6. Nothing to Lose
Samuel stopped the car at the turn-off, where the provincial road left the highway and began to climb.
The lights were up there on the ridge. He could have been at the gate in fifteen minutes.
“You go up now,” Jerry said, “you die at the gate, and she’s an orphan in that house.” He did not say it unkindly. “There are thirty men on those walls. You have a pistol, an empty trunk’s worth of luck, and me with one foot. Turn around.”
Samuel sat with both hands on the wheel. Every part of him that was a father wanted the accelerator.
The part that had been a soldier turned the car around.
They took the long way back, twice around the market and once through a petrol station, with Jerry twisted in his seat watching the mirrors. Nobody followed.
“They won’t be organised yet,” Jerry said. “Carla runs the days. Who gets paid, who moves what, which truck goes where. With her gone and the showroom burning, everything stops until somebody tells it to start. Tonight the Buwaya is a body with no hands.”
“How well do you know the mansion?”
“Better than most. I was house guard there six years before Carlos gave me the dock.” He hesitated. “But that was years ago. They’ll have changed things.”
“Not the walls.”
“No. Not the walls.”
At the vulcanizing shop Samuel backed the car right up to the roll-down door. They lifted Carla Santiago out of the trunk between them, limp, eyes rolled back, sick from the fumes and the fear, and carried her to the bolted chair where Jerry had sat that afternoon. Jerry looked at the chair a moment before he tied her into it.
Jacob was at the workbench with the green ledger open under a lamp. He was not alone.
A man stood behind him, reading over his shoulder. Sixty or so, slim, in a pressed barong, with the stillness of someone who had been listened to all his life. A driver waited by the side door.
“Sam, this is my client,” Jacob said. “The logistics company. The borrowed container numbers.”
The man came forward with his hand out. Samuel did not take it. He was not being rude. He simply had not noticed it.
“Mr. Reyes. Your friend has shown me this book. Two years of my containers, my seals, my company’s name, used for that.” His jaw worked. “I have a granddaughter. I want you to understand that what you did today will not be forgotten. If you finish this, if the Santiagos are put down and this trade ends, you will be rewarded. Handsomely. You will never guard a lobby again.”
“Keep it,” Samuel said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I don’t know you. I don’t care about your containers and I don’t want your money. I want my daughter.” He walked past him. “If you want to be useful, find a prosecutor who isn’t on their payroll and put that book in front of him.”
The man looked at Jacob. Jacob shrugged. I told you.
Across the room Jerry had borrowed Jacob’s phone and was speaking low and fast, one hand cupped around the mouthpiece. “…no, tonight, Tes. Not tomorrow. Take the bus to my mother’s and don’t tell your sister where… I can’t. I can’t tell you why, not on the phone. Please, Tes. Just go, and keep him inside.”
Samuel filled a tin cup from the tap and threw it in Carla’s face.
She came up choking. For a few seconds she had no idea where she was. Then she saw the shutters, the drain in the floor, the rope, and finally the man crouching in front of her with a scar down the side of his face.
“My name is Samuel Reyes,” he said. “The girl your head guard asked about. Jasmine. I’m her father.”
Her eyes went past him. To Jerry, standing against the wall with a phone at his ear, free, untied, wearing no vest.
Samuel watched her put it together.
He peeled the tape off her mouth.
She screamed. Not from fright. It was a summons, full-throated and furious, the scream of a woman who had always had people within earshot. When it brought nobody she switched to words.
“Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea whose daughter you’ve put in a trunk? My brother will find the street you were born on. He’ll dig up your mother. Everyone you’ve ever spoken to, everyone who sold you rice…”
Samuel let her run. He had been shouted at by sergeants, by a mine, by a doctor in an oncology ward. He waited for her to need a breath.
“Nobody can hear you,” he said. “This is a tire shop on a road of closed tire shops. And you’re threatening the wrong man. My wife is dead. My mother is dead. I have one person left in the world and your brother has her.” He leaned closer. “There’s nothing behind me for you to reach. Do you understand? You have nothing to take.”
Something shifted in her face. She had never met a man she couldn’t threaten.
“Money, then,” she said. “Fine. How much? Give me a number and a phone.”
“No.”
“Then what? You already know where she is. I told you. She’s at the house.” Her lip curled. “So go and get her.”
“That’s what I want. A way in.”
Carla Santiago laughed. It was a real laugh, surprised out of her.
“Into my father’s house? You?” She shook her head, water dripping off her chin. “You will never get inside. Men with more than you have tried.”
7. The House on the Ridge
Jacob had eyes on the mansion within the hour.
The eyes belonged to a seventeen-year-old named Totoy, who lived in the town under the ridge, built radio-controlled helicopters out of carbon rod and hobby-shop motors, and had once taped a camera to one for Jacob in exchange for a soldering station. For five hundred pesos he asked no questions. The picture that came back to Jacob’s laptop was grainy and shook in the wind, but the house was floodlit like a hotel and there was plenty to see.
Jacob studied it for a long minute.
“Carlos’s car isn’t there,” he said. “Black Land Cruiser, plate ending 88. It’s in every photo I have of that driveway. Tonight, nothing.”
Samuel turned back to the chair.
Carla had heard. She was smiling a little.
“So maybe she’s in the house,” she said, “and maybe she isn’t. You didn’t ask why my brother is out of town.” She tilted her head. “The American is in the country. He flew in on Tuesday. Carlos always goes to him, never the other way. And he never goes empty-handed. A girl that he picked out himself, with no container number in the book? She’s not merchandise. She’s a gift.”
He hit her.
Open hand, across the mouth, hard enough to rock the bolted chair. He had never struck a woman in his life. He was distantly appalled at how little it cost him.
“Shut your mouth.” He was shaking. “You shut your mouth about her.”
The shop was very quiet. The client in the barong had found something to look at on the floor. Carla ran her tongue along her split lip and said nothing, but the smile had not entirely gone. She had found the place where he could be hurt.
Samuel breathed until his hands were his own again.
“Where does your family keep its money?” he said.
She blinked. “What?”
“The real money. Not the banks. Clans like yours don’t trust banks. Cash, gold, the papers for the land. Where?”
“In the house,” she said, before she had thought about it. “In my father’s…” She stopped. For the first time her voice lost its footing. “Wait. Why? What are you doing? What are you planning to do?”
He walked away from her without answering.
Jerry was by the workbench with the dead phone still in his hand, staring at nothing. Marites had cried, and asked him what he had done, and he had not been able to tell her.
“If we use her to get through the gate,” Samuel said quietly, “does it still work if she’s alive at the end of it?”
Jerry looked across at the chair. “You’re asking me if you have to kill her.”
“I’m asking if the plan needs it.”
“The plan doesn’t. But don’t spare her because she’s a woman in a nice blouse. She kept the book, Sam. Every child on that dock is a line in her handwriting.” He rubbed his face. “They’re all in it. The youngest brother, Miguel, runs the old trade from a camp in the jungle down in Mindanao. That’s where the shabu comes from. The mother spends it. She’s in a different mall every day with a different handbag. And the father, Don Ernesto, sits in his office on the second floor like a retired gentleman, with his cigars and his golf, and nothing moves in this family unless he nods. Carlos is the boss. The old man is the reason there’s a boss.”
“Then we give it all to the police. The ledger, the photographs, the address. Tonight.”
Jerry looked at him almost with pity.
“You know better than that. I’ve carried the envelopes myself. Station commander, two colonels, a judge. They’ll take your ledger, thank you for it, and telephone the house before you’ve reached your car.”
Samuel did know better. He had only needed to hear himself say it once, so that later he could tell Jasmine he had tried.
“Sam.” Jacob was waving him over. “Count’s done.”
The helicopter was making its last pass. A long white house with a red tile roof, two wings, a fountain in the turning circle. A wall right around the property. Tiny figures walking it in pairs.
“Twenty-five outside, at least. Gate, walls, two on the roof terrace. Call it ten more inside the house, and a dozen staff. Maids, cooks, a gardener’s cottage at the back.” He tapped a patch of bright green behind the east wing. “That’s a putting green, under lights. And that is Don Ernesto Santiago, practising his short game at nine o’clock at night. The wife isn’t home. Her car’s at their villa in Tagaytay.”
“He’s playing golf.”
“He’s playing golf. His warehouse is on every channel and his showroom is on fire, and he’s working on his putting.” Jacob frowned at the screen. “So either the news hasn’t reached him, or it has and he doesn’t care, or it’s being handled in some way we can’t see from up here. I don’t like any of the three.”
He turned up the small television on the shelf. The dock was the lead story. Police vans, tape, a reporter shouting over a generator. Twelve minors recovered from a shipping container. Authorities are describing the scene as…
Samuel unhooked the set and carried it over to Carla, trailing its cord, and held it in front of her face.
She watched without expression.
“It’s a warehouse,” she said. “It’s leased by a company in Cebu that’s owned by a company in Hong Kong. It isn’t our only one, and nothing in it has our name on it. Not the dealership’s. Not the house’s. In a week there’ll be a foreman in handcuffs and a senator giving a speech.” She shrugged against the rope. “You’ve closed one door. We have many.”
The picture changed. Fire engines on a six-lane avenue, hoses arcing into a blackened glass shell. …Santiago Motors, where officials now confirm eight fatalities, all of them believed to be private security personnel. No sales staff or customers were injured in the…
That one reached her. He saw her read the number and understand what it meant: that someone had waited for the room to empty.
“Eight,” she said. Then she looked up at him, and the fear had turned into something sharper. “You stupid man. Do you know what you’ve done? The dock he could ignore. The showroom has our name on it. Carlos will have heard by now, wherever he is. He’ll be coming home.” She smiled with her split lip. “You wanted his attention. You have all of it. And you’re standing in a tire shop, running out of time.”
She was right. It was also the first useful thing she had told him.
“Then we go now,” Samuel said. “Jerry drives. He’s still one of yours as far as the gate knows. You sit in the back, Miss Santiago, and you come home. I’ll be beside you with this.” He showed her the Glock. “If you say anything clever to the guards, you won’t finish it.”
“Of course,” Carla said. “Whatever you say.”
And she smiled. It was a small, private, patient smile, and Samuel had seen it before, on a lieutenant who was about to walk a platoon into a place he had been told was clear.
He did not have to say anything. Jerry had seen it too. He was already behind the chair with a folded rag in his hand and a brown bottle from Jacob’s locker, and Carla Santiago had time to draw one breath to scream with before the rag came down.
8. Forty Minutes
It was forty minutes to the ridge.
Carla lay along the back seat with her head on a folded jacket, breathing through her mouth. Jerry drove. Samuel sat beside him in a black suit that had belonged to Jacob when Jacob could still stand up in one, and a pair of dark glasses that hid his eyes and did what they could about the scar. In the footwell between his feet lay the M4, with one full magazine.
Jacob had held his wrist through the car window before they left. “I’m on the radio,” he had said. “Bring her home.” He had not said come home, because neither of them was superstitious and both of them were.
The city fell behind. Jerry drove like a man taking a driving test.
“The American,” Samuel said. “Have you met him?”
“I’ve stood in a room with him. Twice.”
“Tell me.”
Jerry thought about it. “White. Sixty, sixty-five. Not big. Always a Hawaiian shirt, the expensive kind, with the flowers, like he’s on holiday. He smiles at the staff. He says thank you when you open a door.” His hands tightened on the wheel. “That’s what I remember. How polite he was.”
“His name.”
“Nobody knows it. I never heard Carlos use one. We just call him the American. Even Don Ernesto calls him that, our American friend.” He glanced over. “I’m not hiding it from you. A man like that doesn’t leave his name in rooms.”
Samuel looked out at the dark fields and tried not to think about a holiday shirt.
Thirty minutes out, Jerry pulled onto the shoulder beside a shuttered fruit stand and killed the lights. Samuel got into the back. He put two fingers under Carla’s jaw and his other hand near her mouth and counted. Slow. Steady enough.
“She’s coming up,” he said. Her eyelids were moving.
“So what do we do?”
“We wait for her to wake, and we put her under again.”
Jerry turned around in his seat. “Twice in an hour? Sam, that stuff isn’t medicine. Jacob said it himself. It’s hard on the heart, and it builds up. A second dose on top of the first…”
“I know what it does.”
“She could just not wake up.”
“I know.” Samuel did not look away from her. “If she’s awake at that gate, she says one word and we’re dead in the driveway, and Jasmine has nobody. So I’m going to do a thing that might kill a tied-up woman, and I’m going to do it on purpose. I’m not telling you it’s right. I’m telling you I can’t see another way.”
Jerry said nothing for a while.
“Give me the rag,” he said at last. “She’s my employer. It should be me.”
Carla’s eyes opened. They found the car roof, then Samuel. She drew breath, and Jerry reached over the seat, and then she was gone again. Samuel kept his fingers on her pulse for a full minute afterwards. It went on. He found, to his own surprise, that he was relieved.
They drove the last ten minutes in silence.
The road wound up through coffee trees and came out onto the ridge, and there was the wall: three metres of white stucco with broken glass along the top, and a steel gate with a guardhouse beside it. Two men stepped out into the headlights with rifles slung and palms raised.
Jerry rolled down his window.
One of the guards bent to look in, and his whole face changed.
“Jerry! Pare! Long time!” He slapped the roof. “We heard about the dock. They said everybody was dead. You got out of that?”
“Barely.” Jerry lifted his bandaged foot off the pedal an inch to show it. “I ran straight to the showroom to warn Ma’am Carla. Got her out through the service door maybe two minutes before the place went up.” He jerked his head at the back seat. “She hasn’t stopped shaking since. She finally fell asleep on the highway. Let her be.”
The guard shone his torch into the back. It moved over Carla’s bare feet, her slack hand, her face turned into the jacket. It stopped on the split lip.
“Flying glass,” Jerry said.
The torch moved on. It came to rest on Samuel’s black lenses.
“Who’s this?”
“Bong. Showroom detail. He’s the reason I could carry her.” Jerry’s voice was easy, bored, the voice of a senior man who did not expect to be questioned by a gate. “Are you going to open it, or do I tell Don Ernesto his daughter slept in the driveway?”
“Okay, okay.” The guard straightened and waved at the guardhouse. “Go on up. And Jerry, listen. Sir Carlos is expecting her. He’s been asking every ten minutes. He said if you turned up alive, you report to him right away. He wants the whole story.”
The gate began to roll.
Jerry put the car in gear and drove through, up a long curve of gravel between royal palms, past the fountain. And there, parked crooked across the front steps with its doors still open, was a black Land Cruiser with a plate ending in 88.
Neither of them said it. Carlos was home.
Jerry did not stop at the steps. He kept going, slowly, around the west wing, to where the floodlights gave out by a row of garage doors and no one was walking the wall. He switched off the engine.
In the quiet they could hear crickets, and the fountain, and somewhere inside the house a clock striking eleven.
“What now?” Samuel whispered.
“Now you follow me,” Jerry said, “and you do exactly what I do.”
9. Big Mama
The end garage was unlocked. It held a ride-on mower, a wall of golf bags, and a smell of cut grass and petrol.
They carried Carla in between them and laid her on a stack of folded tarpaulins behind the mower. Samuel bound her wrists and ankles with duct tape and put a strip across her mouth. He turned her on her side so that she would not choke, and checked her pulse one last time.
They pulled the door down behind them. A voice came out of the dark.
“Sir Jerry?”
A guard was standing at the corner of the wing, twenty paces off. He was young and conscientious, the kind who followed a car to see where it parked.
“The gate radioed. You’re supposed to take Ma’am Carla straight up to Sir Carlos.” He was looking past them at the closed garage door. “Where is she? Why did you park back…” His eyes came to Samuel, to the long shape held down against Samuel’s leg. The rifle came off his shoulder. “Who is that? Sir, step away from…”
“Relax,” Jerry said, and smiled, and pointed over the guard’s shoulder toward the house. “No need. Here’s Sir Carlos now. Ask him yourself.”
It was the oldest trick in the book.
The guard turned his head.
Samuel crossed the distance in four strides and had the arm around his neck before the head came back. They went down together onto the gravel. The boy bucked and clawed, and then clawed less, and then lay heavy and slack.
“Don’t kill him.” Jerry was crouched beside them, whispering. “Sam. Don’t. I hired him. He’s twenty-two, he sends money to Samar. He’s never been near the dock.”
Samuel was already letting go.
“I wasn’t going to,” he said, and realised as he said it that it was true, and that this morning it might not have been.
They taped the boy’s hands and mouth. Jerry dragged him behind the golf bags and pulled a cart cover over him. Samuel took his rifle, an M16, and looked at it, and then at the M4, and then at Jerry.
He took the Glock out of his waistband and held it out, butt first.
Jerry stared at it.
“You’re sure?”
“No,” Samuel said. “Take it anyway.”
Jerry took it. He checked the chamber the way a man does who was taught properly, and tucked it away, and neither of them mentioned it again.
They went along the back of the house, under dark windows, past bins and a row of drying mops. The kitchen door stood on the latch. Jerry eased it open.
It was a kitchen the size of Samuel’s whole house. Copper pans, a long steel table, a single bulb burning over the stove. The household had gone to bed. There was nobody.
There was one person. An old woman in a housedress and slippers stood at the stove, stirring a small pot of milk. She turned around at the draught.
“Susmaryosep,” she said. “Jerry? Is that my Jerry?”
Her whole face opened. She was seventy at least, broad and slow-moving, with her hair in a net. She came at him with her arms out.
“They said the dock was a slaughterhouse! I lit a candle for you, you bad boy, I thought…” Then she saw the second man in the doorway. The dark glasses. The rifle. She stopped. Her arms came down, and her eyes went small and hard.
“Who is this?” she said. “Jerry. Who have you brought into this house?”
Samuel raised the M4 and put it on her.
“Mama. Mama, please.” Jerry had both palms up, between them. “Quiet. Don’t call anyone. I’m asking you. I’ll explain all of it, I swear, only stay quiet.”
“Who is she?” Samuel said.
“Big Mama. She’s been with the family forty years. She raised Carlos and Carla. She raised half the guards.” His voice cracked. “She used to leave food out for me on night shift.”
The old woman had not taken her eyes off Samuel. She was not afraid of the rifle. She was working out how far it was to the bell-pull by the pantry.
“She’ll scream the moment we’re out of the room,” Samuel said.
“She won’t if I…”
“She raised Carlos. Look at her, Jerry. She’s already decided.” He did not lower the barrel. “Tape her. Put her in that closet.”
Jerry looked from one to the other. Then he took the roll of tape out of his pocket.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. He was gentle with her wrists. “I’m so sorry. I know what they are to you. I know you’d never forgive yourself if you kept quiet. So I’m not going to make you choose.” He smoothed the tape over her mouth with his thumb, as carefully as if he were dressing a cut. “It has to be done. One day I’ll tell you why.”
She looked at him over the tape with enormous contempt, and let herself be walked into the broom closet. He put a stool in with her so that she could sit.
Samuel turned off the gas under the milk.
“The office is on the second floor, front of the house,” Jerry whispered, when they were in the service passage. “Double doors. If Carlos is home and can’t sleep, that’s where he is, and the old man with him. There’ll be two guards on the doors. Always two.”
“How do we get up?”
“The main stairs are in the lobby. Twin staircase, marble. It comes out right in front of those doors.” He shook his head. “You’d be shot from above before you were halfway. There’s a back stair at the far end of the east wing, for the maids. We go the long way around.”
They went the long way around. A passage, a laundry, another passage with family photographs in silver frames. Samuel saw a boy on a pony. A girl in a First Communion dress, who would grow up to keep the book.
Then they heard boots on the tiles ahead, and two voices, coming closer.
Jerry tried the nearest door. It opened. They slid through and Samuel pressed it shut behind them.
It was a bedroom, narrow, with a crucifix and an electric fan. A woman of about thirty was sitting bolt upright in the bed with a sheet pulled to her chin, staring at them.
Samuel took off the dark glasses so that she could see his eyes. He laid one finger across his lips.
She looked at the scar. She looked at Jerry, whom she knew. Then, slowly, she nodded, and put her own hand over her own mouth.
The boots stopped right outside.
“…telling you, the gate logged them twenty minutes ago. They’ll be upstairs with Sir Carlos already.”
“Then why did he just radio down asking where she is?”
“Maybe she went to her room first. She was in an explosion, pare.”
“And Jerry? And Dodong went round the back and hasn’t come on the radio since.” A pause. “I don’t like it. I’m going to check the garages. You go up and tell Sir Carlos we’re looking.”
The boots moved off, in two directions.
Samuel and Jerry looked at each other in the light from under the door.
They had perhaps three minutes before somebody lifted a cart cover.
10. The Balcony
The maids’ stair was narrow and steep and smelled of floor polish. Jerry took it one step at a time, hauling on the rail, his bad foot leaving a faint dark print on every tread.
It let them out at the far end of the second-floor gallery. Samuel put one eye around the corner.
A long corridor, carpeted, lined with portraits. At the other end, forty metres away, were the double doors. Two men stood in front of them with rifles. A third was arriving at a jog from the main stairs, the one sent up to report, and they bent their heads together.
Forty metres of straight corridor with no cover. Three rifles now.
“Not that way,” Jerry breathed.
“There isn’t another way.”
“There is. The office has a balcony. French doors, over the front steps. The old man likes to stand out there with his cigar and look at his palms.” He pointed at a window beside them. “The roof over the porch runs along the whole front of the house. Tiles, about this wide. We go out here and walk it.”
Samuel looked at the window. Then at Jerry’s foot.
“Can you?”
“I did it once drunk, on a bet, when I was twenty-eight.” Jerry tried to smile. “I’ll manage it sober and terrified.”
The window swung outward without a sound. Somebody in this house oiled hinges.
They stepped out into the night.
The porch roof was a shelf of red clay tiles, pitched just enough to be unkind, with a gutter at the edge and a six-metre drop to the gravel. The floodlights were below them and pointed outward. Up here, against the wall, they were only two more shadows. Down on the drive a pair of guards walked past the Land Cruiser, talking, and did not look up. Men on guard almost never look up.
Samuel went first, with his back to the stucco and the M4 across his chest. He slid his feet rather than lifted them. A tile shifted under his heel and he stood dead still until his heart let him move again. Behind him he could hear Jerry’s breathing, and every few steps a small sound, bitten off, when the weight came onto the wrong foot.
Fifteen metres. Ten. A stone balustrade. He stepped over it onto the balcony and reached back and pulled Jerry after him.
The French doors were shut, with thin curtains drawn across the glass. There was lamplight behind them, and voices.
“…don’t tell me to calm down, Papa. Eight men. The showroom. Our name on every channel, and nobody can tell me where my sister is.”
“And shouting will find her?” An older voice, dry and unhurried. “Sit down. You were told a hundred times that the dock was sloppy. Now a door has closed. We have others. Pour yourself a drink and think.”
Through the gap in the curtains Samuel could see most of the room. Dark panelling. A wall of ledgers and trophies. A vast desk, and behind it, in a high-backed leather chair, a silver-haired man in a golf shirt with a cigar going in the ashtray. Don Ernesto Santiago.
And pacing in front of the desk, a pistol in his hand like something he had forgotten he was holding, a heavyset man of forty-five in a wrinkled linen suit. He had a moustache, a gold watch, and his sister’s mouth.
Carlos.
All day he had been only a name. Now he was eight feet away, sweating through his collar. This morning he had looked at Jasmine.
Samuel held up three fingers. Jerry drew the Glock and nodded.
The old man is mine, Samuel mouthed. His hand. I need him talking.
Jerry nodded again. He set his bad foot behind him and gathered himself on the good one.
Three fingers. Two. One.
Jerry kicked the doors where they met. The lock tore out of the wood and both leaves flew inward in a billow of curtain.
Don Ernesto was fast for seventy. His hand was already going under the desk, to a drawer or a button. Samuel shot him high in the right shoulder, and the big chair spun him half around and threw him back into it with his mouth open.
Carlos had turned with the pistol coming up. Jerry fired once. The gun jumped out of Carlos’s fingers in a spray of red and skittered under a cabinet. Carlos folded over his own hand and screamed, a high, astonished sound, and Jerry was on him at once. He drove him face down into the carpet with a knee between his shoulders and the Glock at the back of his skull.
The double doors burst open.
The two door guards came through together, as they had been trained to, and as it happened that was the worst thing they could have done. Samuel was already facing them. Two shots, a fraction of a second apart. They fell across each other on the threshold.
The third man, the messenger, was still out in the corridor. He had the sense to throw himself sideways out of the doorway.
It had taken perhaps four seconds.
Samuel dragged the two bodies in by their collars and slammed the doors. He turned the key and ran the bolt. Then he put his shoulder to the nearest cabinet, a glass-fronted thing full of golf trophies, and toppled it across the doorway in a crash of silver and plate.
Behind him Jerry was winding duct tape around Carlos’s wrists, and around the ruined hand as well, to keep him from bleeding out. In the leather chair Don Ernesto sat grey-faced with blood soaking down his golf shirt, pressing his own palm to the wound and looking at Samuel with cold, intelligent interest. Samuel had shot first and meant to talk afterwards, and the old man seemed almost to respect that.
The house was waking. An alarm bell had started up somewhere below. There were boots on the marble stairs, a great many of them, and they were drumming along the corridor. They gathered and stopped outside the doors.
“Don Ernesto! Sir Carlos!” A fist pounded. “Sir, answer! Stand clear, we’re coming in…”
Samuel put a burst into the ceiling.
“Stand back!” It was the voice he had not used in fifteen years, the one that carried across a parade ground. “I have the old man and I have Carlos. Both alive. The first hand I see on that door, I shoot the father. The second, I shoot the son. Get back from the doors. Back!”
Silence. Then, from the chair, hoarse and steady, the old man himself:
“Do as he says.”
A shuffle. Boots going backwards, down the corridor. Not far. Far enough.
Samuel lowered the rifle.
He was in a locked room at the top of a house with thirty-five armed men in it. He had one magazine and a little more, a wounded patriarch, and a friend who that morning had been an enemy. There was no way out that he could see.
He found that he did not care about any of it.
He walked across the carpet and crouched down in front of Carlos Santiago. He took off the dark glasses and let the man look at the scar.
“You took a girl this morning,” he said. “Eleven years old. White and green uniform. You know the one.” He waited until Carlos’s eyes showed that he did. “I’m her father. Where is she?”
End of Part Two