Santos had little social life or extended family. Anabeth was his family. After her mother died, when Anabeth was three, Santos had thrown himself into work. A devoted yaya—a babysitter—had raised her until she was sixteen. Santos was devoted to her, but now that she was grown, he realized that he had missed much of her growing up, and that the lost time could never be reclaimed. She seemed to leave his presence much too easily these days.
Now another morning gone. Damn.
He picked up the phones from the table, dropped all three into his pockets, and he followed his daughter out the door.
Santos was waiting for them when the four Americans cleared customs and immigration around 4:45 a.m. He had been awake all night, after working all day.
“Welcome back to the Philippines,” he said, and shook their hands in turn as Mendonza gave their true names.
This didn’t seem right. He felt uneasy, as if they had just disrobed in front of him. But it didn’t matter, he thought: apparently he wouldn’t be seeing much of them anyway.
He gave them the four telephones, along with tickets and boarding passes for Favor and Mendonza on the first flight to Tacloban, departing in about an hour from a domestic terminal on the other side of the airport property. Santos had brought two cars to the airport, one with a driver named Elvis Vega. Favor and Mendonza went with Vega to their flight, and Santos put Arielle and Stickney into his own car and drove them to their hotel.
They had reservations at one of the four-star monoliths in Makati, the city’s international business district. Santos insisted on helping them to check in. He took their passports to the front desk and waited while the clerk made photocopies.
Santos brought Arielle and Stickney their key cards and check-in portfolios.
Arielle asked if he wanted to come up with them, and he did. They had spectacular suites, each occupying one corner of the top floor, at least triple the size of his own apartment.
They ordered breakfast from room service. Arielle asked Santos if he would stay and eat.
“Thank you, no,” he said. “I should be leaving.”
The truth was, he felt like a tour guide. There was nothing wrong with that—he had once been a tour guide, and a damn good one—but it wasn’t what he had hoped for now.
Arielle said, “I have something for you.” She gave him a Bank of America cash envelope.
Santos opened it discreetly and saw a slim stack of bills. They were U.S. hundred-dollar bills, new ones. Santos guessed about twenty bills in the stack.
It was far too much, and Santos was ready to tell her so. But he looked at the suites, and he thought about the private jet and about how they were operating so openly, not even really operating.
They were tourists, he decided. This made him a tour guide after all. And tour guides always know what to do with an overindulgent client.
“Thank you,” he said, and pocketed the money.
Nine
Favor followed Mendonza onto the stairway that the ground crew rolled out. Directly ahead, across an asphalt apron, was the trim white terminal building of the airport at Tacloban. Beyond the terminal he saw the sharp ridges of tree-clad hills. Clouds were breaking up against the hilltops, leftovers of a predawn shower that made the foliage glisten dark green in the light of the rising sun.
The airfield lay the full length of a narrow peninsula that jutted into Leyte Gulf. Tacloban lay near the far end of the peninsula, across a narrow bay, with the sand-colored steeple of a cathedral rising above the city’s low skyline.
Favor and Mendonza walked down the stairway. They had no baggage except what they had carried on, and they went straight to the sole rental-car counter in the small terminal.
Soon they were driving away from the airport, Mendonza behind the wheel. He followed a road that skirted the south end of Tacloban, an area of small homes and modest businesses. Mendonza had spent most of his childhood in the Philippines, and Favor thought he seemed happy and relaxed. A couple of miles from the airport, they turned south along the coastal highway, putting the city behind them. The settlements became more sparse, grouping into small clusters a mile or more apart, tucked between the hills and the shore.
Mendonza was driving with a map and a portable GPS receiver. He slowed and turned off onto a strip of broken pavement that climbed a couple of hundred yards into