sure to stay in contact. It looks for new stations coming into range, and it announces itself to each one: ‘Hey, here I am.’ At the same time, it’s going ‘Sayonara’ to the ones you’re leaving. Even when these kids went missing to the world, the cell system knew where their phones were.”
“To what accuracy?” Stickney said.
“Depends. The more towers you’re working with, the more accurate you would be. In an area dense with stations, you could probably locate a phone to within a hundred yards or so, just by looking at which combination of stations it’s talking to at any given time. Rural areas, with fewer towers, not so much. But probably closer than you’d think.”
“Which is fine,” Mendonza said, “unless the phones are turned off. Then they’re lost.”
“You’d think so, but that’s not the case,” Arielle said. “Even when a phone is turned off, it still interacts with the nearby towers for as long as there’s power from the battery. The only way to break the link is to remove the battery. Otherwise, it stays in contact with the network, checking in. And all these transactions are being logged. A record exists somewhere.”
“And how do we get it?” Favor said.
“We ask.”
Totoy Ribera was stuck in an impossible snarl of midday traffic in Quiapo, the old downtown area of historic Manila. The sidewalks were jammed with carts and vendors selling cheap handicrafts, religious statues and charms, fruit, bootleg software, and DVDs. Totoy was looking for an address about two blocks away, but at the moment it might have been two hundred miles, for all the progress he was making.
He was looking for the owner of the car that had brought the American visitor to Optimo. The registration showed that it was owned by a corporation, Tres Agilas, Inc.—Three Eagles—with an address in the Paco neighborhood of Manila. Fair enough. But the Paco address was a neighborhood restaurant where nobody knew anything about a Nissan sedan.
Totoy had then learned that Tres Agilas was itself owned by several corporations with addresses scattered around metropolitan Manila. One of those was here in Quiapo, two blocks away, and Totoy was pretty sure that when he reached the address he would find another place where nobody knew anything about Tres Agilas or a Nissan sedan for hire.
Andropov was still paranoid about the four curious Americans, although they hadn’t reappeared in more than twenty-four hours. Not in Tacloban, not in Manila. Winston Stickney and Arielle Bouchard hadn’t returned to their $1,800 luxury suites, and Totoy was sure that they wouldn’t be back. They had either gone to ground or had heeded the warning and left the country.
In the first case, they would be much harder to find; if they had left, he could waste an infinite number of hours in fruitless searching.
Yet he didn’t want to stop looking. Not now. He was getting the sense that someone had gone to a lot of trouble here, creating layers of opacity, as if to avoid scrutiny.
This made him all the more anxious to peel back the layers. Someone who didn’t want to be scrutinized was someone he should get to know better.
Up ahead, the welter of cars and people nudged forward for a few feet and then stopped again.
The man Totoy sought—the actual owner of the Nissan Sentra—was less than three blocks away, stuck in the same traffic. And he was bound for the bodega where the four Americans were ensconced. In the backseat of the vehicle was a plastic storage bin that contained the first part of Ray Favor’s want list.
Eddie Santos had spent the morning out and around in the city, gathering the items from Favor’s list. He could have delegated it to others, but he knew he could do it more quickly than anyone, working his phones as he drove, making sure that the items he needed at each stop were ready and waiting for pickup.
And it wasn’t just a matter of efficiency. He was enjoying this. He didn’t know how Favor and the others were going to use the items on the list, but he would recognize it when it happened, and he knew he didn’t have long to wait.
That, and the fact that Favor paid generously—outrageously—had Santos out on the streets.
A light turned green up ahead, and miraculously the three or four cars ahead of him moved into the intersection. He followed them through.
“I wish I could help,” said Arturo Guzman. “But it’s out of the question.”
He was a technical superintendent of