Devil's Keep (21 page)

“But Ribera?” Favor said.

“Totoy Ribera is different,” Santos said. “He’s no better than a gangster. He has a crew that answers only to him. He uses the badge for his own purposes. I don’t know all that he is involved in, but I hear stories. And I can guarantee that if he’s in it, it’s dirty.”

They were all looking at Santos now.

He said, “I won’t ask why you’re here or what is going on. But I know that you didn’t expect trouble at first, and now you must be in trouble to need a place like this. So I think you should know, if you’re in trouble with the man in that photo, you’re really in trouble.”

Ronnie lay tied and gagged on the floor of Ilya Andropov’s office at the compound in Manila. He had been there since early afternoon. He was parched: the cloth gag had long soaked up all the moisture from his mouth. And after hours of needing a toilet, fighting his bowels, he had finally given up and soiled his pants.

He had never been so miserable.

His thirst was overwhelming. He loathed his captors and was terrified to be in their presence. Yet he desperately needed water.

He wormed his way around the floor until he was close to the door. He kicked the door as hard as he could, slamming his heels into the panel.

Andropov opened the door. He had to push Ronnie aside to get in, and he stopped before he took his second step over the threshold.

”Fuck my mother, he’s shit all over himself,” Andropov yelled. “Toly, get in here.”

Ronnie continued to kick and grunt, trying to speak.

Anatoly Markov came into the room.

“Find out what he wants,” Andropov said.

“Yes, boss,” Markov said, and stood over the boy to loosen the gag.

Their faces nearly touched. Ronnie’s stomach clenched with the thought of the hours of pain that Markov had inflicted on him. A sudden surge of anger came over him. On impulse, without a thought, he snapped his head forward and butted Markov directly in the face, forehead to nose.

Markov grunted, rocked back, clapped a hand to his face. Blood gushed through his fingers and he roared in Russian. Ronnie didn’t understand the words, but he saw the fury in Markov’s face; and when Markov grabbed him by the throat, Ronnie knew exactly what was happening. He felt thumbs pressing deep into his throat, and he knew that Markov was about to kill him.

“Stop,” Andropov said. Markov eased his grip.

Ronnie saw that one of the lab techs had come over and was speaking to Andropov.

“Let me have the little fucker,” Markov said to Andropov. Blood was dripping from his nose onto Ronnie’s chest. “Please.”

“Clean him up good,” Andropov said to Markov. “Get a little food in him, and make sure that you replenish his fluids.”

“Clean him up before I kill him?” Markov said.

“You aren’t going to kill him,” Andropov said. “You’re going to get him ready to fly.”

“You got a hit?”

“Right across the board.”

“No shit. A big client?”

“The biggest,” said Ilya Andropov.

It was after midnight, and the former members of Bravo One Nine were stretched out in their cots, which were scattered around the floor of the bodega, tucked behind crates and stacks of boxes.

In the darkness, Favor said, “Ari. You awake?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thinking.”

“Me too,” he said. “I’m thinking how everything leads to that one block on Amorsolo Street. Marivic’s application must’ve been sent to that office. Her blood went next door. Ronnie goes to the office looking for Marivic, and he isn’t seen again.”

He sat up at the edge of the bed, and she sat up too, facing him.

“Where did the kids go?” he said. “And what’s the story with that blood? What are they doing with it there in the house?”

“We’d probably have some answers if we could get into their network,” Arielle said.

“You think they have a network?”

She said, “Most likely. Stick says they have a busy office up there above the nightclub. He saw a lot of security cameras. They’re probably IP cameras, being remotely monitored. Could be from anywhere, but my guess it’s there in the villa next door. Being as close as they are, they’ve probably got a little intranet put together, either wireless or Ethernet. My bet would be on Ethernet. It’s more secure. If you somehow had access to one of the machines on the net…”

“You mean hacking?”

“Hacking in from outside, no. They would have
to be egregiously dumb. But if you could get physical access to a network machine, that’s different. Then you’d be on the other side of the firewall. You could do almost anything at that point.”

A light came on. It was Stickney. He walked over and sat between them.

He said, “The office would be the place to do it. Not that it would be easy. But if you could get in, you’d know right where the machines are. The house, who knows?”

Favor said, “I wonder where the nightclub fits.”

“The woman at Optimo, the owner, seemed ready to have me visit,” Stickney said. ”Take that for what it’s worth, but it could be legitimate.”

“What kind of club is it?”

Mendonza answered from his cot in the shadows: “It’s called a KTV. Think of it as a high-dollar strip club, Manila-style. The girls come out individually and dance. No brass pole, though. If you see one you like, you pay to take her into a private room. The rooms, believe it or not, are set up with video karaoke players—KTV, right?—and the idea is that when you shut the door, the girl is going to pick up a microphone and entertain you with ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.’ I don’t think a lot of singing happens back there, though.”

He got up and came walking over, joining the others.

“A lot of the KTV places also have fishbowl massage parlors: the attendants are sitting behind a big glass window,” he said. “The massage parlors are as
much about massage as the KTV rooms are about singing.

“Impierno is one of the big-expense-account places for the local businessmen. It’s been around for a while, a lot longer than Optimo, which makes me think that it isn’t part of whatever is happening here.”

“They do share a building,” Favor said.

“And the same woman owns them,” Stickney said.

“Allegedly,” Mendonza said. “Unless she’s fronting for one or both.”

“If we got into the network, we’d know for sure,” Arielle said. “We’d probably know everything if we stay on long enough.”

“How would that work?” Favor asked. “You’d have to get into the office and use one of their machines? That sounds ambitious. Also dangerous.”

“You would only need access long enough to release a worm into the system,” she explained. “A few seconds would do it. Write the worm so that it immediately opens up a connection to this machine. I can sit here or anywhere on the Net and start going through the directories and pulling down anything that looks good. It would be just as if I were sitting there in the office.”

“How long could you do that?” Mendonza asked.

“Until they figured out what was happening and shut it down.”

Favor said, “How much time would you need to whip one of those together?”

“Maybe half a day.”

“And then any idiot could put it onto one of their machines? An idiot such as myself?”

“The program would self-install from a USB flash drive. The worm will do the rest. Idiotproof.”

“That’s reassuring,” Favor said. To Mendonza he said, “Any foreigners go in there, you think?”

“Japanese and Koreans love KTVs. Not so many Westerners, but you wouldn’t be a rarity, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“How long would a KTV stay open?”

“Until things get quiet. Three or four in the morning, anyway. Manila’s a night town.”

“Plenty of time,” Favor said.

“You’re going out tonight?” Stickney said.

“That’s right. Al, you can’t come. We were seen together in Tacloban. Somebody might make the connection. Stick, you’ve been burned: you can’t go anywhere near the place. Ari, you can’t come because this is Boy’s Town, and you’d draw way too much attention. So it’s just me.”

“Doing recon?” Arielle asked.

“That’s right. I want to look around that building, so I’ll start where the door is open. That’s Impierno. It’s a dirty job, but … well, you know what they say.…”

Before he parked at Impierno, Favor drove around the block twice, slowing each time as he drove down Amorsolo Street. He looked at the high concrete wall around the residence and paused where he could see the walkway between the two buildings, the unobtrusive door at the side of Impierno. He knew from Stickney that this was the only known entrance to the Optimo headquarters.

The second time, he pulled up and parked at Impierno’s front door, by a valet parking stand.

By day the Impierno building seemed awkward and purposeless. After dark, it was transformed. The copper-colored facade panels shimmered from hidden footlights, and the big neon sign blazed in ripe and wicked shapes. It looked like the throbbing palace of flesh that it was.

A red-coated parking valet took Favor’s car key. A doorman with a coat of gold lamé greeted him and admitted him inside. Favor entered a small lobby with gleaming black walls and a floor of polished marble. A greeter in a white dinner jacket stood before two sets of stairs, one ascending at his left, the other descending at his right.

“Floor show, sir, or massage?”

“I think the show, for starters,” Favor said. The greeter smiled as if Favor had just made the wisest of all possible choices, and stepped to one side, indicating the ascending stairs. At the top of the steps, Favor looked down onto a shallow amphitheater, with tiers of tables and banquettes—several dozen—surrounding a narrow stage that protruded halfway onto the floor.

The floor manager was a woman in her late thirties, white blouse and a dark pencil skirt and bolero jacket. She took Favor to a table near the back of the room and lit the candle. Seconds later, a waiter came over to take Favor’s order: whiskey neat.

Favor looked around.

The room was dim, dark enough that he couldn’t see the faces of most of the customers unless they leaned in close to the tabletop candles. Twin spotlights, high up at the back of the room, sent down shafts that cut through the darkness and met at a single point onstage.

Where the shafts of light intersected, a young woman—very young, Favor thought, no more than nineteen or twenty—was slowly, dramatically, stripping off a chartreuse gown, to the accompaniment of an overwrought American power ballad from the eighties. He couldn’t remember the name.

To his left, along the back wall of the room, were about ten large glass windows, each with a door beside it. Favor guessed that these were the private rooms. On some, the doors were closed and red velvet curtains were drawn. Occupied.

As the song reached its last few bars, the gown fell to the floor and the young woman stepped out of it and walked to the edge of the stage. She stood there for two or three seconds before the stage went dark. Favor could just make out her outline as she gathered the gown and hurried off.

A couple of minutes later, another young woman came out, another gown. While this one danced, the other came out from behind the stage. The floor manager led her to one of the private rooms, where someone shut the door and drew the curtains.

Favor watched for a few minutes, then paid his check and got up to leave. He walked around the back of the club toward the private rooms, went in one, and looked around. Plush couches, pile carpet.

He walked out to the lobby.

“Okay, now the massage,” he said, and again the greeter smiled and nodded as if Favor had just made a choice even wiser than before.

Favor walked down the polished marble stairs to a reception desk. Beside the desk was the big fishbowl display window that Mendonza had described. At least three dozen women, dressed in short white sleeveless dresses, sat on tiered benches behind the glass.

The receptionist asked Favor to choose a room. She pointed to a large placard on the wall, showing different room types and their prices.

Favor told her that he was a newcomer. Could he please look at some of the rooms?

She said, “Why don’t you choose a girl? Let her show you around.”

Favor knew he was supposed to go to the fishbowl and examine the women. He was no prude, but something about this bothered him.
Fishbowl
. He had eaten at seafood restaurants in Hong Kong where you pick your meal from a live tank and watch it taken off to be prepared. This was uncomfortably similar, selecting a woman for sex like choosing a grouper to be grilled.

But he had to get back into those rooms, and he didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself. He took one step over to the glass, glanced in. The women were wearing number tags pinned to their bodice.

He said, “Sixty-three.” It was the first number he saw. The receptionist spoke into a microphone at the desk and called out the number, and a pretty young woman climbed off one of the benches and came out from around the side.

“Give this gentleman a tour,” the receptionist said, and the young woman led him through a set of doors to a hall.

She was about twenty-five, slim and pretty. Her name was Patricia, she said: she pronounced it
PuhTREESia
. She showed him into one room and another in turn, all those that weren’t in use.