Philippine Hardpunch (13 page)

She turned and started to cry out, hoping someone would hear her over the thumping of the jukebox and the rowdy clamor of
upraised conversations from down that hall.

The man behind her hurtled in with both arms coming up to intercept her.

The man who gripped her tightened that grip. He swung around with the momentum she began. He brought the pistol in his other
fist about in a tight arc.

The barrel cuffed her upside her right cheekbone, a glancing blow that shoved her against the wall, dazing her, not knocking
her unconscious but blaring pain to every nerve ending in her body.

Her knees knocked and as the pain subsided Ann realized she had been dragged up another full flight of stairs to the third
level of the building.

The man pulling her paused at a door at the top of the stairs. He knocked on the door twice with the butt of his pistol, his
grip on her wrist like a steel bracelet clamped too tightly, as if his fist were crushing the bones of her wrist.

A voice said from inside, “Get in here.”

Ann knew enough Tagalog, the local dialect, to get around.

What surprised her was that the voice was that of a woman!

The man gripping her opened the door, pulled her in after himself and flung her into the room, which was a plushly appointed
office, air conditioned, of course.

The second man, the driver, stepped in after them and closed the door.

She heard a bolt lock snap into place. Her knees were shaky but she held herself erect.

I will not kneel before them!

She raised a hand to her right eye where the pistol barrel had swacked her. It felt strangely hot-cold numb and she knew the
pain would come stabbing soon. She could already feel a puffy swelling there.

You deserve this
, her mind screamed at her.
You’ve brought all of this upon yourself!

She cast her steadying gaze upon people in the office.

A man over by a window, tough-looking, matched the one who had kidnapped and brought her here.

Her eyes swept to the woman the three toughs appeared to defer to for further instructions.

The woman stood behind the desk. Tall for a Filipino, Ann thought, hair black as a raven’s wing, a full figure encased in
a black something, lush lips and high cheekbones set in a face that had been beautiful once; but the beauty had long ago frozen
into something hard and unkind.

Ann’s eyes briefly flickered over the wall of four closed-circuit television screens opposite the desk, placed so the woman
behind the desk could keep an eye on them along with everything else.

Two of the screens were blank, but one showed a busy bar scene. The noise I heard when we first came in, Ann thought. The
other looked down upon a miniature gambling casino, with Filipino men crowded around various games of chance.

Ann centered her gaze on the woman. She had regained her equilibrium. She felt terribly scared but she was mad, too.

“Who are you?” she demanded of the woman, the words blurting out without being consciously formed. “What… what am I
doing
here?”

“My name is not important,” the woman snapped. “I am in charge here. Who are you?”

“I am Ann Jeffers and I demand—”

That caught the woman a bit off-guard, Ann thought.

“Ann Jeffers…” the woman reacted in a low, thoughtful voice.

She looked to the man who had dragged Ann up here.

“Where did you find her?”

“At Clark, where you told us—”

“I didn’t tell you to kidnap anyone,” the woman snarled.

Then she turned thoughtful for a moment, studying Ann.

Ann felt a chill run up and down her spine. She had spent the past weeks surrounded by surly men with their weapons and machinery
of war.

She felt more threatened at this moment, by this woman, and the bone-chilling evil that emanated from her glittering dark
eyes.

“Please release me,” Ann said. “These men, they work for you?”

“We work together.”

“There has been some mistake! You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

The man at the window growled, “We should call Vincente.”

The woman behind the desk silenced him with an angry glare.

“We should also refrain from using names, fool.”

Mara Zobel turned her attention back to Ann Jeffers.

Mara’s mind raced. She considered her options.

She knew all about the Jeffers kidnapping from the media; it had been all over the TV and the newspapers, not as often lately
but still an item.

Mara had not heard anything about the family being returned or rescued. She had thought the Jefferses were still in the hands
of the New People’s Army.

And yet, here was the Jeffers teenager.

The girl appeared as surprised to be here as Mara was to find Jorges and Ramos dragging Ann into her office.

She decided there was only one thing to do.

Vincente was closely aligned with several of the communist factions, most especially as a former liaison with the New People’s
Army who had not let go his connections.

Mara reached for the telephone.

“What are you going to do?” asked Edmundo.

“What you suggested. Our friends in the NPA have obviously lost the young lady. I intend to offer her back to them, if they
want her.”

“No!”
Ann shrieked.

“Silence her,” Mara snapped.

Ramos started to lift his gun hand to club the girl again.

Ann cried out, “Please, don’t hit me! I—I’ll do whatever you say!”

Mara raised a hand, stopping Ramos from slugging her.

“See that you do,” she snapped.

She found Ann Jeffers staring into her eyes across the desk with hurtful curiosity.

“How…can you do this?” she asked Mara. “I’ve been victimized by men, but
you
, another woman… why are
you
doing this?

“Because you might be worth something, sweet and innocent,” Mara snorted. “And I’ve gone through worse than you, when I was
younger than you.

“And so you direct hatred at me?”

“Shut up or I will have Ramos quiet you down,” Mara snarled. She looked at Ramos and Jorges. “Next time, do not do something
unless you’re instructed to.”

“It, uh, seemed like a good idea at the time,” Jorges mumbled with an overly expressive shrug. “Sorry, Mara.”

She slammed a fist on the desktop.

“And no names, damn you. Am I surrounded by idiots?”

Ann Jeffers made a try at steadying her quivering lower lip.

“Well, now that I do know your name,
Mara
, maybe we can talk.”

“Forget my name, child,” Mara cut her off, “and pray it’s not too late already, or this could be very bad for you.”

That silenced the girl. Her eyes dropped to the carpet.

Ramos said, “It is a good idea to see if the NPA wants her back. Vincen—our friend, will know.”

“And if the family was rescued,” Edmundo added, “they could learn from this one what the authorities know about them—and about
us
.”

Mara picked up the phone on her desk and dialed the number she knew by heart.

She had insisted from the beginning of her arrangement with Valera that their affair be a discreet, strictly kept secret between
themselves, and so none of these men knew of the true depth of the association between Vincente Valera and Mara Zobel, but
it would be natural to them that she would know his number since Vincente was owner of the Gilded Peacock and she, the manager.

She let the phone ring ten times at the other end.

No answer.

She slipped the phone back on its hook and looked up to meet the questions staring at her from the eyes of everyone in that
room, including the girl.

Especially the girl.

Mara found herself recalling one of the very few conversations she had overheard between Vincente and one of his associates
involved in what she was sure was keeping him so preoccupied lately.

She had overheard only two words on that occasion.

Operation Thunderstrike.

She wondered now if it did not all tie together even tighter than she had first suspected.

Vincente’s worries.

Operation Thunderstrike.

And the presence of Ann Jeffers, delivered into her hands by fate and the overzealousness of two of the hired men, whose real
duty was to keep peace in the club.

Mara realized that Vincente had never before sent Ramos and Jorges, nor Edmundo, on jobs with such ambiguous instructions
as he had this day. She figured that maybe Vincente deserved this kind of trouble; but there could still nonetheless very
likely be a profit in it, if she only played her cards right.

“Take her to… the place,” she instructed Ramos and Jorges. “Blindfold her so she doesn’t know where she is or where she’s
going.”

The two men stepped forward from each of Ann’s sides, each of them grabbing one of the girl’s arms.

At that instant, Mara glanced over, behind Ann’s shoulder, in a partly subconscious routine scan of the closed-circuit monitors
in the wall opposite her desk, behind the girl’s back. She saw something out of the ordinary, something that honed her attention
in on those monitors for a moment, strongly enough to be noticed by the others.

Her eyes were accustomed to scanning those two screens as well as the two that were presently off (when they were in use,
these two other monitors were plugged into the video setups hooked into those “private rooms” Felix Aquilar had been so upset
about) and she had become accustomed to seeing the usual collection of uptown and downtown mingling with the dozen or so young
bikini-clad B-girls who circulated among the bar and casino.

This time her practiced eye caught something she knew did not belong.

Four somethings.

The camera down in the bar was one of those rotating models, and at the moment it panned the area just inside the front entrance,
on the periphery of the raucous crowd scene around the tables and an American-style bar that ran down the full length of the
extended, low-ceilinged room.

Like most such establishments along Pilar Street, the city’s red light district, the Gilded Peacock drew a heavy afternoon
trade: those looking to dodge the unbearable midday heat, and those who came specifically for the kinds of action Mara’s club
provided.

The four men who caught her attention in the monitor would have drawn any woman’s attention in any bar room in the world,
she told herself.

They did not look like they would ever have to pay for sex, and, though they looked, even through the monitor, like chance-takers,
none of them looked foolish enough to lose their money in a joint like this.

One was a big black man.

Beside him a bearded, shaggy haired ruffian with a good-natured glint in his eye.

The third one possessed a cool, chiseled profile Mara guessed to be English, or European.

The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder with each other, slightly behind a fourth man.

A full-muscled six-footer with body movements that made Mara think of the soul of a panther moving inside the body of a man.

The four of them made her think that.

Four guys outfitted casually.

They could have been businessmen or off-duty servicemen here for a good time.

She didn’t think so.

Ann Jeffers twisted her head around to see what had caught Mara’s attention.

She saw the four men on the monitor, and she started struggling frantically in the grasp of Ramos and Jorges, not thinking,
reacting blindly, crying out one word.

“Cody! “

M
ara snapped to Ramos.

“Quiet her down. I want to talk to her, and I want her to hear what I have to say.”

Ramos nodded and brought his right hand, the one that wasn’t gripping Ann’s wrist, around to clamp the girl’s mouth. At the
same time he kicked her knees out from under her.

Ann stumbled, lost her balance and fell back upon the carpet.

Jorges released her, stepping back to observe with Edmundo.

Mara came around the side of the desk, scooping up a small but deadly Walther PPK automatic from her purse.

Ramos went down to a kneeling position, bringing the girl flat onto her back, too stunned by this sudden violence to react
yet.

Mara knelt down at Ann’s opposite side.

Ramos held the teenager pinned to the floor with his fist staying clamped over her mouth so she could not speak.

Widened, frightened eyes stared up at Mara from behind Ramos’s hairy, clenching hand.

Mara placed the barrel of her diminutive pistol against Ann Jeffers’ temple.

“Now listen to me and listen good, you spoiled little bitch,” she snarled, jabbing the barrel for emphasis.

The girl winced in pain. “Edmundo is going to walk you down the way you came, and then I am going to drive you out of here.

“I’m going to have this gun on you every step of the way, little girl. If you misbehave even a little bit, I will not hesitate
to kill you. Do you believe me?”

The girl nodded from beneath.

Mara said, “Are you going to behave?”

Ann nodded again, her body shuddering on the floor against which she was held.

“Release her,” Mara instructed.

Ramos did so. He stepped back to stand next to Jorges.

“What about us?”

Mara nodded to the figures in the monitor.

“You are going to get something started down there and take care of those four.”

Jorges gulped audibly.

“We’d better start something
real
big if we’re going to take care of
those
four.”

The camera in the bar downstairs panned away from the men who had been pausing inside the barroom entrance, where they had
quite obviously been sizing the place up.

“Let’s get started then.” Mara snapped. “Who is Cody?” she demanded of Ann.

Ann Jeffers had regained her senses. She was biting her lip, damning herself for the outburst, Mara could tell.

“I don’t know who he is and that’s the truth,” she spat at Mara. “I only know those men mean trouble for you, bitch lady.
Those guys are here and they’re going to kick your ass.”