11. Mr. Steinberg
Carlos did not answer.
They hauled him up off the carpet and put him on the leather sofa under the window. Then they brought the old man over from his chair and sat him at the other end, with a cushion packed against the shoulder and a strip of tape across his mouth. Don Ernesto had already given one order through a locked door. Samuel did not intend to let him give another.
Father and son, side by side, wrists and ankles bound. One was bleeding from the shoulder and the other from the hand.
Samuel took his wallet out. Behind the ID there was a photograph, soft at the corners: Jasmine at ten, squinting into the sun outside the church, holding a candle and trying not to laugh. He held it up in front of Carlos’s face.
“This girl.”
Carlos looked at it. And then, for half a second, he looked away, toward the window and the dark beyond the ridge.
It was enough. Samuel felt the whole day rearrange itself around that glance.
“She isn’t here,” he said. “She was never in this house. You took her straight to him.”
Carlos said nothing.
The rifle butt caught him across the cheekbone and laid him sideways against his father.
“Where is she?”
Carlos came up slowly, spitting red. He was actually smiling.
“You’ll never find him,” he said. “I couldn’t find him if I wanted to. Nobody can.”
“His name.”
“Steinberg. Mr. Steinberg. That’s what he gave me, and I’d bet this house it’s not what his mother called him.” He ran his tongue over a tooth. “I don’t have an address. I don’t have a hotel. I have a number, and it changes every time. He sends it, I call it, he names a place. We meet. He takes delivery, he pays, he leaves. That is all I have ever had.”
“You do business with a man you can’t find.”
“I tried.” The smile soured. “First year. I didn’t like it either. He always came alone, this soft old tourist in a flowered shirt. No driver in the room, no gun that I could see. So one night I decided to teach him who he was dealing with. I put a hand on him.”
“And?”
“And I was on the floor with my arm behind my neck before I’d finished the sentence. He held me there. Like a child. He explained very politely that we would not be doing that again, and then he helped me up and asked if I wanted a drink.” Carlos shook his head. “He isn’t only clever. Somebody trained him, a long time ago, and trained him well. You think you’re frightening, with your scar? You have no idea what you’re walking toward.”
Samuel straightened up. His hands wanted to do things he couldn’t afford yet.
“Watch them,” he said to Jerry.
There was a laptop on the old man’s desk, open, among the cigar ash and the broken glass. He turned it toward himself and thumbed his radio.
“Jacob. I’ve got a computer in the office. Can you get into it from there?”
“Not from here. You’re my hands.” Jacob’s voice was tight. He had been listening to all of it. “Keep it simple. Open the browser, look at the history. Look for a mail program. Don’t expect much. Men like this don’t write things down where their maids dust.”
Samuel did as he was told, clumsily, with one finger. Golf scores. A bank in Makati. A forum about orchids. An inbox full of invitations and a cardiologist’s reminders.
“Nothing,” he said.
“I told you. It was worth the thirty seconds.”
Behind him there was a murmur. Carlos, low and steady, speaking in the patient voice of a man explaining terms. Samuel could not make out the words.
Then came the flat crack of a pistol barrel on bone.
He spun around. Jerry was standing over the sofa with the Glock reversed in his fist, breathing hard. Carlos was doubled over with fresh blood running from his eyebrow. Don Ernesto had turned his head to look at his son with an expression Samuel could not read.
“What did he say?”
Jerry did not take his eyes off Carlos.
“He said that when this is over, the first thing he does, before he sees a doctor, is send two men to my mother’s house in Batangas.” His voice shook. “For my wife and my boy. He said that’s the price of the fingers.”
Samuel walked back across the room.
“He isn’t going to send anyone anywhere,” he said. He crouched in front of Carlos again. “This morning. You had her in your car. Where did you take her?”
Carlos breathed through his mouth for a while. He looked at Jerry’s pistol, and at his father, who was no help to him.
“A café,” he said finally. “North side. Caloocan, off the Monumento circle. A place called Lourdes, with a green awning. He was at a table outside with a coffee. Two o’clock.”
“And?”
“And he looked at her, and he said she’d do. There was a van at the kerb. Blue. A proper van with seats and windows, not one of ours. A driver in it, I never saw his face. He walked her to it himself, with a hand on her shoulder, like an uncle.” Carlos shrugged with his good side. “Then they drove away, and I went to see about a boat. That’s the end of what I know.”
Samuel was already on the radio.
“Jacob. Caloocan, near Monumento. A café called Lourdes, green awning. Two o’clock this afternoon. Blue passenger van, one driver, an old white man and a girl in a school uniform.”
“There’s a bank across from Monumento and a traffic camera on the circle.” The keys were already going. “If that van drove past either one, I’ll have it. Give me twenty minutes. Sam, stay alive for twenty minutes.”
12. The Old Man's Word
Twenty minutes is a long time in a locked room.
Samuel stood by the toppled cabinet and listened to the corridor. Jerry kept the Glock on the sofa. Nobody spoke. Samuel was wondering what he was going to do with these two when the twenty minutes were up, and he had no answer.
It was the old man who broke the silence. He could not speak, so he stamped his bound feet on the carpet twice and looked at Jerry, and then at the tape, with enormous patience.
Jerry glanced at Samuel. Samuel nodded.
The tape came off. Don Ernesto worked his jaw, and breathed, and looked up at the man who had shot him.
“I’ll give you anything you want,” he said. “I’ll start with what you want most. The trade in children ends. Tonight. Every house, every boat, every man on that payroll. This family goes back to what it was.”
“Papa.” Carlos had jerked upright. “Papa, what…”
“Be quiet.”
“Two years. The routes, the buyers, forty men who answer to me…”
“I said be quiet.” The old man did not raise his voice and did not look at him. “You wanted to know what to do with us, Mr. Reyes. I saw you wondering. Before you decide, you should know which of us you’re deciding about.”
Samuel said nothing. He was listening.
“My father ran bootleg rum off this ridge. I gave the family shabu, and marijuana from the south. I am not going to pretend to you that this is honest work. It’s poison and I’ve sold it for forty years. But it’s poison that grown men buy with their own money.” He shifted against the cushion and his face tightened. “My youngest, Miguel, is a chemist. A real one. I paid for the degree. He took to the work the way some boys take to the priesthood. He went into the jungle with six men, and he built me a business nobody in these islands can touch. Product. Laboratories. Lately, on the side, a workshop.” He nodded at the M4 in Samuel’s hands. “That rifle, very likely. What doesn’t come to us from Pakistan or over the Afghan border, Miguel’s people make. I crushed everyone who stood against us and I was content. I had enough.”
“And he didn’t,” Samuel said.
“He said I’d gone soft. An old man playing golf. He gathered his own men, a faction inside my own walls, and he peeled away a third of what I’d built to run as he pleased. A house that’s fighting itself smells of blood, Mr. Reyes. And something came to the smell.”
“The American.”
“He sat at my table. In a flowered shirt. He complimented my wife’s cooking, and then he explained what he bought and what he paid.” Don Ernesto’s lip curled. “I told him to leave my house. I said it plainly. I have a daughter. And my wife, God forgive her, looked at the number and told me I was a fool. And my son went behind my back and shook the man’s hand in a car park.”
“You knew,” Samuel said. “You knew what was in that warehouse.”
“I knew.” He did not look away. “I looked the other way, because the alternative was a war with my own blood. That’s my sin, and it’s a large one. I’m not asking you to forgive it. I’m telling you I’ll end it.” He turned his head at last and looked at his eldest son, the way a man looks at a field that has failed three years running. “As for this one, he lost the way of this family a long time ago. Whether you kill him or my head guard does, I won’t raise a hand. I won’t hold it against either of you.”
“Papa,” Carlos whispered.
Samuel’s phone rang.
“Got it.” Jacob was breathless. “Bank camera has the café. Two-oh-six, blue Hiace, a white man in a print shirt walking a girl in green and white. Sam, it’s her. I followed the van on three more cameras, north, out to where the city runs out. It turned in at a walled villa on the Novaliches side, past the old quarry road, and it didn’t come out. I’ve got Totoy on a jeepney with his helicopter. I’ll have guards and a layout as soon as he’s in the air.”
“How far from here?”
“From the ridge? An hour and a bit, this time of night.”
“Send me everything.”
He hung up. Everyone in the room had heard the word villa.
Don Ernesto had been watching his face.
“You’re going,” he said. “Good. Then let me finish, so that you go knowing all of it.” He drew a careful breath. “He was always like this. As a boy. A bully. A liar. I took a belt to him and it did nothing. His mother spoiled whatever I mended. You may have wondered why a man of forty-five with all this money has no wife.” The old voice was quite level. “Twelve years ago there was a girl. Fifteen. A schoolgirl from the town. There were charges. I paid a lawyer more than this house cost, and I paid her family, and I told myself that a father protects his son.” He closed his eyes. “I should have let them have him.”
Samuel did not think about it. There was nothing in it that needed thought.
He took the Glock out of Jerry’s hand, turned, and shot Carlos Santiago once through the forehead.
The sound was very loud in the panelled room. Carlos went back into the cushions and slid a little sideways, away from his father. Out in the corridor there was a shout and a rush of boots.
“Stay where you are!” Don Ernesto’s voice cracked like a whip. “I’m alive. Nobody touches that door until I say.”
The boots stopped.
The old man did not look at the body beside him. His eyes were wet, and he let them be.
Samuel handed the pistol back to Jerry. Then he took the machete-sharp letter knife off the desk and cut the tape at Don Ernesto’s wrists and ankles.
“I’m holding you to your word,” he said.
“I’ve never broken a promise in my life.” Don Ernesto stood, slowly, with one hand on the arm of the sofa and the other clamped to his shoulder. He swayed.
“That needs a doctor.”
“It hurts. I’ll manage.” He nodded at the doors. “Move your barricade.”
They heaved the cabinet aside. Samuel had his hand on the bolt when the old man spoke again.
“One thing first. Tell me the truth. Besides these two at my door, did you kill any of my men tonight?”
Samuel turned around.
“Not in this house. There’s a boy called Dodong tied up behind the golf bags, alive. Your cook is in the broom closet with a stool.” He met the old man’s eyes. “But the dock was me. And the showroom. All of it.”
Don Ernesto absorbed that.
“For your daughter.”
“Yes.”
“Then I understand it.” He nodded slowly. “I’d have burned more. And mine? Carla was in that showroom.”
“She’s in your end garage, behind the mower. Taped. She’ll have a headache and a split lip.”
Something went out of the old man’s shoulders that even the bullet had not taken.
“Thank you for that,” he said quietly. “She kept his books, and she’ll answer to me for it. But she’s my girl.” He straightened. “The trade ends, Mr. Reyes. I told you. And I believe I’ll end my marriage with it. My wife is the last loose thread on that whole business, and I’m too old to leave threads.”
He drew the bolt himself and threw the doors open.
The corridor was full of rifles.
“Put them down,” said Don Ernesto. “These two are leaving, and they’re leaving as my guests. Somebody fetch Dr. Ocampo. Somebody go to the end garage for my daughter. And show these men to the armory. Whatever they ask for.”
Thirty-five men looked at the blood on his shirt, and at the sofa behind him, and lowered their weapons.
Samuel and Jerry walked out between them. They were at the head of the marble stairs when the old man called down the corridor.
“Reyes! If you kill the American, there’s a bonus in it for you!”
Samuel did not turn around. He shrugged, and kept walking.
13. The Armory
A guard with a ring of keys led them down through the house, past the lobby and the kitchen, where somebody was already helping Big Mama out of the broom closet. She saw Jerry go by and turned her face to the wall.
Jerry hardly noticed. He was lit up. He limped along beside Samuel talking in a fierce whisper, like a boy coming out of a cinema.
“Did you hear him? Did you hear him? That’s the Don. That’s the man I signed on with. Eleven years ago he shook my hand in that office and asked after my mother by name.” He shook his head. “People think I stayed for the money. I stayed because of him. He’s a drug lord, I know what he is. But he has a line, and he keeps his word, and tonight he drew it again in front of thirty-five men. I thought that man was gone. I thought Carlos had buried him.”
“He looked away for two years,” Samuel said.
“So did I.” That sobered him for about four steps. Then he poked Samuel in the arm. “And I’ll say one more thing, and then I’ll shut up. You wanted to drive up here at eight o’clock and go through the gate shooting. Like the dock. Like the showroom.”
“I remember.”
“If you had, there’d be forty dead men in this garden and you’d be one of them. Dodong. The gate boys. Fathers, most of them, who never went near a container. Instead it’s Carlos and two door guards, and the trade is finished, and we’re being walked to the armory like guests.” He spread his hands. “I told you. That’s all. I told you.”
Samuel walked on for a moment.
“You told me,” he said.
The armory was under the east wing, behind a steel door at the bottom of a flight of concrete steps. The guard knocked. A slot opened, and then the door.
Samuel had expected a gun cabinet. It was a vault. A long, low, whitewashed room with racks down both walls and a workbench at the end under a strip light. Rifles stood in rows like books in a library. There were pistols on pegboard and crates stencilled in Cyrillic, in Urdu, and in no language at all. Half the rifles had no maker’s mark. He remembered what the old man had said about the workshop in the jungle.
A small, tidy man in an apron and reading glasses came around the bench, wiping his hands.
“The Don telephoned down,” he said. “Anything you ask for, I’m to provide. So. What kind of evening are you gentlemen planning?”
Samuel’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
It was Jacob, in four messages. An address on the Novaliches side. A photograph taken from above, grey and tilted: a two-storey villa inside a high wall, one gate, a blue van in the yard. A sketch of the floor plan in Jacob’s own hand, photographed off a notepad. Then the count.
11 guards. 2 at gate, awake. Rest scattered, half look asleep. No dogs. Lights on in one room upstairs, back of house. Empty apartment block 180m SE, 2nd floor has clear view of gate and yard. Good luck, brother. Bring her home.
He read it twice. A plan was starting to form.
He walked the racks. He picked things up and put them down. Behind him Jerry cleared his throat.
“So what is it this time? Guns blazing again?”
“I don’t know yet.” Samuel turned to the quartermaster. “Do you have a Dragunov? With a suppressor.”
The little man raised his eyebrows, pleased. “The SVD. I have two. One has a can on it, a Pakistani copy, but I’ve shot it myself and it’s honest.” He went to fetch it.
“Jerry. How are you with a scoped rifle?”
“Me?” Jerry laughed nervously. “Not very. I qualified, a long time ago. I can hit a man-sized target if it stands still and I don’t have to hurry.”
“That’ll do.”
Samuel was already loading. He had taken down a Saiga, the Russian shotgun built on a Kalashnikov frame, and he was thumbing shells into a drum magazine. He filled a second and set it beside the first. Then he added a Kevlar vest, a Glock with a suppressor threaded onto the barrel, and five magazines for it, which he checked one at a time. Last of all, from a hook by the door, he took a plain bolo machete with a wooden handle, the kind every farmer on the ridge carried. He tested the edge on his thumbnail.
Jerry watched the pile grow. He had not touched anything.
Samuel shrugged into the vest, hung the shotgun across his back, and went to the door. He stopped there with his hand on the steel.
“Are you in, or not?”
Jerry looked at the Dragunov lying on the bench in its oilcloth.
“I’m afraid to die,” he said. “I want that understood. I’m not like you. I have people behind me, and I’d like to see them again.” He let out a long breath. “But I counted those children onto the trucks, Sam. Every one. If I go back to my wife tonight and you go into that place alone, I’ll never be able to look at my son.”
He picked up the rifle. He took two magazines for it, and a box of nine-millimetre, and two spares for the Glock.
“I’ll watch over you,” he said. “From a distance. A good, long distance.”
“Good,” Samuel said.
He held up the phone so that Jerry could see the photograph, and put his finger on the grey block to the south-east.
“There. Second floor, abandoned. It’s close enough that you don’t have to be a sniper, and far enough that nobody hears you breathe. You’ll have the gate and the whole yard.” He put the phone away. “I’ll do the rest.”
14. Overwatch
They drove out the way they had come in, around the west wing, past the row of garages.
The end door was up and the light was on. Two guards were helping Carla Santiago to her feet. She had a blanket around her shoulders and scraps of tape still hanging from one wrist. As the car rolled by she lifted her head.
She saw Jerry at the wheel. She saw Samuel beside him. Samuel could not tell whether she knew yet about her brother. She only looked at them, until the corner of the house took her away.
The gate was already open. Nobody raised a hand.
The dashboard clock said 12:30.
It was a long drive down off the ridge and north around the sleeping city, and neither of them spent it talking. Jerry drove. Samuel held the phone in his lap with the photograph of the villa on it and went through the floor plan room by room until he could have walked it blind.
The apartment block was where Jacob had said, at the ragged edge of Novaliches where the houses gave out and the cogon grass began. It had three storeys of bare concrete and no windows in the frames. A developer had run out of money in some other decade. They left the car behind it and climbed a stairwell that smelled of bats.
From the second floor the villa lay below them like a model. It had a high wall, a single steel gate with a bulb burning over it, and a yard of packed dirt. The blue van was there. The house itself was a square two-storey box, dark except for one curtained window at the back of the upper floor, which glowed a dull yellow.
Samuel looked at that window for a long moment. Then he made himself look away.
He set Jerry up at a gap in the wall, kneeling, with the Dragunov resting on a folded jacket laid across a cement block.
“Find the gatepost of the empty lot. The one to the left of the villa, with no light on it. Same distance as their gate, near enough.” He waited. “Got it? Put one in the middle.”
The rifle coughed. It was not silent. It sounded like a heavy book dropped flat on a table. Down in the dark a puff of concrete dust jumped off the post, a hand’s breadth low and to the right.
“That’s the scope, not you.” Samuel reached over and turned the drums on top of the sight, two clicks and then one. “Again.”
A cough. Dust, dead centre.
“Now the roof of that shed behind it. The broken tile on the ridge.”
A cough. The tile vanished.
They waited. A dog barked somewhere a long way off. At the villa gate one of the two guards lit a cigarette and passed the lighter to the other. Neither looked around.
“Good enough,” Samuel said. “Probably.”
“Probably?”
“You’ve had three shots with that rifle. Breathe out, squeeze, don’t snatch at it. And don’t shoot anything until I tell you to.” He pushed the radio bead into his ear and tapped it. Jerry tapped his own. “If it goes wrong down there you’ll hear it. Then you get in the car and drive to your wife. That’s an order.”
“Sam…”
But he had already gone down the stairs.
Jerry watched through the scope. For a while there was nothing. Then a shadow came out of the grass at the back corner of the wall, where the light did not reach. It went up the stucco like a lizard and lay flat for a moment along the top. Then it dropped inside.
After that there was only the yard, and the van, and the two men smoking at the gate.
A minute passed.
Something flickered behind a ground-floor window. It was a small, dull flash, like a match struck under a blanket. Then another. Jerry heard nothing at all. He realised he was holding his breath, and let it go.
A flicker at the side of the house. Then, a while later, two together upstairs.
Then nothing for a very long time.
The guards at the gate went on smoking. One of them laughed at something.
Jerry could not bear it.
“Sam,” he whispered. “Sam, over. What’s going on?”
Static.
“Sam. Talk to me. Over.”
There was nothing. He took his eye off the scope and looked at the stairwell, and at the car keys in his hand. He thought of Batangas, and he put his eye back to the scope.
The bead in his ear clicked.
“I’m in.” Samuel’s voice was very low, and quite calm, and only a little out of breath. “Ground floor’s clear. Stairs are clear. I don’t think there’s anyone left but the two at your gate.”
Jerry counted in his head. Nine men.
“All of them?”
“Most of them were asleep,” Samuel said. He left it there. “The rest never looked behind them. The gate is yours. Take them both, and then walk in the front as if you owned the place. I’ll meet you in the hall.”
Jerry settled the rifle into his shoulder.
He had told himself all the way from the ridge that he would watch, only watch. He found the first guard’s chest in the glass. The man was showing his friend something on a phone.
He breathed out and squeezed, and did not snatch.
The guard sat down against the gatepost. His friend was still looking at the phone when Jerry found him as well.
It had been the same that morning at the dock, he supposed, for the men he had hired. They had been talking about nothing, and then they were on the ground.
He laid the Dragunov down on the jacket. He drew the Glock and went down the bat-smelling stairs on his bad foot, and crossed a hundred and eighty metres of open ground to the villa. He walked in through the gate past the two dead men.
15. The Villa
Samuel was waiting in the front hall with the suppressed Glock held down along his leg. There was blood to the elbow on his right sleeve, and none of it was his. The shotgun was still across his back. He had not fired it once.
Jerry looked at him, and decided not to ask.
From outside it had been a rich man’s villa. Inside it was a ruin. There was no furniture in the hall and no pictures. The paint was coming off the walls in sheets, and the floor was gritty with plaster and cigarette ends. A single bulb hung on a wire. It smelled of damp and instant noodles and unwashed blankets.
“He lives like this?” Jerry whispered.
“He doesn’t live here. Nobody lives here.” Samuel’s voice was flat. “It’s a place to keep things.”
They went through it room by room.
The first was empty. So was the second, except for a guard on a folding cot who would not be getting up. The third was stacked to the ceiling with flattened cardboard boxes, and the fourth with full ones. Jerry lifted a flap. Clothes. Small clothes, T-shirts and school skirts and rubber slippers, hundreds of them, sorted by size.
He let the flap fall. He thought he might be sick.
Samuel had stopped at the foot of the stairs with his head on one side.
“Listen.”
Jerry heard it then. It came from above, at the back of the house. Someone was crying, but it was not loud. It was the thin, worn, hiccupping sound of a child who has been crying for hours and has no voice left to do it with.
Samuel went up the stairs three at a time and did not make a sound.
There was a corridor at the top, and a line of yellow light under the last door.
He did not kick it. He turned the handle and walked in, and Jerry came in behind him with the Glock up in both hands.
It was a bare room with a dim bulb. On the floor against the far wall lay a mattress with no sheet. On a plastic stool beside it stood a laptop, open, facing the mattress, and its screen was the brightest thing in the room. In one corner of the screen a small red dot was blinking.
A man was bending over the laptop, adjusting the angle of the lid.
He was sixty or so and soft in the middle, with thin white hair. His flowered shirt hung on a nail by the door, and he stood there in his undershirt with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He might have been somebody’s grandfather trying to set up a video call.
And on the mattress, with her back pressed into the corner and her knees drawn up to her chin, sat a girl in a white and green uniform. Both her socks were still on. Her ribbon had come half out of her hair.
They were in time.
Samuel knew it before he knew anything else. He had not let himself believe it once in sixteen hours, and his legs nearly went from under him.
The American had turned around. He saw the pistol in Jerry’s hands and the scarred man in the doorway, and very slowly he raised both arms. He did not look frightened. He looked like a man running through a list.
Samuel walked past him as though he were a piece of furniture.
He went down on his knees on the bare mattress.
“Jas.”
She was looking at him and not seeing him. Then she saw the scar.
“It’s Papa. It’s Papa, anak. I’m here.” His hands hovered. He was afraid to touch her. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
Her face came apart. She threw herself at him so hard that he rocked back on his heels, and she cried into his neck with her whole body. It was that same hoarse, voiceless sound, and her fists were knotted in the front of the Kevlar.
He held her. He put his hand over the back of her head, as he had when she was small enough to carry in one arm.
Over her shoulder he could see what he had not seen from the door. There was a bruise coming up along her cheekbone. There were finger marks dark on her upper arm, where the tall man had gripped her that morning by the sari-sari store, and newer marks on top of them. Her shins were scraped raw. She had fought.
“Jasmine.” He kept his voice very gentle. “This man. Did he hurt you?”
She could not speak. She had nothing left to speak with. She nodded, twice, against his collar.
Behind him somebody cleared his throat.
“Sir,” said the American. He had a pleasant, reasonable voice, and it was perfectly steady. “If I could just say one thing. I think there’s a conversation here that would be very much to your…”
Samuel turned on his knees, with one arm still around his daughter and her face still pressed into his shoulder so that she would not see. He shot him.
He shot him twice in the chest and once, as he fell, in the head. The suppressor made three small, dull sounds. The American went down between the stool and the wall and lay still.
Jasmine flinched at each one. Samuel tightened his arm.
“It’s finished,” he said into her hair. “It’s finished. Don’t look. We’re going home.”
Jerry went over. He kept the pistol on the body while he put two fingers under the jaw, and he held them there a long time, because of what Carlos had said. He had expected something more. All night he had been waiting for the man who could put Carlos Santiago on the floor one-handed.
But the American had needed the first move, and room to make it. He had got neither. He was a dead old man in an undershirt.
“He’s gone,” Jerry said.
He stood up, and looked down, and spat.
“Mr. Steinberg,” he said. “The whole clan was afraid to say your name. You weren’t so much.”
He understood, standing there, how near it had been. If they had come through that gate with the shotgun, the house would have woken. Eleven men would have been on their feet with rifles. And this one would have had five clear minutes up here with a locked door and a hostage and that quick, calm mind. It had been the wall, and the dark, and the men who were asleep.
The red dot was still blinking.
Jerry reached over and closed the laptop, carefully. He tucked it under his arm.
Samuel had got to his feet with Jasmine held against his chest, her arms locked around his neck and her legs around his waist. She was eleven, and too big to be carried like that. He carried her as if she weighed nothing.
He walked out of the room without looking back at what was on the floor.
16. More Than Enough
They walked back across the open ground under a sky that had begun, very faintly, to grey.
At the car Samuel shrugged the shotgun off his shoulder one-handed and dropped it on the back seat, with the machete and the spare magazines. Jerry fetched the Dragunov down from the apartment and threw it in after them. Samuel got into the front passenger seat with Jasmine in his lap, as he had not held her since she was four, and pulled the door shut.
Jerry drove.
Samuel got the phone out with his free hand.
“It’s done,” he said. “I have her.”
For a moment there was nothing on the line but breathing. Then Jacob said, thickly, “Is she…”
“Bruised. Frightened. Nothing else. We were in time.”
“Thank God. Thank God.” A long, unsteady exhale. “Don’t go home. Not yet. Either of you. Come here first, until we know who’s looking for whom. I’ll put the kettle on.”
Jerry leaned toward the phone. “Jacob. It’s Jerry. There was a laptop in the room. It was recording. I’ve got it. Do you want it?”
“Do I want it?” Jacob’s voice sharpened at once. “Don’t open it. Don’t let the battery die. Right now that is the most valuable object in the Philippines. Bring it to me like it’s made of glass.”
The city came up around them, shuttered and blue. Bakeries were lighting their ovens. Jasmine’s breathing had slowed and lengthened. Her fists had come loose from his vest. She was asleep.
“Thank you,” Jerry said, after a while. “For letting me come. I’m glad we were in time. I’m glad I got to see her alive.” He glanced over. “That’s all. I wanted to say it.”
Samuel said nothing. He was looking down at the bruise on his daughter’s cheek.
They drove on for a full minute.
“You were with her,” Samuel said quietly. “Yesterday morning. She came through your dock before Carlos put her in his car. You were head guard. You probably walked her in yourself.”
“No.” It came too fast. “No, Carlos handled that one personally. She never went near the container. I told you, I only…”
He stopped.
The road hummed under them.
“I opened the gate for the van,” Jerry said. His voice had gone very small. “A girl in green and white got out. She was fighting. She kicked one of my men in the knee, and I remember thinking, that one has spirit.” He was gripping the wheel with both hands. “Then I signed the sheet and went to get my coffee.”
Samuel did not answer.
“I’m sorry,” Jerry said. “I know I’ve said it. I know it’s worth nothing. I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.”
It was not forgiveness. It was still more than Jerry had expected, and he drove the rest of the way with his eyes wet.
At the vulcanizing shop Jacob had dragged the back seat out of some long-dead jeepney and covered it with a clean sheet. Samuel laid Jasmine down on it, three steps from the workbench, and put Jacob’s jacket over her. He sat on an upturned crate where he could see her face. He did not intend to let her out of his sight for some years.
Jacob worked. The laptop sat in a nest of cables. For an hour the only sounds were the keys, and the kettle, and once a single sharp breath from Jacob that he did not explain. He opened one folder, looked at the first thumbnail, and closed it again with his jaw set. He did not open it a second time.
At last he pushed back from the bench and rubbed his eyes.
“Well,” he said. “It all fits now.”
“Tell me,” Samuel said.
“My client’s containers. The borrowed seals. It was never the Santiagos doing that. They didn’t have the skill. It was him. Steinberg ran the paperwork from this machine, and the Buwaya were his local muscle. He bought from them, shipped under clean numbers, and sold on.” Jacob turned the screen. “But he wasn’t the top of anything. Look.”
It was a contact list. It went on for pages.
“Brazil. Thailand. Three in West Africa. Romania. Each one is a man like him, or a woman, with a patch, a local clan to do the lifting, and a book of buyers. There are dozens of them. He was a middleman, Sam. One regional manager among many.” He scrolled to the top. “And every one of them reports upward to the same person. There’s no name. They only call her Madame. London numbers, New York numbers. She’s the one who introduces the buyers. She knows everyone worth knowing.”
Jerry had come to look over his shoulder. He said a short word under his breath.
“There’s more. Numbered accounts, in six countries, with the access codes sitting in a text file like a shopping list. Client names. Dates.” Jacob laughed without any humour. “On the right forum I could sell the financial side of this laptop for more money than the three of us will see in our lives. It’s the most valuable thing I’ve ever had my hands on.”
“And the recordings,” Samuel said.
“The recordings go to Interpol. Today, every file, through a channel that can’t be traced to this shop. I’m not keeping them and I’m not selling them. There are faces in those videos, and rooms, and voices. People who do this work for a living can put names to them.” He looked at the jeepney seat. “Some of those children are still somewhere.”
Nobody spoke for a time.
“What will you do?” Jacob asked. “Both of you. Tomorrow.”
Samuel considered it.
“Call in sick,” he said. “For me, and for her at school. We’ll go to my mother-in-law’s in Bulacan for a few days. She’ll fuss. Jas needs somebody to fuss.” He rubbed the scar. “Then I suppose I go back to the lobby. Put the uniform on. Say good morning to people.”
“Jerry?”
“I don’t know.” Jerry turned his empty mug around in his hands. “I can’t go back to the Don, even this Don. I’ve seen what I am when I work for that family. I’ll go to Batangas. If Marites lets me in the house, I’ll tell her all of it, and if she lets me stay after that, maybe we open something. A little store. A piggery.” He smiled crookedly. “Something where the stock doesn’t have eyes.”
Jacob nodded slowly. He was looking at the screen again.
“Or,” he said.
They waited.
“Or we don’t hand over everything. The videos, yes. But the list. The accounts. The routes.” He touched the laptop. “We hold on to those. And we follow it. Every name on this list. Every ring, every clan, every Steinberg, all the way up to Madame. We know where they are now. Nobody else alive does.”
Jerry stared at him. Then he laughed out loud, and clapped a hand over his mouth and glanced at the sleeping girl.
“Jacob,” he whispered. “Be serious. Look at us. A man in a wheelchair, a lobby guard, and a crook with a hole in his foot. We’re three Filipinos with some guns and an internet connection. Those people own judges. They own countries. We’re not going to pull down anything.”
He looked to Samuel for support.
Samuel was watching his daughter breathe. He was silent for so long that they thought he had not heard.
“That’s more than enough,” he said.
They both turned to look at him.
He did not raise his voice. He reached over and tucked the jacket closer around Jasmine’s shoulder.
“Steinberg was just the beginning,” he said.
The End