DEVIL’S KEEP

by PHILLIP FINCH

  Arielle and Stickney sat at the table, with the laptop open in front of them.

  In the cockpit, Mendonza studied the console and found the switch that powered up the panel. A status screen appeared, and beside that a navigation screen. More switches powered up more screens. Radar. Forward-looking infrared. Favor cast off the lines from the bow and stern, and Mendonza punched a button that brought the diesels to life. Even at idle, they thrummed with an ominous power. Favor took the second seat up front as Mendonza backed the boat out of the slip and steered it slowly beside the high breakwater, then out the narrow opening and into the bay. Mendonza gently advanced the throttles. The engines answered at once, rising to an easy lope that was enough to lift the nose and send the boat surging over the water. Just like that, their connection with the land was severed. Favor looked back and watched the lights of the waterfront receding. They were leaving behind Manila and its complications, flying free, untouchable now.

  Glass crunched beneath his feet as Ilya Andropov stepped through the empty doorframe at the Optimo headquarters. Behind him came Magdalena Villegas, carefully picking her way through the shards until she stood with Andropov in the office.

  “They came in here for a reason,” Andropov said. ”Look around—look good. See if anything is missing. Tell me what’s out of place. Something isn’t the way it was when you left this evening.”

  He watched her as she went around the room, checking desks and file cabinets.

  After a couple of minutes, Markov came up the stairs. He was holding the device that had been built by Winston Stickney, the pipe and battery and timer.

  He said, “This was in one of the vents. Looks like a smoke generator.” He handed it to Andropov.

  “This is pro work,” Andropov said, examining it. “Not just the device. All of it.”

  “Who are these people?” Markov said. ”And why do they have a hard-on against us?”

  “I don’t know.” Andropov said. ”But we’ll get some answers when we see what Totoy has scooped up.”

  “So you’ve heard from him?” Markov said.

  “No. Haven’t you?”

  “He doesn’t answer. I left a message.”

  Andropov walked into Magda’s office and found her standing beside her desk. Except for the smashed door, nothing in the room seemed to have been disturbed.

  “What did they take?” he said. “What was done here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “They came in here for a reason. Something happened. What was taken?”

  “I keep nothing important here,” she said. “If it matters, it goes into the system. You know that.”

  He needed a couple of seconds to realize what this must mean.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. He began to shout: “Markov, the network! They got the fucking network!”

  He strode out in a hurry and almost ran into Markov, who was holding out a cell phone.

  “It’s Totoy,” Markov said. ”You won’t like this.”

  Manila Bay was almost thirty miles across, measured from the city’s waterfront to the entrance of the South China Sea. The speedboat could have covered the distance in well under twenty minutes, but the bay was cluttered with traffic, including dozens of outrigger fishing boats, some marked by no more than a lightbulb or two, and Mendonza wanted to keep the ride as smooth as possible for Arielle and Stickney and the laptop below. So Mendonza kept the boat throttled back to about 40 miles an hour, and they ran that way for about half an hour, until the bay began to narrow, with long arms of land closing in on both sides, pinching in to form the mouth of the bay. An island, long and steeply humped at one end, lay ahead, in the gap between the two arms.

  The island grew larger, and Mendonza slowed the boat almost to an idle.

  Stickney looked up from the hatch. His face was grave. He said, “Are you anchoring? We’re not done yet.”

  “That’s fine,” Favor said. “We’re just looking for a place to put in.”

  Mendonza brought the boat in close to the shore. He was steering mostly by the infrared video display in the cockpit: the island was still, and completely dark. He brought the boat around to a concrete dock. It seemed to be old; chunks had fallen off the sides, exposing rusted reinforcing rods.

  It was the only human structure in sight. Beside it was a beach of dark sand and gravel, and behind it was a saddle of land, forested, at the foot of the high, craggy hump.

  Favor jumped up onto the dock and tied up the bow line.

  Mendonza cut the engines, and there was silence, broken only by the water gently lapping against the hull and the concrete pilings.

  Favor looked around and said, “Al. This is Corregidor.”

  “Yes, it is,” Mendonza said.

  Corregidor: it was a touchstone of the Second World War, an island fortress where American and Filipino forces had held out for months against daily bombardment and shelling from the Japanese who had captured all the rest of the bay and the land that surrounded it.

  Hundreds had died here during the siege, then thousands more during the island’s recapture by airborne troops three years later.

  “We want a quiet place to talk, it doesn’t get any quieter than here,” Mendonza said. “And this is the mouth of the bay. From here, we’ve got more or less a straight shot south to Devil’s Keep, if it comes to that.”

  “Let’s see,” Favor said.

  He looked down into the cabin. Stickney and Arielle were still at the laptop, talking. Arielle was pointing at the screen, her voice low, animated. Favor couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  Favor and Mendonza sat back in the chairs. They chatted for a while about the boat and Franklin Kwok and their raid on the Optimo offices. About half an hour went by before Arielle came up from the cabin, with Stickney behind her.

  Something was wrong, Favor thought. Their faces were grim.

  Favor said, “Ari? Stick? You got something?”

  “They’re organized,” Stickney said. “They’ve kept a record of everything. So yes. We have it all. Flight logs, duty rosters, the manifest for the monthly supply boat to the island.”

  Favor looked closer at Arielle.

  Her eyes were glistening.

  Tears? Was Arielle crying?

  “I always thought I was shockproof,” she said. “I mean, the four of us? You’d figure there’s nothing we haven’t seen. I thought I knew the very worst that people can do to one another. But I was wrong.”

  Harvest Day

  –1

  Twenty-eight

  They’re Russians,” Arielle said. “A mob, no doubt.

  “And they’re in the heart business.…

  “Human hearts.

  “They’re transplanting healthy hearts to people who need new ones, and who can pay for it. Really pay. They do the transplants down there on the island. They started slow, three in the first two months, but it’s been picking up. Five in the last month and a half, seventeen in all. And two more scheduled in the next couple of days. They have the whole setup—the surgical suite, post-op care facilities, a lab. They built it from scratch, and it must’ve cost them millions, but they probably paid it off in the first couple of procedures. We’re talking millions of dollars for each surgery. Whatever they figure the traffic will bear. When you’re selling life, you can name your price.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Mendonza said.

  “Let me tell you about heart transplants,” Arielle continued. “They’re wonderful, but there are a couple of major problems. One, there aren’t nearly enough healthy donor hearts to fill the demand. Most countries, the waiting list is a year or more. People die waiting for hearts.

  “Then there’s rejection. Our immune systems are built to repel foreign substances. The mechanism is the system of human leucocyte antigens: HLA. It’s genetic. There are two hundred different antigens, and about thirty thousand different possible HLA sets. When the body encounters tissue with an HLA set that’s different from its own—like with a transplanted o
rgan—it goes to war with the foreign tissue. Never mind that the organ is essential to life. The body will literally kill itself to get rid of a heart that looks like it doesn’t belong. Half of all transplant recipients experience a rejection episode in the first year after surgery. You can avoid that, or at least reduce it, by transplanting a heart with a similar HLA profile.

  “The problem is, when you’re on the list and you get that call to come in for surgery, you have no idea how well you match up. The heart is good for three hours after death. There isn’t any time to worry about matching. If you’re next on the list, and you can be there right away, you get a heart. Then it’s a roll of the dice. A bad match, you’re probably in for a rough ride.

  “The Russians have solved both those problems. They’re not waiting for hearts. They’re taking them. But not at random: they have HLA profiles on their transplant clients, and they look for hearts to match. That’s the purpose of the blood tests. They do the lab work in Manila, every night. If an applicant’s profile is a close match to a client, she gets an offer for a job abroad and a bus ticket to Manila. But she doesn’t go abroad. She just goes to Devil’s Keep, and the only part of her that ever leaves is the heart that goes on beating in somebody else’s body.”

  “By the way,” Arielle said, “the employment agency part is for real. Optimo is a front, but it’s a working front, just in case anybody happened to check. They have branch offices in Tacloban, Vigan, Naga, Laoag, and Calbayog—all small to midsize provincial capitals with airfreight service to Manila. And all of them, frankly, full of people who want to work abroad. People who would basically be disappearing anyway. Because that’s what they do when they take that overseas job in Qatar or Singapore or wherever. To the people they leave behind, they’re as good as gone. But if that’s the only chance you’ve got, you jump at it. You do what you have to do.

  “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.”

  Twenty-nine

  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.