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  “A kid in that space might do anything. If she does try something, it’ll take her to some of these people we’re after sooner or later. Keep the lid on the Jeffers angle, but pass what you can along to the Filipino government about what we may be on to.”

  Simmons stood at the door, briefcase in hand, his other hand on the doorknob, sizing Cody up from across the room, or trying to. “The word I got was that your were after terrorists.”

  We are, General, and sometimes we go after terrorists who wrap themselves in millions of bucks worth of protection, and power, like Arturo Javier. Sometimes we go after terrorists who hide behind political shit, like this Vincente Valera.

  “There’s more to it than that.” Simmons said. “More than that, more than the girl. You won’t find that kid, you know. Out there it’s a jungle, like the saying goes, only this one is real, fella, and I’m talking about the islands, and I’m talking about downtown fucking Manila.”

  “Hey, General,” grunted Hawkeye from where the Texan sat sideways in his chair with both long legs cocked over one of the chair arms. “Try this one on for size. It’s just like Nam, you got that, all over again. This one’s the last domino. Maybe we’ve been handed a chance to keep it from falling, all by our lonesome, before too many more people get killed.”

  Simmons started to reply, then professional soldier eyes pinned each man around that table, and he said to Cody, without a hint of sarcasm, “Maybe you can at that.”

  The general left them alone.

  Caine chuckled at Hawkins.

  “A real diplomatic sort of chap, that’s what you are, Tex, so bleeding polite all the time.”

  “The general’s on our side,” Murphy reasoned. “Can’t blame him for being a mite confused. I’m a little confused myself.”

  “What about it, Sarge?” Hawkeye asked. “This ‘something big’ we’re talking about. Okay, I’ll buy that. We all buy it. That nasty shit I said a while back about the Jeffers kid, hell, I was just pissing off steam. We’ve got to find that kid before she gets in worse trouble.”

  “I know that,” Cody assured him. “Ann Jeffers is still Priority Number One, but the general’s right, there’s more to it than the reasons we gave him for going after Valera.”

  “We can’t walk away from this one. It is the same thing Nam was about. The ones who think they need to tear society down instead of weeding out the bad apples and letting the machinery work. They never get their way, not for long, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. Sometimes they win, sometimes we win. They won in Nam. This one’s up for grabs. We can’t walk away from it.”

  “And we won’t,” Hawkeye assured him. “So we’re going nightcrawlin’ tonight, eh?”

  “The Gilded Peacock.” Caine shivered. “Dreadful name. Dreadful enough to be a great place, one can only hope.”

  “Nightclubbin’ in the middle of the day.” Murphy’s gleam of a smile creased his lower face from ear to ear. “Well, all right.

  Cody saw beneath the surface of this easy flow of conversation between fighting men who knew this fight was not over, not yet begun, in the true, bigger sense—if the picture added up the way Cody figured, and Cody knew it did.

  A murderous, all-powerful warlord.

  The mountain guerillas of the New People’s Army.

  And a rotten apple named Vincente Valera who needed serious weeding out.

  And, bottom line, yeah, a mixed-up, abused, confused, on-the-loose kid named Ann Jeffers who had already been through enough hell for three times her short lifetime.

  “Let’s get to it,” Cody growled.

  He led his team out of there, back into the world, to take on the devil.

  The most difficult thing Ann had ever done in her life was to pretend to be normal back there at the base when her mother and father had suggested she see a psychiatrist.

  She understood what was happening to her but could not stop the self-loathing from swirling through her like a spreading dark stain, eating her up inside like a painful cancer, making her wish she had died back there in that jungle.

  It was all like some intense nightmare that had not yet ended.

  She had been such a fool.

  She wondered how her mom and dad could ever forgive her. She wondered how she could ever forgive herself, or live with herself after what she had done to those two decent, good people responsible for her very existence.

  After she left the classified area where they had been brought after the chopper landed, she had soon enough found a stop where several people stood waiting to catch one of the base buses, some army wives with their army brats on their way to catch a bus into Manila outside the main gate.

  She slipped onto the bus and rode to the gate without bringing any suspicion upon herself, as far as she could tell. She got off with most of the others when they reached the gate.

  No one questioned any of the bus riders on their way out.

  In front of the installation, she started toward one of the buses parked across the street, then pulled up short when she realized that she did not have a peso to her name.

  She wore the jeans, blouse, and shoes provided from the PX, and she had cleaned up, scrubbed her face quickly in the ladies’ room, before her mother had popped that psychiatrist stuff, so she looked presentable enough, but that was all.

  She did not know what to do.

  She started walking.

  * * *

  Ramos nudged Jorges in the side.

  “There! Look!”

  “What?” Jorges grumbled irritably, looking at the Air Force dependents passing through the main gate. “What are you talking about?”

  Ramos grew more animated by the second.

  “There! The dark-haired one!” He lifted the photograph he held, a copy of one of the pictures that had been sent. It’s the Jeffers child.”

  “What? Let me see that!” He looked at the snapshot, then at the young woman across the street, the shapely teenager walking by herself away from the base, down the sidewalk. He handed the picture back. “You’re right, it is her. Ha. We are told to sit and watch and learn what we can. Mara said nothing about anything like this. What should we do?”

  Ramos slapped the wheelman irrititably with the snapshot.

  “Why, what do you think, imbecile. We grab her.”

  “Here? In front of all these people? Ramos, I’m not sure—”

  “Do as I tell you,” Ramos hissed in a different voice. “Get us going around from here. Coast up quietly, behind her. No one is looking after her. I can have her in the car and we-’ll be gone.”

  “But we should call—”

  Ramos slid the pistol in his pocket halfway out.

  “There is no time. Do you want me to take the wheel, Jorges, and report that you refused to obey my order?”

  “No, no, of course not—”

  “Then do what I tell you.”

  “Very well.”

  Jorges steered their eight-year-old Renault around in a U-turn, tapped the gas pedal, then cut the engine to begin coasting along the curb, continuing well away from the main gate and activities of people there.

  The car gained on the walking teenager, who had no idea she was being followed.

  “Very slow, now,” Ramos whispered.

  He licked his lips, unlatched his door, and got ready.

  She slowed her pace the more she thought.

  She Wondered what she was accomplishing by running away again.

  That’s what really happened with that lizard, Locsin, she thought, and thinking about it made her hurt more inside. She had run away then, too, from her responsibilities, from her parents, from herself, and the result had been she screwed things up totally.

  Or was she selling herself, and her parents, short?

  They had been through an unbelievable experience together and part of that was the awful thing she had done, the betrayal.

  Yet she had seen, on the way to meet the helicopter in the jungle, and during the flight to the
base and after they landed, that her parents seemed to understand what she had been too stupid to grasp while it was happening.

  If Mom and Dad could forgive her, if the three of them could somehow, after all this, face the future as a family, she would never stop loving them for that, and, maybe someday, after a long, long time, she would learn to forgive herself.

  She decided to turn around, go back and face the music.

  The Jeffers family was of tough stock, she told herself, and it was like a giant weight lifting off her shoulders, and her mind.

  She started to turn.

  And became aware for the first time of the car, a rusting, battered Renault; must have been coasting up on her, closing in on her, along the curb from behind while she had been so lost in thought.

  A man appeared from the side of the car facing her, a man she had never seen before. Filipino, she registered.

  Then they were upon her—it happened so fast.

  “What—” she started to say.

  The Filipino’s arm snaked around her before she could react.

  She realized before she could cry out that she was being pulled-tossed into the backseat of the moving Renault.

  The driver punched the accelerator. The car leaped away from the curb, into the traffic. The man who grabbed her followed her into the backseat, the door slamming shut behind him.

  The driver merged the Renault with the traffic flow, the whole incident having taken no more than two to three seconds—and it could have been a lovers’ quarrel or anything, she realized in that capsizing moment, and no one passing had suspected a thing, if anyone had noticed!

  She twisted in the confines of the backseat, toward the man crowding her.

  “Who are you? Let me out of here! Let me—”

  Ramos punched her with a sharp right to the jaw.

  Ann’s eyes rolled back in her head and she crumpled into the narrow space on the floor.

  The Renault tooled along. It was hot and stuffy in the car.

  Jorges chuckled from behind the steering wheel.

  “She has spirit, this one!”

  Ramos massaged his knuckles, gazing down upon the unconscious girl.

  “She has been through too much for one so young and innocent.”

  “It will not be easy for her.”

  “I know. If you want to know the truth, Jorges, I feel sorry for her. But it is too late now for any of us to turn back, even if we wanted to.”

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Manila has not been beautiful since World War II.

  The older houses that remain have fallen victim to the deterioration of the merciless Asian climate and the plummeting standard of living surrounding them, their tin roofs in serious need of repair, the upper stories jutting out over the streets crying out for paint rollers and several fresh coats, the windows behind boxed-in trelliswork staring out blankly upon the world like the empty eyes of drunks who have seen too many mornings after.

  The teeming boulevards and narrow streets overflow with coursing humanity, thousands of people on foot, on bicycle, on every manner of vehicular contrivance, shouldering for space along tattered, grim boulevards and narrow streets overhung with phone and electrical wires, the noisy, chattering, beeping throngs pushing and shoving to the hot, humid throb of violence lurking always just beneath the surface.

  The natural beauty of Manila Bay clashes with the squalor, the exhaust fumes, the unending cacophony of humans, the gutters stacked high with garbage, the miles and miles of ugly, squat concrete buildings, some burned out, where humiliation and hatred are born and nurtured.

  Mara Zobel had been born forty-one years ago in Leveriza, Manila’s densest slum, where more than 25,000 souls try to live together within one-fifth of a square mile.

  Mara had come of age in the ankle-deep filth of this hellhole of communal water faucets, scant occasional electricity and no public sanitation—one of ten children raised in a one-room tin hut.

  Her father, a janitor, had felt lucky to land a janitor’s job for seven hundred pesos, about thirty-five dollars a month.

  The family had existed on perhaps a thumb-sized piece of bread for each mouth for breakfast, sugared rice for lunch, and for dinner, maybe a three-peso bag of vegetables split twelve ways.

  Mara Zobel always carried around in her mind, clear as a picture, the day many years ago when her mother had taken her and some of her brothers and sisters past Malacanang Palace, from which Marcos had ruled. She still remembered, with even more clarity, having to go back to that smelly, dank, cramped little tin hut in Leveriza, and wondering if anything better in this life could ever be hers.

  Prostitution, beginning at age thirteen, had been Mara Zobel’s passport out of Leveriza, as it had been for countless others, but she had never, ever thought of herself as a mere whore.

  Right now, seated behind the desk in her plush third-floor private office of the Gilded Peacock on Pilar Street, surrounded by the brown paneled walls and the red carpeting, with that look of fear in the eyes of the young man who stood in front of the desk, facing her, she felt once again that satisfaction in knowing how far she had come.

  She was in charge here. She did not wield power outside the walls of this club, but she knew that this could also change within the next twenty-four hours, if things went as Vincente and his friends intended…

  Then her cultivation of Vincente Valera would pay off in a very big way, for if he rose to a visible position of power, he would need to become more “respectable.”

  And she would become Mrs. Vincente Valera and would share in and benefit from the power that would be his.

  She felt confident of this. She knew how strong was her hold on him. He would not, could not, find the white heat she brought him with anyone else.

  Who could say? Perhaps one day she, herself, would be invited to Malacanang Palace.

  She had worked her way up faster than most from whore to mama-san at one of the better houses, where the clients had been primarily the wealthy, the powerful, from the upper-class Manila suburbs.

  This was how she had met Valera.

  She had become his private whore.

  She became manager of this lucrative nightspot.

  She did things, made him do things, that he said he could not live without, and could ask from no other because they would not understand. She was his mistress in more ways than one.

  Thus she knew she owned powerful Vincente Valera not because she understood his needs—hardly that—but because she understood how to exploit them.

  Yes, a very long way from Leveriza.

  She turned her mind from the thing Valera had told her was to take place soon.

  He had been no more specific than that, but she knew he was involved in something, something big, and the pressure he was under had been obvious to the point that even his more base needs had tapered off.

  His tension became contagious and he had started her mind wandering more often than she cared to admit, like right now.

  She brought her attention back to the young man and what he was saying.

  “I’ve done everything I possibly can,” he was whining.

  He was in his early twenties, but already his features were beginning to bloat around the jowls and beneath his eyes, denoting the dissipation already setting in.

  Mara plucked up the handfuls of IOUs and wagged them angrily at him, bringing her mind back to the business at hand.

  “This alone is from two weeks, Felix. Tonight is the end of your credit until these have been paid.”

  “I’ve explained to you that it is only a matter of time,” he protested. “The will is taking time moving through the courts. It is always so. But the money will be mine, and then it will be yours.”

  “If I let you slide,” she snapped, “everyone will want to cry on my shoulder.” She threw the IOUs upon the desk. “Enough. I want my money.”

  The young man nervously licked his lips.

  “I—I hesitate to remind yo
u, but the Aquilar name is one of the most respected in all Manila. And, uh, those debts are not legally collectible. Besides, really, I don’t have the money, but—”

  “I have done some checking on you, Felix.”

  “Checking?”

  The kid’s face fell as if he knew he’d just said the wrong thing.

  “There’s a morals clause in your father’s will. You are to receive a monthly allowance until you’ve reached your thirtieth birthday, at which point you will receive the principal with no strings.

  “Unless evidence of excessive, unseemly behavior is drawn by you to your family name.”

  Felix Aquilar looked stunned.

  “Wh—what are you saying?”

  Mara brushed aside some papers on the desk. She picked up a sheaf of several glossy pictures, 8 × 16s, and handed them across.

  Aquilar looked at those pictures and his complexion grew more pale with each one. He did not look at them all, but dropped them halfway through as if they were too hot to the touch.

  “I… those… you bitch! You said… you said those were private rooms!”

  “Your father was apparently quite concerned that this family name you’re so proud of stay clean,” she snarled. “If you bring dirt on the family name, you lose it all, don’t you, Felix? The monthly allowance, the payoff down the line when you’re thirty, every penny. I’d say these pictures of you and your, uh, ‘friends’ from downstairs should do that.”

  “Don’t,” he gulped. “I’ll… see you get your money!”

  “By bank closing time tomorrow.”

  She pointed a finger his way for emphasis.

  “Tomorrow? But… that’s a small fortune!”

  “Find a way. It’s a bigger fortune you lose if you try to hold out on me.”

  “I’ll get you your money,” he promised sulkily. “Damn you.”

  “Next time don’t wager more than you can afford to lose.”

  “Those pictures?”

  “Stay with me.”

  “But—”

  “Show him to the door, Edmundo.”

  The hulking bodyguard, who had been posted silently at the door, came forward, grabbed the young man around the arm above the elbow, and propelled him out through a door he held open with his other beefy fist.