Devil's Keep (36 page)

“I’ve got him,” Stickney said.

They walked down the hill together, Mendonza following a few steps behind, holding the AK, checking back every few seconds.

Nobody followed.

Marivic was waiting with Arielle at the dock. She shrieked when she saw what Stickney was carrying. She knew. She followed, wailing, as Stickney carried the body down to the cabin and laid it out on the floor.

Mendonza climbed into the boat, and Favor was about to do the same when Arielle put out a hand, touched his arm.

She made a vague gesture to Favor, hands and face.

He understood.

He sat at the edge of the dock and lowered himself into the water, in over his head. He came up and rubbed his face and his arms, wiping off the blood. It made dark clouds in the water. He kept splashing and rubbing his exposed skin until he was clean, the water around him clear.

Then he climbed up on the boat, and Mendonza backed it away from the dock and pointed the nose to the north.

They reached Zamboanga around mid-morning. While Mendonza refueled, Favor called Lorna Valencia. He told her briefly what had happened before he handed the phone to Marivic.

From Zamboanga, Mendonza chose a route that ran along the north coast of Mindanao, through the Surigao Strait, and into Leyte Gulf. Marivic stayed in the cabin with the body, but Arielle went down in the late afternoon and brought her up as the dark green hills of Leyte slid by on the port side.

Mendonza slowed and brought
Banshee
in toward shore. Ahead they could make out the highway and the rutted road up to the village and, through the trees, the huddled huts and houses of San Felipe. Dozens of people were standing on the shore. As the boat got closer, Favor could make out Lorna Valencia among them, looking out, waves lapping at her feet.

Mendonza brought the boat in very slowly and let it run aground gently on the soft mud and sand of the beach.

Arielle brought Marivic to the side, but Marivic wouldn’t leave until she saw Favor coming up with the body. Then she jumped down and ran to her mother. More people were streaming out of the village now, crossing the highway and coming down to the shore. Mendonza jumped down and put his arms up for Favor to lower the body down to him, and Mendonza carried Ronnie’s body through the surf as Lorna wailed in agony and in joy.

The villagers gathered around Lorna and Marivic and Mendonza with the body in his arms, and they began a sad procession away from the shore, across the highway and up the broken road. San Felipe was bringing its children home.

Franklin Kwok was waiting the next evening when Mendonza guided
Banshee
into slip 22 at the Manila Yacht Club. Kwok asked them to stay for dinner, and sat rapt as Favor described in detail all that the boat had done, and what it had meant to them.

They bought tickets for a return flight to San Francisco the next day, the four of them traveling together, first-class. Favor worried about repercussions from their escape at the bodega in Tondo. They were traveling on their true passports, and he thought that warrants or stop orders might be waiting for them when they checked through Philippine immigration at the airport. But the officer on duty just pounded departure stamps onto the pages, and they walked on board and flew out without a hitch.

The hitch came in San Francisco. The hitch was saying good-bye. Mendonza had barely enough time to catch his connecting flight to Los Angeles, so with him it was quick and relatively painless: a brief embrace for Arielle, a shake of the hand for Favor and Stickney a few words of thanks, and he was gone.

Favor’s vehicle was in Oakland, and he hired a limo to take him and Arielle across the bay. Favor wanted to get a limo to take Stickney home to
Mendocino, but Stickney just laughed and said no thanks, he had had enough of the high life for a while, it was just too damn stressful. He was going to rent a car.

So they said good-bye in front of the transportation desks at the arrivals concourse. Stickney gave Arielle a long embrace, and when Favor tried to shake his hand, Stickney grabbed him by the arm and pulled him close.

He said, “You did good, Ray.”

“We all did good.”

Stickney gave a sad shrug and turned and walked away.

It was the last time they ever saw him alive.

Six days later, Karel Lazovic stepped from a taxi and went to the pedestrian gate of the residential compound on Amorsolo Street in Manila.

The gate was unattended, and also unlocked. Lazovic lifted the latch and walked onto the grounds and into the main room of the home.

The room was empty. The banks of video monitors were dark.

He was looking through files in a cabinet when the last remaining Russian in the compound came into the room carrying a bowl of soup and a bottle of beer.

Dmitri Myukin was his name. Of all the Russians in the operation, he was the only one without security training or military experience. He was a lab technician, an expert in the instruments that they had used for protein analysis.

He was startled when he saw the man standing at the cabinets, and said, “Hey!”

Lazovic turned without haste.

Dmitri Myukin saw his face and said, “Oh. Yes.”

“You know who I am, then?”

“Definitely, Doctor.”

“Good. I want to see all the records for the last five days of the operation,” Lazovic said, and added, “I mean the five days preceding the unpleasantness at the island. Can you show me that?”

“There isn’t much. The usual daily reports and logs. That would all be on the computer. Paper, let me see…”

Lazovic stepped aside to let him get to the files.

“Some expense vouchers from the local employees, that’s about it. Oh, and this.”

It was the sheaf of copies from the hotel check-in records obtained by Totoy Ribera.

BOUCHARD, Arielle

STICKNEY, Winston

Lazovic stared at the papers for a few moments, then folded them and placed them in his shirt pocket. He said, “Thank you very much,” and turned to leave.

Dmitiri Myukin said, “Uh, Doctor, that’s the only copy. I should make one for the files.”

“It’s not necessary,” Lazovic said. “This is of use to only one man in the world. And that’s where it’s going.”

——

When he returned to Mendocino, Winston Stickney immediately resumed work on the project that he had suspended when he drove to see Favor at Lake Tahoe. It was a large abstract piece, using seven different metals, intended for the lobby of a school of engineering at a large midwestern university.

He always worked single-mindedly when he was in the shop, but now he was even more focused than usual. His housekeeper seldom saw him during her three-times-a-week visits.

On an early afternoon about two weeks after he returned home—a day when the housekeeper wasn’t scheduled—he was grinding the edges of a shaft of high-chromium steel, a job that required all of his concentration to get the precise bevel that he wanted.

Movement caught his eye: a man walking past a nearby window, wearing the brown jacket of a UPS deliveryman.

Stickney growled under his breath. He often received UPS shipments, and he had told the local delivery office that he wasn’t to be disturbed in the workshop. The experienced drivers knew this; he told himself that this must be a new one.

The bell rang at the front door of the workshop. Stickney’s focus was broken now, and he thought that he might as well answer it and clue in the new guy.

He stopped and took a deep breath.

Patience,
he thought, and he went to open the door.

About twenty-four hours later, Arielle walked into
Favor’s office, the corner room with the knockout view of the lake.

He was at his desk, intent at the monitor screen.

She said, “Hey, Ray. I’ll be at home if you need me.”

“Sure,” he said.

“I think I’ll grill tonight. I’m in the mood for some red meat. I picked up a couple pounds of some great-looking fillet tails. Thought I’d do that, grill some peppers. Get into a bottle of Montrachet. Hey, maybe two bottles of Montrachet.”

He said, “Did you see the files on that Missoula property?”

“I saw it.”

“Sweet stuff.”

She said, “Ray. An invitation just flew over your head.”

He looked at her, uncomprehending at first. Then he got it.

He said, “Right. Sorry.”

He made a vague gesture at the monitor screen, the files from the Missoula property.

He went back to the screen.

She went out, got halfway to the stairs, went back to his door.

Trying not to sound like a female spurned, she said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you lost the key to my place.”

“No I didn’t,” he said. His voice was serious. ”It’s on my key ring.”

She said, “See you tomorrow, Ray.”

She had a house on the Kingsbury Grade. It was the original wagoneers’ route to the lake, winding upward from the Carson Valley to the town of South Lake Tahoe. The home was just a few minutes from the lake, and a few minutes more to her office at the lodge. It sat on thirty acres and lay between two rolling folds of land that cut off all view of any other buildings. Behind the house was a steep hillside. In front, on the other side of the road, was a sharp drop-off to the valley more than a thousand feet below.

When she got home, she changed into hiking clothes, stuck a liter of cold water into a fanny pack, and went out and up the hillside. A hiking trail ran almost to her home, through the rock garden at the back. If Favor were coming to dinner, she would have skipped the hike to marinate the meat and prepare the vegetables and open one of the bottles of wine.

But he isn’t,
she thought,
so screw it.

She hiked nearly back up to the top of the grade, then started down to be back before dark, covering a lot of ground in a hurry on the way down. Near the bottom of the trail, on one of the last switchbacks, she noticed a dark sedan rolling slowly down the road below. Two men in the front seat.

One was looking at her, she thought. Or maybe not. It was hard to be sure in the dusk.

Her house blocked the view of the road from there. The sedan disappeared behind the house, and she waited for it to appear at the other side, continuing down the grade.

But it didn’t.

She knew that it must have stopped at the house.

She slowed but kept walking. She reached the rock garden at the back of the property, and slowed even more.

She was approaching the back door now, watchful.

A stranger stepped out from the north side of the house. She was already dropping, rolling, as he raised the pistol and fired. She came up moving, running, with a handful of sand and gravel. He swung the pistol to follow her, and seemed shocked to find her running straight at him, crouched low, flinging the gravel into his face as he fired.

And missed.

She hit him low, digging a shoulder into his gut, knocking him to the ground. His head barely missed striking a cantaloupe-size piece of granite.

She picked up the stone, raised it high with both hands, and drove it down onto his skull with all the force she could find.

She distantly registered the crunch of bone and the squish of soft tissue, ticking him off as dead, but she didn’t dwell on it. She was looking for the second man as she reached back for the pistol that had to be near the dead one’s right hand.

Nobody else along the north side of the house.

She thought,
The pistol. Maybe behind me.

Behind me.

And there was the second one, no more than five paces behind her, gun coming up, not in a hurry but with the confidence that he had her, that it was all
over now.

A gunshot jerked him off his feet, and he fell.

It was Favor.

She recognized the 9mm Beretta that she kept in her nightstand drawer.

Favor, damn. Waiting for her in bed.

He looked around and said, “Two?”

“Two,” she said. “I’m sure.”

He patted the pants of the man he had shot, came out with a wallet, which he opened. He found the driver’s license. State of New York. Brighton Beach.