Philippine Hardpunch (16 page)

The powerful impact sent the blind man’s frail body reeling into an arm-flailing toss as if it was a petulant child’s discarded
toy, the beggar landing on his back, the pavement of the street caving in the back of his skull, the curb snapping his spine,
his chest cavity already a gutted, pulpy red ruin.

Mara accelerated the Renault past and away from that scene of people curiously clustering around the sight of the tragedy.

Specks of blood dotted the corner of her windshield like droplets of red rain.

Ann lowered her hands from her eyes.

“Y—you’ve got to stop this,” she beseeched in a quavering voice. “We’ve got to go back. You… we…
killed
that man back there!”

Mara flung a glance into the Renault’s inside rearview mirror.

The car she thought she had seen back there, the one she’d suspected of following them only a few short minutes ago, was nowhere
in sight.

It had looked to her, in the mirror, like a Lancia, but the distance of one-and-a-half blocks and the demands on her attention
from steering through the crowded streets made her think maybe she had been wrong, that they had made it.

No one was following them.

“Be quiet,” she snapped at the girl. “Don’t you understand, you brat? There is nothing anyone can do to help you. So sit there
and keep your mouth shut.”

“I’ll sit here,” Ann Jeffers snarled, “but I’ll say whatever I damn well please, you mean-hearted bitch.”

Mara wished she could reach over and strike this young hellion, but she needed both of her hands to control the Renault’s
progress through crowded streets.

“Weigh your words carefully, foolish one,” she snapped at the American girl. “I am taking you to the house of a friend in
Pasay, where he has a large estate and no one will hear you scream. So you had better mind your manners.”

“You’ll put me in hell first,” Ann Jeffers snarled.

She spat into the older woman’s face.

Mara cursed hotly, taking a hand from the steering wheel to work away the well-aimed gob of spit from her right cheek, and
that move nearly caused her to veer the Renault into a parked delivery truck at the side of the street.

She regained control of the Renault and kept her foot on the gas pedal.

Thunder rumbled overhead again. Droplets of rain began pelleting the car’s roof and windshield with increasing intensity.

She looked again into the rearview mirror.

No sign of the Lancia.

Good, she told herself. If they were after us, I’ve lost them.

She wondered how things had gone back at the club after she had whisked the girl into the car in that alley and driven away
without even pausing to strap on her own seat belt.

She had heard the gunfire inside the building as she had pulled away from there as well as the sounds of the massive brawl
she had instructed Edmundo to start as a cover.

She hoped it had gone well for Edmundo, Ramos, and Jorges.

And she wondered again who this
Cody
was who Ann Jeffers obviously put so much stock in.

She knew she would have to lay low for a while in any event. Pilar Street was freewheeling, and the occasional brawl was permissible
in the eyes of the authorities, but that gunfire… if anyone had been killed as a result of that shooting she’d heard, then
the Gilded Peacock would be in real danger of closing and, if the truth became known, she would not be able to go back there.

But after this, she told herself, after what she intended to collect for her troubles in securing custody of Miss Ann Jeffers,
she would hardly need to manage a snakepit of whores and gamblers for a living.

No matter what Operation Thunderstrike was, that which had consumed so much of Vincente Valera’s thoughts, and her own, if
she could “go to the bank” with the stakes she now had in this girl riding beside her, a life of ease could be hers.

For the first time as she drove along and Ann Jeffers lapsed into silence—Mara Zobel began to consider a future without Vincente
Valera.

She had not made a mistake in what she had done, no matter what the cost, she told herself. She would bring Vincente in on
this because she might well need the protection he and his connections could provide. But this is
my
show, she decided.

The girl’s parents, her father’s employees, that fat cat American corporation, would pay plenty to get the girl back, all
the more so this soon after having gotten her back once already from the New People’s Army.

And the lion’s share—the lioness’ share—of that ransom would belong to her, Mara. She would see to that.

She thought of the Walther PPK in her purse and of how Vincente might give her a difficult time over the girl, how he might
even want her returned to the NPA.

As she drove along, Mara considered the chances she was taking; then she thought of the new start, the new identity such a
payoff would buy her, and she knew the risk was worth it even if she had to kill Vincente.

Even if she had to kill the girl.

The buildings fronting either side of this street began thinning out as did the crowds, and ahead she could see the rising
girders and the elevated cement snake of the freeway, arching over the squalor and poverty below.

Traffic was fairly light at this time of day, and the street that merged with this one farther on ahead fed a sparse flow
of traffic onto the rising ON ramp that would take them downtown.

She nosed the Renault toward an opening she saw ahead. She flicked on the windshield wipers, and the steady
snick-snick-snick
of the wipers clearing the windshield got on her nerves right away.

The Renault reached the intersection where the merging street connected.

Mara steered in at several car-lengths behind a Toyota pickup truck. She glanced in her rearview mirror.

Nothing back there coming in along that merging street from behind her.

She’d made it.

Then she realized that merging street came from a curve of its own, and, as she realized this the dark Lancia she’d noticed
before practically
flew
into view.

She could not make out the four figures inside that fast-approaching vehicle moving at this distance, but she knew with a
chill in her heart that it would be the four men she’d spotted less than ten minutes ago on that closed-circuit TV monitor
in her office above the Gilded Peacock.

Ann sensed something, twisting around in her seat, and when she saw the Lancia, she must have known, too.

Ann whipped her face back around toward the woman behind the steering wheel.

“
This
is how it ends, bitch.”

There was a fire in the girl’s eyes that was not quite sane, and madness in her voice somehow intensified tenfold by the shrill
maximum keening of the Renault’s engine bulleting them along.

“Don’t count on that, little girl,” Mara sneered. ‘
I
am in control.”

She started to ease out of the access lane, into the far-right lane of the expressway, edging around the pickup truck that
rode along, still in the access lane.

The Lancia was gaining hard and fast after the Renault, eating up the street pavement behind her, shooting onto the
ON
ramp.

Mara thought, I can make a run for it when I hit the open expressway!

She felt a bit mad, crazy, herself.

“Aren’t you forgetting one thing?” Ann Jeffers asked in a low, strange voice, her eyes two dark, burning coals.

Mara sneered. “

Oh, and what’s that?”

Ann said, “I don’t want to live.”

She reached across fast with both hands to grab the Renault’s steering wheel and wrench it out of Mara’s hands.

Mara lost control.

The car swerved wildly.

Mara screamed.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Murphy cried.

Cody pumped the brakes when he saw it about to happen.

He had beat hell-for-Leather down that one-way street, running the few stop signs the Lancia had encountered, playing the
mild midafternoon traffic for every second he could buy to try to cut off the Renault driven by Mara Zobel and carrying Ann
Jeffers.

He could think of nothing but the girl’s safety; of getting to her in time.

They had missed intercepting the Renault by no more than seconds and it had looked as if they would be able to tail the Zobel
woman now to whatever exit she had in mind. Then Cody would deal with it—when they weren’t moving along at 70 mph, the way
they were now on this approach ramp to the freeway through downtown Manila.

Then it happened.

The Renault careened into an abruptly manic, crazy kind of swerving that cut off the Toyota pickup it had been following,
practically colliding with that vehicle, missing it by inches as it appeared to sail out of control, inches past the pickup’s
front end.

That’s when Murphy muttered his curse and Cody started pumping the Lancia’s brake pedal.

At that moment, John Cody would have traded his soul to the Devil for the chance to somehow reach out across the rain-slicked
distance between the Lancia and the Renault to alter that other vehicle’s unstoppable path that his and every other set of
eyes in that Lancia saw in the sickening, hypnotizing milliseconds before it actually did happen.

The Renault piled a grazing blow into a cement abutment topping one of the girders supporting the freeway, hitting the abutment
with enough force to fill the air with an explosion of smashing glass, slamming, and crunching car-metal sounds.

A violent pitching around of the Renault sent that car with Mara Zobel and Ann Jeffers aboard hurtling across the freeway
pavement—into a full-force, end-over-end series of shattering flips that no one could survive.

General Maceda leaned forward and spoke to his driver when the BMW limousine reached the crest of the hill just north of Pasay.

“Slow here for a moment. I want to look.”

“Yes, sir.” The chauffeur nodded curtly.

The powerful car slowed to coasting speed down the hill and into the valley where Vincente Valera had his estate.

It was one of the old plantations that had never gotten back on its feet economically after World War II but, rather, had
become a residence for the very wealthy.

The small town of Pasay behind him, the general now saw the valley of estates below this crest of the hill fanned out in a
patchwork pattern for some considerable distance in every direction.

Maceda focused his attention on a thorough study of what he could see of Valera’s estate, which was his destination.

He wore pressed military khaki-—even though he had been suspended of active duties until further notice, his being one of
the cases the new government’s civil rights review panel was still considering regarding the charges against him, but he did
not know when he would next get a chance to slow down enough to change clothes.

When the big moment arrived, as it would very, very soon now, he wanted to be ready.

What appeared from this distance to be ten-foot-high stone walls surrounded the fifteen-acre parcel of real estate that belonged
to Valera.

The ex-senator had done rather well, his Marxist rhetoric not withstanding. Maceda imagined that Valera’s tax returns listed
his nightclub holdings and other investments as the principal source of his income.

The main house was a three-level affair, and there were a few outbuildings and one extended garage. Tapered lawns and well-maintained
shrubbery and a small forest of trees lent the place a tranquil, pastoral elegance.

The perfect point from which to unleash a lightning strategic strike, once the signal was given.

Fifty of Maceda’s men were billeted in Valera’s house, and the garage held three armored urban assault vehicles and two canvas-topped
trucks which would serve as troop carriers. A helicopter sat on a landing pad behind the house.

The main entrance to the grounds was a heavy metal gate bolted into the wall.

Maceda leaned forward again and said to the driver, “I’ve seen enough. Continue on.”

“Yes, my general.”

The sleek car picked up speed with no more sound than the purring of a contented kitten.

The driver, like the men waiting for them down there on Valera’s estate, were soldiers attached to the unit Maceda had commanded
before his ouster. They were all supposedly “off duty,” something the General’s connections had managed to aid in, but were
in fact, at this moment, very much
on
duty, in the service of another, greater cause.

Maceda still had some trouble believing he was allowing his men to be put up—and was sharing command of this aspect of the
operation—with an avowed (albeit decidedly insincere) communist.

As a loyal soldier to President Marcos, the communists—be they political party or mountain guerillas—were the sworn enemy
of the Philippine Army.

There had never been any doubt about where Maceda’s loyalties rested after the new government came to power, which was certain,
he knew, the principal reason for his suspension, but he made sure the spies and surveillance teams the government had tried
to wire him with knew nothing of his involvement in this plot that had been set in motion almost before the Marcos jet had
even lifted off from Clark Air Force Base.

There were too many highly placed, influential people who owed too much to the former president (and had too much to lose
under the new government) for there not to have been a concerted effort to overthrow sooner or later. It happened
sooner
because the ex-president already had his forces quietly consolidating almost before crazy Imelda had begun unpacking her
shoes in Honolulu.

Not that it mattered by this time whether Marcos was alive or dead. The balance of power was shortly due to shift in more
ways than one, to General Maceda’s way of thinking…

The BMW gained the bottom of the hill, continued on the short distance to the front gate of Valera’s estate, where the driver
braked for inspection by the posted sentries who wore the uniforms of standard rental security personnel.