This time the door opened. The squeal got louder. It was coming from a room behind the shop. A bell rang on the door when Favor entered and closed the door, but the squeal continued.
Favor looked through the glass top of the display case at the knives inside. It was a mixed bag: kitchen knives, a butcher’s set of skinning and boning knives, a bowie-style with a bone handle. And off to one side, two balisongs: butterfly knives with split handles that would fold up to cover the blades. Or swing back to expose them.
The squeal stopped. Favor reached back for the door, opened it and shut it. The bell chimed, and in a few seconds a man came out from the back, pushing aside a grimy curtain that hung over a rear door. He was about Favor’s age. He wore shorts and rubber sandals, and his face and naked torso were sweat drenched. He squinted at Favor through the smoke from a cigarette clamped in his mouth. Favor guessed that this must be Galicano Esqueviel, Prop.
He waited for Favor to speak.
“I’d like to see a knife,” Favor said.
Sweat dropped off the end of the man’s nose as he reached inside for the bowie.
“No, a balisong,” Favor said.
The man put down the bowie and reached in and took out one of the balisongs and laid it on the glass. He watched through the curling cigarette smoke as Favor opened the knife with a shake of the wrist, one side of the split handle swinging back, the blade locking into position, switchblade quick.
Favor studied the knife blade. Like most balisongs, it was a single-edge, with a slightly dropped point and a flat back that tapered down to a fine edge. Clean, simple. Nice.
“Four hundred pesos,” Esqueviel said. Eight dollars. “It’s one thousand in the gift shop at the Shangri-La hotel. They take everything I send them.”
“This is much too good for a tourist’s souvenir,” Favor said.
“I disagree. The way I see it, every man should have a chance to own a good knife. Even if he doesn’t appreciate what he holds in his hand.”
Favor folded the handle forward, back over the blade. He latched it and put it on the counter and said, “Thank you. That’s very nice work.”
He pushed it back across the counter.
Esqueviel stared at Favor. He said, “This knife isn’t worth four hundred pesos?”
“It’s worth much more than that. But it’s not quite right for me.”
Esqueviel took the cigarette from his mouth and balanced it on the edge of the counter. It took the veil of smoke away from his eyes, and he looked at Favor as if for the first time.
“What are your needs?” he said.
“I want a carry knife that I can hang my life on.”
“You’re not a collector?”
“I’m a user,” Favor said.
“Thrust or slash?”
“Both.”
“What are you carrying now?”
“I’m not. I used to carry a good knife, but I put it away some time ago. I wish I had it now. I’m far from home, though, and I think I might need it soon, but I can’t get to it.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
“Something that will go in my pocket. A very sturdy balisong would be good. A blade of three or four inches. Double-edged or at least with a hollow-ground swage. A strong spine for sure.”
“You plan on hitting bone?”
“I don’t plan on it, but sometimes it happens.”
Esqueviel said, ”Okay, you’re a user.” He picked up the cigarette and gestured Favor to come along as he disappeared through the curtain at the rear.
Favor followed him into a small workshop. In the middle of the floor was a brick forge where chunks of charcoal were glowing red. Esqueviel stood on a wooden bench and reached up into an overhead shelf. He came down with a handful of soiled rag, and when he unfolded the rag he revealed a knife, a balisong, with a very dark, smooth handle.
He put the knife in Favor’s outstretched right hand.
The knife had heft, Favor noticed. Heavier than the usual balisong.
“Ironwood?” Favor said.
“I had some laying around.”
Favor opened the knife. The split sides revealed a wide dagger shape, the twin edges curving to a point. A raised spine added weight and strength.
Favor held the knife at arm’s length. He turned it over in his fingers, studying the blade at different angles. It was perfectly symmetrical. The steel was bluish gray, burnished to a glow.
“What is your bar stock?” Favor said.
“The steel is from the leaf spring of a 1953 Dodge flatbed truck. My father bought the leafs when I was a boy. He made dozens of knives from it, and I have made dozens more. Now I’m down to my last two pieces.”
“This is a fantastic piece of work.”
“I make knives for meat markets and for housewives and for tourists,” Esqueviel said. “Once in a while I make one for myself. I don’t keep it forever. I’m no collector. I don’t care for collectors. I just hang on to it until I’m ready to make another. Then I find a good place for the old one.”
“I want this knife.”
“I wouldn’t know what it’s worth.”
“It’s worth plenty. Name your price.”
“You’re from the States, huh?”
“Yes,” Favor said.
“There’s something you can do for me.”
“Just say it.”
“If this knife helps get you home, I want you to send me another set of leaf springs from a 1953 Dodge flatbed truck.”
Favor admired the knife for a few more seconds. The fit. The balance. Perfect.
“I can do that,” he said.
Twenty
The door buzzer sounded in the bodega.
Favor went to the door, checked the peephole. Edwin Santos. Favor opened the door and Santos came in carrying the clamshell storage bin. He brought it to the table. Stickney opened the folding top and began removing items. A length of PVC pipe, about a foot and a half. Electric drill and bits. Soldering iron. Two gallon-size cans, labeled by hand.
Stickney looked at what was left inside, taking inventory.
He said, “I think we still need some sixteen-gauge wire, twisted pair.”
“Ah yes, the wire,” Santos said. He went over to a shelf on the wall, rummaged through a box, came up with a spool of wire.
“I’m in business,” Stickney said.
“The other items, I should have those late tonight. I can bring them first thing tomorrow. The passports and the weapons, tomorrow afternoon.”
“Can we say twenty-four hours?” Favor asked. The current time was about 2:20 p.m.
“My source for the documents won’t be getting much sleep tonight,” Santos told him. “How about six p.m. at the latest? Will that work?”
“But no later than six,” Favor said.
“No problem.”
Favor went with Santos to the door, shook his hand, shut the door behind him.
When he turned back to the table, Stickney was already at work.
Twenty-one
Stickney was still busy with his project, tools and materials spread across the tabletop, when Arielle returned to the bodega.
She said that she had something to show them. But she didn’t want to disturb Stickney’s work, so she opened the laptop on a top of a shipping crate. They all gathered around the screen; even Stickney stopped what he was doing.
She said, “On Ronnie, the story is simple but not very encouraging. At 1052 on the day of his disappearance, he ended up inside the coverage zones of three towers. Those towers’ zones overlap at an area roughly triangular, about two hundred fifty yards on a side. We know he was going to Optimo, and that makes sense. The Impierno building and the villa are both inside that overlapping zone.
“He did move in and out of that zone a couple of times, but he reentered it for the last time at 1106. During the next eleven minutes he received three text messages from his mother. No reply.”
Favor said, ”When did he leave that co
verage zone?”
“He didn’t. Well, the phone didn’t. We can assume that the phone was taken away from him at some time that day, because at 1618 it transmitted the bogus text to his mother. Immediately after that, the phone went offline and completely off the grid. It hasn’t shown up on the network since.”
“Somebody pulled the battery,” Stickney said.
“Most likely.”
Favor said, “And Marivic?”
“We’ll need maps for this,” Arielle said. On the laptop Arielle pointed at screen captures made by Arturo Guzman, showing the path of Marivic’s phone through the cell system’s towers.
“Marivic did arrive in Manila. Records put her phone in two cells that cover the Philtranco bus station, followed by thirty-two minutes of apparently aimless travel through Pasay and Parañaque and Makati, the areas between the bus terminal and the airport, where she left Manila.”
Mendonza said, “She left Manila by plane?”
“Yes, but not by jet. The phone was picked up by towers at the southeast side of the airport, the general aviation area. Around 0610, the phone began to pass through a succession of cells south of Manila, spending three or four minutes in each cell and moving into the next one. Obviously it was airborne. It flew about one hundred thirty-five miles an hour, three hours and forty minutes, on a heading of about one-eighty true. This flight path took it over the island of Mindoro, across the Sulu Sea, to where it landed along the western peninsula of Mindanao, twenty to twenty-five miles north-northeast of Zamboanga City. It spent approximately thirty minutes on the ground before it took off again. Distance of the first hop was five hundred miles, more or less.”
“This sounds like a slow single-engine plane,” Mendonza said. “The half-hour stop would be for refueling.”
“Apparently.”
“Wait a minute,” Favor said. “Is there an airstrip twenty miles north-northeast of Zamboanga?”
“No.”
Stickney looked closer at the map.
“That’s a coastal area,” he said.
“Seaplane,” Favor said. “It wouldn’t need an airstrip. Just a dock. They were carrying her on a seaplane.”
“It looks that way,” Arielle said.
“Zamboanga … You’re getting deep into Muslim separatist territory,” Mendonza said.
“Correct. Everything south of Zamboanga is in the autonomous Muslim region. And that’s where it was headed on the second hop. It flew south over Basilan Island. Five towers on Basilan picked up the phone before it reached open water and fell off the network.”
“Fell off the network?” Mendonza said.
“Once the phone got over open water, there were no more cell towers.”
“And it was never picked up again?”
“Correct. The southernmost tower on Basilan lost it around 1130 that morning. It hasn’t registered on the system since.”
“Then the plane could have gone anywhere.”
“Oh no,” Arielle said. ”I’m pretty sure I know where the plane landed.”
She began to work with one of the maps on the laptop screen, anchoring the takeoff point above Zamboanga.
“It’s basic trig, and a little deductive reasoning. I used the records from the towers on Basilan. I knew the coverage zones, and I knew how long the plane stayed in each zone. I also knew the airspeed from the first hop—one hundred thirty-five miles an hour. So, putting all that together and knowing the start point, I was able to line out the plane’s flight path over Basilan, two hundred eighteen degrees, give or take a degree.”
She tapped a key, and a straight red line appeared on the map.
“Even knowing the direction, you can’t tell how far it flew,” Mendonza said.
“True. But the destination would have to be an island. And along that flight path, anywhere near it, there’s really only one island of any size.”
She zoomed in on the map, to the red line, and moved the view along the line until a single island appeared in the otherwise unbroken field of blue.
She switched to an online view, Google Earth, a satellite image. At first the screen showed just deep blue, but as she zoomed in, an island took form. It was mottled white and dark, roughly a half-moon shape.
She said, “It’s about forty hectares, almost ninety acres. The locals call it berbalang—that’s a mythical flesh-eating ghoul. There’s another name. In the early nineteenth century, eight British seaman were cast up on the island after a storm swamped their ship in the Celebes. Only one got off alive, three months later. His personal account was a publishing sensation in England, and he gave the island an English name. Devil’s Keep, he called it. What a charming spot it must be.”
Stickney said, “Any idea what’s on the island? Why would anyone fly here?”
“It’s supposed to be uninhabitable,” Arielle said. “The last record of activity was a failed attempt at a coconut plantation in the nineteen fifties. But this is one of the most isolated spots in Southeast Asia. I don’t mean just geographically. It’s far from the shipping lanes, miles north of Malaysian territorial waters, and so out-of-the-way and so deep in Muslim territory that the Philippine Navy would have zero presence anywhere in the area. This is as close to a no-man’s-land as you’re likely to find. So if you ask what’s on the island, the answer is: there should be nothing, but there could be anything.”
When the rich feel a need to look closely at some remote part of the world, they don’t usually travel there to do it.
They buy aerial photos.
Favor did this routinely with property that he was considering. Often he would do it even after he had visited the property. He found that the view from above provided context and scale that were hard to grasp from ground level. Usually he would try to find existing high-resolution imagery, if it wasn’t out-of-date. But if he couldn’t get what he wanted, he would commission a set of images, either aerial photos or satellite images, from the several commercial companies that offered custom high-resolution imagery from orbiting satellites.
That was how he tried to get a closer look at Devil’s Keep Island.
First, Arielle searched the world’s inventory of all known commercial suppliers of high-resolution ground imagery. She had done it so often, this required less than a minute. She had written a program that automatically queried all the indexes of available imagery, both free and for sale. The search turned up nothing beyond the low-resolution imagery used in Google Earth.
She contacted the commercial satellite operators individually, but the soonest opening was ten days away, and they couldn’t wait that long.
Then she began a search for aerial photo operators in Asia. This required some research, since she was unfamiliar with the aerial imagery business there. But within twenty minutes she was on the phone with the manager of an aerial photography outfit in Kuala Lumpur, who said that he would add Favor’s order to a queue that was seventy-two to ninety-six hours long.
“Double the fee if he moves us to the head of the queue,” Favor said.
She conversed briefly with the man in Kuala Lumpur and told Favor: “He can’t do that, but he can bump us up a day. That’s forty-eight to seventy-two hours, weather permitting. I think that’s the best he’ll go, Ray.”
“What’s the equipment?” Favor asked.
“Beechcraft King Air with an UltraCamXp. He suggests two flight runs at an altitude of three thousand feet.”
Favor considered this. The King Air was a substantial twin-engine turboprop. At three thousand feet it was easily spotted from the ground. One pass at that altitude would be suspicious. After two passes, everyone on the island would know that they were being watched.
He said, “That won’t go. I want one pass, eight thousand feet, straight from horizon to horizon. If anybody notices, it should seem to be random. I’ll sacrifice a little resolution for stealth. We may drop in on that rock one of these days, and I don’t want them stirred up before we get there.”
Marivic Valencia sto
od on her wobbly perch and looked over the wall into the cell on the other side.
She could have done this at any time when Junior was there. The wall was the same height all around the room, and she could have looked over at Junior just as she looked out onto the hillside and the dock.
But she hadn’t wanted to see Junior. Without the wall they couldn’t have talked so freely, she was sure of that. Putting a face on that voice—and letting him see her—might have spoiled it.
But this was different. She had been checking over the wall since the orderlies first brought Ronnie in and laid him down on the cot. At first he was out hard, then shifting fitfully as he tried to get past the waning effects of the drugs. She knew how that felt.
Now she watched as he opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. He sat up unsteadily on the edge of the cot.
”Ronnie. Up here. Ronnie.”
He looked up at her eyes, barely visible over the top of the wall.
He didn’t seem surprised.
He smiled.
“Found you,” he said.
Twenty-two
Shortly before midnight, Ray Favor walked down the long hallway in the lower level of the Impierno building. He was headed for the Ultimate VIP Safari Suite at the end of the hall, and the massage attendant named Patricia was walking beside him.
She said, ”Like MacArthur, you have returned.”
He had asked for her automatically, without thinking. PuhTREESia. He would have preferred nobody at all: he needed two or three minutes alone in the room, and he had to find a way to get it.
“Just leaving the office?”
He wore black slacks, expensive loafers, a shirt with a button-down collar, left open. Mendonza had assured him that this was the look of a business executive in Manila, where a traditional jacket and tie marked you as a stuffy outsider. And he was carrying a leather briefcase. The briefcase was the point of the charade.
He said, “Yes, it’s been a long day.”
“And now you want some relaxation,” she said as they approached the room.
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