DEVIL’S KEEP Read online

  Down he went.

  The third one—

  The third one had a knife. He was coming in from behind, blocked from the climber’s view, slashing the knife up as the chain swinger’s body fell away. The tip of the blade swept across the climber’s upper torso. To Sarah Jean this looked like something from a ballet, choreographed, the biker’s momentum twisting him around, the climber leaning away to avoid the knife, somehow keeping his balance, then bringing the bat around and shoving it forward so that the knob at the handle connected with the back of the biker’s skull. It was almost a gentle tap, controlled and precise.

  Down he went, number three.

  The climber turned toward the van.

  The biker women were squealing. Their screeches brought the last two from the van. They came out one after the other, almost too easy. One popped out to look—the bat smashed down across the back of his shoulders, and he tumbled out in a heap. The second one appeared. The climber grabbed him by the hair and pulled him out and rode him, shoving him toward a flat piece of granite embedded in the earth. Sarah Jean was running hard, going for the back of the van, and she was close enough to hear the crunch of bone as the last Demon’s face smashed into the stone.

  The climber’s shirt was torn along a diagonal that the knife had traveled, and blood was spreading from a cut. He spun, looked back at the three on the ground.

  No, Sarah Jean saw. Two on the ground. One was rising to his knees, coming up with a pistol in one hand, a black revolver that he brought up at the end of his arm, pointing it at the climber.

  Sarah Jean couldn’t say exactly what happened next. At least ten or twelve feet separated the two men. Three good strides. Up came the gun, the climber spun and looked down the barrel. And then…

  … then the climber exploded into some wild fast-forward version of movements he had made on the rock, but a thousand times faster now, body twisting, arms and legs shooting out, a water-bug skitter that closed the distance before the biker could react.

  All Sarah Jean knew for sure was that on one side of a heartbeat the climber was looking up the barrel of the gun, and before her heart could thump he had the gun and the biker was down on the ground, the climber pinning him with a knee against his back while mashing his face into the dirt.

  That was with his left hand. His right hand held the pistol. He straightened his arm and thumbed back the hammer as he held the end of the barrel against the biker’s head.

  Sarah Jean screamed, “NO!”

  Although the members of Bravo One Nine were broadly trained, each also had an individual specialty. Arielle was an expert in computers and electronics. Alex Mendonza was a master of vehicles: cars, planes, boats—he could fix them and he could drive them. Winston Stickney knew explosives and demolition.

  Ray Favor was a killer.

  Up-close kind of killing, swift and vicious and personal. To an outsider this might have seemed a trivial ability, but it was prized in fieldwork, and few did it really well. Even trained warriors often feel an internal blink of resistance when the killing takes place within the zone of body heat.

  Not Favor. He killed with the ease of flipping a light switch.

  Sarah Jean didn’t know any of this. But as she watched the climber straighten his right arm and cock the revolver, she knew that he was about to put a bullet in the biker’s brain, no problem. And she knew that she didn’t want to see it.

  Her “NO!” stopped him.

  He paused, turned his face toward her. She could see him clearly in the campfire light. His eyes were hard, so terrible that she almost couldn’t look at them, but she forced herself to do it, make that connection.

  She said, “Don’t, mister. Please.”

  He stared at her. His face softened a little. Just enough. He lifted the pistol, carefully eased the hammer down.

  Sarah Jean ran to the van to put her arms around her friend.

  The wound was superficial. Favor knew it as he sat on a table in the emergency room at South Lake Tahoe. He might need some stitches along the pectoral, where the blade had sliced in about an eighth of an inch deep, but otherwise the wound was hardly more than a deep scratch.

  The ER physician was an attractive Pakistani woman about thirty years old. She cut away his T-shirt and revealed a road map of scars. Three were several inches in length, one bisected by the fresh cut. None were in the usual places for a surgical incision. She also found a small circular indentation at the abdomen, with a matching perforation in his back. They were the scars from a through-and-through bullet wound.

  “You’ve been making a habit of this,” she said.

  “Not lately.”

  She swabbed the cut.

  “And how are you feeling?” she said.

  Favor smiled. “Pretty damn great,” he said.

  Harvest Day

  –6

  Five

  About twenty-four hours after Ronnie left for Manila, about the time that he should be reaching Manila, Lorna Valencia was seated at her kitchen table. A woman from the village came to her door and entered the house without knocking. Erlinda was her name. They had known each other since childhood.

  “You’re awake early,” Erlinda said.

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “You have a problem.”

  Of course, everyone was aware that Marivic had disappeared and that now Ronnie was gone. The villagers knew one another’s lives down to the aching bunion. A disaster like this would travel on the wind.

  “Yes,” Lorna said.

  “I know someone who may be able to help.”

  Erlinda was clutching a small, grimy, spiral-bound notebook. She opened it on the dining table. Inside were handwritten names with addresses and telephone numbers.

  She had no reading glasses. She leaned so close that her nose nearly touched the paper.

  She ran a finger up and down the pages.

  “Here!” Erlinda said. “Give me your phone.”

  Lorna held out the cell phone.

  “How much load do you have on here?” Erlinda asked. She meant the balance left on the phone’s pre-paid SIM card.

  “About two-fifty,” Lorna said.

  “We’ll have to make it quick so you don’t run out.”

  “Run out? Two hundred and fifty pesos?”

  “You’ll need it all,” Erlinda said. “We are calling the United States.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me,” Favor said. “I’m fine. I’m glad to see you—it’s been too long—but if that’s why you’re here, you wasted a trip.”

  He was sitting with Mendonza and Stickney and Arielle in a gazebo that sat on a wide lawn between the lodge and the shoreline of the lake. It was late afternoon, the day after his encounter at the Lover’s Leap campground, and a strip of white bandage showed around the open collar of his shirt.

  Favor wasn’t talking about his wound, though. He meant his state of mind.

  “Ari is concerned,” Stickney said. Stickney’s voice was quiet and low, with a hint of honey-smooth Caribbean vowels. It was a voice that could have belonged to a midnight deejay on an FM jazz station. Cooler than cool.

  “If Ari is worried, we’re worried,” Mendonza said.

  Favor said, “Ari is an alarmist.”

  “Ray,” she said. “Mooning around like a sick hound. Crapping out in a meeting. Blowing off a million-dollar deal. Multimillion. Please.”

  They were watching him, waiting for his response. Mendonza and Stickney sat on either side of Arielle, around an octagonal table in the center of the gazebo. Favor realized that although they spoke on the phone several times a year, he hadn’t seen either Mendonza or Stickney in almost four years.

  The two men had always been physical opposites: Mendonza blocky and muscular, Stickney slim and spare. Favor, looking at them now, thought at first that the years hadn’t changed them much. But he realized this wasn’t exactly true. They had become even more intense versions of themselves: Mendonza, an avid weight lifter, was now truly bull-li
ke, with a thick, corded neck and a powerful upper body; Stickney was now completely lean and angular, without an ounce of excess flesh on his bones. His face was drawn, almost ascetic.

  Favor said, “I’ve been in a little funk, that’s all,” he said. “It happens.”

  Mendonza gave a derisive snort. “Never saw it happen to you, stud.”

  Stickney said, “A funk, Ray? Can you be more specific?”

  Favor didn’t like explaining himself, but he was enjoying the moment, the four of them together again. He couldn’t imagine talking this way with anybody else.

  “It’s like this,” he said. “When I started investing, I got some advice from an old fart. He told me that banking the first hundred million is always fun. After that, making money starts to feel like real work. He said that’s when you find out if you want to be just rich or filthy stinking rich.”

  Mendonza said: “And he was…”

  “Oh, he was filthy stinking rich for sure,” Favor said. “I laughed at him. At the time, I couldn’t believe that making lots and lots of money would ever be anything but lots and lots of fun.”

  “You’re telling me you hit a hundred mil?” Mendonza said. “Nine figures?”

  “Probably about two years ago. I never knew it at the time, though.”

  “Jesus, Ray. I knew you were doing okay. But a hundred million?”

  “It’s up around one-sixty now,” Favor said.

  “Jeeee-zus!”

  “And he was right,” Favor continued. “It hasn’t been fun for a while now. I just never slowed down long enough to realize it.”

  Stickney was nodding. “I understand that,” he said. “You’re at a point, you start to sort things out. You wonder how you want to spend the rest of your life.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You could give it all away and start over,” Mendonza said.

  “I’ve considered that. I might do it. But the point isn’t how much money I have. It’s how much time is left, and what I’m going to do with it.”

  Nobody spoke for a couple of minutes. The day was bright but chilly. A steady breeze rippled the water along the shoreline and raised a chop out on the lake. To Favor, the sunlight seemed startlingly bright, and the wind had a delicious bite on the skin. The day was almost painfully beautiful, as if his senses and perception were amplified.

  Favor hadn’t felt this way for years, and he knew why he felt it today: it was the action in the campground, the swinging of the biker’s chain and the sweep of the knife’s tip across his chest, the loathing and then the fear in the eyes of the bikers. Climbing provided some of the same jeopardy, but not the pure kill-or-be-killed intensity. As he sat in the gazebo and felt the breeze on his face and watched the sharp glint of sunlight off the rough water of the lake, Favor recalled that exquisite moment when the third Demon had pulled the pistol. Oh, the malevolence in his eyes as he brought the gun up. The surprise, the shock, as Favor sprung across the packed dirt of the campsite and disarmed him, and held the muzzle to his head. No rock wall ever gave him that. Not even close.

  Stickney broke the silence: “Ari also says you were talking about One Nine.”

  “Apparently Ari is a goddamn bottomless fountain of personal intel.”

  “Looking back? Taking stock?” Stickney said.

  “Don’t go there,” Mendonza said. His tone was bantering, but Favor knew that Mendonza genuinely didn’t like this tack. The differences between Mendonza and Stickney were not just physical. Stickney had always been introspective, analytical. A thinker. Mendonza, though intelligent, was most comfortable in the concrete, the here and now.

  “Taking stock, yeah, something like that,” Favor said to Stickney.

  “Worried about how you stand in the karmic ledgers?”

  “Don’t go anywhere near there.”

  “I don’t know about karma,” Favor said. “But you look back, you’d like to think that you’ve left the world at least in no worse shape than it was when you arrived. I can’t say that.”

  Stickney was nodding, his face serious. He understood. Mendonza was shaking his head, arms folded across his big chest. Mendonza really didn’t like this kind of talk.

  Favor said, “What we did, a lot of it, you never know. Somebody gives you a job, tells you it has to be done. You do the job, they say you did a good thing. But you’re never sure. All you see is the blood on the floor. That’s real, the rest is guesswork. And some of it, you know that it was bad juju. That bothers me. It does, I won’t lie.”

  Mendonza’s phone chimed. He took it out, looked at it, and said, “My mother. I have to take this one. Ray, no shit, don’t torture yourself over things you can’t change.”

  Mendonza got up and walked some distance away, standing out of earshot as he spoke on the phone.

  “Seems you were quite the badass last night,” Stickney said.

  “A taste of the old times.”

  “Havoc was wreaked. Bones were broken. Heads were cracked.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “Ray Favor at his best,” Arielle said.

  “At my best, he never would’ve gotten near me with that knife,” Favor said. “But yeah. That was me.”

  “How was it?” Stickney asked.

  “I have to admit, I haven’t had so much fun in a long time.” Favor found himself grinning.

  “No misgivings?” Arielle said.

  “Hell no. They were raping that girl. And the way it went down, I’m sure it wasn’t their first time. They had it coming. Unmitigated assholes.”

  “You see our point,” Stickney said.

  “What point?”

  “Favor being Favor isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s all in the situation. Just make sure you’re right. I mean locked-down sure, no questions, no gray areas. No goddamn ambiguity. Then when you’re clear about that, go out and joyfully be the fearsome badass that you are. You’ll have no second thoughts.”

  “But how often does that come along? I only had to wait ten years for last night.”

  “Some would say that opportunities to do good will come your way when you commit to a righteous path,” Stickney said.

  “Who says that?”

  “It’s been said.”

  “You made that up.”

  Favor laughed. Arielle laughed.

  “Yes, I did,” Stickney said. He was laughing too. “But I believe it.”

  “Tell you what I think,” Favor said. “I think it’s goddamn cold here. I want to go someplace warm. We ought to get on a jet and fly someplace where we can bake. Seychelles or Koh Samui or Raiatea or wherever. And then raise some decadent hell for a few days.”

  “When do you want to do that?” Stickney said.

  “Tonight. Just go. I can have a G550 sitting on the flight line at South Lake Tahoe in three hours. One thing about money, it makes things happen in a hurry.”

  “I have no plans,” Stickney said.

  “Beautiful,” Favor said. He looked at Arielle: she grinned and shrugged. Mendonza was walking back to the gazebo, putting his phone away.

  “Pack your bags,” Stickney said to him. “Apparently Ray wants to sponsor a disgusting blowout at some place you can’t spell, and we’re going there in style.”

  “I’d like to,” Mendonza said. “But I can’t. I’m on a midnight flight to the Philippines. And it’s not in style, it’s on standby.”

  “An emergency?” Favor said.

  “I have no idea. A kid, a teenage girl, is in trouble. I’ve been conscripted to help out.”

  “Your family?”

  “Her father is the second cousin of my mother’s uncle by marriage. Something like that. Don’t laugh. Please. It’s a Filipino thing. There is no such thing as a distant relative. Something else about Filipinos. When Mom says you get on a plane, you don’t argue, you look for a ticket counter.”

  “Want me to come along?” Favor said.

  “I wouldn’t mind a little company,” Mendonza said.

  “I’m
going if Ray goes,” Arielle said.

  “I’m in,” Stickney said.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Mendonza said.

  “We were just going to fart around and get a sunburn anyway,” Arielle said. “We can do that in the Philippines.”

  “Okay,” Mendonza said. “Great. But I don’t think we’ll all get on the flight.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the flight,” Arielle said. “We have an alternative.”

  “What’s the story on the girl?” Favor said.

  “The girl went missing; nobody knows what happened. Mom was getting this thirdhand, and she was vague on the details. All she said was ‘You must go to Manila, the truth is in Manila.’ Quote unquote.”

  Six

  Far from Manila, and half a world from Lake Tahoe, Marivic Valencia lay on her cot in a small room with high concrete walls. She was waiting for the sign that would reassure her, tell her that her situation was not as desperate as she feared.

  It would be a few bars of a beautiful melody, whistled pitch-perfect by someone who really knew how to whistle. She had been waiting for it almost half a day. But she heard only the incessant churning of the ocean against a shore, and the soft whisk of the ceiling fan, the broad blades turning overhead.

  No melody.

  It should have happened by now. Every minute that passed, she became more certain that she would never hear it and that she was in a deep pit of trouble, with no way out.

  Her ordeal had begun when she stepped off the bus in Manila six days earlier.

  She didn’t realize it right away. She was aware only of the thick, pungent air that leaves its impression on all first-time visitors to Manila. It was like walking into a wall. All her life, growing up beside the gulf, she had known only fresh air and ocean breezes, nothing like this viscous stew of diesel fumes and sweat and rotting garbage and fish fried in hot oil.

  The odor stunned her—that, and the mob of people milling around the concrete apron, and the sounds, and the activity. So much happening at once.