Devil's Keep by Phillip Finch

Author:Phillip Finch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery And Suspense Fiction, Fiction - General, Action & Adventure, American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, General, Intelligence service, Suspense fiction, Adventure fiction, Thrillers, Suspense, Undercover operations, Mafia, Crime, Fiction
ISBN: 9781439168561
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-12-29T08:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

With more than four hundred thousand residents in an area of about one and a half square miles, the Tondo district of Manila is among the most densely populated places on earth. It is the home of Manila’s main slaughterhouse and its docks, a place of freight depots and tenements and off-kilter utility poles that bristle with illegal electrical connections, daringly installed. It is a place where gray water stands in the crevices of broken sidewalks. Tondo is the birthplace of pickpockets and revolutionaries and whores and anonymous saints. It is rich in heart and humanity and history, but rousingly poor by almost every other standard.

Tondo was also the childhood home of Edwin Santos. He operated many of his businesses there, and when he learned from Arielle Bouchard that she and the others required secure emergency lodging, he immediately thought of Tondo. In all the Philippines, it was probably the last place anyone would look for four wealthy Americans.

Arielle didn’t say why they needed safe haven, but obviously they were in some difficulty, not of the kind that could be fixed with the infusion of money. Trouble wasn’t something he would have wished for them, but since it had happened, he did feel a small thrill knowing that he was being depended upon by serious people acting seriously.

The place he had in mind for them was hardly luxurious, but it was as discreet and secure as any place they could hope to find. Thirteen years earlier, the four Americans would have recognized it for the gem that it was.

Now Santos would find out just how much they had changed.

Mendonza followed Santos’s directions to one of Tondo’s dark side streets. They found him waiting outside a bleak, bare structure with barred windows and a steel roll-up door as big and wide as a

truck.

When he saw them, Santos reached down and lifted the door, running it up on tracks until they could drive in and park.

It was a bodega, a storehouse, with stacks of cartons and crates, and walls full of steel shelves. But Santos had brought in cots, about half a dozen box fans, and a water cooler, a refrigerator, and a microwave oven. In one corner was a toilet and a native-style shower: a bucket and dipper that filled from a spigot in the wall.

When they were in, he rolled the door down and locked it. He turned to watch their faces as they got out and looked around.

He said, “It’s clean, and you’ll have plenty of room. I guarantee that you won’t be disturbed. You can keep your cars off the street, out of sight. There is room for two vehicles in here.”

Arielle said, “I’ll need Internet access somehow. I don’t think I can find the satellite from here.”

“No problem,” Santos said. “Behind this back wall is an Internet café. I made arrangements; they ran a line in. Here, see?”

He pointed to where an Ethernet cable lay coiled on the floor beside a steel table.

Arielle opened her laptop on the table and powered it up.

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