Devil's Keep Read Free Page A

Then after midnight the stops were more frequent, the populated areas bigger and closer together, until finally there was no more countryside, just an endless sprawl of streets and homes and shops and buildings, with Manila glowing in the sky ahead.
    She didn’t know exactly when they entered the city. But some of the streets became wider, and there were trucks and cars and taxis waiting at traffic signals—even at 3:30 a.m.!—and she knew they must be close. She turned on the phone and tapped out a quick message to Ronnie:
    arrived
    He would be asleep, but he’d find it first thing in the morning.
    The bus terminal was on the south side of the metropolitan area, along a broad boulevard. Most ofthe passengers seemed to know that they were getting close, because they began to gather their bags. Marivic stood, took down her duffel, and sat with it in her lap.
    On impulse, she unzipped it and dug down into the clothes. She brought out a small drawstring bag of red velvet with a braided cinch. She looked around, saw that nobody seemed to be paying attention to her, opened the bag and let the contents fall into her palm.
    It was her most treasured possession: a gold herringbone bracelet with a centerpiece of red rubies forming the letter “M,” encircled by a ring of small diamonds. Nothing else she owned was even remotely so expensive, but this wasn’t the real significance. The bracelet was a gift from her father, bought in Brazil for her sixteenth birthday. He had always brought thrilling surprises when he returned from his voyages, but this one was really special. It was a grown-up gift. It had made her feel like a woman.
    Marivic had intended to keep the bracelet out of sight in Manila. She had heard stories of robbers who stole gold chains and even rings, ripping them free and then running. But she had also heard of bus station thieves who snatched baggage from the hands of unwary travelers, and she could just as well lose the bracelet that way.
    Marivic folded her hand around the bracelet. She thought about her father. She imagined him shopping for it and thinking of her and carrying it halfway around the world to place it on her wrist. Justtouching it now made her feel confident and secure, as if it carried some of her father’s strength and love.
    She draped the bracelet over her left wrist, and fastened the clasp.
    Some of the passengers were standing in the aisle now, impatient. Marivic looked to the front and saw that the bus was pulling into the terminal. It rolled to a stop. The front door huffed open.
    Marivic waited until most of the passengers had left. Then she grasped the handle of the bag and stepped out into the aisle. She walked up to the front of the bus and into the thick, pungent air of Manila.

Two
    A rap on his bedroom door woke Ilya Andropov. He had given orders to be awakened as soon as the deed was done. Within a few seconds he was conscious and aware, ready to operate.
    “Done?” he asked.
    “Done,” said the voice on the other side of the door.
    “Coffee,” Andropov said.
    He came out several minutes later, a red silk robe over black silk pajama bottoms. Andropov was an elegant man, nails manicured, his stylishly cut hair maintained with a weekly trim. But his lips pursed in a perpetual sneer, and his eyes and his manner were completely without warmth. He had the appearance of a man both prim and vicious.
    He walked down the hall to his office, in a walled residential compound in the Malate district of Manila. Waiting on his desk was a glass French press filled with dark coffee. He poured out a cup and picked up the telephone. He punched in a call to a number in the United States. But the routing was indirect. It ran through an Internet connection, into a landline relay from Chechnya to Moscow, again across an Internet trunk to London, from where itfollowed the usual pathway into the domestic circuits in the U.S.
    Though the call quality was often poor, with a lag of several seconds,