Reamde

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.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think I’m going to take you down there and we are going to check it out.”

“But what do you really think?”

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Tell you what, let’s go down there, I’ll show you around, and in another couple of days, once we’ve gotten to know each other, established a trust relationship, then we can each tell the other what we really think.” Then he pitched forward a bit. “What!? What!?” for a look of amusement had crept onto her face.

“I thought you were here,” she said, “because you were no good at politics.”

He put his palms together, fingertips nestled in his beard, like a Southie boy going to his First Communion. “I like to think I am here,” he said, “because I’m good at acquiring new skills. Which comes in handy in Zamboanga. Want some breakfast?”

“Are we going to miss our plane?”

“They’ll wait for us.”

THE REASON FOR his lack of urgency became plain when they got out the door and into Manila traffic, for which simple words like “bad” or “horrendous” were completely inadequate as descriptors. Two hours into the journey, they had traveled less than a mile from the hotel.

“Up for a stroll?” Seamus asked her.

“I would be up for just about anything that wasn’t this,” Olivia said. So he paid the taxi driver and they set out on foot, Olivia feeling inordinately proud of herself for having packed light and, moreover, done so in a bag that could be converted into a backpack. Seamus chivalrously offered to carry it for her but she shrugged him off, and they began walking between lanes of stationary traffic for a while until he steered them off to the edge of the road. The heat was fantastic, whooshing out from beneath the stopped vehicles and baking her bare legs. It abated somewhat as they worked their way out of the traffic jam and onto smaller streets. Seamus purchased two flimsy umbrellas from a street vendor, handed one to Olivia, and snapped the other open to keep the sun off his head. She followed his lead in that. Navigating by the sun, he maneuvered them into a residential neighborhood that started out seeming reasonably affluent and became somewhat less so as they got farther from Makati. But she never felt in any danger, out of a possibly fatuous belief that no harm could come to her when she was walking next to someone like him. They were noticed, and watched carefully, by hundreds of people, and followed by dozens. “Miss? Miss?” some of them called.