They waited until they were at SeaTac to call the kids, letting them know they’d be out of the country for a few days.
“Another mission already?” Connor asked in the stern, disapproving tone only a twenty-one-year-old can muster.
“It’s not a mission,” True told him. “Dad doesn’t go on missions. This is a fact-finding tour. No bad guys.” We hope, she added silently. Aloud, she said, “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“You mean don’t tell Grandpa?” Connor asked.
“Smart kid.”
They will be in the Philippines just overnight—twenty-eight hours between arrival and departure. So she brought only what would fit in her daypack: a change of clothes, a jacket for the plane, a utility vest for her gear, a few toiletries, a small first-aid kit, her MARC visor, and an assortment of small robotics from the origami army—to the amusement of the Filipino customs officer who inspected her bag. “Cool stuff! You sure this is not a boy’s backpack?”
She put on a teasing smile as she explained to him, “Other women pack clothes. I pack toys.”
All harmless of course, surveillance only. The customs officer admitted her to the country with a grin and no further questions.
They’ve been forty minutes on the road, crawling through traffic, when Rey startles her with an enthusiastic announcement. “Okay, this is it! Stage two. We trade cars in case someone is following us.”
He turns off into a large gated parking lot roofed with banks of photovoltaic panels, parking the black SUV in an empty stall. They transfer their gear and the traffic cam, then drive off in another SUV—a much older, tan-colored model. It’s less comfortable, less impressive, and far more practical, with a high clearance and an everyday look that won’t draw unwanted attention.
They leave the city behind, and the chaotic traffic with it. So far as the camera can tell, no one is following as Rey drives on a neat concrete road, past small towns and rice fields, with mountains visible in the distance beyond drifting curtains of light rain.
As they put more kilometers behind them, Rey’s tour-guide narrative gives out. He tries to engage Lincoln in a discussion of the business structure and ethics of private military companies, but he doesn’t get far. Miles talks to him for a while about the travails of independent journalism. Eventually, though, silence takes over. True is grateful for it.
An hour slides past. They leave the highway to follow a narrow road flanked by towering tropical growth, little homes half-hidden in the vegetation.
She watches their progress, charted on a map displayed on her tablet. They are entering unknown territory. If this was a mission, she would have requisitioned a UAV to do advance surveillance. She would have real-time coverage of the route and the destination. She would have deployed beetle and mosquito drones to do reconnaissance: mapping potential hazards and identifying the people who live there.
But it’s not a mission. It’s just an interview.
Still, they will not be going in blind.
Right on schedule—a planned two kilometers from their destination—Lincoln speaks. “Let’s stop for a few minutes,” he tells Rey.
It’s the first anyone has spoken in some time. Rey is startled. “Stop? But we’re almost there.”
“Just for a few minutes,” Lincoln says reassuringly. “And stay away from any houses.”
Rey pulls off the road alongside towering bushes—an unfamiliar species that True can’t identify. A misty rain is falling, but she’s not too worried about it. The clouds are breaking up, and she expects a return of blazing sunshine in another minute or two. In the meantime, she retrieves a small biomimetic bird from her daypack and unfolds its long, narrow wings.
Tamara calls the device a blue gull. Its dorsal surface is dark with a photovoltaic skin, but its belly is coated with a light-blue paint containing tiny reflective chips that simulate the complex range of subtle colors in a living bird. The wings are long, thin, and adjustable, but it doesn’t fly by flapping. It uses quiet electric engines to drive tilt rotors. Blue gulls are an old design, not very agile, and only vaguely birdlike. But on a calm day like today, with sunshine to supplement its batteries, the device should be able to soar for up to two hours.
Without a word, she wades out into the searing humidity and launches the blue gull, sending it ahead through the steaming air to reconnoiter.
When she returns to the air-conditioned comfort of the SUV’s cabin, Rey has turned around. He’s watching her, looking confused and very curious—but she offers no explanation. They are minutes away from meeting Daniel and she is too tense to speak. So she just smiles an apologetic smile, slides on her reading glasses, and calls up the gull’s video feed on her tablet.
Alex leans over to look, telling Rey, “It’s just reconnaissance.” When she makes no comment, he prods her: “Right, True?”
“Yes.”
Hearing her voice, even a word, reassures him. Alex does not like it when she goes silent. It’s been a point of conflict between them. “When you get too quiet,” he’s told her, “there’s a reason for it—usually not a good one.”
He’s probably right.
Silence gripped her hard in the early days after Diego’s death, when all words sounded trite and pointless. Alex didn’t understand that. He interpreted her silence as guilt. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened,” he eventually lectured her. “You didn’t make him go army. You didn’t even encourage him to do it.”
That was the day she realized how frightened he was—for her. He had no way of knowing what thoughts roiled behind the cold walls of her inward-facing grief. So she kissed him in gentle apology and gave the counterargument: “I didn’t need to encourage him. I let my old man do it.”
A harsh joke, but it won a snort of bitter laughter.
“I don’t feel guilty, love,” she promised him. “Brokenhearted, that’s all.”
Slowly, slowly, the pain faded. And still, eight years on, she sometimes awakens at three AM, her heart catching in panic, desperate to run to Diego, knowing he needs her but not knowing where he is or how to reach him. When that happens, she pulls on a shirt and wanders the house until the feeling subsides. If Alex wakes up, comes looking for her, she tells him it’s just insomnia, never letting him know what’s going on in her head.
It isn’t guilt she carries from one day to the next. It’s the frustrated, horrifying sense of knowing she can never comfort Diego, never reach him, never undo what was done.
And the bitter knowledge that she will feel this way for the rest of her life.
The blue gull soars sedately past houses and small farms, rain wet and glittering in the sun. True waits until Daniel Ocampo’s little estate comes into sight, then slides her finger around the screen, cueing the gull to circle.
She half-expects to see camouflaged guerillas in the woods, or maybe uniformed police officers. But there is only the neat pink house, a gravel driveway, a covered parking area with a small sedan, and white goats in a fenced pasture out back.
Lincoln watches the feed on his own tablet. “We’re good,” he says after a couple of minutes. “He’s got no one here. I don’t think he knows we’re here.”
Rey looks at all of them with narrowed eyes. “It’s not Mr. Ocampo you’re worried about… is it?”
“Let’s go,” Lincoln says. “We don’t want to be late.”
Daniel
Rey parks just off the gravel driveway beneath the shade of a massive mango tree. As True gets out, black hens and two colorful roosters nervously retreat into the surrounding bushes.
The house is a modest wooden one-story, pastel pink with white trim and a gray corrugated roof with mounted photovoltaic panels. Red hibiscus bushes flank three wide steps leading up to a screened porch.