Jack Wilder - The Missionary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Snatched by who?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not say! They know.”

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

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

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

And now they were back, and they had Wren.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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