The Missionary

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.

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

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

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

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

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

“Keep talking.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stone tamped down his disgust and followed as the man led him down a block and into an apartment building, up and up and up around endless stairs. Through a doorway marked with a tilted brass number and into