a long time since I was last here. Just over six years. And it hadn’t changed much. Still dirty, noisy and with appalling traffic, even given the time of night. A chaotic jumble of cars, rickshaws, motorbikes, tricycles with sidecars, and brightly coloured converted buses called jeepneys clogged up the roads as my taxi from Ninoy Aquino Airport crawled its way into the city.It was almost one a.m. when we finally turned into a comparatively quiet backstreet in Manila’s Ermita district, not far from the bay. The taxi pulled up outside a small guesthouse, set back behind a wrought-iron fence topped with coils of barbed wire. The room had been booked in advance for two nights in the name of Robert Mercer, which was the identity Bertie Schagel had set me up with three years ago, and the one I always used now.
A couple of shabbily dressed hawkers appeared out of the shadows as I got out and paid the driver. One tried to sell me a fake Rolex, the other cigarettes, but I pushed past them, my sympathy for their plight tempered by my tiredness, and rang the bell on the gate.
I think I woke the owner up. It took him several minutes to answer the intercom, during which time the hawkers kept hassling me and ramming their wares in my face, and when he finally did, I had to repeat my name three times before he came out and unlocked the gate, scowling at all three of us, which I thought was a bit off, before ushering me inside.
My room was a small box with a single bed and a view of the back of the building next door. The air-con unit on the wall hummed and rattled angrily and a cockroach the size of a small stag beetle marched confidently up one of the walls.
The owner – a short, miserable man with a droopy moustache, who looked like Charles Bronson – stood in the doorway. ‘OK?’ he demanded, as if daring me to say no.
‘Sure,’ I said.
There followed an awkward silence; I think he was waiting for a tip. I didn’t give him one, figuring that showing me to my room was an essential part of his job description, and after a few seconds he got the message and left. When he’d gone, I stuck the chain across the door and threw my overnight bag on the bed,before putting on a pair of plastic gloves and reaching under the mattress.
The gun was there, as I’d been told it would be, and I took it out and inspected it. It was an M-1911 .45 pistol, with a suppressor attached, manufactured by a company called Firestorm, which I remembered as a local, Philippines-based company. It was a cheap but reliable and easy-to-use weapon that I’d used once before some years back, and the one I was holding now looked clean and new. There were two eight-round magazines taped to the side of the handle and I unloaded them both and checked the bullets – semi-jacketed hollowpoints, better known by their colloquial name ‘dum-dums’, designed to cause as much tissue damage as possible by expanding as they hit the soft flesh of the victim. If I took my target out at close range, he wouldn’t have a chance. However, with a .45, the noise was likely to be pretty loud, even with the suppressor attached, which increased the risk several times over. A .22 would have been a better option, but you have to work with the tools you’ve got.
I reloaded a magazine, inserted it in the barrel, and racked the slide, before pointing the gun two-handed at the door. It felt reassuringly heavy in my hands, and I cocked the hammer and glared down the sights, my thumb resting on the safety catch, feeling that rush of power and invincibility that comes from being a trigger-pull away from being able to kill any man in the world.
I stood like that for a good ten seconds, and as I did so, the rush steadily dissipated and was replaced by a much more profound sense of disgust.
With a sigh, I uncocked the hammer and put the gun back where I’d found it, then opened the window and stared out into the gloom, wondering if this was what my life had really come to.
A couple of shabbily dressed hawkers appeared out of the shadows as I got out and paid the driver. One tried to sell me a fake Rolex, the other cigarettes, but I pushed past them, my sympathy for their plight tempered by my tiredness, and rang the bell on the gate.
I think I woke the owner up. It took him several minutes to answer the intercom, during which time the hawkers kept hassling me and ramming their wares in my face, and when he finally did, I had to repeat my name three times before he came out and unlocked the gate, scowling at all three of us, which I thought was a bit off, before ushering me inside.
My room was a small box with a single bed and a view of the back of the building next door. The air-con unit on the wall hummed and rattled angrily and a cockroach the size of a small stag beetle marched confidently up one of the walls.
The owner – a short, miserable man with a droopy moustache, who looked like Charles Bronson – stood in the doorway. ‘OK?’ he demanded, as if daring me to say no.
‘Sure,’ I said.
There followed an awkward silence; I think he was waiting for a tip. I didn’t give him one, figuring that showing me to my room was an essential part of his job description, and after a few seconds he got the message and left. When he’d gone, I stuck the chain across the door and threw my overnight bag on the bed,before putting on a pair of plastic gloves and reaching under the mattress.
The gun was there, as I’d been told it would be, and I took it out and inspected it. It was an M-1911 .45 pistol, with a suppressor attached, manufactured by a company called Firestorm, which I remembered as a local, Philippines-based company. It was a cheap but reliable and easy-to-use weapon that I’d used once before some years back, and the one I was holding now looked clean and new. There were two eight-round magazines taped to the side of the handle and I unloaded them both and checked the bullets – semi-jacketed hollowpoints, better known by their colloquial name ‘dum-dums’, designed to cause as much tissue damage as possible by expanding as they hit the soft flesh of the victim. If I took my target out at close range, he wouldn’t have a chance. However, with a .45, the noise was likely to be pretty loud, even with the suppressor attached, which increased the risk several times over. A .22 would have been a better option, but you have to work with the tools you’ve got.
I reloaded a magazine, inserted it in the barrel, and racked the slide, before pointing the gun two-handed at the door. It felt reassuringly heavy in my hands, and I cocked the hammer and glared down the sights, my thumb resting on the safety catch, feeling that rush of power and invincibility that comes from being a trigger-pull away from being able to kill any man in the world.
I stood like that for a good ten seconds, and as I did so, the rush steadily dissipated and was replaced by a much more profound sense of disgust.
With a sigh, I uncocked the hammer and put the gun back where I’d found it, then opened the window and stared out into the gloom, wondering if this was what my life had really come to.
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