Devil's Keep (18 page)

The boy said, “Sir, I have to go.”

“All right,” Stickney said. “Thank you.”

The boy went off down the street, bouncing the basketball. He got about one hundred yards away, then stopped, held the ball and turned. He ran back to Stickney.

The phone was in his hand. He offered it to Stickney.

“It’s for you,” he said.

Arielle was in the suite when she got the text. She put on her shoes, zipped the laptop into the case,
slung it over her shoulder, and picked up her purse. She was out the door within twenty seconds.

She started for the elevator, then thought,
No. The stairs.
When you bail, you look for alternatives, the unexpected. She couldn’t get a cell signal in the stairs, though. She went all the way down, past the lobby level, into the basement. The stairs ended at a utility hall, and she walked past several housekeeping carts to an exit that opened onto a street behind the hotel.

She walked to the corner, flagged a taxi, and tapped in a callback to the phone that had sent the text.

At that moment, Totoy Ribera and one of his lieutenants were in the lobby with the hotel manager, who told them that Stickney had checked in with an American woman and that they occupied separate suites. Totoy demanded keys to the suites and copies of their passports. It was a brief conversation: Totoy got everything he wanted.

In the taxi, Arielle listened to Stickney’s description of what had happened at the Optimo office and then in the backseat of the black sedan, then passed the phone up to the taxi driver so that the boy with Stickney could give him the address.

Then she called Mendonza in Tacloban. He was with Favor in the pension house. She told them what she had learned from Stickney. “This puts things in a whole new light,” she said. “Stick thinks we should talk it over, and I agree, but first we need to get in off
the street. Do you know someplace that’s under the radar and won’t ask questions?”

She heard a soft laugh from Mendonza.

“Oh yeah, I know a place,” he said. “I know a couple hundred places. You’re going to love this.”

The Philippines is one of the most devout nations on earth. It is a country where the Roman Catholic Church often has the last word in public policy debates, where many ferry voyages begin with the recitation of the rosary on the public address system, where millions of faithful line the roads on Good Friday to watch processions and gruesome Passion reenactments.

Paradoxically—or not—it is also a nation where the word “motel” has a specific, lurid meaning. “Motel” is not a budget lodging choice or an overnight stop for families on a driving vacation. In the Philippines, a motel is a discreet, short-term accommodation for sexual assignations, usually the illicit kind. No identification is required at check-in, because there is no check-in. Charges are by the hour, with payment in cash.

Anonymous, accessible—and with twenty-four-hour room-service menus—motels in the Philippines are an ideal impromptu hideout. And Manila has dozens.

There were five motels within half a mile of where Arielle picked up Stickney. The taxi driver, of course, knew them all. Arielle asked him to stop first at a drugstore, where she picked up some first-aid supplies. The
motel was a windowless two-story building. They drove in through a portal off the street, into a dimly lit indoor courtyard where individual garage doors lined the walls. An attendant stepped forward to open the door as the taxi stopped. He whisked them up to a deluxe room on the second floor. The room had a circular bed under a mirrored ceiling, condoms on the nightstand, porn on a flat-screen television.

Arielle cleaned Stickney’s cuts and abrasions, put a cold pack on the bump at the back of his head, and checked his pupils for dilation. He looked okay so far.

Then she called Favor. She put the phone on speaker, and Favor did the same, with Mendonza beside him in the pension room in Tacloban.

Mendonza said, “Stick, if I get this right, both kids have definitely been taken against their will, and Optimo is involved.”

“No question,” Stickney said.

“And Optimo is wired into the PNP, or they’ve got enough juice that they can pretend to be PNP without getting in trouble. Either way, that makes them dangerous.”

“I agree with that too,” Stickney said.

Mendonza said, “Then we need to reevaluate. This is more than any of you signed on for back at Tahoe, and as of this moment I’m voiding any commitments that were made then.”

Arielle spoke up: “Are you out, Al?”

“No,” Mendonza said. “I’ve looked these people in the eye. I can’t walk away now.”

She said: “Ray?”

“I’m in,” Favor said.

She looked at Stickney. His turn.

“I’ll help any way I can,” he said. “But I don’t know what it’s worth. I was half a beat slow every time it mattered today. It was pathetic.”

“We’re all out of practice,” Favor said. “I had us going in like we were taking a ride at Disney World.”

Arielle said, “So we have to tighten up. Do this right. The way we know how. Operational standards all the way. I should call Eddie Santos and put him to work. We need a safe house, paper, weapons … we need everything. You agree, Ray? This is all on your dime.”

“Agreed,” Favor said. “We should have done it that way going in.”

“We didn’t know then,” she said. “But we know now.”

“You talk like you’re in, Ari,” Mendonza said.

“Yes, I’m in,” she said. “Of course I’m in.”

“One more thing you all should know,” Stickney said, “I’m not going to kill anybody. I’ll do what I can to help the kids, but I won’t take a life. I decided ten years ago that I had killed for the last time. I didn’t expect that it would ever come up again, but it was a good choice, and I’m not going back on it. Can everybody live with that?”

They all said yes.

As Mendonza clicked off the call, he recalled the
conversation in the gazebo beside Lake Tahoe: Stickney talking karma, Favor confessing his unease about One Nine and what they had done in their years together. He thought about Arielle telling them, “Something is up with Ray.”

Mendonza said, “How about that from Stick? He’s gone pacifist or something.”

“I’m not surprised,” Favor said. “I can see how a guy could get there.”

“Really?” Mendonza said. “You getting there too, Ray?”

Mendonza looked at Favor. He tried to make it a casual glance, but he wanted to see Favor’s reaction.

Favor was looking down at his hands. Staring at them. Mendonza glanced down at the hands as well, wondering what had caught Favor’s attention. But they were just hands, held palms up.

Favor’s face was pensive and hard. He clenched the hands slowly, then opened them. Still gazing down.

The things those hands have done,
Mendonza thought.
The things they could do
.

Favor lowered his hands to his side, like holstering weapons, and he looked at Mendonza and answered the question.

“No,” Favor said. “I guess I’m not.”

Totoy Ribera walked into the ops room at the residential compound, to where Ilya Andropov was seated. He put four sheets of paper on the desk: copies of the check-in records from the hotel, with photocopies of the two passports.

BOUCHARD, Arielle

STICKNEY, Winston

“They’re registered in adjacent suites,” Totoy said. “Very expensive, eighteen hundred a night. That’s dollars, not pesos. We went through their things. They didn’t have much, nothing of interest. Both suites are in the woman’s name, paid for on an American Express card in her name, and she has two more reserved for tonight.”

“The two from Tacloban,” Andropov said.

“Probably. I left word at the hotel to inform me if those parties check in.”

“They shouldn’t be checking in,” Andropov said. “They should be leaving, correct?”

“That was the message,” Totoy said.

Andropov called to Markov.

“Bring the boy in,” he said.

Markov went out and came back dragging Ronnie with the help of another Russian.

Andropov put the photocopy of the woman’s passport in his face, giving him a good look at the photo.

“Know her?” Andropov said.

Ronnie shook his head wearily. “No.”

Markov said, “Little bastard, you haven’t had enough? I guess we go at it again.”

“No,” Andropov said. “You don’t have to do that.”

Markov seemed puzzled.

“I believe him,” Andropov said.

“You do?” Markov said.

“Look at him. Look at that shirt. Those trousers. Does he really look like he has anything in common with the kind of people who pay seven thousand U.S. dollars per night for hotel rooms? I don’t know who these Americans are or why they care, but I’m sure they have no personal connection with this sorry specimen.”

Markov, dropping into Russian, said, “What should we do with him?”

Andropov answered in Russian: “Take care of him tonight.”

Markov nodded and started to take Ronnie from the room.

Andropov stopped him. “Have Leonid do a blood draw first.”

Markov gave a derisive snort.

“What?” he said. “You expect to strike gold twice in the same family?”

“Let me tell you about gold mining, hunting for nuggets,” Andropov said. “You spend a lot of time and money just to get in the right place to do it. If you go to all that trouble, you’re a stupid fuck if you don’t turn over all the stones.”

He saw that Markov still didn’t understand.

“Just do it,” he said.

He turned to Totoy Ribera.

“Find the Americans,” he said.

“It isn’t that easy,” Totoy said. “This is a city of twenty million people, with thousands of foreign visitors at any time.”

“I want to know where they are. I want to know what they’re doing,” Andropov said.

Totoy thought that finding the four might have been easier if Andropov hadn’t overplayed his hand with the soft-spoken visitor named Winston Stickney. Totoy had suggested a discreet tail. Andropov had insisted on the rough stuff.

“Muscle up on him a little,” Andropov had ordered.

And Andropov was unquestionably the boss.

Now Totoy began to ask himself how he might find four Americans in one of the largest and most chaotic cities on the planet.

He went to the video monitors, where one of the Russians sat staring blankly.

“This morning,” Totoy said. “Around the time the American arrived and I took him for a ride. What do you have on the sidewalk outside?”

One of the views was from a camera above the front door of Impierno. Another looked up the walkway to the sidewalk. The operator began to rewind both cameras, jumping back in time, first rewinding in large chunks, then slowing the rate.

Then it was there, at the top of one view: Winston Stickney speaking with the old woman on the
sidewalk.

“Back more,” Totoy said, and the view loped backward in time until it caught Stickney and another man speaking on the sidewalk, then standing in front of the front door of Impierno, then leaving a car—a Nissan sedan—that was backing into a parking space as it arrived.

A car, not a taxi. He had a driver.

“Stop. Slowly forward.”

Totoy was watching the Impierno camera, the rear bumper of the car, looking for the license plate as it backed in toward the curb.

A group of pedestrians cut off the view just before the plate became visible. By the time they moved out of the way, the car was parallel to the curb, the plate unreadable.

“Okay, forward again.”

It all began to unfold in the proper sequence now, the American and his driver getting out together, looking around, the American going into Optimo and coming back out again, speaking to the woman, standing, and being hustled off the sidewalk, into the car.

The camera above the front door caught the driver watching this, hesitating, then going around and getting behind the wheel, backing up, turning out, into the street…

“Stop,” Totoy said. “Forward by frames.”

And there it was, caught in a single frame, the license plate. Totoy leaned in close to the monitor screen. Three digits, three letters.

Totoy reached for a piece of paper.

Favor was watching from the front window when the old trike driver named Romeo Mandaligan pulled up to the hotel precisely at four p.m. Favor went down and folded himself into the cramped passenger seat, hunching under the low canopy, and they rode a block and a half down the street to where the doctor’s Kia was parked.

“Do you know this car?” Favor asked.

“I have seen it around here. I don’t know the owner, and I don’t know where it belongs.”

“Good,” Favor said. He had wanted to make sure that the old man wasn’t somehow connected to the doctor and the Kia. Tacloban seemed just small enough.

“Let me tell you what I need. In about two hours, somebody’s going to get into that car and drive away, and I want to follow it, see where it goes. Can you do that?”

“Can you tell me why?”

“I can tell you that we’re helping a nice lady who has lost two children.”

“Oh, terrible! And is the driver of this car involved?”

“I believe that he is.”

“This is like the movies? You want to follow the driver and see what he is up to?”