Authors: Phillip Finch
“We really ought to have three vehicles,” Mendonza said. “This looks like a daily routine, right? Wait a day, we can have that third car, do it right.”
“No,” Favor said. “I feel like I already gave away a day yesterday. I don’t want to give away any more. Two vehicles is what we’ve got, so we make it happen with two.”
He looked around at them, checking their faces. He was looking for hesitation, disagreement.
He saw that they were all with them.
“Then we’re on,” he said.
He got into the second car with Arielle and drove out of the parking lot, past the terminal, down the one-way terminal. He found a parking space on the street where the terminal road exited into city traffic.
He pulled in and parked, and waited for the call from Mendonza and Stickney that would ID their target for the tail. Cars and jeepneys surged past his window, moving fast. Favor knew that darkness would help mask the tail, but he would have to hustle to stay with the target. Mendonza in the second car might not be able to catch up. Then it would be just him, hanging with the target while trying to stay unnoticed.
He realized that Arielle was looking at him. She had turned partway toward him and was taking him in, studying him. Smiling.
She said, “Ray, you’re looking good.”
“I appreciate that, but we probably ought to wait until we get to a room.”
“I didn’t say you looked edible. Although you do. I said you look good.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Solid. Squared away. On the beam,” she said.
“Good.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he said.
Stickney and Mendonza sat waiting in their car, Mendonza behind the wheel. The parking area was thinning out, and foot traffic through the front doors was light.
A red Honda CR-V pulled up and parked at the curb in front of the terminal. Mendonza watched the new arrival, but there was no movement, and about half a minute later a dark blue Toyota van stopped short of the pickup zone, reversed, and backed up to the loading dock.
Mendonza said, “This may be it.”
A side door opened on the van, and the overhead light briefly illuminated the driver and a passenger, both young men, as the passenger got out and walked around to the back.
At the periphery of his vision, Mendonza caught movement at the red Honda in front of the terminal—someone stepping out onto the sidewalk—but he disregarded it and focused on the blue van at the loading dock.
A door opened at the dock. Someone pushed out a freight dolly. Stacked on the dolly were five cream-colored cartons sealed with red tape.
Mendonza had his camera out, shooting with the telephoto lens. He said, “Call Ray. Dark blue Toyota van, driver and passenger, coming his way.”
“No,” Stickney said. “Let that one go.”
“Let it go? Stick, they’re putting the cartons in the van.”
He looked over at Stickney and saw him bent low at the waist. Stickney was hiding behind the front dash.
“Ray’ll be burned if he follows the van,” Stickney said. “Guy that just got out of the red Honda, standing on the sidewalk—I think he’s running cover for
the shipment. Tell Ray to follow him. He’ll go where the shipment goes.”
Mendonza saw him now: a stocky Filipino standing at the entrance of the terminal.
“Close-cropped hair, late forties, white shirt worn untucked?”
“That’s him,” Stickney said.
The man was appraising the situation, alert. For a moment he looked straight at the car where Mendonza was sitting, checking him out, before he clocked over somewhere else.
Mendonza had put the camera in his lap. He raised it now and fired off several frames, getting a couple of good shots as the man stood beneath a light at the entrance.
Stickney was still bent down, trying to stay out of sight.
Mendonza said, “I think you’re right. Good read, Stick. How did you know?”
“I met him this morning,” Stickney said.
Most of the time, Totoy Ribera left his drones to handle the daily cargo run from the airport, and most of the time the Russians were fine with that. Not tonight, though. Tonight Andropov had insisted that Totoy go along for the pickup.
The Russians were nervous, Totoy thought. It was because of the unknown Americans poking around, even though they hadn’t actually done anything more than ask a few questions.
At first Totoy thought that the Russians were
overreacting. This was the first little bump in the road since this deal first came together seven months earlier, and it didn’t seem like much of a threat.
But Totoy was aware that he had one big disadvantage: he didn’t know what the Russians were hiding at the other end of the seaplane ride from Manila. The Russians knew, though, and Totoy told himself that if they were uneasy, maybe he should be too.
So when Andropov told him to accompany the pickup crew to the airport and back, Totoy didn’t argue. And he didn’t just go along for the ride, either. He took a separate car so he could shadow the pickup on the return trip. While the van was loaded, he parked the red Honda at the terminal concourse. He got out and scanned the scene, looking for some disturbance, some subtle hint of jeopardy.
He noticed the car in a front row of the parking lot. One occupant, a driver, sitting in the dark. Totoy couldn’t make out details, but he saw that it was a man. A big man.
Toto thought about the description from the Optimo office manager in Tacloban.
A big Fil-Am. Very very big.
Totoy considered whether he ought to go over to the car, check out the big guy.
To Totoy’s left, at the loading dock, his boys were pushing the last of the cartons into the van, shutting the door. They were getting ready to leave. Totoy knew that crossing the road and checking out the car in the parking lot would take at least two or three minutes, maybe more. He could order the boys in the
van to wait, but he didn’t like the idea. He wanted that shipment on the move.
But there was an easier way to check: just watch the car, see how the driver reacted when the van left the terminal. If the car remained behind, then Totoy could assume that the big driver was harmless. But if the car pulled out of the lot and followed the van, then Totoy would know that the Americans had somehow discovered the nightly delivery, and that the big Fil-Am was trying to track the shipment to its destination.
That can be dealt with,
Totoy thought.
The van was moving, wheeling away from the loading dock. It passed Totoy and continued down the terminal road to the exit.
The car with the big man inside didn’t move.
Totoy waited. He counted out half a minute, and still the car didn’t move. By now the van was at the exit, turning into the city streets. Totoy climbed into the Honda and pulled out from the curb at the terminal. He looked back in his rearview mirror and saw that the car with the big man at the wheel still hadn’t moved.
In the clear,
Totoy thought. He put the car and the big man out of mind as he accelerated along the terminal road. The van was now turning into the street, entering traffic. When Totoy pulled into the street, he was about half a block behind the van.
That was just right for his purposes. He was checking for a tail, watching the vehicles between him and the van, how they moved and behaved.
He saw nothing unusual.
The direct route from the airport to the residence was just a couple of miles, usually no more than ten or fifteen minutes, but Totoy had told the van driver to make a couple of sudden turns, and he hung back to see how the other vehicles reacted. After the second detour, the set of vehicles between him and the van was completely different from those at the beginning of the trip, so he was sure they were unobserved.
At that point Totoy pulled in close behind the van as it crossed Amorsolo Street and turned down the alley that ran behind the Impierno building and the residence.
They stopped at the back entrance of the residence, a black-painted gate of solid steel that the guards opened and swung in. Totoy followed the van in, and the gate closed behind them.
Done, and not a ripple of trouble. Maybe the Russians really were paranoid after all.
Favor followed the Honda as far as the alley behind the residence. He swung around the block and came back the other way, and when he passed the alley again the two vehicles were pulling through the open gate. Mendonza and Stickney were behind Favor’s car, and they, too, got a glimpse of the Honda following the van inside.
They all had plenty to talk about. Mendonza suggested dinner, and they gathered at a restaurant called Aristocrat, on the curving boulevard that ran along the bay front, where they got a private room
and talked over all that had happened and what they would do next.
Two missing teenagers, shipments of blood samples, and all of it going to a block on Amorsolo Street, a place so touchy that Winston Stickney had been assaulted just for going near it.
They had finished dinner and were still talking when Eddie Santos called Arielle to tell her that he had found a hideout. She gave the phone to Mendonza so that he could get directions.
“Where are we going?” Mendonza asked.
“Bear in mind, I was working on short notice,” Santos said.
“Where, Eddie?”
“North side of the Pasig River.”
“How far north?”
“Oh, it’s close in, don’t worry about that.”
“Eddie—where?”
“It is in Tondo.”
Mendonza muted the phone. He turned to the others. He said, “My friends, life just got very real.”
With more than four hundred thousand residents in an area of about one and a half square miles, the Tondo district of Manila is among the most densely populated places on earth. It is the home of Manila’s main slaughterhouse and its docks, a place of freight depots and tenements and off-kilter utility poles that bristle with illegal electrical connections, daringly installed. It is a place where gray water stands in the crevices of broken sidewalks. Tondo is the birthplace of pickpockets and revolutionaries and whores and anonymous saints. It is rich in heart and humanity and history, but rousingly poor by almost every other standard.
Tondo was also the childhood home of Edwin Santos. He operated many of his businesses there, and when he learned from Arielle Bouchard that she and the others required secure emergency lodging, he immediately thought of Tondo. In all the Philippines, it was probably the last place anyone would look for four wealthy Americans.
Arielle didn’t say why they needed safe haven, but obviously they were in some difficulty, not of the kind that could be fixed with the infusion of money. Trouble wasn’t something he would have wished for
them, but since it had happened, he did feel a small thrill knowing that he was being depended upon by serious people acting seriously.
The place he had in mind for them was hardly luxurious, but it was as discreet and secure as any place they could hope to find. Thirteen years earlier, the four Americans would have recognized it for the gem that it was.
Now Santos would find out just how much they had changed.
Mendonza followed Santos’s directions to one of Tondo’s dark side streets. They found him waiting outside a bleak, bare structure with barred windows and a steel roll-up door as big and wide as a
truck.
When he saw them, Santos reached down and lifted the door, running it up on tracks until they could drive in and park.
It was a bodega, a storehouse, with stacks of cartons and crates, and walls full of steel shelves. But Santos had brought in cots, about half a dozen box fans, and a water cooler, a refrigerator, and a microwave oven. In one corner was a toilet and a native-style shower: a bucket and dipper that filled from a spigot in the wall.
When they were in, he rolled the door down and locked it. He turned to watch their faces as they got out and looked around.
He said, “It’s clean, and you’ll have plenty of room. I guarantee that you won’t be disturbed. You
can keep your cars off the street, out of sight. There is room for two vehicles in here.”
Arielle said, “I’ll need Internet access somehow. I don’t think I can find the satellite from here.”
“No problem,” Santos said. “Behind this back wall is an Internet café. I made arrangements; they ran a line in. Here, see?”
He pointed to where an Ethernet cable lay coiled on the floor beside a steel table.
Arielle opened her laptop on the table and powered it up. She plugged in the cable.
“Good,” she said. “But is it secure?”
“The owner of the café guarantees that it’s secure.” He flashed a quick smile. “That would be me.”
Stickney looked around, nodded approval.
Mendonza grinned. Santos thought he seemed amused by the idea, enjoying it.
Santos looked at Favor.
“It’s perfect,” Favor said.
Santos showed them around. The roll-up door was opened by key from outside—he gave them two keys—and was manually locked from inside. The second entrance was at the rear, a steel-sheathed door with a security peephole and a buzzer. The steel looked thick enough to stop a pistol round. The windows were barred from the outside, boarded over on the inside. Mendonza thought this wasn’t the first time the place had been used for something more than storing dry goods.
Santos began describing the neighborhood—a bakery, the shops, a fruit and vegetable market, a
small restaurant—while Arielle got the memory card from Mendonza’s camera. She copied the files to the laptop and opened an image viewer to organize them.
Mendonza stood behind her chair as she clicked through the images. She stopped to study the photo of Totoy Ribera, standing under the light at the concourse of the domestic airport.
Santos was a few feet away, talking to Favor and Stickney. He had a view of the screen and occasionally glanced down at it as the images clicked by.
He suddenly stopped and said, “Excuse me, it’s none of my business, but that photo—”
“Yes?” Favor said.
“I shouldn’t say anything. I suppose you’re already aware of who you’re dealing with.”
“You know this man?” Favor said.
“I know
of
him. His name is Antonio Ribera. Totoy Ribera. He is a captain of the PNP. The PNP has a certain reputation, that’s no secret. And to me, it’s mostly undeserved. These guys aren’t paid well, they have families to feed, so I don’t blame them for maybe doing a little monkey business where they can. But mostly they’re good cops. They care; they want to do what’s right. Most of them.”