.
    Hawk had a very bad night. He hardly slept, most unusual for him. At three in the morning he found himself pacing his slightly dreary living room in Georgetown and wondering if he had the right to involve Nick in this decision. It wasn't Nick's load, really. It was Hawk's. Hawk was the head man at AXE. Hawk was paid — not enough — to make the decisions and bear the onus of mistakes. On his own stooped, seventy-odd-year-old shoulders lay the burden and he really had no right to shift part of that burden to another.
    Why not simply make up
his
mind whether to play Cecil Aubrey's game or not? It was a shabby game, admittedly, but Hawk had played at worse. And the gains were beyond measuring — a man of his own in the Kremlin. Hawk, professionally speaking, was a greedy man. Also a ruthless one. In time — though he kept speculation at a distance now — he knew that he would find means to gradually take over the Kremlin man, more and more, from Aubrey. But that was all in the future.
    Had he the right to involve Nick Carter — who had never killed a man in his life except for his country and in the performance of his sworn duty? Because it would be Nick Carter who would have to do the actual killing.
    It was a tricky moral question. Slippery. It had a million facets and it was possible to rationalize and come up with almost any answer you wanted.
    David Hawk was not accustomed to tricky moral questions. For forty years he had fought the good fight and had put hundreds of his and his country's enemies under the sod. To Hawk's mind they were one and the same thing. His enemies and his country's enemies were exactly the same thing. Interchangeable.
    On the surface it was simple enough. He, and the entire Western world, would be safer and sleep better with Richard Philston dead. Philston was an arch-betrayer who had caused unlimited damage. There was really no arguing with that.
    So, at three in the morning, Hawk made himself a very mild drink and argued with it.
    Aubrey was going against orders. He had admitted as much in Hawk's office, though he had given specious reasons for going against his orders. His superiors wanted Philston taken and brought back to face a proper trial and, one supposed, execution.
    Cecil Aubrey, though wild horses would not have dragged it from him, was afraid that Philston would somehow slip the hangman's knot. Aubrey was thinking as much of his dead young wife as he was of his duty. He did not care about seeing a traitor punished in open court. He only wanted Richard Philston dead in the shortest, quickest, ugliest way possible. To do this, and to obtain AXE help in gaining his revenge, Aubrey was prepared to bargain away one of his nation's most valuable assets — an unsuspected pipeline into the Kremlin.
    Hawk freshened his drink just a mite and clutched his faded bathrobe around a neck that got scrawnier every day. He glanced at the ancient ormolu clock on the mantel. Nearly four. He had promised himself a decision before he got to the office that day. Had promised Cecil Aubrey, too.
    Aubrey was right about one thing, Hawk admitted as he paced. AXE, almost any Yank service, could handle this matter better than the British. Philston would know every gin and snare that MI6 had ever used or dreamed of using. AXE might have a chance. Certainly if he