Authors: Phillip Finch
Marivic Valencia woke around this time too. A scuffle in the other cell woke her.
She didn’t know how long it had been going on, but it lasted only a few more seconds before she heard the door close on the other side of the wall.
“Ronnie?”
“Yeah.” Disgruntled.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. But they were rough with the needles.”
She said, “Needles?”
“Twice. Once to take blood from my arm. Once to give me an injection.”
“NO!”
she cried.
Favor ran south through Tondo’s streets, then across the Roxas Bridge over the Pasig and past the thick stone redoubts of Intramuros, the old walled city
of Manila. He ran through the city park called the Luneta, past the Manila Hotel, past the steel shafts of the fence around the U.S. embassy, perched on a shelf of land that angled into Manila Bay.
He ran on the broad sidewalk along the bay front, past gleaming hotels on one side and the still water of the bay on the other, with the high green ridges of the Bataan peninsula in the distance. A man, sleeping on palm fronds, opened his eyes and looked up as Favor passed.
Favor ran the full length of the curving bay front, past the Manila Yacht Club and the headquarters of the Philippine Navy. Where the seawall ended, at the green lawn and white walls of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, he stopped and checked his watch. He had been running for thirty-one minutes. A little over five miles at six minutes per mile.
He turned and ran back the way he had come, but the return trip took longer. He made a stop along the way. When Favor returned to the bodega, the time was almost seven a.m. and he was sweating from the heat of the day.
Mendonza and Stickney were seated at the table, drinking coffee and eating breakfast. Arielle, too, was at the table, but she was intent at her laptop.
Two large canvas bags sat on the floor of the bodega.
“Eddie Santos been by?” Favor asked.
“Second installment on the wish list,” Stickney said.
“Now we just need the firearms and the paper. And Ari’s worm.”
Without looking up she said, “Ari’s worm will be ready.”
Favor said, “Ari, if you can take a break, I need to know about a dude named Franklin Kwok.”
Now she looked up. “Would that be the rich dude Franklin Kwok?”
“Apparently.”
“Hong Kong. Shipbuilding is the family business, but since he took over, Franklin has expanded into construction and chemicals and agricultural commodities—especially construction, I think. He’s somewhere on the
Forbes
list. Not right at the top, but not anywhere near the bottom, either. He must be about your age. He has a touch of the flamboyant about him. He dates actresses and drives fast cars the way they’re supposed to be driven. Kind of unusual for serious Hong Kong money. They usually keep their heads low.”
Favor said, “I need an introduction.”
“To Franklin Kwok? Ray, I rarely say this, but you may be playing out of your league.”
“Probably,” Favor said. “But I want to sit down with him. Right away. He has something that we need.”
“What’s that?”
“A rat hole,” Favor said.
They all understood. To the members of the former Bravo One Nine, a rat hole was a haven. A refuge. It was any place where they could disappear and regroup in safety when their cover was compromised.
A rat hole being the place where rats go when
someone unexpectedly turns on the lights.
When One Nine was active, they had never operated without at least one rat hole. Sometimes they would have several, a sequence of places where they could fall back and hide, buying some time before they retreated to the next one in the string.
The love motel had been a rat hole of sorts, but it had been improvised, and rat holes weren’t supposed to work that way. Too chancy. Rat holes were supposed to be set up in advance, waiting.
“Jeez, Favor, a rat hole. It’s about time,” Arielle said.
“Is it a good one?” Mendonza said.
“It’s a beauty,” Favor said. “Like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
Franklin Kwok motioned Favor to a seat at his table.
They were in the dining room of a golf club south of Manila. Kwok wore a golf shirt the color of lapis lazuli, mirror sunglasses, and a Rolex watch with a gold band only slightly smaller than a boxer’s championship belt.
“Sit,” he said. “Have a drink. Do you know what you want to eat? I recommend the yellowfin.”
The introduction had been arranged by Favor’s banker in Hong Kong, who knew Franklin Kwok. But this wasn’t surprising. Most bankers in Hong Kong knew Franklin Kwok.
“I’m happy to meet you,” Kwok said after they had ordered lunch. “But I have to tell you directly, I’m not selling. I didn’t build it to sell.”
“I knew it must be a custom job.”
“Custom? I built it! It’s my design, one of a kind. I was even in there getting my hands dirty when I had the time.”
Favor wrote two numbers on the back of a business card, several digits each. He passed the card to Kwok.
Kwok took off his sunglasses and held the card up to read. “What are these figures?”
“The first is my estimate of the fair market value in U.S. dollars. The second is the amount I’m prepared to pay.”
“Twice as much as the first,” Kwok said. “I like the way you think. The first is close. The second … Look, if you’re willing to spend this much, you can build one of your own. I won’t let you have my plans, but I’ll give you a few ideas to get you started.”
“I don’t have time for that,” Favor said. “I need something that’s ready to go right now.”
“Need?” Kwok said. ”One doesn’t
need
something like this. Desire, yes. But not need.”
“I need it,” Favor repeated. “My friends and I are engaged in a certain enterprise. It’s not for profit—not what you might think—but it entails an element of risk. This could save our lives, me and my friends. I’m not being dramatic. That’s a fact.”
“Tell me,” Kwok said. Now he was interested.
Favor spoke: not all the details, but enough that Kwok would understand.
“Fascinating,” Kwok said when Favor had finished. “This is perfect for your purposes.”
“I thought so.”
“No, I mean
perfect
. Even better than you could know.”
“I may not even use it,” Favor said. “But I want to know that I have it.”
“And for how long would you want to know that?”
“I expect that the problem will be resolved in a couple of weeks. Maybe just days.”
Franklin Kwok thought for a moment.
He said, “Are you a gambler?”
“Not the casino kind.”
Kwok laughed. “I know what you mean. The stakes that really matter, you don’t bet those at a roulette wheel.”
He dug into a pocket and came up with a coin. He held it up for Favor to see. On the face it showed the national heroes Apolinario Mabini and Andres Bonifacio; on the reverse, the Philippine national seal.
“You call it,” Kwok said. “Win the toss, it’s yours for one month.”
“And if I lose?”
“If you lose…” Kwok flipped the coin into the air.
“Tails,” Favor said.
Franklin Kwok caught the coin and slapped it onto the back of his left hand without revealing it.
“If you lose,” he said, “maybe you should take it as a bad omen, and consider abandoning your enterprise.”
He lifted his hand, just enough to peek at the coin.
He looked down on the faces of Mabini and Bonifacio.
“This must be your lucky day,” he said, and he swept the coin into his pocket. “Let me tell you exactly what you’ve got. No, better yet—let me show you.”
In Nice, France—seven hours behind Manila time—the sun was just rising as Ilya Andropov’s most important client extracted himself from the limbs and bodies of the four young women who slept sprawled, mostly naked, on his oversize bed. He sorted out the arms and legs and rumps and breasts, clearing the tangle enough that he could crawl to the edge of the mattress.
He was in his fifties, a big man gone soft, his back and shoulders and barrel chest matted in graying body hair.
He was breathing hard as he sat up at the edge of the bed.
The jostling awoke one of the women. Lisette was her name. She was twenty-two, a sun-washed and tanned-all-over blonde. At different times she called herself, or had been called, a model, actress, party girl, whore. Just words, and they fit all the other women on the bed as well. They belonged to the female swarm that gravitated to the huge house on the hill above the city, with its infinity pool and its fast cars and endlessly flowing champagne, and the pricey gifts, and the prodigious quantities of drugs that were never out of reach.
And, really, all you had to do for it was be there, and be yourself, and be prepared to show a little indulgence to the man who called himself Uncle Teddy.
She watched him now as he stood and made his way over to the water closet and leaned over the toilet, bracing himself against the wall with one arm while he pissed.
She looked at his face as he walked back over to the bed. It was misshapen, out of balance. Normal from the centerline to his left ear … but the right side, the cheekbone to the jaw, was caved in and scarred. To Lisette it looked as if it had been badly broken and then put back together by someone who didn’t know what he was doing. An accident, she supposed. It had left one eye slightly off-axis, just enough that you would notice when you looked at him straight on—enough that the swarming females all called him Cockeye Teddy, though never in his presence.
He walked over to the bed and stood looking down at the sleeping women. His dick was within arm’s length of Lisette, and she reached up and gave it a casual tug. She knew there was no chance that he would respond. The dick didn’t really work, but he liked to pretend that it did, and that he was voracious and desirable. Another indulgence.
He let her fondle it for a few seconds, then said, “Not now, my little dirty-leg slut. There’s no time.”
He reached into the bed and began grabbing wrists and ankles, shaking them, saying, “Let’s wake
up, come on sleepyhead, time to get up,” speaking in his laughably awkward French. He clapped his hands loudly. “Let’s go, girls. Time to leave. The party has ended.”
Lisette didn’t understand. In the weeks since she first came to the house, it had been an endless rolling feast of pleasure and the senses. The party never ended.
She said, “Leave?”
“Yes,” he said. “I have to get dressed. Uncle Teddy is going away, and you can’t come with me.”
The passports were ready for Eddie Santos about an hour later than promised. They were from Canada, for Jules Touchfeather; from the Philippines, Roberto Dugay; from Haiti, Claudette Monfort; from Trinidad and Tobago, Arnold Goforth. The quality was good, and Santos knew that Favor would be pleased. But he also knew that Favor was expecting the paper and the weapons no later than six p.m. The time was nearly five p.m., Manila’s afternoon rush was swelling by the minute, and Santos still didn’t have the pistols.
They were hidden at Santos’s beer pub, in the northern suburb called Valenzuela. Santos drove there furiously, drawing on his lifetime knowledge of Manila’s streets, avoiding congestion by using alleyways and obscure shortcuts every time traffic seemed to slow.
The time was almost 5:30 when he reached the beer pub. It was a Filipino version of a workingman’s bar, with about a dozen outside tables and more inside. Santos found a space out front, parked, and hurried in.
Santos waved a quick hello to the beer pub’s day manager and kept on walking. No time for chatter. He picked up two bar towels from behind a counter,
went to the back room, closed the door. The floor hatch was beneath a tall stack of cases of Red Horse ale, and Santos had to move the cases one by one. The back room was sweltering, and Santos was soon damp from perspiration.
He pried up the floorboards with the tip of a pocketknife, and he reached in and found the pistols and a box of ammunition. He had acquired the weapons and stashed them there weeks earlier. It was like putting money in the bank—the demand for quality firearms was constant.
He wrapped a towel around one of the pistols, then wrapped another towel around the second pistol and the ammo. He replaced the boards and moved several cases of Red Horse over the spot.
He was sweating hard now. He went out quickly, holding the wrapped guns and ammo in the crook of one arm, checking the time on one of his phones as he walked. It was 5:43, and the bodega in Tondo was fifteen minutes away even under the best conditions. Santos was ready to call Favor, tell him that he would be late, but he decided to hold off until he knew for sure.
He put the phone in his pocket and looked up as he approached his car.
Totoy Ribera was standing in his path.
Totoy said, “You. You fucking little hustler. I should have guessed.”
Just after seven p.m., Elvis Vega came by the bodega with dinner. Favor asked him if he had
heard from Eddie; Vega said no, not since the early
afternoon.
Vega left, and they ate. Arielle was at the laptop, munching as she worked. At 7:15 she said to Favor, “Here you go, hotshot. Don’t lose it.”
It was a USB flash drive, about the size of her thumb.
“Plug it in, that’s all,” she said. “The software does the rest. It’ll take a few seconds.”
“How do I know if it worked?” Favor said.
“I’ll know. I’ll be online. If it loads, it should connect back to me within a few seconds, then I’ll tell you.”
They were going to set up a conference call on their phones, Bluetooth headsets, using the phones like radios.
She said, “Nothing from Eddie?”
“Not a thing.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not enough to cancel tonight.” He thought for a moment, and corrected himself: “There is no canceling tonight. We’re committed.”
Stickney said, “Anyway, the passports are in case we screw up. The guns are in case we really screw up. We don’t have the guns or the passports…”
“So let’s not screw up,” Mendonza said.
“There you go,” Favor said.