Her indecision lasted until she went into her purse, looking for lipstick. Her eye fell on an envelope stuck near the top. It was a tuition envelope for her youngest daughter at a technical college in Tacloban. The school cost 5,500 pesos per quarter, and Lisabet kept the envelope in her purse as a reminder. Whenever she was tempted by an extravagance—a pair of shoes, maybe, or a magazine—she would see the envelope and put the money there instead. The payment was due in a week and a half, and Lisabet was still 1,400 pesos short, but she knew that she would make it on time. She had a payday between now and then.
Now the envelope told her what she had to do. She knew almost nothing about Optimo or those behind it, and she felt no loyalty to the company or the people. But without those paydays…
She reached for the phone.
Eleven
Who told you to come here?” said Totoy Ribera. ”Who put you up to it?”
“Nobody,” said the boy. “It was my idea.”
They were still in Totoy’s office. The boy, who said his name was Ronnie, was seated in the chair while Totoy stood beside his desk, looming over him.
“You did all this on your own?” Totoy said. “Jumped on a bus and came all the way from Leyte just to ask a few questions here?”
“Yes.”
“Bullshit, I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. I had to sneak out of the house.”
In one ear, Totoy heard Magda’s voice coming through his Bluetooth earpiece: “Ilya wants you to ask what made him believe that we have his sister. And move over, you’re blocking the camera. Ilya wants to see his face.”
Magdalena and Andropov were in the operations room at the residence, taking in a feed from a surveillance camera in Totoy’s office, with Magda relaying instructions through the earpiece. The boy didn’t know this.
He also didn’t realize that he was making a case for his own life.
Totoy sidled to the other end of the desk, moving out of the camera’s view.
“On what suspicion?” he said.
“The text message from Marivic.”
“You were going on nothing more than a one-word text on your phone?”
“That’s enough. I knew that Marivic arrived on the bus and Optimo said that she didn’t. So I knew that you were lying. I was right too. The old bitch has her bracelet. She knows what happened to my sister.”
Shut up, you’re digging your own grave, Totoy wanted to tell him.
He knew that Ronnie would leave this office one of two ways. Andropov could decide that the boy was acting alone and posed no threat, that his story would not be believed no matter how passionately he told it. In that case, Ronnie would be allowed to walk out and disappear into the world, unaware of how close he had come to the end of his life.
Or Andropov could decide that the boy needed more persuasive interrogation than Totoy could do here in the office with the staff just a wall away. In that case, Ronnie would be taken out to the compound. And that would be the end. Having seen the compound and the Russians, he would know too much. He could never be allowed to leave alive.
Totoy didn’t especially care either way, but some distant part of him was actually rooting for the kid. He was a gutsy little fucker.
Magda, in his ear, said: “Ask about the second text.”
Totoy said, “What did your mother mean, ‘Help is on the way’?”
“I don’t know,” Ronnie said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
In his earpiece, Totoy heard a sound that he recognized as the ring tone on Magda’s cell. He heard her voice as she answered the call.
A hell of a way to conduct an interrogation, he thought.
To Ronnie he said, “Who is coming to help you?”
“Nobody is helping us. That’s why I came here.”
Magda was chattering in his earpiece. Not to him—to somebody on the cell. Loud, displeased.
Totoy said, “Why would your mother say something like that if it’s not true?”
“She probably wanted to keep me out of trouble, keep me from coming here. I don’t know.”
Now Andropov and Magda were talking back and forth in the earpiece. Totoy couldn’t make out the words, but it was loud and insistent, so distracting that he couldn’t continue. He stood and looked down at the boy and waited for the racket to die down in his earpiece.
“A call from Tacloban: two men were asking about Marivic this morning,” Magda said. She was talking directly to Totoy this time. “A Fil-Am and an American. Tough guys. What does he know about that?”
Totoy said, ”Who are the men asking about your sister in Tacloban today at the Optimo office? A Filipino-American and an americano.”
“I don’t know any Fil-Ams. And I don’t know any ’canos.”
Totoy said, “Claiming to be friends of the family, threatening our representative there.” He was repeating Magda’s words in his ear now, word for word. “A mestizo built like a tank, an American with eyes like ice.”
“I never heard of them before,” Ronnie said. “You’re making this up.”
The boy wasn’t defiant anymore. He was scared. His voice was unsteady, and his lower lip trembled.
“No,” Totoy said. “This is for real.”
The boy said nothing. The earpiece was quiet, too, for a moment. Then Andropov spoke. His voice was hard, but somewhere underneath there was a note of worry. He said, “Who the fuck are these men?”
Totoy moved around to the side of the chair, so that he was directly over Ronnie. He leaned in close, getting right in Ronnie’s face—blocking the camera, he knew, but to hell with it—and he snarled, “Who the fuck are these men?”
Then he stood aside to let Andropov watch the response.
“Sir, truly, I have no idea.”
The kid was telling the truth. Totoy was sure of it. He had been doing this for twenty-five years, putting the squeeze on assholes with something to hide, and he had learned to detect the rare golden nugget of truth buried in the endless shitpile of deception.
Now it was up to Andropov.
Totoy waited.
Andropov said, “I want him over here.”
And that was it. The question was how to get him out, past the office staff, who believed that they were working for a legitimate employment agency. It was almost midday: lunch hour. Totoy got the idea of having Magda take them all out for lunch, a special treat from Optimo. Nobody turned that down. The office cleared out in a hurry.
Two of the Filipino guards came over from the compound. Ronnie still didn’t know what was happening. He was sitting in the chair in Totoy’s office, waiting.
He tried to bolt when he saw the guards, but he couldn’t get past them. They threw him to the floor. One of them had brought a tranquilizer in a syringe. The kid fought hard when he saw the needle, but Totoy knelt on his arm, pinning it down, while he found a vein and stuck it in.
The boy started to fade right away.
They wanted to take him out while he could still walk, so they brought him to his feet and led him through the deserted office, one guard holding him up by each arm. He was stumbling, nearly deadweight, too far gone to resist. They got him down the stairs and crossed the walkway to the gate in the wall of the residence compound. They were practically dragging him now, and if anyone had seen them, the scene would have looked like exactly what it was: two thugs strong-arming a kid from the country.
But this was bustling Manila. Nobody noticed; nobody cared. They hustled the kid across the walkway and through the opening in the wall, Totoy shut the gate behind them, and it was done.
Twelve
Favor told Mendonza that he wanted to wait for the last plane of the day from Tacloban to Manila. It left at 7:35 p.m., which gave them a few hours to watch the building across the street from the pension house. The path from the moment of Marivic’s disappearance, traced backward in time, lay through the building. Therefore it was worthy of observation.
Patient and unobtrusive observation w
as a callback to their Bravo years. To go convincingly undercover, you learned to quietly absorb a place and a situation. Watch and listen … just be there.
While Mendonza left to buy the plane tickets, Favor stationed himself in a chair at the window with Mendonza’s camera and a telephoto lens. He watched young men and women entering the building, then coming out about an hour later with the gauze patch under a piece of tape. About four an hour, he guessed.
He had a good view down into the two first-floor windows. One showed a partial view down into the clinic’s waiting room. It showed a chair that was sometimes occupied, sometimes not. The other gave him an angle down into a room that Favor thought might be a storage area.
Through the powerful lens, Favor saw boxes of bandages and tape and latex gloves and tongue depressors. On a white counter along one side of the room, Favor could make out a rack with small vials, clear glass or plastic, sealed with a stopper. About every quarter of an hour, a middle-aged Filipino man in a lab coat—the doctor, Favor guessed—would enter the room and stand at the counter to fill one of the vials with dark liquid from a syringe. Favor knew this must be the blood draw from an examination, taken from another applicant. The doctor would seal the vial, write out a label, wrap the label around the vial, and place it in a small refrigerator under the counter. A couple of minutes later, one more young man or woman would leave the building: exam completed, application submitted.
This routine continued throughout the day, unvarying, into the afternoon. Mendonza returned after a while with a roasted chicken and rice and some San Miguel beer and soft drinks. Favor kept watching the building while he ate. When Mendonza stretched out on the bed to nap, Favor stayed by the window, sipping from a bottle of beer, patiently watching.
In the late afternoon, the light softened and shadows lengthened. The people of Tacloban began heading home. Traffic picked up in the street below, mostly jeepneys and three-wheel motorcycles with rudimentary covered passenger seats. In Tacloban, they were sometimes called trikes, sometimes sidecars.
At 5:55, the nurse from the clinic left the building and flagged down an empty trike. She folded herself into the passenger compartment and the trike buzzed off, skittering through traffic like a rasping water bug.
At 6:05, Lisabet Bambanao walked out of the front door and out to the sidewalk. She waved at a jeepney; it pulled across traffic to stop in front of her, and she climbed into the back.
A few minutes later, Mendonza woke and looked out the window. He checked his watch. The airport was about four miles away, ten or fifteen minutes. He told Favor that they ought to leave by quarter to seven, give themselves plenty of time to make the 7:35 flight.
“Sure,” Favor said. He was watching the second window across the street, the storage room. The doctor was at the white counter, but he wasn’t doing the usual routine of filling a vial this time. Instead he was reaching into the refrigerator and taking out a rack with a couple dozen filled vials, blood specimens.
He took a box from under the counter. The box was plain, cream-colored, no printing. He placed the rack with the filled vials into the box.
“You hear from Lorna’s boy, Ronnie?” Mendonza asked.
“No,” Favor said. “I thought he must’ve called you while you were out.” Favor was still watching through the telephoto lens on the camera, which was zoomed in all the way to get a good look at the box and the vials. The box seemed to have thick walls, maybe Styrofoam, some kind of padding.
“No, he didn’t call me,” Mendonza said.
The doctor reached into the refrigerator for another rack of vials—sealed specimens—and placed it into the box. He took a plastic bag from the freezer compartment—ice cubes, Favor saw—and placed the bag on top of the vials, and closed the box.
“He should’ve called by now,” Mendonza said.
“Call Lorna and see what’s up,” Favor said.
The doctor had a roll of red packing tape. He was laying a wide strip of it across the top seam of the box. Sealing the package.
“Damn, he’s leaving with it,” Favor said.
Mendonza had his phone in hand when Favor turned from the window.
Favor said, “Al, hang loose, I have to follow this package.”
Favor hurried from the room. He ran down the hall, bounded down the stairs, hurried through the lobby.
Favor stepped out, then withdrew back inside. He didn’t want the doctor to notice him. Favor waited until the doctor had turned up the street, a few steps along the sidewalk, the package under his arm. Then Favor started out the door and up the street, tracking the doctor on the opposite sidewalk with the streaming lanes of traffic between them.
It was a brief pursuit. After half a block, the doctor stopped at a Kia sedan parked at the curb. Favor ducked into the entrance of a bakeshop and watched. The doctor pulled keys from his pocket, opened the passenger-side door, placed the package in the foot well of the passenger seat, shut the door.
He walked around to the other side, opened the door, got behind the wheel.
The headlights came on; the backup lamps glowed.
Favor stepped out from the doorway. The car backed up a few feet as the driver turned the wheel, ready to pull out. Favor looked out into oncoming traffic and tried to spot an empty taxi headed his way.
The doctor found an opening and swung out into traffic. Favor watched the Kia blend into traffic as it accelerated away, down the street.
As Favor watched the Kia disappear, a trike whipped into a sudden 180-degree turn, cutting through traffic, stopping inches from Favor. The driver was a small man in shorts and T-shirt. He stood up on the foot pegs, looking at Favor over the passenger awning, and said, “Hey, Joe. Need a ride?”
The Kia was out of sight now, gone.
“Hey, Joe” was an archaic phrase. In World War II it was Filipinos’ universal greeting to American GIs, and then for a few decades it was applied to all foreigners. But it was now long out of use, an old man’s phrase. When Favor looked closer in the dim evening light, he saw that the driver really was an old man. Thin gray hair, a near-toothless grin.
“How about it, Joe. You need trike?”
Not anymore, Favor was about to answer. Then he realized what he had just seen, the amazing move, the agile way the driver had cut across traffic. Favor knew he could use this guy.
“Not tonight,” Favor said. “Tomorrow. You know Tacloban?”
“Tacloban is my home, Joe. All my life.”
“What is your name?” Favor asked.
“I am Romeo Mandaligan.”
“My name is Ray,” Favor said. “I’m in the Mirador, over there. You come around in the afternoon, I’ll tell you what I need.”
“Sure, whatever you say, Joe.”
Favor dug in his pocket, came up with some bills: Philippine currency, a five-hundred-peso note at the top. He stripped it off and walked around the front of the trike and gave it to the driver. The typical trike fare in a provincial city was ten or twenty pesos, and Romeo Mandaligan accepted the five hundred with something like reverence.
He said, ”For what?”
“So you know I’m serious,” Favor said. “Come around tomorrow, I have a one-thousand-peso job for you.”
Romeo Mandaligan slid the bill carefully into the front pocket of his shirt.
He said, “Ray, you can count on me.”
Mendonza was on the phone with Lorna Valencia when Favor returned to the room.
Mendonza said, “Ray’s here now, let me talk to him. Send me that text. Don’t you worry, I’m sure he’s all right.”
He clicked off and said to Favor: “Lorna tried all day to get Ronnie, phone calls and texts, no luck. But about an hour ago she gets a text from him—” Mendonza’s phone cut him off. He looked down and found a text, and showed it to Favor.
No problem Optimo
coming home soon
bttry low see you later luv u
“She says it doesn’t sound like him,” Mendonza said. “
I don’t know what that means, but she has a bad feeling.” He checked the time and said, ”We have a little time; we can grab a bite on the way to the airport.”
“I’m not leaving,” Favor said. “I want to be here this time tomorrow.”
“All right,” Mendonza said. “There’s a nice resort hotel on the north side of town. We’ll get a couple of rooms there, come back here tomorrow afternoon.”
“I’d rather stay where I am.”
“Here?” Mendonza said.
“Right now that building across the street is the most interesting place in Tacloban. By far. But you go ahead. I’ll catch you in the morning.”
“No way, cowboy,” Mendonza said. “You’re staying, I’m staying.”
Mendonza did persuade Favor to go out for a meal, a seafood restaurant a couple of blocks away. Afterward, Favor went back to the room while Mendonza stopped at an Internet café to send the photo of Marivic and Ronnie to Arielle in Manila.
Then he returned to the room.
Mendonza wondered what the sleeping arrangements would be: just one small bed. He thought they might need a second room. But when Mendonza returned to the room, Favor was back in the armchair, and he stayed there while they talked for a couple of hours, with Mendonza perched at the side of the bed. Then they both got sleepy.
Favor just stretched out his legs and lounged back in the chair, and that was the last sight Mendonza saw before he nodded off: Favor still in the ratty armchair, still facing out the window toward the building across the street.
The drugs wore off sometime around nightfall. When Ronnie came around, Markov and Totoy Ribera were comparing methods for squeezing information out of reluctant prisoners.
It was a professional discussion that drew on long years of experience, going back to when they were both young men. Markov’s initiation had come as a junior KGB officer in the waning years of the Soviet Union. Totoy Ribera had trained by questioning suspected Reds during the latter years of the Ferdinand Marcos era.
Ilya Andropov was standing nearby, listening, and was the first to notice that Ronnie was conscious again.
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