Authors: Phillip Finch
By midday she was sure that something was wrong. A small island, a few buildings. Where was Junior, if not here?
In the afternoon she heard another pair of voices outside. Two men, foreigners, speaking their foreign language. She didn’t understand the words, but she recognized the tone. They were complaining.
She climbed up to look. It was the two men who tended to her cell every day, the mismatched pair. They were walking down the hill. They carried large white buckets, one in each hand, four in all. The buckets were deep and were covered with lids. They seemed to be heavy. The giant handled them easily, but the little guy was working hard and yapping loudly.
She watched as they hauled the buckets down the hill to the dock. They put the buckets down, not far from where the speedboat was tied up.
The two men began to talk between themselves, some kind of discussion. Then the small man pried the lid from one of the buckets, picked it up, and carried it to the end of the dock. He upended it and dumped out whatever was inside, spilling it into the sea.
An angry shout came from somewhere up the hill, just out of Marivic’s sight. The men on the dock stopped and looked up toward the sound.
Now the shouting man stepped into view, right below Marivic. He gesticulated, pointing with a sweep of his left hand.
Around back!
he seemed to be saying.
The two men didn’t argue. They just carried the three remaining buckets into the speedboat. The giant cast off the lines; the other got behind the wheel and started the motor.
From his sharp bark and the way the others had obeyed him, Marivic guessed that the man who stood below her must have some authority. Maybe he was in charge. He stood watching as the boat backed out and headed around the island, and he didn’t move until the boat was out of sight.
Then he turned just long enough for Marivic to glimpse his face. It was the foreigner who had sat beside her in the plane. He walked back the way he had come.
She wished that he would stay. She had some questions for him
Where is Junior?
she wanted to ask.
What have you done with him?
But he was gone, and the boat was gone too. There was just the path and the hillside down to the empty dock.
She climbed down from the top of the wall and went back to her cot.
Favor was wrong about the Gulfstream 550. For a transpacific flight, the charter operator needed six hours’ notice, not three. And since the plane was based in Oakland, Favor would save time by meeting it there instead of routing it to Lake Tahoe. He suggested that they drive down together, have a good dinner, and board the plane when it was ready.
Stickney and Mendonza needed the extra time to get their passports. Mendonza’s wife sent his by courier to Oakland. Stickney’s housekeeper, who had a key to his home, found his passport in his desk; her son agreed to bring it down to Oakland.
All this came together in less than twenty minutes as the four of them sat in the gazebo along the Tahoe shore. Arielle handled most of it, down to the dinner reservations and the catering details for the Gulfstream.
“One thing we ought to talk about,” Mendonza said. “I was wondering what you want to do about logistics in Manila. Maybe we ought to have somebody on the ground handling arrangements.”
“You think we need that?” Favor said. “I figure we book suites at a kick-ass hotel, the hotel sends a limo to meet us at the airport, after that we play it by ear.”
“It could get complicated,” Mendonza said. “I need to get to Leyte right away. See the mother, get the story. We all ought to have cell phones. A couple of cars with drivers would be nice. We could do all that ourselves, but it’d be easier to have somebody else hassling the details.”
“You’re right. Yeah, let’s do it,” Favor said. “You have somebody in mind?”
“How about Edwin Santos?” Mendonza said, and in unison Arielle and Stickney yelled, “No Problem Eddie!”
They all remembered Santos. Bravo One Nine had once spent several weeks on assignment in Manila, and Santos was the team’s local contact and logistical source—a critical asset. He boasted that he could supply whatever they needed: weapons, documents, electronics, vehicles.
“No problem!” he would crow.
It wasn’t an empty claim. What he promised, Santos had always delivered.
And not just tangibles. Santos also dealt in access and knowledge. His contacts seemed endless. He moved among politicians and gangsters, bishops and pimps, Red guerrillas and right-wing vigilantes, brokering services and esoteric transactions. Edwin Santos was incredibly useful.
“Is Eddie still around?” Favor asked. “I wouldn’t know where to find him.”
“He’s around. I used him last year,” Mendonza said. “I handled security for a client on an Asian tour. Eddie took care of the crap at the Manila end. You
know, the endless little wrinkles that bog you down. Crap came up, I handed it off to Eddie, he made it disappear.”
Arielle said, “That’s Eddie.”
Favor turned to Winston Stickney. It was an automatic gesture from their years in the field. Stickney was the wise man, insightful and sober. Stick always seemed to know what to do.
He was having no part of it now, though. He held up his hands, shook his head.
“It’s not my party, Ray. Do what you think is best.”
Mendonza was looking at Favor, waiting for an answer.
“Sure,” Favor said. “Call Eddie. Phones, cars, domestic flights.”
Mendonza said, “What about paper?”
Paper
meant forged passports and supporting documents. To a Bravo team, it was a staple. Paper was as basic as air.
“Why would we need paper?” Favor said. “To look for a girl gone lost? To scuba dive and lie on the beach?”
“Just asking,” Mendonza said. “I guess it feels a little strange, the four of us going off somewhere without cover.”
“We don’t need cover,” Favor said. “We’re going to do a little good deed and then we’re gonna have some fun. That’s all. No cover, no paper. No fucking tradecraft, we’re done with that shit.”
He realized that his voice had risen. The others were looking at him. Staring.
Favor took a couple of seconds, composed himself. When he spoke again he made sure that he sounded calm.
“I just want to play it straight,” he said. “Agreed?”
“Sure,” Stickney said.
“Why not?” Arielle said.
“Whatever you think,” Mendonza said.
“That’s what I think,” Favor said. “It’s just a vacation, goddammit.”
Arielle left them and went off to pack.
Her home was about fifteen minutes away, but she didn’t have to go there. She had a bedroom at the converted lodge, a place to crash at the end of a long night of work. She kept clothes there, and an overnight bag that was always packed and ready to go. Favor often traveled on a few minutes’ notice to inspect property, and usually he wanted Arielle with him.
When she got to the room, she spent a few minutes replacing winter clothes in the bag with some warm-weather pieces. Then she carried it to her office. She picked up a laptop computer—one of two that she kept in sync with the desktop machine—and she zipped it into a carrying case.
She opened a desk drawer and removed a piece of electronic equipment about the size and shape of a paperback book: a black case dotted with a row of LED lights. At a glance, it resembled the broadband modem found in many American homes. It was in fact a compact satellite antenna: when connected to
the laptop, and properly aligned with a data satellite, it provided a reliable high-speed Internet connection virtually anywhere in the world.
Favor sometimes said that Arielle’s job was to be the smartest person in a fifty-mile radius, major research universities not excepted. It was a joke with a large kernel of truth. When he researched a new business opportunity, Favor was full of questions, usually esoteric and difficult. And when he needed to know, he went to Arielle. She had a gift for learning. She read rapidly and retained almost everything, and above all she knew how to find the answers she didn’t already know. The satellite antenna and her laptop allowed her to do it from anywhere.
She slid the antenna into a pocket of the laptop case.
On her way out, she paused at the top of the stairs. She asked herself:
What will Ray need?
She answered:
Antibiotic ointment and dressings.
It was exactly the kind of thing he would neglect.
Looking after Ray Favor was not part of the job description. Yet she did it, probably more than was healthy for either of them. She didn’t consider herself the nurturing type, and she was definitely not self-sacrificing. It came down to two reasons:
She cared for him.
He had nobody else to do it.
Their relationship was unique, as far as she could tell. They never married, but they knew each other far better and were far more intimate than most married couples. They had been lovers for the past dozen
years, yet she had had others in her life, and Favor had had many women. They disdained sexual exclusivity and the jealousies that went with it, and they both resisted any infringement on their personal freedom. Still, they were mutually devoted.
Arielle thought that they had proved themselves to each other so often, in so many different ways, that they needed no formal commitment. They didn’t need declarations of love. They didn’t even need a name for what they had. They just
were
, and they always would be.
Arielle went to a supply room where Favor kept some first-aid supplies. She grabbed bandage squares and gauze, bandage tape and antibiotic ointment, and zipped it all into a pocket of her overnight bag.
When she got to the gazebo, Favor and the others were discussing which vehicle they should take and who would drive.
She said, “Slow down, hotshot. Let’s take a look at those dressings.”
“The dressings are fine,” he said.
“Take off your shirt.”
“You think I can’t tell if the dressings are good? Think I haven’t been banged up often enough to know when I need fresh bandages?”
“Ray,” she said. ”The shirt.”
He opened the shirt.
The G550 had twelve seats, first two occupied by the two relief pilots. Halfway back in the cabin, four of the seats were grouped around a table. The four of
them gathered there once the plane was airborne at cruising altitude.
They joked and laughed, drank champagne, and ate oysters and caviar before a meal of lobster bisque and tournedos Wellington.
By now the time was past midnight on the West Coast. They dimmed the cabin lights. Mendonza and Stickney went to the back of the cabin and were soon asleep, reclining in their seats.
Favor sat across the table from Arielle. She watched him fall asleep, his eyes gradually closing, his chest rising and falling in a measured rhythm.
His body suddenly tensed. He mumbled an extended guttural sound. It could have been words or just a tortured groan; she couldn’t tell. His hands clenched the ends of the armrests.
She knew that he was dreaming. And from the anguished expression on his face, she thought it must be one of
those
dreams.
She was right: it was one of those dreams. Except Favor didn’t think of them that way. True, they came while he slept, and they came on their own relentless schedule, even though he desperately willed them not to come. So in that way they were like dreams.
But dreams were supposed to be symbolic creations of the mind. These were real. Every moment came direct and unaltered from Favor’s life, selected with brutal logic, assembled in such a way as to inflict maximum pain. They were a personal library of horror, episodes of
his history that he had always tried to push aside. Long avoided in his waking hours, the memories came roaring back to him in sleep. But even as he slept, some part of his mind was always conscious when they played out. The memories seemed to want this. They demanded his awareness. No matter how bad they were, he could not turn away.
The one that played for him now as he slept in the Gulfstream’s cabin was the worst of the worst. It was so searing, and so shameful, that he had never told anyone. He was the only living person who remembered it, and he knew that he would take it to his grave.
It begins with the voice of his mother, summoning him to attention.
Oh, Raymond,
she says, a sad sigh that pierces him through the heart. He is eight years old, in the living room of their little bungalow on the back side of his grandparents’ ranch. He’s looking into her eyes. Dark eyes, red rimmed and glistening with tears. She’s a beautiful woman. Long black hair and glowing pink skin and ripened-cherry lips. At eight, he doesn’t comprehend her this way. But thirty-six years later, as he dozes in the seat, the alert part of his mind sees her as she was, the way others must have seen her. A beauty.
Oh, Raymond
. Her tone is beseeching. He doesn’t know what she wants, and this scares him, because it is the most important thing he has ever done or ever will do, and he has to get it right.
Tell me what you want,
the eight-year-old boy wants
to say. But he can’t speak.
Tell me,
the sleeping adult says across the distance of decades.
Pull the fucking trigger,
says his father. It’s a few days earlier, a summer evening. The boy is holding a .22 rifle, crouching with his father beside a fallen log in a forest. (The sleepborne memories do this sometimes, bouncing back and forth in time and place, but never at random. There is always a point.) The boy squints down the barrel. He has handled guns for more than a year: his father insisted on it. First it was paper targets and tin cans, now live game for the first time. Ten or fifteen paces away, a chipmunk squats on a flat rock, facing the fallen log, nose twitching. The rifle has a notched sight at the top of the receiver and a thin blade sight at the end of the barrel, and the boy has lined them up with the plump patch of fur at the chipmunk’s throat.
Shoot,
his father hisses into the boy’s ear. His finger is at the trigger, touching the cool curve of steel. The animal’s small head fills his vision. Black eyes, dancing whiskers, and the perfect alignment of notch and blade and fur. His finger doesn’t move. Refuses to move. With a woodsman’s stealth, the father snakes his arm along the boy’s back and reaches around his neck. He takes the boy’s ear between thumb and forefinger, and he pinches, nails digging into his son’s flesh.