Devil's Keep (28 page)

“You think that was an official PNP operation?” Stickney asked.

“Probably not. I think he was making a strong-arm play. But we have to consider ourselves fugitives. They lit up that neighborhood, and somebody has to be the bad guy. And we did commit felonious assault on a police captain.”

Favor noticed that Arielle seemed subdued. She hadn’t spoken. She was holding the laptop case in both arms, a distant expression on her face. He wondered if she had been shaken by the raid.

He said, ”Ari … you okay?”

She said, “I need to sit down somewhere and look at these files. I was just getting started when the cops showed. And there should be lots more. I had files piling up the whole time. I really need to see all of them, Ray.”

“Right. Under the circumstances, I think the rat hole is our number one priority. Then we can sort things out, decide what we do next.”

She said, “I
really
need to look at those files.”

“You will. I promise.”

She nodded, but she didn’t seem satisfied. Her face seemed troubled. She held the machine tight. “They’re in Russian. I need you, Stick. Your Russian is way better than mine.”

“You got it,” Stickney said.

Up ahead was Claro M. Recto Avenue, a major thoroughfare. Mendonza found an empty spot about half a block away, and they parked.

Within a minute, they had flagged a taxi.

Favor got up front with the driver; the others squeezed into the back.

“Out for the evening?” the driver said.

“Actually, we’re going on a trip,” Favor said.

“Ah, the airport.”

“No. Manila Yacht Club.”

The clubhouse was dark when they arrived. Favor paid the driver, and when the taxi was gone, he led the others to a locked gate where a security guard sat with a shotgun in his lap.

Favor had a key to the gate and a letter from Franklin Kwok authorizing his use of the boat in slip 22. But he didn’t need the keys or the letter. Kwok had already told the yacht club staff about the arrangement. The guard opened the gate, which led down to a pier beside the clubhouse.

From a few berths away, slip 22 seemed to be vacant. Only when they got closer did the form of a boat become visible. It was a black V-hull speedboat with dark tinted windows.

The rat hole.

They stood at the dock, taking it in.

Mendonza had been around boats all his life. He said, “Holy shit, Ray.”

“Save the applause until the end,” Favor said. “Otherwise you’ll just wear yourself out.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. Franklin Kwok wanted to be top dog at any marina he visited, anywhere. So he built himself forty-eight feet of the
baddest long-range oceangoing speedboat in the world. Twin turbocharged diesels, eighteen hundred horsepower. Range is six hundred miles at cruising speed, which is fifty-five miles per hour. It’ll hit ninety wide open, but the ride gets a little rough over fifty or so.”

Arielle said, “Will I be able to use the laptop?”

“There’s a forward cabin. It’s small, but it’ll work. And the boat is stable. I suggest we cruise out to the entrance of the bay. That’ll give you a chance to look at those files. Then we’ll find a quiet place to anchor and we can talk it over.”

“Good,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They climbed in near the stern, then crossed a short deck to the cockpit. At the front of the cockpit, beneath the steeply raked windscreen, was a broad console with a set of control wheels. Two thickly padded chairs, each with a harness and lap belt, sat at the wheels. At the back of the cockpit were four more padded chairs, also with belts and harnesses.

Arielle and Stickney went through a hatch that opened onto the cabin. It was minimal: a small table, a small galley, an even smaller head. Upholstered benches, just wide enough for sleeping, ran along both sides.

Arielle and Stickney sat at the table, with the laptop open in front of them.

In the cockpit, Mendonza studied the console and found the switch that powered up the panel. A status screen appeared, and beside that a navigation screen. More switches powered up more screens.
Radar. Forward-looking infrared. Favor cast off the lines from the bow and stern, and Mendonza punched a button that brought the diesels to life. Even at idle, they thrummed with an ominous power. Favor took the second seat up front as Mendonza backed the boat out of the slip and steered it slowly beside the high breakwater, then out the narrow opening and into the bay. Mendonza gently advanced the throttles. The engines answered at once, rising to an easy lope that was enough to lift the nose and send the boat surging over the water. Just like that, their connection with the land was severed. Favor looked back and watched the lights of the waterfront receding. They were leaving behind Manila and its complications, flying free, untouchable now.

Glass crunched beneath his feet as Ilya Andropov stepped through the empty doorframe at the Optimo headquarters. Behind him came Magdalena Villegas, carefully picking her way through the shards until she stood with Andropov in the office.

“They came in here for a reason,” Andropov said. ”Look around—look good. See if anything is missing. Tell me what’s out of place. Something isn’t the way it was when you left this evening.”

He watched her as she went around the room, checking desks and file cabinets.

After a couple of minutes, Markov came up the stairs. He was holding the device that had been built by Winston Stickney, the pipe and battery and timer.

He said, “This was in one of the vents. Looks like a smoke generator.” He handed it to Andropov.

“This is pro work,” Andropov said, examining it. “Not just the device. All of it.”

“Who are these people?” Markov said. ”And why do they have a hard-on against us?”

“I don’t know.” Andropov said. ”But we’ll get some answers when we see what Totoy has scooped up.”

“So you’ve heard from him?” Markov said.

“No. Haven’t you?”

“He doesn’t answer. I left a message.”

Andropov walked into Magda’s office and found her standing beside her desk. Except for the smashed door, nothing in the room seemed to have been disturbed.

“What did they take?” he said. “What was done here?”

“Nothing.”

“They came in here for a reason. Something happened. What was taken?”

“I keep nothing important here,” she said. “If it matters, it goes into the system. You know that.”

He needed a couple of seconds to realize what this must mean.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. He began to shout: “Markov, the network! They got the fucking network!”

He strode out in a hurry and almost ran into Markov, who was holding out a cell phone.

“It’s Totoy,” Markov said. ”You won’t like this.”

Manila Bay was almost thirty miles across, measured from the city’s waterfront to the entrance of the South China Sea. The speedboat could have covered the distance in well under twenty minutes, but the bay was cluttered with traffic, including dozens of outrigger fishing boats, some marked by no more than a lightbulb or two, and Mendonza wanted to keep the ride as smooth as possible for Arielle and Stickney and the laptop below. So Mendonza kept the boat throttled back to about 40 miles an hour, and they ran that way for about half an hour, until the bay began to narrow, with long arms of land closing in on both sides, pinching in to form the mouth of the bay. An island, long and steeply humped at one end, lay ahead, in the gap between the two arms.

The island grew larger, and Mendonza slowed the boat almost to an idle.

Stickney looked up from the hatch. His face was grave. He said, “Are you anchoring? We’re not done yet.”

“That’s fine,” Favor said. “We’re just looking for a place to put in.”

Mendonza brought the boat in close to the shore. He was steering mostly by the infrared video display in the cockpit: the island was still, and completely dark. He brought the boat around to a concrete dock. It seemed to be old; chunks had fallen off the sides, exposing rusted reinforcing rods.

It was the only human structure in sight. Beside it was a beach of dark sand and gravel, and behind it
was a saddle of land, forested, at the foot of the high, craggy hump.

Favor jumped up onto the dock and tied up the bow line.

Mendonza cut the engines, and there was silence, broken only by the water gently lapping against the hull and the concrete pilings.

Favor looked around and said, “Al. This is Corregidor.”

“Yes, it is,” Mendonza said.

Corregidor: it was a touchstone of the Second World War, an island fortress where American and Filipino forces had held out for months against daily bombardment and shelling from the Japanese who had captured all the rest of the bay and the land that surrounded it.

Hundreds had died here during the siege, then thousands more during the island’s recapture by airborne troops three years later.

“We want a quiet place to talk, it doesn’t get any quieter than here,” Mendonza said. “And this is the mouth of the bay. From here, we’ve got more or less a straight shot south to Devil’s Keep, if it comes to that.”

“Let’s see,” Favor said.

He looked down into the cabin. Stickney and Arielle were still at the laptop, talking. Arielle was pointing at the screen, her voice low, animated. Favor couldn’t hear what she was saying.

Favor and Mendonza sat back in the chairs. They chatted for a while about the boat and Franklin
Kwok and their raid on the Optimo offices. About half an hour went by before Arielle came up from the cabin, with Stickney behind her.

Something was wrong, Favor thought. Their faces were grim.

Favor said, “Ari? Stick? You got something?”

“They’re organized,” Stickney said. “They’ve kept a record of everything. So yes. We have it all. Flight logs, duty rosters, the manifest for the monthly supply boat to the island.”

Favor looked closer at Arielle.

Her eyes were glistening.

Tears? Was Arielle
crying
?

“I always thought I was shockproof,” she said. “I mean, the four of us? You’d figure there’s nothing we haven’t seen. I thought I knew the very worst that people can do to one another. But I was wrong.”

They’re Russians,” Arielle said. “A mob, no doubt.

“And they’re in the heart business.…

“Human hearts.

“They’re transplanting healthy hearts to people who need new ones, and who can pay for it. Really pay. They do the transplants down there on the island. They started slow, three in the first two months, but it’s been picking up. Five in the last month and a half, seventeen in all. And two more scheduled in the next couple of days. They have the whole setup—the surgical suite, post-op care facilities, a lab. They built it from scratch, and it must’ve cost them millions, but they probably paid it off in the first couple of procedures. We’re talking millions of dollars for each surgery. Whatever they figure the traffic will bear. When you’re selling life, you can name your price.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mendonza said.

“Let me tell you about heart transplants,” Arielle continued. “They’re wonderful, but there are a couple of major problems. One, there aren’t nearly enough healthy donor hearts to fill the demand. Most countries, the waiting list is a year or more. People die waiting for hearts.

“Then there’s rejection. Our immune systems are
built to repel foreign substances. The mechanism is the system of human leucocyte antigens: HLA. It’s genetic. There are two hundred different antigens, and about thirty thousand different possible HLA sets. When the body encounters tissue with an HLA set that’s different from its own—like with a transplanted organ—it goes to war with the foreign tissue. Never mind that the organ is essential to life. The body will literally kill itself to get rid of a heart that looks like it doesn’t belong. Half of all transplant recipients experience a rejection episode in the first year after surgery. You can avoid that, or at least reduce it, by transplanting a heart with a similar HLA profile.

“The problem is, when you’re on the list and you get that call to come in for surgery, you have no idea how well you match up. The heart is good for three hours after death. There isn’t any time to worry about matching. If you’re next on the list, and you can be there right away, you get a heart. Then it’s a roll of the dice. A bad match, you’re probably in for a rough ride.

“The Russians have solved both those problems. They’re not waiting for hearts. They’re
taking
them. But not at random: they have HLA profiles on their transplant clients, and they look for hearts to match. That’s the purpose of the blood tests. They do the lab work in Manila, every night. If an applicant’s profile is a close match to a client, she gets an offer for a job abroad and a bus ticket to Manila. But she doesn’t go abroad. She just goes to Devil’s Keep, and the only part of her that ever leaves is
the heart that goes on beating in somebody else’s body.”

“By the way,” Arielle said, “the employment agency part is for real. Optimo is a front, but it’s a working front, just in case anybody happened to check. They have branch offices in Tacloban, Vigan, Naga, Laoag, and Calbayog—all small to midsize provincial capitals with airfreight service to Manila. And all of them, frankly, full of people who want to work abroad. People who would basically be disappearing anyway. Because that’s what they do when they take that overseas job in Qatar or Singapore or wherever. To the people they leave behind, they’re as good as gone. But if that’s the only chance you’ve got, you jump at it. You do what you have to do.