nearby, wind and birds circulating through their broken windows. They were badly shaken up in an earthquake during the 1980s and have not been put to rights yet.
He passes by a restaurant with a squat concrete blockhouse in front, its openings covered with blackened steel grates, rusty exhaust pipes sticking out the top to vent the diesel generator locked inside. NO BROWN OUT has been proudly stenciled all over it. Beyond that is a postwar office building, four stories high, with an especially thick sheaf of telephone wires running into it. The logo of a bank is bolted to the front of the building, down low. There is angle parking in front. The two spaces in front of the main entrance are blocked off with hand-painted signs: RESERVED FOR ARMORED CAR and RESERVED FOR BANK MANAGER. A couple of guards stand in front of the entrance clutching the fat wooden pistol grips of riot guns, weapons that have the hulking, cartoonish appearance of action-figure accessories. One of the guards remains behind a bulletproof podium with a sign on it: PLEASE DEPOSIT GUNS/FIREARMS TO THE GUARD.
Randy exchanges nods with the gunmen and goes into the building's lobby, which is just as hot as outside. Bypassing the bank, ignoring the unreliable elevators, he goes through a steel door that takes him into a narrow stairwell. Today, it is dark. The building's electrical system is a patchwork-several different systems coexisting in the same space, controlled by different panels, some on generators and some not. So blackouts begin and end in phases. Somewhere near the top of the stairwell, small birds chirp, competing with the sound of car alarms being set off outside.
Epiphyte Corp. rents the building's top floor, although he is the only person working there so far. He keys his way in. Thank god; the air conditioning has been working. The money they paid for their own generator was worth it. He disables the alarm systems, goes to the fridge, and gets two one-liter bottles of water. His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other activities.
He is too sweaty to sit down. He must keep moving so that the cold dry air will flow around his body. He flicks globes of sweat out of his beard and does an orbit of the floor, looking out the windows, checking out the lines of sight. He pulls a ballistic nylon traveler's wallet out of his trousers and lets it dangle from his belt loop so that the skin underneath it can breathe. It contains his passport, a virgin credit card, ten crisp new hundred dollar bills, and a floppy disk with his 4096-bit encryption key on it.
Northwards he can survey the greens and ramparts of Fort Santiago, where phalanxes of Nipponese tourists toil, recording their fun with forensic determination. Beyond that is the Pasig River, choked with floating debris. Across the river is Quiapo, a built-up area: high-rise apartment and office buildings with corporate names emblazoned on their top storeys and satellite dishes on the roofs.
Unwilling to stop moving just yet, Randy strolls clockwise around the office. Intramuros is ringed with a belt of green, its former moat. He has just walked up its western verge. The eastern one is studded with heavy neoclassical buildings housing various government ministries. The Post and Telecommunications Authority sits on the Pasig's edge, at a vertex in the river from which three closely spaced bridges radiate into Quiapo. Beyond the large new structures above the river, Quiapo and the adjoining neighborhood of San Miguel are a patchwork of giant institutions: a train station, an old prison, many universities, and Malacanang Palace, which is farther up the Pasig.
Back on this side of the river, it is Intramuros in the foreground (cathedrals and churches surrounded by dormant land), government institutions, colleges, and universities in the middle ground, and, beyond that, a seemingly infinite sprawl of low-lying, smoky city. Miles to the south is the gleaming business city of Makati, built around a square where two big roads intersect at an acute angle, echoing the intersecting runways at NAIA, a bit farther south. An emerald city of big houses perched on big lawns spreads away from Makati: it is where the ambassadors and corporate presidents live. Continuing his clockwise stroll he can follow Roxas Boulevard coming toward him up the seawall, marked by a picket line of tall palm trees. Manila Bay is jammed with heavy shipping, big cargo ships filling the water like logs in a boom. The container port is just below him to the west: a grid of warehouses on reclaimed land that is about as flat, and as natural, as a sheet of particle board.
If he looks over the cranes and containers, due west across the bay, he can barely make out the mountainous silhouette of the Bata'an Peninsula, some forty miles distant. Following its black skyline southwards- tracing the route taken by the Nipponese in '42-he can almost resolve a lump lying off its southern tip. That would be the island of Corregidor. This is the first time he's ever been able to see it; the air is unusually clear today.
A fragment of historical trivia floats to the surface of his melted brain. The galleon from Acapulco. The signal fire on Corregidor.
He punches in Avi's GSM number. Avi, somewhere in the world, answers it. He sounds like he is in a taxi, in one of those countries where horn-honking is still an inalienable right. 'What's on your mind, Randy?'
'Lines of sight,' Randy says.
'Huh!' Avi blurts, as if a medicine ball has just slammed into his belly. 'You figured it out.'
Chapter 9 GUADALCANAL
The marine raiders' bodies are no longer pressurized with blood and breath. The weight of their gear flattens them into the sand. The accelerating surf has already begun to shovel silt over them; comet trails of blood fade back into the ocean, red carpets for any sharks who may be browsing the coastline. Only one of them is a giant lizard. but all have the same general shape: fat in the middle and tailing off at the ends, streamlined by the waves.
A little convoy of Nip boats is moving down the slot, towing barges loaded with supplies packed into steel drums. Shaftoe and his platoon ought to be lobbing mortars at them right now. When the American planes show up and begin to kick the shit out of them, the Nips will throw the drums overboard and run away, and hope that some of them will wash ashore on Guadalcanal.
The war is over for Bobby Shaftoe, and hardly for the first or last time. He trudges among the platoon. Waves hit him in the knees, then spread into magic carpets of foam and vegetable matter that skim along the beach so that his footing appears to glide out from under him. He keeps twisting around for no reason and falling on his ass.
Finally he reaches the corpsman's corpse, and divests it of anything with a red cross on it. He turns his back on the Nip convoy and looks up a long glacis toward the tideline. It might as well be Mt. Everest as seen from a low base camp. Shaftoe decides to tackle the challenge on hands and knees. Every so often, a big wave spanks him on the ass, rushes up between his legs orgasmically and washes his face. It feels good and also keeps him from pitching forward and falling asleep below the high-tide mark.
The next couple of days are a handful of dirty, faded black-and-white snapshots, shuffled and dealt over and over again: the beach under water. positions of corpses marked by standing waves. The beach empty. The beach under water again. The beach strewn with black lumps, like a slice of Grandma Shaftoe's raisin bread. A morphine bottle half-buried in the sand. Small, dark people, mostly naked, moving along the beach at low tide and looting the corpses.
Hey, wait a sec! Shaftoe is on his feet somehow, clutching his Springfield. The jungle doesn't want to let go of him; creepers have actually grown over his limbs in the time he has lain there. As he emerges. dragging foliage behind him like a float in a ticker-tape parade, the sun floods over him like warm syrup of ipecac. He can see the ground headed his way. He spins as he falls-momentarily glimpsing a big man with a rifle-and then his face is pressed into the cool sand. The surf roars in his skull: a nice standing ovation from a studio audience of angels, who having all died themselves, know a good death when they see one.
Little hands roll him over onto his back. One of his eyes is frozen shut by sand. Peering through the other he sees a big fellow with a rifle slung over his shoulder standing over him. The fellow has a red beard, which makes it just a bit less probable that he is a Nipponese soldier. But what is he?
He prods like a doctor and prays like a priest-in Latin, even. Silver hair buzzed close to a tanned skull. Shaftoe scans the fellow's clothing for some kind of insignia. He's hoping to see a
'Ignoti et ... what the fuck does that mean?' he asks.
'Hidden and unknown-more or less,' says the man. He's got a weird accent, sort of Australian, sort of
