The Last Good Man

by Linda Nagata

  It’s early morning in Manila and the terminal is busy. Passengers from the Seattle flight, most with phones pressed to their ears, move toward the doors, eager to escape after the sixteen-hour flight. Progress is slow. They’re forced to weave through a barrier of tour guides, hotel drivers, and eager families. People begin to notice Lincoln. There are murmurs. Startled eyes fix on his scars. Frank gazes don’t turn away even when he meets them. He doesn’t let the attention rattle him. He stays aloof, on task, surveying the crowd for potential threats.

  He’d like to be wearing a MARC visor, running apps to analyze the identity and intent of the faces around him, but the devices are unpopular and unwelcome here. So he relies on his own judgment and experience. He considers the distribution of individuals, their focus, their baggage. He looks past them to consider the traffic outside. None of it registers in his mind as a threat. All appears normal, acceptable.

  So far.

  “There’s Rey Gabriel,” Miles says.

  Lincoln follows his gaze and sees a face, grown familiar during two video calls, moving toward them through the throng. “Got him.”

  The leftist writer has spotted them as well. He raises a hand over his head, waving in greeting and calling out, “Welcome to Manila!” in a voice so unrestrained that people turn to look for the source of commotion.

  Lincoln had hoped to keep a low profile, to not draw attention. Wishful thinking.

  True’s disapproval takes the form of quiet sarcasm. “Hel-lo, world. Here we are.”

  It’s been just three days since Miles proposed this trip. Even so, events haven’t moved fast enough to suit True. Lincoln is all too aware she’s been on edge, affected by a paranoid strain of worry that says another day, another hour, could bring on something unforeseen, and she might never get to meet Daniel Ocampo. Alex’s efforts to get her to de-escalate, to relax, just irritate her. It’s unbelievable to Lincoln that, after thirty-plus years of marriage, Alex still hasn’t figured out when to leave her the hell alone. Never, he reminds himself, travel with a married couple.

  Miles takes the lead, extending his hand to Rey, who’s agreed to act as their guide and go-between with Daniel Ocampo. “Good to meet you, and thanks again for setting this up.”

  Rey Gabriel is a slight, wiry man, wearing a dark-red button-front shirt, worn cargo pants, and battered sandals on his feet. His complexion is dark brown and he’s clean-shaven, but his thick black hair, down over his ears, could use a trim. There’s a cynical edge to his smile that warns Lincoln not to underestimate him.

  “I spoke to our friend yesterday,” Rey assures them in excellent English delivered at enthusiastic speed. “He is expecting us but he was surprised you got here so soon. I told him it was a challenge to get everything ready in time, but of course you were eager”—he pauses to take a breath, getting dual use out of the moment by nodding at True—“this is about your son.”

  “He was my oldest child,” True tells Rey in a soft, somber voice. “He was subjected to a horrific death and his memory was exploited for political ends all around the globe. So you will understand why it’s important to us to keep this visit discreet. No attention, no publicity. No photos. That was our agreement.”

  Lincoln doesn’t miss the implicit threat in her voice. Rey hears it too. He responds with a quick and nervous smile, but his enthusiasm still bubbles through. “Yes, True. May I call you True? It’s hard for me to resist thinking of this as a story, I admit. I’m an investigative journalist down to my soul! And this—it will be like opening a letter written years ago and only now delivered.” He sighs wistfully. “But I promise discretion. No worries. I will abide by our agreement.”

  An agreement for which Rey is being well paid.

  Having made her point, True smiles, putting Rey at ease. “Thank you so much for understanding.”

  It’s already day’s end at home—the end of yesterday, Lincoln reminds himself. He is stiff from the long flight and still feels a lingering lethargy, but with the help of drugs and soothing white noise he was able to front-load on sleep. They all were.

  The plan is to make the long drive to Daniel Ocampo’s home, arriving in the afternoon, and when the interview is done, return to the city, where they’ll catch a few hours of sleep at a hotel before flying home in the morning.

  As they follow Rey’s lead to the parking structure, Lincoln monitors their surroundings. He notes security cameras and looks for phones and for video eyewear that might be turned in their direction, but sees nothing that makes him suspicious.

  The parking structure is packed with mostly new cars, reflecting a growing business class. Rey brings them to a black midsize SUV so clean and shining it looks like it just left a dealer’s lot.

  “I borrowed it!” he exclaims, his voice echoing faintly against the concrete. “We will trade it for another when we are partway there. You are concerned about security. So is our friend. He’s worked hard on behalf of the common man, and he’s suffered for it. Now he is cautious. He does not want strangers coming uninvited, asking questions. So I am making it harder to follow us.” With a cynical wink, he adds, “Maybe!”

  “We’d like to monitor that,” True says. She gets a hemispherical camera pod from her daypack. “It’s a traffic cam,” she tells Rey, and as he watches wide-eyed, she secures it with a suction mount to the roof above the lift gate.

  “That’s going to tell if someone is following us?” he asks.

  “That’s what it does,” Lincoln assures him. He checks his tablet, confirming a connection. “An app assesses the video feed for suspicious vehicles.”

  “Does it watch the sky too?”

  Lincoln shrugs. “Visible light only. The camera won’t be able to see through clouds and it doesn’t have the resolution to pick up high-altitude UAVs, even if the sky is clear. But if there are municipal UAVs monitoring traffic, it should find them.” He takes the shotgun seat, and when Rey gets in behind the wheel, he asks, “Have you noticed any extra attention since we got in touch?”

  “There is always someone,” Rey says with such energy that Lincoln suspects him for an adrenaline junkie. He might be disappointed if this visit doesn’t stir unwanted attention.

  From the backseat, True asks, “Did you find a printing service we can use? We’d like to finalize our preparations before heading out to see Mr. Ocampo.”

  “I have!” Rey assures her as they get underway. “I have reserved three hours at the printer’s. Is that enough?”

  “It’s enough,” Lincoln agrees. But adds, as he gets his first look at traffic, “If we get there in time.”

  The roads are packed. It’s crazy. All kinds of vehicles—high-end glittering sedans, mud-splattered trucks, jeepneys, scooters, motorcycles with sidecars or trailers, bicycles—all jockeying for position, with brave or foolhardy pedestrians wading into the chaos. Horns sound constantly, near and far, varying between quick warning taps and prolonged angry blasts. Rey is an aggressive participant, accelerating, braking, avoiding collisions by a whisper as a dash cam records their progress.

  At least the road monitor stays quiet.

  It takes them an hour to get to the printer’s but that’s all right, because Rey planned for an hour—but there’s a delay. Customers ahead of them are running late. The machines are still in use. They wait fifty minutes in the lobby before they’re issued a key card—and their schedule is blown. “Rey,” Lincoln says, “I need you to call Mr. Ocampo, let him know we’re going to be late.”

  Rey shakes his head, rocks his palm back and forth in the air. “Mr. Ocampo is… nervous. He did not want this meeting. You change a thing, he might say no way, call it off.”

  “We don’t need the full complement,” True says softly.

  Lincoln considers this. He’s not happy about it, but she’s right. They can make do. “Come on,” he tells her. “Let’s go check out the equipment. Rey, I’ll be right back.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  The printers are in little c
ubicles with opaque glass doors. True swipes the lock on their assigned room. Lincoln follows her inside. He’s relieved to see that the printer is the promised Maemuki Quick-Task 3000, with multiple stages allowing parts to be printed simultaneously. “Looks good,” he says.

  “So far.”

  The facility advertises “fast, private, personal printing.” Street speak to let customers know their activities will not be closely monitored. To verify this promise, they both get out their MARC visors, using the devices to survey the room’s clean white walls, its smooth ceiling.

  “I don’t see any cameras,” True says. “You?”

  “No. Not detecting microphones either. Let’s do it.”

  Lax oversight, combined with computer-aided design, 3-D printing, and amateur engineering guilds, has fed a continuous proliferation in the type and availability of armaments. What they are about to do has no doubt been done here many times before.

  The visors go back in their cases. Then True slots an instruction card, one that Tamara prepared. This is an anarchist hack, Tamara told them. It overrides the printer’s logging function and sets a value of zero to the list of restricted manufactures. You’ll be able to print your gun parts without leaving any record of it.

  Lincoln watches over her shoulder as she runs a short series of system checks that Tamara instructed her to undertake. “Looks good,” she tells him as she pulls up the project list. They intended to print four handguns. “But we’ve got time to print just two.”

  “Do it. It’s just an insurance policy.”

  Shaw Walker might or might not know they’re here, might or might not give a damn—but on this mission, Shaw is only one in a trio of potential hazards. Equally concerning is the possibility of Chinese interest, stirred up by Miles in his research on Nungsan, or being caught in the crossfire of the radical politics supported by both Rey and Daniel. No way to know where any of it could lead.

  True initiates the print run. The process is hidden behind shields as lasers melt and fuse metal alloy powders to slowly form the necessary parts.

  “How do you feel about Rey?” she asks Lincoln.

  “He’s cocky. Confident. Not a bad thing.”

  “This is a game for him.”

  “I think that’s his personality. We hired him to keep a secret and he likes being on the inside. Don’t worry. We’re going to pull this off.”

  “Sooner or later he’s going to ask what we’re printing.”

  “I’m sure he knows what we’re printing. But it’s best for him if we don’t confirm or deny.”

  She nods. “You better go get the ammunition.”

  He sends Alex and Miles to keep her company while he goes with Rey to a courier’s office to claim the package of ammunition he sent in-country. He goes in alone, wanting to limit their exposure on the slim chance that some law enforcement agency has flagged the shipment—but he takes delivery with no questions asked, and an hour later, he’s back at the printer’s.

  He tells the others, “Take Rey and get something to eat.”

  True returns just as he finishes assembling the newly printed parts into two snub-nosed all-metal handguns. He gives her one. She checks the load, slips it into the deep pocket of a hip-length beige utility vest.

  “Did you pull the card?” she asks.

  Lincoln hands her the anarchist’s hack. “Let’s go.”

  ~~~

  True sits in the SUV’s backseat. She’s behind Lincoln, with Alex beside her and Miles next to him. Rey has decided he is their tour guide. She obediently turns to look whenever he points out sights or names the districts and neighborhoods through which they’re passing. She pretends to be interested, pretends that she’s calm. So much of her emotional life is pretending. Putting on a face, playing a role, because the personal cannot be allowed to interfere with the professional.

  She long ago learned to live by the mantra of military life: Focus on what needs to be done, and do it.

  Right now she needs to play along, but the truth is that nothing Rey says makes any difference to her. They are less than two hours away from meeting Daniel Ocampo. That is all that matters.

  After it was decided that they’d go to the Philippines, she called Alex to share what they’d learned of Daniel.

  Alex was skeptical. “An ex-priest? You think this is real?”

  “I do. But he won’t do a remote interview. We have to go down there and talk to him.”

  Alex was incredulous. “Come on. This has got to be a setup.”

  “No. I don’t think so. The journalist checks out. He’s credentialed. Alex, I told Lincoln you would want to go.”

  “Yeah. Of course. If you think this is real.”

  People at work owed him favors, so he was able to adjust his schedule, trading shifts to get the time off.

  That night as they lay together in the dark, he asked her, “What are you hoping for?”

  “Not a lot,” she answered. “I just… I want to know how it was for Diego in those last hours. I want to know if Shaw was with him, if he took care of him. And how did Shaw get away? I want to know that too.” She sighed at her own neediness. “Fuck. I want to know everything about that mission. I want to know what went wrong, and I want to know who’s responsible.”

  They waited until they were at SeaTac to call the kids, letting them know they’d be out of the country for a few days.

  “Another mission already?” Connor asked in the stern, disapproving tone only a twenty-one-year-old can muster.

  “It’s not a mission,” True told him. “Dad doesn’t go on missions. This is a fact-finding tour. No bad guys.” We hope, she added silently. Aloud, she said, “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “You mean don’t tell Grandpa?” Connor asked.

  “Smart kid.”

  They will be in the Philippines just overnight—twenty-eight hours between arrival and departure. So she brought only what would fit in her daypack: a change of clothes, a jacket for the plane, a utility vest for her gear, a few toiletries, a small first-aid kit, her MARC visor, and an assortment of small robotics from the origami army—to the amusement of the Filipino customs officer who inspected her bag. “Cool stuff! You sure this is not a boy’s backpack?”

  She put on a teasing smile as she explained to him, “Other women pack clothes. I pack toys.”

  All harmless of course, surveillance only. The customs officer admitted her to the country with a grin and no further questions.

  They’ve been forty minutes on the road, crawling through traffic, when Rey startles her with an enthusiastic announcement. “Okay, this is it! Stage two. We trade cars in case someone is following us.”

  He turns off into a large gated parking lot roofed with banks of photovoltaic panels, parking the black SUV in an empty stall. They transfer their gear and the traffic cam, then drive off in another SUV—a much older, tan-colored model. It’s less comfortable, less impressive, and far more practical, with a high clearance and an everyday look that won’t draw unwanted attention.

  They leave the city behind, and the chaotic traffic with it. So far as the camera can tell, no one is following as Rey drives on a neat concrete road, past small towns and rice fields, with mountains visible in the distance beyond drifting curtains of light rain.

  As they put more kilometers behind them, Rey’s tour-guide narrative gives out. He tries to engage Lincoln in a discussion of the business structure and ethics of private military companies, but he doesn’t get far. Miles talks to him for a while about the travails of independent journalism. Eventually, though, silence takes over. True is grateful for it.

  An hour slides past. They leave the highway to follow a narrow road flanked by towering tropical growth, little homes half-hidden in the vegetation.

  She watches their progress, charted on a map displayed on her tablet. They are entering unknown territory. If this was a mission, she would have requisitioned a UAV to do advance surveillance. She would have real-time coverage of the route and the de
stination. She would have deployed beetle and mosquito drones to do reconnaissance: mapping potential hazards and identifying the people who live there.

  But it’s not a mission. It’s just an interview.

  Still, they will not be going in blind.

  Right on schedule—a planned two kilometers from their destination—Lincoln speaks. “Let’s stop for a few minutes,” he tells Rey.

  It’s the first anyone has spoken in some time. Rey is startled. “Stop? But we’re almost there.”

  “Just for a few minutes,” Lincoln says reassuringly. “And stay away from any houses.”

  Rey pulls off the road alongside towering bushes—an unfamiliar species that True can’t identify. A misty rain is falling, but she’s not too worried about it. The clouds are breaking up, and she expects a return of blazing sunshine in another minute or two. In the meantime, she retrieves a small biomimetic bird from her daypack and unfolds its long, narrow wings.

  Tamara calls the device a blue gull. Its dorsal surface is dark with a photovoltaic skin, but its belly is coated with a light-blue paint containing tiny reflective chips that simulate the complex range of subtle colors in a living bird. The wings are long, thin, and adjustable, but it doesn’t fly by flapping. It uses quiet electric engines to drive tilt rotors. Blue gulls are an old design, not very agile, and only vaguely birdlike. But on a calm day like today, with sunshine to supplement its batteries, the device should be able to soar for up to two hours.

  Without a word, she wades out into the searing humidity and launches the blue gull, sending it ahead through the steaming air to reconnoiter.

  When she returns to the air-conditioned comfort of the SUV’s cabin, Rey has turned around. He’s watching her, looking confused and very curious—but she offers no explanation. They are minutes away from meeting Daniel and she is too tense to speak. So she just smiles an apologetic smile, slides on her reading glasses, and calls up the gull’s video feed on her tablet.