The three who survived the ambush on the black-sand beach were the 19-year-old second lieutenant of infantry; the five-foot-four guerrilla; and the huge, somewhat crazed medical corpsman who had sweated, starved and raved away 16 pounds in the week that followed.

Yet it was Hovey Profette, the Arkansas medic, who first noticed the two Imperial Marines in the valley below, some 40 or 50 yards away, as they slowly emerged from a grove of neglected coconut palms. “Shoot the little fuckers,” the medic urged in a hoarse whisper.

Booth Stallings, the second lieutenant of infantry and putative leader of the ambushed intelligence and reconnaissance patrol, flattened himself between the pair of sun-baked black rocks. After brushing away what seemed to be four dozen flies he squinted down through the afternoon haze at the two figures in their mustard uniforms. Both Imperial Marines had stopped and were glancing around with the apprehensive air of point men who suspect someone is about to shoot at them.

“I’d say that second little fucker’s at least six-two, maybe even six-three,” Stallings said.

“Imperial Marines,” the guerrilla murmured. “There is a minimum height requirement.”

For the fourth time that day the medic’s terrible rage exploded without warning. It surged up his 18-inch neck in a bright wave, turning his curiously small ears a lipstick red and twisting his face into a fat pink angry knot that Booth Stallings thought might never be untied.

“You ain’t even gonna try and shoot ’em, are you, Lieutenant Pissant?” the medic said, enough menace in his soft question to make it a death threat.

Booth Stallings shook his head no as he continued to gaze down at the two Imperial Marines who were now moving slowly across the clearing that once had been planted to maize. “They’re scouts, Hovey,” Stallings said, forcing a measure of reasonableness into his answer. “They’ve got a squad behind them at least. Maybe a platoon. Maybe even a company.”

“Probably a company,” the guerrilla said in the flat, almost toneless Kansas accent he had acquired at the hands of a Thomasite maiden lady who had landed on his shores in 1901 and spent the next 40 years teaching little brown boys to speak and write American English the way it was spoken and written back in Emporia.

Hovey Profette, still crimson-faced and seething, ignored the guerrilla and stuck out his right hand for Stallings’ rifle, the sole community firearm. “Gimme the piece,” he demanded. “I’ll shoot the fuckers.”

Stallings again shook his head no, trying to insert a trace of unfelt regret into the gesture.

“There’s no rear sight, Hovey,” said Stallings. “That dead guerrilla I took it from must’ve pried the sight off and thrown it away. Guerrillas think rear sights just fuck things up — right, Al?”

Alejandro Espiritu, the five-foot-four guerrilla, smiled politely. “An old and much observed military tradition in my country.”

“You know what you are, Lieutenant Stallings, sir?” the medic said, his voice almost too loud, his color far too high. “You’re just a... a great big pile of yellow shit, that’s what.”

Hovey Profette lunged for the Garand, tore it easily from Booth Stallings’ grasp, jammed its butt into his own right shoulder and was sighting down the sightless barrel when the blade of the guerrilla’s bolo sliced almost halfway through the 18-inch neck.

The medic made a sound that was part sigh, part wheeze and collapsed atop the unfired rifle. A gurgling noise followed that Booth Stallings thought went on forever but lasted only seconds. When it was over, Hovey Profette, infantry medic and failed conscientious objector, lay dead on the tropical volcanic ridge that afforded Imperial Marines on one side and a fine view of the Camotes Sea on the other.

Stallings jerked the sightless Garand from beneath the dead man. Not bothering to wipe away the blood, he flicked the safety to off and aimed the rifle at the squatting guerrilla who ignored it and went on wiping Profette’s blood from the bolo with a handful of wild monkey grass.

“Why the hell didn’t you just nick him a little?” Stallings demanded.

Espiritu the guerrilla carefully examined the two-foot bolo before shoving it back down into its homemade wooden scabbard. “He might’ve screamed,” he said finally and pointed with his chin down into the valley where a long line of Imperial Marines was now moving quickly across the clearing. “A company at least,” he said. “Just as you and I thought.”

Booth Stallings shifted his gaze to the hurrying Japanese Imperial Marines, then to the dead American medic, and back to the Filipino guerrilla. It occurred to him that this was the second Filipino he had come to know well, the first having been Edmundo something or other from San Diego who, like a robin, had appeared each spring near Stallings’ grade and junior high schools, dispatched by the Duncan Yo-Yo people to demonstrate their product. Edmundo could make a Yo-Yo do anything, and for three childhood springs Booth Stallings had taken a limited number of private lessons at an exorbitant 50 cents an hour until, turning thirteen, he had discovered masturbation, Lucky Strikes and girls in approximately that order.

“So what the fuck do we tell the Major?” Stallings asked.

The 22-year-old guerrilla seemed to ponder the question with care. “We — you and I — will tell Major Crouch that our fallen comrade died bravely defending the rear.” He paused to gaze thoughtfully at the dead Profette. “The wild pigs’ll eat him by morning.”

For a dozen seconds Booth Stallings stared at the still squatting guerrilla with a frozen expression that agreed to nothing. For during those twelve seconds Stallings had stumbled across what to him was a new and comforting credo, an epiphany of sorts, that neatly excised the moral imperative and left him not only comforted, but also wiser and older. Much older. At least 26.

Still wearing the frozen expression and oblivious to the sweat that ran down over it, Stallings spoke in his new cold grown-up voice.

“You’ve got a whole lot of elastic up in that head of yours, don’t you, Al? I mean, you can make it stretch and wrap around just about anything you want it to.”

“I think,” Alejandro Espiritu said, almost smiled, thought better of it and started over. “I think we should recommend poor Profette here for a posthumous medal — a Bronze or Silver Star perhaps?”

Booth Stallings gazed down at the dead medic and lapsed Quaker. “What the fuck,” he said. “Let’s go for the DSC.”

At three in the afternoon they summoned Booth Stallings, the terrorism expert, to the library in the foundation’s seven-story building just east of Dupont Circle on Massachusetts Avenue and fired him over a glass of fairly good Spanish sherry. It was the Ides of March, which fell on a Saturday in 1986, and exactly two months after Booth Stallings’ sixtieth birthday.

The firing was done without any qualms that Stallings could detect by Douglas House, the foundation’s 35-year-old executive director. House did it politely, of course, with no trace of acrimony, and with about the same amount of regret he might use if calling the Washington Post circulation department to put a vacation stop on his home delivery.

It was the foundation’s 51-year-old chairman, Frank Tomguy, who administered the pro forma ego massage while wearing an apologetic, even deferential air and one of his $1,100 three-piece suits. Tomguy went on and on about severe budgetary restrictions and then turned to the quality of Booth Stallings’ work, which he swore had been brilliant. No question. Absolutely, totally brilliant.

Tomguy’s massage completed, Douglas House spoke of money. There would be three months’ severance pay in lieu of notice and the foundation would keep Stallings’ health insurance in force for six months. There was no talk of pension because the terrorism expert had been with the foundation only 18 months, although that was three months longer than he had ever stuck with any other job.

As the dry talk continued, Stallings lost interest and let his eyes wander around the black walnut paneled library, presumably for the last time. He eventually noticed the lengthening silence. Now that they’ve canned you so nicely and apologized so handsomely, you’re expected to say something appropriate. So he said the only thing that came to mind. “I used to live here, you know.”

It wasn’t what Douglas House had expected and he shifted uneasily in his leather wingback chair, as if apprehensive that Stallings had launched into some kind of sentimental, even mawkish goodbye. But Tomguy, the chairman, seemed to know better. He smiled and asked the obvious question. “Where’s here, Booth?”

“Right here,” Stallings said with a small encompassing gesture. “Before the foundation built this place in — what? seventy-two? — there used to be a big old four-story red sandstone mansion that got cut up into apartments during the war.” He glanced at Douglas House. “World War II.” House nodded.

“I rented the third floor one in February of sixty-one,” Stallings went on. “Partly because I could walk to work and partly because of the address — 1776 Massachusetts Avenue.” His lips stretched into what may or may not have been a small smile. “A patriot’s address.”

Tomguy cleared his throat. “That walk was to the White House then, wasn’t it, Booth? And you were back from Africa or some such.”

“I was just back from Stanleyville and the walk was to the old Executive Office Building, which wasn’t the White House then and still isn’t.”

“Heady times, those,” Douglas House said, apparently just to be saying something.

Stallings examined House briefly, not blaming the executive director for having been ten years old in 1961. “Ancient history,” he said and turned back to Tomguy. “What happens to my Angola survey?”

Tomguy had a square and too honest pink face and not very much gray-blond hair whose sparseness he wisely made no attempt to conceal. From behind rimless bifocals, a pair of wet brown eyes, slightly popped, stared out at the world’s perfidy, as if in chronic amazement. Still, it was a face to inspire confidence, what with its stairstep chin, purselike mouth and an aggressive Roman nose that was altogether reassuring. A perfect banker’s face, Stallings thought, if only it could dissemble successfully, which it seemed incapable of doing.

The question about the Angola survey made Tomguy turn to the executive director for guidance. With a slight smile that could have meant anything, Douglas House gazed steadily at Stallings who prepared himself for the inevitable evasions.

“We ran it by some people downtown,” House said, the smile still in place, the gray eyes indifferent.

Stallings returned the smile. “Did you now? What people? The Georgetown boys? The folks in the Building? Maybe some of the Langley laddies? Did everybody love it?”

“They all thought it could use a bit of restructuring.”

“That means they don’t mind my calling Savimbi brilliant, but they’d just as soon I didn’t call him a brilliant back-slid Maoist crook, which they damn well know he is.”

Tomguy, the prudent conciliator, offered soothing noises. It’s still scheduled for summer publication, Booth. Our lead item.”

“Restructured though.”

“Edited,” House said.

Stallings shrugged and rose. “Then take my name off it.” He gave the handsome library another last glance. “Thanks for the drink.”

Tomguy rose quickly, right hand outstretched. Stallings took it without hesitation. “Sorry it had to wind up like this, Booth.”

“Are you?” Stallings said. “I’m not.”

He nodded at the still seated Douglas House, turned and headed for the door, a tall lanky man who used a kind of gliding lope for a walk. He wore a thatch of short ragged gray hair that hugged his head like an old cap. Under it the world was presented with a face so seamed and weathered that many looked twice, not sure whether it was ugly or handsome and, finding it neither, settled on different.

After Booth Stallings had gone, Tomguy watched silently as House rose, went to the telephone and punched a local number from memory. It rang only once before being answered. “It’s done,” House said into the phone. “He just left.” House listened to either a question or a comment, replied, “Right,” hung up and turned to Tomguy.

“They’re all extremely grateful,” House said. “I’m quoting.”

Tomguy nodded, his expression sour. “They fucking well better be.”

Booth Stallings sat in the lobby of the Madison Hotel near a couple of bored-looking Saudis and waited for Harry Crites who was already 19 minutes late. But Crites had always been late, even back in the early sixties when he would burst into a meeting a quarter hour after it had started, wearing a big merry smile, an inevitable King Edward cigar, and clutching a file of hopelessly jumbled documents. He would then disarm everyone, even the punctuality sticklers, with a wry, self-deprecating crack that had them all chuckling.

After Kennedy’s death in 1963, Harry Crites had resigned from what he later always referred to not quite accurately as “my White House stint” and moved over to Defense, where he wasn’t at all happy, and from there to State where he landed a slot in the suspect Public Safety Program of the Agency for International Development. AID dispatched Crites to seven or eight lesser developed countries from which came mutterings about some of the deals he had cut with their premiers, presidents-for-life and prime ministers. But Stallings had never paid much attention.

Besides, it was around in there — 1965 — that Stallings, his wife and two young daughters, cushioned by a $20,000 foundation grant, had left Washington for Rome where he would continue his research on terrorism.

In the seven or eight years that followed, Booth Stallings only returned to Washington and sometimes New York when forced to wheedle additional funds out of mostly unsympathetic foundations. And occasionally he would bump into Harry Crites at some unavoidable cocktail party or embassy reception.

By then Harry Crites’ shiny blue suit and King Edward cigar and the old Ford Fairlane with its rusted-out rocker panels were long gone. Instead, the suits were from J. Press and the cigars smelled of Havana and the car was a beige Mercedes sedan, not the most expensive model, but not the diesel either.

At these infrequent encounters Harry Crites and Booth Stallings never said much more than hello and how’ve you been, although Crites almost never gave an answer, or waited for one, because there were always others he wanted to talk to far more than he did to Stallings, and usually he was already waving and smiling at them.

But once there had been nobody — nobody worthwhile anyway — and Harry Crites said he had left government and was now doing liaison work, which meant he was peddling what back then was still called influence but in later years was softened to access. Stallings had sometimes speculated about who might be retaining Crites and his conclusions had left him as depressed as he ever got.

During the next half hour Stallings and Crites drank three cups of coffee and discussed the recent not quite bloodless February revolution in the Philippines. They touched on Ferdinand Marcos’ exile to Hawaii; Imelda’s shoes; the shambles the Filipino economy was in; the disastrous world price of sugar; Mrs. Aquino’s prospects as President (dicey, both agreed); and whether it was four or eight billion dollars that Marcos had managed to squirrel away. After discovering that neither apparently knew much more than what he had read, or seen on television, they returned to Alejandro Espiritu.

“How well did you know him?” Crites asked.

“Fairly well.”

“What was he like then?”

“Short. About five-four.”

“Come on, Booth.”

“Okay. He was smart. Maybe even brilliant. About twenty-two or twenty-three then and tough. He was also kind of flexible — for a guerrilla.”

“He was one of those commie guerrillas, wasn’t he — what they called Huks?”

“The Huks were mostly up north — in Luzon. We were down south. Negros and Cebu. Most of the time Cebu.”

“What’d Huk stand for anyway? I forget.”

“For Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon,” Stallings said, pleased he could still remember the Tagalog. “That translates into something like, ‘People’s Army to Fight the Japanese.’ It was shortened to Hukbala-hapa, which finally got cut down to Huks so it’d fit in a headline. Then Lansdale came along in the fifties and helped Magsaysay put the boot to them. You remember General Lansdale, don’t you, scourge of the Orient?”

Crites ignored the question and said, “They’re calling themselves the NPA now — the New People’s Army.”

“Not the same bunch. Most of what was left of the Huks turned into mercenaries and strikebreakers.”

“You sure?”

“Christ, Harry, if they were still the same guys, you’d have some pretty superannuated guerrillas puffing up and down those mountains.”

“But the NPA’s also red as a rose.”

Stallings shrugged. “So?”

“You ever talk politics with Espiritu?”

“I was nineteen. My job was to kill people, not discuss dialectics.”

“Let me tell you what Espiritu is to the NPA,” Crites said and drew on his cigar. He inhaled a tiny portion of the smoke and then blew it all out — and away from Stallings. “He’s their secular archbishop. Their grand panjandrum. Their oracle. Their high lama. Their keeper of the sacred and everlasting flame. Some claim he’s even been to Moscow.”

“Moscow,” Stallings said. “Think of that.”

“Listen, Booth. If Espiritu comes down from the hills and exiles himself to Hong Kong, my people figure it’s eight to five that Madame Aquino can cut a deal with the NPA and keep on being President.”

Stallings studied Harry Crites’ expression, looking for guile and deception, but finding only a crack salesman’s normal greed and unassailable confidence. “With the token communist or two in her cabinet, right?”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because then it would be all over for the NPA, Harry. Capitulation. Surrender. Defeat. And for what? So they can come down and starve in the barrios? They can do that up in the hills. Look. If the NPA makes a deal with Aquino, they won’t’ve won anything and they’ll’ve lost what power they had. It doesn’t work like that. Not in the Philippines. Not in Afghanistan. Not in El Salvador or Lebanon. Not in Peru. Not in the Basque country or Northern Ireland. Not anywhere.”

Crites put his cigar out in the ashtray, taking his time, tamping it carefully, making sure no spark was left. When he looked up, it was with an expression from which all friendliness had vanished. The blue eyes had come down with a chill and the wide joke-prone mouth had slipped from glad into grim. A faintly surprised Stallings realized that the son of a bitch didn’t like me — surprised not so much by the realization as by the surprise itself.

“They say you’re the expert,” Crites said, not bothering to keep the disbelief out of his tone. “That’s what they say. Everybody. But my people’re willing to bet five million bucks you’re wrong.”

“Five million could buy the NPA an awful lot of M-16s and AK-47s and Uzis — maybe enough to bring back martial law.”

“My people figure five million’s not enough to buy anything but one guy.”

“And just who the fuck are your people, Harry?”

“Money people, who else?”

“I think they’re the duck people.”

The frost suddenly melted from Crites’ eyes and the wiseacre smile returned. “The Langley ducks, you mean.”

Stallings nodded. “You sure quack like one.”

“No ducks,” Crites said.

“Who then?”

“Suppose there was a bunch of people,” Crites said slowly and carefully, “a consortium, let’s call it, that has a billion or so already invested in the Philippines. And this consortium is still hoping to make a return on its investment, or break even, or maybe just cut its losses a little. But its only hope in hell of doing any of that is with a stable government.”

Crites paused, as if waiting for encouragement. Stallings gave him an impatient go-on nod.

“Okay. So if this consortium spends another five million — which is maybe one-half of one percent of what it’s already sunk out there — well, it just might bring it off. And that’s it, Booth. The whole plate of fudge. Tranquillity instead of trouble. A few years of peace and quiet. And my people’re willing to spend a few bucks to get it.”

“And buy off the chief troublemaker.”

“Pension him off.”

“You’re going to bribe him, Harry, and you want me for your bagman.”

“Not me. Him. Espiritu. Like nine-tenths of the world, he doesn’t much trust or like Americans — God knows why, wonderful as we are. But he will deal with his old asshole buddy from World War II. So that means you’ll be our authenticator, our bona fides, and convince him the deal’s really kosher. Then he can retire to Hong Kong, spend his money and watch the Chicoms take over.”

“He’s already nibbled then, hasn’t he?” Stallings said. “If he hadn’t, you and I wouldn’t be talking.”

“He’s nibbled.”

There was a long silence as Stallings drew careful cross-hatch patterns on the tablecloth with the tines of his unused dessert fork. The patterns turned into a Filipino nipa hut. A smile of anticipated victory spread slowly across Crites’ face. “Well?” he said and then went on without waiting for an answer. “You want in, don’t you, Booth?”

Booth Stallings looked up slowly from his tablecloth sketch. “I want ten percent.”

Crites’ victory smile vanished and his mouth formed a small shocked O. The eyes widened with what Stallings judged could only be horror. Nor was there any mistaking the fury in the whisper. “You want half a million dollars?”

Stallings smiled. “I’m sole source, Harry, and I get to charge a lot.”

They used the silence that followed to stare at each other: Stallings with amusement; Crites with something that resembled rage. Then the rage, if that’s what it was, suddenly went away, replaced by what Stallings interpreted to be an utter and alarming confidence. Crites reached for the dinner check. He studied it and when he spoke his tone was neutral and businesslike. “You’ll pay your own expenses, right?”

“Sure,” Stallings said.

“Then let’s start right now,” Crites said and dropped the check on top of the nipa hut sketch.

At 11:08 that night Booth Stallings waited under an old elm across the street from the three-story vanilla house with the black shutters on the south side of P Street in Georgetown. He waited until the last two guests came down the five wrought-iron steps and headed west toward their car.

When the guests were 30 yards away, Stallings crossed the street, mounted the steps and rang the bell, which was actually a loud buzzer. He heard footsteps on the parquet floor of the entrance hall behind the door. The sound of the footsteps stopped, but the door didn’t open. Stallings hadn’t expected it to. Instead, from behind the door a man’s deep baritone said, “Yes,” managing to make it neither a question nor an answer.

“It’s your father-in-law, Mr. Secretary,” Stallings said to the man behind the door who was either deputy assistant secretary of state or assistant deputy secretary of state, a pair of rankings whose fine distinctions Stallings had never bothered to fathom.

“Jesus, Booth, it’s past eleven,” Neal Hineline said from behind the still closed door. “You sober?”

“Close enough.”

The door opened and Stallings entered into a reception hall whose parquet floor creaked nicely with age. A remarkable stairway curved up to the second floor. His son-in-law stood — or posed — beside the delicately carved newel post, a man so handsome it was difficult for Stallings to believe that he was as dim as he seemed. Difficult, but not impossible.

Stallings sometimes hoped it was all an act, and that beneath the wavy blond hair and behind the puzzled puppy eyes was a magnificent brain, busily thinking up all sorts of elegant international schemes. This was, Stallings sometimes thought, one of his last remaining fantasies.

“Joanna’s right through there,” Hineline said, indicating the living room’s 150-year-old double sliding doors that had been carved by the same craftsman who had created the newel post.

“It’s you I need to talk to, Neal.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course.” Hineline’s right hand strayed automatically toward the inside breast pocket of his gray tweed jacket. “Sorry about the foundation, Booth. How much—”

“Not money,” Stallings said, stifling a sigh. “Advice.”

Hineline’s hand stopped its slow journey toward the inside pocket where the checkbook presumably lay. “Advice,” he said.

Stallings nodded.

“Did you see your Mr. Crites? The one who called Joanna?”

“I saw him.”

“Well, then, why not just pop in and say hello to Joanna and then come on back to my study where we can talk.”

A shirtless Otherguy Overby, wearing only baggy chino walking shorts and a pair of laceless New Balance jogging shoes, stood in front of the open four-door garage, waiting for water and trying to decide what to drive to the Los Angeles International Airport. He could choose from a Mercedes 560 SEC sedan; a Porsche 911 cabriolet; a seven-passenger Oldsmobile station wagon; or a high-sprung, four-wheel-drive Ford pickup.

He had almost decided on the Mercedes when he heard the truck grinding up the long gravel drive. He turned to watch as the Peterbilt tractor-cab nosed around the corner of the enormous house and shuddered to a stop, air brakes hissing. Coupled to the Peterbilt was a tanker containing ten thousand gallons of fairly pure water that wholesaled at two cents a gallon.

Luis Garfias, the young Mexican driver, lit a cigarette and stared down at Overby for several seconds, as if trying to place him. He finally nodded in the self-satisfied way some do when they’ve managed to match a face to a name. “Your water, Señor Otherguy.”

“You’re late, Luis.”

Luis Garfias smiled and blew out some smoke. “Your mother,” he said, put the Peterbilt in gear, and started creeping toward the ten-thousand-gallon water tank that rested on a man-made earth mound just to the right of the drive. The mound was high enough to raise the bottom of the tank level with the roofline of the two-story house, thus permitting gravity to do its work and send water flowing to the nine bathrooms, two kitchens, three wet bars, two Jacuzzis and one laundry room, not to mention the octagonal swimming pool that twice a year required twenty thousand gallons all for itself.

Stallings disliked Billy Diron’s house the moment he saw it. He was offended by its Disney-like mock-Tudor design and its tinted mullioned windows. He thought its weird eight-sided blue swimming pool was awful. But what bothered and dismayed him most of all was its total lack of trees and greenery.

Yet Stallings couldn’t fault the view. The house was built on a high sloping bluff. A thousand feet away and a hundred feet down were miles and miles of Pacific Ocean. The view was from Trancas on the right to Santa Monica on the left and then out to Palos Verdes, Catalina and beyond. Stallings knew it was a view most could only dream of and of which few would ever tire — unless they developed an aversion to 97 shades of blue.

Standing beside the Mercedes in what he took to be the courtyard, Stallings looked from ocean to house, back to ocean and then at Otherguy Overby. “He hasn’t got any view from the house,” Stallings said. “He’s only got those tiny little windows the English thought up to let in some light and still keep out the cold but never do either.”

Overby nodded in agreement as he too glanced from the ocean to the house and back to the ocean. “Billy didn’t want a whole lot of view. He figured it’d be a distraction.”

“From what?”

“His music.”

“He’s a musician?”

Overby cocked his head to the left, the better to study Stallings. “You never heard of Billy Diron?”

“No.”

“What about Galahad’s Balloon?”

“I’d guess it’s a rock group. But that’s a guess from someone who no longer sings his country’s songs.”

“That’s like guessing the Rams play—” Overby broke off when he heard the unmistakable whine of a Volkswagen engine. He turned toward the noise, clamping his lips into a stern line and folding his arms across his chest. A certain amount of forbidding crept into his eyes.

Both men watched the open white VW cabriolet speed around the corner of the house too fast, skid on the used brick paving, and buck and shudder to a stop when the woman driver applied the brakes but forgot to throw out the clutch. Stallings saw that she was young, quite young, no more than 22 or 23, and rather pretty once he got past the spiky silver hair and manic eyes.

The man who sat next to her in the passenger seat was older, at least 30 or even 32. He had a journeyman surfer’s tan, more ripe-wheat hair than he really needed, and jittery blue eyes so pale they seemed almost bleached. The man’s gaze flitted about, darting straight ahead to Overby, right to Stallings, left to the house and then back to Overby where it hovered with a hummingbird’s bold resolve.

The woman opened the car door and got out. She was barefoot and wore half a blue T-shirt that just covered her breasts and ended eight inches above her navel. She also wore skimpy white shorts that hadn’t been washed in a while. The wind had made a mess of her spiky silver hair. But even with the bird’s-nest hair and the forest creature eyes, Stallings thought she could pass for a standard Hollywood beauty if only something would iron the sullen rage out of her expression. He thought he knew what that something might be.

As though feeling Stallings’ gaze, she looked at him but directed her question to Overby. “Who the fuck’s he, Otherguy?”

“Nobody.”

“He’s somebody. Everyone’s somebody.”

“He isn’t.”

She moved several steps closer to Overby who still stood guard, arms folded, eyes implacable, his mouth all set to say no.

“I wanta go in and get my shit,” she said.

“I work for Billy, Cynthia, and Billy says you don’t go in.”

Cynthia Blondin’s wide unpainted mouth twisted itself into what began as an ingratiating smile but ended as a snarl. “I gotta have it, Otherguy.”

“It’s gone,” Overby said. “I flushed it down the john. Just like Billy said to.”

“You fuck.”

Overby nodded his indifferent agreement.

“The lady thinks you’re lying, Ace,” said the man in the car as he opened the door and stepped out, his lower body concealed by the car door.

Overby glanced at the man without curiosity. “Who cares what she thinks?”

“I do,” the man said as he stepped around the car door and aimed a short-barreled five-shot revolver at Overby. “She goes inside.”

Overby first studied the pistol, and then the man’s face. After that Overby turned and walked slowly to the rear of the Mercedes sedan, produced a key and opened the trunk lid. He reached into the trunk and brought out a tire iron. Stallings wondered if the tire iron came as standard equipment with a Mercedes and decided it didn’t.

Holding the tire iron down at his side in his left hand, Overby walked over to the man with the pistol. “You better take Cynthia and get in the car and leave,” Overby said. “I think maybe you better drive.”

“You’ve just about cost yourself a knee, fuckhead,” the man said and pointed the pistol at Overby’s left knee.

Overby brought the tire iron up fast and smashed it into the underside of the man’s right wrist. The man yelped as the pistol flew up and out of his grasp and landed at Stallings’ feet. Stallings bent down, picked it up, examined it briefly, and then aimed it at the man who now stood, slightly bent over, left hand clutching his right wrist.

“Go get her what she wants, Otherguy,” Stallings said.

A surprised Overby stared at Stallings. “Why?”

“Because if you don’t, she’ll be back, and I don’t want her here.”

Overby thought it over, acquiesced with a nod to superior logic, turned and entered the house. Cynthia Blondin took two happy dance steps toward Booth Stallings. “Who’re you, Pops?” she said.

“I’m Daddy Goodtimes,” Stallings said, looking not at her but at the man with the injured wrist who had now straightened up and was gently massaging the hurt wrist with his left hand.

Cynthia Blondin giggled happily. The man with the hurt wrist glowered at her. She giggled again. The man turned his uncertain gaze on Stallings. “I want my piece back.”

Stallings replied with a head shake and a slight smile.

“Bet I can take it away from you.” This time there was no smile when Stallings again shook his head no.

The man took a slow hesitant step toward Stallings who cocked the revolver, pleased with the ominous sound it made.

“Old fart’s gonna shoot you, Joey,” Cynthia Blondin said and again giggled. “You’ll shoot him dead, won’t you, Pops?”

“You bet,” Stallings said.

The man with the hurt wrist started to say something else but stopped when Overby came out of the house, still carrying the tire iron in his left hand and, in his right, a small brown paper bag that was folded over into a packet and wrapped with two rubber bands. Overby stopped in front of Cynthia Blondin who bit her lower lip, staring greedily at the packet.

“I want you to listen to what I’m gonna say, Cynthia. You listening?”

She nodded, not taking her eyes from the packet.

“Billy doesn’t want you back. He doesn’t want to see you. He doesn’t want to talk to you. If you’ve got something to say to Billy, call Ritto and Ogilvie and talk to Joe Ritto. Am I getting through?”

“Gimme my shit, Otherguy.”

Overby sighed and offered her the packet. She took it with both hands, gently, carefully, as if taking a baby bird from its nest. She turned then, humming something, and hurried toward the driver’s side of the Volkswagen.

The man with the hurt wrist started toward the passenger side, changed his mind, and turned back to Stallings. “You really ain’t gonna gimme my piece back?”

“No,” Stallings said.

The man nodded sadly, turned again, and climbed into the car. Cynthia Blondin, now holding the packet in one hand as if it might shatter, opened the driver’s door. Before sliding behind the wheel, she looked at Overby who stood, tapping the tire iron against the palm of his right hand.

“Tell Billy,” she said. “Tell him I’ll always love him and I’ll always care for him and that I wish him all the success in the world.”

“Okay,” Overby said.

Cynthia Blondin slipped behind the wheel, gently placing the packet in her lap. After starting the engine she leaned her head out and called to Overby, “You won’t forget?”

“I’ll tell him,” Overby said. “Billy likes stuff like that.”

Cynthia Blondin nodded, backed the car around until it faced the drive, ground the gears twice and drove off. Just as the car reached the corner of the house, the man with the hurt wrist twisted around and used his unhurt hand to give Stallings and Overby the inevitable finger. Overby waved goodbye with the tire iron, turned to Stallings, indicated the revolver and said, “You want to keep it?”

“What for?” Stallings said, handing it over.

A relieved Overby said, “Now what?”

“Now? Well, now we’ll go inside and talk about Wu and Durant.”

Booth Stallings sat at the large round table in Billy Diron’s elaborate kitchen and watched Overby make two canned corned beef sandwiches. He made them with the quick economical moves usually learned in either a delicatessen or an institutional kitchen. Since he suspected Overby would starve before working in a delicatessen, Stallings decided not to ask for the name of the institution in which he had trained.

Overby served the sandwiches on two plates, each containing exactly seven potato chips and three slices of dill pickle. Stallings had watched him count out both the potato chips and the pickles. To drink were two more bottles of San Miguel beer.

After Overby sat down, Stallings took a bite of the sandwich. Between the slices of dark rye he found not only corned beef, but also several leaves of Boston lettuce, a thick slab of Bermuda onion, and a dressing of mayonnaise and two kinds of mustard that Overby had carefully measured out and blended together.

After Stallings swallowed his first bite of sandwich, he said, “Tell me.”

“What?” Overby said.

“How old are they?”

Overby tried to recall. “Well, Artie must be—”

“That’s Wu, right?”

Overby nodded. “Arthur Case Wu. He must be around forty-four now, but it’s kind of hard to tell about Durant on account of there was never any birth certificate. But Durant thinks he’s about the same as Artie. Forty-four. Around in there.”

“What else?”

“Well, they were both raised in this San Francisco Methodist orphanage, ran away when they were fourteen, wound up at Princeton for a while, and they’ve been partners ever since.”

“They went to Princeton — to college?”

“I never got that quite straight. Artie went on a scholarship and Quincy sort of went as Artie’s bodyguard.”

“Dear God,” Stallings said. “Their specialty is what exactly?”

“This and that. But most of the time they probably do pretty close to what you’d want ’em to do.”

“I haven’t said.”

“Maybe you should.”

“I’ll get to it,” Stallings said and ate some more of his sandwich, washing it down with the Filipino beer. “They married?” he asked.

Overby produced one of his sly grins that displayed no teeth. “To each other, you mean?”

“To anybody.”

“Durant’s not married and fools around. But Wu’s married to this lady from Scotland, and by lady I mean she’s got some sort of thoroughbred bloodlines — eighteenth cousin to the Queen twice removed or something — which suits Artie just fine on account of he’s still pretender to the Emperor’s throne.”

“Emperor?” Stallings said. “What emperor?”

“The Emperor of China, who else?”

“Sweet Jesus.”

“He’s even got genealogical charts and everything. He also figures if there were about two revolutions, three wars and maybe ten thousand deaths of just the right people, his oldest twin boy could be both King of Scotland and Emperor of China.”

“He has twin sons?”

“Twin sons and twin daughters. Cute kids — or were the last time I saw ’em. The girls are younger than the boys.”

Stallings slowly poured more beer into his glass and tasted it. “He’s not... obsessed with this emperor thing, is he?”

Again, Overby smiled slyly. “Artie figures he’s the last of the Manchus.”

“How about a straight answer?”

Overby’s frown managed to make him look both grave and highly proper. Stallings thought it must be one of his most useful expressions. “Artie knows exactly who he is,” Overby said. “More’n anybody I ever met.”

“And Durant?”

“He doesn’t much give a shit who he is.”

“When’d you meet them?”

“The fourth of July in sixty-eight, Bangkok. At the Embassy reception.” He paused. “The Ambassador’d invited everybody who even looked American. Even us.”

“What were you doing in Bangkok?”

“Looking around. I’d bumped into Wu and Durant and they needed a crimp for a little something they’d decided to play off against the chief of station.”

“The CIA chief of station?”

“Who else.”

“So what happened?”

Overby looked puzzled. “What d’you mean what happened? We ran it and walked away with about sixty-three thousand. That was major money back then, in sixty-eight.”

“And what did he do about it?”

“The chief of station? He ate it. What else could he do? He sure didn’t go around bragging about the bad case of greed he’d come down with.”

“Were either Wu or Durant ever hooked up to Langley?”

Overby’s answering shrug was a bit too elaborate to satisfy Stallings. “Is that a maybe yes or a maybe no?”

“Artie says that a couple of times they were maybe unwitting assets. But Durant always says they were half-witted assets and no maybe about it. They moved around a lot and sometimes they just took whatever turned up.”

“When’s the last time you worked with them?”

“Seven or eight years ago. We went in on a deal together and we all got well.”

“Where?”

“Here. In California.”

“What kind of deal?”

“That’s none of your fucking business, is it?”

They stared at each other for long moments, each searching for the other’s weakness, only to find there was none. Stallings finally replied to Overby’s question. “No,” he said, “I don’t guess it is. Any of my fucking business.”

Overby drank some of his beer and said, “Tell me about your deal.”

“All right.” Stallings was silent for perhaps ten seconds as he edited what he planned to say. “Somebody,” he said, “and I don’t know exactly who, wants to pay me half a million dollars to bribe a Filipino freedom fighter and/or terrorist to come down from the hills and light out for Hong Kong where five million dollars U.S. will be waiting for him. Or so they say.”

Although Overby’s face and eyes remained calm and even impassive, his nose betrayed him with a long, long sniff as if he suddenly smelled sweet profit. After the sniff came the white, wide and utterly ruthless grin, which Stallings found curiously merry.

“You need help,” Overby said.

“I know.”

“You need Wu and Durant.”

“So it would seem.”

“You also need me.”

Stallings raised his eyebrows to register surprise. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Overby’s ruthless, merry grin returned. “Like hell.”

“It’s an interesting notion.”

“Where’s this freedom fighter and/or terrorist of yours holed up — central Luzon?”

Stallings shook his head. “Cebu. Know it?”

Overby’s grin grew even wider. “Lapu-Lapu land. Yeah, I know Cebu. Like my name. Not to get too commercial and all, but what kind of split are we talking about?”

“You’re negotiating for Wu and Durant now, right?”

Overby nodded. “For both them and me.”

“I was thinking in the neighborhood of fifty-fifty.”

Overby’s feigned disappointment took the form of a sorrowful frown. “I think we’d need just a little more taste than that.”

“It’s take it or leave it, Otherguy.”

The frown went away and the grin came back. “Well, hell, half of five hundred thousand split three ways, less expenses, is about eighty thousand each, which isn’t bad. Not good, you understand, but not bad.”

“I guess I didn’t make myself clear,” Stallings said. “I intend to split the entire five million — not just the five hundred thousand.”

Overby didn’t try to disguise anything. The big white smile was back, never more ruthless, never more merry. “You’re talking interesting fucking money now.”

Stallings didn’t return the smile. Instead his eyes took on the look of someone who has dipped into the future and is dismayed by what he’s seen.

“It’s poisoned money,” Stallings said.

“Money’s money.”

“Not this time.”

Guided only by his almost infallible con man’s instinct, Otherguy Overby came up with exactly the right measure of reassurance.

“In that case, friend,” he said, “you sure as hell got off on the right floor.”

The pretender to the Emperor’s throne stood in the innermost sanctum of the deposed ruler’s palace and listened, beaming with pride, as the younger of his ten-year-old twin daughters finished reading the framed poem aloud. The poem had been left behind on the wall when the deposed ruler fled into the night.

“‘Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,’” she read, “‘And — which is more — you’ll be a man, my son.’”

The ten-year-old girl had read Kipling’s “If” with what at one time was called expression. The Filipinos in the line behind her applauded enthusiastically. She turned, curtsied prettily — despite the jeans she wore — then looked up at the big Chinaman (as she and her sister always thought of him) who was not only her father, but also pretender to the throne of the Emperor of China.

“Very, very nice,” said Artie Wu who stood six foot two and three-quarters inches and weighed 249 pounds, only six percent of it pure blubber.

His younger daughter made a face at the poem on the wall. “God, that’s dumb.”

“Mr. Kipling had an unhappy childhood,” Agnes Wu explained. “To make up for it he sometimes became a trifle optimistic and overly sentimental.”

Her daughter nodded wisely. “Mush, huh?”

“Mush,” agreed Agnes Wu whose Rs were tinged with a slight Scot’s burr. Everything else she said sounded like the English spoken by those who have gone to proper schools that place a high premium on received pronunciation. But none of the schools were able to do anything about the burr of Agnes Wu who had been born Agnes Goriach.

The older of the twin daughters (older by 21 minutes) turned on her sister. “It wasn’t half as dumb as ‘Invictus’ that you got out of and Mrs. Crane made me memorize last year. You want mush? ‘Out-of-the-night-that-covers-me-black-as-the-pit-from-pole-to-pole-I-thank-whatever-gods-may-be-for-my-unconquerable-soul.’ That’s mush.”

“You’re holding up the line, ladies,” said Artie Wu as sternly as he ever said anything to his daughters. Totally incapable of assuming the heavy father role, Wu continued to be surprised at his daughters’ reluctance to take advantage of his faltering will. His twin 13-year-old sons were something else. His sons would flimflam a saint.

The Wu family moved out of Ferdinand Marcos’ small private study whose shelves still contained scores of pop histories, biographies and steaming political exposes, written — for the most part — by American authors. The study was a windowless room tucked away in the Malacanang Palace on the banks of the Pasig River in Manila. The Wus had already toured the discothèque, the throne room, and were heading for Imelda Marcos’ bedroom when Agnes Wu turned back to the trailing Peninsula Hotel limousine driver who was also visiting the palace for the first time.

“How much time do we have, Roddy?” she asked.

Rodolfo Caday glanced at his watch. “Plenty, ma’am. The flight’s not till four and I fix it with A and A to meet us here outside.”

A and A were the twin 13-year-old Wu sons, Arthur and Angus, who already had toured the palace twice on their own. “Then we don’t have to go back to the hotel for them?” Agnes Wu said.

“No, ma’am.”

With a small gesture that took in the palace, Agnes Wu said, “Well?”

Rodolfo Caday frowned, then shrugged. “Much foolishness.”

Wearing a yellow People Power T-shirt, seersucker pants and a pair of sandals, Artie Wu ate a large buffet breakfast in the Peninsula Hotel’s La Bodega — where they always lost money on him — and by 7:05 A.M. was slipping the hotel’s black Mercedes sedan through Manila’s demented traffic. As always, the Filipino drivers relied exclusively on their horns to signal their uncertain intentions. Artie Wu matched them toot for toot.

At a long red light two professional beggar children approached him. The older child was a girl of no more than ten who carried her emaciated four-year-old brother in her arms. Their eyes were enormous; their expressions pitiable; their minds possibly retarded by malnutrition. Although suspecting that all beggar children stood for hours in front of mirrors to get their woebegone looks down pat, Wu nevertheless rolled down his window and put a 20-peso note into the four-year-old’s palm.

He knew the children would be lucky to get a dime out of the dollar he had just handed them. The rest would go to the cops and the syndicate they worked for. Wu also knew if they managed to live another year or two, the syndicate might fatten them up and turn them into child prostitutes.

After leaving Manila, Wu didn’t stop until he reached Angeles and was past both the sprawling Clark Air Base and the long line of open-air shops that offered black market PX goods. He stopped at a McDonald’s for coffee and watched the 18- and 19-year-old U.S. airmen and their 15- and 16-year-old whores put away the Big Macs and the Cokes and the french fries at ten in the morning.

Later, not far from Tarlac, which was Corazon Aquino’s hometown, Wu again stopped, locked the car, and walked up a short hill to inspect the memorial built on what was said to be the exact spot where the Bataan Death March had ended in 1942. Wu had passed the memorial several times, but had never stopped and was curious about what its plaque said. But there was no plaque. None that Artie Wu could find.

The only other visitor was a lanky red-faced man with thinning gray hair and a limp who wandered around taking pictures with his Instamatic.

“Where’s the plaque?” Wu asked him.

“Guess somebody stole it,” the man said in an accent that Wu thought could be from either of the Dakotas or possibly Minnesota.

“Hell of a thing,” Wu said.

“Hell of a walk.”

“You weren’t old enough.”

“My daddy,” the man said. “That’s how I still think of him. Daddy. He shipped out to the P.I.’s in thirty-nine. I was two then. Don’t even know if he made it up this far. Never did find out what happened exactly — to him, I mean. But I thought I’d stop by and, you know, kind of pay my respects.”

Wu nodded. The man glanced around, not much liking what he saw. “Looks like they could spruce it up a little.”

“People like to forget lost wars,” Wu said.

The man nodded. “I guess.” He squinted at Wu through the 90-degree glare. “You’re not Japanese, are you?”

“No,” Wu said.

“For a second there I thought you coulda been one of the Japs that might’ve known my daddy and — aw hell, you know what I thought.”

“Sure.”

The man turned as if to give the Death March memorial one last look. “Well, what the fuck, I don’t even remember him anyhow.”

Quincy Durant sat propped up in the Hyatt hotel bed, smoking a rare cigarette and drinking Scotch and water, when Artie Wu came out of the bathroom, shrimp pink from his shower and wearing only a pair of voluminous white boxer shorts. Wu started putting on the pants to the white silk money suit. He spoke only after he had the pants on and was buttoning a tent-size blue chambray shirt. “How much?”

“About a thousand,” Durant said. “I spread it around town with the word that I was trying to locate Ernie. I got a call at six this morning from a taxi dispatcher. One of his drivers took an Air Force CID major to that post beer joint, the Nineteenth Tee, where they’d found Ernie. The Major’s car wouldn’t start, which is why he called a taxi. The driver recognized Ernie.”

“But didn’t say anything.”

“Not to anybody but the dispatcher.”

Wu, looking into the mirror, carefully continued to knot his paisley tie. “What d’you think?”

“What or who?”

“Who.”

“A cuckolded husband. A disappointed bankrupt maybe.”

“Christ, that second one’s us.”

“The list goes on,” Durant said and took another swallow of his drink. “A spurned lover, male or female. Some guy who didn’t get the job in the ministry of works, or whatever, that he’d paid Ernie to get him. An NPA sparrow team.”

“Sparrow team. That’s nice.”

“You prefer hit squad?”

Wu shrugged. “Not really, but you may be right at that. Let’s say Ernie’s out cruising. He meets this young sparrow, male or female, in a bar and they agree to a quickie in the front seat of Ernie’s BMW. The second sparrow’s already down behind the back seat. He cuts Ernie’s throat, they drive out to the camp, strip him, cut him some more and leave him in the neo-colonialists’ playground as a warning to whoever they’re mad at this week. If you needed a symbol of corruption, you couldn’t do much better than Ernie.”

“I always kind of liked him,” Durant said.

“So’d I, until he stiffed us.” Wu crossed to the mini-refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. He twisted off the cap, had a swallow and looked at Durant. “It’s a write-off, isn’t it?”

“The three hundred thousand? Total.”

“How much’ve you got?” Wu asked.

Durant finished his drink, put the glass down, ground his cigarette out, locked his hands behind his head, leaned back against the bed’s headboard and stared at the ceiling. “Three thousand two hundred and twenty-three dollars and a Gold American Express card that’ll lie still for a couple of months if we don’t beat it too hard. You?”

“About the same,” Wu said. “Maybe two or three hundred more. I’m afraid to count it.”

“If we needed to front something, I could probably borrow ten thousand from Emily.”

“Front what, for Christ sake?” Artie Wu said as he put his beer down, picked up the white money suit’s jacket, flicked something from its left sleeve and slipped it on.

“No idea.”

Wu turned to examine himself in the mirror that hung over the bureau. “Boy Howdy’s looking for us.”

Durant’s long face went still. Nothing moved. Not the green-gray eyes or the wide mouth that always stayed turned up at its ends. Artie Wu watched him in the mirror, trying to detect some reaction. It was no use looking for a flush because Durant wore one of those hot country tans that takes years to acquire and never seems to fade, not even in cold climates.

Durant at last unlocked his hands from behind his head and rose slowly. He stood an inch taller than Artie Wu but weighed at least 60 pounds less. At first glance most found him skinny until they realized their mistake and tried slim. When that didn’t quite work either they resorted to lean and left it at that because they couldn’t think of anything else.

In addition to his permanent tan Durant wore a pair of chino pants and a V-neck navy blue cotton sweater but no shirt. On his feet were a pair of expensive but sockless tasseled loafers that hadn’t been shined in a while — if ever. He walked over to the mirror and stared at Artie Wu’s reflection. “I don’t work with that Aussie git,” Durant said, using an offhand tone that Wu long ago had learned to interpret as adamant.

“Okay,” Wu said. “Forget it.”

There was a brief silence while they stared at each other in the mirror. Finally, Durant asked, “What’s Boy got?”

“I don’t know. He might be just the post office.”

“With a hell of a lot of postage due — as always.”

“So?”

“So we don’t have much choice, do we?”

“None at all,” said Artie Wu.

Otherguy Overby explained that the very early breakfast meeting in the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge was simply a matter of edge.

“This guy Harry Crites — the poet I’ve been reading up on — well, he flies in from Washington late last night and he’s still on East Coast time, right? So this morning we’re getting him up at say, six, six-thirty, and this’ll throw his biorhythms all out of whack and that gives us the edge. Not much, but some.”

“His biorhythms,” Booth Stallings said.

“Yeah.”

Stallings glanced at Overby who was behind the wheel of the yellow Porsche 911 cabriolet they had borrowed from the stable of the still incarcerated Billy Diron. They were rolling down the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, approaching the Getty Museum. It was 7:04 A.M., a Saturday, and the third day of spring in the year 1986.

“So you think his out-of-whack biorhythms are somehow going to help us pilfer the five million?”

“Pilfer? You don’t pilfer five million bucks. You... liberate it.”

Stallings chuckled. “Maybe I should recite the names of two or three dozen countries that’ve been sacked and plundered under liberation’s bright banner.”

Overby gave him a quick frowning glance. “Look,” he said. “Let me ask you something you don’t have to answer. But have you got funny politics? Not that I give a shit, but I’d kind of like to know.”

“Funny?”

“Red. Rouge. Pink.” He paused. “Moscow, Peking, maybe Havana?”

“No,” Stallings said with a smile. “In that sense I have no politics at all.” He chuckled again. “What’re yours — if I may be so bold?”

Overby seemed to give the question serious thought. “Well, you’d have to say I’m kind of a Republican, except I don’t bother to vote much anymore.”

“Don’t — or can’t because of a past felony rap or two?”

Overby sealed himself away in that remote and frozen place where Stallings had seen him go before. It’s his fuck-off retreat, he thought.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your goddamn business,” Overby said with his always surprising dignity.

“You’re right,” Stallings said. “It’s not.”

For the second time in his life Booth Stallings flew first-class. The first time had been nearly five years before when a Swedish small-arms manufacturer had flown him to a sales conference in London to deliver an ill-received paper Stallings perversely had entitled: “Terrorism: the Exciting Hot New Industry.”

Otherguy Overby had insisted on first-class to Manila as a matter of front and, by chance, Stallings had two seats to himself. Across the aisle were Overby and Georgia Blue who scarcely spoke to each other. After the 747 was 30 minutes out of Los Angeles, and after an overly solicitous flight attendant had pressed a second martini on him, Stallings rose, tapped Overby on the shoulder and said, “My turn.”

Georgia Blue watched as Stallings slipped into the vacated seat with his drink and said, “Tell me about the money.”

“The five million,” she said.

Stallings nodded.

“It’s real,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“It’ll be in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank — their new headquarters on Des Voeux Road.”

“That’s where it’ll be. Not where it is.”

“Right now it’s where it can be wire-transferred without bothering Washington.”

“Not in the States then, right?”

She smiled.

“When’ll Harry wire it?”

“When I tell him to.”

“By code?”

Again, she smiled.

“Like to share the code — since we’re partners and all?”

“Not just yet.”

“Whose money is it?”

“Who cares? Which means I don’t know.”

“Harry gave me some crap about it coming from a business consortium.”

“Crap’s a fairly apt description.”

“Think it’s Langley money?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“They wouldn’t go through Harry. They’ve got their own proprietary false fronts.”

“Like to hear what I think?” Stallings said after ten seconds of silence.

“Of course.”

“I think the money’s coming from someone who won’t send after it when it disappears.”

“Harry’ll send after it,” she said. “And if we work it just right, he’ll send me.”

Stallings grinned. “Now there’s a pretty notion.”

“Yes, isn’t it though,” she said.

Stallings leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes and said, “Now tell me about you and Otherguy.”

Georgia Blue thought before replying, “He was a bad accident that happened in Guadalajara when I was twenty and he was thirty-one, or so he claimed, except you never can tell about Otherguy because he lies so much.”

“But he’s good at what he does,” Stallings said, opening his eyes.

She shrugged. “He’s in the top forty anyhow.”

Despite Stallings’ encouraging nod, Georgia Blue volunteered nothing else. After 15 seconds went by, he said, “So what did Treasury have you doing?”

“I guarded the bodies of the wives and mistresses of visiting prime ministers, premiers, presidents, potentates and what have you. Actually, I was the maid who carried the gun. So when a certain stark-naked madame told me to give her a massage, I told her to fuck off and got fired and Harry Crites hired me three weeks later.”

“To watch his back?”

She nodded.

“Just curious, but what does Harry really suffer from — enemies or paranoia?”

“They sometimes bunk in together, you know.”

“So I’ve heard,” Stallings said as he rose and returned to his seat across the aisle.

Overby worked it so that he would carry the $5,000 and Georgia Blue the small flat Walther semiautomatic. She wore it stuck down behind her jeans, concealed by the tails of the Hawaiian shirt Overby had found for her in one of the Manila Hotel specialty shops. The Walther was her own.

It was nearly 10 P.M. when they rode the elevator down to the hotel lobby. “We’re Mr. and Mrs. Average B. Tourist,” he said. “The B is for bored and we’re out for a halfway dirty night on the town.”

“Gosh, it’s like a disguise, isn’t it?”

Overby sighed. “If I have to carry a chunk of money around Ermita, I want to do it so nobody notices me. And when I try and beat Boy Howdy down five thousand, I want to look as hard-up as possible.” He inspected her critically. “Trouble with you is, you can’t even look hard-up.”

“My God,” she said as the elevator door opened. “I think you just paid me a compliment.”

“Think again,” said Overby as he walked out of the elevator ahead of her.

Outside the hotel the doorman tried to sell Overby on the safety and security of a hotel limousine. When Overby refused, the doorman shrugged, whistled up a taxi, wrote something down on a small pad, tore it off and gave it to Overby who passed it to Georgia Blue without a glance.

The slip had the name of the hotel printed at the top. Below was the cautionary statement: “Dear Guest: For your Safety and Convenience the vehicle you are now taking bears the following information.” After that the doorman had written the taxi’s name and plate number.

“In case we get banged on the head and dumped in the bay, right?” Georgia Blue said.

Overby nodded as the five-year-old Toyota taxi pulled up to a stop and they climbed into its rear. When Overby said he wanted to go to Boy Howdy’s in Ermita, the driver offered to take them to a much nicer place, his cousin’s, where they wouldn’t be cheated nearly as much. Overby had to decline the offer twice before the driver put the taxi into gear and crept down the hotel drive to Roxas Boulevard.

The trip was short in distance but long in time because of heavy traffic and the sin and sex customers who jammed the short narrow one-way street in Ermita. At the street’s far end was a big flashing pink neon sign that spelled out Boy Howdy’s name. At least a dozen clubs lined the block and outside each of them was a barker, hawking the delights that lay within. About half of the barkers were Australians in their forties and fifties with mean mouths and disappointed eyes.

Prospective customers included Japanese businessmen, wearing stylish sports clothes and foolish grins; American servicemen, all of them young and many of them drunk, and a scattering of European males who seemed torn between apprehension and desire. The rest of the crowd was made up of adult and child prostitutes of both sexes plus a variety of pimps, beggar kids, transvestites, pickpockets, all-purpose grifters and a sprinkling of middle-aged American tourists who looked as if they had bought the wrong guidebook.

When the taxi was fifty yards from Boy Howdy’s, it became stuck in a traffic jam. Overby paid off the driver. Once his passengers were out of the taxi, the driver switched off his engine, rolled up the windows, locked the doors and resigned himself to a steam bath of indefinite duration.

Overby led the way with Georgia Blue slightly behind him and to his left at curbside where the trouble, if any, would come from. Overby ambled along, sticking to his tourist role, his eyes wide and a know-it-all grin plastered across his face.

The trouble came from a big drunken American sailor who wore a T-shirt that read, “All-American Fuckup.” He grabbed Georgia Blue by her right wrist, proclaiming: “Just can’t help it — I’m in love!”

Overby turned to watch impassively as Georgia Blue allowed herself to be spun around. She almost laughed when the sailor told her that tall women turned him on. But then her left hand darted to the big right hand that still clutched her wrist. Her fingers sought and found the nerve that lay just below the pad of his thumb. She clamped down on it. The sailor yelled. He kept on yelling as she forced him to his knees, released him and walked away. A small crowd quickly gathered to discuss whether the kneeling man was damaged enough to roll.

“Durant taught you that, didn’t he?” Overby said as Georgia Blue rejoined him.

“Did he?”

“I saw him do it in Bangkok once to some big special forces ape.”

“I’m just fine, Otherguy, but it was sweet of you to ask.”

Overby gave her a quick puzzled glance. “I wasn’t worried, if that’s what you mean. It’s what you fucking well do.”

She nodded slightly, looking away, and said, “You’re right. It’s what I fucking well do.”

It was past midnight when Artie Wu heard the knock at the door, turned and said, “Let’s get it over with.”

Georgia Blue rose, her hands unconsciously smoothing and tugging at the gaudy Hawaiian shirt she still wore. Head bowed, she walked slowly across the sitting room of the suite in the Peninsula Hotel. Wu and Otherguy Overby watched her, their curiosity evident. Wu was on the couch; Overby in an easy chair. When she reached the door her bowed head came up and both men seemed to relax.

She let her hand rest lightly on the doorknob. The knock came again, two light taps. She gave her lower lip a quick bite, tightened her grasp on the knob and opened the door. Quincy Durant stood in the corridor. It was difficult to tell whether the sight of her shocked or only surprised him.

His eyes reacted first. They blinked twice, quite rapidly, and then his mouth opened, as if there were something he needed to say. But no words came and his mouth spread itself into a wide pleased grin that she thought made him look about six, possibly seven.

Durant said, “Georgia, by God.”

“That’s a silly smile, Durant. It makes you look about six. I was hoping for something older — something that maybe needed a cane.”

Durant ran a hand through his hair. “Like the gray?”

“Not enough of it.”

His smile went away for an instant and then came back, as if taking up permanent residence. “You look almost the same. Except better. I especially like your shirt.”

“Otherguy picked it out.”

“Otherguy. Well. You’re back with him then?”

“I’m his new partner,” Georgia Blue said. “I’m also yours and Artie’s.”

The wide smile slowly went away, an eighth of an inch at a time. “I see.”

“No you don’t,” she said. “But come on in and we’ll explain it.”

After Durant entered and closed the door, he turned to find Georgia Blue standing only a foot or so away. In her eyes and expression was something he interpreted as either a demand or an invitation, so he tilted up her chin with his left hand and put his right arm around her waist. He kissed her then. It was a chaste kiss of the closed-mouth kind that lasted as long as a kiss ever lasts between distant cousins of the opposite sex. Wu and Overby watched with polite detachment.

When the kiss ended, Georgia Blue said, “The fire’s gone out, I see.”

Durant’s right hand patted the Walther that was still stuck down in her jeans. “Must be your extinguisher,” he said.

She reached back and removed the hand. “Years back, Quincy, I had fantasies about you. Real three-in-the-morning S-M stuff that usually ended with my shooting you. But they went away just like cancer sometimes goes away.”

Durant studied her briefly. “Whatever you say, Georgia.”

Durant turned to find Otherguy Overby up and standing by the club chair. Overby wore his hard merry grin. Durant returned it with a crooked one of his own that was half fond and half wary. “Otherguy,” Durant said, a little surprised by the warmth that had crept unbidden into his tone. He crossed the room and held out his hand. “Quincy,” Overby said as they shook hands.

“I hear it’s fat.”

“You hear right.”

“Good,” Durant said and turned to the beaming Artie Wu who was still on the couch, hands laced across his belly. “When you called,” Durant said, “you kind of forgot to mention Georgia.”

Wu shook his great head. “If I’d told you, your heart would’ve started going pitty-pat and you’d’ve turned all sweaty and gone looking for roses at one in the morning. This way you open the door and — bang! It’s over and done.”

“Like a good neat hanging,” Durant said.

“Exactly,” Wu said and looked at Georgia Blue. “You okay?”

She nodded and sat down on the couch.

“Well, sometimes reunions aren’t as bad as we—”

“For Christ sake, Artie, drop it,” she said.

Wu smiled agreeably. “Okay. Let’s get down to business.” He rose from the couch. “I’ll pour for whoever’s thirsty. After that, Otherguy’ll go through it from start to finish without interruption. When he’s done, it’ll be question time. Any comments or suggestions?”

There weren’t any. Georgia Blue asked for a glass of white wine. The three men chose beer. Wu served the drinks, then sat back down on the couch, took out one of his immense cigars and held it up to see whether anyone objected. When no one did, he lit it carefully, blew the smoke up in the air and looked at Overby. “Let’s hear it, Otherguy. From the beginning.”

“Let me put the price on it first for Quincy,” Overby said. He looked at Durant. “It’s a five-way even split on five million U.S. There’s another loose half million that’ll go for expenses and the this-and-that.” He paused. “Interested?”

Durant grinned. “Extremely.”

Overby told it then, concisely and quickly, leaving out the adjectives and all hyperbole. He pronounced each name carefully and even spelled it. A brief report on the meeting with Boy Howdy was given without rancor, which somehow made it even more damning. When he was done he leaned back in the club chair, picked up his beer, and drank half of it.

There was a brief silence until Durant said, “Our other partner, the one who isn’t here?”

“Booth Stallings,” Overby said.

“The terrorism expert.”

Overby nodded.

“Is he an expert on its cure and prevention, or is he a how-to-do-it man?”

“I read a book he wrote,” Overby said. “Well, most of it anyhow. He knows a hell of a lot about it — maybe everything. But...” Overby frowned as if his thought had dried up.

“But what?” Durant said.

“Well, when he explains how and why it happens, he stays kind of neutral — you know, like he was above it all.”

Artie Wu blew a large fat smoke ring at the ceiling and turned to Georgia Blue. “Tell us about the other one, Georgia. The poet who hired you as shotgun.”

“Harry Crites.”

Wu acknowledged the name with a wave of his cigar.

“He’s a very smooth, well-connected fixer who works Washington out of his Watergate apartment. He has clients in South and Central America, a kind of poste restante office in London, and makes a lot of trips to the Middle East. To Cairo. Nowhere else there. Just Cairo.”

“What’s his background?” Durant asked.

“Federal,” she said. “White House — well, kind of, a long time ago — then DOD and State.” She paused. “Varied and murky.”

“Langley?” Wu said.

“He says not.”

Artie Wu stuck the cigar back in his mouth, locked his hands behind his head and examined the ceiling. He spoke around the cigar.

“Okay. Harry Crites is the tap that turns on the money. It flows through the pipe that’s our very own Booth Stallings and lands in the bucket — maybe receptacle would be better — that’s Alejandro Espiritu, aging freedom fighter and/or archterrorist.”

He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at Durant. “Except for the fact that he and Stallings were once comrades-in-arms during the war, what else do we know about Espiritu?”

“Fuck all,” Durant said.

“Then we’d better get a fix on him. You want to take that on, Otherguy?”

Overby thought about it and finally said yes.

Wu picked up an ashtray and carefully put out his cigar. “Now we get to the real question. Just whose money are we going to lift?”

“Stallings had some thoughts on that,” Georgia Blue said. “He thinks it must be dirty money that, once gone, nobody’ll send after. I told him Harry Crites’ll sure as hell send after it and that he’ll probably send me.”

Wu raised his right eyebrow. “And what did Mr. Stallings say?”

“He thought it was a pretty notion.”

“So do I,” Wu said. “Quincy?”

“Very pretty.”

“I think it’s fucking beautiful,” Overby said.

Artie Wu looked at his watch, yawned and stretched. “Somewhere along the way, after the money leaves the tap and before it drops into the Espiritu bucket, we’ll have to siphon it off. I can think of several ways we might do that and Otherguy can probably come up with even more.”

“At least a dozen,” Overby said.

“We’ll have to run it on a no-comeback basis,” Durant said.

“Absolutely,” Wu said.

Durant frowned. “But we can’t do that until we know whose money it really is.”

Overby squirmed in his chair, asking for the floor. “Want to know my gut hunch?”

Artie Wu leaned forward, elbows on knees, his expression suddenly interested and wide awake. “Very much,” he said.

“Okay,” Overby said. “We know we’re messing with serious money that involves governments or at least multinationals. I mean, nobody’s going to spend five million just to bring some old ridgerunner down from the hills unless they stand to get five hundred million back, right?”

“Five hundred million worth of something anyhow.”

“Well, I don’t much care whose five million it is so long as we can fix up the no-comeback.” Overby paused. “But my gut tells me what they want that five million to do.” He leaned back in his chair and waited for someone to prompt him, which Durant quickly did.

“Fuck up the Philippines, that’s what,” Overby said as a look of absolute certitude spread across his face.

There was a lengthy silence while Overby’s prediction was digested. Finally, Artie Wu softly said, “Well, I guess it’s not going to happen then, is it?”

Dismay and more than a trace of alarm erased Overby’s normal confidence. “You mean we don’t go for the money?”

“What he means,” Durant said, “is that if we make the money disappear, then it can’t be used to fuck up the country.”

Overby’s relief was apparent. “Yeah. Right.”

“I can’t believe this,” Georgia Blue said.

Overby looked at her. “Why the hell not?”

“Because bullshit in the moonlight still stinks. Do-gooders don’t steal five million dollars. Thieves do. Grifters like us, Otherguy. If those two want romance, fine. I’ll take cash.”

“What’s so wrong with doing a little good while we’re at it?” Overby asked.

Georgia Blue sighed. “Because there’s never any money in it.”

At 7:15 the following morning Booth Stallings came out of the Manila Hotel coffee shop, where he had been among its first customers, and strolled into the lobby. He dumped the three somewhat strident Manila newspapers that had been his breakfast reading into a wastebasket and turned to watch an ABC television news crew fret over the logistics of loading its equipment into a waiting van.

Stallings wondered what the crew’s story might be and what percentage of its viewers would know or care that the Philippines were not, after all, in the Middle East just to the left of Syria. That’s the Philistine Islands you’re thinking of, hon. Maybe ten percent, he decided, but immediately raised that to twenty and then, mostly out of unfounded optimism, increased the percentage to thirty.

Knowing where a country is doesn’t make you care what happens to it, Stallings thought, not even if you’d once been enrolled in the ultimate geography lesson of a world war. With a small private grin he recalled what the Marines had said about the Carolines: Who gives a fuck about Truk?

The ABC news team carried out its last big black box and Stallings crossed to the reception desk to see whether he had any messages. The clerk turned, looked and turned back with an envelope. It was a plain white envelope, neither cheap nor expensive.

It was addressed to Stallings in a handwriting that he recognized as Filipino, which he thought to be the prettiest in the world. He also knew his judgment was influenced by the striking similarity of much Filipino penmanship to that of Mary Helen Packer who had sat in front of him in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades, and whose firm but graceful hand had won her a prize every year.

He wondered whether the high quality of Filipino handwriting was a legacy from the Spanish friars or, less likely, from the 540 American schoolteachers who had shipped out to Manila in 1901 aboard the S.S. Thomas, a first echelon that had fanned out over the islands, bringing both English and the Palmer method to the provinces. He remembered Espiritu once mentioning that he had been taught by an elderly Thomasite. From Kansas, Stallings seemed to recall.

He crossed to one of the lobby chairs, sat down and examined the envelope. It was handsomely addressed to Mr. Booth Stallings, The Manila Hotel. Down at the lower left-hand corner were the words: By Hand.

Inside was a once folded sheet of good quality white paper. Black ink had been used to write two lines so straight they seemed almost ruled. The lines formed more of a command than an invitation: “Meet me at nine this morning under my name at the American Memorial Cemetery in Makati.” The letter was signed Hovey Profette. Stallings used a weak smile to block the chill the dead medic’s name was meant to cause.

As they walked back to his still waiting taxi, Stallings said, “She lied about being Espiritu’s granddaughter.”

“How d’you know?” Durant asked.

Stallings made no reply until he paid off the young driver and the taxi had driven away. He then turned to examine the four-door Mercedes that was parked just behind where the taxi had been.

“Yours?” he asked.

“The hotel’s,” Durant said.

“Air-conditioned?”

“Right.”

“Let’s have some,” Stallings said, heading for the car. He climbed into the rear, Durant and Georgia Blue into the front. Durant started the engine and switched on the air-conditioning.

“How old was she, Georgia?” Stallings asked. “Twenty-five? Twenty-six?”

“At least. You could even add on a year or two.”

“Old Al’s sixty-two now; maybe even sixty-three. And he wasn’t married when I knew him. So he and his kids, if he had any, would’ve had to hump it to produce a twenty-six- or twenty-seven-year-old granddaughter.”

Neither Durant nor Georgia Blue disagreed. There was a silence until Stallings cleared his throat and said, “No offense, but I’ve always been leery of nick-of-time stuff. So how’d you two manage it?”

“Nothing fancy,” Durant said. “Artie and I thought the five of us should meet. So I drove over to the Manila and called Otherguy from the lobby. When he didn’t answer, I called Georgia. She and I met in the lobby and she saw you getting into the taxi. We followed in the Mercedes and you know the rest.”

Durant watched in the rearview mirror as Stallings smiled coldly. “Checking me out?” Stallings asked.

“That’s right.”

“Don’t blame you.”

Durant put the car into gear and drove off. For nearly a minute Stallings stared to his right through the sloppily tinted side window, thinking that it was like looking through a quarter inch of blue Jell-O. “She bothers me,” he said, breaking the silence.

“Carmen,” Durant said.

“Not her so much as her apparatus, and she and old Al sure as hell have one. Remember the girl she mentioned in L.A.? Blondin?”

“The addict,” Georgia Blue said.

“A real space cadet,” Stallings said. “I met her at a place Otherguy was house-sitting. In Malibu. Carmen claims her people got to Blondin and then a few days later you guys ran into Carmen herself on the road down from Baguio. I’d sure like to hear about that, Mr. Durant, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Durant said. “It had to do with the Cousin.”

“Whose cousin?”

“Marcos’ third cousin. Ernesto Pineda. Somebody slit his throat and cut off his balls. Carmen and her people take the credit.”

“That’s an interesting beginning,” Stallings said. “How’s it turn out?”

Durant told of his and Wu’s involvement with Ernesto Pineda, leaving out nothing he thought pertinent. He then spent five minutes answering Stallings’ quick, probing questions. After Stallings ran out of questions, they rode in silence for a minute or two until Georgia Blue could no longer suppress the noise that lay somewhere between a giggle and a guffaw.

“My God, Quincy. You and Artie got stiffed.”

Durant opened his mouth to reply but changed his mind. Another silence followed. Stallings broke it when he leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Let’s suppose, just for the hell of it, that the Cousin’s reinsurance deal was legitimate — as legitimate as those things ever are once you factor in the graft. Okay, Georgia?”

She nodded without conviction.

“And let’s also suppose, Mr. Durant, that Carmen found out about your deal with the Marcos Cousin just about the time she heard I’d signed Overby on. Now was there anybody else who’d’ve known that Otherguy was looking for you and Mr. Wu?”

“Here in Manila?”

“Yes.”

“Boy Howdy.”

“Nice enough fella?”

“The opposite.”

“Think he might’ve talked too much or even sold Carmen what he knew?”

“You could almost count on it.”

“Then it’s possible,” Stallings said slowly, “that Carmen and old Al Espiritu might’ve preferred the devils they knew.”

“That’s Artie and me, I take it.”

“Sure. She must’ve known what the Cousin was up to and that you and Mr. Wu were in cahoots with him. Well, why not make sure you two jump at Otherguy’s proposition? The best way to do that is to dent your finances. So she and her lads kill the Cousin and you guys are out three hundred thousand and broke — right?”

“Right.”

“All cash?”

Durant sighed. “All.”

“Which means your money might’ve provided Carmen with a nice chunk of working capital and also more or less forced you to go to work for me. You know, Mr. Durant, the more I think about it, the more it sounds just like old Al.”

“Why’d she stop us on the way down from Baguio?” Durant said. “Just to mindfuck us?”

“Sure. It was typical push-pull intimidation. They love stuff like that.”

“You want a second opinion?” Georgia Blue asked.

“Certainly,” Stallings said.

“I saw her, Booth. Up close. And she was all set to shoot — not just hijack you down to Cebu. The signs were all there — stance, breathing, everything.”

“That your professional Secret Service opinion, Georgia?” Stallings asked.

“It’s what they trained and paid me to spot.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said. “A terrorist’s first job is to terrify. Well, she sure scared hell out of me. Another minute and I’d’ve been on my way down to Cebu alone and I don’t much care who knows it. But we also threw a pretty good scare into her. Who terrifies most, controls. Right now I’d call it a draw.”

“Carmen’s still out front,” Durant said. “Ahead on points anyway. About three hundred thousand points.”

The first thing Booth Stallings said after Durant introduced him to Artie Wu was, “How’d you get to be the pretender, Mr. Wu?”

“You want a beer or a drink?” Wu said.

“A beer’d be good.”

Durant went to the sitting room’s refrigerator and took out three beers. He passed the cans around without opening them. Wu popped his open, took a long draught, sighed with pleasure and said, “I’m the illegitimate son of the illegitimate daughter of the last Emperor of China.”

“The Boy Emperor?” Stallings said without surprise, popping his own beer can. “Old P’u Yi?”

“The same,” Artie Wu said, pleased that Stallings would know, and even more pleased that not much explanation would be necessary.

“Mao threw him in jail for a while, didn’t he? And then made him a tourist guide in Peking — or whatever they’re calling it now. Died back in the sixties, I think. Sixty-four, sixty-five — around in there.”

“Sixty-six,” Wu said.

Stallings raised his beer can in a toast of sorts. “Well, here’s to Grandpa.”

Wu smiled at the toast and said, “You may as well know the rest. My real father was an oversexed Methodist Chinese bishop who either sneaked or snuck into my mother’s bedroom. She’d been adopted by a Methodist missionary couple in China who brought her back to San Francisco. She was seventeen when the bishop had his way with her and she died having me. My adoptive grandparents were killed in a car wreck a few years later and I wound up in the John Wesley Memorial Orphanage in San Francisco.”

“Where he met me,” Durant said.

“And you two’ve been partners ever since, right?”

Durant nodded.

“Must be a comfort,” Stallings said.

Wu’s eyebrows moved up into a quizzical look. “Being partners?”

“Knowing where you spring from. Most people don’t even know who Grandpa’s pa was. I know I don’t. A few years back I thought maybe I should, but then I asked myself what the hell difference would it make and got over it. But I can still see how it could be a comfort.”

“You have children?” Durant asked.

“Two daughters but no grandchildren.”

Wu took out one of his large cigars and went through the ritual of lighting it, talking all the while. “I’ve always felt that a marketable skill provides far more emotional security than a well-diagrammed family tree. When the rent’s due and you’re broke, it’s not much help to know you’re the shirttail relative of some guy who signed the Declaration of Independence, or rode up Cemetery Hill with Pickett, or lent King John a pen.”

He looked up and blew one of his fat smoke rings at the ceiling. “On the other hand, when you reach down into your pocket and nothing jingles, and you have to get out and scratch something up, it’s nice to know you’ve got a skill to sell, whether you’re a cooper, a parson, a wheelwright, a miller or even a terrorism expert.”

Stallings winked at Wu. “I sure like the way you slid into that.”

Wu leaned forward, big elbows on broad knees, an interested look on his face. “So how’d you get to be a terrorism expert, Booth?”

Stallings drank some of his beer, thought for a moment and said, “I learned by doing because that’s what I did from about the time I turned nineteen until I was almost nineteen and a half.”

“Here?” Durant said. “I mean, here in the Philippines?”

“Negros and Cebu. Mostly Cebu.” Stallings paused. “You want the rest?”

“Of course,” Wu said.

Stallings finished his beer before continuing. “I was a just-commissioned second lieutenant. A replacement. One Hundred and Eighty-second Infantry. The Cebu invasion was set for March twenty-sixth.”

“Forty-five?” Durant said.

“Forty-five. There was a pretty fair guerrilla outfit on Cebu that division needed to make contact with. So they decided to send in an eight-man I and R patrol three weeks early — mostly fuckups and new guys like me. Besides me, there were four riflemen, a buck sergeant, a radioman, a T/5 medic and a guerrilla liaison.”

“Alejandro Espiritu,” Wu said.

“Right. Old Al. Well, they caught us on the beach. Japanese infantry. Four of us never even made it out of the rafts. The sergeant and three riflemen died first. The fourth rifleman bought it the second he made the beach. Then the radioman. That left Al, the medic and me. We ran like hell, lost everything in the surf and finally made it to where we were supposed to hook up with the guerrillas, but they were all dead — all nineteen of ’em. We salvaged an M-1 with no rear sight and about a hundred rounds the Japs’d missed.” He paused. “We called them Japs then.”

Wu nodded. “I still do when the TV conks out.”

“After that,” Stallings said, “well, we turned into terrorists, at least Al and I did.”

“What about the medic — Profette?” Durant asked. “The guy with his name up in gold letters.”

“He went apeshit. Hovey was a Quaker and a C.O. who’d misplaced his faith. We were up on a ridge in the Guadalupes, the three of us, when Hovey spotted two scouts from a Japanese company-strength patrol. They turned out to be Imperial Marines. Big fuckers. Well, Hovey wanted to take out the two scouts with that one rifle we had. The one with no rear sight. Al and I didn’t think that was such a hot idea. But then Hovey grabbed the rifle.”

There was a silence that threatened to go on and on until Durant broke it with a one-word question. “And?”

“And Al took Hovey out with a bolo.”

“Can’t say I blame him,” Durant said.

Wu nodded slowly several times before he asked the next question. “Then what?”

“Then Al and I hooked up with some other guerrillas, ate fish and rice when we could get it, dog and worse when we couldn’t, and turned into pretty fair terrorists.”

“When you got back to your own outfit,” Wu said, “did they ask about the medic?”

“They asked. I recommended Hovey for a DSC. He got it, too.”

“And before you got back...” Durant didn’t quite make it a question.

The smile that Stallings gave Durant was thin and cold and bleak. His February smile, Durant thought. “Who’d we terrorize is what you want to know, right? Who’d we kill?”

Durant nodded.

“The Japanese were our primary target. We killed a lot of them. Filipino collaborators were our secondary target. We killed a bunch of them, too.”

“How’d you know they were collaborators?” Wu said.

“We had a list.”

“Whose list?”

“Espiritu’s.”

“Good list?”

“Good as any.” Stallings paused. “Wartime lists, I discovered later, a lot later, often include the names of the enemies of those who draw up the lists. I imagine old Al sprinkled a few of his in.”

“You have anything... personal against him?” Wu said.

“Espiritu?”

Wu nodded.

“He’s a guy I soldiered with a long time ago. That’s all. I don’t like him or dislike him. But when it comes to trusting him I’m not quite so ambivalent. I don’t trust him at all.”

“Then neither will we,” Artie Wu said. He looked at Durant. “Let’s order up some lunch and get Georgia and Otherguy in here. We might as well start.”

“I thought we already had,” Durant said as he picked up the phone.

Because of impossible traffic, it was not until 36 minutes later at 3:39 P.M. that Durant drove the hotel Mercedes through the open steel gate of the high breeze-block wall that enclosed Emily Cariaga’s house in Forbes Park. The house was a little more than two blocks south and east of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) and it bothered Durant that there was no guard on the gate and that a beige Toyota sedan was blocking the narrow asphalt drive.

He parked just behind the Toyota and climbed slowly out of the Mercedes, staring at the house. It was one of the older ones in Forbes Park with wide eaves covering a verandah that wrapped itself around two sides and across the front. The windows were large and deeply recessed into thick stuccoed walls. The solid-looking old place seemed to promise it would be ten or even fifteen degrees cooler inside.

The next thing Durant noticed was the pair of running shoes that poked out — toes up, heels down — from beneath an elegant Traveler’s palm. The soles had been worn smooth. The shoes — and the feet inside them — were attached to a pair of jeans-clad legs. The upper legs disappeared into the thick clump of scarlet bougainvillaea that formed a backdrop for the Traveler’s palm.

A gravel path led to the running shoes but Durant avoided it, not wanting the gravel’s crunch to disturb the man in the bougainvillaea if he were asleep or — less likely — drunk. Walking on grass, Durant reached the bougainvillaea and parted it, trying without success to avoid the thorns.

The jeans-clad legs belonged to a stocky man in his mid-twenties. He had a wide ugly face, made even uglier by deep smallpox pits. He was obviously dead with an obviously broken neck. But his dark brown eyes remained open and still wore what may have been a look of mild surprise.

The man’s name was Placido, Durant remembered. He was one of the two guards who worked for Emily Cariaga. The other guard worked nights and his name was Mario. Durant also recalled that Placido was married and had three children, all boys. He couldn’t remember if Mario, the nightwatch, was married.

Durant straightened and turned toward the house. Its front door was ajar, not more than an inch or two. Durant glanced around the carefully tended grounds, looking for something with which to hit or cut or stab. He was hoping for a gardener’s machete, even a spade, or at least a rake. He found only a green plastic garden hose with a seven-inch brass nozzle.

Durant unscrewed the nozzle, trotted to the house, went quickly up the steps of the verandah, crossed to the door and kicked it open. The door didn’t bang against the wall as it should have. Instead, it hit something soft and yielding that made no noise.

The Filipino giant stepped out from behind the door. In his right hand was a tiny knife. As the knife flashed toward him Durant decided — almost dreamily — that it was actually a big knife, a shakeout with a seven- or eight-inch blade. The giant’s huge hand only made it look tiny. Still appraising the knife, Durant spun sideways, arching his body back like a matador anxious to avoid the horn. The knife sliced through his shirt.

Durant drove the brass nozzle into the giant’s left eye. The giant grunted and clapped his left hand to the eye. Durant pivoted and slammed the fist with the nozzle into the giant at least six inches below the massive silver belt buckle. The giant said something that sounded like whoof, took one step back and kicked Durant in the chest.

It was a hard kick powered by a telephone-pole leg. If Durant hadn’t spun right, bending over, offering only his left thigh, the kick would have caught him in the groin. But it missed the groin and the thigh and struck just below the sternum. Durant discovered he could no longer breathe and that it hurt too much to try. He sank to his knees and then curled up on the cool terrazzo floor.

As he lay on the floor, wondering about suffocation and waiting for the knife blade, Durant felt the giant’s hand go through his pockets. He heard the Mercedes key jingle on its ring. He heard the front door slam and wondered whether the kick had broken any ribs and whether the ribs had punctured his lungs. Durant tried for a deep breath but the pain wouldn’t permit it. He attempted a single cautious shallow breath. It burned like a poison gas, but some air flowed into his lungs and Durant discovered he wasn’t going to suffocate after all.

He heard the Mercedes’ engine start. Then a car door slammed. Another engine started, this time the Toyota’s, and there was the unique strained sound of a car being driven in reverse. After that, it was quiet.

Durant made himself sit up. He made himself breathe small shallow breaths. The pain in his chest was still excruciating but at least he could pull air into his lungs. He rose slowly, a few inches at a time. He tried to stand up straight, found that he couldn’t, and stood — bent over — breathing little sips of air. Finally, he straightened, ignoring the pain, and shuffled into the long living room, moving like a 96-year-old emphysemiac with bad feet.

A tan suitcase and a dark brown carry-on bag were on the floor next to the baby grand piano. The piano’s lid was closed. Someone had left a woman’s cordovan purse on top of it.

Durant tried to call Emily Cariaga’s name, but all that came out was a high-pitched croak. Durant sucked in his first deep breath. It seared his lungs, but again he refused to acknowledge the pain and used the breath to bellow her name. He waited, listening. There was no reply.

He left the living room and walked slowly down the long hall toward her bedroom. The door was closed. Durant reached for the doorknob, hesitated, opened the door and went in.

She lay on her back near the foot of the large spool bed, dressed for traveling in gray slacks and a dark blue blouse. Near her left hand was a heavy dark gray tweed jacket because she always said it turned cold once you reached Hawaii. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open, and she had been stabbed in the chest. Durant knelt beside her and noticed she had been stabbed three times and that there really wasn’t very much blood.

He was never quite sure how long he knelt beside Emily Cariaga’s body. It could have been one minute, or it could have been ten. But after she at last turned from Emily Cariaga into a corpse, Durant rose, walked around the bed to the telephone and called the police. After that, he called Artie Wu.

For the next hour, Lt. Cruz peppered Wu and Durant with questions about themselves, about the late Ernesto Pineda (whom even he had begun referring to as “poor Ernie”), and about Emily Cariaga.

“What connection was there between her and poor Ernie?” Cruz wanted to know and seemed dissatisfied when Durant replied none that he knew of. After that, Cruz began asking Wu and Durant about each other.

He inquired of Durant whether Wu was married and if so, what were the given names of Mrs. Wu and the children. Durant rattled them off. He then asked Wu if Durant had ever sought treatment for his asthmatic bronchitis. Wu nodded gravely, replying that Durant had sought out the best specialists in Los Angeles, Denver, Zurich and, in a few weeks, would be consulting a Harley Street specialist who looked promising.

“We have good doctors here, you know,” Cruz said, not bothering to mask his jingoist feelings.

“It was my doctor here who recommended the one in London,” Durant lied with what Artie Wu noted was his usual artistry.

“We have the best dentists in Asia,” Cruz said, apropos of almost nothing.

“In the world, for my money,” said Artie Wu.

Cruz seemed to know when he was being gulled so he resumed his questions. “You’re obviously a well-educated man, Mr. Wu,” he said, his tone clearly anticipating a lying response.

Artie Wu only shrugged. It was Durant who supplied the details. “Princeton. He even made Phi Beta Kappa.”

“And you, Mr. Durant. Are you also a Princeton graduate?”

“No. I went but failed to graduate.” Durant saw no need to explain how he had sat through all of Artie Wu’s classes not as a student, but as the ever-present bodyguard of the pretender to the Chinese Emperor’s throne.

Lt. Cruz abandoned all efforts to suspend his disbelief. “What you’ve been trying to sell me is that two intelligent grown men — well educated, well traveled, a couple of real been-arounds — let themselves get taken by a three-peso buy-and-sell hustler.” He gave his head two quick skeptical shakes. “Let’s hear it all. Even the dirty parts. You first.” He pointed his chin at Artie Wu.

Wu’s sigh seemed full of embarrassment. “I’m afraid poor Ernie was, as you say, Lieutenant, nothing but a confidence trickster.”

“Really,” Cruz said, making sure his sarcasm was heavy enough to be noticed. He then smiled a gleaming smile that had been fashioned in part by one of the best dentists in Asia. “How much did Ernie take you for?”

“Three hundred thousand.”

“Pesos?”

Wu shook his great head sadly. “Dollars.”

“Mother of God,” Cruz whispered. “If you did kill him, they might rule it justifiable homicide.”

“But you’ve already been in touch with the Baguio cops, haven’t you?” Durant said.

Cruz hesitated, then nodded.

“So you know we didn’t.”

“Who do you think did?”

“A guess?” Wu said.

Cruz moved his tailored shoulders in a “why not?” shrug.

“An NPA sparrow team,” Wu said.

The answer made Cruz frown. But then the frown went away and he nodded reluctantly. “Makes sense,” he said. “A little.”

There was a long silence while Lt. Cruz examined Wu, then Durant and then Wu again. “You two,” he said softly, “may be the best liars I’ve come across in years.”

Wu smiled. “I take it that means we can go.”

“But not far.”

“Cebu okay?” Durant asked.

Lt. Cruz bristled. “Cebu! What’s in Cebu?”

“Business,” Durant said. “We still have to eat.”

Lt. Cruz stared at Artie Wu. “Ever been in any of our jails, Mr. Wu?”

“Never.”

“They’re an absolute scandal.”

Wu nodded. “How does one avoid them?”

“One keeps in touch.”

“What if one has nothing to report.”

“Our jails, although horribly overcrowded, can always hold two more.

“We’ll keep in touch,” Wu said.

It was 10:33 that night when Georgia Blue arrived by taxi at the Manila Hotel. She slowly entered the vast lobby, sweeping it with practiced eyes as she crossed to the elevators, her right hand down inside the leather bag that hung from her shoulder.

She rode an elevator alone up to the fourth floor. From there she took the stairs to the fifth floor, slipped past the dozing floor porter and hurried down the corridor to suite 542 where she knocked softly. Booth Stallings opened the door a few seconds later.

“I think I’m in a little trouble,” she said in a voice not much louder than a whisper.

Stallings poked his head out and looked up and down the corridor. “Come in,” he said, opening the door wide enough for her to enter. He then closed the door, shot its dead bolt and fastened the chain. Turning, he found Georgia Blue in the center of the suite’s sitting room, her posture awkward, her expression uncertain. Stallings thought she almost looked as if she were missing something, maybe a key part of her body — a foot, or even an arm — until he realized it was her tremendous poise that had vanished. She’s lost it somewhere, he decided. Or somebody took it away from her.

“Sit down,” he said.

For a moment she seemed not to have understood him. Then she smiled, as if it were the kindest invitation ever offered. The smile vanished as she turned to make her choice of where to sit. It was obviously a difficult choice and possibly the most important of her life. Finally, she decided on a green armchair, which she sank into, keeping her right hand deep in the leather shoulder bag.

“Drink?” Stallings said as he moved to the room refrigerator. She shook her head. Stallings took out a can of beer, carried it back to the couch, sat down, popped open the can and said, “What kind of trouble?”

“I need a place to stay tonight,” Georgia Blue said.

“Here, you mean?”

She nodded.

“Wu and Durant are looking for you.”

“Oh?”

“Otherguy, too.”

“Fuck Otherguy.”

Stallings drank some of his beer. “Tell me about it,” he said and leaned back, resting the beer can on the left arm of the couch. He draped his own right arm over the couch’s back, hoping it was the most nonthreatening posture he could assume. It then occurred to him that a smile might help keep her right hand down inside the shoulder bag. So he smiled.

“Why’re they looking for me?” she said.

“They didn’t say and I didn’t think they much wanted me to ask.”

“May I stay here tonight?” she said.

“What about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s next year. The future. Tonight’s right now and that’s all I can handle.” She paused and added, almost as an afterthought, “We can do some sex if you’d like.”

“Sounds interesting,” Stallings said and gave her another smile.

“No it doesn’t,” she said, bringing her right hand out of the bag. In it was the Walther semiautomatic. “Is this what’s bothering you?”

He shrugged. “It’s not exactly a turn-on.”

She put the pistol back into the shoulder bag and then placed the bag on the floor beside her chair. “Better?”

“Much.”

Another silence began to build. Stallings let it. The silence collapsed before reaching 30 seconds when Georgia Blue said, “Shit.”

“Go on,” Stallings said.

“It happened between the time we got back from the war memorial and had lunch at the Peninsula. That’s when he called.”

Another silence threatened but Stallings warded it off with: “He being?”

“Harry Crites.”

“Ah.”

“From Washington.”

“I see,” Stallings said. “Must’ve been about midnight yesterday back there, if it was around noon today here. Give or take an hour.”

“We didn’t talk about the time. Or the weather.”

Stallings gave her what he hoped was an encouraging nod. When that failed to produce a response, he said, “What did you talk about?”

“We have a code,” she said. “A kind of silly verbal code. He used it to tell me to call a number exactly ten minutes after he hung up. I was to call for instructions.”

“Local number?”

“A pay phone. It’s always a pay phone.”

“Did you call it?”

“I’m supposed to be working for him, right?”

“Right.”

“So I called it.”

She waited, as if expecting Stallings to prod her along with yet another question. He obliged with, “Who answered?”

“A man.”

“Recognize his voice?”

“He had an accent.”

“Filipino?”

“I’m not sure. He may have been faking it. Probably not. But I don’t know who he was.”

“He gave you the instructions though?”

“Yes. He told me to—”

“The guy on the pay phone?”

She nodded. “He told me to call Boy Howdy, identify myself, and say I wanted to rent that giant bouncer of his to throw a fright into somebody called Emily Cariaga. I was to offer Boy Howdy two thousand U.S. Then the pay phone man gave me her address in Forbes Park and told me what he wanted the bouncer to warn her about. Then—” She suddenly stopped talking and for a moment Stallings thought she might have been struck dumb.

“Go on,” he said.

“She was flying out late this afternoon. She was going to Spain.” Again there was that sudden silence with its air of absolute finality. Stallings felt his irritation growing and decided to vent some of it.

“Goddamnit, Georgia!”

She blinked twice, as if mildly surprised by his tone. “This bouncer,” she said. “This monster man who works for Boy Howdy was to warn her she’d better not tell anyone about what she’d learned. No one. Ever. The monster man was to be — extremely firm, the pay phone man said.”

“I don’t guess he told you what she wasn’t supposed to talk about?”

“No.”

“So you called Howdy then?”

She nodded. “He wanted his money first. I said he could pick it up at the desk downstairs. I left it there for him. In an envelope. And then I went to the Peninsula and we all had lunch.”

“So we did,” Stallings said, finished his beer, crushed the can, rose and headed for the small refrigerator. As he passed Georgia Blue’s chair he scooped up her shoulder bag. She turned to look up at him.

“I knew you were going to do that,” she said.

Instead of replying, Stallings looked inside the bag.

“I could’ve stopped you,” she said.

Stallings took the Walther out, examined it briefly, and stuck it down into his right hip pocket. He dropped the bag back to the floor. “When’d you find out she’d been killed?” he said.

“Late this afternoon. It was on Radio Veritas, I think. I went downstairs to a pay phone and called the police to make sure it was the same Emily Cariaga.”

“Then what’d you do?”

“I went out. I went to the Shoe Mart and Rustan’s in Makati near the Peninsula. But I didn’t buy anything. Then I went to a couple of bookstores. After that, to the Inter-Continental. They have a cafe there with Jeepneys. I mean with booths that look like Jeepneys. I had a drink. Maybe two. I may have eaten something. I know I’m not hungry.”

“And then straight back here?” Stallings said.

She nodded.

“You don’t know who she was, do you?”

“No.”

“Durant got a phone call after you left this afternoon,” Stallings said. “It was from Emily Cariaga. She and Durant were — well, pretty good friends, I guess. It was Durant who found her.”

Georgia Blue grew still. Nothing moved. Stallings didn’t think she even breathed. There was nothing else for him to say so he waited for her reaction. She finally exhaled the breath she had been holding, drew in another one and used it to say, “I see.” There was another long silence until she said, “You’d better call Durant.”

“What for?”

“Tell him I’m here.”

“What’s he going to do tonight that he can’t do tomorrow?”

She looked at him with an expression that was both puzzled and confused. And then she asked a question to which she obviously knew the answer although it still seemed to surprise her. “You’re... you’re damned decent, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes,” Booth Stallings said. “Once in a while.”

Georgia Blue came out of the suite’s bedroom, wearing one of those long white terry-cloth robes that the better hotels provide their guests, along with a warning that he who steals it will pay. She came out barefoot, her right hand deep in the robe’s pocket where it clutched the Walther PPK that Booth Stallings had returned earlier without comment.

Stallings noticed she had recovered her lost poise. It now seemed almost unshakable as she stopped to look at each of the four men. She nodded at Artie Wu, who sat on the couch in his favorite left-hand corner, a cup of coffee in one hand, a morning cigar in the other. Wu nodded back politely. Georgia Blue’s gaze skipped over Overby, seated as usual in a straight-back chair, and lingered only briefly on Stallings, who looked back at her over the rim of his coffee cup. Her gaze came to rest on Durant, who stood by the room service cart with its too many cups and saucers and its twin chrome pots of coffee.

Durant turned to the cart and poured a cup of coffee. “Black, right, Georgia?” he said. “No sugar.”

“Please,” she said.

Durant turned with cup and saucer, crossed to where she stood in the center of the sitting room, and handed her the coffee. She accepted it with her left hand, keeping her right one wrapped around the Walther in the robe’s pocket. She turned then, looking for a place to sit, and again decided on the green armchair with its side table. Placing the cup and saucer on the table first, she sat down, crossing her legs beneath the long robe, keeping her right hand in its pocket.

No one said anything until she picked up the cup with her left hand and sipped the coffee. Then Artie Wu spoke. “Booth told us what you told him last night, Georgia. He made it all very factual, very objective. Anything you’d like to add or clarify?”

“Before I’m sentenced, you mean?”

“I don’t think you really meant to say that.”

She thought about it, shrugged and looked at Durant who still stood, leaning now against a wall and smoking his first cigarette of the morning. “I didn’t know who she was, Quincy,” Georgia Blue said. “I didn’t know she would be killed. I’m sorry.”

Durant stared at her without replying. Finally he said, “Take your hand out of your pocket, Georgia. You’re not going to need it.”

Georgia Blue’s slight sag of relief was almost invisible. She picked up the cup with her left hand, sipped more coffee, put the cup back down and looked at Artie Wu, her right hand still in the robe’s pocket.

“Now what, Artie?” she said.

Artie Wu sent one of his fat smoke rings toward the ceiling. “The plan stays the same,” he said, “except we speed it up. Emily Cariaga was apparently killed to shut her up. But we don’t know what she’d found out or how important it was, and it seems pointless to speculate. We get in and out of this thing fast and hope the Manila cops’ll lose all interest in Durant and me.”

“I think the Cariaga lady found out who’s putting up the five million,” said Otherguy Overby to whom speculation was meat and drink.

“Very pat, Otherguy,” Durant said.

Overby gave him a cold look. “So I like things neat. But just because I like ’em that way doesn’t mean that when nice and neat comes along I’ve got to toss it out just because I like it so much. That’s waste.”

“He has a point,” Booth Stallings said, turning to Wu. “Can’t you guys check it out? See the same people she saw. Find out what they talked about?”

“Quincy and I’ll try, of course,” Wu said. “But I don’t think we’ll get anywhere. Emily moved at social heights where the air’s thin and the climb up’s difficult — if not impossible — for a couple of grifters with no credentials other than their cheerful smiles and witty small talk.”

“That’s what I thought you two did best,” Stallings said. “Separating the undeserving rich from their money. If you can do that, why the hell can’t you get them to babble?”

“To part them from their money,” Durant said in a too patient tone, “all we have to do is tickle their greed. But we’re not going for their money this time. We’re going to ask them to confide in us about something that got someone they know killed. And we don’t have that kind of leverage.”

“But we are going to try, Booth,” Artie Wu said.

“You’d better try damned hard,” said Stallings.

Wu nodded his agreement and turned to Georgia Blue. “I said we’re going to speed things up, Georgia. That means Otherguy flies down to Cebu today on the noon plane and you follow on the three o’clock flight. Booth’ll fly down tomorrow, with Quincy and me following the next day, which is—” He looked at the calendar on his watch. “Wednesday, April the first.”

“April Fools’ Day,” said Overby, ever literal.

No one spoke for several seconds. Instead, they watched Artie Wu blow three more smoke rings into the air. As the last one drifted to the ceiling, Wu said, “Let’s have some more coffee and then I’m going to deliver a small homily that I trust everybody’ll take to heart.”

Overby rose, went to the room service table and picked up one of the chrome pots. He moved about the room, filling the cups. Everyone sipped politely at coffee that no one really seemed to want. Booth Stallings kept his eyes on Artie Wu, not quite marveling at the big man’s ability to dominate the room — any room, for that matter.

It was partly Wu’s great size, Stallings decided, and partly his brilliance that enabled him to lead and command, almost without seeming to. But his real weapon was that effortless easy charm that made virtually everyone like him and, far more useful, seek his approval. Even you aren’t immune, Stallings warned himself.

And then there’s that fucking Durant, he thought, unconsciously adopting the by now familiar designation. Durant, who’s just as smart, or nearly so, and who carefully cultivates that ticking-bomb image, which he damn well might be. The charming, lovable Mr. Wu and his terrible paladin. Some combination.

It occurred then to Booth Stallings — for the first time — that they, the five of them, might really steal the five million after all. The notion was so bizarre that it made him smile and almost caused him to chuckle. But he stifled the chuckle, drained his coffee cup and turned his attention to what Artie Wu had to say.

“With the exception of Booth here,” Wu began, “we’ve all known each other forever, which may be too long. We know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, quirks and hang-ups. None of us is perfect, God knows, but each of us is competent. Extremely so. Well, we’re going for the lallapalooza — for five million dollars and, as Otherguy says, that’s major money. With an even five-way split it should be enough for everybody and I’m convinced we can bring it off. But each of us is human and therefore susceptible to dangling temptation. So if it’s ever dangled in front of you, and you’ve decided you can’t resist, just remember this: I’ll come after you. And right behind me will come that fucking Durant. One of us will find you. Maybe both of us. And you’ll never ever spend the money.”

Artie Wu smiled, puffed on his cigar and leaned back in the couch.

Georgia Blue was the first to respond. “Gosh, Artie, that’s the most inspirational thing I ever heard.” She took her right hand out of the robe’s pocket and rose, gathered up the clothing she had left in the sitting room the night before, and disappeared into the bedroom.

After watching her leave, Durant turned to Wu. “I couldn’t have said it better,” he said. “But I could’ve made it shorter.” He crossed to the door, opened it and looked back at Wu. “I’m going down to the lobby and see if there’s anyone around who’ll talk to us about Emily”

“I’ll be down later,” Wu said.

After Durant was gone, Overby rose and looked around the room, nodding a goodbye first to Stallings, then to Artie Wu. “I’ve got to catch that plane,” Overby said.

“See you in Cebu, Otherguy,” Wu said.

Overby started for the door, got halfway there and turned back to Wu. “Who was all that shit really aimed at, Artie? Me?”

“You and everybody else, Otherguy.”

Overby’s answering nod only served to affirm his disbelief. “I bet,” he said, turned and left the room.

Booth Stallings rose, went over to the window and looked out at Manila Bay. “You have something on your mind you want to tell me, Artie?”

“I don’t think so.”

Stallings turned. “No likely suspects, defectors or agents provocateurs?”

“They’re all likely,” Wu said.

“Me too?”

“You too.”

“What about you and Durant?”

“Five million’s a lot of money, Booth. Keep an eye on us.”

“Everybody watches everybody else, right?”

“It’s the only safe way, if we’re really going to pull it off.”

“Think we are?”

Artie Wu didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “I think so. I really do.”

“So do I,” Booth Stallings said. “Well, I’m off.”

“Where to?”

“Corregidor,” Stallings said. “Thought I’d go see if I can ride out on a hydrofoil and take a look.” He patted his pockets to make sure he had his sunglasses, keys and wallet. “Might be the last chance I’ll ever have.”

Wu smiled. “Not planning to pass this way again?”

“Not if I can help it,” Stallings said as he opened the door and left.

Durant noticed the bodyguards first: an almost matched pair of wide thick Filipinos in their late thirties with quick eyes, empty hands and twin lumps on their right hips beneath their sport shirts’ squared-off tails.

One of their charges was racing on short fat legs toward the Manila Hotel’s newsstand-drugstore. He was followed by a girl of nine who was trying not to hurry so she would appear prim, grown-up and in sharp contrast to her six-year-old brat of a brother, who her parents still swore was not adopted.

Walking between the bodyguards was the mother, a not quite plump pretty woman in her early thirties, who wore a black linen dress with white piping that Durant suspected had come from Neiman-Marcus. He knew that Neiman-Marcus was the only thing the woman had ever liked about Dallas.

Rising from his chair, Durant made a slow oblique approach across the lobby so that the woman and her two bodyguards would see him simultaneously. But the quicker of the bodyguards noticed him first and obviously didn’t like what he saw.

The bodyguard snapped something at his partner who shooed the boy and girl into the newsstand-drugstore. The other bodyguard planted himself squarely in front of the woman, his right hand straying back to the concealed lump on his hip. Durant came to a full stop. The woman in the black dress with white piping touched the bodyguard on the arm and said something that made him relax.

The woman who now smiled at Durant from behind and a little to the left of the bodyguard was Restituta Ortiz, mercifully called Tootie by almost everyone. She was married to Cristobal Ortiz who had taken his modest inheritance and invested it at first in banking and shipping, with fair results, and then in politics, which had made him rich.

The dead Emily Cariaga and Tootie Ortiz had grown up together in Manila and later spent a year at Miss Hockaday’s in Dallas, hating every minute of it. Back in Manila they were married within a month of each other. When Durant and Emily Cariaga’s affair had first begun — and the cuckolded Patrocinio Cariaga was still alive — it was Tootie Ortiz who had served the lovers as go-between, even though she was hopelessly inept at keeping the assignation times and places straight. But she wholeheartedly had approved of the affair because, as Emily Cariaga once said, Tootie likes anything romantic, daring and dirty — as long as it’s once-removed.

When Durant reached her, the first thing Tootie Ortiz did was to take his right hand in both of hers and whisper, “It was beautiful, Quincy. It was the most beautiful requiem mass I’ve ever seen.”

“I’d’ve liked to have been there, Tootie, but—” He shrugged, making the shrug say that the mass was for the dead Emily’s family and friends and not for her foreign paramour.

Tootie nodded. “I understand — and so does Emily.”

“We need to talk, Tootie.”

“About—?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

Durant nodded. She looked at her watch. “Well,” she said, her voice full of doubt, “I suppose we could, except—” As was frequently the case, Tootie Ortiz didn’t finish her sentence. The almost chronic incompletions were one of her less endearing habits. Durant waited patiently for the question he was sure she would ask.

“Did you really find—?”

“I found her,” Durant said.

“Was it—?” The expression on her face was a synonym for terrible.

“It was worse than that, Tootie.”

She turned to the bodyguard and said something in a low voice. The bodyguard frowned his disapproval. She snapped at him. The bodyguard gave Durant a glare that was almost a warning, turned and entered the newsstand-drugstore where his partner was reading a comic book to the little boy. The boy’s sister was trying to look as if she had no idea who either of them was.

“They’ll take the kids to the coffee shop for some, you know—”

“Ice cream,” Durant said.

Tootie nodded. “We’ll have something nice in the Cowrie Room.”

“I don’t think it’s open yet,” Durant said.

Tootie smiled one of her more patronizing smiles. “They’ll open it for—”

“Us,” Durant supplied.

“Me,” she corrected him.

At 10:47 that morning Booth Stallings was almost halfway to the island of Corregidor when one of the hydrofoil’s two engines failed and the pilot immediately switched off the other one. The Filipino crew, Booth Stallings and nearly three dozen other passengers, including 24 young Japanese naval aviators in immaculate white uniforms, began drifting with the tide in Manila Bay.

One of the aviators and Stallings had been carrying on a kind of conversation, almost shouting to make themselves heard above the engines’ scream. The young aviator’s English was rudimentary but he seemed determined to make his point, which was that the United States was most fortunate to be led in these times of grave international peril by the greatest President in its history. When Stallings replied that the President certainly had an unusual grasp of history, the young aviator had nodded his solemn agreement.

They drifted only a few minutes before a twin hydrofoil came alongside and the two Filipino crews held a quick conference. Since the Japanese Navy was a steady repeat customer, it was decided that the aviators would be transferred to the other hydrofoil and ferried on to Corregidor. The remaining dozen or so passengers would remain aboard the disabled craft, which would limp back to port (Do hydrofoils limp? Stallings wondered) where all fares would be cheerfully refunded.

The announcement was met with resignation by all of the seasoned tourists except a gray-haired American who immediately did a rain dance around the bemused Filipino crew, accusing it of incompetence, favoritism and, most of all, ingratitude. The Filipino crew members, ever polite, nodded in agreement and sniggered behind their hands.

When the hydrofoil docked at Manila, the neatly bundled cash refunds were ready. The irate American insisted on counting his twice while Stallings waited in line behind him. Instead of counting his own refund, Stallings simply folded it once and stuck it in a pants pocket.

“Probably clipped you for a hundred pesos,” the gray-haired American said.

“Think so?”

“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” the American said. “We turn Corregidor into a goddamn shrine and just one hell of a big tourist draw and who do they give priority to? The fucking Japs, that’s who — the same fuckers who flattened it during the war.”

“Grandsons of the fuckers probably,” Stallings said.

“Same thing. Where you headed?”

“Manila Hotel.”

“Me too. Wanta share a cab?”

Stallings agreed and they were nearly halfway to the street before he stopped and turned to examine the American carefully. “What if I’d said no?”

The American gave him a small tight grin. “Then I’d just have to look you up later, Mr. Stallings.”

With Otherguy Overby buckled into one of its rear port-side window seats, the Boeing 707 took only an hour to fly the 365 miles due south from Manila to the long skinny island that centuries before had been called Sugbo, then Zugbu and, finally, Cebu.

Bristling with a spine of green mountains, the island was 300 kilometers long and 40 kilometers across at its widest point. About halfway between its northern and southern tips, facing east into the Bohol Straits, was the port of Cebu City, population 600,000 or thereabouts, and of all the cities in Asia, Otherguy Overby’s absolute favorite.

As the Philippine Airlines 707 began its descent to Mactan Airport, Overby thought about why Cebu City still ranked so high in his pantheon of metropolises. For one thing it’s old enough, he told himself, and you like real old towns. Cebu City had been founded in 1565 — an easy date for Overby to remember because it was exactly 400 years later that he had walked down the gangplank of a Sweet Lines coaster and onto Pier Three with $29 and change in his pocket.

A year after that, he had flown up to Manila and then on to Bangkok with close to $3,000 in a brand-new money belt. And that’s why you like Cebu best of all, he decided. Because when you were a kid here you got fat instead of winding up dead broke on the beach.

The Spanish had founded Cebu City 44 years after Chief Lapu-Lapu’s spear ended the life of the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan on Mactan Island, the same island where Overby’s plane was landing. They had finally put up a statue to Lapu-Lapu, and named a tasty fish after him, but what the Cebuanos revered far more than the dead chief were the fragments of Magellan’s Cross, the first Christian cross ever seen in the Philippines.

The fragments were said to be sealed inside another cross made out of tindalo wood that was on display in a kiosk on upper Magallanes Street. Overby remembered that the shrine, if that’s what it was, had drawn pilgrims, beggars and pickpockets in almost equal numbers. He assumed it still did.

Once inside the airport terminal, Overby ignored the blandishments of a dozen guitar salesmen and found a driver who swore his taxi’s air-conditioning still worked. Partly to get back into practice, Overby haggled with the driver over a flat rate to the Magellan Hotel. The bargain struck, they left the airport, drove up and over the Mandaue-Mactan bridge, past the Timex plant, along the south edge of the Club Filipino golf links and into the short drive of the 23-year-old Magellan Hotel that long ago had awarded itself four stars for ambience and five for service.

Twenty-one years had passed since Overby had first checked into the Magellan Hotel. That had been right after he’d run his $29 stake up to $200 in a touch-and-go deal for ten cases of PX Camels, smuggled down from Subic by the second mate on a Panama-registered freighter. As soon as the $200 was safely buttoned into his hip pocket, Overby had checked out of the YMCA and into the Magellan.

The five-story hotel was built in the shape of a Y. It boasted two hundred rooms and more bellhops than it really needed. Three of them now saw Overby and his bag out of the taxi and into the hotel. As he entered and glanced around, Overby noticed that the lobby still reeked of maximum tolerance. It was the same atmosphere he’d found the world over in commercial hotels that made a point of not being overly curious about their guests or their guests’ friends. He remembered that at one time such hotels could always be found down by the train station. Now they were all out near the airport.

Conservative by instinct, Overby was also pleased to see that almost nothing had changed in the Magellan’s lobby. There was still an honest-to-God cigar stand next to the elevators, right where it should be. Across the lobby from the elevators were the reception desk and, next to it, the barred cashier’s window. To sit on, there were the same low comfortable chairs and couches, now occupied, he saw, by packaged Japanese tourists in their twenties and thirties who seemed to be wondering where the action was.

At the reception desk, Overby asked about his reservation. The young room clerk sent his eyebrows up and down in the Cebu salute and murmured that the manager would very much like a word with Mr. Overby. The clerk went away and returned with Antonio Imperial.

Overby didn’t try to hide his shock. “Jesus, Tony, you’re the manager?”

Imperial, a short wide man with a wide brilliant smile, spread both hands in a gesture that encompassed the entire hotel. “Imperial of the Magellan — at your service,” he said and reached across the counter to grab Overby’s right hand and pump it vigorously. “How long’s it been, Otherguy?” Imperial said, still pumping.

“Eight years,” Overby said. “Hell, maybe nine. But back then you were still working the front nights.”

“Remember when you checked in here the first time twenty-one years ago and I was the kid who carried your bag up?” Imperial gave his head a “time flies” shake and turned to the hovering young clerk. “Mr. Overby is to have the best of care, Zotico. The very best.”

“Yes, sir,” the clerk said.

“I’ve got some other people coming in, Tony,” Overby said.

Imperial recited their names from memory. “Blue and Stallings later today; Wu and Durant tomorrow. Correct?”

Overby grinned. “No wonder they made you manager.”

“Maybe we could have a drink later, Otherguy — catch up on things.”

“I’d like that,” Overby said.

When Antonio Imperial, general manager of the Magellan Hotel, turned, banged the bell and barked, “Front!” at the cluster of bellhops, Otherguy Overby felt that perhaps, at long last, he really had come home.

It was the Magellan Hotel’s general manager, Antonio Imperial himself, who registered Booth Stallings at 5:41 P.M. on April Fools’ Day, 1986. Noting that Stallings was not burdened with luggage of any kind, Imperial smiled and said, “Airline lose your bag, Mr. Stallings? They’re very good at that.”

“A mix-up in Manila,” Stallings said, as he filled out the registration form. “Some friends are bringing it down.”

“Mr. Wu and Mr. Durant?” When he saw Stallings look up with the beginning of a frown, Imperial hurried on. “Otherguy — I mean, Mr. Overby — checked on all your reservations and, since Miss Blue’s already here, I assumed Wu and Durant would be bringing your luggage down tomorrow.”

The frown was canceled and Stallings smiled slightly. “Known Otherguy long?”

“More than twenty years.”

“He changed much?”

“An interesting question. I’d have to say no, not really. He’s — well, timeless, I suppose.” Imperial turned, took Stallings’ room key from its slot, turned back, reached under the counter, and came up with a small sealed clear plastic bag that contained a throwaway razor, a toothbrush, miniature tubes of shaving cream and toothpaste, and a small bottle of shampoo.

“Our compliments,” Imperial said, placing the key and the plastic bag on the counter.

“Thanks very much,” Stallings said. “What room’s Miss Blue in?”

“She’s just next door to you, four twenty-six.” Imperial snapped his fingers, as if remembering something. He turned again, picked up a small stack of mail, thumbed through it, selected a letter and handed it to Stallings. “This arrived just before you did,” he said.

Stallings examined the envelope which was square, white and cheap. His name was printed in ink. Down in the lower left-hand corner, someone had written: “Hold for arrival.” Stallings shoved the letter down into a hip pocket, gathered up his room key and plastic bag, and started for the elevator.

“Like a bellman to show you up, Mr. Stallings?” Imperial asked.

Stallings turned back. “No, but you might send up a couple of cold beers.”

After a warm handshake and a somewhat stiff embrace at the top of the bamboo stairs, Stallings followed Carmen and Alejandro Espiritu into the nipa hut, which was really more house than hut.

They came into a combination kitchen-living-and-dining-room. Food was being cooked over a charcoal brazier by a plump handsome woman in her fifties who wore bright red slacks. An old plank table had been set for two with glasses, plates, forks and spoons, but no knives, which many Filipinos seldom use, preferring to cut whatever needs to be cut with the edge of a spoon.

The living room area was furnished with four bentwood chairs and a matching couch. There were no pictures on the wall or rugs on the polished split bamboo floor. But music came from a small battery-powered Sony shortwave set that was softly playing something by the Rolling Stones. The woman in the red slacks left her cooking, went to the radio and turned up its volume slightly, placing her left ear close to the speaker. No one introduced the woman to Stallings.

Espiritu waved his guest to the bentwood couch and chose one of the matching chairs for himself. Carmen Espiritu stood nearby, leaning against a wall, her right hand down inside her woven fiber shoulder bag. It occurred to Stallings that only recently he had seen someone else stand just like that, leaning against a wall, all coiled up and ready to spring. Durant, of course.

“Care for a beer before we eat, Booth?” Espiritu asked.

Stallings said he would and the woman in the red slacks took a bottle of San Miguel from a plastic sack, opened it, crossed the room to Stallings, pausing at the table to pick up one of the two glasses. She handed the bottle and glass to Stallings without a word. He said thank you, but she only nodded and returned to the Sony radio where she glued her left ear back to the speaker.

Stallings carefully poured the warm beer into his glass, indicated the woman with a nod and asked, “Who’s she?”

“My little sister,” Espiritu said with a smile. “Although not quite as little as she once was.”

The plump woman, ear still to the Sony’s speaker, gave the right cheek of her buttocks a defiant smack and went on listening to Mick Jagger.

“And her?” Stallings asked, indicating Carmen Espiritu with another nod.

“Who did she say she was?”

“Your granddaughter.”

Espiritu giggled and smiled broadly. Stallings noticed that the smaller man’s teeth looked absolutely perfect. If he’s laid off the sugarcane all these years, Stallings thought, he probably hasn’t got a filling in his head.

“Carmen lies as a matter of course,” Espiritu said. “She’s my bride of six months.”

“The present Mrs. Espiritu,” Stallings said.

“The only Mrs. Espiritu.”

“Well, she certainly keeps busy,” Stallings said and drank some of his beer.

Espiritu smiled at his wife. “She’s also very ambitious, aren’t you, Carmen?”

“I do my part.”

Espiritu turned to Stallings. “Who used to say that, ‘We Do Our Part’?”

“The Blue Eagle,” Stallings said. “Roosevelt’s NRA.”

“Price fixing was its purpose, wasn’t it?” Before Stallings could reply or comment, Espiritu went on. “You’re certainly looking well, Booth. Stayed skinny and even grew a little more, didn’t you?”

“Half an inch.”

“I didn’t,” Espiritu said with another giggle. “As you must’ve noticed.”

What Stallings had noticed most was the slight tremor in Espiritu’s left hand. When the tremor threatened to turn into a shake, Espiritu clutched the left hand with his right. And if the teeth were perfect, or nearly so at 62, Stallings found Espiritu’s complexion too sallow and the black eyes too dull.

But the rest of him seems okay, Stallings decided, although it’s hard to tell with that white shirt buttoned up to the neck and those sleeves down over his thumbs. He also wondered why Espiritu kept the balled-up handkerchief in his left hand. But when the hand trembled its way up to the left corner of the mouth and mopped away the trace of saliva, Stallings thought he had his answer.

After another swallow of warm beer, Stallings smiled almost gently at Espiritu and asked, “When’d you have it, Al — the stroke?”

“Still very observant, aren’t you?”

“When?”

“Months ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to be. I’m quite recovered and the prognosis is good.” He smiled, dismissing the subject. “Shall we eat?”

Dinner was broiled lapu-lapu, the inevitable rice and a large bowl of fruit. Stallings ate everything set before him; Espiritu only a small portion of rice and a banana. Neither of the women joined the men at table. The plump sister continued to listen to the radio and Carmen Espiritu continued to stand throughout the meal, her right hand down inside the fiber shoulder bag.

“I suppose you were surprised to see old Major Crouch,” Espiritu said as he peeled his banana. “Colonel Crouch, actually, retired.”

“Very surprised.”

“He’s grown garrulous, as I suppose we all do. I sometimes think the old tend to talk mostly about the past because there’s so much of it. And so little future. My wife finds the past boring, don’t you, Carmen?”

“I find it largely irrelevant,” she said.

“What was it Santayana said?” Espiritu asked. “‘Those who—’”

Carmen Espiritu interrupted the familiar quotation. “Santayana was an ass.”

Espiritu smiled at Stallings. “A woman of strong opinions, especially about history. Anything that happened before she was born is irrelevant. As for her politics...” He shrugged, still smiling at Stallings. “What do you do for politics these days, Booth?”

“I do without.”

“Really? After all those years of studying what you insist on calling terrorism?”

“Terrorism’s just a shorthand term.”

“Yes, but for what?”

“It’s like pornography, Al. Everybody knows it when they see it, but they can’t agree on a definition.”

“Like to hear mine?”

“Sure.”

“Politics by extreme intimidation.”

Stallings grunted. “Needs a little work.”

“I thought it rather good. Maybe we can discuss it further in the morning.”

“In the morning?” Stallings said. “Where?”

“Here, of course. Right after we discuss the five million. We are going to talk about that, aren’t we? Or we could talk about the money now, and my definition over breakfast.”

Stallings leaned back in his chair with a bleak smile. “I’m your hostage, huh?” He looked at Carmen Espiritu. “Or hers.”

“Yes,” Espiritu said. “I believe you are.”

Carmen Espiritu came away from the wall, looking at her watch. “That took long enough,” she told her husband and turned to Stallings. “I’m leaving now, Mr. Stallings. Our people surround and protect the compound, so please don’t go wandering off.”

After Stallings nodded, she turned to her husband. “Expect me when you see me.”

“As always,” he said.

Carmen Espiritu turned and left the room. Twisting around in his chair, Stallings watched her leave through the front entrance. When he turned back he was surprised to find Espiritu’s plump sister also gone.

A long silence followed, raising a barrier between the two men. Stallings leaned forward, elbows on the table, and broke the silence, if not the barrier, with a recommendation he made in the form of a question.

“What if we just took off, Al?”

“It’s quite simple,” Espiritu replied. “You’d be shot.”

At 1:43 A.M. Otherguy Overby returned to the Magellan Hotel, parked the gray Toyota and entered the lobby to discover Artie Wu seated on one of the low couches, hands clasped across his belly, eyes fixed on the entrance.

“Artie,” Overby said, his eyes darting first to the right where Durant leaned on the counter of the closed cigar stand, and then to the left where Georgia Blue stood in front of the closed cashier’s cage, her right hand down inside her shoulder bag. It was then that Overby resolved never again to have anything to do with women who wore shoulder bags.

He also decided to preempt Wu. “I think they’ve got Booth Stallings,” he said, watching carefully for Wu’s reaction, which turned out to be only a polite nod of limited interest.

“They?” said Durant who somehow was now only a foot or so away from Overby. “Who the fuck’re they?”

Overby wasn’t surprised by Durant’s ability to transport himself, as if by magic, but he didn’t have to like it. “Christ, you’re sneaky,” Overby told him and turned back to Wu.

“When’d you guys get here, Artie?” Overby asked. “You weren’t due till tomorrow.” He remembered the time then and amended his statement. “Or today, I guess it is now.”

“Something came up and we chartered a plane,” Wu said. “A Cessna, wasn’t it?” The question went to Durant.

“A Cessna,” Durant agreed.

“We came in at sundown,” Wu said, again staring at Overby. “Landed at the old airport up the road. The flight down was quite interesting. We flew at about six thousand and were able to see a lot. The islands all looked very lush, Otherguy, very prosperous.” He paused. “Very deceptive.”

“Ask him who’s got Stallings,” Georgia Blue said, crossing from the cashier’s cage to stand behind Wu’s couch.

“Never hurry Otherguy,” Wu said. “He’ll tell us after he decides what he wants us to know.”

“You want me to tell it down here?” Overby said. “Or up in the room of somebody who’s got a bottle because I don’t.”

“I’ve got Scotch,” Durant said.

Wu rose from the low couch without any help from his hands. “Then let’s use your room, Quincy.”

The shouting match ended the next morning at 8:49 in the Magellan Hotel’s Zugbu restaurant after Otherguy Overby threw half a cup of lukewarm coffee in Georgia Blue’s face and stalked out.

Breakfast was served buffet style in the Zugbu and Overby made sure he had finished his scrambled eggs, rolls and some tasty sausages before he gave Georgia Blue the signal to begin the performance.

It was a vicious although generic kind of domestic scrap with few specifics and much acrimony. Alleged infidelities were recalled. Long-buried grudges were exhumed. Failed joint ventures of a suspect and possibly criminal nature were alluded to, and through it all ran the recurring theme of money and its lack.

The audience, mostly Filipino, Australian and American — plus a contingent of Japanese — found it all fascinating. The Japanese seemed particularly appreciative, despite the absence of subtitles.

After Overby left, Georgie Blue calmly wiped the thrown coffee from her face with a napkin. She lit a cigarette, smoked it for several moments, ground it out and called for the check. She signed it with a hand that trembled only a little, rose and made a slow dignified exit that drew appreciative murmurs from the Japanese.

She used the house phone in the lobby to call Artie Wu. When he answered, she said, “The son of a bitch threw a cup of coffee in my face.”

“Wonderful,” Wu said.

“There was a full house.”

“Great.”

“I’ll be at the pool the rest of the morning,” she said and hung up.

When the moving mass blocked out the sun at 10:52 A.M., Georgia Blue’s eyes snapped open. She was wearing an immodest green bikini and lying on one of the wheeled chaise longues near the Magellan Hotel pool. The shoulder bag was nearby and her hand darted toward it but stopped when the heavy woman in the bright red slacks said, “I’m Minnie Espiritu.”

“Minnie?”

“Minerva. And I’ve got a letter for either Wu or Durant, except they’re not in. The desk says you’re with them so I guess I can give it to you.”

Georgia Blue sat up slowly. “Minerva Espiritu?”

“Alejandro’s sister.”

“You’re from—”

Minnie Espiritu interrupted, as if in a hurry. “From here. Cebu. But I spent a lot of time in California and sure wish I was back there.” Wariness spread across her face. “You are Georgia Blue, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Minnie Espiritu dropped a folded copy of The Manila Bulletin on the chaise longue near Georgia Blue’s feet, fished a pack of cigarettes out of her red pants pocket and lit one, using both hands to shield the match. She blew the smoke out and turned to inspect the pool and the guests. “Inside the paper,” she said, still inspecting the pool.

“I’ll take it up to my room.”

Minnie Espiritu nodded, continuing her inspection. “The Magellan’s not bad,” she said. “I like nice hotels. If I had my way, I’d check into one and never check out. Well, nice meeting you.”

She turned and headed toward the hotel. Georgia Blue yawned, seemed to notice the folded Manila Bulletin for the first time, picked it up and carelessly stuck it into her shoulder bag. She then lay back down, her left forearm across her eyes, and waited for five minutes to pass.

She lay on the floor by the room’s one good chair in that discarded rag doll position that only the dead seem able to manage. Artie Wu thought she certainly looked dead. Antonio Imperial, whose passkey had unlocked the door to room 426, was convinced of it. Only Quincy Durant had any doubt as he quickly crossed the room to kneel beside Georgia Blue.

His hands seemed to know exactly where to go and what to do. He felt first for the big artery in her neck. He then peeled back an eyelid. Next he opened her blouse and put his left ear to her chest. Then he sat back on his heels and studied her for a moment before looking up at Imperial.

“She’s alive, but you’d better get a doctor.”

“Shouldn’t she go to hospital?” the hotel manager said.

“That’s up to the doctor. But if you don’t get her one, she could die on you.”

“I’ll get one,” Imperial said and hurried out.

After the door closed, Durant said, “Let’s put her on the bed.”

Wu frowned. “Should she be moved?”

“You want to talk to her?”

Wu nodded his reply and helped Durant lift her gently onto the nearer twin bed.

“Get a cold wet washcloth or towel,” Durant said.

While Wu was in the bathroom, Durant examined the ugly swelling just above Georgia Blue’s left ear. After Wu returned with a wet towel, Durant’s practiced hands applied it to the swollen area. Georgia Blue’s eyes flickered, opened, closed and opened again. She made a retching noise far down in her throat.

“Get a bucket,” Durant snapped.

Georgia Blue threw up into the metal wastebasket Artie Wu held for her. After lying back down and closing her eyes, she asked Durant, “How bad?”

“You’ll live, but you’ll have one hell of a headache.”

“A doctor’s on his way, Georgia,” Wu said as he came back from the bathroom where he had emptied the wastebasket.

She opened her eyes to look at Wu. “An NPA sparrow team, Artie. One big; one little. The big one was almost as big as you.”

“Tell us about it,” Wu said. “If you can.”

“They wanted to know about me and Otherguy and that stupid fight we put on. And then they wanted to know about the letter from Stallings.”

Wu and Durant looked at each other. “What letter?” Durant said.

In sentence fragments and disjointed phrases she told them about Minnie Espiritu delivering the plain white unaddressed envelope. About checking at the desk to see if Wu and Durant were in. About going up to her room and finding the two men, one big, one little. About kicking the little one and being choked by the big one. About the little one finding the Walther and the big one the letter. But she said nothing about opening Stallings’ letter and reading it over the phone to Boy Howdy, and nothing about sending a copy of the map to Howdy by taxi.

“Any idea of what was in Booth’s letter?” Wu asked.

“He... he read it to me,” she lied.

“The big one?” Durant asked.

“Yes. There was the letter and a map. He read me the letter and showed me the map. They wanted to know how I got them.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“Lies.”

“Can you remember what was in the letter?” Wu said.

She closed her eyes again, as if struggling to recall. “Most of it, I think,” she said, opening her eyes.

“Let me get something to write on,” Wu said, going to the desk and returning with a magazine and several sheets of hotel stationery. “Okay,” he said and clicked his ballpoint pen.

“I... I think,” Georgia Blue said haltingly, “that it went something like, ‘I’m bringing Espiritu out tomorrow from A on map.’” She paused. “And then there was something about when they’d start. Four, I believe.”

Wu looked up from his notes. “Four P.M. tomorrow?”

“Yes. Then something like, ‘Have transportation at B on map,’ except transportation was abbreviated and I’m fairly sure the time for that was between five-thirty and six.”

“What about the map?” Durant asked. “Did you get a good look at it?”

“Yes.”

Wu leaned forward. “Can you remember where points A and B are?”

“Give me some paper, Artie. Maybe I can draw it.”

It took her ten minutes to draw the map on a sheet of hotel stationery. It took that long because she kept hesitating and changing her mind and discarding wadded-up sheets of stationery. Finally satisfied, she handed what she had drawn to Wu. It was another fair copy of the map Booth Stallings had drawn, except that on this second version points A and B were about a kilometer farther west and east, respectively.

Wu studied the map with care. “Nice,” he said, passing it to Durant. “You have a good memory.”

Durant examined it and looked up. “Some map,” he said.

Georgia Blue wearily closed her eyes. “It could be a little off.”

“How little?” Durant asked. “Twenty yards? Five hundred meters? A mile or two?”

“You want a money-back guarantee?” she said, opening her eyes to glare at him. “That map and what I told you are all I know. Everything. Except, well, except one dumb question they asked that made no sense.”

Wu smiled encouragingly. “And what question was that, Georgia?” “They asked me, or rather the big one did, what Boy Howdy was doing at the Cebu Plaza. I said I didn’t know. So the one time I tell the truth the big bastard hits me.” She attempted a smile and nearly made it. “But that’s okay, I guess, since the little one wanted to shoot me.”

“Why do you think they asked you what Boy’s—”

A loud knock at the door kept Wu from completing his question. And before he could get around the twin beds, the door opened and a man in his late thirties strode in, a doctor’s bag in his left hand and a worried-looking Antonio Imperial just behind him. The man with the doctor’s bag stopped in the middle of the room and glanced around, as if expecting evidence of a riot, revolution or at least a three-day orgy.

He wore an expensive green polo shirt, pale yellow linen slacks and a competent look on a narrow face that featured gentle dark brown eyes and an unforgiving mouth.

“I’m Doctor Bello,” he announced to the room at large. “Who the hell are you two?”

“Friends of the patient,” Durant said.

“Friends of the patient will kindly wait outside.”

There were two small bullet holes just below Boy Howdy’s left nipple. Blood, although not very much, had made some of the reddish gray chest hair even redder. There were also two bullet holes in the thin pillow, which Wu assumed had served as a make-do silencer.

Glancing around the room, he noted the rumpled bed clothing and how Boy Howdy’s own clothes formed a kind of trail to the bed. The shirt had been discarded first, then the net undershirt followed by the pants, the Jockey shorts and finally the shoes. Wondering where the socks were, Wu looked back and found a pair of white cotton ones still on the dead man’s feet. The socks made him fret a little about his powers of observation.

Wu picked up Boy Howdy’s pants and went through the pockets, finding nothing of interest. There was a second thin pillow on the bed, but nothing underneath it. Wu lifted up the mattress and found what he was looking for — Boy Howdy’s wallet.

It was a large worn ostrich-skin wallet, very old, very thick, that contained 585 pesos, $800 in American Express traveler’s checks, three credit cards, a driver’s license, two condoms, some receipts and a sheet of Magellan Hotel stationery, the same sheet on which Georgia Blue had drawn her fair copy of Booth Stallings’ map.

Wu put the ostrich-skin wallet back where he’d found it and carried the map to the writing desk. On the desk were a phone, a bottle of Dewar’s Scotch whiskey, a bucket of half-melted ice and two glasses, only one of them used. There was also a nine-sheet stack of Cebu Plaza Hotel stationery. Lying diagonally across the stationery was a hotel ballpoint pen.

Wu switched on the desk lamp, took the map Georgia Blue had drawn for him and Durant from his hip pocket, and compared it with the one he had found in Boy Howdy’s wallet. The two maps, obviously drawn by the same hand, were virtually identical, except that points A and B on the map drawn for Wu and Durant had been moved a kilometer west and east, respectively.

Wu smiled and nodded his appreciation of the neat deception. He picked up the Scotch bottle and smelled its contents. It smelled like Scotch whiskey so he had two swallows straight from the bottle. As he used his handkerchief to pat his lips, someone knocked at the door. It wasn’t a polite tentative maid’s knock, but the hard open-up-in-there kind.

Wu’s reply was a loud growl to indicate he was coming as soon as he could get some clothes on. He studied the two maps that lay side by side, put one on top of the other and folded a crease into both just below the Magellan Hotel letterhead. He tore the letterheads off along the crease and stuffed them into his pocket.

Crossing quickly to the bed, Wu took Boy Howdy’s wallet from beneath the mattress and put the false map Georgia Blue had drawn for him and Durant into it, returning the wallet to its quaint hiding place. The map he had found in Howdy’s wallet went down beneath the elastic top of Wu’s left calf-length black sock.

There was more hard knocking at the door. Wu glanced around the room and headed for the door, pausing only to switch off the desk lamp. He opened the door to discover the pair with the “Made in the U.S.A.” look. Neither made any attempt to hide his surprise. The older of the pair, Weaver P. Jordan, recovered first, smiled his tight no-teeth smile and said, “I told you we’d see you in Cebu.”

Wu nodded affably. “So you did.”

The elegant one, Jack Cray, was wearing a different suit but the same suspicious frown. “Where’s Howdy?”

Wu shook his head sadly and replied in an appropriately hushed tone. “Shot dead, it would seem.”

Although Wu was already moving back and to one side, Weaver Jordan still said, “Get the fuck out of our way,” as he pushed past him into the hotel room followed by Jack Cray.

Jordan slowly circled the dead Boy Howdy three times as Cray stood a few feet away, his eyes not on the corpse but darting around the room, searching — Artie Wu presumed — for the killer. Not finding him he turned to Wu and said, “Who killed him?”

“If you’d asked who wanted him dead, I could give you a long list. Boy had an absolute knack for making life-long enemies.”

“You kill him?” Cray said, obviously not expecting much of an answer.

“No.”

Weaver Jordan stopped circling the dead Boy Howdy long enough to glower at Wu. “What about Durant?”

“He’s sitting up with a sick friend, even as we speak.”

“So what’re you doing here?” Cray asked in a tone braced for both lies and evasions.

Wu smiled. “Since you have no more official authority than I do, I’ll ask the same question.”

Jack Cray turned to stare somberly at the naked dead man. When he spoke it was in a voice usually reserved for graveside eulogies. “He was one of ours.”

“Boy was one of everybody’s,” Wu said. “Did he do piecework? Casual labor? Or did you have him on a retainer?”

When Cray only stared at him bleakly, Wu went on in a half-speculative, half-reminiscent voice. “He was on your books for what — ten years? Fifteen? I’d say fifteen.” A thought seemed to strike him. “You did know he was on Tokyo’s books, didn’t you? And Taipei’s, Canberra’s, Kuala Lumpur’s and, the last I heard, even Bangkok’s, although Bangkok doesn’t really pay all that much.”

“Bangkok,” Weaver Jordan said, staring at the dead Howdy with disapproval. “Jesus.”

Cray said nothing. Instead, he gave Wu a slow up-and-down inspection, as if curious about what would come next.

“His best customer, of course,” Wu continued, “was always the old boy in Malacañang Palace. Howdy was both his supplier and distributor. But you know that, don’t you, because you must’ve bought Palace stuff from Boy so fresh the ink was still wet.” Wu turned to examine the dead Howdy, as if for the last time. “I expect Boy really missed the old guy.” He paused. “I know he missed the money.”

“You jump to nice conclusions,” Jack Cray said.

Wu nodded and gave the room itself a final quick glance. “Looks just like a typical honey trap, doesn’t it? Boy has something he wants to sell or buy. She walks in. There’s some talk. Some business. And then some sex — first on the bed followed by a variation in the chair. And then bang, bang, Boy’s dead.”

“Through the pillow,” Weaver Jordan said. “She was probably kneeling on it — at first anyhow.”

Jack Cray looked at Jordan and made a small gesture. “Toss it,” he said.

It took only two minutes for Jordan to find the ostrich-skin wallet under the mattress. “Well, lookee here,” Jordan said, handing the map to Jack Cray. Wu sidled up behind Cray, as if trying to steal a glimpse over his shoulder. Cray gave him a cold look and walked to the other side of the room where he continued to study the map.

Wu watched Weaver Jordan eye the sheaf of Cebu Plaza Hotel stationery on the writing desk. Jordan first looked at it from above and then squatted so he could look across its surface at eye level. While still squatting and looking, he switched the desk lamp on, off and on again. He produced a pencil and began shading in a portion of the top sheet of stationery.

“I saw a guy do that in a picture once,” Wu said.

“We employ all the latest techniques,” Jordan said, shading away. “Invisible ink. Poison toothpaste. Real state-of-the-art shit.”

He kept on shading the stationery with his pencil for another three or four seconds before he said, “Well, now, by God.” He put the pencil down and bent over the sheet. “Listen to this, Jack, will you: ‘Am bringing A. Espiritu out—’”

Jack Cray cut him off with a sharp, “Goddamnit, Jordan!” He then turned to Wu and said, “You want to stay around for the cops?”

“Not particularly.”

Cray smiled his coldest smile. “Then we’ll tell them you weren’t here.”

“Should it arise.”

Cray nodded. “Should it arise.”

Artie Wu turned and headed for the door, but turned back. “In that picture I saw,” he said to Weaver Jordan. “The guy went to all the trouble of shading the pad with a pencil, but you know what the secret message turned out to be?”

“A fake,” Weaver Jordan said.

“I guess we saw the same picture.”

“I guess we did,” Weaver Jordan said.

Convincing Antonio Imperial to hand over Georgia Blue’s black attache case required far less persuasion than either Wu or Durant had anticipated. She had lodged her case with Imperial for safekeeping and they politely looked elsewhere as the hotel manager worked the combination of the large old Mosler safe that dominated his office.

“How is Miss Blue?” he asked, tugging open the safe’s door.

“Comfortable,” Wu said. “Doctor Bello gave her a sedative.”

“She’s sleeping then?”

“Dozing,” Durant said. “But she needs some of the documents in her case.”

“You wouldn’t mind signing for it, would you?” Imperial asked as he handed Wu the attaché case.

“Mr. Durant’ll be happy to,” Artie Wu said.

At 3:32 that afternoon, Alejandro Espiritu put down his mug of tea and asked, “What’s the most you ever earned in a year from this terrorism diddle of yours?”

“Diddle?” Stallings said with a grin.

“Diddle. A perfectly good word — good enough for Poe, which is where I first ran across it. In one of his short stories.”

“You’re a treat, Al.”

They were again seated at the rough board table in the big nipa a hut. Minnie Espiritu had returned a half hour earlier with a sack full of beer for Stallings. She now sat with her ear to the Sony shortwave, listening to a talk program from the BBC.

“Well, how much?” Espiritu asked.

“Fifty-eight thousand in eighty-four.”

“What qualifications must you have before setting yourself up as a terrorism expert?”

“Well, you should read a couple of books, maybe even three. Spend at least a week in Beirut and maybe one in either San Salvador or Lima. Then you come back to the States, Washington probably, rent an office, get some cards printed and you’re in business.”

“You’re joking, of course.”

“Not much.”

“Isn’t there some kind of professional organization that sets standards — an American Society of Terrorism and Counter-Insurgency Experts?”

“None that ever asked me to join.”

Espiritu drank more tea. “You’ve talked to many so-called terrorists, according to your book.”

Stallings nodded.

“The Polisarios?”

“Nice bunch of people for crazies.”

“The Shining Path?”

“They’re just crazy.”

“Why didn’t you ever talk to us, Booth? You gave us just two pages in your book. That’s all.”

“I only gave the Tupamaros one.”

“They’re out of business.”

“Well, to tell the truth, I figured I already knew all I needed to know about the NPA from that time you and I were in the low-intensity insurgency business.”

“The NPA didn’t even exist then.”

“But you did, Al.”

Espiritu started to reply, but before he could the big Filipino who had hammered Georgia Blue unconscious came into the hut followed by his smaller partner. The big man looked at Minnie Espiritu and, with a jerk of his head, ordered her out. She lit a cigarette first, carefully turned off the shortwave set — to conserve batteries, Stallings guessed — and left.

The big Filipino turned to Stallings and said, “Come.”

“No, thanks,” Stallings said.

“Better go with him, Booth,” Espiritu said.

Stallings rose slowly and followed the smaller of the two Filipinos out of the hut. The big man formed a rear guard. When they reached the bamboo stairs, the big man indicated that Stallings should go down them first.

As he started down the thirteen steps, Otherguy Overby started up. Waiting behind Overby on the ground was Carmen Espiritu who looked reasonably cool in her white duck slacks and black T-shirt. Overby, by contrast, appeared hot and tired. His polo shirt and gray slacks were soaked with sweat. He stared up at Stallings silently and backed down the steps.

Stallings went down the bamboo stairs briskly, his two escorts right behind him. “Hot enough for you, Otherguy?” he said and stopped, as if curious about the answer.

But Overby had retreated into his sealed-off preserve where nothing could touch him. He merely nodded at Stallings, much as he might nod at some not quite despised neighbor, and said, “Almost.”

Stallings grinned at Carmen Espiritu. “How you doing, Carmen-honey?”

“You’re only going to another house, Mr. Stallings,” she said, pointing. “Just over there.”

Stallings nodded agreeably and started for it, accompanied by his two mismatched escorts. Suddenly, he spun around and called to Overby who was nearing the top of the bamboo stairs.

“Hey, Otherguy!”

Overby turned, his expression indifferent.

“What d’you want me to tell that fucking Durant?”

“You’ll think of something,” said Otherguy Overby.

The nearly empty warehouse was down on the Cebu docks near Pier Two. Painted on its outside walls in huge letters was the name of the Chinese-owned department store on Colon Street. Inside, Wu and Durant watched as the old man with the silky white hair and the rust-red face inspected his two dozen mercenaries, not much caring for what he saw. The time was 10:17 P.M.

The mercenaries, none of them over 22 or 23, were lined up in two wavering rows of 12 each. Most were armed with M-16s, but a few carried shotguns. Some had regulation canteens and the rest had plastic bottles suspended from their necks by cords. Spare shotgun shells and ammunition clips were jammed into the pockets of pants that were either dark brown or black. All wore very dark green T-shirts, compliments of the old Chinese merchant who had sent somebody out to buy them from a rival store.

Vaughn Crouch made his inspection, looking very much the competent, if somewhat superannuated, mercenary in his short-sleeved bush jacket and dark blue gimme cap. He also wore a webbing belt that supported two canteens and a .45 Colt automatic pistol — or semiautomatic, as he insisted on calling it.

Prior to the inspection Crouch had addressed the mercenaries for five minutes in a mixture of English and Cebuano. When finished he had asked for questions. There had been only one from a very thin man who asked if there would be anything to eat. Crouch replied that there would be plenty.

The inspection over, Crouch told the mercenaries to climb into the two large Toyota vans parked nearby. As they moved to the vans he walked over to Wu and Durant, pausing to pick up a small plastic shopping bag.

Crouch handed the shopping bag to Durant. “Two Smith & Wesson five-shot belly guns,” he said. “Also ten extra rounds. If you guys find you need any more’n that, I suggest you take out a white handkerchief and wave it around.”

“Sounds sensible,” Durant said.

Artie Wu nodded toward the mercenaries. “What d’you think?”

Crouch shrugged. “Average. By the time I get through walking ‘em all night, they’ll be dog meat.” He turned to give the young men a glum look. “I guess I’ll let ’em sleep in shifts tomorrow once we get to point B.” He turned back to examine Wu carefully, then Durant. “You gents still planning to put in an appearance tomorrow evening?”

“We’ll be there,” Artie Wu said.

“Yeah, I guess you will at that,” Crouch said and turned to go, but again turned back. “What do you think of those Hondas?” he asked Durant.

Durant smiled. “Nice car. But what happened to Swarthmore?”

“If that granddaughter of mine wants to go to college, let her borrow from the government like everybody else.”

At dawn, Booth Stallings rose naked from his cot in the smallest room of the large nipa hut and dressed in his freshly laundered and ironed clothes. The night before, Minnie Espiritu — not quite by force — had confiscated his shirt, pants, socks, and shorts.

“They stink,” she had said, “so take ‘em off and give ’em here.”

After Stallings had removed his shirt, pants and socks, she said, “Shorts, too.”

When he had hesitated, she grinned. “Old guys don’t flick my Bic. They still say that in the States — flick my Bic?”

“I don’t think so,” Stallings had said, handing her his shorts. After giving his naked body a frankly curious appraisal, Minnie Espiritu had said, “Not bad. Considering.”

They came out of the cave, Overby first, Espiritu second and then Booth Stallings who kept his M-16 pointed at the Filipino. They left the dead Carmen Espiritu where she lay, next to the empty cardboard box.

After walking nearly a kilometer along a steep rutted track that was not quite a road, they reached Overby’s rented Jeep. “You could’ve driven closer, Mr. Overby,” Espiritu said.

“If I had, I couldn’t’ve turned around,” Overby said as he slipped behind the wheel and watched curiously to see how Booth Stallings would climb into the Jeep’s small rear seat without exposing his back to Espiritu.

Stallings managed by backing through the Jeep’s flimsy homemade door and into the rear seat. Espiritu, half-smiling, climbed into the seat next to Overby.

The rutted track was still so narrow it took Overby four back-and-fill tries before he got the Jeep turned around. He drove down the track slowly, never more than 15 miles per hour, hugging the right side of the ridge. To the left was a sheer drop of at least 300 feet.

Stallings leaned forward and asked, “So why’d you kill her, Al?”

“To keep myself alive,” he said, turning to look at Stallings. “It was all her idea — having someone pay me five million to go into exile. Carmen’s scheme was that I’d go to Hong Kong, grab the five million, use it to buy arms and then slip back into the country.”

“Sounds okay,” Overby said.

“She’d go to Hong Kong with me, naturally.”

Overby grunted. “Bad idea.”

Espiritu smiled his agreement. “I suspected that if she did, I’d suddenly be leaving behind a very rich widow. But I told her to go ahead and make the initial contact.”

“Who with?” Stallings asked.

“Ernesto Pineda. He was a devious sort from up in Baguio who sometimes worked for us — and sometimes for his third cousin who’d be putting up the money.”

“This third cousin with all the millions,” Overby said. “You happen to remember his name?”

“Ferdinand Marcos — who else,” Stallings answered, deciding that the world was far more deceptive and dangerous than he had ever supposed. It was Wu and Durant’s kind of world. And Otherguy’s, of course.

Espiritu, still turned around in the front seat, looked at Stallings with something like approval. “So you didn’t really believe that nonsense about it being an American business consortium?”

Stallings only shrugged.

Espiritu nodded sympathetically. “Americans always seem to be swinging from utter naivete to raging paranoia and back again. But how could anybody believe a group of hardheaded American businessmen would spend one peso, let alone five million dollars, to get rid of me? I’m their blessed communist menace, Booth, that doesn’t cost them a cent. I’m what’s going to justify the coup that’ll dump Aquino and get things back to normal where deals can be cut and profits made.”

“If I was them, I’d pay you to stay on,” Overby said.

“Precisely.”

“And Marcos?” Stallings asked.

“As usual, he’s being more subtle. Maybe too subtle. He’s only agreed to pay me to go into exile. But he thinks he knows what I’ll really do once I get my hands on the money. He thinks I’ll buy weapons, sneak back here and raise hell. That, I suppose, is our unspoken agreement. The rest is foolishness.”

“And Marcos will wind up financing the NPA.”

“He prefers to think he’s financing a quick coup.”

“What would you really do, Al — with the money?”

Espiritu smiled. “I’m still not quite sure.”

Hungry for details, Overby asked, “So it was Carmen who worked out the deal with the cousin, what’s his name, Pineda?”

“Yes,” Espiritu said.

“Then what?”

“After the five million was transferred to Luxembourg — I think it was Luxembourg — Marcos could no longer control it. So Carmen quite sensibly executed the cousin who, after all, was our only real link with Marcos. She had a good mind, did Carmen.”

“The guy in Washington, Harry Crites,” Stallings said. “The one who recruited me. Does he know whose money it really is?”

“No.”

“Then who—” Stallings said, but was interrupted by Overby who had a question of his own. “Now which way?”

Espiritu turned around to look. They had reached a fork in the track. “To the right,” Espiritu said, “and I’d like to make a comfort stop, if you don’t mind.”

“Up around that bend okay?”

“Perfect,” Espiritu said.

When the Jeep was around the bend, Overby pulled it over to the edge of the track that had almost widened into a road. Espiritu got out and walked over to a thick wall of tropical foliage where he stood with his back to the Jeep. Stallings climbed out, slung his M-16 over his right shoulder, and joined him. Overby, now out of the Jeep, leaned against its front right fender and waited.

As they stood urinating, Espiritu said, “Remember my definition of terrorism, Booth?”

“Sure. Politics by extreme intimidation.”

“You said it needed work.”

“Still does.”

Espiritu zipped up his fly. “What about: ‘Politics without moral compunction’?”

Stallings thought about it as he zipped up his own fly. He shook his head and said, “That doesn’t quite cut it either.”

“I really don’t have any, you know,” Espiritu said. “Any moral compunction.”

Stallings turned to find Espiritu aiming the revolver at him.

“Well, shit, Al,” Stallings said.

“This will simplify things.”

Stallings looked at Otherguy Overby who still leaned against the Jeep’s right front fender. “Guess you’d like things simple too, Otherguy.”

Overby’s only reply was his remote, sealed-off look.

“You want to turn around, Booth?” Espiritu asked.

Stallings thought about it and was surprised by his decision. “Yes, by God. I think I do.”

Stallings turned slowly, discovering that of all places, Cebu was absolutely the last place he’d have chosen to die. He was almost completely turned around when he heard the two shots. They were fired so closely together they sounded like one. He tensed, waiting for the pain, even as his mind told him there would be none — not if he’d heard the shots. Finally, he turned to find Alejandro Espiritu sprawled facedown in the dirt, part of the right side of his head gone. The second round had made a hole dead center in the back of his blue shirt.

Otherguy Overby, the pistol he had paid $500 for on Pier Three dangling from his right hand, stared down at the dead Espiritu from less than six feet away.

He looked up at Stallings. “I don’t guess I’ve got a whole lot of moral compunction either,” Overby said.

“You’ve got enough,” Stallings said.

They heard the unmistakable sound of a Jeepney’s diesel engine long before it chugged around the bend in the road and came to a stop. Five armed men scrambled out. Stallings recognized them as five of the young guards who had been posted around the perimeter of the Espiritu compound.

Minnie Espiritu was the last one out of the Jeepney. She climbed down slowly from the rear, wearing her bright red slacks and a black cotton sweater. In her right hand was a machine pistol — an Ingram, Stallings saw, wondering where she had got it. She nodded at Stallings, gave Overby a sour look and walked over to where her brother lay dead.

She stared down at him for several moments before looking up at Stallings and Overby. “Which one of you killed him?”

When neither answered, she said, “Whoever it was saved me the trouble.” She looked back down at Espiritu. “We found Carmen in that silly cave of his. He kill her?”

“Yes,” said Stallings.

“He would.” She sighed heavily. “That Orestes kid, too?”

“Him, too.”

She shook her head, as if in disbelief. “The kid was my son. Picture that? Alejandro killing his own nephew?” She turned to look at both men again. “Yeah, I think you can picture that.”

She sighed again, even more heavily than before, and said, “He went bad by stages, you know. Not all of a sudden.” She looked at Overby. “Think he might’ve had a tumor on the brain or something?”

“I couldn’t say,” Overby replied.

Minnie Espiritu indicated the M-16 that was still slung over Stallings’ right shoulder. “That Orestes’ piece?”

He nodded.

“I’ll take it unless you wanta come help out with the revolution.”

“No, thanks,” Stallings said, unslinging the rifle and handing it to her. She gave it to one of the young guards and said something in Cebuano. The five young guards turned and headed toward the Jeepney.

Minnie Espiritu gave her dead brother a long look, turned to nod goodbye at Overby and Stallings, and started after the young guards. She turned back at Stallings’ question. “What do you want to do with Al, Minnie?”

She gave her brother one quick final glance. “The wild pigs’ll eat him by noon,” she said, turned and slowly walked to the Jeepney. After she climbed into its rear, the Jeepney bumped off down the rough road.

Otherguy Overby, ever literal, said, “There aren’t any wild pigs up here.”

“So?”

“So is that what they say when they don’t want to say, ‘Who gives a fuck?’”

“How would I know?” Booth Stallings said.

It was 10:29 that morning and already sweltering hot when Artie Wu ran out of road. He had driven the rented Avis van as close as possible to point B on Booth Stallings’ map, but the point still remained some four kilometers away. The mountain road Wu had followed out of Cebu City had disintegrated into a rutted trail two kilometers back. He stopped the van when the trail suddenly narrowed into a trace just wide enough for two small goats or one fairly large human.

He turned to Georgia Blue who sat beside him, studying the crude map. “This it?” Wu asked.

She nodded. “This is it.”

Without turning his head, Wu spoke to Durant who sat on the floor in the van’s seatless rear. “What d’you think, Quincy?”

“I think we should eat.”

“I think you’re right,” Wu said.

Thirty-one minutes later the five of them reached the crude bamboo bridge that spanned the stream that flowed between the two steep ridges. It was point B on Booth Stallings’ rough map and Jack Cray, looking around, didn’t at all like what he saw.

“Who picked this place?” Cray asked.

“Why?” Durant said.

“It’s a perfect trap.”

Durant looked up and around, nodding in what seemed to be surprised agreement. “I believe it is.”

“So who picked it?”

“Espiritu, probably.”

Jack Cray raked one ridge with his eyes, turned and did the same to the other one. “There’re bandits up on those ridges, aren’t there?”

“Why do you say that?” Artie Wu asked.

“Because you can feel the fuckers, that’s why,” Weaver P. Jordan said. “Because when some guy’s got a bead on you, you damn well sense it.”

Jack Cray moved as close to Artie Wu as he could without touching him. “Who’s up there, damn it?”

Wu sighed. “Mercenaries.”

“Mercenaries! Whose mercenaries?”

“They could be ours. Possibly Espiritu’s. Maybe even yours. It all depends.”

The shock appeared first in Cray’s eyes, popping them wide, and then flowed down to his mouth, giving him a dim, slack-jawed look. When he asked his question, it was in a low monotone that shock had robbed of all expression, even the normal rising inflection. “That was just a shuck about giving us Espiritu, wasn’t it?”

Wu gave the far ridge his own long look before replying. “There’s a small problem with that,” he admitted. “You see, to keep the mercenaries away from Espiritu and their hands off whatever price is now on his head, we had to promise them a couple of profitable hostages.”

Weaver Jordan turned apoplectic red. His voice was a shout. “Us? You promised them me and him?”

“You were handy,” Georgia Blue said.

Durant studied the glassy-eyed Cray and the crimson-faced Jordan. “How much would Langley pop for you two?” he asked. “A rough guess.”

Cray answered as if by rote. “Not a dime. The agency will not negotiate with terrorists.”

“No one need ever know,” Wu said.

“You’d know,” said Weaver Jordan.

Artie Wu nodded sadly. “Yes, I suppose we would, wouldn’t we?” There was a silence and then Wu smiled, as if suddenly struck by an idea so wise and wonderful that it bordered on pure inspiration. “You could, of course—” Wu broke off. “Well, never mind.”

“We could what?” Cray asked.

“You could make your own deal with them.” Wu turned to Durant. “What d’you think, Quincy?”

Durant appeared to give it some thought. “Sure. Why not?”

“Georgia?” Wu asked.

“It’d be better than your playing hostage up in the hills for a year or six months,” she said to Cray and Jordan. “Unless you’re both crazy about fishheads and rice.”

Resignation spread across Cray’s face, erasing the last vestige of shock. Cynicism, in the form of a slight smile, moved in to replace resignation. “Isn’t this where I ask: I don’t suppose they take American Express?”

Wu’s frown was one of deep concern. “Money does present a problem.”

“But not an insurmountable one, right?” Cray said.

Wu looked a question at Durant who nodded his answer. “Yes, well, I suppose Quincy and I could lend you the money and you could give us an IOU or something.”

“A promissory note would be best,” Durant said.

“You fucks,” said Weaver Jordan.

Jack Cray again looked first at one ridge, then the other, turned to Wu and said, “Write it out.”

Wu smiled at Georgia Blue. “Georgia.”

She reached into her shoulder bag and removed an envelope. From the envelope she took a thrice-folded sheet of bond paper, which she unfolded and handed to Jack Cray.

He looked at it. “Neatly typed, I see.”

“What’s it say?” Weaver Jordan asked.

“It’s headed ‘Promissory Note’ and then it says, ‘For value received we promise to pay to Arthur Case Wu and Quincy Durant on demand the sum of forty-eight thousand Filipino pesos or twenty-four hundred U.S. dollars with simple interest accruing at the rate of six percent per annum.’ And then there’re places to fill in the date and sign our names.

“Who’s got a pen?” Weaver Jordan asked. “I’ll sign the fucker.”

Georgia Blue silently handed him a ballpoint pen. Using Durant’s back as a desk, Jordan signed his name with a flourish and handed the promissory note to Cray who glared at Wu. “We’re signing under duress, of course.”

Wu smiled politely. “We’ll let the lawyers argue about that, should it ever come up.”

Cray signed, handed the note to Wu and said, “Okay. Let’s get it over with.”

Durant turned toward the far ridge, took a white handkerchief from his pocket and waved it back and forth above his head.

“What the fuck’re you doing?” Weaver Jordan said.

“Surrendering, what else?” Durant said.

When Booth Stallings came down to breakfast at 6:30 the next morning after three and a half hours’ sleep, the only other customer in the Magellan Hotel’s Zugbu restaurant was the retired Colonel, Vaughn Crouch. Stallings helped himself to rice, fruit and scrambled eggs from the breakfast buffet and sat down at Crouch’s table.

“What time’d you get back?” Crouch asked, spearing the last piece of ham on his plate.

“A little before three this morning.”

“I got back yesterday afternoon — around four-thirty.”

“You didn’t have to walk as far.”

“The rest of your bunch sleeping in?”

Stallings nodded and tried some of the eggs, which tasted like eggs had tasted when he was a child.

“Then I guess they haven’t seen this yet,” Crouch said, handing Stallings a Cebu City morning newspaper. “My kids made the front page,” he announced proudly. “Had themselves a hell of a time.”

Booth Stallings read the headline first, which claimed in 48-point Bodoni bold italics across three columns: ‘SURRENDER’ REPORT DISPUTED. He then read the story, or at least its first three paragraphs:

Stallings gave up on the story, handed the paper to Crouch and went back to his breakfast. After another forkful of eggs, he said, “Where were you?”

The retired Colonel grinned. “Once I shadowed the kids and those two Langley shitbirds down from the hills, I kind of disappeared.” He indicated the newspaper. “Sure you don’t want to finish the story?” he said. “It gets better.”

“Who cares?” Stallings said and pushed his breakfast plate away.

Crouch slipped on his trifocals to give Stallings a closer inspection. “Something happened, didn’t it — up in the hills?”

Stallings nodded. “Al got himself killed. I guess you could call that something — something you’d better not tell anyone.”

“By God. Old Al,” Crouch said, leaned back in his chair, took off his glasses and stared off into blurred nothingness for almost a minute. “Well, I think he was just about due, don’t you?”

“I don’t think Al thought so,” Booth Stallings said.

After Otherguy Overby knocked on the door of Artie Wu’s fifth-floor suite in the Manila Peninsula Hotel, he was told to come in. He entered to find Durant up and leaning against a wall. Wu was seated on a couch, looking freshly barbered and wearing his white silk money suit. Overby would have preferred to find them feet up, shoes off and drinking beer.

“Sit down, Otherguy,” Wu said. “Like a beer?”

Overby shook his head as he sat down in a straight chair, folding his arms protectively across his chest and planting his feet firmly on the carpet.

“Everything set?” Durant asked.

Overby looked at him. “I called the old Colonel down in Cebu and he got word to Minnie. She’s agreed to meet us in Hong Kong but she wants proof it’s all on the up-and-up. Otherwise, no deal. Okay?”

Wu said it was fine and Overby continued. “Welcome-Welcome got the telex confirmation on our rooms at the Hong Kong Peninsula and it’ll send a couple of cars to meet us at the airport.” He paused and looked again at Durant. “What about that homicide cop, Lieutenant Cruz?”

“Manila contacted Hong Kong through a back channel and got him wired into the CID there,” Durant said. “He’s to get full cooperation.”

“No trouble with the airline, I trust?” Wu said to Overby.

“None.”

Wu gave Overby a long look of what seemed to be genuine liking. “I was just trying to tell Quincy about that Rotary Club billboard in Cebu, Otherguy. How’d it go? ‘Will it benefit all concerned?’”

“‘Be beneficial to all concerned,’” Overby said.

Wu nodded, as if grateful for the correction. “And it really looks as if it might be beneficial, doesn’t it?” he said. “Except to one of us.” He stared at Overby. “Or possibly two of us.”

“Get to the point, Artie,” Overby said. “You can shine me on some other time.”

Wu sighed. “I think I will have a beer, Quincy.”

“Me, too,” Overby said.

Durant went to the room’s mini-refrigerator, took out three cans of San Miguel and passed them around. Wu opened his, took several swallows and said, “Who were you, Otherguy, when you called the Secret Service from Cebu?”

“Reuters,” Overby said and drank some of his beer.

“Inquiring about?”

“October, last year.”

“Any special date?” Durant said.

Overby shrugged. “October eighteenth, around in there.”

Wu and Durant looked at each other. Durant shook his head. The date meant nothing.

“October eighteenth where?” Wu said.

“New York.”

“It’s like pulling teeth,” Durant said.

“Otherguy tells things his own way,” Wu said. “Where in New York, Otherguy?”

“The United Nations.”

“Ah!” Wu said.

“What the fuck does ‘Ah!’ mean?” Durant said.

Wu ignored him and smiled again at Overby. “You’re doing fine, Otherguy. What happened last year on October eighteenth at the U.N.?”

“An acting foreign minister made a speech. At a commemorative session of the fortieth anniversary.”

Durant smiled mockingly at Wu and said, “Ah, so!”

Wu ignored him and gently asked Overby, “Whose acting foreign minister, Otherguy?”

Overby had another drink of beer and said, “The acting foreign minister of the Philippines.”

Durant got there first and said, “Jesus.”

Artie Wu, scarcely a beat behind, nodded at Overby and said, “Imelda Marcos, right?”

Overby shrugged again and drank more beer.

“What was in her speech, Otherguy?” Wu said.

“How the hell should I know? We live in terrible times. We should all pull together. Stamp out injustice. What they always say at the U.N.”

“It wasn’t the speech, Artie,” Durant said.

“No. Of course not,” Wu said, staring at Overby. “It was Georgia, wasn’t it?”

Overby looked first at Durant, then at Wu. It was an amused, speculative look. “Good thing you guys don’t play this game for money.”

Artie Wu smiled, as if in complete agreement. “The Secret Service had assigned Georgia to watch Imelda Marcos’ back, right?”

“That’s it.”

“How’d you pry it out of them?” Durant asked.

“I told them Georgia was applying for a job out here with Reuters and I was checking her references and work history. And is it true, I ask, that Miss Blue was once assigned to Mrs. Marcos who’s listed as a reference? And they say yes and give the dates and places. So then I ask if Georgia had quit the Service or been fired or what, and they say she quit. Resigned. Although she tells everybody else, Booth anyway, that she got canned.”

“You got all this over the phone?” Durant asked with unconcealed skepticism.

“From their personnel section, which is what it’s there for. Credit checks. References. And if I’ve got to say it myself, Quincy, I’m the best fucking phone man who ever lived.”

“You are indeed, Otherguy,” Wu said. “But tell me. What exactly made you pick up the phone?”

“Artie, nobody — and I mean nobody — sends out five million dirty unless they’ve got a trace on it. A trace they can trust. Well, I eliminated me first, of course, then Booth and you two last. That left Georgia. Then I remembered Booth saying Georgia’d told him that Treasury assigned her mostly to the wives of visiting big shots. So I play the hunch, pick up the phone, ask a couple of questions and bingo.”

“Nice,” Artie Wu said. “Very nice. Almost brilliant.”

“And that’s when you almost went solo, right?” Durant said.

Overby looked up with his unassailable, nothing-can-touch-me stare. “Like I said, Quincy, it crossed my mind.” He smiled his hard merry smile. “Just like it would’ve crossed yours.”

Wu rose, walked over to the seated Overby and put a friendly, almost comforting hand on his left shoulder. Overby looked down at the hand suspiciously.

“It was thoughtful of you to confide in us, Otherguy,” Wu said. Overby rose and turned to Durant who was still leaning against the wall. “Now that Espiritu’s dead, you guys know what she’ll try to do, don’t you?”

“We know,” Durant said.

Overby nodded. “Yeah. I thought you might.”

After he had gone, Wu turned to face the suite’s open bedroom door. He raised his voice slightly and said, “You can come out now, Lieutenant.”

Lt. Cruz walked into the suite’s sitting room. “You get all that?” Durant asked.

The homicide detective nodded. “Fascinating. He has a very good mind, doesn’t he?”

“Too good sometimes,” Durant said.

Lt. Cruz smiled, obviously pleased. “Yes, well, I’ll see you in Hong Kong then.”

The next morning, shortly before ten o’clock, two of them went to Hong Kong Island by ferry and three went by car. The two who took the Star Ferry were Georgia Blue and Booth Stallings. She wore a serious dark gray dress and a black leather shoulder bag. Stallings wore the tan suit Otherguy Overby had picked out at Lew Ritter’s in Los Angeles. He also carried a slim brown leather attaché case that looked new.

Georgia Blue noticed the case and said, “Window dressing?”

Stallings shrugged. “I don’t want to walk in, ask for five million dollars and then have no place to stick it, except my hip pocket.”

“It won’t be in cash, Booth.”

He grinned. “Still.”

They took seats forward in the first-class section of the ferry during the crossing from Kowloon. The only time they spoke was when Georgia Blue asked, “What’ll you do with your share, Booth?”

“Endow myself,” he said.

At 1:45 that afternoon Artie Wu entered his suite, accompanied by Otherguy Overby, to find Durant leaning against the wall and Booth Stallings pacing up and down the sitting room, a glass of what looked like straight Scotch whiskey in his right hand, the attache case in his left.

Wu turned to Durant and said, “What’s wrong with him?”

“He thinks we should’ve stopped the ferry.”

“To rescue Georgia?”

Durant nodded.

“You didn’t tell him?”

“How could I?” Durant said.

“Of course. You didn’t know for certain.”

“Sit the fuck down, Booth, will you?” Otherguy Overby said. “The cops fished her out.”

Stallings stopped pacing and turned quickly to face Overby. “She didn’t drown?”

Overby grunted. “Do fish drown?”

“Where is she?” Stallings said.

“In jail,” Overby said. “Where the hell’d you think she’d be?”

Artie Wu went over to Stallings and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Sit down, Booth. Please.”

Stallings sat down in an easy chair, the attaché case on his lap, the dark drink still in his right hand. He looked up at Wu who was staring down at him with an extremely gentle expression. “Let’s have a beer, Otherguy,” Wu said.

“Sure,” said Overby and went to the room refrigerator.

“All of us, Booth, are very fond of Georgia,” Wu said. “Some of us, at one time or other, have been even more than fond of her. Therefore, we wouldn’t do anything to her that she didn’t deserve.”

“Unless we had to,” Overby said, handing beers to Wu and Durant.

“It was Otherguy who thought she’d make it past the cops,” Wu said and took a swallow of his beer. “I didn’t. It was Quincy who suspected she’d use the ferry and make the jump. Again, I didn’t think so. But when you two headed for the ferry, I went to the Hong Kong police — the red-faced man, did you notice him?”

Stallings nodded.

“And suggested that he send a police launch after the ferry. Which he did. The reason we’re so late is that Otherguy and I had to find Georgia a lawyer. A solicitor, actually.”

“The first thing he wanted to talk about was money,” Overby said.

“What about extradition to Manila?” Stallings said.

“He’ll try to delay it.”

“What about bail?” Stallings said.

“I don’t think so,” Wu said.

Overby grinned. “If she got bail, it’d be goodbye, Georgia.”

Durant left the wall and went over to Stallings. “It’s over, Booth. All over.”

Stallings nodded.

“Except for one thing,” Durant said. “Are you sure you gave her the right envelope?”

Stallings thought about it. “Christ, I don’t know. I was getting nervous in the bank. But I think so. I sure as hell hope so.”

Overby looked at Wu. “Did she still have her shoulder bag when they pulled her out of the drink, Artie?”

Wu slowly shook his head no.

“Jesus,” Overby whispered.

Durant cleared his throat. “May we take a look, Booth?”

“You do it,” Stallings said and handed the attaché case to Durant.

Durant went to the couch, sat down and put the attache case on the coffee table. He stared at it as Overby and Wu gathered round.

Durant looked up at them, shrugged, undid the brass snaps and raised the lid. A Bank of Hong Kong and Shanghai envelope was all the case contained, except for Stallings’ passport. Durant tossed it to him.

Again, Durant stared at the envelope, then snatched it up and ripped it open. Inside were five buff-colored checks.

“I think I’m going to cry,” said Otherguy Overby.

At 12:45 P.M. on the sixteenth of May, 1986, a Friday, Booth Stallings sat on his favorite bench in Dupont Circle, his face turned up to the spring sun, waiting for his luncheon guest and remembering, for no very good reason, that on this date in seventeen-sixty-something, Boswell had first met Dr. Johnson.

Two minutes later, Harry Crites sat down next to him on the bench, cracked a smile and said, “What’s for lunch?”

“Drugstore chili dogs,” Stallings said, offering a white greasy paper sack.

“I like chili dogs,” Crites said, took one, unwrapped it and, leaning forward to avoid the drip, bit into it.

Stallings slowly unwrapped his own chili dog. “Sorry about your employee, Harry. But there was nothing I could do.”

Crites nodded, chewed and smiled slightly, remembering not to show any teeth. “Georgia, you mean?” he said after he swallowed.

“Georgia,” Stallings said, curious about what kind of self-absolution Crites would offer.

Harry Crites finished his chili dog in two enormous bites, chewed some more, swallowed, wiped his mouth and hands carefully with a paper napkin, rose and stared down at Stallings.

“I didn’t hire her, Booth,” he said. “She hired me.”

Stallings stared back at him, unblinking, determined not to let his face betray anything — not surprise or disappointment or sadness. Especially not sadness. “She hired you to get me fired and recruited,” he said, not making it a question.

“You were sole source, remember?” Crites said. “All it took was half a dozen phone calls, a dinner at the Madison and a trip to L.A.” He smiled the smile of a superior mind. “I imagine you’d like to know how much I cost her.”

Stallings only nodded, despising himself for the curiosity he was unable to stifle.

“Fifty thousand plus expenses.” Crites produced his superior smile again. “But hell, Booth, it all worked out okay. I saw on TV a few weeks back that big funeral they gave Espiritu in Cebu. So in a way you must’ve brought him down from the hills after all.” He shook his head in what seemed to be a mixture of regret and admiration. “That Georgia,” he said. “She’s something, isn’t she?” When Stallings made no reply, he added, “You heard what happened, didn’t you?”

Stallings, still seated, stared up at him and, after a moment, shook his head.

“She cut herself a deal. Traded everything she knew about how Marcos sluices his money around for reduced charges. Christ, she ought to be out in a year or two. Maybe even sooner.” He paused just long enough to give Stallings a cruel smile. “Think you can wait, Booth?”

“Why not?” Stallings said, adding, “Who told you about the deal she cut, Harry?”

Harry Crites seemed almost on the point of answering, but shrugged instead, turned and walked away. Stallings watched him go. He then leaned back against the bench, closed his eyes and lifted his face up to the sun, wondering what Georgia Blue was doing and thinking at that very moment. When this proved both pointless and adolescent, he wondered whether Harry Crites might have been lying.

It was then that it came to him — struck him actually — with startling clarity. And he realized what it was that he missed, needed and even wanted to do and be now that he was all grown up. Or nearly so.

Stallings picked up the empty white paper bag, crumpled it, rose quickly, hurried to the trash basket and tossed it in. After crossing the street to the bank of pay phones near the Peoples Drugstore, he dropped in a quarter, the only coin he bothered to carry, and tapped out the office number of his son-in-law, the criminal lawyer.

As it rang, Stallings was convinced that his son-in-law would have a new phone number where Otherguy Overby could be reached. And he was equally certain that by now Otherguy would have something going. Something Stallings could buy into. Something interesting and different out on the Rim perhaps — or, for that matter, almost anywhere.