Devil's Keep (15 page)

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Nothing special about her?”

“Just a girl, that’s all.”

“How many applications do you process per week in this office?”

“About two hundred and fifty, most weeks.”

“And how many of those are offered jobs?”

“I don’t know. I just take the applications and
send them on. I don’t know what happens after that.”

“No? You don’t issue bus tickets and expense money to all who have been offered a job?”

“Not routinely.”

“How many bus tickets do you issue, an average week?”

“I don’t know—” she said, before cutting herself off. She could see where he had led her, but it was too late. He knew.

“You issued one to Marivic. Why?”

“Instructions from Manila.”

“This office has been open how long?”

“About seven months.”

“And in all that time, how many other applicants got the same treatment as Marivic?”

“I can’t say any more. Please go now. I know nothing about any of this. I take applications and send them on, that’s all.”

“Was Marivic unusually qualified? Gifted? Exceptional in some way?”

The woman shook her head. No. No. No. Not so much answering him as trying to refuse him.

She said, “Please. I have no part in this.”

“What was special about Marivic? What made her different?”

“Nothing,” she said. ”Nothing that I could see. Please go now.
Please
.”

Favor got up from the chair and walked out, with Mendonza following. On their way down, they met a young woman, college age, headed up. She was holding a clipboard with an application form. On the inside of her
left forearm, visible to Favor as he stepped aside, was a gauze pad held in place by a piece of surgical tape.

Favor said, ”Miss? Excuse me? Your arm, did you hurt it?”

She paused.

She said, “Not at all, sir. It’s from the examination. The physical exam, the doctor takes a blood sample.”

“You were required to take a physical?”

She said, “All applicants are required, sir.”

They watched her go up the stairs and into the Optimo office.

Among several offices at the bottom floor, Favor found one with a hand-lettered sign,
CLINIC
, taped to the door. He opened it, peeked in, found a nurse in a small waiting room.

He said, “I woke up this morning with a sore throat and a headache. I think I’m running a fever. Can I get an appointment this afternoon?”

The nurse looked up and said, “I’m very sorry, this is a private facility.”

“Associated with the agency upstairs?”

“That’s correct.”

He went out and joined Mendonza on the sidewalk.

“It’s an Optimo clinic,” he said. “I don’t see how that pays off.”

“Sending people overseas, you want to make sure they’re healthy,” Mendonza said.

“Yeah, when they’re actually ready to go,” Favor said. “I get that. But most of these people will wait weeks or months for a job. By then you just have to
do it all over again. I’m guessing most won’t ever get that call. So why would they do the exams now?”

They walked along the front of the office building. Just above eye level was a row of windows. Favor knew that one or two of the windows must belong to the clinic.

He crossed the street to the pension house, with Mendonza following.
MIRADOR PENSION
said the sign above the front door. Inside looked like the film noir
set of a cheap hotel. The desk clerk appeared stunned to see them, even more surprised when Favor said that he wanted to see a room. Second floor, street side.

The clerk plucked a couple of keys off a peg-board and led them up to the second floor. He told Favor that the street-facing rooms were six hundred pesos a night—about twelve dollars—but the rooms at the back were larger and quieter, just one hundred pesos more.

“American style,” he said. ”Much nicer.”

“I prefer the street side,” Favor said. “I’m on a limited budget.”

The room had a dank and musty smell. One small bed, an ancient armchair. Favor went to the single window, parted the drapes, and looked out into the street.

“Perfect,” he said.

“It is?” the clerk said.

“Exactly what I want,” Favor said. He stripped some bills from a wad of cash, gave it to the clerk, and said, “My friend will be down in a while to check us in.”

The clerk walked out and shut the door behind
him.

“Remind me why we’re here,” Mendonza said.

Favor pushed the drapes open a few more inches. Across the narrow street was the building they had just left. From here he could see two windows that opened onto the clinic. The windows were set above sidewalk eye level, but from up here they allowed a perfect angle down into the clinic.

“I like the view,” he said.

For about an hour after the two men walked out of the office, Lisabet Bambanao resumed her usual routine, acting as if nothing unusual had happened. She continued to handle applications while interacting with the applicants as little as possible. When she received completed applications, she fed them through a document scanner, checked to be sure that the files had been saved to the appropriate directory on her computer, and then filed the paper originals in a cabinet beside her desk.

Outwardly, she continued to function just as she always had, six days a week, eight a.m. to six p.m., during the seven months since Optimo had hired her to open its office in Tacloban. But while she clicked through the tasks as smoothly as ever, a part of her mind was fully occupied with a debate about how she ought to react to the visit by the two strangers.

There should have been no question. When she was hired, she was given a numbered list of directives that described and governed her tasks. Most of it was
minutiae:

11. Verify that all pages are correctly oriented before placing documents in the auto feed tray.

But a few were sweeping, and ominous.

23. The business of the Agency is confidential. Do not discuss your work with anyone.

24. Report any remarkable occurrence at once.

That was plain enough. The visit was remarkable—and disturbing—and as soon as the two men left, Lisabet knew that she ought to call the Manila office and tell them what had happened.

But she hesitated.

The American’s interrogation had been unnerving, partly because she had asked herself some of the same questions.
What was different about Marivic Valencia? Why did she get the special treatment?
It was as if he had looked into her mind and read her doubts.

But not completely. The American apparently didn’t know about Danilo Magcapasag. That was a month after the office opened. It was the same story as Marivic: a seemingly ordinary applicant who was quickly summoned to Manila with a bus ticket and expense money from petty cash.

And the same outcome: the disappearance, the distraught family demanding answers, the denial from Manila.

The first time, Lisabet had seen no reason to doubt the denial. But now the story was playing itself out again.

This was why she hesitated. Something seemed wrong here, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to be a part of it.

Her indecision lasted until she went into her purse, looking for lipstick. Her eye fell on an envelope stuck near the top. It was a tuition envelope for her youngest daughter at a technical college in Tacloban. The school cost 5,500 pesos per quarter, and Lisabet kept the envelope in her purse as a reminder. Whenever she was tempted by an extravagance—a pair of shoes, maybe, or a magazine—she would see the envelope and put the money there instead. The payment was due in a week and a half, and Lisabet was still 1,400 pesos short, but she knew that she would make it on time. She had a payday between now and then.

Now the envelope told her what she had to do. She knew almost nothing about Optimo or those behind it, and she felt no loyalty to the company or the people. But without those paydays…

She reached for the phone.

Who told you to come here?” said Totoy Ribera.
”Who put you up to it?”

“Nobody,” said the boy. “It was my idea.”

They were still in Totoy’s office. The boy, who said his name was Ronnie, was seated in the chair while Totoy stood beside his desk, looming over him.

“You did all this on your own?” Totoy said. “Jumped on a bus and came all the way from Leyte just to ask a few questions here?”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit, I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. I had to sneak out of the house.”

In one ear, Totoy heard Magda’s voice coming through his Bluetooth earpiece: “Ilya wants you to ask what made him believe that we have his sister. And move over, you’re blocking the camera. Ilya wants to see his face.”

Magdalena and Andropov were in the operations room at the residence, taking in a feed from a surveillance camera in Totoy’s office, with Magda relaying instructions through the earpiece. The boy didn’t know this.

He also didn’t realize that he was making a case for his own life.

Totoy sidled to the other end of the desk, moving out of the camera’s view.

“On what suspicion?” he said.

“The text message from Marivic.”

“You were going on nothing more than a one-word text on your phone?”

“That’s enough. I knew that Marivic arrived on the bus and Optimo said that she didn’t. So I knew that you were lying. I was right too. The old bitch has her bracelet. She knows what happened to my sister.”

Shut up, you’re digging your own grave,
Totoy wanted to tell him.

He knew that Ronnie would leave this office one of two ways. Andropov could decide that the boy was acting alone and posed no threat, that his story would not be believed no matter how passionately he told it. In that case, Ronnie would be allowed to walk out and disappear into the world, unaware of how close he had come to the end of his life.

Or Andropov could decide that the boy needed more persuasive interrogation than Totoy could do here in the office with the staff just a wall away. In that case, Ronnie would be taken out to the compound. And that would be the end. Having seen the compound and the Russians, he would know too much. He could never be allowed to leave alive.

Totoy didn’t especially care either way, but some distant part of him was actually rooting for the kid. He was a gutsy little fucker.

Magda, in his ear, said: “Ask about the second text.”

Totoy said, “What did your mother mean, ‘Help is on the way’?”

“I don’t know,” Ronnie said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

In his earpiece, Totoy heard a sound that he recognized as the ring tone on Magda’s cell. He heard
her voice as she answered the call.

A hell of a way to conduct an interrogation,
he thought.

To Ronnie he said, “Who is coming to help you?”

“Nobody is helping us. That’s why I came here.”

Magda was chattering in his earpiece. Not to him—to somebody on the cell. Loud, displeased.

Totoy said, “Why would your mother say something like that if it’s not true?”

“She probably wanted to keep me out of trouble, keep me from coming here. I don’t know.”

Now Andropov and Magda were talking back and forth in the earpiece. Totoy couldn’t make out the words, but it was loud and insistent, so distracting that he couldn’t continue. He stood and looked down at the boy and waited for the racket to die down in his earpiece.

“A call from Tacloban: two men were asking about Marivic this morning,” Magda said. She was talking directly to Totoy this time. “A Fil-Am and an American. Tough guys. What does he know about that?”

Totoy said, ”Who are the men asking about your sister in Tacloban today at the Optimo office? A Filipino-American and an
americano
.”

“I don’t know any Fil-Ams. And I don’t know any
’canos.
”

Totoy said, “Claiming to be friends of the family, threatening our representative there.” He was repeating Magda’s words in his ear now, word for word. “A mestizo built like a tank, an American with eyes like ice.”

“I never heard of them before,” Ronnie said. “You’re making this up.”

The boy wasn’t defiant anymore. He was scared. His voice was unsteady, and his lower lip trembled.

“No,” Totoy said. “This is for real.”

The boy said nothing. The earpiece was quiet, too, for a moment. Then Andropov spoke. His voice was hard, but somewhere underneath there was a note of worry. He said, “Who the fuck are these men?”

Totoy moved around to the side of the chair, so that he was directly over Ronnie. He leaned in close, getting right in Ronnie’s face—blocking the camera, he knew, but to hell with it—and he snarled,
“Who the fuck are these men?
”

Then he stood aside to let Andropov watch the response.

“Sir, truly, I have no idea.”

The kid was telling the truth. Totoy was sure of it. He had been doing this for twenty-five years, putting the squeeze on assholes with something to hide, and he had learned to detect the rare golden nugget of truth buried in the endless shitpile of deception.

Now it was up to Andropov.

Totoy waited.

Andropov said, “I want him over here.”

And that was it. The question was how to get him out, past the office staff, who believed that they were working for a legitimate employment agency. It was almost midday: lunch hour. Totoy got the idea of having Magda take them all out for lunch, a special treat from Optimo. Nobody turned that down. The
office cleared out in a hurry.

Two of the Filipino guards came over from the compound. Ronnie still didn’t know what was happening. He was sitting in the chair in Totoy’s office, waiting.

He tried to bolt when he saw the guards, but he couldn’t get past them. They threw him to the floor. One of them had brought a tranquilizer in a syringe. The kid fought hard when he saw the needle, but Totoy knelt on his arm, pinning it down, while he found a vein and stuck it in.

The boy started to fade right away.

They wanted to take him out while he could still walk, so they brought him to his feet and led him through the deserted office, one guard holding him up by each arm. He was stumbling, nearly deadweight, too far gone to resist. They got him down the stairs and crossed the walkway to the gate in the wall of the residence compound. They were practically dragging him now, and if anyone had seen them, the scene would have looked like exactly what it was: two thugs strong-arming a kid from the country.