Alone in his House of Eternal Solitude (as he himself called it), Ethan Peteros could not sleep. Something was keeping awake. And it wasn’t his usual happy dreams of marrying Captain Bautista and having children with her (he had already named all three), and then growing old beside her (she aged gracefully; him, less so).
No, it was something very different.
It was Pastor Josh’s comments.
He had plainly directed them against her.
So what was so dangerous about his latest, or rather, first, girlfriend?
It itched his brain like a rash.
He had to know.
He got up and woke up his computer with a flick of the mouse.
All was calm in Paraiso.
Good.
Time to do some cyber-stalking.
And he was an expert at it. He’d done often enough.
What else was a man to do when he spent most of his existence on his own?
He tried all social media channels.
Nothing.
It was as if she didn’t exist.
Which was highly unusual for a Filipina of her vintage.
But then, Reyna Bautista did not seem to him the type of woman who would pout and throw peace signs from random locations just to fill a feed with nonsense for likes.
He would have to go deeper.
He searched bulletin boards. Forums. Chats.
And there he saw it.
And boy, he did not like it.
Captain Reyna Bautista was hated by many, many men in the dark shadows of the internet. And quite a few women.
Her modus operandi?
Really simple.
She would tempt them. Tease them. Pretend she was interested in them. Get information from them. Intelligence. Or maybe some valuable clue or evidence for a crime she was investigating.
And then they would be dumped.
Drop-kicked to the kerb.
Abandoned.
The trail of damage was long and bitter.
Ethan gasped.
Reality struck him hard like a two-by-four across the chops.
What if he was next?
What was he doing?
In her small but adequate condo in Ormoc City, Captain Reyna Bautista could not sleep. That pastor bothered her. How could he know? How could he? She had never met him before. She had not misled him before.
So how could he know?
And those words. Those words from Frank’s sermon. They buzzed around her head like angry, bloodthirsty mosquitoes, unabated by repellent or the air conditioning in her room:
‘Honesty with God.’
‘Honesty with each other.’
‘Honesty with God.’
‘Honesty with each other.’
‘Without them we are hopelessly alone.’
‘Hopelessly alone.’
‘Hopelessly alone.’
Captain Bautista’s eyes jolted wide open, as if she had drunk a vat of coffee.
She had made up her mind.
This was it.
She needed to ride.
Darkness surrounded them. Deep, oppressive darkness. Frank Diggory was in the back of a Transit van with three other men. Two more men were in front. All were in black from head to toe. All had balaclavas ready to be pulled over their faces in an instant. All were deeply focused.
They were parked on the outskirts of Glasgow, in an industrial unit. Around them were warehouses, mostly vacant and rusting from lack of use. The place felt desolate.
They sat there in silence. Bleak, concentrated silence.
Somewhere out in the blackness of the night, a lookout was watching.
And waiting.
A radio crackle split the silence.
‘Positions!’ The command rang out like a church bell.
All six men left the van. They fanned out around one of the warehouses. Took their positions. Silently. Directing through hand signals only.
Rain began to fall. Misty, freezing rain. Their breath around them felt heavy. And thick. As if simply existing could give the game away.
The lookout watched as the last man took up his position.
‘Go! Go! Go!’ the lookout barked.
They advanced suddenly. Loudly. Yells on all side designed to panic and disrupt. They took metal battering rams. Smashed down doors. Broke through thin metal walls. Swooped in on their prey like eagles.
Inside, men were playing cards on barrels to pass the time. The cards went flying in alarm as they grasped at weapons: baseball bats, batons, guns.
But they were taken by surprise. They were struck on the head, back, legs. Crumpled to the ground like paper. Hands bound in cable ties. Gagged. Instructions yelled in their ears as if they were deaf.
Guards immobilised, the men fanned out once more. They had to find where they were searching for. They were iron-willed. Determined.
Sure enough, they found them: young women in their twenties, teens, some absolutely underage. All with the olive, weathered complexion of the Eastern Mediterranean or the Balkans. All with dark, deep eyes that screamed desperation, while their voices were too stunned to cry out.
They were hidden in metal cages like wild animals.
Frank was beyond appalled.
The men let the woman and girls out of their cages. The women smiled behind the deepest pain.
But their troubles were not over.
Frank and his men roughly wrenched their wrists behind them. They cable tied them again. They shoved them out of the warehouse into a series of black Transit vans, which had arrived like dark shadows, drivers at the ready to leave at pace.
One, two, three vans were boarded by force. Women whimpered and mourned the apparent death of hope.
Again.
Sides were banged as soon as the vans were loaded. Off into the darkness they shot.
Frank didn’t ask where.
He surveyed the darkness and the dankness and smiled. Mission accomplished.
He raised his mobile phone from his pocket and made a triumphant call.
Frank Diggory awoke seated in his washroom, gripping his knees for dear life, weeping loudly and rocking back and forth, as if to rock himself to sleep.
‘Did you have a bad dream again, Frank?’ Emet’s gentle voice called out like an audible lighthouse through the storm of his nightmare.
‘The worst.’ he told her. ‘What kind of human being gets involved in any way in smuggling people? I mean, what passes through a person’s mind to even think that could be even remotely okay?’ he whimpered rhetorically.
Emet calmed him. ‘Not the Frank Diggory I know. Not the Frank Diggory you have become.’
‘I wish I could believe in me as much as you do.’ Frank told Emet calmly.
‘Then you need to know the man you have become, not the man you were.’ Emet replied. ‘The man you have become is someone who is gentle and kind and works hard and lives a good life. He would never do something like that.’
Once Emet had calmed Frank down until he was happy to talk banal chit-chat, they both returned to their separate bedrooms in their separate houses for a few more hours of fitful sleep.
Before their great escape.
While they were lying in their beds, slowly drifting off back to sleep, it began to rain: slowly at first, but then the raindrops fell faster, stronger, harder.
Captain Bautista seemed to feel every one as she drove onwards on her motorcycle out of Ormoc City and out towards the villages and subdivisions that surrounded it. She could even hear the swish and the splash of the wheels through seemingly endless puddles. But she didn’t mind. To be honest, it hardly even registered, so focused was she on what she had to do.
She arrived in Paraiso, parked up beside the pathway into the hillside and headed up the pathway. It was slippery because of the rain. Once or twice, maybe even three times, she felt a foot give way beneath her. But she always recovered. She kept surging forward, driven by a singular focus and desire that, for the first time in her life, was not just about her.
She reached the door of the house she needed to get to. She banged hard on the glass door, not caring for a second about the noise she was making. ‘Ethan!’ she yelled through the teeming rain. ‘Ethan! We need to talk!’
‘I’m not sure I should let you in anymore.’ Ethan called back to her, deep sadness in his tone. ‘I know what you do. I don’t want to be another of your victims.’
‘But that’s the thing: I can’t do it to you. I can’t. For the first time in my life, someone is so important to me that I want to stop doing what I've done my whole life.’ Captain Bautista pleaded. ‘I want to change everything for you. Be a better person for you. I want to be with you, Ethan, whatever it takes.’
‘So, you’ll give up manipulating men to get ahead in your career?’
‘Yes! Men. Women. Everyone in between.’
‘And you’ll live a normal life?’
‘Yes!’
‘And we’ll get married, have kids...’
Captain Bautista had never given those things a second’s thought before, but right now somehow she longed for them with every fibre of her being.
‘Yes! I want to get married to you. Have children. Live a life like everyone else.’
‘In that case, come in.’ Ethan called out.
‘But you haven’t unlocked it.’ Captain Bautista reminded him.
‘It was never locked. Not to you. Never to you.’ Ethan told her, before running to the door and sliding it open. ‘I forgave you as soon as I saw you.’
There she stood, drenched in the downpour. She had never looked worse.
But to Ethan, she was beauty personified. ‘Come on in, out of the rain.’ he told her.
He stepped backwards a pace to allow her to enter. She did, and immediately held on to him tightly. ‘I don’t want to be hopelessly alone, Ethan.’ she told him. ‘I’m done with that. For good.’
‘I promise you that you will never be alone again.’ He told her, before adding, ‘Maybe we should get you out of those wet clothes.’
‘You’re moving fast.’ she joked. ‘I mean, I’m not entirely opposed to it...’
Ethan rather hastily completed his sentence. ‘...into something drier.’
‘Spoilsport.’ Captain Bautista grinned.
‘Why did you try to manipulate me anyway?’ Ethan asked her, as she removed her sodden shoes and socks.
‘I’ve been playing Hughes and Kaplan against each other. They both want whatever it is that Diggory has forgotten.’ she informed him.
‘And what were you looking for from them?’
‘A million of their currency plus settlement visas for me and whoever came with me.’
Ethan looked wounded at those words. He knew it would have meant her moving to the US or UK, and potentially leaving him behind.
‘I would have brought you with me. I think...’ Captain Bautista jested.
‘There’s something you need to know about me.’ Ethan confessed. ‘I hadn’t told anyone because I’ve been under orders to keep it quiet in case people take advantage of my kindly nature.’ Ethan began.
‘Oh?’ Captain Bautista raised her eyebrows in surprise as she removed her soaking leather jacket.
‘My parents are rich. Really rich. They bought this place for me. They got me the spying and coordinating gig through the mayor and bought me all this equipment.’ He gestured to his computer. ‘They sent me here to keep me out of trouble, away from the social scene in Manila, where there are so many women looking to take advantage of nice men like me.’
‘I knew it! No-one makes that much money from cryptocurrency. So they sent you here instead, to be taken advantage by women like me.’ Captain Bautista joked. ‘Well, now I know that you’re rich, maybe we should get you out of those dry clothes.’ She looked at Ethan’s thoroughly bemused face. ‘Too soon?’ she joked.
‘Too soon.’ Ethan smiled. ‘How about you dry yourself in the bathroom and I'll look out some dry clothes for you? I think I can find you something. You can stay here at least until the rain finishes.’
‘Or... longer?’ she teased.
‘Or longer.’ he agreed.
Captain Bautista did as he said: she went into his bathroom, found a towel and dried her hair. Ethan found a hoodie and a pair of baggy jeans for her and knocked on the bathroom door, before handing them to her respectfully, without looking at her body, which, anyway, was wrapped in a bath towel.
‘You can peek if you like.’ she told him. ‘It’s not like anyone else is going to see it.’
‘I want to save some surprises for our wedding night.’ he replied.
‘Respectful, patient and chivalrous? You are so different from any other man I've dealt with.’ she chuckled. ‘I really like it.’
She came out of the bathroom in the clothes Ethan gave her, still drying the last drips of water from her ears. Ethan had brought a blanket and two pillows through from his linen cupboard.
‘What are those for?’ she asked him.
‘I’m making you a bed out here.’ He told him. ‘I figured you're probably tired.’
‘But there’s a bedroom. And two pillows.’ Captain Bautista noted.
‘I know.’ Ethan replied. ‘I’ll be out here too. I’ve always longed to have a woman like you. I never thought it would be possible. But now we’re together, I don’t want to miss another moment with you, if I can.’
Captain Bautista thought her heart would melt.
And even more so when they snuggled together on the couch, her head resting on Ethan's arm, and a blanket over their bodies, and drifted off to the sweetest of sleeps.
They didn’t even notice when Ethan’s computer sprung to life, when motion sensors blinked on the desktop and his smartwatch vibrated.
Or when the roar of a motorcycle signalled its departure from Paraiso Subdivision.
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