Ambuklao Road curved along the side of the cliff. For a road that had few houses, its condition was very good—smooth concrete, no rubble dusting, no dislodging boulder. I began to wonder if Chet’s presence was connected to real estate and then, as my mind spiraled into fantasy, if he was building a house for us. Maybe he was constructing a summer residence, a three-story building anchored to the side of the cliff with terraces on every floor, each room poised over the gorgeous dive of valley. Maybe he wanted to surprise me.

“Okay, Ting,” said Inchoy. “It’s coming up on the right.”

If this was a building project, the work had been completed. There was an adobe wall wrapped around an improbably large area, snaking down the cliff in a feat of extreme engineering. All the trees in the surrounding area had been cleared, which made the house, rising above the wall, seem spotlit, sitting in too strong a square of sunshine in an otherwise shady region. On the opposite side of the street was another cleared area and in the middle of this sat a helicopter—big, much bigger than Jim’s. It looked official, military.

“I want a closer look,” said Inchoy.

“How? I’m not calling Chet, especially not now that I’m tracking him using some KGB software.”

Inchoy pursed his lips in an exaggerated way, looked at me, then at the house. “We probably can’t get in, but maybe we can get a peek.” Inchoy instructed the driver to go back down the hill a short way, so the presence of a taxi did not arouse suspicion. We parked on the shoulder of the road. “Wait here,” Inchoy instructed the driver.

I hesitated. “What if Chet sees us?”

“I’m willing to risk it,” said Inchoy.

“Two minutes,” I said. “And if he catches us, I’m blaming it on you.”

“Fine,” Inchoy said. “After all, I am deranged with grief. How would I even know where I am?” He checked again that the driver understood that he was not to leave, giving a nervous look to the purchases crammed between us on the back seat.

The peace of the street was disquieting. Inchoy and I were the only people here. I had grown accustomed to the constant crowdedness of Manila life. On the sidewalk, you had to fight for your square of pavement. You crowded around to buy tickets and ice creams and permits, casually bumping the people around you, feeling their inoffensive warmth invade your own. You sat in cars jammed along Ermita and Edsa, Aurora and Morato. Here, the sky was not chopped into corridors of smut-tinged blue but rather a vast expanse interrupted by a few branches: a circling dot in the distance that must have been a bird, a plane dividing with casual exactness one half of sky from the other.