Countdown: H Hour (23 page)

If . . . by the grace of God . . .

The shivering ceased as Ayala felt a wave of warmth come over him.
Oh, shit. Now comes the fever and the shakes.

Just across the trail, a young girl shrieked anew as her masters tore her sphincter for about the fourth time this evening.

Allah not making an answer, Janail was left on his own. Slinging his rifle over one shoulder, he left his hut and walked to the shore to the north, where some low cliffs kept back the sea. On the way he passed by the crucifixion site, a couple of bodies, dead and stinking with decomposition, and one fifteen year old Filipino, struggling and, in effect, torturing himself to death.

Janail spent a moment looking up at the writhing body, just barely discernable in the jungle gloom. With an indifferent shrug, he continued on.

The old man’s a wasting asset. I use him, or I lose him, anyway. So next week we’re going to make another video, taking another finger. If he dies in the course of making it, so be it. We can cut that out of the recording. His family won’t know, and the one in his family who has been helping us would rejoice if he did.

Reaching the low cliffs to the north, Janail sat, cross legged, looking to sea and thinking hard upon his unenviable plight.

After all, I’m only taking one chance among many. If he doesn’t die this time he surely will next. And I never intended to give him back. At some point in time, we’re going to be left with a corpse anyway. If we have the money, well and good; he becomes a corpse after that. If he dies before we have the money . . . well, we’d have had to bluff anyway.

Hmmm. That leads to an interesting thought. What if we take not one finger, then change his clothes a bit, then take another finger, maybe with a slightly different camera angle. Then we wash him up, bandage him, dirty the bandage, and change his clothes. Another slightly different camera angle . . . then a toe . . .

Yes, that’s the trick. We’ll take six months worth of videos in a single day. He’ll probably die but that doesn’t matter if we have the means to keep terrorizing his family.

Ah, Janail, you are brilliant.

Hmmm . . . should I get that cooperative journalist back? No, I think we can handle this better on our own, without any distractions. And better have the doctor get him as strong as possible so that he lasts long enough. I’ll give the doctor that week.

I wonder, should we take as many parts as we possibly can before he dies? Mmm . . . no. Six—or five, even, if he doesn’t last that long—should be more than enough. Anything beyond that—on the off chance he does last that long—would be gratuitous and I am, after all, a civilized man.

“Old man, get up,” announced the guard, pulling on the chain that ran from Ayala’s leg to the rock. The guard was one of two. In another time, a stronger Mr. Ayala might have been flattered that they felt he needed two guards. Now? Now he couldn’t possibly care if they’d sent a regiment.

“Get up.”
Tug. Tug.
“The boss wants to speak with you.”

Ayala wasn’t sure he even
could
rise. A quick inventory suggested it was possible. Another hard tug from the guard indicated it was necessary. Weakly, he forced himself to a sitting position, then to his feet. He started to fall over before the guard, younger, taller, fitter, and much, much healthier, caught him, one handed.

Ayala took one look at the camera, set up on its tripod, and turned to flee. The senior of the two guards caught him by his filthy, ragged collar, pulled back, spun him, and then cuffed him hard enough to split his lip.

By the collar, Ayala was dragged to his chief kidnapper’s chair and thrown, roughly, to the ground.

Two men, both armed and wiry-looking, stood behind and to either side of the chair, which seemed to Ayala to be a sort of rude jungle throne. The men had their faces covered with thick gauze, wrapped around them, starting at the neck, then spiraling up to form something like turbans. Janail was similarly masked.

Behind them a green banner was hung, proclaiming something—Ayala had not clue one as to what—in Arabic script.

Janail nodded to the cameraman, who started recording.

In English, the language he and the Ayala clan shared best, he said, “I warned you what would happen if our demands were not met. I sent you instructions. You have not contacted me. You have not met my demands. This is the price of your intransigence.”

“Take him.”

The two veiled guards behind Janail came out from behind his pseudo-throne. One pushed Ayala over into the dirt. The other grabbed his leg and yanked, presenting the bare foot to Janail.

Janail picked up the same set of shears he’d used before. They were rustier now. He held them before him a bit for the cameraman to focus on.

“Please? Oh, plleassse! Nooo,” begged the old man.

“Whine to your vile and decadent clan of oppressors,” Janail responded, loudly enough for the microphone on the camera to pick up. “Only they can help you.”

Twisting around in his seat, Janail locked one of Ayala’s skinny ankles in a vise grip, forcing down the lesser toes as he did. Then he carefully placed the shears around the big toe. Squeezing once drew both blood and a shriek that would have made a kinder man blanch. Janail didn’t care in the slightest.

The shears met bone, which resisted for a bit. The old bone was no match, though, for the strength behind the shears, especially once Janail began twisting them with his wrist. If anything, the old man’s screaming redoubled.

The bone split with a audible crunch. Clamping down on the shears’ handle, Janail severed the last shreds of flesh. Ayala’s big toe popped off, flying several feet to the dirt. The camera followed its path, then held steady on the pitiful, bloodied bit of flesh for several long moments, Then, finally, it returned to the victim, lying on his back in the dirt and sobbing like a young child.

“Next month, it will be another piece,” Janail finished, making an imperious gesture to stop the cameraman’s recording.

“Ooo
kay
,” the terrorist chieftain said, with enthusiasm, still in English. Reverting to his own language, and rubbing his hands together, he said. “That went pretty well. Now take him, bandage his foot up, but make the bandage look old and dirty. Clean him up a little. Change his shirt. Comb his hair. Then bring him back and we’ll do number two. A finger this time, I think.”

Quivering with shame, humiliation, disease, infection, and pain, the old man was dragged off to prepare him for his second ordeal.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,

And the people who ask it explain

That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld

And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

—Rudyard Kipling, “Dane-geld”

Malate, Manila, Republic of the Philippines.

Aida wore a light sweater, pink, when she arrived. She’d been her before, and always found the air conditioning set too low.

Pedro’s head was down, shaking back and forth slightly in a way that suggested he didn’t even realize he was doing it. “She’s in the TV room, Aida,” he said. “She’s in a bad way.”

Aida nodded. She knew the gist of it but not the details. “How did the recording get here?” she asked.

“Junior found the disk on the front lawn. I suppose somebody frisbeed it in.”

Aida grimaced. “Yeah, I suppose. Where is Junior? And why aren’t you with the Kanos?”

“Junior’s gone to the office. Says he can’t stand to see his mother like this. They called me back to see if I could help with Madame.”

Pedro sighed. “Aida, I’m not going to try to take your gun. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t let Madame see it. That’s how bad a way she’s in.”

“Point taken,” Aida agreed. “Though she’s not nearly that weak. You don’t have to escort me; I’ll find her myself.”

“Won’t be hard, even if she’s moved. And I’ve sent for the head of the Kanos. And a doctor who won’t ask too many questions.”

Long before even reaching the corridor that led to the “TV Room”—it was much more of a high end commercial theater in miniature—Aida heard the keening. It was high pitched, repetitive, and really not quite human-sounding.

Oh, dear.

The first thing Aida saw on the one hundred and eighty-four inch screen, mounted to one wall—yes, the peasantry could no longer have cheap, incandescent bulbs; this meant little to the very rich—was a very sharp image of something she could not, at first, identify. The screen was locked on that image. She stared for some moments, then drew her breath in sharply once she realized she was looking at a bloodied human toe, fuzzily displayed about twenty times life-size on the screen.

Aida couldn’t see the tiny woman, being rather short herself and Paloma Ayala being dwarfed by the seat back. She didn’t need to see, though, to know where Mrs. Ayala was; the keening sufficed for that. She walked forward about twenty feet and turned left, toward Madame. Mrs. Ayala had her arms crossed in front of her. She was rocking back and forth, rhythmically, tears pouring down her face, ruining her makeup. Paloma’s hair was a torn-up mess. She had nothing around her neck, at the moment, though there were a number of mixed pearls and diamonds scattered across the floor. Even her customary crucifix was nowhere to be seen.

Taking a seat next to the stricken old woman, Aida reached out one arm, patting her back in a sort of
there, there
gesture.

Paloma turned toward Aida, then, still keening, rocking, and weeping, and buried her face in the other woman’s shoulder. Automatically Aida wrapped her in a one-armed hug, then began stroking the tangled mess of Mrs. Ayala’s hair with the other hand.
There, there
.

Aida rested her own cheek on the top of Paloma’s head. “I’m so sorry, cousin. I’m so very, very sorry.”

Shuddering, Paloma finally got a few words out, the words broken by sobs, sniffles, and shudders bordering on the epileptic. “I’ve . . . got . . . to . . . pay them, Aida. He’s . . . old . . . older than me. He can’t . . . take that.” She wailed, “Aiaiaiaiai . . . he’ll . . . aiaiaiai . . . he’ll die!”

“If you pay them,” Aida said, softly, “he’ll surely die.”

At those words, Paloma went into an even worse bout of pseudo-epileptic contractions.

Welch looked around the expansive and ornate—ornate almost to the point of tackiness—estate.
“Let me tell you of the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

“What happened?” Welch asked of Pedro, by the entrance into the mansion from the porte cochere.

Welch had a sudden, odd thought.
I like this guy because, not only doesn’t he hesitate to do what’s needed, I’m twice as big as he is and he’s not remotely intimidated by that.

“We got a video disk,” the sometime taxi driver, sometime arms provider, and full-time bodyguard and doer-of-needful-things replied. “The Harrikat took off the old man’s toe. I’ve seen the recording. He looked . . . bad. Really bad. I think Madame wants to pay the ransom.”

“That would be . . . unwise,” Welch said.

Pedro agreed. “You know that. I know that. So does Aida, who’s in with her now. But Madame, she don’t know anything except that the one person she loves most in the world is being slowly chopped to bits, that she can’t stand that, and that she’ll do anything to make it stop.

“You can kind of understand.”

Welch nodded ponderously. “I
do
understand. It’s still unwise.”

“Yeah. C’mon, Mr. Welch, I’ll bring you to her.”

God
, thought Welch,
I
hate
to see a woman cry. It just flips all kinds of genetic switches.

Aida had wiped Paloma’s runny nose and more or less reorganized her hair.
The makeup was mostly rubbed off and resting among the fibers of Aida’s sweater. It wasn’t quite so uniformly pink anymore. About the stream of tears, she hadn’t been able to do much.

Aida and Welch exchanged glances. Reluctantly, the woman said, “She wants to pay the Harrikat.”

“I cannot even begin to explain what a bad idea that is, Madame.”

Paloma couldn’t speak; sobbing, she pointed a trembling hand more or less at the screen with its big bloody toe.

“Yes, I understand that. But if you pay there is no chance you will see your husband again. You’ll see another ransom demand, for even more money, perhaps. But him? No, no; he’s the goose with the golden eggs.”

“When can you do a rescue then?” Aida asked. “He’s not going to survive through much more of this.”

That last set Paloma Ayala to howling:
Aiaiaiaiai . . . aiaiaiaia . . . aiaiaiaiai

“We’re pretty sure we know where he is. Madame was there for that. The rest of my force arrives in three days. We go in three or four days after that. Call it a week from now.”

“Can you guarantee to save him?”

Welch shook his head. “I told Madame up front, there are no guarantees in this kind of thing, only odds. We have a preliminary plan, and I think we have a good chance . . . a
very
good chance. But no more.”

Later, after Madame had been sedated and put to bed, Aida and Welch reviewed the video.

“Disgusting . . . disgusting . . . disgusting.” Aida said it about every four seconds of the few minutes’ duration.

“I need a copy of it,” Welch said, when it was finished.

“Why? There’s nothing there to see.”

“You never know,” Welch said, “And Lox is remarkably good at ferreting out things you wouldn’t normally see.”

Aida was a policewoman, and a good one. She knew that, on the global scale, Filipino police were about as good—if also about as corrupt—as could be expected in a poor country. She also knew there were capabilities that her force couldn’t even dream of having. The Kanos just might.

“I’ll have a copy made and give it to Pedro for you,” she agreed.

Welch hesitated a moment, then said, “Ralph told me I could trust you. He told me before we left and he wrote it again, just recently. Can I trust you, Aida?”

She shrugged. “Depends on with or about what?”

Welch looked around, then stood up, walked to the theater door, and closed it. Returning to his seat next to Aida, he asked, “Any chance this place is bugged?”

Aida scoffed. “You seriously think the old man, or his wife, would ever set up something that might allow their conversations to be recorded or tapped?”

“Good point,” he agreed. “I need some help. Some of my people have been grabbed . . . kidnapped.”

“Muntinlupa?” she asked. At his confirming nod, she said, “Yes, I saw a report on that.” She paraphrased, “One obvious Kano dead. Bloodstains. Some shooting besides. Maid was probably working for the kidnappers. Probably TCS.”

“How’d you know about the maid?” Welch asked.

“It’s their style.”

“Yes . . . well, I brought in extra people, a half dozen of them, that Madame didn’t know about.”

“Why?”

Welch snorted. “Because I don’t trust her.”

“That’s sensible,” Aida agreed.

“Yeah, but I was too clever by half. They have four of my people. And I need them.”

“Can’t mount a rescue for them,” she cautioned. “The papers would be all over it. And then the Harrikat would know you’re here.”

“Can the police do anything?”

Aida scoffed. again. “Sorry, but TCS’s area has long since become a no go zone. We need to send the army in, but the pols don’t want to admit it’s gotten that bad.

“There is one good thing,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Well, unlike the politicians, TCS, when bought, stays bought. They’re a business; some ways just like any other. If you give them the ransom, they’ll give you your people. They always have. Bad advertising if they didn’t, ya know?”

“Will they actually kill my people?” Welch asked.

“Only if you don’t pay.” Aida answered. “Then? No question about it.

“The only real problem might be if one of them got killed. Then they’ve got another advertising issue going on: ‘Don’t resist us.’ ”

“Shit.”

“No,” Aida said, “you can’t just grab some of theirs to trade. It wouldn’t work unless you got the very highest leaders, and they’re all in Tondo, surrounded by hundreds of armed men. Well trained? Maybe not. But there are a lot of them. That’s
how
their area became no go to the police.”

“Could we grab some of their wives? Kids? Husbands?”

Aida shook her head. “Same problem; they’re all in Tondo.”

Terry stood and paced for a bit, then asked, “What about the gangs around them?”

“Hate each other. Shoot on sight levels of hate, if one is found in the wrong area. The other . . . mmm . . . five or so . . . they hate TCS, too. Maybe even more, because TCS has been so successful. But they’d turn on your people, too, if you tried to go through them, which you would have to. There’s a rough balance of power now. They wouldn’t upset that lightly. And there are a couple of safe areas, exits in and out, where nobody shoots at anybody, by mutual agreement.”

“Okay,” Welch said. “Let me think on that problem for a bit. What’s their method for trading the prisoners for their ransoms?”

“It’s a multi step process,” Aida explained. “You have a way to contact them? Maybe the victims’ cell phones?”

If he wasn’t convinced before, that detail convinced Welch the woman knew what she was talking about. “Yes, I have a way.”

“When you tell them you have the ransom, they’ll give you a time to be at some particular place. That place may or may not be covered by their people. No matter, they’ll send you three, four, maybe five more places and one of those
will
be covered, to make sure you’re not being tailed, and don’t have a force with you.”

“Day or night?” he asked.

“No set pattern. Odds are . . . day, though. They’re not stupid and know what they don’t have. Day means their eyes are as good as yours. Night means you might have an advantage they can’t match.

“They’ll be at the place where the exchange is to take place well in advance, one or two hours, anyway, well before they tell you where to finally go. You won’t have a chance to set up an ambush or a rescue there.”

“Do they prefer rural exchanges or urban?” Welch asked.

“Generally, urban. They know the police have qualms about a major firefight in a crowded area.”

“We’re not police.”

“Yes,” Aida agreed, “and they know you aren’t. That doesn’t mean they’d discount the possibility you might have police backup. And you’ve got another advantage and a disadvantage TCS doesn’t know about, or at least probably doesn’t know about. If they knew who and what you were, they’d probably have left your people alone in the first place. Since they didn’t leave them alone, they don’t know what you might, just might, be able to do.”

“Yeah,” Welch agreed, “ignorance can be a dangerous thing. And, you know, if they have an advertising and public relations issue with one of their being killed, so do we.

“I don’t suppose you have a way to communicate with the leaders of the other gangs?”

“Could be,” Aida admitted.

“Do you have a list of places where they’ve done exchanges before, and with whom?”

“I can get it.”

“What will we owe you?” Welch asked.

“Nothing. I really don’t like the idea of some self-declared foreigners claiming sovereignty inside
my
country. I’ll get you the file on TCS, too.”