Devil's Keep (22 page)

Favor glanced around each room. He knew exactly what he was looking for. As they moved down the hall he tried to imagine the layout of the place, where they stood in reference to the club floor above.

He pointed to a room down the hall.

“Can we look at that one?” he asked.

A flicker of hesitation passed over Patricia’s face, as
if she sensed that something beyond the ordinary was happening here.
Smart,
Favor thought. He knew that most men, given the chance to be alone in a room with Patricia, wouldn’t be too picky about the room. But she seemed to dismiss it, and took Favor down the hall and into the room.

It was the biggest and most lavish so far, a large room in a jungle motif, faux leopard-skin wall coverings and potted plants, with a glass wall at one end that looked onto a large shower and whirlpool bath.

Favor looked around and saw what he needed.

“Sir, this is the Ultimate VIP Safari Suite. It’s our most exclusive room. You wish to see another?”

“No,” Favor said, “this is good.”

“The price is three thousand. If you wish, you can give me the money. I’ll take it to the front. You can disrobe, wait for me in the shower. I will bathe you; it’s part of the service.”

“It’s all right,” Favor said. “I don’t need the service tonight. I just wanted to look at the rooms. But thank you.”

He left her in the room as he walked out to the front, past the desk.

The receptionist seemed startled to see him leaving.

“It’s all right, I’ll be back soon,” Favor said. “You can count on it.”

Favor brought the car around to the front of the bodega, the roll-up steel door. He got out, unlocked the door, pulled it up.

The others were still awake, sitting on their cots.
Favor drove the car in, and Stickney came over to pull the door down and lock it.

They all gathered around the table.

Favor said to Stickney, “Just to be sure I have this straight. The only way up to the Optimo offices is through that door on the north side of the Impierno building.”

“Correct,” Stickney said.

“It’s through that door, up a long staircase, right?”

“Under video surveillance the whole time,” Stickney said.

“Okay. Then there’s just a glass door and you’re in the offices.”

“Thick glass. It looks solid,” Stickney said.

“That’s all right. I think we can do this.”

“Do what, Ray?” Arielle asked.

“Get into the office. Get onto one of those machines. Plant your worm. I know a way.”

Eddie Santos rose early in his apartment. He checked his phone—the one that really mattered—and found a text message from the man whom he was now learning to call Ray Favor.

Pls call me asap any hour

Favor’s voice was breathy. He told Santos that he was in the middle of a morning run. But Favor quickly gathered himself and rattled off a list of items that he needed from Santos.

“Is that possible?” Favor asked. “I know the chemicals might be a reach on short notice.”

“No, the chemicals are easy. I have a source. I’ll bring them after lunchtime. Some of the other items might take a little longer. Maybe tomorrow morning.”

“That’s fine,” Favor said. “Now, what are the chances of getting passports and weapons?”

“Passports? Come on, Ray, you’re in Manila. It’s like asking for a pastry in Vienna.”

“Okay. Just make sure they’re good pastries. Use the old identities, if you remember them.”

“I remember.”

“Weapons, a couple of handguns at least. But I’m sure Al would love to get his hands on an M10 or an Uzi.”

“On short notice, the best I can do is a couple of Colt .45s. Things have tightened up here. It’s not the way it used to be.”

“We’ll take what we can get.”

Santos had something to say. He wasn’t sure he should mention it; he didn’t want Favor to think he was wheedling for information. He didn’t know—he didn’t
need
to know.

But as he reviewed the list in his head, making sure that it was safely cached in his memory, Santos knew he had to say it: “You guys are operating again.”

“Yeah. I guess we are,” Favor said.

Santos had assigned Elvis Vega to keep the Americans fed. Shortly before eight a.m., Vega delivered a basket of fresh fruit and brewed coffee and the bread rolls that Filipinos call
pandesal
.

A couple of minutes later, as they were eating, Arielle said, “I was lying awake last night thinking about this. We may be able to get a fix on where Marivic and Ronnie went after they disappeared. At least part of the way.”

“Get a fix?” Mendonza said. “Like tracking with GPS?”

“Almost that accurate,” Arielle said. “Both of these kids were carrying highly sophisticated tracking devices.”

She waited to see who would get it first.

“Cell phones,” Stickney said after a couple of seconds.

“Cell phones. Of
course
,” Favor said. “Cell phones talk to towers.”

“Exactly,” Arielle said. “A cell phone continually identifies itself to all the stations in its vicinity. The stations, the towers, send that information to the system, and the system keeps track of it. If I want to talk to Al, I don’t need to know where he is.”

“The system already knows,” Favor said.

“Yes,” Arielle continued. “I send the call in, the system recognizes the number, does a quick search of its records, and says, ‘Okay, he’s in Tacloban,’ his phone is logged in with towers seven eighty-eight and seven eighty-nine—whatever—and it picks one of those towers and sends the call through to that location.

“If you’re in motion, moving in and out of range of different stations, things really get busy. Your phone goes into overdrive, making sure to stay in contact. It looks for new stations coming into range, and it announces itself to each one: ‘Hey, here I am.’ At the same time, it’s going ‘Sayonara’ to the ones you’re leaving. Even when these kids went missing to the world, the cell system knew where their phones were.”

“To what accuracy?” Stickney said.

“Depends. The more towers you’re working with, the more accurate you would be. In an area dense with stations, you could probably locate a phone
to within a hundred yards or so, just by looking at which combination of stations it’s talking to at any given time. Rural areas, with fewer towers, not so much. But probably closer than you’d think.”

“Which is fine,” Mendonza said, “unless the phones are turned off. Then they’re lost.”

“You’d think so, but that’s not the case,” Arielle said. “Even when a phone is turned off, it still interacts with the nearby towers for as long as there’s power from the battery. The only way to break the link is to remove the battery. Otherwise, it stays in contact with the network, checking in. And all these transactions are being logged. A record exists somewhere.”

“And how do we get it?” Favor said.

“We ask.”

Totoy Ribera was stuck in an impossible snarl of midday traffic in Quiapo, the old downtown area of historic Manila. The sidewalks were jammed with carts and vendors selling cheap handicrafts, religious statues and charms, fruit, bootleg software, and DVDs. Totoy was looking for an address about two blocks away, but at the moment it might have been two hundred miles, for all the progress he was making.

He was looking for the owner of the car that had brought the American visitor to Optimo. The registration showed that it was owned by a corporation, Tres Agilas, Inc.—Three Eagles—with an address in the Paco neighborhood of Manila. Fair enough.
But the Paco address was a neighborhood restaurant where nobody knew anything about a Nissan sedan.

Totoy had then learned that Tres Agilas was itself owned by several corporations with addresses scattered around metropolitan Manila. One of those was here in Quiapo, two blocks away, and Totoy was pretty sure that when he reached the address he would find another place where nobody knew anything about Tres Agilas or a Nissan sedan for hire.

Andropov was still paranoid about the four curious Americans, although they hadn’t reappeared in more than twenty-four hours. Not in Tacloban, not in Manila. Winston Stickney and Arielle Bouchard hadn’t returned to their $1,800 luxury suites, and Totoy was sure that they wouldn’t be back. They had either gone to ground or had heeded the warning and left the country.

In the first case, they would be much harder to find; if they had left, he could waste an infinite number of hours in fruitless searching.

Yet he didn’t want to stop looking. Not now. He was getting the sense that someone had gone to a lot of trouble here, creating layers of opacity, as if to avoid scrutiny.

This made him all the more anxious to peel back the layers. Someone who didn’t want to be scrutinized was someone he should get to know better.

Up ahead, the welter of cars and people nudged forward for a few feet and then stopped again.

The man Totoy sought—the actual owner of the Nissan Sentra—was less than three blocks away, stuck in the same traffic. And he was bound for the bodega where the four Americans were ensconced. In the backseat of the vehicle was a plastic storage bin that contained the first part of Ray Favor’s want list.

Eddie Santos had spent the morning out and around in the city, gathering the items from Favor’s list. He could have delegated it to others, but he knew he could do it more quickly than anyone, working his phones as he drove, making sure that the items he needed at each stop were ready and waiting for pickup.

And it wasn’t just a matter of efficiency. He was enjoying this. He didn’t know how Favor and the others were going to use the items on the list, but he would recognize it when it happened, and he knew he didn’t have long to wait.

That, and the fact that Favor paid generously—outrageously—had Santos out on the streets.

A light turned green up ahead, and miraculously the three or four cars ahead of him moved into the intersection. He followed them through.

“I wish I could help,” said Arturo Guzman. “But it’s out of the question.”

He was a technical superintendent of the cell service that both Marivic and Ronnie used. Arielle had managed to talk her way past several layers of employees and representatives and
management—Filipinos were amazingly open and accessible, she thought—and now Arturo Guzman was the last barrier between her and the data that she wanted.

“Two lives are at stake,” Arielle said.

“I’m sure that the cause is legitimate. But it’s strictly against corporate policy. If we allowed everyone with a cause to rummage through our data, we would never get any work done.”

The walls of Guzman’s office were glass from waist height to the ceiling. The office was in the middle of a large open floor, and Guzman could look out over several dozen desks and consoles that were spread in all directions. Arielle smiled pleasantly and said, “But no one is standing in line behind me. And when I have what I need, I’ll say good-bye with thanks, and I’ll never bother you again. Please. Two numbers only, covering just the past ten days.”

He said, “Ten days, with well over one billion individual records per day, even more if you include hits at our competitors’ unique sites. And I’m sure that you do want that, correct?”

“The more data, the better.”

“There—you see how difficult this would be?”

She said, “But the data does exist, correct?”

“In theory, yes. Sites retain their records for about fifteen days. But it’s moot, because we access that data only on a large scale, to track traffic flows and patterns. The kind of granularity you’re talking about, we just don’t do.”

“I see,” she said. “I guess I had the wrong
impression. I mean, based on my experience in the States.”

“How’s that?”

“A couple of years ago I had occasion to make the same request of a cell provider in the U.S., and it seemed to be a trivial matter for them. But naturally their software would be highly sophisticated. It isn’t fair to expect that a company in a developing country would have tools so powerful and robust.”

Guzman recoiled. His face showed disbelief. Outrage.

“Robust?” he said. “From a U.S. cell company? Give me a break. My American counterparts are constantly griping about their kludgy software. Inadequate software infrastructure is the curse of the early adopter. By the time the Philippines was ready for cellular, we understood what was possible. We had a chance to do it right, and we did.
Robust? Powerful?
Please. My software tools will blow away anything that the fat cats in the U.S. are working with.”

Arielle didn’t say anything. She wanted to give it a chance to sink in, what he had just said.

After a couple of seconds, he got it. His face took on a wry expression.

Checkmate. And he knew it.

“Give me those numbers,” he said. “Let me see what I can do.”

Marivic Valencia stood on her precarious perch and watched two orderlies carry a limp passenger off the seaplane and load him into the green and
yellow six-wheel utility vehicle they regularly used at the dock.

Marivic had noted the markings early on. The side panel said
JOHN DEERE
and on the back was the word
gator
. She had also learned to recognize the sound of its engine as it passed, and would move her chair and table against the wall and scramble up to see what was happening. She rarely learned much, but it was at least a break in the monotony of the day.