curb at the terminal. He looked back in his rearview mirror and saw that the car with the big man at the wheel still hadn’t moved.
In the clear, Totoy thought. He put the car and the big man out of mind as he accelerated along the terminal road. The van was now turning into the street, entering traffic. When Totoy pulled into the street, he was about half a block behind the van.
That was just right for his purposes. He was checking for a tail, watching the vehicles between him and the van, how they moved and behaved.
He saw nothing unusual.
The direct route from the airport to the residence was just a couple of miles, usually no more than ten or fifteen minutes, but Totoy had told the van driver to make a couple of sudden turns, and he hung back to see how the other vehicles reacted. After the second detour, the set of vehicles between him and the van was completely different from those at the beginning of the trip, so he was sure they were unobserved.
At that point Totoy pulled in close behind the van as it crossed Amorsolo Street and turned down the alley that ran behind the Impierno building and the residence.
They stopped at the back entrance of the residence, a black-painted gate of solid steel that the guards opened and swung in. Totoy followed the van in, and the gate closed behind them.
Done, and not a ripple of trouble. Maybe the Russians really were paranoid after all.
Favor followed the Honda as far as the alley behind the residence. He swung around the block and came back the other way, and when he passed the alley again the two vehicles were pulling through the open gate. Mendonza and Stickney were behind Favor’s car, and they, too, got a glimpse of the Honda following the van inside.
They all had plenty to talk about. Mendonza suggested dinner, and they gathered at a restaurant called Aristocrat, on the curving boulevard that ran along the bay front, where they got a private room and talked over all that had happened and what they would do next.
Two missing teenagers, shipments of blood samples, and all of it going to a block on Amorsolo Street, a place so touchy that Winston Stickney had been assaulted just for going near it.
They had finished dinner and were still talking when Eddie Santos called Arielle to tell her that he had found a hideout. She gave the phone to Mendonza so that he could get directions.
“Where are we going?” Mendonza asked.
“Bear in mind, I was working on short notice,” Santos said.
“Where, Eddie?”
“North side of the Pasig River.”
“How far north?”
“Oh, it’s close in, don’t worry about that.”
“Eddie—where?”
“It is in Tondo.”
Mendonza muted the phone. He turned to the others. He said, “My friends, life just got very real.”
Sixteen
With more than four hundred thousand residents in an area of about one and a half square miles, the Tondo district of Manila is among the most densely populated places on earth. It is the home of Manila’s main slaughterhouse and its docks, a place of freight depots and tenements and off-kilter utility poles that bristle with illegal electrical connections, daringly installed. It is a place where gray water stands in the crevices of broken sidewalks. Tondo is the birthplace of pickpockets and revolutionaries and whores and anonymous saints. It is rich in heart and humanity and history, but rousingly poor by almost every other standard.
Tondo was also the childhood home of Edwin Santos. He operated many of his businesses there, and when he learned from Arielle Bouchard that she and the others required secure emergency lodging, he immediately thought of Tondo. In all the Philippines, it was probably the last place anyone would look for four wealthy Americans.
Arielle didn’t say why they needed safe haven, but obviously they were in some difficulty, not of the kind that could be fixed with the infusion of money. Trouble wasn’t something he would have wished for them, but since it had happened, he did feel a small thrill knowing that he was being depended upon by serious people acting seriously.
The place he had in mind for them was hardly luxurious, but it was as discreet and secure as any place they could hope to find. Thirteen years earlier, the four Americans would have recognized it for the gem that it was.
Now Santos would find out just how much they had changed.
Mendonza followed Santos’s directions to one of Tondo’s dark side streets.