The Missionary Page 5

  Stone brushed his hand against the butt of the pistol at the small of his back, hidden under his loose gray Navy T-shirt. Wren and the other students were still standing on the corner, waiting for the light to turn. It was a busy intersection, four lanes of crazy, honking, speeding traffic. The crowds were growing as evening neared, bringing with it relief from the heat and humidity. Stone bounced on his toes, keeping his eyes locked on the small knot of students, then burst into a run as the light turned and the waiting crowd on the other side surged into motion, carrying Wren and the other three with them. He caught Wren’s arm in his right hand, wrapping his left arm around the other three, and hustled them across the street, not breathing until they were safe on the other side with Brett and Leslie.

  “Next time, run across. Don’t get separated again.” He met each of their eyes, received serious nods in return.

  They made it back to the hostel, and Stone rested his aching feet before rounding up the last group, mostly volunteer staff and older college students. As they ate tacos and shopped, his sense of unease heightened. Every step had him scanning the crowds, hunting for the source of his fear. But like every day for the past two weeks, he saw nothing unusual. No tails, no suspicious faces.

  Nonetheless, his gut churned as he led the last group back to the hostel.

  And that was when it came, the disaster he’d been waiting for, half a block from the hostel.

  “Stone! Stone!” Emily, one of Wren’s friends—a tall, slim girl with nut-brown hair. She was running toward him, panic scarring her face.

  “Emily? Are you hurt?”

  “No, no. I don’t know what happened! We went to the corner store to get some water, all four of us together. It wasn’t even a block, and we were all together the whole way, I promise! We even told John we were going. And then we turned around and she just wasn’t there, and we can’t find her!”

  Stone felt his gut clench. “Take a breath, Em. Slow down. What happened? Who’s not there?”

  “Wren! We can’t find her! She was with us, right there with us the whole time. And then she just wasn’t. We went back to the store but they hadn’t seen her since we left, and she’s not here, and—What if something happened to her? Where would she go? We have to find her! Please!” Emily was sobbing now, trying not to and failing.

  Stone swore under his breath. “Where are the others you were with?”

  “There.” She pointed to two guys, sophomores at UV with Emily and Wren.

  The guys weren’t crying, but they were clearly upset. “What happened?” Stone demanded.

  Doug told a version of Emily’s story. “We were like, a hundred feet from the hostel, and I turned around and realized Wren wasn’t with us. She just…she just vanished, man! I don’t know what happened. She didn’t say anything, didn’t make a noise, just…poof, gone.”

  “Show me where you realized she was gone.” He pointed to other two. “You two, back to hostel. Tell John I said no one leaves. No one, for anything.”

  Doug brought Stone to a spot a few hundred feet from the hostel, a random location on the sidewalk, just like any other. No sign of Wren, no clues. He stood and tried to think. Wren wouldn’t just run off without telling her friends. If she’d been hurt, she would have told them, made a noise. There wasn’t any blood anywhere, no dropped articles. Just a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, an electronics shop, and the entrance to an alley, dark, wet, and smelly.

  “Anything else you can think of? Anything?”

  Doug shook his head, long blond surfer-style shaggy hair flopping. “No, man. Nothing.”

  Stone took a few steps into the alley. The concrete was wet and rucked and puddled, a dumpster on one wall, bags of trash and an abandoned men’s shoe, a broken wooden crate. A rusted, red-metal doorway led into the electronics shop on the left side, and on the right, a blank stone wall. At the end, another street, cars passing intermittently. Power lines overhead.

  He turned in place, desperate for any clues, anything.

  There. A cigarette butt on the ground. Crushed underfoot, but the white end of the cigarette was still white, recent. Not mud-stained or faded.

  “Did a vehicle come out of this alley?”

  Doug started to shake his head, then stopped. “Actually, yeah. A van or a truck or something. I don’t know. I was looking for Wren, but I do remember seeing some kind of vehicle pull out of here. I only noticed it because I was facing the alley, wondering if she’d gone back for something.”

  Stone guided Doug back to the hostel, then found Pastor Nick and John, a parent volunteer and one of the deacons of the church. “Wren is missing.”

  Nick paled. “What? What do you mean she’s missing?”

  Stone didn’t try to mask the anger in his voice. “She and three other students went to the corner store to buy water, and Wren vanished on the way back.” He looked at John. “They said they asked you first, and you let them go, against the policy we’ve gone by for the last three weeks.”

  John nodded numbly. “They told me they were just going to the corner. It’s not even half a block. I thought it would be fine.”

  Nick wiped his face with both hands. “What’s the next step then?”

  “Contact the US embassy, file a missing persons report. I’ll look for her while you do that. John, you stay here with the students. Gather everyone and stay together. No one goes anywhere. Not ten steps out of your sight.” He stabbed John in the shoulder with a finger. “I mean that, deadly serious. Not one person takes one fucking step out of your sight. Not for water, not to pee, not for anything.”

  John nodded, his eyes wide with fear. “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

  “Nick, go to the embassy. Give them Wren’s information, show them her picture.”

  “Don’t you have contacts in the embassy?” Nick asked.

  “I’ll follow up with them later if I need to, but for now I need to look for Wren. Every second counts.”

  “What do you think happened?” Nick kept his voice down, but his worry was palpable.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she just got turned around or something.” He met Nick’s eyes, and knew he had to give his friend the truth. “I’m worried she got snatched, though.”

  “Snatched by who?”

  “The bad guys.” Stone couldn’t make himself say it. He pulled his pistol from his waistband, ejected the clip and checked the loads, more for something to do than anything else. It was a familiar action, one that helped him feel more like a Navy SEAL than a helpless church worship leader. “Get the kids home. Get them to the airport tomorrow, and get them home. I’ll find Wren.”

  He shoved the pistol back in his waistband and left the hostel, mind whirling with possibilities, contacts, potential locations, people he could shake down for information.

  He returned to the alley where his gut told him Wren had been abducted. There weren’t any extra clues, just that one cigarette butt. Some oil on the ground, dripped from an old engine. Stone felt the rage of helplessness bite at him. Where to begin? He was a warrior, not an investigator. Others sniffed out the information. He acted on it.

  His gaze flicked across the street, landed on an abandoned, shuttered shopfront, graffiti-tagged and piled up with trash. There, almost completely hidden in the piles of trash in one corner, was an old man. He was nothing but a dirty, straggly beard and small, beady eyes lost amidst the newspapers and food wrappers and Coke bottles and plastic bags.

  Stone felt a fleeting glimmer of hope as he jogged through traffic and crouched in front of the derelict.

  “You see something happen there?” Stone asked in rough but passable Filipino.

  “See nothing.” The old man spoke Filipino as roughly as Stone. He probably spoke some obscure dialect. He claimed ignorance, but grime-crusted fingers made themselves visible through the trash.

  “You sure?” He dug a wad of Philippine Pesos from his jeans pocket, stuffed a few bills into the outstretched fingers.

  “A truck. Some men. They t
ake a girl, American, look Filipino.”

  Stone bit back a curse. He shoved a few more bills into the now-empty hand. “Who take her? You know?”

  The old man shook his head, beard waggling. True terror flashed in his eyes. “Not say. Not say. You look Smokey Mountain. Maybe find her there.”

  Stone peeled yet more pesos from the wad and shoved them at the old man, who only shook his head and refused to take them, burrowing down into the trash. A stump protruded from the garbage, where a foot had once been. “Who was it? Who are they?”

  “Not say! They know.”

  That in itself told Stone several things. First, if an old homeless cripple was afraid of talking about them, then he knew who they were. And if he was afraid of talking about them, they were organized, and brutal. He remembered the briefings before his team had landed in Manila, rumors of informants disappearing. Snitches turning up dead. Sources of information drying up cold, frozen by terror.

  Stone also remembered debriefing interviews with the girls he and his team had rescued at such great cost. They spoke of quick and silent abductions. Needles in the arm, brutal beatings and forced addictions, being sold to the highest bidder into sexual slavery.

  Something told Stone that his team’s strike had only set back the trafficking ring, hadn’t killed the beast entirely. Organizations like that were hydras, seven heads emerging for every one you cut off.

  And now they were back, and they had Wren.

  He left the old man cowering in his den of garbage, flagged a passing taxi and named an intersection far across the city. He set out on foot, navigating narrow streets and busy intersections. In the distance, a mountain of trash loomed, a two-story monument of waste covering several acres, wreathed in smoke and fumes. The closer he got, the more looks his presence received. He was a lone white man in a place most residents of Manila avoided. To one side were the tenement apartments the government had built several years ago, which now housed thousands of people who used to live on the trash mountain itself.

  The shantytown spreading from the base of the mountain was a world of its own, a maze of tin and rot and desperation, tumbledown heaps of refuse serving as homes for starving millions. It was into this place, this fever-dream nightmare of abject poverty that Stone ventured.

  Vacant eyes watched him, apathetic, resigned. Faces peered from glassless windows, watching him shuffle warily from one shadow to another. He wasn’t safe here. He knew that.

  Ropes were strung from pole to window, strung with shirts and pants and bras. Stacks of cinder blocks formed walls, and often, roofs were the floors of the residence above. The shanties were stacked two and three high in places, patchwork squares of rickety homes. Most were barely six or eight feet wide, and perhaps the same high. Flaps in the wood fronts could be let down to function as windows. Stone hadn’t ever been inside the stacked shanties, and had no idea how the residents got from the street level to the top. Perhaps there were ladders somewhere within. Belongings were hung from the windows, clothes, pots and pans, buckets, water coolers. Bicycles were lined up along the streets, often the only means of transportation for entire families. Where the shanties were only one story high, the roofs served as storage, sidewalk, and homes for those with nowhere else to go.

  Where the shantytown followed the river, homes often sat mere feet above the water, which was stagnant and green and thick and slurried with trash.

  Stone tried to ignore the eyes on him, ignore the warning prickle of hairs on his neck. He was following old memories, lost in the maze now, swallowed by Manila. He ignored the futility of wandering in this place, ignored the fear. He could disappear here and never be found. He had no idea what he was looking for, where he was going, what he was doing.

  Nonetheless, he picked his way through the shanties, eyes raking and roving, watching and assessing.

  Sheer blind, dumb luck brought him his first break. A middle-aged Filipino man, dressed a little too nicely, hands a little too clean, hair a little too neatly cut and combed, stepping gingerly through the dirt, avoiding bits of trash. Stone’s instincts screamed, and he listened. The man didn’t see him pressed against a wooden wall, hidden in shadows cast by the trembling bulk of the jury-rigged buildings above him. Stone followed at a distance, noting his surroundings and the route through the maze back to a main road. The man waited at a curbside bus stop with half a dozen others. After a few minutes, a bus rumbled to a stop, belching diesel fumes. Stone burst into a run, falling into line several places behind his quarry, digging out change. On the bus, he slumped against a railing, peering out the window at the passing cityscape, hoping his prey wouldn’t notice him. The man rode for nearly a dozen stops, de-boarding in the middle of the metropolitan city center. Stone followed, keeping as many people between himself and his target as he could without losing visual. As he made his way through the city on foot, the Filipino man fished an older model flip-style cell phone from his hip pocket, hit a speed dial number, spoke briefly, and hung up, the entire conversation lasting less than ten seconds.

  And then, between one breath and another, the man vanished. Stone stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, scanning the crowds, the street-side carts and vendors of tourist trinkets, the alleys and doorways. All to no avail. He cursed under his breath, moving into the lee of a doorway, and scanned the crowd again, hunting for some clue to where his target had gone—a closing doorway, a knot of people disrupted, as if pushed aside by someone in a hurry.

  Something cold and hard pressed into Stone’s ribs, and fetid breath huffed in his face. “What you want, huh?” The voice was pitched low, thickly accented but fluent.

  Stone shifted slightly, and saw the man he’d been following standing beside him, a pistol pressed against Stone’s side, hidden from view by their bodies. “I’m looking for a girl.”

  The man chuckled. “I know lots of girls. Maybe you new here, yeah? Pollow me not smart. Pind girls some odder way.”

  Stone clenched his fist and forced himself to play a role. “I’m looking for a certain kind of girl.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “I think you can find the right girl for me. Young. American. I’ll pay good money.”

  Silence strung out a little too long, and Stone braced for the shot that would kill him, but it never came. “Show me money. American dollars.”

  Stone held his hand out to show it was empty, then rooted in his hip pocket for his emergency stash of US dollars. “There’s a thousand here. I can get more.”

  The man laughed again. “You need more. Much more. Dat kind of girl, she not cheap, huh? Maybe you a cop? Work por goberment? Yeah. You smell bad. You smell like po-liss-man.”

  “Fuck that. I just wanna get off. You know? Stick my dick in someone warm. She ain’t even gotta be willing, know what I’m saying?” Stone grated the words out. “But I like American girls, and I heard you got ‘em around here.”

  “Sometin’ wrong with Pilippines girl? Not so sexy por you, huh?”

  Stone shrugged, affecting nonchalance. “Nah, they’re fine. You just get homesick, you know?”

  The pistol barrel was still touching his ribs, but wasn’t pressed quite so hard. And then it was gone and the man was gesturing for Stone to follow him. “Dis way. Dis way. I got girls. You got dollars, I got girls.”

  Stone tamped down his disgust and followed as the man led him down a block and into an apartment building, up and up and up around endless stairs. Through a doorway marked with a tilted brass number and into a low, dank, dark apartment. Threadbare blankets hung over the windows, sunlight streaming in through cracks along the edges. A drooping couch faced away from the doorway, and a coffee table stood just beyond, covered in empty beer bottles, full ashtrays, empty baggies that had once held drugs. Three girls were draped on the couch, slumped sideways against each other, one resting on the armrest, another drooling onto the first girl’s shoulder, and the third across both their laps. All three were mostly naked, clad in nothing but panties. They were sk
inny, ribs showing, arms and legs like sticks, hair lank and greasy and unwashed. They didn’t look up as the door opened, but when they saw Stone’s escort, they righted themselves quickly, blinking, eyes going wide and fearful. They cringed as the man rounded the couch.

  Stone made himself stay still and not react. The man latched his fist around one girl’s wrist, yanking her upright. She stumbled, bleary-eyed, clearly strung out into dazed incoherency. She stood awkwardly, weight on one leg, the other bent slightly and turned inward, arms hanging at her sides. Her eyes were green, bright moss-green, her hair black. Her filthy, scarred, needle-tracked skin had once been porcelain.

  She had once been beautiful.

  Now, as the man shoved her toward Stone, she blinked once, slowly, realizing this was a cue. She glanced up at Stone, forced an empty smile onto her slack, dry lips, and shoved her panties down around her thighs, stepped out of them. She pushed herself against him, fumbling for his belt.

  The pimp, or whatever he was, stood with his back to the window, watching, a leering grin on his face.

  “What, are you gonna just gonna fuckin’ stand there and watch?” Stone growled.

  “Ha, no. You want, I charge extra for dat. Tree hundred dollar, you do what you want with all dese girls. Couch, fine. Room ova dere, fine.” He pointed at a slightly ajar door at the end of a short, narrow hallway. There was one other door, leading to a bathroom, and a tiny galley kitchen.

  “What about you?” Stone asked.

  “Smoke, out da door. Not far.” He stepped between Stone and the girl, who was waiting apathetically, eyes crossing as she fought to stay conscious. He pinched her nipple hard enough that she whined and stumbled away, but didn’t try to stop him. “Only rule, no cutting, no burning, no makin’ dem bleed. Yeah?”