Chapter 5 Uninvited Guests at the Penthouse #2
“Boots. Yours, not the sandals. And your passport, which is in the drawer of the nightstand, which I put there on Tuesday because you left it on the counter like a lunatic.” She was pulling a dishtowel off the rail with her teeth and her right hand. “Ninety seconds. Go.”
Hal went.
It was, he would think later, the single most useful thing anybody had ever done for him. She had not asked whether he was all right. She had given him a list.
He came back through the kitchen with the duffel on his shoulder and the laptop under his arm and stopped in the doorway, because she was on the floor going through the men.
She was fast about it and she was not gentle.
She went through pockets, waistbands, the inside of a boot.
She took four phones and put them in a plastic bag from a drawer and put the bag in her own pocket.
She turned one man’s forearm over and looked at the inside of it under the light of a phone screen and grunted at something.
“Baby,” Hal said.
“Two minutes.”
“What is on his arm?”
“Nothing. A tan line where a watch was. They took their watches off.” She moved to the next one. “Which is a procedure. Which means they have a procedure. Which means they are not somebody’s cousins with guns.”
She got to the fourth one, the one against the refrigerator, and stopped.
He had a lanyard. Not a badge on it. Just the lanyard itself, tucked down inside his shirt, a plain black woven strap with a snap swivel at the bottom where a card should have been and was not.
Mina held it in the light for a second.
Then she took a small hard object out of her hip pocket, a thing the size of a matchbox, and passed it slowly along the man’s collar and down his sleeve and across the front of his vest.
It made a sound.
It was not a loud sound. It was a single soft tick, and Mina went very still, and passed the thing over the same six inches of vest again, and it ticked again in the same place.
“Ay,” she said, in a completely different voice.
“What.”
“He is chipped.” She sat back on her heels. “It is in the vest. Hal, they are wearing employer credentials with active tags, which nobody does, which nobody has done since about twenty nineteen, because it is a catastrophically bad idea for exactly this reason.”
“Then why are they doing it?”
Mina looked up at him, and in the gray light from the glass her face did something he had not seen on it before, and would see twice more before Saturday.
“Because they are not being run as a covert unit,” she said.
“They are being run as staff. Somebody is issuing these men site credentials and access tags and expecting them back at the end of a shift, and that means somewhere in this city there is a facility with a door that these tags open, and a supervisor, and a roster.”
She cut the lanyard off him with a paring knife.
“Two minutes,” she said again, and did not use them, and was on her feet in forty seconds.
He found her in the front hall with the duffel open at her feet, in a different shirt, winding a proper bandage around her forearm with her teeth and her right hand and doing it fast and wrong.
Hal put the laptop and the drive and the paper on the floor. Then he took the end of the bandage out of her mouth.
“Stop. You are doing that like a person wrapping a gift.”
“Hal.”
“Arm.”
She gave him the arm.
He turned it under the gray light from the window and looked at what was there and did not react, because his mother had taught fourth grade for thirty years and had a face she used for blood and Hal had inherited it.
It was long and it was deep along about six inches of the outside of the forearm and it was going to need a great many stitches and it had missed everything that mattered.
He wound it firm, overlapping by half each turn, and tucked the end.
“You are good at that,” Mina said.
“I have got two hundred and twelve people in a warehouse in Forest Park and about nine of them do something stupid every year.” He tied it off. “Also I was a lifeguard in Tybee for two summers and I have not been allowed to forget it.”
“Hal.”
“Not yet.”
“Hal, I have to tell you.”
“I said not yet.” He was still holding her wrist. He looked up.
“There are four men on your kitchen floor and one of them is going to wake up in nineteen minutes and you told me ninety seconds and that was four minutes ago. Whatever the sentence is, baby, it is going to be the same sentence in the truck.”
Mina looked at him.
“There is no truck,” she said. “There is a car in the basement and it is being watched, and there is a service elevator that is on a different circuit than the one they killed, and there are nine floors of stairs at the bottom that I am not going to enjoy.”
“Then that.” Hal picked up the duffel and put it over his shoulder. “Which stair?”
They took the north stair because it came out by the utility door in the back hall.
Hal counted the flights the way he counted everything, and somewhere around thirty-one he understood that he had been counting out loud, and that Mina had been letting him.
The stairwell was full of people. That was what he had not expected.
Forty-one floors of a residential tower with the power out at half past twelve during a typhoon, and the whole vertical shaft was families going down with phone torches, an old man being carried in a plastic chair by two younger men, somebody’s cat in a laundry basket, a girl of about eight furious about her shoes.
Nobody was panicking. Everybody was talking.
There was, at floor twenty-two, a woman handing out pandesal from a plastic bag to anybody who wanted it.
Hal got shoved into a wall on twenty-eight by a teenager going up, against the traffic, two steps at a time, with an empty five-gallon water jug in each hand and an expression of total purpose.
“Where is he going?” Hal said.
“Up.” Mina had her bandaged arm held across her body and was taking the stairs at a speed that was costing her. “The tanks are on the roof. When the pumps stop the upper floors go dry first, so somebody’s lola on thirty-four has no water, so that boy is going to the roof with two jugs.”
“For his grandmother?”
“For somebody’s.”
On nineteen a woman with a headlamp was standing on the landing directing traffic.
She had no authority to do it whatsoever.
She was doing it anyway, in Tagalog and English and once in what Hal took to be Korean, keeping the down-traffic to the right and the up-traffic to the left and shouting the floor number at every landing so people would stop asking.
On fifteen somebody had set a phone on the rail with the torch pointed at the ceiling to light the whole flight, and had left it there, and gone.
And on fourteen, a man in a Real Madrid shirt looked up, and saw who was coming down the stairs beside him, and his mouth opened.
Mina put her right hand out and took his elbow.
“Kuya, we did not see each other,” she said, “and I will explain to you personally on live television in about a week, and I am asking you to trust me for that week. Please.”
The man looked at her. He looked at her bandaged left arm, which she had not been able to hide, and at Hal behind her with a duffel and a laptop, and at the blood that neither of them had noticed was still on Hal’s forearm from the bandaging.
“Ate,” he said. “Ingat.”
That was all. He stood aside, and he put his back to the wall so his body was between her and the rest of the landing, and his phone stayed in his pocket, and they went past him and down.
Hal was aware of that for the rest of his life.
The service door came out into a loading dock, and the loading dock came out into an alley, and the alley came out into the sound.
Hal had not understood the rain from the forty-first floor.
Down here it was a solid. It came off the roofline of the building opposite in a sheet and hit the concrete and came back up as far as his knees.
The alley was already running four inches deep and the water was moving, with a current in it, carrying a plastic bottle and a great deal of leaf matter and one flip-flop toward a drain that was not taking it.
Somebody flashed headlights at them from the mouth of the alley. A silver car. The same driver from Poblacion.
They got in and the doors shut and the noise dropped by ninety percent and Hal sat in a wet seat holding a duffel he had been told not to open, and looked at the water going past the wheel arch.
“Okay,” he said.
Mina had her head back. Her face was gray.
“Okay,” she said.
“Say the sentence.”
She turned her head against the seat and looked at him.
“I am not just an actress, baby,” Mina said.
“I work for a body called the Global Integrity Taskforce and I have for six years, and the men in my kitchen were sent by the people who edited those setpoints, and they were not sent for me, they were sent for what is in that green drive, and they will send more. We have to go right now.”
The car pulled out into the water.
Hal sat with that for about four blocks.
“Right,” he said.
“That is it? Right?”
“No, that is not it, I have got about nine hundred things, and I am going to say all of them for the next three days, and some of them are going to be stupid.” He looked out at Bonifacio Global City going under.
“But we are in the car, and I said the sentence would keep until the car, and it did, so now I get to ask my one.”
“Ask it.”
“This morning,” Hal said. “You sent Meding away. You sent Letty and Marisol and the boy who does the plants. You put five people in a van at eight in the morning and told them it was the storm.”
Mina did not say anything.
“You knew,” he said.
“I did not know. I thought it was possible.”
“Mina.”