Devil's Keep (29 page)

“I guess that’s what bothers me most about this. In material terms, these people have next to nothing. All they really have is each other, and life. And these sons of bitches are taking that away and selling it to the highest bidder.”

Favor saw that she was finished. He said, “You’re sure about all this?”

“Oh yeah, we’re sure,” she said. “There’s a certain amount of connecting the dots required, but all the pieces are there. We have the clients’ medical records. We have HLA typing results for thousands of Optimo’s applicants. We have the maintenance and flight records for the floatplane that they use to ferry the victims from Manila, and for the private jet that picks up the clients and brings them to Malaysia—Kota Kinabalu, it’s the nearest international port of entry—and for the helicopter that
takes them from Kota to the island. Oh, and we also found downloads from the helicopter’s nav system. Devil’s Keep is definitely the destination. That’s where all this is going down. They have two surgical teams living on site—presumably one for the removal, one for the transplant—and a post-op recuperation facility.”

“Only hearts?” Mendonza said.

“That’s where the money is,” Arielle said. “There’s already a black market in kidneys, some Third World countries, poor but healthy people selling off one of their two kidneys to raise money. But the going rate is in hundreds of dollars, not millions. It’s all about supply. Most of us have one more kidney than we need. But hearts…”

Favor said, “Stick, what’s your take?”

“I don’t follow the medical details as well as Ari,” Stickney said. ”But it all holds together for me. I buy it.”

Mendonza said, “What about Ronnie and Marivic?”

“The records don’t show names, just code numbers,” Arielle replied. “But looking at dates, we’re almost sure that we’ve identified Marivic and that she’s on the island. And another donor entered the system the day after Ronnie went missing. We surmise that it’s him. He’s on the island too.”

“They’re alive?” Favor said.

“They’re alive, but I think the clock is ticking. Beginning forty-eight hours before the surgery, the victims are put on an immunosuppression drug regime. You want to minimize the chances that T cells from the heart will attack the body of the recipient. The records show that
Marivic is scheduled to start the regime tomorrow … well, we’re after midnight, so it would be sometime this morning. When that happens, she’s forty-eight hours from surgery.”

“What about Ronnie?”

“About Ronnie…” she began. But her voice choked, and tears welled up again.

Stickney said, ”They started Ronnie on the routine yesterday morning. He’s due for the second round of injections today. After that, he’s on a twenty-four-hour countdown. The recipient for his heart is already en route from the south of France, and is expected in Kota Kinabalu later today.”

Arielle gathered herself up and finished the thought. “Surgery is scheduled for ten a.m. tomorrow morning. For Marivic’s recipient, twenty-four hours later. So the thing is, Ray, we need to talk about what we’re going to do, but we can’t talk too long.”

Stickney asked how quickly they could reach Devil’s Keep.

“The island is about eight hundred miles,” Mendonza said. “Figure fourteen hours’ running time at fifty-five miles an hour. Any faster, you’ll just get pounded to jelly before you get there. And that’s assuming good weather and reasonable conditions. We’ll have to refuel at least once. Probably Zamboanga. I’d have to look at the charts. If conditions are decent, I can put us in the vicinity sometime late this afternoon.”

Stickney said, “The problem is, just being in the neighborhood doesn’t accomplish anything. We have
to figure out what we’ll be able to do once we get there. The island has a six-man security detail. It’s on the personnel roster. We can assume that they’re not nice men, and that they’re well armed, and that they won’t just hand over these kids, who are worth way more than their weight in gold.”

“How are we fixed for ordnance?” Mendonza asked Favor.

“The boat carries a twelve-gauge shotgun,” Favor said. ”And we have the pistol.”

“We don’t even know the layout of the island,” Stickney said.

“We could sure use those aerial photos,” Mendonza said.

Arielle said, “The aerials are supposed to be available sometime today.”

Stickney said, “Ray, how do you see it?”

“It seems pretty obvious to me,” Favor said. “Two kids are about to have their hearts ripped out, and we’re the only four people in the world with a chance to do anything about it. I don’t know what we’ll do when we get there. Maybe we can’t stop it. But it’s too soon to worry about that. Let’s get there first, then we’ll think about what’s not possible.”

They all nodded agreement, and without a word they prepared to leave.

Arielle stowed the laptop in the cabin and strapped herself into a seat at the back of the cockpit. Stickney took the chair beside Mendonza: he wanted to learn the boat so that he could take the wheel and give Mendonza a break sometime during the night. Favor
released the lines, threw them aboard, and climbed in. He strapped himself into a chair beside Arielle.

Mendonza entered the coordinates for Devil’s Keep into the GPS navigation system and designated it as the destination. He backed the boat away from the pier and accelerated toward the open water beyond Corregidor.

Arielle said, “I forgot to ask. Does this beauty have a name?”

“She’s
Banshee,
” Favor replied.

“It’s Irish,” Arielle said. “A wailing female spirit of the night.”

“That’s what Franklin said.”

“Also a harbinger of death.”

“Yeah. He said that too.”

“Whose death, though? That’s the question.”

“That’s always the question,” Favor said.

They were past the island now, through the mouth of the bay, pulling away from the headlands of Bataan on one side and Cavite on the other. This was the South China Sea. Open water. Mendonza turned the wheel, and the boat swung to the south. Mendonza pushed the throttles forward, and the boat rose up and seemed to leap forward, a stunning surge of power, and they hurtled into the darkness.

“How did all this happen?” Andropov said.

He was standing with Totoy Ribera in the ops room at the villa.

“They’re good,” Totoy said.

“
We’re
good.”

“Yes, but this bunch…”

“What?”

Totoy paused. He didn’t want to inflame Andropov any more.

“Spit it out,” Andropov said.

“What the little hustler said this afternoon? It’s starting to sound pretty good to me. I don’t know why these people are coming after you, but if you have something they want, maybe you should consider handing it over and hope it makes them happy.”

Before Totoy could finish, Andropov was already shaking his head, an emphatic no, no, no.

Totoy said, “I’m just thinking practically. An end to the difficulty. They go away, business resumes just as before.”

“To hell with that,” Andropov spat. “To hell with the little hustler for saying it. To hell with you for bringing it up.”

His voice rose with each phrase, so that he almost shouted the last few words. But he gathered himself inside, tamped down the anger.

Truth was, Andropov had already considered this possibility. But it was impractical. Impossible. The intended recipient of the boy’s heart was already en route from Nice, and would expect full satisfaction at the end of his journey.

Even if he had wanted to make a deal and hand over the kids, Andropov had nobody to deal with. The Americans had disappeared again. They seemed to have a knack for that, vanishing and reappearing at the time they chose.

“You can put that idea out of your head,” Andropov said, his voice calm again. “It’s a little late for that.”

They got lucky with the weather. The skies were clear and the seas were calm. To save fuel, Mendonza kept the speed around fifty miles an hour, and after a couple of hours he saw that they’d be able to make Zamboanga without refueling.

Around noon, they pulled into a small marina. While an attendant fueled the boat, Arielle got out onto the dock and found a spot where she could set up the laptop and the satellite transceiver. She needed a stable platform for the uplink. That was impossible on the boat, so this was her first chance to check for the aerial photos online.

The others watched from the boat. They needed those photos.

Arielle sat cross-legged with the case in front of her. She unzipped the case, removed the computer and the flat, book-size antenna. At this location, just a few degrees north of the equator, the Inmarsat Broadband Global Area Network Asia-Pacific satellite was almost directly overhead; she aimed the antenna almost straight up.

A weak electronic tone rose out of the laptop’s speakers. She began to adjust the antenna in increments, tilting it slightly toward the southern
sky, and the tone grew louder and more high-pitched.

It shrieked.

Connected.

She worked the keyboard for a few seconds, shielded her eyes against the sun, looked closer.

She shook her head.

No.

While the boat refueled at the city dock in Zamboanga, the floatplane was doing the same at its base about twenty miles up the coast. It carried four: Andropov, Anatoly Markov, who was flying it, and two other members of the Manila crew. This left only one Russian at the Manila headquarters, but Andropov wasn’t concerned. He believed that Manila didn’t matter anymore, as far as the four Americans were concerned. The action would be on the island, and it would come soon. The most important transplant yet to be performed on the island—by far—was to take place in less than twenty-four hours. Its recipient would be landing in Kota Kinabalu around sunset, and Andropov believed that the Americans would do everything in their power to interfere.

He knew that this was improbable, in realistic terms. But the very existence of the Americans was an improbable event, and here they were.

Anything was possible.

Andropov knew that they must be out there somewhere, somehow finding a way to the island, and he intended to be ready when they arrived.

The sea grew restless after they left Zamboanga. At first it pushed up easy swells, so broad and gentle that they seemed to be incidental distortions in the bright green surface. The swells began to roll, more abrupt, the troughs steeper and deeper. Then the swells became waves, two and three feet high, a hard chop that pounded the hull.

The sky was hazy now, and gray cloud tops were dimpling up on the far horizon to the east. The boat was alone, surrounded by open water.

Banshee
easily handled the waves, but it was pounding through the water now, not skimming anymore. Mendonza was at the wheel. He throttled back slightly. The navigation display showed sixty-three miles to Devil’s Keep, with at least three hours of daylight.

Favor stayed down in the cabin, where an LCD screen showed the boat’s navigation panel. When the distance to Devil’s Keep reached sixty miles, he came up and spoke to Mendonza.

“I want to stay at least ten miles off the island until the sun goes down,” Favor said. “Due south would keep us out of visual and take us into the archipelago. I don’t want to run into any habitation, but maybe we can find a quiet place to put in for
a while. See if we can find somewhere for Ari to connect.”

Mendonza turned the wheel slightly to the right, and immediately the boat’s sharp nose swung around by about fifteen degrees. Favor and Mendonza stood together in the cockpit, watching the nose tick up and down as the hull shot through the chop.

After a few minutes, Mendonza said, “Ray, it’s almost crunch time. What’re we going to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” Favor said. “Let’s see if we can get those aerial photos. That’ll give us an idea.”

“And without the pics? We don’t know fuck-all about what’s on the island. And it’s not like we can do a quiet little recon, cruise around it a few times to check it out. This is a sweet boat, but it’s not going to sneak up on anybody.”

“We don’t back off now,” Favor said. “You decide this doesn’t work for you, that’s no problem. We can turn the boat around, I’ll take you back to Zambo. No questions asked, no hard feelings. Ari and Stick, same deal. But I’m going to do this.”

“You know I don’t back off,” Mendonza said. “I’m just asking.”

“Fair enough,” Favor said. “All else fails, I guess we wing it.”

Mendonza looked over and saw that Favor was grinning.
Grinning
.

Mendonza couldn’t help it—he found himself laughing out loud.

He said, “I guess it wouldn’t be the first time.”

About an hour later they spotted the tops of palm trees in the southwest horizon. Mendonza steered toward them. The trees seemed to rise up out of the ocean, finally revealing a ragged line of low coral islands, most no larger than an acre or two, connected by shallow white flats that lay just below the surface. Mendonza cut the engines back and idled down the string of islets until he reached the largest of the group.

He motored in close and anchored. The navigation display showed 14.2 miles to Devil’s Keep.