“I presume Manila is not my final destination?”
“It is as far as commercial airlines are concerned,” he said. “When you are there, you’ll have one night in a hotel to pull yourself together and then you’ll find yourself in the company of one Seamus Costello, Captain, U.S. Army, retired.”
“So he is, what, just a gentleman of leisure now?”
Uncle Meng did not wish to dignify her witticism with a direct response.
“Mostly,” Olivia said, “I would just like to know whether he’s working for some other branch of the government or a private security contractor.”
“Oh no, we wouldn’t set you up with a mercenary,” said Uncle Meng, a bit pained.
“Right then, so he was a snake eater. They decided he had talents beyond his station in life. They kicked him upstairs.”
“The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex,” was all that Uncle Meng would say. “It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.”
“He must have other duties.”
“Oh yes. He spends most of his time on Mindanao, looking after the Abu Sayyaf crowd.”
Here, as Olivia knew perfectly well, Uncle Meng was referring to Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines who had hosted and succored Abdallah Jones for several months. U.S. special operations forces, operating hand in hand with their Filipino counterparts, had launched a raid against a jungle encampment where Jones had been positively sighted. They had found the place abandoned but extensively booby-trapped. Two Americans and four Filipinos had lost their lives. Weeks later, Jones had been traced to Manila, where he had set up a bomb factory in an apartment building and created explosive devices that had been used in a precisely timed series of car bombings. From there his trail had consisted of nothing but hints and rumors until Olivia had found him in Xiamen.
“Costello has been after Jones for a long time,” Olivia guessed. “He takes pride in his work, or used to. Jones got the better of him more than once. Killed members of his team in sneaky and cowardly ways. Blew up civilians on his watch. Then left the country—went where Costello couldn’t get to him. Leaving Costello stuck in a backwater.”
“He is just your type,” Uncle Meng said gently. “Please do try not to fuck him.”
“How come it’s okay for James Bond?”
THE FLIGHT TO Dubai was all rich Arabs and City types. The Dubai-to-Manila leg was almost entirely Filipina domestic servants headed for home. The racial and cultural crossrip was far too heavy for Olivia to get thinking about, so she watched movies and played Tetris, finally falling asleep thirty minutes before they began their descent into Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It was late afternoon. Four days had now passed since she and Sokolov had parted ways at Kinmen. A car picked her up and took her to a business hotel in Makati where she ate room service steak, cleaned up, took her malaria pills, and went to bed.
She slept through three alarms and wake-up calls and made it down to the lobby fifteen minutes late. Seamus Costello was in the restaurant eating bacon and eggs, over easy. The reddish-yellow color of the runny yolks perfectly matched that of his beard, but even so he self-consciously wiped his chin before standing up to shake Olivia’s hand. He looked like a slightly over-the-hill backpacker, the kind of guy you’d strike up a conversation with on a rattletrap bus in Bhutan or Tierra del Fuego, borrow a joint from, ask for advice on where and where not to stay the night. He was lean, like a strip of bacon that had spent too long in the pan, and a bit north of six feet tall. He had green eyes that seemed just a little too wide open—though, she had to admit, any nonblack eyes looked that way after you’d been living in China for a while—and he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover. But he’d been to school—anyone in his job would probably have a master’s degree or better—and he could dress up his speech when he remembered to make the effort.
Which he didn’t, now. “Ya came this close,” he said, holding his thumb and index finger an eighth of an inch apart.
Delivered in the wrong tone, it would have been a rebuke or even mockery. But he had a trace of a smile on his face when he said it. The tone was philosophical.
He was congratulating her.
She shrugged. “Not close enough, I’m afraid.”
“Still. What was that like? Sittin’ there, day after day, listenin’ to yer man and his crew…”
“I don’t speak Arabic, unfortunately.”
“I’d not have been able to contain myself,” he said ruefully, staring out the window and getting a sort of mischievous-boy look on his face as he imagined (she guessed) going across that Xiamen street and walking up to Apartment 505 and gutting Abdallah Jones with a knife. “Ah, that fucking bastard.” He turned his eyes back to her. “So. You think he’s on Mindanao.”
“There is a cove not far from Zamboanga, sheltered enough that it would be a good place to ditch, deep enough that a plane would sink rapidly and become invisible to—”
“I’ve swum in it,” he said.
“Oh.”
Olivia was looking a little startled. “I read the report,” he explained. “I know what your working theory is. They ditched, just where you said, and went ashore. That whole area is lousy with Abu Sayyaf, it would have been easy for them to hook up with their brothers.” He chose to turn the Boston accent all the way up to eleven when pronouncing the word “brothers.”