Devil's Keep (27 page)

Mendonza kicked the pistol across the floor and turned back to the staircase, pike pole at the ready again.

Favor said, “Ari, anything?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s been thirty seconds. That must not be a network machine.”

“Shit.”

“Try the rooms in the back,” Stickney said.

Favor unplugged the drive, shut down the PC,
and made his way through the smoke to the back of the room.

The flashlight’s bright spot found a door to his right. He tried it. Locked.

He swung the ax, and the door splintered.

He stepped in, found the PC and the power switch.

He turned it on and waited for it to boot.

Stickney said, “Al, two more. One with a long gun.”

Favor plugged in the drive. “Ari, it’s in.”

Mendonza stepped down into the thick smoke of the stairwell. He held the pole out in front of him, waited, and jabbed hard at the first shape he saw in the smoke. It was the barrel of a shotgun, and he knocked it aside with one flick of the pole, then went hard at the belly of the man behind the gun.

The blow knocked the man back, off balance, into the second one behind him, and they both fell backward down the stairs. Mendonza pressed forward down the steps, holding the pole out in front of him. The outline of a pistol appeared in the smoke. Mendonza knocked it aside and jabbed with the blunt end of the pole, looking for windpipes, abdomens, groins.

Ari said, ”We’re in.”

Favor pulled out the flash drive, pressed the PC’s power button, and left the room. He crossed through the office, over the broken glass, down the stairs. He stepped over the two sprawled figures on the steps, to where Mendonza waited near the door, looking up for him.

They walked out of the smoke and into the night.

“Out,” Favor said.

Stickney watched until they had disappeared into the tumult on the sidewalk, swallowed up, and he pulled out of the parking space for the last time and drove away.

Favor and Mendonza made their way through the crowd, back toward the Mitsubishi. Mendonza got in on the driver’s side, Favor through the passenger door. Before he ducked inside, he pulled the mask away.

Nearby was the group of young women from behind the fishbowl window, and when Favor removed his mask he saw that one of the women was watching him.

It was Patricia.

She met his eyes, flashed him a grin, naughty and complicit:
Ah, so you did this,
the grin seemed to say.

He returned the smile, then dropped into the seat and closed the door, and they drove away.

With the chaos at Impierno receding in the mirrors, he said, ”Ari, are you getting what you wanted?”

“I’m getting it,” she said.

“Good. Because I don’t want to try that again for a while.”

He laughed.

And he said: “Well done, well done, well done.”

On the laptop screen at the bodega, Arielle Bouchard watched the directory listing for the Optimo network scroll up in front of her.

The characters were Cyrillic. Russian.

Arielle had studied it for a couple of years as a college undergrad. She hadn’t used it much since then, but figured she had enough to get by. She began to review the list, looking for subdirectories that seemed interesting or important, checking their sizes and selecting those she wanted for download, trying to get the most important ones earliest in the queue. The connection could be cut at any time.

She heard Favor’s “Out” in her earpiece, and a little while later he was asking her whether she was getting what she wanted, and laughing, and murmuring
Well done, well done, well done
.

They kept the phone connection open. She heard Mendonza and Stickney discussing their locations, learning that they were about two blocks apart on Roxas Boulevard, with Stickney slowing down so that Mendonza could catch up.

She kept opening directories, checking their contents, sometimes opening individual files.

At a corner of the screen was a counter that kept
track of the data that had already been transferred, tracking it in megabytes. The number kept rolling over, growing by the second. A pulsing light on the laptop indicated network activity, data being received.

She opened a directory, looked at some of the files within it.

Something was odd here. The directory contained medical files. Dozens. Another directory contained thousands of lab results, protein analyses.

In her earpiece Favor was suggesting that they stop to eat, bring back some food. He asked Ari whether she was hungry.

“No,” she said, distracted, and “Yeah, sure, whatever you get is fine with me.”

She was absorbed in the files, the medical records. Favor and Mendonza and Stickney were discussing restaurants, what was nearby and what they wanted to eat. The chatter in her ear was distracting, but if she dropped the call, she would disconnect the others too. So she took out the earpiece and put it on the table in front of her, and kept opening files and directories, disturbed by what she saw.

The buzzer sounded at the back door. She got up, went to the door, put her eye to the peephole.

Edwin Santos.

She unlocked the door, started to open it, and said, “Hey, Eddie.”

The door flew open. Two Filipino men rushed in, guns drawn.

They caught her off guard, one of them knocking her down and pushing her to the floor while the
second took a combat shooter’s stance and swung his pistol around the building.

Two more men rushed in behind them, then two more, all of them in shooter’s stances, yelling, “
Down on the floor! Put down your weapons!”

Finally Eddie Santos appeared, stumbling inside with his hands behind his back. Arielle was down on the floor. One of the intruders had a knee at her back and a pistol to her head. But her face was turned toward the door, and she recognized the man who shoved Santos inside and stepped in behind him. She had seen him in the photos that Alex Mendonza shot outside the PAL terminal. Totoy Ribera was his name.

He looked around the room, then down at Arielle.

He said, “Just you? When will the others return?”

She showed him a shrug.

He said, “All right. If that’s how you want, all right.”

He sent two of the men out to park the cars where they wouldn’t be seen.

“Yes. We’ll wait,” he said. “All the better. This will work out fine.”

Mendonza and Favor caught up with Stickney along Roxas Boulevard. Favor motioned Stickney to stop and park, and they all got out and gathered near the curb.

Favor took out his earpiece and put it in his pocket. The others did the same.

Favor said, “Did you hear that?”

Totoy Ribera and the six men of his crew took up positions inside the bodega. Totoy was barking the orders, arranging the men in a rough semicircle, with fields of fire that converged on the door.

Santos and Arielle were seated on the floor near the table, both cuffed with plastic restraints. From where she sat, Arielle could see the laptop screen, the download counter still turning over. Nobody seemed to notice.

Totoy and the gunmen waited. Long minutes.

A car horn sounded outside, two quick taps on the button. It sounded close, just on the other side of the steel roll-up door.

The men all looked that way, toward the front.

Then came the sound of a key in the roll-up door, someone unlocking it. Several of the gunmen shifted positions, looking for cover. They all swung their guns toward the sound.

The door came up. It revealed the Mitsubishi, motionless, backed up to the door. The lights were on, engine was running. Nobody was in sight.

Several seconds ticked by.

The sound of rapid gunfire exploded from inside the Mitsubishi, a ripping sound like a clip being fired off in an automatic weapon, and the interior pulsed with rapid bursts of orange light.

In the bodega, one of the gunmen fired at the Mitsubishi, punching a hole in the rear window, and then everyone opened up, jerking off shots as quickly as they could, firing nonstop, creating a single, sustained, deafening roar of gunfire.

Bullets tore through the Mitsubishi, puncturing the body panels, smashing the windows.

Nobody heard the back door opening. Nobody saw Favor come through the open door in a crouch, his movements fluid and precise.

He pounced on the gunman closest to the door, knocked him unconscious with a single blow to the back of the head, then wheeled and sprang toward his next target. Mendonza and Stickney were through the door now, too, coming in behind Favor.

Mendonza crossed the floor with improbable agility, his mass perfectly balanced as he stepped in among the gunmen. He crumpled one with a vicious elbow to the side of the head. Without breaking stride, he smashed another in the face with the heel of his hand, launching a spray of blood and spittle and loose white teeth as the gunman spun and dropped.

Stickney seemed almost casual in his movements. He stepped in behind a man who was blasting the Mitsubishi with continuous fire from a 9mm automatic pistol. Stickney reached in from behind him, snaking an arm around his throat while grabbing the wrist of his gun hand. Stickney shook the gun loose, jacked the man’s head back, and levered him hard into the floor, facedown.

The assault was swift and furious. The gunmen were so intent on the Mitsubishi that they were overwhelmed before they saw what was happening. Only Totoy Ribera reacted. As the gunfire slackened, he glanced to his left and found Mendonza advancing toward him.

Totoy swung his pistol around. The weapon was still in motion when Mendonza’s roundhouse kick exploded into Totoy’s midsection, doubling him over, dropping him to the ground.

He was the last to go down. Only Favor and Mendonza and Stickney were left standing. They stood tense and poised, ready to spring, but the only movement was from a gunman who writhed on the floor, hands clamped around his face as he tried to hold back the flow of blood.

Firecrackers continued to pop in the Mitsubishi for several seconds. Then the shattered black hulk went silent, and the only sounds were moans and mumbled curses from the gunmen who remained conscious.

Favor and Mendonza and Stickney relaxed.

Favor opened his new balisong to cut the restraints from Arielle and Eddie Santos. The blade sliced through the tough plastic without resistance. He helped them both to their feet.

He said, “Time to move out, my friends. Let’s grab what we need. Al, you want to collect the hardware?”

Mendonza and Stickney went around the room, patting down the sprawled gunmen, picking up weapons and dropping them into a basket that Elvis Vega had used to deliver dinner.

Arielle went to the steel table and fitted the laptop into the padded case. The download indicator was still pulsing when she disconnected the cable.

Favor said, “Eddie, you coming?”

Santos shook his head. “I’ll deal with this. I’m a little old to run away from home.”

“Your choice.”

Mendonza knelt over one of the gunmen, lying prostrate on the floor, and bent to pat down the legs of his trousers.

A few feet away on the floor, Totoy Ribera suddenly turned over on his back and came up holding a pistol. The muzzle swung toward Mendonza.

The four Americans all saw the movement, and they all reacted.

Arielle, farthest away from Totoy and on the wrong side of the steel table, could only yell,
“Al—”

Favor, three or four steps away, flipped open the balisong as he started toward Totoy.

Mendonza instinctively rolled away from the gun as Totoy pulled the trigger. The gun boomed, the muzzle belched flame.

The shot missed. Totoy continued to swing the weapon, tracking Mendonza for a second shot.

A large dark hand flicked out and grabbed the barrel and pushed it up and away, pointing it toward the ceiling as the gun erupted again. The hand belonged to Stickney, who had been standing near Totoy’s head. Stickney jerked the pistol free and turned it on Totoy.

All this in the interval between two ticks of a clock.

With one hand Stickney held the pistol at Totoy’s head. The other hand flashed up, a palm-out
Stop!
signal to halt the knife that Favor had raised as he moved toward Totoy.

Favor stopped.

Totoy’s eyes went wide, and he sucked in a breath. He stared past the muzzle, into the eyes of the man he had assaulted a few days earlier.

For several moments the bodega was completely still.

Totoy slowly exhaled.

Favor straightened, looked around the room.

“Anybody else?” he said.

They left through the open door at the front, walking past the shattered Mitsubishi, to the Hyundai parked nearby. The Hyundai was untouched. They drove off through streets that were now mostly empty.

Six blocks down the street, they passed a police patrolman on foot, then two more a block later.

As Mendonza drove, they sorted through the pistols. Most had just two or three rounds left. One was empty. There was enough ammunition to load one clip, and Favor tucked the pistol into the waistband of his trousers, under his shirt.

“We’ll have to lose the car, grab a taxi,” Favor said. “They’ll be looking for us.”