Reamde

“It’s freaking them out that you’re carrying your own bag,” Seamus said, and so she finally surrendered it to him, leaving herself with nothing but a belt pack that was now serving in lieu of purse and the parasol. She’d assumed they were trying to get to the airport, which was definitely off to their left, or south; but Seamus kept taking them west, cutting across the occasional cemetery or basketball court, until they struck water: a very unappealing stagnant creek, half choked with plastic debris and smelling of sewage. Olivia couldn’t tell which way it was flowing, but Seamus made an educated guess and led her along its bank, occasionally holding out an arm to prevent her from toppling into it, until they got to a place where it widened into a little basin where actual boats were to be seen: long, slender double-outrigger canoes equipped with outboard motors. Seamus had no difficulty hailing one of these and inducing its owner to take them in the direction of Sangley Point. The hull was so narrow that Olivia could bridge it with her forearm. They sat amidships under an awning of sun-blasted canvas, Olivia in front, leaning back against her pack, and Seamus behind.

She knew that word “sangley,” at least; it was Chinese, from the dialect that was spoken around Xiamen, and it quite literally meant “business.”

They maneuvered down progressively wider channels for a quarter of an hour or so, the densely packed neighborhoods giving way to giant industrial zones and expanses of flat empty territory, then abruptly turned into a blunt channel that disgorged them directly into Manila Bay. For the first time Olivia was able to look about and get a clue as to where they were. They were headed for a claw of land reaching out into the bay a couple of miles ahead of them. A running conversation between Seamus and the pilot, in a mixture of Tagalog and English, led to a series of increases in the throttle, to the point where they were bounding and bouncing over chop, sending occasional gouts of spray into Olivia’s face. “He’s worried you don’t like it. Wants to go slow for you,” Seamus explained, and Olivia twisted around until she could make eye contact with the boatman, grinned, and gave him the thumbs-up.

The spray and the cool sea air were a fine antidote for the killing heat of the traffic jam, and so they arrived at a dock on Sangley Point salty and in need of showers but somewhat refreshed. It was a military installation: an airbase, Seamus had explained, formerly of the United States, now of the Philippine Air Force. A pilot in uniform met them at the dock—Seamus had called or texted ahead, apparently—and walked them to a waiting Humvee that took them directly onto the tarmac of the base’s single, very long runway. They pulled up next to a simple two-engine passenger plane with military markings and were airborne a few minutes later. They took off to the west, headed straight for the narrow exit of the gigantic bay, and soon banked left and began the long flight south to Zamboanga: something like five hundred miles, which they expected to cover in a couple of hours. Seamus spent most of it sleeping. Olivia looked out the windows and tried to see the archipelago’s countless islands, inlets, and channels through the eyes of an Abdallah Jones.

“What do you think?” Seamus asked her, just as she was finally about to nod off. She jolted awake, looked across at him—they were seated on opposite sides of a small table that occupied most of the plane’s cabin—and tried to snap out of the jet-lag torpor that had crept up on her. She wondered how long he’d been watching her. His decision to leap out of the taxi in Manila and set off on foot had been made to look like the spontaneous act of a free spirit, but she had little doubt that it had been calculated as a way of putting her to the test. Not by any stretch of the imagination a difficult or strenuous test, but an unscripted moment in which she might let her guard down and reveal aspects of her personality otherwise difficult to see. By sleeping for most of the flight, Seamus seemed to be telling her that she had passed the test, whatever it was. Now they were starting to get down to work.

“A million places to hide, once you get down on the surface,” Olivia said. “But flying in on a business jet in the middle of the day, you’d be absurdly conspicuous.”

With the tiniest suggestion of a nod, Seamus broke eye contact and looked out the window. “There it is,” he said. “Welcome to the GWOJ.”

“GWOJ?”

“Global War on Jones.”