Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

ONE

KILLING ISN’T THE HARD PART. Gangbangers and other fear biters do it every day. Anger pumps you up, panic cancels consideration, you grab the gun, close your eyes, pull the trigger, Christ, an ape could do it, you don’t even need to be a man.

No, the truth is, killing is the easy part. Getting close to the target, though, that takes some talent. And making it look “natural,” which is my specialty, well, I’ve known of only one other operator who could consistently get that right, and I’m not sure he should count because I’m the one who killed him. And leaving no trail back to yourself, that’s no cakewalk, either.

But the hardest part? The part that you can’t plan for, that you can really understand only when it’s already too late? Living with it after. Bearing up under the weight of what you’ve done. That’s the hardest. Even with limitations like mine-no women, no children, no acts against non-principals-you’re not the same person after. You never draw the same breath again, or dream the same dreams. Trust me, I know.

As much as you can, you try to dehumanize the target. Accepting the target as human, a man just like you, creates empathy. Empathy makes killing more difficult and produces caustic regret.

So you employ euphemisms: in Vietnam we never killed people; we only “wasted gooks” or “engaged the enemy,” the same as in all wars. When possible, you prefer distance: air strikes are nice, bayonet range is horrible. You diffuse responsibility: crew-served weapons, long chains of command, systematic replacement of the soldier’s sense of self with an identification with the platoon or regiment or other group. You obscure features: the hood is used not to comfort the condemned, but to enable each member of the firing squad to pull the trigger without an anguished face to remember afterward.

But it’s been a long time since any of these emotional stratagems has been available to me. I typically operate alone, so there’s no group with whom to share responsibility. I don’t discuss my work, so euphemisms would be pointless. And what I do, I need to do from a very personal distance. By the time I’m that close, it’s too late to try to cover the target’s face or otherwise conceal his humanity.

All bad enough, even under the usual circumstances. But this time I was watching the target enjoy a Sunday outing in Manila with his obviously adoring Filipino family just before I killed him, and it was making things worse.

The target. See? Everyone does it. If I’m different than most, it’s only in that I try to be more honest. “More” honest. A matter of degree.

Manheim Lavi was his name, “Manny” to his business associates. Manny was an Israeli national, resident of South Africa, and citizen of the world, which he traveled much of the year sharing bomb-making expertise with a network of people who put the knowledge to increasingly grisly use. Vocations like Manny’s once offered a reasonable risk-to-reward ratio, but post-9/11, if you sold your expertise to the wrong people, you could lose your rewards pretty fast. That was Manny’s story, as I was given to understand it, a tragic fall from a certain government’s grace.

Manny had arrived in Manila from Johannesburg that evening. A black Mercedes from the small Peninsula fleet had picked him up at Ninoy Aquino Airport and whisked him straight to the hotel. Dox and I were already staying there, outfitted with first-rate ersatz identities and the latest communication and other gear, all courtesy of Israeli intelligence, my client of the moment. Dox, an ex-Marine sniper and former comrade in arms of mine, had recently walked away from a five-million-dollar payday to save my life in Hong Kong. Bringing him in on this job was in part my way of trying to repay him for that.

Dox was waiting in the lobby when Manny arrived. I was in my room on the sixth floor, a tiny, flesh-colored, Danish-designed wireless earpiece nestled in my ear canal, a wireless mike secured to the underside of the left lapel of the navy blazer I was wearing. Dox was similarly equipped.

“Okay, partner,” I heard him say softly in his southern twang, “our friend just got here, him and the world’s biggest, butt-ugliest bodyguard. They’re checking in right now.”

I nodded. It had been a while since I’d worked with a partner, and not so long ago Dox had proven himself a damn good one.

“Good. Let’s see if you can get the name he’s using and a room number.”

“Roger that.”

Having to get this information on our own wasn’t ideal, but the Philippines wasn’t exactly the Israelis’ backyard, and they hadn’t been able to offer all that much. Manny traveled to Manila frequently from his nominal home in Johannesburg, taking as many as ten trips in a year. He never stayed for less than a week; the longest of these visits had lasted two months. He’d been doing this for a decade: presumably because customs control in Manila isn’t as tight as it is in, say, Singapore, making the Philippines a good place for meetings with the MNLF, Abu Sayef, Jemaah Islamiah, and other violent groups in the region; possibly because he liked the price and variety of Manila’s well-known nightlife, as well. He always stayed at the Peninsula. There were a few surveillance photos. That was all.

With less than the usual dossier to go on, I knew we would have to improvise. Where to hit Manny, for one thing. The hotel was our only current nexus and so presented a logical choice. But if Manny died in the hotel, it would absolutely have to look natural; otherwise, there would be too much investigative attention on the other guests, including Dox and me. Staying elsewhere wouldn’t have helped; it would have kept us too far from the action.

The level of “naturalness” a hotel hit itself would require isn’t easy, but there were other problems, as well. Most of the ruses I typically use to get into someone’s room depend on the target’s anonymity, yet Manny was well known to the hotel. And even if I did get into the room while Manny was out and then waited for him to return, what if the bodyguard swept the room immediately before his arrival? What if Manny came back with a bar girl? In the current terrain, I couldn’t control for these variables, and I didn’t like that.

Still, I wanted the room number. Partly in case a better opportunity didn’t present itself and we had to use the Hotel Room Expiration as Plan B; more important, so we would know on which floor to place the video camera that we would use to track his movements. We could have tried placing a camera in the lobby, which would have been easier because it would have saved us the trouble of finding out what floor he was on. But there were downsides to the lobby, too. With all the people coming and going through the hotel entrance, we’d have to scrutinize the grainy feed constantly to pick Manny out of the crowd. And if the lobby was always our first chance to see him on the move, we’d have to scramble to follow him out of the hotel-behavior that any decent bodyguard would key on in a heartbeat. So I decided we would use the lobby only if we had to.

Even low-end hotels don’t give out their guests’ room numbers, though, and the regal Peninsula Manila, with its expansive, marble-lined lobby and white-uniformed bellhops, was anything but low-end. And even if we found an indiscreet employee, we wouldn’t have known who to ask for because we didn’t know what name Manny would be staying under. So, while leaning forward to ask some typical questions about Manila and environs, Dox had taken the liberty of placing a few adhesive-backed transmitters under the long front edge of the marble reception desk. When Manny checked in, Dox would be able to listen in on his conversation with the clerk.

I waited two minutes, then heard the twang again. “Well, it’s good news and bad news. Our friend is here under the name Mr. Hartman. But all the clerk said to him is, ‘Mr. Hartman, your room number is written here.’ ”

I’d received the same treatment when I checked in and wasn’t surprised. The hotel staff was well trained.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Sure, there’s something else,” I heard him say, and I could imagine his trademark grin. “He took the elevator on the Ayala Tower side.”

The hotel had two separate wings-the Ayala and the Makati. Now we knew which set of elevators to focus on. We were beginning to triangulate.

“You get on with him?” I asked.

“I tried to. But the bodyguard was awfully polite and insisted that I just head on up by my lonesome.”

All right, his bodyguard had some tactical sense. Not a surprise. “Did he get a good look at you?”

“Good enough. I think we can expect him to recognize the best-looking fella in Manila next time he sees me.”

I nodded. Letting Dox run ahead was a calculated risk. Soon enough we would be double-teaming Manny, and it would be hard for his bodyguard to avoid getting distracted by sightings of Caucasian Dox, with his linebacker’s physique and good ol’ boy’s grin. Distracted enough to completely overlook the smaller, unassuming Asian guy Dox was working with.

There were about two hundred and sixty rooms on the Ayala side, and I thought about calling each of them from the house phone, offering, “May we have someone draw you a bath, Mr. Hartman?” until I hit the right room. But if Manny knew the hotel’s routines, as presumably he did, or even if he was just reasonably paranoid, a call like that could make him suspicious. He might phone the front desk to confirm. Or he might just accept the offer, which would create its own set of problems. Enormous, goateed Dox showing up to draw you a bath isn’t everyone’s idea of proper hygiene.

So I’d hold off on Plan Bath, and use it only if our more subtle attempts came to nothing. “Think you can get anything else?” I asked.

“You know I’m working on it. Give me five minutes.”

The next part of the plan was for Dox to make his way to the gift shop, where he would buy a book or something and charge it to his room. The clerk would check Dox’s name and room number against a list to ensure that the transaction was legitimate. Dox would be holding a high-resolution camera designed to look like an ordinary cell phone. Dox would position himself so that he could use the camera to capture what was on the list, including the name Hartman and an accompanying room number. We’d tested the system earlier, and it had worked perfectly. Now that we had the right name, it was time to see whether it would work when it counted.

Five minutes later there was a knock on my door. I padded quietly over and flipped up the small piece of cardboard I had taped over the peephole-no sense blocking the light from behind with my approach and alerting a visitor to my presence-and looked through. It was Dox. I opened the door. He came inside wearing his indefatigable grin.

“You’re smiling like that, you better have good news,” I said, closing the door behind him.

The grin broadened and he nodded. “That, and I’m just happy to see you, partner, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

I gave him a nod in return, knowing that anything more would encourage him. I couldn’t pretend to fully understand Dox. In many ways he was a contradiction, a conundrum. He was a talker, for one thing-not a breed I’ve ever been particularly comfortable around-and a loud one at that. And yet every other sniper I’ve known, and I’ve known more than a few, has been reserved, even taciturn. Every environment has a certain flow to it, a rhythm, a connectivity, and snipers instinctively and habitually enter into that flow without disturbing it. But Dox liked to stir things up-in fact, his nom de guerre was short for “unorthodox,” an accolade awarded by consensus in Afghanistan, where the Reagan-era CIA had sent men like us to arm and train the Mujahedeen against the invading Soviets. His constant boisterous clowning there had put me off at first, and I’d initially figured him for nothing but a braggart. But when I’d seen his effectiveness and coolness under fire, I knew I’d been wrong. When he settled behind the scope of his rifle, there was an eerie transformation, and the good ol’ boy persona would fade away, leaving in its shadow one of the most focused, deadly men I’ve ever met. I didn’t understand the opposing forces that combined to create his character, and I knew I would never have trusted him but for what he’d done at Kwai Chung. Of course, that single act couldn’t eradicate my lifelong tendency to doubt, but it seemed in a way to have eclipsed it, or at least to have created an uncomfortable exception.

We walked into the room. I sat down at the small desk and flipped open the Mac PowerBook I’d brought along for the festivities. It came out of sleep mode and I typed in the password. Dox handed me the camera.

“You sure you got a shot of the page with Manny’s name on it?” I asked.

He gave me a theatrical sigh. “There you go, hurting my feelings again.”

“Does that mean you got it?”

He sighed again. “Didn’t I tell you I’d get it?”

I attached the camera to the laptop. I hit the “sync” key, then glanced at him and said, “Let’s see if I have to apologize for my outrageous lack of faith in your infallibility.”

“Don’t worry, partner, I’ll be gracious about it. I hate to see a grown man grovel.”

It took just a few seconds for the images to download. The first of them was an alphabetical listing of hotel guests, A through F. I closed the image and opened the next one. G through M. Including one Randolph Hartman, Room 914. Bingo.

“How’d you get the clerk to give you a shot of G through M?” I asked. “You’re checked in under Smith, right?”

“Yeah, Mr. Smith first told the clerk that he couldn’t remember his room number, but that she could charge the Snickers bar he was buying to Mr. Herat.”

Cute. Herat is one of the northern cities of Afghanistan.

“And then?”

“Well, the nice young lady-pretty little thing, by the way, and I think she liked me-she flipped to the page with the H names on it and told me there was no Mr. Herat registered at the hotel. I told her, ‘That’s odd… Oh, wait a minute, that’s right, the room is under my name, not my partner’s.’ Should be under Smith, I told her, and okay, now I’m remembering, it’s room 1107, Ayala Tower. Which is indeed where Mr. Smith is staying.”

I looked at him. “Did she seem suspicious?”

He rolled his eyes. “Shoot, partner, I was trying to buy a damn candy bar, not cash a check. She couldn’t have cared less. Besides, it was pretty obvious she was distracted by her blossoming feelings for me. I think I might stop by again later, see what time she leaves work.”

“Hey,” I said, looking at him, “if you need to get off, Burgos Street is a two-minute cab ride from here. I don’t want you trying to make it with the hotel staff. That kind of shit gets noticed.” Even as I said it, though, I realized it would be pointless. Dox was genetically wired to be conspicuous. In some ways, I supposed, the tendency could be an asset. In an environment like this one, Dox came across more like an ugly American tourist than an undercover operator. He was hiding in plain sight.

He shrugged. “All right, don’t get your panties in a wad. It’s just that I hate to disappoint the pretty ones, is all.”

“ ‘The pretty ones’?” I said, still annoyed. “Dox, you’d fuck an alligator if it would hold still for you.”

“That is not true, partner, Marines do not engage in congress with reptiles. We prefer whenever possible that our partners be mammalian.”

I gave up. “Oh, okay. I don’t know how these rumors get started.”

“Lot of nasty people in the world, man, that’s all,” he said, giving me the grin. “I mean a sheep is one thing, but an alligator? I’m surprised you’d think so little of me.”

I didn’t know how Dox was able to maintain his constant good cheer even as he prepared to go operational. When I’m gearing up, I get serious, even dour. Harry, my martyred hacker friend, had always been nervous helping me with ops, and had often provoked an unfamiliar clownishness in me. But Dox and I seemed to polarize the opposite way.

But he’d done well so far. I wasn’t yet confident in his social engineering skills. He was too consistently brash, too direct, and, I had to admit to myself, his style was just too different from mine. Getting Manny’s room number had been a test. I’d resisted the urge to tell him how to go about it, and he had come up with something close to what I’d thought of myself. More important, something that worked. It wouldn’t come easily to me, but I’d have to try to give him more slack as we went along, as he continued to prove himself.

“Let’s see,” I said, closing my eyes. “He’s in nine-fourteen. That’s around the corner from the elevators. Unless the bodyguard is positioned at the elevators while Manny is in his room, I ought to be able to get some video in place.”

“Yeah, nice having a way to know when he’s leaving. I hate hanging around in the open, waiting for someone to go out.”

In the dark, though, I knew Dox could wait for days. He had the kills to prove it.

I opened my laptop bag and took out a camera, a wireless unit about twenty millimeters square and weighing less than an ounce. I clicked it on, then worked the laptop’s keyboard for a minute, watching as the screen filled with input from the unit. “It’s transmitting all right from here,” I said, “but at nine hundred megahertz it’s only rated to about a thousand feet. I might have to install a couple of repeaters along the way. You wait here and monitor the screen. Tell me if you’re getting reception and the right view of the elevators once I’ve got it in place.”

“Roger that.”

We took earpieces from the laptop bag and slipped them in place. I walked over to the door and checked through the peephole. The hallway was empty.

I walked out, hearing a loud clack as the door closed behind me. “You there?” I asked quietly.

“Roger that,” I heard back. Okay, the commo gear was still working.

I took the elevator down to the lobby level, not wanting to go to Manny’s floor directly from mine. To satisfy anyone who might be watching through the dome security camera peeking down from the elevator ceiling, I got out and bought a pack of gum at the gift shop, then came back and headed up to the ninth floor. There were no stops along the way, and a minute later the doors opened on nine. I walked out and looked around. The hallway was empty.

There was a wooden credenza against the wall opposite the elevators with a mirror behind it. I walked over, supported myself against the credenza with my left hand, and ran the fingers of my right through my hair. There was another dome camera mounted on the ceiling in front of the elevators, and if anyone was watching right then, all they would see was a man concerned with his appearance. In fact, I had slipped the adhesive-backed unit underneath the left edge of the credenza, where it would have a wide-angle view of the approach to the elevators.

“How’s the image?” I asked quietly.

“No go. Too grainy. Signal’s falling off before it reaches the receiver. I think we need the repeater to boost it.”

“Okay. Hang on.”

I walked down the hallway for a few paces, then returned to the elevator, just another hotel guest who’d absentmindedly gotten off on the wrong floor. This time, I stopped on six. As I got off, I checked my room key and looked around in slightly theatrical confusion, thinking, Gosh, these floors all look the same, where was I staying again? just in case someone was watching. Then I placed a repeater in front of the elevators the same way I had put the camera in on Manny’s floor.

The moment I clicked it on, I heard Dox’s voice: “Okay, there we go. Now that’s a beautiful view.”

I moved out of the way. “The approach to the elevators?”

“Yeah, and it beats the wide-angle shot of your crotch I was getting a minute ago. Someone should call America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

I thought about a retort, but then this was exactly what he wanted. I let it go and walked back to the room.

TWO

THE TWO MEN who’d offered me the Manny job a week before had never explicitly acknowledged their affiliations. They might have been Mossad; they might have been attached to one of the elite Israeli military units, like the Sayeret Matkal. All I knew was that they were compatriots of Delilah, who had vouched for them. Her involvement had been enough to convince me to meet them.

Delilah and I had first crossed paths in Macau, where we discovered we were both focused on Achille Belghazi, an arms merchant I had been hired to kill but whom Delilah’s people needed alive for the extraction of critical intelligence. We’d managed to create an uneasy truce, though, and things had worked out well in the end. Very well, if you included the month Delilah and I had spent together in Rio afterward, before she had to return to her world and I to mine.

But despite our personal chemistry, I didn’t trust Delilah completely: she was an operator, after all, with her own professional agenda. So I had insisted that her people travel to Nagoya, a large Japanese city two hundred miles west of Tokyo. For me, Nagoya would be native terrain, but for a couple of visiting Israelis, and any uninvited guests they might decide to bring, it would be unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and they would be reassuringly conspicuous there. Tokyo might have served my purposes instead, but I preferred to travel there infrequently. It had been two years since I’d faced off with Yamaoto, the puppet-master behind much of Japan’s endemic corruption, but I knew the man had a long and bitter memory and would be looking for me in Tokyo. Nagoya was better.

My prospective clients followed my instructions, and on the appointed day and time we met at Torisei, a small yakitoriya in Naka-ku. Yakitori is down-home Japanese fare, primarily chicken, other meats, and vegetables grilled over an open charcoal barbecue and served on wood skewers. It’s usually supplemented by chazuke, a soupy mixture of tea and rice, and always washed down with copious portions of beer or hot sake. Yakitoriya tend to be small, cozy, and unpretentious, and are often located near subway stations to make it easier for their sarariman and student patrons to duck in for a quick meal at a corner table or the easy camaraderie of the counter.

I was sitting in a tea shop across the street, wearing an unobtrusive sarariman-style navy suit and reading the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese-language daily paper, when they arrived. I saw them approach from the north, pause to glance at Torisei’s sign, and go inside. Although they were out of their element in Nagoya, they didn’t refer to directions or other written instructions to confirm that they’d found the place, and I sensed from this that they were accustomed to operating sterile, something that in professionals becomes a habit.

I waited and watched the street. After ten minutes, I got up and followed them in. As I parted the establishment’s blue noren curtains, I was thinking in Japanese and maintaining a Japanese persona. In my peripheral vision, I saw that they had taken one of the small tables. They both looked up when I arrived, but I ignored them. I expected Delilah would have given them a description, but I doubted that would be enough for them to pick me out if I wanted to stay anonymous. I took a seat at the counter, facing them and with the entrance door to my right. I ordered yaki-onigiri-grilled rice balls-and an Asahi Super Dry, opened my paper, and started to read. After a few minutes, when I felt they would have concluded I wasn’t of interest, I glanced around.

I liked what I saw. They were dressed neatly, blazers but no ties, and seemed relaxed and comfortable in the doubtless unfamiliar environment. But for a slightly heightened sense of alertness that only someone like me would have recognized, they could have been a couple of visiting European tourists, or businessmen pleased to have discovered an authentically Japanese place to eat after a day of interminable meetings in some generic office conference room.

I looked around and didn’t see anyone or anything that set off my radar. After another moment, I explained to the counterman that my acquaintances were already here and I had somehow overlooked them. I was going to go join them at their table, and, when it was ready, the waitress could just bring my order there.

I got up and strolled over. I left my newspaper at the counter, wanting to reassure them in the face of this small surprise by keeping my hands empty. They watched me coming.

When I reached their table, I said, “Boaz? Gil?” These were the names I had been given.

They both stood up. The one with his back to the door said in lightly accented English, “I’m Boaz.”

The other said, “Gil.”

“Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t see you here at first.”

Boaz laughed at that. They knew damn well I had seen them.

We shook hands and I sat down next to Gil. Boaz looked at the all-Japanese menu and asked with a smile, “Do you want to order, or shall I?”

His smile was reassuring and I returned it. I said, “Maybe you should let me.”

As we ate and talked, I found myself impressed. They were in their early forties, senior enough to have advanced within their organization, presumably on merit, but not so senior that they would have lost touch with the field. They were comfortable in their cover: although I sensed by a dozen small tells that they were ex-military, nothing in their outward appearance would have revealed their backgrounds to a casual observer. They eschewed G-Shock wristwatches, aviator shades, too-short hair, and the other indicators of an ongoing attachment to a military past. Instead they wore their hair at a civilian length; dressed tastefully, even stylishly; and either were comfortable unarmed or were carrying weapons I wasn’t able to detect. They were confident, but not arrogant; businesslike, but not cold; obviously serious, and even grave, about the business at hand, but not without a sense of humor.

Of the two, Gil was quieter. His eyes were a contradiction-partially hidden by heavy lids that made him appear relaxed, almost ready to doze, and yet lit by a strange glow from within. In those eyes and in his unaffected tone I recognized a fellow killer, a man who had taken lives at close range, and who was prepared to do so again. Boaz, short, balding, and slightly chubby, had a warmer persona, and I judged him the less lethal of the two. In fact, he had an infectious laugh and insisted on telling me several American jokes, which I didn’t find unfunny. If they were a team, Boaz was the front man and Gil the trigger puller, a division of labor that, I imagined, would be fine with Gil.

They had initially insisted that Manny’s expiration would have to appear natural. I pressed them for a more precise definition. Certainly a heart attack is natural, about as natural as it gets, and I’ve been known to cause one when conditions are right. But I wasn’t sure I could get that close to someone like Manny, wasn’t sure I could establish the necessary control over the environment. I asked them about an accident, or a suicide. These were possible, they said, if things could be made to look convincing. I told them there were no guarantees, not with the little they were giving me to go on. I told them that in the end it might have to look like a crime-a robbery or a kidnapping gone awry, foul play, yes, but not foul play that had been directed specifically at Manny. And therefore not attributable to anyone who would be happier in the absence of such attribution.

In the end, we had agreed on a sliding scale of compensation, with the richness of each potential payment tied to the degree of “naturalness” of Manny’s demise. Sure, there were some gray areas that a good lawyer might have been able to better define. But I was confident that any disputes would be resolved in my favor. Trying to take advantage of someone like me is usually unwise, and smart people tend to know better.

I noted the way they made decisions. There was no “We’ll get back to you on that” or “We’ll just have to check with headquarters first.” They examined the facts and made up their minds on the spot. Obviously their organization gave them a healthy amount of operational autonomy. I sensed a deference on Gil’s part toward Boaz, and took Boaz’s likely rank as further evidence that he was more the brains, Gil more the brawn of the operation.

I asked them why they had come to me rather than doing the job in-house. Boaz laughed his infectious laugh. He looked at Gil, then at me, and said, “You think the two of us would blend in in a place like Manila?”

“I know this might come as a shock to you,” I told them, “but not all Asians look alike. I don’t look particularly Filipino.”

Boaz said, “We don’t mean to imply that all Asians look alike. We’re familiar with the differences. I only mean that an Asian would blend there better than a Caucasian. I don’t think that’s an inaccurate statement, is it?”

In fact I wasn’t worried. Although it’s true I don’t look like the average Filipino, there are plenty of ethnic Chinese in the country and all sorts of other mixes, too, along with a significant expat population. With the tan I had acquired in Rio, where I had been living since leaving Japan, I knew I could blend in just fine. But I didn’t want them to think this would be easy. They might try to price it accordingly.

We were quiet for a moment. Boaz said, “Also, you were highly recommended.”

“Delilah?”

Gil said, “And other sources.”

I wondered whether there really were any other sources, or whether they were just trying to seem more connected than they really were. Cops, intelligence agents, interrogators… puffery about how much you know is a venerable technique for establishing control.

“Recommended on what grounds?”

Boaz shrugged as though the answer were obvious. “Reliability. Discretion.”

Gil, his eyes flat, added, “Lethality.”

I glanced around and confirmed that no one was within earshot. The Japanese education system’s ubiquitous efforts to teach English as a second language are sometimes endearingly useless, but there are plenty of success stories wandering around, too, and you have to be careful. I said, “I’m glad my references checked out.”

Gil shrugged. “Delilah seems to think highly of you.”

The comment was redundant after Boaz’s assurance that Delilah had recommended me. That, and something in Gil’s tone, suggested to me that he wasn’t entirely pleased by Delilah’s enthusiasm. If he was jealous, it was sloppy of him to show it. On the other hand, it was clear to me that Gil was employed for talents other than his knack with people.

“To be more specific,” Boaz said, “lethality without weapons.”

His smooth catch of the conversational ball made me feel I had been on to something in thinking that Gil might have some issues with Delilah. I raised my eyebrows, and Boaz went on.

“Firearms present a problem in Manila. All the public venues-hotels, shopping centers, theaters-have guards and metal detectors. Lots of bombings in the region, and these are countermeasures. So if you’re carrying a gun, you’ll limit your mobility.”

Gil said, “But we understand you don’t carry.”

“Depends on the terrain,” I said, deliberately noncommittal.

“But you don’t need one,” Gil pressed, as though intrigued.

I shrugged. “A gun is a tool. Sometimes it’s the right tool to carry, sometimes not. Like I said, it depends.”

They nodded: Boaz, seemingly satisfied; Gil, as though mentally confirming that, in a pinch, he could drop me. Christ, he was in his forties, he really should have been past that sort of shit. Well, I guess you never get past it.

After a moment, Boaz said, “Regardless, we would prefer if he died of something other than lead poisoning.” He raised his eyebrows, and I nodded to indicate I understood the joke. He smiled.

Gil added, “As we’ve explained, the less this looks like an assassination, the better.”

“The ultimate point being deniability,” I said.

To that, they both nodded.

I wanted to ask about that, but I sensed it might be a sensitive subject, so I decided to hold off for a moment. “Tell me,” I said, “what has our friend Manny done that’s made you want to wish him other than a long, prosperous life?”

The truth was, I didn’t particularly care why they wanted him dead. What I needed was who, and where, and when. But I’ve learned from experience in the business that their ostensible reasons, and what I might glean from between the lines of their response, could help me protect myself from unpleasant surprises.

Gil took a briefcase from the floor and placed it on the table, then reached inside. Although we were in a public place and all seemed comfortable enough, I noted that he moved reassuringly slowly. The implication was: If you have a problem with me reaching into a bag, just say so, and I’ll stop. The move was courteous and showed experience.

Gil took out a sheaf of about a dozen color photographs and handed them to me. Holding them so that no one in the restaurant could get a casual look, I started leafing through them.

Boaz said, “The top one is Bali, October twelfth, 2001.”

The photo was of a demolished building. Charred bodies were everywhere, lying among burning palm trees and smoking rubble. A dismembered hand was front center, a man’s wedding band prominent on the fourth finger, bloody tendons protruding from the stump of the wrist like wiring ripped from the back of an electronic appliance.

“You’re saying Manny did this?” I asked, my tone dubious. “I thought Bali was Jemaah Islamiah.”

“Yes, JI carried out the op,” Boaz said. “The Malaysian Azahari Husin was the bombmaker. But where did Azahari acquire his expertise? From our friend.”

“Lavi is a chemist by training,” Gil said. “He has special expertise in the explosive properties of various materials. That expertise is now for sale.”

“Take Bali,” Boaz said. “The Bali bomb used lots of low explosives-potassium chlorate, sulfur, aluminum powder, alum, and chlorine-and only a small amount of TNT. The mixture created a shock wave and blistering heat. Most of the victims were roasted alive.”

“He’s Israeli, and he’s doing this?” I asked.

Boaz nodded. “It’s… how do you say, ‘infamy’? But yes, just like everyone else, we have some people who will do anything for money. There are Israeli soldiers who’ve been prosecuted for selling weapons to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza-the same weapons that are then used to kill their own brothers in the army.”

Gil shook his head disgustedly and said, “I don’t understand why we bother prosecuting them.”

Boaz reached over and showed me another photo. “This is the Jakarta Marriott, August 2003. For this bomb, the terrorists used sulfur, potassium chlorate, gasoline, and TNT. The resulting bomb was both smaller and more powerful than the Bali device. This mixture created a shock wave and again a horrible burning effect.”

He pointed to the next photo. “The Australian embassy in Kuningan, Jakarta, September 2004. This time we have sulfur, potassium chlorate, and TNT. The mixture created a tremendous shock wave followed by fire. Again, more powerful than the Bali bomb.”

Gil said, “This is Lavi, learning by experimentation.”

Boaz said, “Lavi isn’t just disseminating his knowledge. He’s refining it. He’s briefed on the composition of these bombs, he analyzes the results, and he proposes ‘improvements.’ Lavi is one of the linchpins of a worldwide terrorist knowledge base. He helps these monsters improve their tools and tactics all over the world. What is learned in Southeast Asia is passed on in Europe, in the United States, in the Middle East.”

“How long have you known about what he’s up to?”

“Not long enough,” Boaz said. “A chance observation of a meeting with an Azahari cutout, more focused attention after that. We want him removed as soon as possible. As you understand, though, and personally I consider it unfortunate, we need deniability.”

“Otherwise,” Gil said, “the list of volunteers for this job would be long.”

It was clear to me that Gil would be first in line.

“Knowledge,” I said, musing. “How can you stop it? Isn’t the genie out of the bottle?”

“We do what we can,” Boaz said, without any trace of his characteristic good humor, and for a moment I wondered whether I had misjudged in thinking that between them Gil was the only killer. “We do our part.”

I went through the rest of the photos. Boaz gave each a place and date in a monotone: first World Trade Center attack, 1993; Buenos Aires Jewish Community Center, 1994; U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, 1998; USS Cole, 2000; others. Gil explained Manny’s behind-the-scenes involvement, and how his participation was increasing the lethality of the bombs and furthering knowledge of how to create them.

“So you see,” Boaz said when I was finished and had handed the sheaf back to Gil, “to us, eradicating Lavi is like curing a fatal disease. We can’t bring back the people he has already murdered, but we can save the lives that will be lost if his life were to continue.”

“We think you can help us,” Gil said.

Boaz added, “And we think you can do it the right way.”

I got the point. The main thing was, they weren’t looking for something foolproof, only something deniable. If they had insisted on a heart attack, I would have taken it to mean that their fundamental concern was that no questions even be asked. I would then have assumed that Manny was an unusually connected target, and would have reevaluated accordingly. Instead, they seemed willing to have questions asked, as long as the answers didn’t lead back to them.

I found it interesting that they had approached me directly. They might have used someone else, and insulated themselves with cutouts. My guess was that, in their judgment, the extra insulation afforded by the cutouts would have been outweighed by the greater chance of discovery. If Manny were to die of a headshot from a high-powered rifle, somebody might feel compelled to look very hard for whoever was behind it. Sure, there would be some insulation then, but the method of the hit would make the insulation necessary. My methods, and my track record, were such that they must have been more confident of my ultimate success. Less insulation, less need for it. A trade-off. And regardless, Delilah had brought me in. She’d pitched the work to me, she’d brokered the meeting. It would have been pointless to try to run things under a false flag after that.

The flexibility we’d agreed on was helpful, but overall I was still operating in a relatively constrained universe of possibilities. The whole thing would have been simpler if I could have just learned Manny’s routine and then positioned Dox to blow his head off from a thousand yards away. But I didn’t mind the constraints, really, and I suppose I never have. After all, they’re part of what justifies my prices. And “natural” means no investigation, perhaps not even any questions. I can slip away afterward without pursuit. And make fewer enemies in the process.

“One thing concerns me,” I said. “I don’t understand the need for deniability. With the kind of stuff he’s been up to, I would think that you or anyone else could kill Manny any way you wanted.”

They glanced at each other. Obviously I’d been right in sensing that this would be a sensitive topic.

After a moment, Boaz said, “We have reason to believe that Lavi is a CIA asset.”

In my mind, the price of the job instantly doubled.

“You have reason?” I said.

He shrugged. “We’re not positive. But obviously, if there is a relationship, we don’t want to have to apologize.”

“Why would the Agency want this guy as an asset? Why not just put him six feet under?”

“The CIA has exaggerated ideas of its own capabilities,” Gil said. “They think they can do more good running people like Lavi than they can by just killing them. They think the intelligence they get from Lavi and his type serves the ‘big picture’ and the ‘greater good.’ ”

Boaz asked, “You know A. Q. Khan?”

“The father of the Pakistani bomb,” I said. “And a whole lot of illegitimate children, too, if the news is getting it right. The Paks arrested him for running an international Nukes R Us, then pardoned him pretty much the next day.”

Boaz nodded. “Makes you wonder what you have to do to get thrown in jail over there.”

Gil said, “Khan sold his nuclear starter kit to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and others, possibly including some nonstate actors. It turns out the CIA was watching Khan for thirty years. Everything he did, he did right under their noses. Twice the CIA persuaded Dutch intelligence agents not to arrest Khan because the CIA wanted to follow his trail.”

“What about your people?” I asked. “Sounds like Khan was ripe for an accident.”

“We very stupidly deferred to the CIA on how to handle him,” Gil said. “With Khan, everyone was too clever by half. We’re not making those mistakes anymore.”

“So you think the Agency might be taking the same approach with Manny that it took with Khan.”

“Similar,” Boaz said. “Not the same. Khan was never a U.S. asset. We think Lavi might be. But either way, we’re no longer interested in trying to get these characters to lead us to other characters. That’s all just a… what do you say, ‘circle jerk’?”

“I think you could call it that, yeah.”

He smiled, pleased at his use of the idiom. “Well, we’ve learned from our mistakes. Now, when we find people like Lavi, we just make them dead. In this case, for the reasons we’ve shared with you, dead with discretion is preferable.”

We were all quiet for a long time. Then I said, “If this might offend the CIA, there’s more risk. The prices we discussed a few minutes ago won’t do it.”

Boaz looked at me and said, “Tell us what will.”

THREE

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS in Manila, Dox and I learned two important things. First, Manny wasn’t actually staying at the hotel. He would show up there once or twice a day, typically in the early afternoon, and sometimes again in the evening. He would stick around for about an hour, then depart again for parts unknown. Second, a hotel car, one of a small fleet of four identical black Mercedes S-classes, was taking him around. We never saw the car, license plate MPH 777, except when it pulled in to deliver Manny, and then the driver would wait in the carport until Manny had reemerged. It didn’t even come back at night. Manny must have reserved it on a twenty-four-hour basis, possibly for the duration of his stay.

I was tempted to call the front desk-“Hello, this is Mr. Hartman, can you remind me, how long did I reserve the hotel car?”-which might have given us an indication of how long Manny planned to be in town. But I decided the call would be unnecessarily risky. Given Manny’s long association with the Peninsula, the staff might know his habits, perhaps even his voice.

But maybe there was a better way. Among the goodies we had brought along for the job was a miniature GPS tracking device. It was a slick unit, with an internal antenna and motion activation to preserve the battery when the car wasn’t running. If we could place it in the vehicle, we could track Manny’s movements remotely.

That day, I hired one of the cars for a trip out to Lake Taal. In a thick Japanese accent, I told the driver that I wanted to see the lake and the active volcano that had conceived it. On the fourth finger of my left hand I wore a gold wedding band, purchased for cash from a Manila street vendor. I gave the driver plenty of opportunities to see it.

The journey, my first beyond Metro Manila since arriving in the city, was strangely beautiful. We drove first past the area’s slums, shanty cities clinging precariously to the undersides of highways and train tracks, their rusted corrugated walls provisional, yet also, somehow, timeless; their inhabitants sitting, sometimes squatting, before their wretched domiciles and among chickens and foraging dogs, watching uncomplaining as the Mercedes crawled past them in the thickening morning traffic. Beyond EDSA, the highway that encircles Manila like a traffic-choked noose, the city gave way to rice fields and green hills in the distance, and I had the odd and not unpleasant sense that I was being driven back into Vietnam. We picked up speed. Goats and gaunt cows observed our passage without evident interest. We passed a thin boy riding a water buffalo alongside the highway. He ignored our passage, but I noticed that he was smiling dreamily to himself as he swayed atop the animal, and I wondered for a moment what random thoughts might have provoked such gentle rapture. The lake itself, utterly placid, surrounded the cone of an active volcano that seemed to be merely sleeping, perhaps soon to stir. Because of the earliness of the hour no tourists had yet alighted, and I was gratified to have a moment to contemplate the water, the sky, the buzz of insects, and the calls of tropical birds before heading back to the density of Manila and the weight of the operation.

Back at the hotel, Dox and I took turns monitoring the feed from in front of the elevators for a sign of Manny’s return. It was boring work, as surveillance inevitably is. This time we were lucky: he showed up at a little after two in the afternoon, having kept us waiting only a few hours. As soon as we saw him and the bodyguard moving past the camera, I walked out to the carport.

In a heavy Japanese accent and broken English, I explained to the bell captain what had happened. One of the cars had taken me out to Lake Taal, I said, and somehow I had misplaced my wedding ring during the trip. The man seemed genuinely sympathetic: he must have understood how it would look to my wife when I tried to explain that I had lost my wedding ring in Manila, a city notorious for its pleasure quarters. He examined some paperwork, then gestured to one of the cars. “There, Mr. Yamada, the one on the far left, that’s the one you were in. Please, have a look.”

I thanked him and made a show of feeling around in the gaps in the seats and looking under the floor mats. Strangely enough, my ring was nowhere to be found.

“Not there,” I said, shaking my head in apparent agitation. “You are certain… that is correct car? All look same.”

“Quite certain, sir.”

I rubbed a hand across my mouth. “Okay if I check others? Please?”

He nodded and offered the sympathetic smile again. “Certainly, sir,” he said.

I made sure to search license plate MPH 777 next, going through the back in the same thorough fashion I had used a moment earlier. But this time, I left behind the GPS unit, adhered to the underside of the driver-side seat. The driver was chatting with another of the hotel staff by the front door and seemed neither to notice nor to care about my brief intrusion.

My search of the third and fourth cars was similarly fruitless. I thanked the bell captain sheepishly and asked him to please call me right away if anyone found a gold wedding band. He assured me that of course he would.

If an opportunity presented itself when we were done with the op, I would retrieve the unit. If I didn’t, eventually someone would find it. But so what? The driver would be reluctant to report it lest he somehow cause trouble for himself. If he did report it, his supervisor would suffer from the same inhibitions. Even if the incident reached management, the hotel could be counted on to take the high road of not advertising that someone had been surreptitiously tracking a guest through the hotel’s own fleet. And thus do greed and shame become progenitors of complicity.

Over the next few days, we used the GPS to track Manny’s movements. He seemed to travel widely within Metro Manila, but there was one commonality: a suburb called Greenhills. He would typically arrive there in the early evening, and, although he would sometimes go out again an hour or two later, he would always return for the night.

“Why do you suppose he’s going out to the suburbs every day and not even staying in the hotel?” Dox asked as we charted his movements.

I paused and thought about that for a moment. “I’m not sure. It could have to do with security, with the multiple locations creating a shell game dynamic. But two shells isn’t much. And his timing is more regular than I would be comfortable with.”

“I reckon he’s got a woman out there.”

“He could get a woman a lot easier in Makati, near the hotel.”

“Maybe this one is love.”

I shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

Upon arriving in Manila three weeks earlier, I had rented an unobtrusive gray Honda Civic, which I had garaged at the Peninsula. In my mind, I was an advance man for a Japanese boss, scouting locations for his arrival in the city. The cover was simple, provided for a wide range of behavior, and would be difficult to disprove. The yakuza maintains a sizable presence in the Philippines, a country that supplies many of Japan’s female “entertainers,” and my story, including a reticence about details, would be adequate to survive any foreseeable inquiries.

I drove out to Greenhills late in the afternoon, before Manny’s usual arrival time. With the GPS information, we knew to within a meter where the car was stopping. It was always in front of 11 Eisenhower Boulevard, which turned out to be a brick-and-glass high-rise condominium that looked like new money. I sat and waited in the window of a Jollibee, the local McDonald’s equivalent, in a shopping mall across the street. I had noted that, with the sun overhead and continuing to move westward, the store glass was mirroring a lot of light, making it difficult to see inside from the street.

I’D SPENT TIME in Manila while with the army in Vietnam, but of course that had been long ago, and the city had changed. Enclaves like what was now called Greenhills had once been rice paddies. The city was denser now: more people, more cars, more frenzy. There was a new air of commercialism, too, with mega-malls visible from auto-choked highways and billboards advertising teeth-whitening toothpastes and modern high-rises emphasizing by contrast the eternal shantytowns and slums around them. For the three weeks before Manny arrived, I had taken in these changes while indulging myself with a Manila-and-environs refresher course. The itinerary varied, but there was certainly a theme. I might have been researching a unique guidebook, something like Trouble in Paradise: Ambush, Escape, and Evasion for the Independent Operator in Metro Manila. The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat, an army instructor once told me, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson. If I ever die during an op, it won’t be because I was too lazy to prepare properly.

Manny showed up at dinnertime. I saw the black S-class round the corner on Eisenhower and pull up in front of the condo. The bodyguard got out first. He spent a moment scanning the street for trouble, but failed to spot it eating a cheeseburger behind the reflective plate glass of the Jollibee. When he was satisfied, he opened Manny’s door, his eyes still periodically roaming the street. Manny got out and the two of them walked inside. Two uniformed guards in front of the building nodded to Manny as he went past, and I realized he was well known to them. Getting to him inside, while offering certain advantages, would obviously pose a challenge. We would have to keep watching for a better opportunity.

I left the Jollibee and entered the shopping mall. I called Dox from a prepaid cell phone I had bought with cash. Dox was also using a prepaid. He had his own GSM unit, but I’d told him to keep it switched off while we were operational. There are ways of tracking a cell phone, and I didn’t know who might have had Dox’s number.

“He’s here,” I told him. “The condominium in Greenhills.”

“I know. I’m watching the little arrow moving around the computer. I saw the car pull up ten minutes ago. Anything interesting?”

“There’s a lot of security at the building. We’re going to need to watch him some more.”

“Roger that.”

“What’s the earliest he’s left the building so far?”

“Hang on a minute.” I heard the sound of the keyboard. “Oh-seven-hundred. Seems like he’s typically on his way by oh-eight-hundred.”

“All right. I’m leaving. I’ll come back in the morning. I’ve seen him arrive. Maybe I’ll learn something watching him go out.”

I returned at just before seven the next morning. It was Sunday. I ate at the Jollibee again. The morning crew was new. Even if they’d been the same as the previous afternoon, I doubted that they would have noticed me. When I want to, I have a way of just being part of the scenery.

Manny came out forty-five minutes later. He was with a pretty Filipina and a boy of about seven or eight who looked to be of mixed heritage. Manny was wearing dark trousers and a cream-colored silk shirt; the woman, dark-skinned, petite, showed a nice figure in a yellow floral dress. The little boy was wearing a blue blazer and khaki pants. He was holding Manny’s hand, and in the instant my mind put all the pieces together in some sort of preconscious shorthand, I realized, He’s just happy to be with his daddy, and was surprised at the acuteness of the pang that accompanied the thought.

They got into the back of the Benz and I watched as it pulled away from the curb. My cell phone rang. It was Dox.

“He’s moving,” he said.

“I know. I’m watching.”

“What do you see?”

I paused, then said, “He’s not staying at the hotel because he’s got a family here in Greenhills. A woman and a son.”

“How do you know?”

“I just saw them all together. From the way they’re dressed on a Sunday morning, I’d say they’re on their way to church. And it makes sense. The file says Manny has a family back in Johannesburg. My guess is that somewhere along the line, say seven, eight years ago from the apparent age of the boy, Manny knocked up a Filipina. That’s why he’s been coming out here so regularly and for so long. It’s not business, or at least it’s not just business. He keeps a room at the hotel so his Johannesburg wife doesn’t get wise, and he goes back there once or twice a day. Think about the times he shows up at the hotel-morning and afternoon in South Africa. Probably calls home from the room so she can see the caller ID readout.”

“I thought old Manny was of the Israeli persuasion. When I was growing up, I didn’t go to church too often, but I don’t remember seeing a whole lot of Jews there at the time.”

I thought for a moment, then said, “If I’m right about where they’re going, he’s probably doing it as an accommodation to the woman. Filipinas can be pretty serious about their Catholicism.”

“All right, I’ll buy that. Any angle on how we reach out and touch him?”

“We’ve got a pretty good idea of where he’s actually staying. That’s a start. Keep me posted on where the car is heading, and I’ll follow them from a distance until they stop. Maybe I’ll learn more.”

“Roger that.”

As it turned out, they weren’t going far: a nearby gated community called East Greenhills. I had to show a guard my ID, which was fake in any event, but he let me in when I told him, following my hunch, that I was there to attend morning Mass. He could have tested me on the liturgy if he’d wanted. My American mother, who was Catholic, had taken me to church regularly enough for the experience to have made an impression.

The approach to the church was clogged with cars, and I had to park some distance away and walk. That was fine. I preferred to keep the car out of view, so as not to give the bodyguard too many opportunities for multiple sightings.

Inside it was crowded, nearly full. I recognized the subject of the sermon, which was being delivered in English-spoken almost universally, along with indigenous Tagalog, throughout Manila. The priest was discussing the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, who opined, among other things, that it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

My own experience has led me to contrary conclusions, but I didn’t see the point of arguing.

The priest’s voice echoed from the front of the long room, competing with a series of wall-mounted ceiling fans that swayed forward and back as though alternately entranced by and then distracted from the cadences of his speech. The room was open on three sides to the outside, and the air was heavy with tropical moisture.

I sat in back on one of the varnished wooden pews, feeling the weight of the edifice settle in around me. It had been a long time, a lifetime, since I’d been in a church, and that was fine with me.

I could see Manny and his family, to the left and six rows forward. The boy sat between Manny and the woman. I sensed I’d been right in suggesting to Dox that periodic church attendance was an accommodation Manny made to the desires of the woman. Probably he didn’t really give a shit on a religious level. Or maybe the whole thing was uncomfortable for him. Either way, that he was willing to participate was further evidence that he cared a lot about the woman, and, I assumed, about the boy, too.

I watched from where I sat, wondering what the boy made of the ritual to which he was being subjected. I didn’t know if his father’s participation would make things better for him, or worse. My own visits to church had always been exclusively with my mother, over the silent protests of my Japanese father, who objected to such silliness, and, I realized later, to the Western infection it would impart.

Yes, I thought. Four-hundred-plus years ago, the Spanish infect the natives. And now the infection perpetuates, persists. The woman passes it on to the boy.

My own father was killed when I was eight, in a Tokyo street riot. Since then there have been a number of what I suppose might be called “defining moments,” but that first death was the original. I can still feel the terrible fear and shock as my mother broke the news to me, trying and then failing to hold back her own tears. If I choose to, and I usually don’t, I can vividly recall the years of strange dreams after, in which he would be back with us and alive but always insubstantial or mute or dying or in some other way less than whole. It had taken me a long time to recover from all that.

I realized that seeing Manny with his family was stirring up this shit. And being in a church, that wasn’t exactly a plus, either.

I thought of the photos Boaz and Gil had shown me. If Manny were to die in an accident today, there was no question that many innocent lives would be saved. How could it be a sin, then, to facilitate his demise? On the contrary, wouldn’t the sin lie in forbearance? Wouldn’t such forbearance, in fact, be a form of complicity in those later deaths?

But I also knew that Manny’s death would leave this boy bereft, crucify him in grief and loneliness. I knew that very well.

All at once I hated being faced with this dilemma. I resented all the forces, past and present, that had conspired to impose it on me. I wanted to be one of the ignorant, the undeserving recipients of the fruits of awful choices like this one, who could sleep secure in their beds and dream innocent dreams and enjoy the profits of the sacrifice I was about to impose on this child, and the sacrifice I would make in the process, without bloodying their own hands in the process. They didn’t deserve the benefits any more than this boy deserved the burden, and goddamn if I was going be the one to present them with such a bloody gift.

And then I thought, Maybe this is the sacrifice that’s required of you. This is the sacrifice that you owe. All those lives you’ve taken… do lives saved count against them?

I shook my head, confused. I’ve been at this for more years than I care to acknowledge, and I’d never been troubled this way before. At least not in the middle of the proceedings. Sometimes you learn something afterward, or see something when it’s too late to turn back… it bothers you later. But not like this.

It’s the boy, I told myself. You never want to see that the target has a family. And the boy is reminding you of yourself. Perfectly normal reaction. It’ll pass, like it always does. Focus on the job, on doing the job. That’s all you can trust, that’s the thing that gets you through.

I took a deep breath and let it out. Right. The job.

Mass lasted another forty minutes. When it was over, I drifted behind Manny and his family, staying well back in the crowd. As we exited the church, the boy clambered onto Manny for a piggyback ride. I could hear his delighted laughter carrying across the tropical air. I watched the three of them load into the Mercedes, then walked back to my car.

I called Dox. “They were at church. My guess is that they’re on their way to a meal now. Let me know where they’re heading and I’ll stay with them. This might be our chance, too, so be ready to move.”

“Already am.”

With Dox apprising me of the direction they were taking, I was able to follow them without maintaining a visual. It turned out I was right about the meal. They stopped in the Ayala Center, a sparkling mega-mall almost across the street from the Peninsula. I got to the mall only a minute behind them, and took my best guess, based on where they had parked, on where they had gone inside. From there, it was mostly a matter of checking restaurants. It took me only a few minutes to find them, in the main food court on the third floor. They were sitting in front of a place called World Chicken, already working on a meal. The bodyguard was standing off to the side. I picked him up in my peripheral vision, but gave no sign that I was aware of him. I felt confident he hadn’t noticed me. The area was crowded with shoppers and diners and I had plenty of cover.

I called Dox. “I’m on him again. They’re at the Ayala Center, right across the street from you. Walk over and you’ll be here in less than ten minutes.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Switch to the commo gear when you get here.”

“Roger that.”

I bought a coffee from one of the vendors and sat down on the other side of the food court. After a few minutes, I heard Dox.

“I’m here,” he said. “First-floor atrium. Where are you?”

“A place called Glorietta Food Choices, third-floor Glorietta. One floor under one of the cineplexes, right next to a video game arcade. I’m sitting near the windows, farthest from the escalators. Our friend is getting lunch ten feet in front of the escalator. Guard is staying with them. Come up and move to your left right away and he won’t see you. Then stay at the periphery until you ID the players. I don’t want him to recognize you from the hotel.”

“Roger that.”

A minute later, I saw Dox enter. He circled wide as I had suggested, keeping the crowd between himself and the principals. I saw his eyes move past me without stopping.

I realized that Manny hadn’t taken a restroom break since church. I was thinking that at some point, maybe after lunch, he was going to heed a call of nature. The bodyguard would be watching for anyone moving in after him. But it wouldn’t occur to him that some antisocial someone might be in there already.

I felt a small wave of adrenaline coming ashore.

“Hey,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“There’s a men’s room on this floor. I’m going to wait inside it. I have a feeling our friend is going to go after he finishes his lunch. With luck, he’ll come alone.”

“I’ll watch your back, partner.”

“Good.”

Restrooms are nice because they’re one of the last urban places where you can’t find a security camera. I would wait inside, come up behind him, break his neck, and be out the door before he hit the floor. There were no cameras in the vicinity of the restroom, so my entrance and exit would go unrecorded. No one would check on Manny for at least two minutes, and probably more like five, giving Dox and me plenty of time to slip away unnoticed. Not quite the level of naturalness that the Israelis were hoping for, or that I would have liked to be paid for, but I thought it would do. The police can be as lazy as anyone else, and for anyone disinclined to fill out a lot of paperwork, a broken neck would be easier to file under “slip and fall” or “accident” than would a bullet hole in the forehead. The main thing was that no one would be able to attribute it to my client.

I imagined Manny’s family, waiting for him to return. Two minutes becomes three, three becomes four. Someone makes a joke about how Daddy must have fallen in. The woman goes to the door and calls for him. There’s no answer. She feels confused, possibly a little concerned. She pokes her head inside and sees Manny on the floor, his head at an impossible angle. She screams. The boy comes running. He stops at his mother’s leg and looks through the door she’s holding open. The image carves itself into his brain and never, ever leaves him.

I heard Dox’s voice in the earpiece: “You all right, partner?”

I looked around the food court. “Yeah, fine. Why?”

“You looked a little spooked there, for a while. Thought maybe you saw something I didn’t.”

“I’m all right.”

“Well, you’ve got company, coming up from behind you. I was afraid you hadn’t noticed.”

“What kind of company?”

“The kind that’s wearing a big bulge under the back of a suit jacket.”

“Bodyguard?”

“That’s right.”

I wondered how he had managed to get a gun inside. He must have been licensed. Manny had been coming to Manila for a long time and was probably well connected.

“Tell me if I need to turn, let him know I see him coming.”

“I think you’re okay. His hands are empty. But he’s definitely coming to check you out.”

I knew what had likely drawn the man’s attention. It wasn’t something I did. It was something I am.

No one can completely obscure the signs of a profound acquaintance with violence. The obvious ones are the hard cases. These are men who’ve lived through the shit and have no ability, and certainly no inclination, to hide the predacious air such survival conveys. This type, which includes gangbangers, ex-cons, and a certain breed of former soldier, gives off the strongest, most distinctive vibe, and is the easiest to detect.

There’s another type, too, as intimate, if not more so, with violence as the first, but better aware of the scent they now carry and more inclined and better able to conceal it. This type, which includes your average undercover operator, is harder to detect, but is often noticeable anyway not so much by the presence of a particular vibe as by the absence of any vibe at all. These people have become aware of the danger signals they put out and have reacted, or in a sense overreacted, by retracting everything. Within the energy of a given social environment, these men show up as an absence, a missing something, like gray in a color canvas, or a black hole against a tableau of stars.

The third type is the hardest to pick up, and is probably unrecognizable to the first two and certainly to civilians. It, too, includes men who have been forged in violence, but who also are natural camouflage artists, chameleons. These men hide their predator’s mark not so much by trying to retract the vibe, but by concealing it behind a new persona that they recognize in civilians and then imitate and project like a hologram. I know this type because I call it my own.

But even the third type is detectable sometimes, at certain moments, if you know what to look for. I find it impossible to articulate just what gives the chameleons away. Sometimes it’s something in the eyes, something that doesn’t fit with the clothes, the gait, the speech patterns. Sometimes it’s something that feels like a ripple at the edge of the persona, a not-quite-perfect fit in the façade. Whatever it is, it’s something the intuitive mind can flag, but that remains too subtle for the conscious mind to label. And as I sat in the food court, troubled by my thoughts, something must have surfaced in my expression, and it was this the man coming toward me must have keyed on and felt worth examining more closely.

Operators don’t let people move in from their blind side, so if I didn’t turn or otherwise let him know I was aware of his approach, it might help persuade him to ignore whatever had caught his attention, to conclude that I was a civilian after all. He might then simply move on after taking a sniff. Or, if he got too close and forced me to act, he would be less likely to be properly prepared for what he encountered.

“How close?” I asked, without moving my lips. I picked up a packet of sugar, tore it open, and started pouring it into the coffee cup. If you’re trying not to be spotted, it helps to do mundane things, and, if possible, to think mundane thoughts. Don’t ask me why, but it does.

“Eight yards. Seven. Six…”

“Hands?”

“Still empty. Four yards.”

At four yards, I should have heard his footfalls. Either he was naturally stealthy, or he was deliberately approaching quietly. Either way, I knew I was dealing with something more than typical rent-a-cop security.

“Three yards. He’s stopped, next to a big old potted plant for partial concealment. Hands are still empty. I don’t think he knows what to make of you, but I don’t think he wants to be friends, either.”

I busied myself swirling sugar into the coffee with a wooden stirrer, thinking, Hmmm, I hope this tastes good, I prefer my coffee black, well, this coffee was fairly bitter anyway, maybe it’s an arabica, yeah, dark-roasted, I wonder what country it’s from.. .

I heard Dox’s voice again: “All right, he’s heading off. Must have decided you weren’t interesting after all.”

I took a sip of the coffee. Actually, with the sugar it was pretty good. “I’m not,” I said.

I heard him laugh.

When the bodyguard had moved off, I got up and walked away, shuffling like a typical Japanese sarariman. I sensed him watching me go, knowing that he would take my exit as further confirmation that I didn’t present a threat.

But at the far end of the food court, with the arcade between us, I ducked into the restroom. The room was rectangular, about five meters by six, with the entrance on one of the short ends. Three urinals along one long side; two stalls on the other, sinks against the connecting wall. Two Filipino teenagers were zipping up when I came in and left a moment later.

I went into the corner stall and closed the door.

“I’m in,” I said. “Tell me when he’s moving.”

“Roger that.”

I waited ten minutes. Then: “They’re getting up. Looks like he’s saying good-bye to the woman and the boy. Yeah, they’re heading down the escalator.”

They were splitting up. Good.

“Bodyguard’s staying, though. No surprise there.”

“No, no surprise.”

A moment passed. Then: “He’s coming toward your position. I think your hunch was good.”

I felt another adrenaline wave roll in, bigger than the first. “With the bodyguard?”

“No, he’s hanging back. Okay, our man is walking down the corridor to the restroom right now. Ten more seconds and he’s inside.”

“Good.”

I heard the bathroom door open. I took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled all of it through my mouth, its passage smooth and silent in counterpart to the thudding of my heart.

I looked through the gap alongside the stall door and saw Manny. He walked over to a urinal. His back was to me.

I opened the stall door. I took two silent steps forward.

Dox, in my ear: “Shit, partner, the woman and the boy are back. The boy’s heading toward you. Must have told his mom he needs to take a leak.”

Shit. Shit.

I started back into the stall. I heard no sound, but adrenaline was closing down my hearing and there must have been some noise of which I was unaware, because Manny turned his head and looked at me.

In the moment before the kill, I never look at the target’s face. My gaze tends to focus on the torso, the movement of shoulders, hips, and hands. Doing so offers the advantage of spotting defensive movement, and of avoiding having to see the target’s eyes, his expression, his fucking humanity.

But this time I looked. Maybe it was morbid curiosity. Maybe it was misplaced instinct, something that would have been noble in other circumstances, a desire to face the consequences of my deeds. Regardless, I looked.

Our eyes met. In his I saw earnestness, perhaps some surprise. No recognition. Not yet any fear.

The door opened. It was the boy.

And then I froze.

There’s no other way to put it. My thoughts were clear. Likewise, my perception. But I couldn’t move my body. I seemed rooted to the spot. I thought, absurdly, Move! Move!

Nothing happened.

I felt beads of sweat popping out on my forehead. Still I couldn’t move.

Manny looked at me, his surprise fading into concern, then to fear, then to resolution. He pulled himself back into his pants, and his right hand dipped into his front pants pocket. The word knife! flashed in my mind, but still my limbs were locked.

But it must have been some sort of panic button, not a knife. Because a second later, I heard Dox in my ear: “Shit, partner, something’s up. The bodyguard’s heading in fast.”

I couldn’t answer. I heard him say, “Are you there, man? Say something!” Then, “Fuck, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I guess you can’t answer. All right, I’m coming in.”

Manny started backing toward the door. He turned and swept the boy up in his arms. A moment later, the door flew open and the bodyguard burst inside, nearly running into the two of them. He saw my face and pulled up short, recognizing me, realizing he’d been wrong to dismiss me earlier, knowing now that he should have listened to his gut.

He shoved Manny and the boy to his right and reached behind and under his own jacket. Sweat was running down my face but I still couldn’t move a muscle.

The door burst inward again and Dox barreled into the room. The bodyguard turned, his gun coming out.

And then, finally, when I saw that he was going to get the drop on Dox, my paralysis broke. Roaring something unintelligible, I took two steps forward and grabbed the gun with both hands as it came out and around. My decades of gripping and twisting the judo and jujitsu gi have given me abnormal hand strength, and once I had gotten ahold of the guard’s gun I knew it was mine. I twisted hard, keeping the muzzle pointed away from me and Dox. The guard cried out and his hand gave. The gun went off as I took it away from him, the small room suddenly reverberating with the report.

Dox slung an arm around the guard’s neck from behind and yanked him off his feet. The man’s hands flew to Dox’s massive forearm and his feet kicked wildly. Manny and the boy slipped past them. I looked for a shot at Manny, but Dox and the guard were in the way. Manny yanked the door open and he and the boy spilled out of the room.

Dox transitioned to hadaka jime, a sleeper hold, and the guard’s struggles intensified, his body twisting and his legs churning the air.

The door crashed inward again. Two men, both Caucasian, burst into the room. Both had guns drawn.

“Down!” I shouted at Dox. But he was still struggling with the bodyguard. Still, he did the next best thing: he spun, pulling the guard in front of him like a shield.

Both men dropped to one knee, reducing the size of the target they offered, the smoothness of the move demonstrating training and experience. Dox and the bodyguard were between us-in what was about to become the crossfire.

A crazy thought zigged through my brain: How the fuck are they getting these guns in here?

His considerable muscles no doubt supercharged with adrenaline, Dox dropped one hand to the back of the guard’s belt and heaved him into the two men. He used the force of the throw to hurl himself to the floor in the other direction.

Both men tried to get clear of the oncoming mass of the bodyguard. Only one succeeded-the one nearest the door, who jerked away just in time. His partner took the impact. But in avoiding the bodyguard, the first man had been forced to momentarily give up his focus. And in that moment, I put two rounds into his chest.

The other man was on his back now, he and the bodyguard hairballed up against the wall. He was trying to reacquire me, but too late. I swiveled and squeezed off two more shots. The first hit the bodyguard in the back of the neck. The second caught the downed man in the shoulder, jerking him partway around. He recovered, started bringing the gun toward me again.

No way, shitbird, it is not your turn now. You don’t get a turn.

I moved in, keeping the gunsight on him, and pressed the trigger back twice more. The first shot caught him in the sternum, the second in the face. I tracked to the bodyguard-Pause. Breathe. Aim-and put one in the back of his head, then a final one in the head of the man I’d shot in the chest.

The room was suddenly, eerily quiet. My ears were ringing. The air was acrid with gunsmoke.

Dox was looking up at me from the floor. His eyes were wide. “Damn, man, where did you learn to shoot like that?”

I stepped over to the bodyguard and felt along his belt. There, a spare magazine. I pulled it free, ejected the current magazine, and popped in the new one. I stuck the gun in the back of my pants where it would be concealed by my shirttail. The used magazine went into my pocket. There was no time to wipe these items down and otherwise ensure that none of my DNA or anything else incriminating had adhered to them. Besides, from where we were to where we needed to get, the gun and the rounds left in the first magazine might prove handy.

“Come on,” I said, myself again. I would think about what had happened to me later. “We’ve only got a few seconds. Follow my lead now.”

“Your lead?” he asked, coming to his feet.

I struggled not to get impatient. It seemed so obvious to me. “Look, some nutcase was in here shooting up the place. Security guards are going to be converging any second. We’re running from it, same as anyone would.”

“Okay, you’re persuading me now.”

We each pulled a hat from a pocket. Mine was a baseball cap; Dox’s was for fishing. Witnesses tend to remember gross details only, such as shirt color or the presence of a hat, and elementary precautions like ours can save a lot of grief later.

We moved to the door. “Ready?” I asked.

“Right behind you, partner.”

I looked at him. He was grinning.

“Goddamnit,” I said, “we were the victims, remember? You need to look scared.”

“Man, I am scared!”

“Try to show it better,” I growled.

“Fuck, man, I’m telling you this is how I look when I’m scared!”

Our eyes locked for a moment. His grin didn’t budge.

I shook my head and said, “Here we go.”

I opened the door. The corridor was clear. No sign of Manny or the boy. Just outside the corridor, though, the mood among the dining crowd had clearly been disrupted. The people with good sense and experience with the sound of indoor gunfire were wisely heading down the escalators. The curious, the deniers, and the simply stupid were lined up and gawking. For their benefit, I turned my head back toward the bathroom and shouted, “They’re shooting in there! Somebody call a guard!”

I heard Dox add, “I’m scared! I’m scared!”

An unhelpful thought flashed through my mind-My partner is insane-but I kept moving. My quick scan of the crowd hadn’t revealed my biggest concern-that individual or handful of individuals you will always encounter in a crisis who, sometimes by instinct but more often by experience, are not fleeing and not in denial, but instead calmly watching and evaluating, and perhaps looking for an opportunity to intervene. Ordinarily, these people simply make better than average witnesses later on, although sometimes they can access some deep-seated protective impulse and actually attack. I kept my head down and avoided anyone’s eyes, and we joined the crowds hurrying down the escalator. In my peripheral vision, I saw two white-shirted security guards heading up opposite us. Neither had drawn his gun; they weren’t sure what the trouble was and weren’t yet taking it fully seriously.

On the second floor, the crowd was less agitated but still distracted. People were looking around, trying to figure out what had happened, what was the disturbance, whether they needed to do anything or if they could just get back to their shopping.

We moved laterally, heading in the direction of the next set of down escalators. As we walked, we each automatically removed the hats, then, one at a time, pulled off and balled up our outer shirts, which were navy blue. Underneath we both wore a second shirt, in cream-typical Filipino attire.

“We need to split up,” I said. “Big white guy, Asian guy, that’s about as much as people are going to remember, but it’s enough to ID us right now.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Go straight to the airport. I’ll get the gear from the hotel. We’ll meet at the backup in Bangkok.”

“You saved my life back there, partner. You really did.”

“Bullshit.”

“That bodyguard would have drilled me clean if you hadn’t gotten to him first. I saw his eyes, and he meant business.”

I shook my head. There was no time to explain. And I still didn’t understand what had happened to me in there.

“Think those guys were Agency?” he asked. “They sure got there fast and they moved like pros.”

The agitation was behind us now; the next set of escalators, and the exits below, just a few meters away.

“That’s one of the things we need to find out,” I said. “But first we have to get out of Manila. I doubt Manny is going to report this to the authorities-it would mean too much attention for him. But I don’t want to stick around waiting to find out.”

We reached the escalators and paused for a moment.

“You go down here,” I said. “I want to lose the gun and the mag. I’ll drop them in a toilet tank in one of the bathrooms. With a little luck I can find some bleach or other cleaning supplies in a janitor’s cart and douse them first.”

He grinned like a schoolboy about to brag of a prank or some other exploit. “I guess I need to break my date with the girl at the concession stand,” he said.

In the craziness of the moment, half of me wanted to laugh. The other half wanted to strangle him. I looked at him for a moment, shaking my head, and in the instant before I walked away his grin actually broadened.

FOUR

THE ARRIVALS AREA of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport was crowded, bustling, and noisy. Tourists in tee-shirts and shorts jostled with haredi, the tremblers before God, in their black suits and hats. Announcements in English and Hebrew reverberated off the long concrete walls. The sun was setting beyond the western windows, and for a moment the terminal’s interior burned headache bright with its sideways orange glow.

Delilah no longer felt comfortable here. Although her employer arranged for her to return at least annually to visit her parents and other relatives, the years of living a foreign cover had pulled her inexorably from the shores of the Levant, farther and farther until finally she had lost sight of land. This was her country, but she was no longer supposed to be here. The extraordinary security measures that accompanied these visits-false papers, disguise, countersurveillance-were testament to that. She was more comfortable now ordering pain au chocolat in French in Paris than she was giving instructions to a taxi driver in Hebrew in Tel Aviv. She told herself that this was the natural and perhaps not undesirable consequence of her commitment to her work, but still it was odd, to feel that you were forgetting who you are, or anyway who you used to be. The point of it all could wind up seeming so remote, so abstract. She wondered at times whether other operators were similarly afflicted, but knew she would be wise to discuss her concerns with no one. Regardless, she understood that this growing sense of estrangement from things that had once seemed inalienably hers would be known, in other endeavors, simply as the cost of doing business.

Her business was what the domestic media called sikul memukad, or “focused prevention,” a construction she preferred to the more straightforward “assassination.” The former was, to her thinking, more descriptive, and more associated with its purpose of saving lives than with its means of snuffing them out. She wasn’t one of the trigger pullers, but at times she wished she were. After all, the men with the guns had the easy side of the division of labor. They never had to know the target. They didn’t have to spend time with him. They certainly didn’t have to sleep with him. They got close only once, only for an instant, and then they were done and gone. Emotionally, it was the difference between parting after a one-night stand, on the one hand, and dissolving a marriage, on the other.

Still, she was quietly proud of her sacrifices, proud that she made them for her own reasons and not for the recognition of her peers. Recognition, that was funny. Notoriety would be more like it. Her superiors acknowledged her unique talents and employed them with ruthless calculation, but deep down, she knew, they looked at her as somehow stained by what they called upon her to do. The best among management was merely uncomfortable with a woman who wormed her way into the lives of her victims, who slept with the monsters night after night, who knew even as she took them into her body that she was guiding them to their deaths. Management’s worst, she suspected, thought whore.

Sometimes she felt coldly angry at the men who harbored such thoughts; other times, she almost pitied them. Their problem was that they couldn’t get beyond the limits of their own inherently male experience. Men were simple: they were propelled by lust. And so they assumed that women should be the same. That a woman might sleep with a man for her own, more calculating reasons, even reasons of state security, put them off balance. It made them wonder if they were as vulnerable as the woman’s victims, and this made them fidgety. If the woman was attractive, and they secretly desired her, the fidgeting became a squirm. Whore was their way of reassuring themselves that they were the ones in control.

She wondered why they had called her in this time. Things were going well with her current op, a straightforward “honey trap” of a certain Paris-based Saudi diplomat who had become distracted from his Wahabi religious convictions by her long, naturally blond hair, and the way it cascaded around her shoulders when she chose to wear it down; by her blue eyes, endlessly enthralled, of course, by the man’s awkward palaver; by her tantalizing Western décolletage and the porcelain skin beneath it. The man was smitten with her story of an absentee husband and her longing for true love, and was therefore nearly ready to hear the tearful tale that someone had learned of their illicit passion and was now blackmailing her with exposure-exposure that would of course encompass the Saudi himself-unless he could take certain actions, trivial in themselves, but which over time would compromise him further and further until her people would own him completely. Why recall her when she was so close? They had used the ordinary communications channels, with no abort signals, so she knew she wasn’t in any danger, that the current op wasn’t compromised. But that only made the reasons behind the recall even more mysterious.

Her papers were in perfect order, and her Hebrew, though no longer her primary language, was still native, so she and her carry-on bag passed quickly through customs. She caught a cab outside the terminal and headed directly downtown. She needed to get to the Crowne Plaza on Hayarkon, a nice, anonymous business hotel and the site of the meeting to which she had been directed. The participants would arrive and depart separately to keep her affiliation sterile, and they wouldn’t use the same hotel for months. After the meeting, she would call her parents and go see them, then spend the night at their house in Jaffa. She never announced these visits; they understood that her work, whatever it was, precluded notice. But business first.

She changed cabs several times and used a variety of other techniques to ensure that she wasn’t being followed. When she was satisfied, she made her way to the hotel. She took the elevator directly to the fourth floor and headed toward room 416. She didn’t have to look hard-there were two crew-cut men outside it, each with an earpiece and an Uzi. The obvious security was unusual. Something was definitely up.

One of the men examined her ID. Apparently satisfied, he opened the door and then immediately closed it behind her. Inside, three men were sitting around a table. Two she recognized-Boaz and Gil. The third was older by perhaps two decades, and it took her a moment to place him. She had met him only once.

Good God. The director. What was going on here?

“Delilah, shalom,” the older man said, getting up from his chair. He walked over and shook her hand, then continued in Hebrew, “Or should I say, bonjour? Would you prefer to use French?”

She liked that he asked. Moving in and out of cover, out of two separate identities, was stressful. She shook her head and answered him in Hebrew. “No. She’s not supposed to be here. Let’s let her sleep. She’ll wake up when she’s back in Paris.”

He nodded and smiled. “And then this will all seem like a dream.” He gestured to the other men. “You know Boaz? Gil?”

“We’ve worked together, yes,” she said. They stood, and the three of them shook hands.

Boaz was one of their best IED-improvised explosive devices-experts. She liked him a lot, as everybody did. He was serious when the situation called for it, but his default persona was boyish, at times mischievous, and he had an easy laugh that could almost be a giggle. He never came on to her, and in fact treated her as much like a sister as a colleague, which made him rare in the organization and, had the director not been present, deserving of a hug.

Gil was different-gaunt, moody, and intense. People admired Gil, but he also made them uncomfortable, and both for the same reason: he was extremely good at what he did. On two of Delilah’s assignments, Gil had been the shooter. In both instances, he had emerged from the dark to put a.22 round through the target’s eye and then disappeared without a ripple. He worked with others when he had to, but at heart, Delilah knew, he was a loner, and never more in his element than when he was silently stalking his prey.

Once, in a safe room in Vienna, he had made a pass at her. His move had been crudely direct, and Delilah hadn’t liked the underlying assumption of entitlement and expectation of fulfillment. She knew the sex would have given him a kind of power over her-that in fact this was part of the reason he wanted it-and she wasn’t about to surrender one of her few mysteries, her few levers of influence, with a colleague. Her rebuff had been as unambiguous as his proposition. It shouldn’t have been a big deal-he was hardly the first-but on the few occasions on which she’d seen him since then, he always looked as though he was remembering, and not without resentment. There was a breed of man that was inclined to feel humiliated by a woman’s demurral, and she suspected that Gil was such a specimen.

The table was set up for four, which told her they weren’t expecting anyone else. They all sat down. The director gestured to the sandwiches. “A little something to eat?” he asked.

She shook her head, not yet comfortable. “They served dinner on the plane.”

Gil took a sandwich and bit into it. Boaz picked up the teapot and smiled at her. “Tea, then?” he asked.

She smiled back and extended him her cup. “Thank you.”

Boaz poured for everyone. They all sat silently for a few moments, sipping. Then the director said, “Delilah, let me explain why you’ve been called in. You may have been wondering, eh?”

She nodded. “A bit, yes.”

“We’ve had a problem in Manila. We think you can help solve it.”

We’ve had a problem, she thought. Wasn’t that what those Apollo 13 astronauts had said as their spaceship was breaking apart? And his use of the inclusive pronoun, that was interesting, and vaguely worrisome, too.

“All right,” she said, wondering what was coming.

“Recently we used a contractor for a job in Manila. A part-Japanese fellow named John Rain.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, I brokered that introduction.”

She wondered for a moment why the director was playing dumb with her. If the problem were serious enough to warrant his presence at this meeting, he would have been fully briefed on all the details, including Delilah’s early involvement. He must have been testing her, looking for opportunities to gauge her reactions.

“Yes, of course,” he went on. “You met Rain in Macau. The Belghazi op.”

“Yes.”

“Everything we were able to learn about this man, including your own evaluation, indicated that he was extremely reliable.”

Including your own evaluation. Something had gone wrong, and she was going to take some heat for it.

“Yes,” she said again, sensing that it would be better to say less.

He paused to take a sip of tea, and she recognized that he was attempting to draw her out with his silence. She resisted the urge to speak and instead took a sip of tea herself. After a moment, he went on.

“The man Rain was hired to remove is named Manheim Lavi. He goes by ‘Manny.’ An Israeli national, currently residing in South Africa. He has contacts in the Philippines, and, it now seems, a second family there. Recently we learned that he had turned traitor. He has been sharing bomb-making expertise-extensive expertise-with our enemies.”

The director wouldn’t be telling her any of this if she didn’t need to know. Nothing formal was being said, but she was being brought in on the op. He had mentioned her “evaluation” to let her know she was partly to blame for whatever the problem was; the information he was now sharing was to inform her she would be responsible for the problem’s resolution.

She looked at Gil. “Why did you use a contractor? Why outsource the operation?”

“Manny is connected,” Gil replied. “We believe he’s a CIA asset. The CIA doesn’t take kindly to ‘friendly’ intelligence services erasing its people.”

“So instead you brought in a contractor who screwed something up?”

Gil’s eyes narrowed slightly, and she smiled at him to let him know he had definitely just received a “Fuck you” for talking down to her. And her response served another purpose: it indicated to the director that, although she knew Rain, she had no interest in downplaying whatever his screwup had been or in otherwise protecting him.

“You told us he would be reliable,” Gil said, and she was gratified by the touch of petulance in his voice.

The director waved a hand like a father dismissing a squabble among children at the dinner table. “It doesn’t matter how we got here. What matters is what we do next.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment, and the director continued. “Rain tried to hit Manny in a restroom in a Manila shopping mall. Manny got away, but Rain killed three other people. A bodyguard.” He paused and looked at her. “And two CIA officers.”

He paused to let it sink in. Delilah said nothing, but thought, Oh my God. She asked, “Can the CIA connect the mess to us?”

“That,” the director said, “is the question.”

“Here’s what we know,” Boaz said. “Rain called in yesterday to brief us. He told us he had followed Manny and his family into a Manila shopping mall. Manny was with a woman and a boy. When the woman and the boy seemed to leave the scene, Rain anticipated that Manny would use the restroom, and moved there ahead of him to wait. Manny came in, but then the boy showed up. When Rain saw the boy, he hesitated.”

“Apparently, Rain won’t harm women or children,” Gil added.

Delilah looked at him. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“It depends on how badly he’s screwed things up.”

Delilah turned back to Boaz. “And then?”

“Then the bodyguard burst in. Rain thinks Manny hit a panic button. Rain disarmed the guard just as the two CIA men arrived. Rain didn’t know who they were, and still doesn’t, so far as we know. But they were armed, too.”

Gil said, “Rain managed to kill everyone but Manny.”

Delilah looked at him. “The boy?”

Gil shrugged as though this was irrelevant. “Not the boy, either.”

She looked at Boaz again. “How good a look did Manny and the boy get at Rain?”

“Rain says he’s not sure.”

Gil added, “That’s bullshit. How could this have gone down without someone seeing his face? Someone got a good look, and Rain knows it. Otherwise he would have just told us he got away clean. Anyway, it’s in his interest to downplay his exposure here. We have to assume if he acknowledges Manny got any kind of a look, it means Manny got a damn good look.”

She couldn’t argue with any of that. She nodded.

“So here’s what’s happening right now,” Gil went on. “Manny is freaked out. He’s sitting down with his CIA handlers. They’re showing him photos of known Asiatic operators. That should be a stack about what, three or four photos high? If they have pictures of Rain, and Manny can ID him, the CIA is going to be hunting for him. Hunting hard.”

She saw where this was going. A refrain started buzzing through her mind: Shit, shit, shit. She said nothing.

“Manny has lots of enemies,” Gil continued, “but I think we can safely assume that, when the CIA draws up a list, we’ll be at the top. So if they get to Rain, our status will change from ‘prime suspect’ to ‘proven culprit.’ ”

The room was silent for a moment. The director looked at Delilah and sighed. “You understand what’s at stake here?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Not just your career,” he went on. “Not just theirs.” He glanced at Boaz, then Gil, letting the comment sink in, then back to her. “Not just mine. We would only be the first casualties. The government would quickly and rightly sacrifice us to try to contain the damage. But if the damage couldn’t be contained… there’s no telling. It could affect billions of dollars in aid from the United States. Not to mention arms deliveries. Access to satellite imagery and other intelligence cooperation. Do you understand? This is not an organization problem. It’s a geopolitical problem. We have to get it under control.”

“I understand,” she said.

He nodded as though satisfied, then said, “Tell me, how well do you know this man?”

She should have seen this coming. Now she understood.

She shrugged. “Our paths crossed in Macau. Some people”-she looked at Gil-“wanted to take him out there because he was after Belghazi and might have killed him before we acquired what we were after. I argued there were better ways to manage him.”

“You were wrong,” Gil said. “It’s true things turned out well, but that was all luck. Rain might have killed Belghazi before we had what we needed.”

“I was managing him,” Delilah said, and immediately realized her mistake in letting Gil goad her.

“You spent time with him, then?” the director asked.

She shrugged again. “I told you, yes. I persuaded him to stand down for a while, for long enough. Then we tracked him to Rio. I traveled there and made the pitch. Boaz and Gil took it from there. This is all in the file.”

“How did you contact him at the time, again?” Gil asked.

Fuck Gil and his games. “Did you not review the file?” she asked, with an innocent smile.

He clenched his jaw and tried to recover. “It was an electronic bulletin board, wasn’t it?”

“Are you asking because you don’t remember? It’s not like you to forget details, Gil. Usually you remember everything.”

His jaw clenched again. She knew he would be hating her for one-upping him in front of the director, especially in this insinuating way, and at the moment the knowledge was deeply satisfying.

“Can you contact him now?” Gil asked, abandoning his losing game.

“I don’t know. I suppose so, if he’s kept the bulletin board and still checks it.”

Gil started to say something, but the director held up a hand. “Delilah. Do you know this man in any way not reflected in the file?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. Although of course she did, but damned if she would answer the question without at least having him endure the discomfort of asking it.

“Did you ever have a… personal relationship?”

She paused, then said, “I’m not going to answer that.”

In her peripheral vision, she saw both admiration and sympathy in Boaz’s eyes. In Gil’s she saw surprise that she would doom herself this way, something he would never have had the integrity to do himself. Poor Gil. He didn’t understand that her advantage in this game was that, for her, the stakes were so much lower. Gil was moving up in management. He wanted a career here. She knew that was impossible for her. In just a few years, she would be too old to do what she did, and then they would give her a desk job or a training position and she would be bypassed, ignored, and forgotten. Under the circumstances, what did she have to lose?

The director drummed his fingers on the table, then said, “I’m not asking you for personal reasons. I’m asking you professionally. Because the information will affect the way we proceed in a very serious matter.”

Delilah looked him in the eyes. “I’m still not going to answer. I’m not going to let you cross that line today. If I do, you’ll cross it again tomorrow.”

He looked at her for a long moment, then smiled at her chutzpah and pressed no further. She gave him credit for that. But why would he press? In her refusal, she had already answered his question.

Gil looked confused, then nonplussed. Had she actually just scored points with the director?

“Delilah,” Boaz said. “Do you think… Can you get close to Rain?”

“You mean, can I set him up?”

Boaz nodded.

“I’m not sure. I can try.”

The three of them settled slightly in their seats as though a bit of tension had been suddenly drained from their bodies, and in that instant she understood completely the nature of the conversation that had preceded her arrival: Do you think she slept with him? Will she do this? Can we trust her?

“But why do you need me?” she asked. “You’ve met him, presumably you have a means of contact?”

“If we ask for a meeting now,” Boaz said, “he’ll be suspicious. We need something to lower his guard.”

“He might be suspicious with me, too,” she said. “Under the circumstances.”

“We’re counting on you to dissolve his suspicions,” Gil said. “You’re the best at that.” His tone indicated that her abilities, although useful, also were somehow suspect.

She looked at him, but ignored the comment. “How are you going to do it?”

Gil waved as though it would be nothing. “You contact him. Go somewhere with him, a romantic getaway. When the moment is right, you contact me.”

“Who’s the shooter?”

“I am.”

“He knows your face. How are you going to get close?”

“He’ll never see me.”

She almost laughed. “You don’t understand who you’re dealing with.”

“He’s a fuckup. He’s going down.”

She thought of the way Rain had dealt with that guy in the elevator on Macau. He had gone from calmly talking to her to breaking the man’s neck without anything in between.

“If he sees you,” she said, “he’ll know I set him up.”

“Do it yourself, then.”

She didn’t answer.

“He won’t see me,” Gil said. “Anyway, you know how to handle yourself.”

There was a long silence. She was used to making hard decisions quickly and under pressure, and by the time the director spoke, she had already made up her mind.

“You’ll do this?” he asked, looking at her, his expression open, his tone affable.

“When have I ever refused?” she replied.

“Never,” Gil said, and in those two syllables she heard an echo of whore.

She looked at him. When she spoke, her voice was frozen silk.

“Well, there was one time, Gil.”

He flushed, and she smiled at him, twisting the knife.

The director, pretending to ignore what he fully understood, said, “It’s settled, then.”

FIVE

THE DAY AFTER the Manny debacle, I made my way to the Bangkok Baan Khanitha restaurant on Sukhumvit 23, the backup Dox and I had agreed upon in case things went sideways-as indeed they had.

I chose an indirect route to get to the restaurant, as much to indulge an incipient sense of nostalgia as for my usual security reasons. Sukhumvit, I saw, had changed enormously in the decades since the concentrated time I had spent here during the war, yet in its essential aspects it was still the same. There had been no high-rises back then, true, and certainly no glitzy shopping malls, and the traffic, although chaotic, had not yet reached today’s level of biblical-style calamity. But the smell of the place, the vibe, then and now, was all low-level commerce, much of it sexual. In my mind, Sukhumvit has always been about lasts: the last party of the last evening that everyone wants to prolong because tomorrow it’s back to the war; the last chance for nocturnal behavior that will surely be the source of regret in the light of the oncoming day; the last desperate stop for those women whose charms, and therefore their prices, have fallen short even of the standards of nearby Patpong.

I walked along Sukhumvit Road, letting the crowds carry me and flow past me, then carry me along again. My God, the area had grown. I’d been back several times since the war, of course, and had even done a job here once, a Japanese expat, but somehow my frame of reference, which was over three decades out of date, seemed unwilling to oblige the area’s changing topography. There were vendors back then, yes, but not this many. Now they had overgrown the sidewalk and were selling every manner of bric-a-brac: ersatz luggage, knockoff watches, pirated DVDs, tee-shirts proclaiming “Same-Same” and “No Money, No Honey.” Hawkers wheedled and cajoled, competing with the hum of the crowd, the roar of passing bus engines, the distinctive, sine-wave growl of motor scooters and tuk-tuks weaving back and forth through the constipated traffic. I smelled diesel fumes and curry, and thought, Yes, same-same, it all really is, and was surprised at an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss I couldn’t name. Nothing looked the same here, but to me it smelled the same, and the dissonance was confusing.

I walked on. And then, with a burst of mixed pleasure and horror, I came upon an artifact: the Miami Hotel, which was still here at the top of Soi 13. Squalid and moldering from the moment it went up in the late sixties to house U.S. troops on R &R, the hotel now felt like an architectural middle finger extended to the rich, upscale Bangkok that was growing up around it. As I moved past, I caught a glimpse of a grizzled expat looking out from one of its windows onto the street below, his expression that of a man serving a life sentence for a crime he doesn’t understand, and I thought it possible that I had just seen one of the original inhabitants, as stubborn and anachronistic as the hotel itself. I walked. Arabs and Sikhs in turbans smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee under the corrugated eaves of collapsing storefronts. Prostitutes lurked in the vestibules of massage parlors, passersby ignoring their sad eyes and desperate smiles. An amputee, filthy and in rags, rattled a cup at me from the sidewalk where he lay. I gave him some baht and moved on. Half a block later, the vendors’ tables parted momentarily and I saw a sign for the Thermae Bar & Coffee House, the lowest of the low, which had once housed the women who serviced the Miami’s soldiers. I wondered if its patrons still called it, appropriately and inevitably, the Termite. The original building, it seemed, had been torn down, but the Termite had been reborn, demonstrating in its reincarnation that although the body might fade and die, the spirit, for better or worse, is eternal.

I passed a vendor selling knives, and took the opportunity to arm myself with a knockoff Emerson folder with a wooden handle and a four-inch, partially serrated blade. For a long time I had gotten by without carrying a weapon, and I had liked it this way. For one thing, you tend to comport yourself differently when you’re armed, and there are people who can spot the signs. Also, my lawsey, lawsey civilian cover would have been compromised somewhat if I’d been picked up carrying, say, a folding karambit or other concealed cutlery. And then there’s the matter of blood, which can get all over you and severely compromise your attempts to blend with the crowd after a close encounter. But I sensed that the balance of costs and benefits was changing now. I wasn’t as fast as I once was, for one thing. Or as durable, for another. I wondered whether what had happened to me in that restroom with Manny, also, was in part the consequence of age. I had needed Dox to bail me out there, as he had at Kwai Chung a year earlier. On top of all this, being back in Sukhumvit was itself a reminder that I had aged in the intervening years, and that things I had once ably done with my hands might now be accomplished more effectively with tools.

I caught a tuk-tuk for the final leg over to Sukhumvit 23. Dox and I were supposed to meet at the restaurant at noon, but I arrived early to scope the area out, as I always do on those rare occasions when I agree to a face-to-face meeting. A sneak preview tends to prevent surprises. In this case, though, the surprise was already waiting for me, in the form of Dox. Resplendent in a cream-colored silk shirt, he was sitting in one of the cushioned teak chairs at the back corner of the main room sipping some tropical concoction from a tall glass through a long straw, and looking, I had to admit, utterly at ease and at home in his surroundings.

“I knew you’d get here early,” he said, grinning. He put down the drink and got up from the table. “Didn’t want to be rude, keeping you waiting.”

I walked over, looking around the restaurant as I moved. The clientele was about half local, half foreign, and all seemingly more interested in the Baan Khanitha’s excellent traditional Thai food than in whatever might be going on around them. I realized, though, that I was doing my security check out of habit, not because I thought Dox would have brought trouble. And then I was surprised, almost stunned, to realize that I trusted someone this way. I looked at him, and my discomfort must have showed, because he raised his eyebrows and said, “You all right, man?”

I gave him a nod that was half exasperation, half pleasure at seeing him after our scrape in Manila. “Fine. I’m fine.”

I reached for his hand, but he ignored it, instead clapping his arms around me and pulling me in for a hug. Jesus, I thought. I patted his back awkwardly.

He stepped back from me, looked at my face, and laughed. “Hey, man, you’re blushing! You don’t have a crush on me or something, do you?”

I ignored him. “Any problems on the way over?”

He laughed again. “No problems. Hey, it’s good to see you, man, even if you’re starting to have unnatural feelings for me. You want to eat here, or should we go somewhere else? I recommend we stay. The poo nim pad gra pow is the best in the city.”

I looked around again. Dox might have known his poo nim, whatever that was, but his tradecraft wasn’t always up to my standards. Although in fairness, I don’t know whose would be.

“You’re leaving your cell phone off, right?” I asked.

“Yeah, Mom, I’m leaving it off. Disappointing all the ladies who want to reach me.”

“You sure you weren’t followed?”

He rolled his eyes. “C’mon now, you’ve got to get over this lone-wolf, international-man-of-mystery shit. You can’t live like that twenty-four-seven. It’ll bum you out, man, I’ve seen it happen.”

“Does that mean you weren’t followed?”

He frowned. “Yeah, that’s what it means. You know, I might not be quite the urban ghost you can be, but I do know how to be careful. I’ve made my way doing this fucked-up thing of ours for a long time on my lonesome, and I’m still breathing even though there are plenty of people who’d rather I wasn’t.”

“Weren’t.”

He clasped his hands to his head and said, “Somebody save me, my partner’s a schoolmarm!”

I raised my hands in surrender. “All right, all right.”

“ ‘John Rain, killer and grammarian.’ You ought to put it on a business card.”

“All right,” I said.

“ ‘Use the subjunctive correctly or he’ll take your life.’ ”

Jesus, I thought, looking around. “Look, let’s just eat here,” I said.

“Well, thank God. I’m starving.”

We sat down at his table. The waiter came over and Dox ordered the food. He knew what he was doing-even his Thai seemed passable. We also asked for a couple of iced coffees. It had been a long few days.

“Okay, what’s the status?” Dox asked, when the waiter had departed. “I hope the Israelites aren’t pissed.”

I had told him who the client was. They, of course, didn’t know about Dox. They didn’t need to.

“I’m not entirely sure,” I said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning as soon as I was out of Manila, I contacted my friends Boaz and Gil. I told them what had happened. They seemed to take it in stride. They were disappointed that Manny got away, and concerned that he would harden his defenses now. But they were reassured that I had made it out of there without further incident.”

“You mean without being caught and implicating them.”

“Yes.”

“They’re probably a little despondent that you weren’t just killed in the fracas.”

“It’s just business.”

“Wishing it is just business. Trying to bring it about is different.”

“I don’t think we need to worry about that. It wouldn’t be worth it to them. It looks like I’m clear of it, so they are, too.”

“Yeah? Whatever happened to the professional paranoid we all know and love?”

“I’m being careful. I told you what I think is likely, but I don’t assume anything.”

“What did you tell them happened?”

“That two unknown players that I hadn’t managed to spot popped onto the scene and turned it into a shooting gallery. That said players were good and might have been CIA.”

“What did they say to that?”

“Like I said, they were concerned. But they’ll verify the body count easily enough. It’s in all the English-language Philippine newspapers today.”

“You checked?”

I nodded. “Spent the morning online.”

“Well, what do the papers say?”

“One dead Filipino, two dead foreigners whose identities are being checked. Witnesses seem to think there were two shooters. Both Asian.”

He smiled. “Both Asian, huh?”

I nodded. “Even in the best of circumstances, people don’t see straight. Add adrenal stress, they don’t remember what the hell they saw. They could be searching for Martians right now. Boaz and Gil are looking into the dead men’s identities, too. When they learn more, they’ll tell us. In the meantime, we just have to monitor the situation and wait.”

The waiter brought over our food and departed. Poo nim turned out to be sautéed soft-shelled crab. Dox hadn’t been exaggerating. It was excellent, soft and fresh and redolent of basil.

“I think they were Agency,” Dox said.

“They could have been, I don’t know. You didn’t see them before heading into the bathroom?”

“Sure, I saw them. They were sitting in the food court, just the two of them. But they didn’t look like hitters to me. Although I admit I might have been distracted by what was going on with Manny and the bodyguard, and not paying attention to the little signs like I might have otherwise. What about you?”

“The same. Damn, they were low-key, I’ll give them that.” I dug into the crab. “My guess is they were hooked up with Manny in some way. They weren’t there to harm him, otherwise they would have looked to drop him as he exited the bathroom, like I did. They were trying to protect him.”

“Yeah, I kind of picked up on that. More bodyguards?”

“Maybe. But we hadn’t seen them earlier. I think they were there for a meeting.”

“With Manny?”

“Yeah. They didn’t look like locals, so figure they were staying at a hotel-maybe the Peninsula, the Mandarin Oriental, the Shangri-La. They’re all a stone’s throw from the Ayala Center, and that’s where Manny took his family for lunch, even though Greenhills shopping center would have been closer.”

“So he has lunch with the family, says good-bye, the woman and the boy leave, and he gets down to business with the people who are waiting for him.”

“Yes. And when they see a huge, goateed, dangerous-looking guy busting into the bathroom along with Manny’s bodyguard, they realize something’s going down. They go in, too.”

He nodded. “Well, I’ll buy that. They were cool and their tactics were good. And like you said, they wore their cover well. I didn’t make them until it was too late. That’s my fault, man, and I’m sorry. I told you, you saved my life there, you really did.”

I wanted to tell him the truth-that by bursting in as he had, Dox had saved my life, not the reverse.

Instead I said, “The thing is, we still don’t know for sure who they were. Who they were with. Why they were meeting Manny. If we knew those things, we might get a second chance.”

“You think we could still get that close?”

“Depends. I hate to leave things unfinished, though.”

He laughed. “You mean like an uncashed paycheck?”

I nodded. “That’s part of it. And letting Boaz and Gil know that I’m still after Manny gives me an excuse to be in touch with them, and an opportunity to continue to evaluate them.”

“To make sure they haven’t changed their minds about just letting the whole thing go.”

“Of course. And they’re also a potential channel of information.”

“About who those shooters were.”

“Etcetera.”

We ate quietly for a few minutes. Then Dox said, “There’s one thing I want to ask you.”

I raised my eyebrows and looked at him.

“When I got in there, I was surprised Manny was still vertical. I know what you can do up close with your hands. You were alone with him for long enough.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You going to tell me what happened?” he asked.

I looked away. “I don’t know, exactly.”

“Are you leveling with me, partner?” I heard him say.

I paused, then said, “I don’t know. He came in, his back was to me, I moved out of the stall. Then you told me the boy was coming. I went to move back into the stall before the boy came in, but I must have made a sound, because Manny turned. I looked in his eyes…”

“Whoa, why’d you look in his eyes, man?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Shoot, man, when I look through the scope, I never look in the eyes. Or if I do, I just look at one of them, and then all I see is a bull’s-eye, you know what I mean? I never see a man. Only a target.” He looked at me, then added, “If you see a man, you might… hesitate.”

I thought of several things to say, but none of them came out.

He took a sip of iced coffee and looked upward as though contemplating something. Then he said, “Well, each of us has only so much courage in the well. You draw from it too many times, eventually you come up dry. I’ve seen it before. I guess one day it’ll happen to me, too.” He paused, then smiled and added, “Although probably not.”

“That’s not what happened,” I said.

“Then what?”

I looked at the wall, images flickering against it as though it were a screen. “It was something about the boy. Seeing him with his family… I don’t know.”

There was a pause. He said, “Sounds like you spent a little too much time watching them this week, man.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Well, that happens. It can make it hard, it’s true.”

I felt like an idiot. What was wrong with me? Why had I frozen? Why couldn’t I explain to a man I’d fought alongside, a man I trusted?

Trust, I thought. The word felt slippery in my mind, dangerous.

“That’s not it,” I said. “Or, it’s not the only thing.”

“What else?”

I shook my head and exhaled hard. “I haven’t had a partner in a long time.”

“Hang on now, this is my fault?”

I shook my head again. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just… I didn’t trust you before, when you first came for me in Rio.”

“Yeah, I got that feeling.”

“But then, after what you did at Kwai Chung… I saw that I’d been wrong. That’s hard for me.”

“Guess I should’ve just shot you and taken the money for myself. At least that way you’d have been right not to trust me.”

“Did you think about it?”

He laughed. “Jesus, man, you almost sound hopeful.”

“Did you?”

He shook his head. “Not even for a minute.”

“Goddamnit. I knew it.”

“You want an apology?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“You don’t owe me anything. Like I said at the time, I know you’d have done the same for me. Wait, don’t respond to that, it’ll spoil my reverie.”

The waiter came by and cleared away our plates. We ordered mango and sticky rice for dessert. I watched the man leave.

There was something I wanted to ask Dox, something I’d been thinking about, on various levels, for a long time, and particularly after Manila. It wasn’t something I’d ever said out loud before, and I found myself reluctant to bring it up. Partly because doing so might make it feel more real; partly because it would probably all seem so silly to Dox. But I’d told him a lot already. I wanted to finish it.

“I’ve got a question for you, too,” I said, looking at him.

He pushed his chair away, leaned back, and laced his fingers together across his belly. “Sure.”

“You ever… you ever bothered by what we do?”

He smiled. “Only when I’m not paid promptly.”

“I’m serious.”

He shrugged. “Not usually, no.”

“You don’t ever feel like…” I chuckled. “You know, like God is watching?”

“Oh, sure he’s watching. He just doesn’t care.”

“You think?”

He shrugged again. “I figure he’s the one who made the rules. I’m just playing by ’em. If he doesn’t like the way things have turned out down here on planet Earth, he ought to speak his mind. I would if I were him.”

“Maybe he is speaking his mind, and no one’s listening.”

“He ought to speak a little more clearly, then.” He looked up and added, “If you don’t mind my saying so.”

I studied my hands for a moment. “It bothered me, thinking about that boy losing his father.”

“ ’Course it did. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be the good man you are. That’s why it’s best not to get too close to the target. ‘If it inhabits your mind, it can inhibit your trigger finger,’ as one of my instructors once told me.”

“Yeah, that’s the truth.”

“The thing is, you can’t make the decisions and also carry them out, you know what I mean? The judge and the executioner, they’re different roles. The judge does what he does, and then the executioner carries things out. That’s the way it is. We’re just doing what we’re supposed to.”

“That’s an interesting way to look at it,” I said, feeling uneasy.

“It’s the only way. I didn’t know you were such a philosopher, partner. In fact, I think this is the most I’ve ever heard you talk.”

“Sorry.”

“No need to apologize. But I do think that pondering too deeply might not be highly recommended for men such as ourselves. We might start thinking we’re the judges or something, and where would we be then?”

The waiter brought the mango and sticky rice. It was good, but my mind was elsewhere.

Dox asked, “Well, what’s the next step? With Manny, I mean.”

I considered. “We can’t get close to him again the way we did. He got too good a look at me, for one thing, and I think we can expect him to be taking extra precautions, for another.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing.”

“We need a new variable, something to shake things up. And the only one I see coming our way is information from Boaz and Gil. If they can find out the affiliations of the two guys we took out in that restroom, we might have something to go on. Otherwise I think the op is dead.”

“So nothing to do but wait and see what the Israelites can offer.”

“That’s right.”

He leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Well, in my not inconsiderable experience, there’s nowhere in the world better to wait around than here in Bangkok.”

I sighed, feeling like a parent about to remonstrate with a teenager. “We still have work to do. You’re not going to be useful drained of all bodily fluids and nursing a binge hangover.”

He laughed. “Yes, Mom.”

“Look, just be available in case I get a call and we need to move quickly.”

He nodded, then said, “Tell you what. Best way for me to be available is for us to stick together. Why don’t you come out with me tonight?”

“No, I think…”

“C’mon, man, when was the last time you got yourself properly laid? Or even laid at all.”

I shook my head. “A night out with the prostitutes isn’t really my thing.”

“Who said anything about prostitutes? The local girls will be throwing themselves at you when they see you with a handsome stranger like me. And by the way, I think you’re avoiding my question.”

I thought of Delilah, but said nothing.

“C’mon, man, we can get you some of that black market Viagra.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hey, with a double dose, you’ll do fine. Plus, you’ve still got a quart of my blood sloshing around in you. That ought to be a help.”

He was reminding me of the transfusion he’d given me after I’d nearly bled out at Kwai Chung.

“I mean I don’t think I’m in the mood for One Night in Bangkok,” I said.

“What, are you worried you might have fun? Tell you what, if I see you laugh and have a good time, I promise not to tell anyone. I know you’ve got your reputation to protect.”

I thought about it. Maybe I would take a long walk through some of the city’s less-traveled boulevards. I could pass by some of the places where I had once caroused with other teenagers hardened by war, who were yet, in retrospect, still astonishingly innocent, and observe these relics to see how my memories animated or distorted them as they might exist in Bangkok today. But as I considered these possibilities, I was surprised to find I didn’t really want to be alone.

“All right!” Dox said, taking my hesitation as a yes. “We can get dinner, hit a few bars, talk to the ladies, who knows. Hey, you like jazz, right? I know a new place on Silom that’ll be right up your alley. I tend to favor the discos myself, but I know you’re a man of sophisticated tastes and I’m willing to indulge you.”

I nodded in capitulation. “All right.”

The grin got wider. “You made the right decision, Mr. Rain, and I promise you won’t regret it. You checked into the hotel yet?”

We were staying at the Sukhothai, which offered the right combination of high class and low visibility. Something like the Oriental had plenty of the first but none of the second; innumerable Bangkok hotels would have offered the opposite combination. But the Sukhothai had been built for both beauty and discretion. The property, with its acres of flower gardens and lotus ponds; its long, symmetrical lines and soft lighting; and its traditional accents of Thai architecture and art was certainly a triumph of form. But from my perspective, the hotel was also highly functional: its small, intimate lobby was utterly unlike the grand, bustling thoroughfares that greeted visitors at, say, the local Four Seasons, which was well designed for people who wanted to see and be seen, but uncomfortable for those who favored invisibility instead.

“I got an early check-in this morning,” I told him. “You?”

“The same. Nice place, too. I like those big bathtubs. You can get three people in one of them, did you know that? With all those mirrors, you can have a lot of fun. This one time…”

“Why don’t we meet in the lobby, then?” I said.

He grinned at the interruption. “All right. Twenty-hundred?

“You need to rest up first?”

“No, son, I need to go out and buy you that double dose of Viagra.”

Trying to get the better of Dox was a losing proposition. I signaled the waiter for the check and said, “Eight o’clock, then.”

SIX

JIM HILGER never got upset. It wasn’t that he didn’t show agitation; he simply didn’t experience it. The crazier things became around him, the calmer he felt at his center. The quality had made him one of the best combat shooters in the Third Special Forces during the first Gulf War. When someone was firing at him, it felt almost as though his personality had floated out of his body, leaving a machine to handle things in its place. He knew that, had he lived in the age of dueling, he would have been fucked with by nobody.

He knew, too, that his imperturbability was a useful leadership skill. In combat, when his men saw how calm and deadly he was, they became calm and deadly, too. And now, in his new role, he had found that his flatlined demeanor gave him power over the people he managed. The more upset they became in a crisis, the more his temperature dropped, cooling the people around him in the process. It was as though people assumed he must know something they didn’t; otherwise, he would be coming unglued, too. In fact, he doubted that he really knew more than others. It was just that he had come to rely on his own coolness, to believe that his coolness was the one thing he could count on to get him through, as it always had before. He didn’t believe in anything more than that.

When Manny had called him the day before, nearly hysterical with rage, Hilger’s calmness had been put to the test. “Just tell me what happened,” Hilger had repeated while Manny had fulminated and threatened. It took a little while, but eventually he had brought Manny around. And Jesus, a little hysteria almost seemed to be in order. Someone had tried to hit Manny in Manila, and Calver and Gibbons, two of Hilger’s best men, men from his Gulf War unit, had been killed in the process. A critical first meeting with an asset, which Hilger had been trying to set up with Manny’s help for over two years, and which Calver and Gibbons had gone to Manila to take care of, had been aborted. The whole thing was a mess.

As Manny had hyperventilated the news to him, Hilger automatically shifted into problem-solving mode.

“Where is VBM?” he asked, using the cryptonym they had established for the new asset.

“I don’t know,” Manny told him. “I don’t have an immediate way of contacting him. He probably went to the meeting site, and when we didn’t show up, he left.”

Shit. Not quite the first impression Hilger had been hoping for.

“Can you reestablish contact?” he asked. “Set up another meeting?”

That produced a minor explosion. “Another meeting? Someone just tried to kill me! In front of my family!”

Hilger realized he wasn’t demonstrating the proper priorities. All right, one thing at a time.

“Look, there’s not much we can do over the phone,” he told Manny. “We need to meet. You’ll give me every detail. And then we’ll figure out what to do.”

“But how do I know I can trust you,” Manny had whined. “How do I know you weren’t behind this?”

“Those were my people who were killed,” Hilger told him. “I can’t give you better proof than that.”

Manny wasn’t being rational. He said, “Maybe it was a trick, maybe it was a trick.”

Hilger sighed. He said,“Let’s work together and we can solve this problem the way it needs to be solved.”

There was a long pause. Hilger’s heart rate was slow and steady.

Manny said, “All right, all right.”

“Good. Where do you want to meet?” Giving Manny the choice would help ease his ridiculous suspicions.

“Not in Manila. I can come to…” He paused, and Hilger knew he had been about to say Hong Kong and then had thought better of it. Hong Kong was Hilger’s home base, where he lived his financial-adviser cover. Manny didn’t want to offer him any advantages just now, and, probably because he felt spiteful, was glad to deny him any convenience, as well.

“Jakarta,” Manny said. “I can come to Jakarta.”

Hilger didn’t want to fly to Jakarta. Manny was being a pain in the ass.

“Sure. But I’ve got a few things here I need to wrap up first-it’ll probably take a few days. Are you sure you can’t make it to Hong Kong?”

There was a long silence. Hilger said, “Look, we can meet anywhere you want, but Hong Kong will be faster, and I’d like to get started on this right away. Anywhere in Hong Kong, fair enough?”

That closed it. The next day, they were sitting in a coffee shop off Nathan Road in Kowloon, just a fifteen-minute cab ride from Hilger’s office through the Cross-Harbor Tunnel. There weren’t quite as many white faces in Kowloon as there were in Central, where Hilger worked, but there were enough so that neither of them would stick out, and there was a lower chance that Hilger might run into someone he knew. Not that anyone would recognize Manny-it wasn’t as though the man’s face appeared on post office walls, although probably it should-but it was better to be safe. Hilger had taken the usual precautions to ensure that he hadn’t been followed, and hoped that Manny had been equally thorough. He had indulged Manny his mandatory hysteria. When he felt he had been nodding sympathetically for long enough, he began his debriefing.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Hilger commanded, and he knew that his calm would now be reassuring. “Not just that day, but every day, from the moment you arrived in Manila.”

Manny complied. When he was finished, Hilger began to drill into the details.

“You say there were two of them.”

“I think so, yes. Someone came in after the bodyguard.”

“But you didn’t see his face.”

“Not well. He was big. I think Caucasian. I’m not sure.”

Hilger considered. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you hadn’t seen him, I could have told you he was there. The first guy, the Asian, you say he was already in the bathroom, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“He’d been following you for a while before he decided to anticipate you in the bathroom. But he wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t have backup continuing to watch you. Otherwise, if he’d been wrong about you coming to the bathroom, he would have lost you.”

Manny nodded and said, “Yes, that makes sense.”

“You think you could recognize the Asian?”

Manny nodded. “If I saw him again, yes. I got a good look at his face. Can you find him? And the other one?”

Hilger thought for a moment. He said, “I have some photos I’ll show you before you leave. We’ll see if the men I have in mind are the ones you saw.”

“Then you can find them.”

Hilger knew that if he was right about the men in question, identifying them would be a trivial exercise compared with actually finding them. Still, he said, “I think so.”

Manny leaned forward. “You better. And when you find them, you make them suffer first. They were following me with my family, they might have harmed my son!”

Hilger nodded to show that Manny could count on him. He said, “And VBM? You can contact him, set up another meeting?” Letting Manny know that there was something of a quid pro quo here.

Manny shrugged. “I’ve already left him a message. But he’s not an easy man to reach. And he might be spooked when he hears about what happened in Manila.”

Hilger doubted VBM would spook that easily. Men like him tended to be tougher than that. But no sense contradicting Manny’s assessment.

“If he’s spooked, he’s spooked,” he said. “But if you told him about what my people can do for him, I think he’ll still want the meeting.”

“I told him.”

“Good. Keep trying to contact him. When you do, tell him that the people behind the problem in Manila have been taken care of. Tell him…”

“I’ll tell him that when it’s true.”

“By the time you contact him, it will be true,” Hilger said, his voice as even as his gaze.

Manny nodded, and Hilger went on.

“Tell him I’ll come to the meeting myself. That we can do it anywhere he likes. And give him my cell phone number. He should feel free to contact me directly.”

Manny nodded again and said, “All right.”

Hilger detected a slight churlishness in the set of Manny’s mouth, no doubt precipitated by Hilger’s willingness to discuss matters not directly related to Manny’s recent difficulties. Partly to continue the debriefing, partly to assuage the man, Hilger asked, “Who do you think might have been behind this?”

Manny leaned back and shrugged. “How should I know? It could have been anyone.”

“ ‘Anyone’ doesn’t help me narrow it down.”

“Who do you think?”

“Manny, I have my own ideas, but I doubt anyone is in a better position to say than you are. Are you holding something back from me? That’s going to make my job harder.”

Manny shook his head. “I’m not holding anything back. I just don’t know. It could have been the Mossad, I suppose. They might not like my choice of friends, the fucking hypocrites.”

Hilger had already thought of the Israelis. They were at the top of his short list. “Who else?” he asked.

Manny looked at him. “The CIA, of course.”

Hilger nodded. “My contacts there are already looking into that. Any others? Maybe BIN?”

“BIN?”

“The Badan. Indonesian intelligence. They’ve had a lot of problems-Bali, the Jakarta Marriott, the Australian embassy…”

“BIN, yes. Maybe. Maybe.”

Hilger realized that Manny wasn’t going to be helpful here. He was the kind of man who was uncomfortable acknowledging that he had real enemies-which, given his activities, was almost funny. It seemed that this was the first time Manny had come face-to-face with the reality that someone really, truly, wanted him dead and was actively trying to make it so. It would take Manny a while to adjust to the reality of that. In the meantime, Hilger would just have to investigate on his own. Well, he was used to doing things alone. Sometimes it was the only way to get the job done.

Hilger decided to return to the previous line of questioning, on which Manny was more useful. “You say the Asian saw you and seemed to freeze,” he said. “Could it have been your son that he saw?”

Manny scowled. “I think it was me.”

Hilger wondered about Manny’s recollection. He didn’t expect it to be particularly accurate in any event; he knew that memories of traumatic incidents rarely are. Also, Manny probably wanted to believe that the men who had come after him were vicious, subhuman killers. This would make Manny feel virtuous by comparison. That one of these men might have hesitated at the sight of a child wouldn’t fit with this view, would detract from the accompanying sense of comparative righteousness, and would likely be rejected. The mind of a man like Manny had so many ways of unconsciously pleasuring itself. You had to be careful.

“Still,” Hilger said, “I find it odd that the man seemed to hesitate at all, regardless of the reasons. Hesitation tends to be an affliction of the inexperienced.”

Manny scowled. “Maybe these men were inexperienced.”

“Inexperienced men wouldn’t have been able to drop your bodyguard and my people with him. They were all dispatched with tight shots, headshots. Take my word for it, the shooters were not inexperienced.”

“Then why? Why did he hesitate?”

Hilger shook his head. “I don’t know yet.”

“My son is traumatized,” Manny said. “He and his mother have gone to stay with her relatives in the provinces.”

“I can arrange for extra protection.”

“They’re okay where they are. But I need a new bodyguard.”

This was the closest thing Hilger had heard to an expression of sorrow about one of the men who had given his life in the course of saving Manny’s. Me, me, me, Hilger thought. It wasn’t just Manny. It was the state of the fucking world.

“Otherwise,” Manny went on, “I can’t continue to help you.”

Hilger sighed. Manny was always making poorly timed, even unnecessary, threats.

“I’ve already taken care of it,” Hilger said.

“And the men who tried to kill me?”

“My people will find them.”

Manny clenched his jaw and said, “Find them soon. You’re not my only friend, you know.”

Another silly threat. Hilger had seen it coming. He said, “Manny, I know you have many friends. Has any of them been as reliable as I have?”

Manny was silent for a moment, then burst out, “You told me that your friendship would protect me! That something like this would never happen!”

Hilger looked at him. For the first time in the conversation, he let some emotion creep into his voice. Part of it was for effect. But not all of it.

“Two of my best men just died protecting you,” he said. “And a bodyguard who I set you up with.”

Manny didn’t answer. Hilger found his silence characteristically petulant. Three men had just died for him, and he couldn’t even say, All right, that’s a fair point.

“If you go to other people,” Hilger went on, “it complicates my job. Give me some time to solve the problem before you do something to complicate it, all right?”

“I have other friends,” Manny said again.

Hilger sighed. Time for a reality injection.

“Manny, the people you’re talking about aren’t your friends. They’re people you know, who have interests. If those people decide that their interests are out of alignment with yours, you’ll find that they become decidedly unfriendly. How will I protect you then?”

Manny looked at him, resenting him for not being more fearful of the threat, and for making a veiled one of his own.

“Make them suffer,” he said again, demanding something to save face.

Hilger nodded. More because he was thinking of his men than out of any particular desire to appease Manny, he said, “I will.”

SEVEN

THERE WERE A FEW HOURS to kill before I met Dox for our evening out, so I took a cab to nearby Silom to look for an Internet café.

I rarely take down an electronic bulletin board once I’ve established it. Clients need a way to reach me, and maintaining the bulletin boards provides it. But when business necessity doesn’t justify the continued maintenance, pleasure, in the form of nagging hope, provides the necessary motivation instead. If I’d ever established a board with Midori, who had loved me, then shunned me after learning that I had killed her father, I would probably check it all the time. In lieu of a board, I commune with my hopes for Midori by listening to her CDs, four of them now, each deeper, more soulful, more daring than the last; by imagining enthusiasts applauding her piano in the dark jazz joints of lower Manhattan, for which she had left Tokyo; by whispering her name every night like a sad incantation that always summons, along with certain qualities of her spirit, the continued pain of her absence.

Checking the bulletin board I had established with Delilah, I told myself, was a mix: business and pleasure. The introduction she had provided was what led to the Manny assignment, and, if I could straighten out the aftermath of that one, there might be more where it came from. But business wasn’t really why I kept the bulletin board, or why I continued to check it almost every day. The real reason, I knew, was the stolen time we had spent together in Rio after our initial run-in in Macau and my subsequent near-death experience there.

It wasn’t just the sex, good as it had been; nor was it only her stunning looks. Instead it was something deep inside her, something I couldn’t reach. What that thing might be I couldn’t really say: regret over her role in so many killings; bitterness at her ill treatment at the hands of her organization; sorrow over the normal life, the family, that she had chosen to forgo and that probably now would be denied to her forever. She hadn’t been the perfect companion with me. She could be demanding, sometimes moody, and she wasn’t without a temper. But sweetness and perfection were the charade I assumed she played with the targets of her work. The uncertainty and the barriers that spiced her relationship with me made her feel real, and led me in the direction of trusting her. And trust, as I was discovering with Dox, is a dangerous narcotic. I thought I had weaned myself from its rapture, gotten the monkey off my back. But then I had a little taste, and that thing I’d lived without for so many years was suddenly indispensable.

I had the cab let me off at Silom Road under the Sala Daeng sky train station. The sky train had opened a few years earlier, and this was the first time I was back in Bangkok to witness its effect. I wasn’t sure I liked it. No doubt its presence made the city easier to traverse, bringing together points once rendered impractically distant by automotive gridlock. But there was a price. The overhead passage of steel tracks and concrete platforms smothered the streets below in shadow, and seemed somehow to compress and amplify the noise, the pollution, the pent-up weight of the whole metropolis. I smiled, without any mirth, because I had seen the same thing done to Tokyo with the elevated expressways, to the long-term regret of everyone bar the construction companies and their corrupt government cronies, who profited from the implementation of such schemes and who would no doubt profit again when the city planners determined that now it was time to banish those dark monstrosities they had once seen fit to invoke. By building a subway across the sky, the custodians of Bangkok had made the streets below effectively subterranean. I could imagine a time, not too distant, when the sky train would be so dramatically expanded and agglomerated with food courts and wireless shops and video outlets that life on the streets below, the pedestrians and the cars and the stores, would without conscious planning or the apportionment of blame become by default the city’s true subway, its final stop for those denizens who had fallen through the cracks and who would now lie unseen in a darkness from which they could fall no further.

I walked, zigzagging along the sois and sub-sois-the main streets and their arteries-between Silom and Surawong, passing several storefront places advertising Internet access and overseas phone calls. Most of these were tiny spaces in larger buildings that had probably gone unused until the Internet arrived and created the possibility of profit for places with a half-dozen tables and chairs and terminals. Soon enough, I found one whose looks I liked. It occupied a ground-floor niche in a gleaming Bank of Bangkok building, and seemed almost to be hiding there. Inside there were ten terminals, several of which were occupied by women who looked to me like bar girls, who were perhaps now sending e-mails to those farang customers foolish enough to provide addresses, telling interchangeable stories of sick mothers and dying water buffalos and the other reasons for this one-time-only, embarrassed request for the farang’s dollars or pounds or yen. I chose a table that put my back to the wall. The girls, intent on their correspondence, gave me barely a glance.

Before getting started, I downloaded some commercial software from a storage site I keep and checked the terminal for keystroke monitors and other spyware. When I was sure it was clean, I went to the bulletin board I had established with Delilah, not with any more than the usual inchoate hope.

But there was a message waiting. My heart did a little giddyup.

I entered my password and went to the next screen. The message said, I’ve got some time off. Do you? Followed by a phone number starting with 331-the country code for France and city code for Paris.

Damn. I looked around for a second, a reflex in response to having my sense of aloneness unexpectedly disturbed. The girls typed determinedly away, their eyes filled with calculation and hope.

I looked at the screen again. The message had been left the day before. I wrote down the number, using my usual code, exited the bulletin board, and purged the browser to erase all records of where I’d just been.

I got up and walked back out onto Silom. My heart was racing, but my brain hadn’t shut itself off. It was hard to believe that the timing of her call was a coincidence. More likely it had something to do with the Manny op. Although I couldn’t be sure.

I stopped and thought, You can’t be sure? What the hell is wrong with you?

I’ve never believed in coincidences, not for things like this. Sure, maybe they exist, but you act as though they don’t. Most times, the thing that might have been a coincidence wasn’t, and your doubt helps you survive it. And if you’re wrong, and the thing was a coincidence? Well, what’s the downside? There is none.

But now there was a downside, apparently, and it was as though my mind was trying to warp my worldview accordingly. What I wanted to believe wasn’t the point. What I needed to believe was everything.

Then ignore the message. Don’t call her. At least not until Manny is straightened out.

The thought was depressing. Even painful.

Dox hadn’t known, and I would never tell him, but his comment about the last time I “got laid” had hit home. Yeah, I pay for recreation from time to time. You have to take care of your physical needs. Something real, though, something worthwhile? Not since Delilah, and there hadn’t been many before her, either.

How could I know what this was about, what she had in mind, unless I saw her? She might have the information I would need to get close to Manny again. She might be able to give me insight into her people’s thinking about what had happened in Manila, about their related plans. Yes, there would be risks. But there always are. And I could control the risks. I always do.

My gut told me it was worth taking a chance. For a moment I was afraid that I couldn’t trust my gut, that maybe the instinct that has always served me well had somehow been distorted, the internal navigation instruments compromised. But then I thought, If your gut’s no good anymore, you’re done anyway.

Which might itself have been a distortion. But the hell with it.

I found an international pay phone and called the number. As the call went through, I felt my heart beating harder and felt foolish for it. Dox would have ribbed me if he’d known, told me I was acting like a kid or something.

She answered after one ring.

“Allo,” I heard her say.

“Hey,” I said, staring out at the street, afraid of my hopes.

“Hey,” she said back. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How have you been?”

Whatever I’d been expecting, I hadn’t expected it to be awkward. “Good. You?”

“The same. I’ve been working on a… project, but I can get away for a few days, if you can.”

No mention of business. Either this was a personal call, as I wanted to hope, or it was business disguised as personal, which among the current range of possibilities would probably mean the worst.

“Yeah, I can get away. I’m in the middle of something that’s quiet for the moment, but it might heat up suddenly.”

I wondered if she would react to that. She didn’t. She said, “I can come to you, if that’s better.”

I considered for a moment. I needed to stay in the area, in case Boaz and Gil turned up something that could put Dox and me back in the game with Manny. And I wanted to meet Delilah someplace that would pose difficulties for her if she was thinking of bringing company. Just in case.

“Can you make it to Bangkok?” I asked.

“Sure. I can probably get a nonstop from de Gaulle.”

“Put your itinerary on the bulletin board and I’ll meet you just outside customs.”

“All right. Are you sure you want to do Bangkok, though? They say taking a date there is like bringing a lunch box to a restaurant.”

I smiled. “I know the kind of food I like.”

She laughed, and the tension eased a little. “All right, then. I’ll make the flight arrangements, and leave the rest to you.”

I recognized the concession to what Dox might call my paranoia. She knew that letting me choose the final destination, without telling her in advance, would be more comfortable for me.

“I’ll need to know the name you’re traveling under,” I said. “To make reservations.”

“I’ll put it all on the bulletin board.”

“Okay, then.”

There was a pause. She said, “It’ll be good to see you.”

“Yeah. I’m glad you got in touch.”

“Jaa,” she said, displaying a little knowledge of Japanese. Well then.

I smiled. “À bientôt.” And hung up.

I walked for a few minutes, then went into another Internet café. I did the usual spyware inspection, then checked on flights to Bangkok from Paris. The only nonstops were on Thai Air and Air France. The Thai flight left daily at 1:30 P.M. Let’s see, it was already 1:15 P.M. in Paris, so she’d missed that. The Air France flight left daily at 11:25 P.M. and arrived at Bangkok International at 4:35 the following afternoon.

I thought for a minute. Either she had some sudden free time, as she’d said, in which case she would want to make the most of it, or, more likely, she was coming on business, which would entail its own form of urgency. Either way, I could expect her to move promptly, which would probably mean that evening’s Air France flight. All right, I’d bet on that.

I thought about where to take her, and how to go about it. It had to be someplace special. Partly, I had to admit, because I wanted to impress her. More important, because I wanted her to feel far away from whoever might have sent her. A sense of distance, of disconnection, would increase the likelihood that she would talk openly, or at least that she would slip. The place also had to be secure. And we’d have to get there in a way that would give me the opportunity to satisfy myself that she was traveling alone.

I checked the bulletin board again and saw that she had already left me the name she would be traveling under. Good. I spent the next half hour making the appropriate reservations online. I thought it all through again when I was done, and was satisfied in all respects. The only problem was a sudden feeling of impatience. Everything was set, and I had nothing to do but wait. The next day would feel like nothing more than killing time.

Ordinarily, killing time in Bangkok would mean taking in a Thai boxing match at Lumpini or Ratchadamnoen, or jazz at Brown Sugar or in the Bamboo bar at the Oriental, maybe an evening with one of the girls from Spasso in the Grand Hyatt. But tonight, it seemed, I would simply go out with a friend.

The thought felt strange. Not unpleasant, by any means. But strange. It was like hearing a song I had enjoyed a long time ago, and had then somehow forgotten, a simple tune that at the time had been rich and fresh and full of promise and that now, by its unnoticed loss and unexpected reappearance, had been alchemized into something haunting, a reminder not only of what was but also of what had been lost in the accumulated years, the melody now tinged with hope that what was gone might be recovered and fear that its loss instead was irretrievable.

Dox and I met in the lobby as planned and, after the appropriate precautions, caught a taxi to Silom. I asked him where we were going on the way, but he refused to tell me. It was a measure of the degree to which I had come to trust him that I didn’t just stop the cab and leave. But the childishness of his demurral was irritating.

We got out in front of the State Tower Bangkok building and took the elevator to the sixty-third floor, the building’s highest. Emerging from the elevator, we walked through a pair of floor-to-ceiling glass doors and were greeted with what I had to admit was an impressive sight.

Stretching out along the open-air roof below us was a tableau of symmetrically arranged tables covered in white linen and, at one end of the arrangement, a circular bar on a promontory glowing in red, then blue, then yellow. To our left was a higher terrace, upon which a jazz quartet was making music for the diners below. The restaurant’s floor, stone and dark teak, stretched all the way to the edges of the building, beyond which in all directions twinkled the endless lights of the city, the Chao Phraya River, expressing itself only as a sinewy absence of light, winding its way silently through it. A glass sign at the bottom of the stairs announced discreetly that the place was called Sirocco.

“Well, what do you think?” Dox asked. “Do you like it?”

“I do,” I admitted, failing to keep the surprise out of my voice.

“What did you think, I was going to take you to a go-go bar or something?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

He frowned. “Sometimes you don’t give me enough credit, man.”

I was surprised by that. Dox played the buffoon so often and so well, it seemed odd to me that he would want to be acknowledged for occasionally possessing some good taste.

“How did you hear about it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I spend a fair amount of time out here, so I keep my ear to the ground. Just opened a few months ago, and it sounded like your kind of place. So I figured we could give it a try.”

I looked at him and said, “Thank you. I didn’t mean…”

He grinned. “Ah, forget it.”

“I was just going to say, I’ll order the wine.”

The grin started to fade, then came back at double voltage. “Whatever makes you happy, man,” he said.

The hostess brought us to our table. The menu, consisting of what Sirocco called “Inspired Mediterranean Dining,” was as good as the view. We ordered garlic-rosemary marinated grilled double lamb chops, grilled Phuket lobster with lemon and aromatic olive oil, confit of duck and pan-seared foie gras appetizers. I took care of the wine: a ’96 Emilio’s Terrace Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve. It would be a little young, but some air would bring it around.

“Damn, this is good,” Dox said, after the waitress had opened and decanted the bottle and we had taken our first sips. “I don’t know who Emilio is, but I’d sure like to shake his hand. How do you know so much about wine, man?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know that much.”

“Cut the modesty routine. I can tell you do.”

I shrugged again. “For what I do, I need to be able to blend in a lot of different strata of society. To do that, you need to know the little things, the tells. Could be wine, could be the right fork to use. Could be the right clothes to wear. Or the right words. I don’t know. I just watch and try to learn. I’m a good imitator.” I took a sip of the Emilio’s Terrace. “But also, I just like wine.”

“So you can just… put these things on, then take them off, like they’re a disguise?”

“I guess so. You do it, too, although a little differently. You’ve got a way of disappearing when you want to, I’ve seen that.”

“Yeah, that’s from sniper school. You just… draw in all your energy, like. It’s a Zen thing. Kind of hard to explain. A buddy of mine once told me it’s like what that creature did in Predator, or a Klingon warship with a cloaking device. I think that’s about right. I wouldn’t mind being able to move comfortably in all those different societies like you do, though. Still, it must be strange, to be able to move in them but not really belong in any of them, you know what I mean?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

The meal turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. The food and wine were first-rate, and the feeling of being in the heart of, and yet above and isolated from, the dense metropolis around us was invigorating, almost heady. The weather was Bangkok’s finest: cool and relatively dry, and a few stars were even visible through the polluted pall above. We talked a lot about Afghanistan, which was the conflict we had in common: the men we had known there; the crazy things we had done; the unintended consequences of an armed and well-trained cadre of Islamic fanatics that had followed in the wake of the departing Soviet army we had helped to drive out.

We talked, too, of Asia. I was surprised at his knowledge of and affection for the region, and his inquiries about Japanese culture, in particular, were intelligent and insightful. He told me about his love for Thailand, where he had been “sojourning,” as he liked to put it, for years, staying longer and longer with each visit, and how he hoped to retire here. How he no longer felt at ease in the States.

I understood his feelings. There’s something accepting about Thai culture, and there are species of farang, foreigners, who find themselves drawn to it. On the dark side of the phenomenon are pedophiles and other deviants who come to indulge their secret sicknesses. And there are the aging middle-management types, who anesthetize regrets about failed ambitions and the implacable, day-by-day approach of death by renting women with whom they are in any event too old and too far gone to function, and by reassuring themselves of their worth by living in a neocolonial style that the locals can’t afford. But there are many who stay for more benign reasons. Some, in a sense, are Easterners trapped in Western bodies, who find their truer natures liberated in Thailand’s “foreign” climes. Some are simply adventurers, addicts to the exotic. Some are refugees from a misguided affair, or divorce, or bankruptcy, or other such personal trauma. And some, like Dox and me, are soldiers who found themselves too altered by the things they did in war to return to the lands of their youth. For some, the distance between who you were and who you have become is unbridgeable, and the dissonance attempted repatriation creates is a constant reminder of the very changes that you want so badly to forget.

When we were finished with the meal, and lingering over enormous mugs of cappuccino, I told him, “I need your help with something.”

He looked at me. “Sure, man, anything, you know that. Just name it.”

“My Israeli contact. The one who brokered the meeting with Boaz and Gil. She just contacted me. She wants a meeting.”

“Maybe this is the break we’ve been waiting for, then. Some new info on Manny.”

I shook my head. “She didn’t say anything about Manny. She says she just wants to see me.”

He cocked his head and looked at me. “I don’t get it. Why would she want to see you, if it’s not about Manny?”

“Before she set things up with Boaz and Gil, I spent some time with her.” I gave him the Reader’s Digest version of how Delilah and I had met in Macau, of what had happened between us there and then in Rio after.

He listened quietly, his expression uncharacteristically grave. When I was done, he said, “You’re thinking about seeing her.”

I nodded.

“Are you going to do this because you think she might have some operational intel, or because you just want to?”

For a guy who liked to play the hick, Dox had a way of going straight to the heart of the matter. I could have equivocated, but I decided to play it straight with him. He deserved that.

“I just want to see her.”

He nodded for a moment, then said, “I’m glad you said so. I could tell it was that from how you just talked about her, and I would have been awfully concerned if you’d tried to bullshit me. I would have wondered if you were bullshitting yourself, too.”

“I don’t know if I’m bullshitting myself or not.”

“Partner, that in itself is a profound species of honesty.”

I sipped my cappuccino. “She might still have something operational for us. I doubt that the timing of the meeting is just a coincidence.”

“If it’s not a coincidence, and she told you she was calling just because she missed your charming personality, she wasn’t playing straight with you. There might be something nefarious at work.”

“ ‘Nefarious’?”

“Yeah, you know, it means ‘immoral’ or ‘wicked.’ ”

I frowned. “I know what it means.”

He smiled. “Well, if you know what it means, what do you think?”

“You might be right.”

“But you want to meet her anyway.”

“Yeah.”

He pursed his lips and exhaled forcefully. “Sounds like unsafe sex to me, partner. And I’m not sure I want to be the condom.”

I nodded. “When you put it that way, I’m not so sure, either.”

He gave me a medium-wattage grin. “Well, tell me what you want, anyway.”

“She’s coming to Bangkok. I told her I would meet her outside of customs. If she puts people there to anticipate me, you can spot them.”

“Okay…”

“We’ll take a taxi from the international terminal to the domestic. You’ll be tailing us, so you should have some opportunities to tell if we’re followed. If I’m clean, we’ll go through security on the domestic side. I’ll have two tickets for Phuket, which is where Delilah and I are going, and you’ll have a ticket for somewhere else. That way you’ll be able to get through security, too, and you’ll have another chance in the boarding area to confirm that we’re alone.”

“Phuket, huh? Hope you talked to your travel agent. There are still a few places that aren’t back on line after the tsunami.”

“I know.”

“Or you could go to Ko Chang, it’s in the Gulf of Thailand and they didn’t get hit at all. Plus it’s less built up and only about a four-hour drive from Bangkok.”

“I know. I want to fly. We’ll be harder to follow that way.”

“Ah, that’s a good point. Well, Phuket sure is nice, anyway. Where are you planning on staying?”

I balked for a second out of habit, then said, “Amanpuri.”

“Hoo-ah! Paradise on earth! Stayed there once and saw Mick Jagger. My kind of place, although I believe I do slightly prefer the beach at the Chedi next door. I won’t need one of the villas or anything like that. Just a pavilion ought to be fine. With an ocean view, of course. No sense being in paradise if you can’t see the water.”

“No, I don’t think…”

“Hey, how am I going to watch your back if I’m not there? She could call her people once you arrive, and you’d be all on your own.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Then why are you asking me for my help?”

“Look, I don’t know if I can get another room there. I was lucky to get the one on such short notice.”

“Come on, man, you know their bookings are off because tourists think the tsunami damage is worse than it really is. All on account of them CNN camera crews going in and asking the locals, ‘Can you take us to a scene of appropriately picturesque destruction that’ll increase our ratings back home?’ And then their viewers think, ‘Shit, that’s the whole island, I better just go to Hawaii instead.’ But you and me, we know better, don’t we?”

I didn’t see any room for negotiation in his expression. I sighed. “All right. But this woman is sharp, understand? She notices what goes on around her and she remembers faces. If you stay in sniper mode, you’ll be fine. But if you slip, she’ll make you in a heartbeat. And that could multiply our problems.”

He grinned. “I promise to behave.”

I looked at him. A part of me was shaking its head, thinking, Nothing good can come of this.

But I only said, “All right.”

“Well, I’m glad to be getting an all-expenses-paid trip to Amanpuri, but I still don’t like it, partner. Mixing business and pleasure like this ain’t smart. It’s apt to leave you confused. And you getting killed would be a piss-poor way to clarify the confusion.”

I took another sip of my cappuccino. “There’s some risk, but there’s a reward, too. If I don’t meet her, I’ll blow a chance to learn what the Israelis know, what they might be planning.”

“Yeah, son, but that ain’t the only reward that’s on your mind here.”

“No, it’s not.”

“All right, you’re a grownup, I’m not going to tell you what time to go to bed or who to take there. I hope she’s worth it, though.”

I nodded. A breeze picked up, and for a moment, the terrace was actually chilly. I wondered about the wisdom of what I was doing, and about the fairness of involving Dox.

The stars, which had been briefly visible, were gone now, reclaimed by the polluted sky. I looked out at the lights of the city. The meal over, I no longer had the pleasant sense of being above it all, removed from it. Rather, I felt that I was right in the middle of something, probably more than I knew.

EIGHT

HILGER SAT at his desk in his eighty-eighth-floor office at the International Finance Center. Two IFC was one of the newest buildings on Hong Kong and, at 1,362 feet, the tallest. He had to admit, he really liked the place. It wasn’t just the views, the amenities, the feeling of being on top of the world, detached, all-powerful, untouchable. The building was also the perfect cover. The lease itself was so breathtakingly expensive that it was inconceivable that a government or any other nonprofit could be footing the bill for it. And, indeed, Uncle Sam wasn’t paying for Hilger’s lease, or for any other aspect of his operation. These days, Uncle Sam pretty much left Hilger alone, enjoying the quality of his intelligence but preferring not to know too much about how he came by it. All of which suited Hilger just fine.

The room was done in natural oak and off-white wool Berber carpet. The desktop supported only a few items: a brushed nickel Leonardo Marelli halogen reading light; a Bang & Olufsen Beocom 2500 telephone, with CIA-issue Secure Telephone Unit circuitry installed; and an anodized aluminum Macintosh thirty-inch flat panel display with a wireless keyboard and mouse. The overall look, which he had put to good effect with numerous clients, was solidity, focus, money, connections. The view, of the skyscrapers of Central and Victoria Harbor, was part of the impression, and Hilger liked it a lot. Tonight, to minimize reflection and reveal the glowing cityscape without, he had the room illuminated only by the desk light. Gazing out at the view soothed Hilger’s mind, helped him figure things out. Which was good, because at the moment there was a lot of figuring to be done.

The situation wasn’t entirely positive, certainly, but things were still fixable. Yes, he’d lost two men, but he’d lost men before and understood that losing men, perhaps losing his own life, was part of any mission. It was the mission that mattered, the operation. The operation had to succeed and he would ensure that it did.

He took things backward. The goal: protect the operation. Which meant: ending the threat to Manny, who was a critical part of the operation. How to do that? Easy enough. Find out who had been behind the hit and who had tried to carry it out, and then, insofar as possible, eliminate both.

The problem was doing it all under pressure. After meeting Manny in Kowloon that morning, he had returned to his office. There was a message waiting for him from someone in his network who was currently stationed at Langley. Hilger had called him. The man had offered a heads-up: the news that Calver and Gibbons had been gunned down in Manila had reached the top immediately. Manila Station had liaised with the Metro Manila police, who had checked the dead bodyguard’s records and learned that his only client was one Manheim Lavi, Known Major Scumbag. Lavi was currently unreachable, but the inference was that the bodyguard had died protecting, and that the two dead ex-spooks had been mixed up with, said Known Major Scumbag. The burning question, his man had said, was: What were Calver and Gibbons doing with the Scumbag, and who else was involved? Hilger knew he had to tie up all the loose ends before someone grabbed hold of them and unraveled the whole fucking thing.

Well, on the first front, finding out who had tried to carry out the hit, he had managed to move quickly. From the description Manny provided, Hilger had immediately suspected John Rain, who he knew had done the Belghazi job at Kwai Chung in Hong Kong last year. Hilger had been against that op, and had even tried to have Rain killed to stop it. Rain had proven a hard man to deter, though, and he’d gotten to Belghazi anyway. Which, strangely enough, turned out to have been all right: that bastard Belghazi had been trying to move radiological missiles right under Hilger’s nose. If Rain hadn’t wound up doing the job, Hilger would have had to do it himself.

What a mess that had been, though. Some of the assets he’d been so carefully cultivating had suspected he’d been involved. If it hadn’t been for Manny, he doubted he would have been able to regain their trust. And then there was the heat from the CIA, which wanted to know exactly what the hell his involvement had been and why none of the proper paperwork had been filled out. There, too, outside intervention had made the difference. His National Security Council contact had effectively bought off the Director of Central Intelligence by telling the DCI the Agency could take carte blanche public credit for stopping a terrorist operation at Kwai Chung. It had all been in the news the next day, with the heroes of the CIA, the DCI foremost among them, standing squarely in the adulatory spotlight. And there had been some side benefit, too: because the National Security Council spoke in the name of the President, the fact that the NSC had intervened aggressively on Hilger’s behalf told the DCI that Hilger was protected, all the way to the top. The DCI, the DDO, and pretty much everyone else who mattered in the Directorate of Operations left him alone after that.

But there was a new DCI now, this guy Goss, and with all the firings and resignations, all the people who had been intimidated were now gone. The good news was that Goss didn’t have a clue, at least not yet. He had so many things he was trying to get under control that Hilger could probably fly under his radar for a while. If there were another slip, though, or if Goss took it into his head to assert himself by getting in Hilger’s face, things could get messy again. Yeah, maybe he’d be able to call in another round of favors and get the mess cleaned up, but he preferred not to have a showdown with the new management so soon. Even if Hilger won, there would be grudges after. Hunters don’t like to be interrupted in the act of pouncing on their prey.

Rain’s involvement suggested that the CIA had ordered the hit, as it had with Belghazi. The thought was almost sickening. If those idiots had any idea what Hilger was up to, of what in three short years he had managed to accomplish, they would know to get out of his way and leave him alone. Leave him alone, hell, if they had any sense of proportion they would fucking genuflect.

He drummed his fingers along the edge of the blond wooden desktop and watched the lighted barges inching like water bugs along the dark surface of the harbor a quarter mile below. He didn’t know why his men believed in him, exactly, but they did. They always had. He sensed that, at just south of forty years old, he had become a sort of father figure to them. It would be too much to say that they worshipped him, but his opinion of them mattered hugely, as did his understanding, his forgiveness, for the things their work required them to do. He’d never had anyone like himself in his own life, but he understood the power, and the responsibility, of the position. He could pat a man on the back, sometimes literally, and tell him that it was all right, that he had done the right thing, that the images and the smells, the fears and the doubts, the corrosive effects of conscience, all these were in fact part of the man’s nobility for not having taken the easy, the common path of shying away from what needed to be done. And because no one could ever know of their quiet heroics, of the anonymous sacrifices they made, because there would never be medals or ticker-tape parades or the thanks of a grateful nation, his understanding and, when necessary, his forgiveness were all his men had to comfort them. It wasn’t enough to remove the weight, true, but it was enough to lighten it. Sometimes he wished he had someone he could turn to in a like manner, but he didn’t, and he supposed this was part of the burden of leadership, to bear the doubts, and the hard memories, alone.

Manny had said there had been another man, a big white guy. That wasn’t much to go on by itself, but Hilger had more. There had been a sniper at Kwai Chung. Maybe it had been Rain, but Hilger knew that Rain had no sniping background, and the gunman at Kwai Chung had been a pro. He’d taken the heads off those two Transdniester bagmen from far enough away so that no one had even heard the shots. That didn’t feel like Rain, who worked from close up. Hilger couldn’t be sure, but he suspected the shooter had been a CIA contractor called Dox. Hilger, through an intermediary, had tried to hire Dox to eliminate Rain and save Belghazi. Afterward, he wondered if the damn ex-Marine had decided to work with Rain instead of against him. He knew they had “served” together in Afghanistan, helping the Muj chase out the Red Army. He’d expected Dox’s mercenary instincts to be more powerful than any sense of comradeship the man might still feel from that shared conflict, but it seemed in that respect Hilger had misjudged.

He had his own files on both these men, complete with photographs. The photo of Rain was out of date, but Hilger had used some Agency software to update it. He’d shown the photos to Manny before Manny returned to Manila, and Manny had given him a positive ID on both.

So far, so good. But who had been behind the hit was proving more difficult to divine. The CIA had been his first guess, but he hadn’t been able to find out anything there. Of course, his inquiries had to be somewhat oblique, lest someone connect him through Manny to the men who had died in Manila, but he had his sources, and all of them had come up blank. The CIA might have wanted Manny dead, but it seemed they hadn’t tried to bring it about.

Who, then? Manny hadn’t wanted to face it, but, as they’d discussed the day before, the list was anything but short. The problem was that Rain had no known connections with any of the primary suspects. He had a history with the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party and of course with the Agency, the latter dating all the way back to Vietnam, but he wasn’t known to work with anyone else. That didn’t mean there weren’t any other clients, of course; Rain was a freelancer, a mercenary. But expanding a client base in Rain’s line of work isn’t easy. You can’t just hang out a shingle, or take out a few ads. New clients come slowly, if at all.

Well, there was a fairly straightforward way to get to the bottom of this. All he had to do was ask Rain or Dox. They might not want to tell him, true, but they’d be inclined to believe him when he said that he understood they were just contractors, that he had no personal beef with them nor any professional reason to want them removed. Hell, after he’d cleared this whole thing up, he’d be happy to have them on his team.

What would make it sound appealing was that it was very nearly true. It would be true, in fact, except they’d killed Calver and Gibbons, which did indeed make things personal. And they had scared Manny’s boy, ruining any chance that Manny might want to just let bygones be bygones, as well.

All he needed to do was get to them. A clean snatch, the back of an unmarked, unobtrusive van. A reasonable, man-to-man conversation, if possible. Electrified alligator clips attached to their scrota, if not. Either way, he would get the information he wanted.

He took a deep breath. Yes, he needed someone who could snatch them, then interrogate them. And who knew the region well enough to be able to make it all happen quickly.

There were several men he could have chosen, but one name stood out: Mitchell William Winters. The man was an expert. He had trained with the famed FBI Hostage Rescue Team and rendered more than his share of bad guys. And he had worked in Asia, doing security consulting for companies that needed such assistance in the region. Winters was into martial arts-Hilger remembered hearing about kali or something like that in the Philippines and Thai boxing in Bangkok. He didn’t particularly care about the karate stuff-Hilger’s choice of martial art was a SIG P229, concealed in a belly band carry, and he had yet to meet the Long Dong Do master who could block a bullet from it-but the experience in Asia would be critical.

And Winters had another plus: Hilger knew he was a graduate of an off-the-books CIA hostile interrogation program. The program was ostensibly designed to teach operators to resist torture, but it was well known in the community that, in doing so, the program taught torture itself, and that this was its true purpose. Some people took to the course material more readily than others. Winters, Hilger knew, had a knack.

The sky was beginning to grow light behind Central off to his right. He consulted his directory, then picked up the phone.

NINE

AFTER DINNER, Dox insisted on heading over to the go-go bars in Patpong. I wasn’t happy about it, but I supposed I would just have to accept that the man was large enough to contain multitudes: lethal and loud; cultured and crude; profound and party-going. And what he had said earlier, about having been doing fine on his own, was of course true. Maybe I was being unfair to him. I decided I would try to trust him more. The thought was strange and uncomfortable, but it felt like the right thing to do.

I stopped by an Internet café to check on Delilah’s plans. There was a message waiting from her: she was coming in on the Air France flight, and would be arriving in Bangkok the following afternoon at 4:35. All right. I made the necessary reservations for Dox, went back to the Sukhothai, took a hot bath in the excellent tub, got in bed, and slept.

But my sleep was restless. I dreamed that I was a little boy again, in the apartment where I had grown up, and that something was chasing me there from room to room. I called for my parents, but no one came, and I was terrified at being alone. My father had kept a katana, the Japanese long sword, which had belonged, he said, to his great-grandfather, on a ceremonial stand in my parents’ bedroom, and I ran in there and slammed the door behind me. Then I went to grab the katana, but instead of one, there were two, and I couldn’t choose which to pick up. I froze. My mind was shouting, Just pick one! Either one! but I couldn’t move. And then the door started to open…

I woke and sprang off the bed into a crouch. I remained like that for a long time, catching my breath, feeling the sweat dry on my body, trying to shake off the dream and come back to myself. Finally I straightened, used the toilet, then took another bath.

But this one didn’t help me sleep at all. I lay in bed for a long time afterward, thinking. It bothered me that I’d frozen again, even in a dream. Two swords within easy reach-an embarrassment of riches if you’re in danger, you would think. And yet I couldn’t choose either one. If I hadn’t awoken, whatever had been pursuing me in the dream would have killed me.

DOX AND I went to the airport early the next afternoon to give ourselves time to establish a countersurveillance route and walk it through. We were using the commo gear from Manila. If Dox had to warn me of anything, he could do it at a distance and right in my ear. This would give us a better range of options than if he had been trying to protect me from afar without contact.

The area outside customs was crowded with people waiting for arrivals: families, Thai and expat; hotel car drivers in white livery; greasy-haired backpackers in sandals with adventure-seeking friends coming in from Europe and Australia. No one set off my radar, but the area was too crowded to be sure. If there were trouble, I expected it would look Israeli. After all, part of the reason Delilah’s people had brought me in to begin with was their lack of Asian resources. The “lack” was relative, of course: through both the gemstone trade and the underground arms market to groups like the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Israel does have contacts in Thailand. Still, if they wanted to move quickly enough to take advantage of any intel Delilah might have supplied them, I didn’t think they’d be able to outsource. None of which is to say I ignored people who didn’t fit the profile, but it does help to keep certain guidelines in mind as you go.

I set up far to the right of the exit, where I would be able to see her as she emerged from customs but where she would have to look hard for me. Dox was positioned a few meters behind me and to my left, and when I casually checked in his direction, it took me a second to spot him, even though I knew him and I knew where to look. He really did have that sniper’s knack for disappearing into the background.

There were two possibilities: first, they would have someone pre-positioned outside of customs, where I had told Delilah I would meet her, along with when. Second, they would have someone on the plane with her, who would have to follow her if his presence were going to serve any purpose. Of the two, I thought the second the more likely, as well as the easier to deal with. More likely, because their probable lack of Asian resources would prevent them from getting someone in place that quickly; easier, because whoever it was would have to be close to Delilah coming off the plane and would have a hard time staying submerged once I started moving her. Either way, I wasn’t unduly worried about someone making a move inside the airport. The levels of surveillance, security, and control over ingress and egress involved would make an airport job almost impossible to pull off cleanly.

The plane arrived ten minutes ahead of schedule, with nothing noticeably out of place in the crowd beforehand. I saw Delilah immediately as she came through. She was wearing a navy pantsuit and brown pumps, her long blond hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. A crocodile carry-on was slung across her left shoulder, the bag resting comfortably against her opposite hip. The surface brand was looks, money, confidence, style. There was a lot more to her than just that, I knew, but she wore that outward persona well.

I reached into my pocket and turned off the commo gear, then turned on the mini bug detector Harry had made for me in Tokyo and that I’ve relied on since. The former would have set off the latter, and I wanted to make sure Delilah wasn’t wearing a transmitter.

She looked around, saw me, and smiled. I felt something going on down south, like a slumbering dog stirring in response to an enticing aroma, and I thought, Down, boy. Don’t embarrass me.

She walked over and put the bag down, then leaned in and kissed me lightly on the mouth. I put my arms around her and pulled her close. She smelled the way she did the first time I’d kissed her, clean and fresh and with a tantalizing trace of some perfume I couldn’t name. The warmth of her, the feel of her against me, her scent, it all seemed to ease in under my clothes, and in the crowded airport the embrace was suddenly private, focused, almost naked in its intimacy.

She pulled her head back and looked at me, one hand resting against the back of my neck, the other dropping gently to my chest. The dog was coming fully awake now. Another minute and the damned thing would sit up and beg. I eased away and looked at her.

She smiled, her cobalt eyes alight with good humor. “I guess this is when I’m supposed to ask, ‘Is that a gun in your pocket…’ ”

I felt myself blush. “No, I’m definitely just glad to see you.”

She laughed. “Where are we going?”

The bug detector slumbered peacefully in my pocket. She wasn’t wired. I struck a casual pose, my hands in my pockets. I switched the bug detector off and powered the commo gear on. I heard a slight hiss in my ear canal where the flesh-colored unit was inserted.

“A little place I know in Phuket,” I said.

“Wonderful! I’ve heard it’s beautiful, but have never been. How are things there, after the tsunami?”

“The place we’re going is elevated from the beach and did fine. Actually, most of the island is recovering nicely. How much time do you have?”

“Three days. Maybe longer. You?”

“I don’t know. I’m waiting for something. I hope it’ll take at least a few days to materialize.”

“Well, let’s not waste any time. Where do we go?”

“The other terminal. Our flight leaves in an hour.”

I eschewed the shuttle bus, instead choosing a route that required a walk through the terminal and a descent to the level below us. She knew what I was doing but didn’t comment on it. On the level below, I flagged down a cab and had it take us to the domestic terminal. A minute after we had pulled away from the curb, I heard Dox in my ear: “All right, so far, so good. It doesn’t look like anyone’s trying to stay with you. If they are, they’re sure not being obvious. I’ll head over and see if we see any familiar faces.”

The cab pulled up in front of the domestic terminal. I paid the driver, got out, and held the door for Delilah, checking behind and around us while I did. She saw what I was doing-I wasn’t trying to be subtle, and she would have spotted it anyway-and again, she didn’t comment. I logged her failure to protest as a possible source of concern. In Rio, we had moved past the point where I was treating her as a potential threat, and I knew that my willingness to relax my guard had been important to her. That my mistrust had apparently resumed should have been the source of insult, and, I knew from experience with her occasional temper, of anger. Unless, of course, she was aware of the reasons behind the resurgence and was misguidedly trying to lull me.

We went inside the terminal and headed down to gate eight. A few minutes later, Dox moved in, keeping to the periphery. I heard him again in my ear: “Okay, partner, there is no way you were followed over here. Also I don’t see anyone here who was waiting outside international arrivals. So unless someone knew where you were headed and got here before us, you are in the clear. I think the next point of concern will be our destination. She might make a call or something, tell her people where you are after you’ve arrived. That way they wouldn’t have to give themselves away trying to follow you. If I was her, sorry, if I were her, I know you’re sensitive about that, and I had bad intentions, that’s the way I’d do it.”

Enough, I thought. It’s not as though I hadn’t already worked this all through myself. In fact, Dox and I had already discussed it all. He was feeling awfully talkative.

Delilah and I made some small talk about the flight. She had flown first class and had slept the whole way, and was refreshed and ready for an evening in a tropical paradise. But Dox kept jabbering, and with Delilah right there next to me, I had no way of telling him to knock it off.

“And damn, man, I have got to tell you, that is one fine-looking woman! Why didn’t you say so? I would have understood right away why you wanted to see her. Hell, I’d have tried to see her myself. I would have done your countersurveillance for free, partner, if I’d known she was going to be the subject, you wouldn’t even have had to pay for my vacation. Well, too late now, a deal’s a deal.”

He stopped, and I thought, Thank God. But a moment later it started up again: “And here I thought you’d been leading a lonely life with nothing but your tired right hand for comfort! I judged you wrong, man, and I’m big enough to admit it, too. From now on, you’re my hero, I’m taking all my romance cues from you.”

Once we were on the plane I knew I was safe, at least temporarily, and I took the earpiece out, satisfied to think that Dox would now be talking only to himself.

Delilah and I caught up some more. The conversation was largely small talk, but I was probing, as well. So far I had two pieces of data, and both pointed to a problem: the timing of her call, and her failure to react to my obvious security moves. The jury wasn’t in yet, but the evidence was piling up. It bothered me, at some level, that it had come to this. In Rio it had been good, it really had. I should have just been able to deal with it-she was a professional, and business is business-but yeah, it was bothering me.

God, she was beautiful, though. You could see why she was so effective in her work. There was something about her, an aura, a magnetism, that I’d never encountered in anyone else.

And despite my suspicions, it felt good to be with her. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the data would start to accumulate in a more favorable direction.

The approach and landing were smooth, and a hotel car was waiting outside arrivals to take us to Amanpuri. The sun was getting low in the sky as we drove along Phuket’s two-lane, narrow roads toward the resort. I knew what she must be thinking: This is it? It’s actually not that much. But we were still somewhat inland. The island’s beauty doesn’t really unfold until you hit the coast. At which time, I knew, her diminishing expectations would make Amanpuri that much more breathtaking.

We pulled in off the resort’s winding, gated drive just as the sun was setting behind the steep, Thai-style rooflines of the bungalows and pavilions and the Andaman Sea beyond them. Palm trees swayed in silhouette to a gentle ocean breeze. A teak terrace flowed from the edge of the driveway to a long, black-bottomed pool, its surface like polished onyx against the darkening sky. In the tenuous golden light, we might have been looking at a movie set.

A porter opened the car door and we got out. “Welcome to Amanpuri,” he said, pressing his palms together under his chin and bowing his head in a formal wai, the Thai attitude of greeting and gratitude.

Delilah looked around, then at me. Her mouth was slightly agape.

“What’s that wonderful smell?” she asked.

“Sedap malam,” the porter said. “Brought here from Indonesia. It means ‘heavenly night’ because it offers its scent only in the evening. I think in English you call it the tuber rose.”

I smiled and looked at her. “Well? Do you like it?”

She paused for a moment, then said, “Oh, my God.”

“Does that mean yes?”

She nodded and looked around again, then back at me. Her face lit up in an enormous smile. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it does.”

We checked in under the rafters of the open-air entrance pavilion. A woman named Aom gave us a quick tour of the facilities-the fitness center, the library, the spa. Everything was teak and stone and seemed to rise up out of the hilly terrain as indigenous as the surrounding palm trees. I noted the presence of multiple guards, all extremely discreet. Amanpuri is a celebrity magnet, and the resort takes security seriously. Which, to me, was part of the attraction. Even if Delilah informed her people of our whereabouts, they would have a hell of a time getting in here unannounced and unobtrusive. As for Delilah herself, from what I had seen of her organization’s MO, her role was to set up the bowling pins, not to knock them down. Also, without checked bags, her ability to carry weapons would be limited. Knowing all this, and also, inevitably, influenced by the blissfully beautiful surroundings, I began to relax. I felt as though we’d been granted some sort of time-out, during which I might learn what I needed to know. Maybe I could turn the situation around, if that’s what was called for. Yeah, we’d faced a conflict of interests before and found a way to work things out. Maybe we could do it again.

Aom took us to our pavilion-number 105, with a full ocean view. The room was low-key and luxurious. The walls, floor, and simple furniture were all teak, with the porcelain of a long tub, a cotton duvet, and oversized thick towels all gleaming white by contrast. Everything seemed to glow with the golden light of the sun, which was still visible through the pavilion’s western doors.

Delilah was starving, so we decided to eat at one of the property’s two open-air restaurants. We sat along the railing overlooking the ocean. The sun was now completely below the horizon, and but for a thin line of glowing red between them the water was now as dark as the sky. The restaurant, like all Amanpuri’s facilities, wisely eschewed any piped-in music, instead allowing the breeze swaying the palm trees and the waves lapping at the beach to supply the necessary ambience.

We ordered roast duck sautéed with morning glories, soft-shelled black crab sautéed with chile paste, stir-fried mixed vegetables, and stir-fried bean sprouts with tofu and chili. I started us with a ’93 Veuve Clicquot.

“I have to tell you,” Delilah said as we ate. “I’ve been to some of the most beautiful places on earth. Post Ranch in Big Sur. The Palace in Saint-Moritz. The Serengeti Plain. But this is right up there.”

I smiled. “There aren’t many places that can make you forget everything. Everywhere you’ve been, everything you’ve done.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Where are the others? For you.”

I thought for a moment. “A few places in Tokyo, believe it or not. But they’re more like… enclaves. Oases. They can protect you from what’s outside, but you still know it’s there. This… it’s another universe.”

She took a sip of the champagne. “I know what you mean. There’s a beach in Haifa, where I grew up. Sometimes, when I’m back there, I can find a quiet spot at night. The smell of the sea, the sound of the waves… it makes me feel like I’m a girl again, innocent and unblemished. Like I’m alone, but in a good way, if you know what I mean.”

“To be unaccompanied by constant memories,” I said, quoting something a friend had once said to me, “is to find a state of grace.”

“Grace?” she asked, taking the reference literally. “Do you believe in God?”

I paused, thinking of my conversation with Dox, then said, “I try not to.”

“Does that help?”

I shrugged. “Not really. But what difference does it make, what you believe? Things are what they are.”

“What you believe makes all the difference in the world.”

I looked at her. We’d been down this road before, and I didn’t like the implicit criticism, maybe even condescension, in her comment. Then or now.

“Then you better be careful about what you believe in,” I said. “And about what it might cost you.”

She looked away for a moment. I wasn’t sure if it was a flinch.

We finished the champagne and I ordered a ’99 Lafon Volnay Santenots. Delilah had a disciplined mind, I knew, but no one does as well in the presence of wine and jet lag as in their absence. And if she were here for something “nefarious,” as Dox had put it, the discord between her feelings for me from before and her intentions for me now would be producing a strain. I wanted to do everything I could to turn that strain into a fault line, the fault line into a widening crack.

We talked more about this and that. She never let on that she knew anything about Manny, or that the botched hit in Manila had anything to do with her presence here now. And as the evening wore on, I realized I couldn’t accept that the timing of her contact had been a coincidence. So the absence of any acknowledgment had to be an omission. A deliberate omission.

If she had been anyone else, and if this had all happened just a year or two earlier, I would have accepted the truth of what I knew. I would have acted on it. Doing so would have protected my body, albeit at some cost to my soul. But sitting across the table from her, no doubt affected by the wine, as well as by the surroundings and the feelings I still had for her, I found myself looking for a different way. Something less direct, less irredeemable, something that might have as its basis hope instead of only fear.

And there was something strangely attractive about the feeling that I was taking a chance. It wasn’t anything as base as the thrill of “unsafe sex,” as Dox had suggested. It was more a sense of the possibilities, the potential upside. Not just the possibility that, if I confronted her and she cracked, she might give me information that would help me understand where I stood regarding Manny. I was aware, too, of a deeper kind of hope at work, for something more than information alone, something intangible but infinitely more valuable.

After a dessert of fruit and Thai sweets followed by steaming tureens of cappuccino, we strolled back to the pavilion. We left the lights dim and sat on a low teak couch facing the sea, present by the sound of the surf but unseeable in the darkness without. The silence in the room felt heavy to me, portentous. My previous, oblique conversational gambits had afforded me only hints and clues. I decided it was time to be more direct. My mouth felt a little dry at the prospect, part of me perhaps afraid of what I might discover.

“Did your people tell you about what they’ve involved me in?” I asked.

She looked at me, and something in her expression told me she wasn’t happy with the question. This wasn’t why we had come back to the room. It wasn’t part of the script.

“No,” she said. “Everything is ‘need to know.’ If I don’t need to know, it’s better that I don’t.”

“They sent me after a guy in Manila.”

She shook her head. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t want what’s between us to be nothing more than ‘need to know.’ If it is, we’re just gaming each other.”

“Protecting each other.”

“Would you protect me?”

“From what?”

“What if something went wrong?”

“Don’t put me in that position.”

“What if you had to choose?”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “I don’t know. What would you do?”

I looked at her. “It’s easy for me. I don’t believe in anything, remember? I can make up my own mind.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s more of an answer than what you just told me.”

“I told you I don’t know. I’m sorry if that wasn’t the answer you were looking for.”

“I’m looking for the truth.”

“You know who I am.”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

She laughed. “Look, I’m like a married woman, okay? With a family I always have to return to.”

I didn’t respond. After a moment she said, “So stop pretending you don’t know all this.”

That sounded dangerously close to a rationalization, one with which I’m all too familiar: He knew what he was getting into. If he hadn’t been in the game, they wouldn’t have wanted him dead.

Of all the potential angles, the possible gambits, it seemed to me that the truth would be what she was least prepared for. The closer I got to it, the more it was putting her off her game.

“You’re here only for personal reasons?” I asked her.

She shifted a fraction on the couch. “Yes.”

“Look in my eyes when you say that.”

She did. A long beat went by.

“I’m here only for personal reasons,” she said again.

No. I knew her, from the time we’d spent together in Rio. If what she just said were true, my suspicions would have provoked her instantly. But now she was trying to manage her behavior in the presence of fatigue, conflicting emotions, and alcohol, and under pressure from my questions, and the unaccustomed effort was showing.

I looked at her silently. She returned my gaze. A long time went by-ten seconds, maybe fifteen. I could see some color coming into her cheeks, her nostrils flaring slightly with each exhalation.

All at once she looked away. I saw her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing. “Goddamn you,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Goddamn you.”

She glanced around the room, her head moving in quick, efficient jerks, here and there and back again.

She got up and started pacing, slowly at first, then more rapidly, her head nodding as though internally confirming something, trying to accept it. She looked everywhere but at me.

“I have to get out of here,” she said, more to herself than to me. She walked over to one of the dressers, pulled open a drawer, and started shoving things into her bag.

“Delilah,” I said.

She didn’t answer, or even pause. She pulled open a second drawer and stuffed its contents into the bag, too.

I stood up. “Delilah,” I said again.

She threw the bag over her shoulder and headed toward the door.

“Wait,” I said, and moved in front of her.

She tried to go left around me. I stayed with her. She went right. That didn’t work either. She moved left again, more quickly. No go.

She had become almost oblivious to my presence. Something had gotten in her way, she had been blindly trying to go around it. But her lack of progress forced her to change her focus, and all at once she saw that the obstacle was me. Her eyes narrowed and her ears seemed to settle back against her head. In my peripheral vision I took in a shift in her weight, a slight rotation of her hips. Then her right elbow was blurring in toward my temple.

I retracted my head and shrugged my left shoulder, bringing my left hand up alongside my face as I did so. Her elbow glanced off the top of my head. Her left was already coming in from the other side. I covered up, dropped through my knees, and deflected it the same way.

She shifted back and shot a left palm heel straight for my nose. I weaved off-line and parried with my right. Other side-same drill.

She took two more quick shots, hooks to the head. I avoided the worst of both. She grabbed my arm and tried to drag me to the side, frustration and anger eroding her tactics.

If there’s one thing my body learned in twenty-five years of judo at the Kodokan in Tokyo, it’s grounding. She might as well have been trying to move one of the room’s thick teak posts.

She made a sound, half rage, half desperation. She stepped back and whipped the bag around at my head. I dissipated some of the blow’s force by flowing with it, and absorbed the rest by covering up with my shoulder, bicep, and forearm. She reloaded and swung again. Again I flowed and absorbed.

She started swearing something in Hebrew and hammering at me with the bag, with no obvious goal now other than to vent her fury. I let her pound on me, taking most of the impact along my arms and shoulders. She was in shape, and it took longer than I would have liked for her to tire. But eventually the power of the blows lessened, the interval between them lengthened. She stood, the bag hanging at her side, her breath heaving in and out. I lowered my arms and looked at her.

She glanced around the room. I realized she was looking for a better weapon of convenience than the bag. I tensed to grab her before she could pick up something heavy and blunt, or something sharp.

She must have sensed that I was on to her. Or she didn’t see anything that looked likely to do the job. Regardless, she stopped scoping the room and looked in my eyes. Her pupils were huge and black-dilated by adrenaline.

Her panting punctuated her words. “Get. The fuck. Out. Of my way.”

“Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

She sucked wind for a moment, then said, “Fuck you.”

I looked at her. “This is going to be a long night.”

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want…” I started to say.

But it had only been a feint. She dropped her right shoulder and charged into me, trying to knock me off balance. The move surprised me and might have worked, but I caught her shoulders with both hands and used her body as a momentary brace. She reared up under me, looking for a head butt, and connected with my chin. My teeth slammed together, narrowly missing my tongue.

Enough. I grabbed her by the biceps and shoved her against the wall.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said.

She dropped the bag and tried for an uppercut to my gut. I took hold of her wrists and slammed her arms up against the wall on either side of her head. Our faces were inches apart.

I felt her knee coming up and pressed my body against hers to stop it. She twisted right, then left. My cheek was pressed against hers and her smell, that perfume I liked, now mixed with sweat and fear and rage, got inside me and wrought some weird alchemy. I dropped my face to her neck, feeling first as though I was just going to brace it there, but then I was kissing her instead. I heard her say, “No, no,” but she wasn’t fighting me anymore, or at least not the same way.

Keeping her arms and body pinned to the wall, I brought my face around to kiss her on the mouth. She twisted her head away. I let go of her wrists and took her face in my hands. She tried to push me away for a second, but then she was kissing me back, almost attacking me with her mouth. I ran my hands down around her breasts and squeezed her waist, her ass. I realized I was kissing her as hard as she was me.

I reached up and tried to undo one of the buttons on her blouse but my hands were shaking and I couldn’t do it. Fuck it. I slipped the fingers of both hands into the gap between the buttons and pulled hard to the sides. The buttons all popped free. The bra beneath was lace, with a front snap. I could feel her nipples, hard, through the fabric. I struggled to get the snap undone. Fabric tore. The bra opened up and her breasts were in my hands. Her skin was smooth and hot and damp from exertion.

Kissing me so hard I was forced to step back from the wall, she reached up and tore my shirt open the same way I had done hers. Then she reached down for my belt buckle. No, I thought. You first. I yanked her blouse and bra down to her wrists and spun her around so that she was facing the wall. We started to struggle again. I took her left arm in a wristlock and bent it behind her back. I held it high, almost to her shoulder blades, with my left hand, and shoved her up against the wall. I reached under her skirt with my right. She was wet through her panties. I pushed her skirt up, pinned the fabric against her ass with my hip, and tore her panties away. She snapped her head back and caught me on the cheek with a rear head butt. I saw stars. I pushed against her harder and pressed the side of my face against hers so that she was pinned entirely to the wall. I reached down and began to touch her. She closed her eyes and groaned. I moved my fingers inside her and her body shook.

I looked around wildly. To our left-the dresser. I shoved her over to it. There was a stack of travel magazines on top. I swept them to the floor with my free hand. Then I bent her over the dresser, bearing down on her arm and pinning her upper torso. She struggled but the wrist hold was too tight. I stepped to her side, opened my belt, and undid my button and zipper.

I stepped on the cuff of my left pants leg with my right foot and dropped my pants, stepping clear of them with my left leg as soon as they hit the floor. No way was I going to deal with her with a pair of trousers pooled around my ankles. I repeated the procedure with my right leg, then slipped off my boxers. My erection was straining upward like spring-loaded cement.

I stepped between her legs and pushed up the skirt. Her breathing was more like gasping now, and so, I realized, was mine.

Still pressing her down with the wristlock, I started touching her again. I don’t know what I was waiting for. Maybe I wanted to torture her a little, to torture both of us.

“Do it,” I heard her gasp. “Do it, or I’ll kill you.”

My heart was hammering so hard I heard it thudding in my skull. My fingers and toes were tingling. I kicked her feet farther apart, wiped some of her wetness onto myself, and entered her in one smooth motion.

She gasped so loudly I felt the sound of it run back up into me, like a feedback screech through a microphone. I started driving into her, my hips sliding up and forward, my gut and ass clenching and releasing with each profound stroke.

I looked down at her. The side of her face was pressed against the dresser, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth open and panting, in pain or ecstasy or both I didn’t know. Her cheek was streaked with tears. I kept going. I didn’t slow down at all.

A minute went by, maybe two. I forgot who she was, who I was, why we were there. There was only the room, the heat, a singularity generating a rhythm as old as oceans.

I heard a deep groan and realized it came from me. Or maybe it was hers. She opened her eyes and looked back at me, pleading for something. I let go of her wrist and took hold of her hips. She gripped the edges of the dresser and moved up onto her toes, raising her ass higher. Her lips were moving but if there were words I couldn’t hear them. Her legs were trembling. I felt her start to come and it took me over the edge. I dug my fingers more deeply into her hips. The pounding in my chest and in my head seemed to fuse together with everything else, my legs, my balls, my gut, her body beneath and before me, everything. Through it all I could hear her swearing in Hebrew again, could feel her coming in waves under me and all around me and myself coming with her.

Finally it subsided. I eased down on top of her, supporting some of my weight with my arms. We stayed that way, our breathing abating, our sweat drying, coming back to ourselves.

After a while, I eased myself up and stepped to the side. I touched her shoulder.

She pushed herself up off the dresser and looked at me. Neither of us said anything.

“You okay?” I asked, after a moment.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay.”

“You want to talk?”

“No, I want to get out of here.”

“Is that going to help?”

“No.”

“Then maybe we should talk.”

There was a pause. She looked down at what was left of her blouse and bra, then let them slide off her arms to the floor. She stepped out of her skirt.

“Tell me one thing, okay?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me that you haven’t done that before. Without a condom, I mean.”

I thought of Naomi, and, even more, of Midori. “Not in a few years.”

She nodded. “Good. Although at this point AIDS or whatever ought to be the least of my worries.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

She walked over to the shower and took a robe off the peg next to it. She pulled it on. I walked over and did the same. We moved over to the bed and sat on it.

“Those men you killed in Manila,” she said, looking at her hands. Her voice was slightly husky. “Two of them were CIA officers.”

I looked at her. I saw that she was being straight with me.

“Shit,” I said.

She didn’t respond. After a moment I said, “How bad is it?”

“My people are afraid the Agency will find you and you’ll talk. They don’t want to take that chance.”

“So they sent you.”

She shrugged. “What would you have done?”

“You came here to set me up?”

“I thought I did. Now I’m not sure.”

“That’s not quite what I was hoping to hear.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Couldn’t pull the trigger yourself?”

“What I do is hard enough.”

We were silent for a minute while I digested the news. I said, “What’s next?”

She brushed away a few strands of hair that were clinging to her face. “I’m supposed to call my contact, let him know when and where you’ll be vulnerable.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

She looked up at the ceiling and said, “I have absolutely no idea.”

“What changed your mind?” I asked, and thought, Maybe you haven’t, though. Maybe this is just the best set-up you’ve ever pulled off.

I’d have to keep testing for that. I didn’t think the way her body had responded could possibly have been acting. But maybe there were a bunch of dead men out there who had all convinced themselves of the same thing. And maybe I would be a fool to assume that the body would always follow the mind. Or vice versa.

There was a long silence. Then she said, “You’ve been lucky so far. I don’t know anyone who’s been luckier for longer. But nobody’s bulletproof. I can’t keep bailing you out.”

“Bailing me out?”

“I warned you about that guy in your room in Macau.”

“I didn’t need your warning.”

“No? You took it.”

I let it go. “And this time?”

She looked at me. “Enough, all right? You know why. I don’t want to be responsible for your death. You fucked up in Manila and I don’t know if you’re going to survive it. I just don’t want to be the one who kills you. Or helps make it happen.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you out.”

She glared at me. “Stop being a child. You caused this situation, and now I’m caught in it, too.”

I paused and took a breath. I needed to think. There had to be a way out of this.

“What did they tell you happened in Manila?” I asked.

“Only what you told them. That you tried to hit Lavi in a restroom but his son came in and got in the way. Then the bodyguard and the other two guys burst in and Lavi and the boy got away.”

“Yeah, that’s about right.”

“Why don’t you give me your perspective, with details?”

I told her, leaving Dox out of it.

When I was finished, she said, “That tracks with everything my people told me. At least they were being straight.”

“Do they know what Manny was doing with Agency operators?”

“If they do, they didn’t tell me. Other than to say that Lavi is a known CIA asset.”

Something was nagging me, jostling for my attention. I parsed the facts, tried to identify the assumptions. Then I realized.

“How do your people know those men were CIA?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

I thought for a moment, then said, “From what your people told me, Manny is a world-class bad guy. Not the kind of person the Agency can acknowledge is on the payroll. In fact, even post nine-eleven, employing a character like Manny is highly illegal. If it got out, there would be a lot of embarrassment. The people involved would probably have to take a fall.”

“I don’t understand.”

I nodded. “No, you don’t, and your people might be having the same problem. You all work for a small, tightly knit organization that operates with little oversight and few constraints. But the CIA isn’t like that. I’ve worked with them on and off for years and I know. They’ve been ripped apart again and again-the Church Commission, the purges under Stansfield Turner, now again with this guy Goss-and they’ve developed a Pavlovian aversion to risk. Should they be recruiting terrorists? Absolutely. But if you’re the guy who does it, if you recruit, run, and God forbid pay someone who has American blood on his hands, and if the paperwork has your name on it, the first time some Congressional committee starts trying to assert its prerogatives, or the first time someone needs a sacrificial lamb, or the first time you make a bureaucratic enemy, you will absolutely be crucified.”

“You’re assuming they were running Lavi. They might have been there to kill him, like you were.”

I shook my head. “That wasn’t it. The way they rushed into that bathroom after Manny hit the panic button, they’d spotted trouble and were on their way to protect him. Trust me, I know the difference.”

“All right, so they weren’t there to harm him.”

“That’s right. You see what I’m getting at? Something’s not right here. Manny’s not like some Second Secretary in the Chinese Consulate that everyone wants to take the credit for. He’s an explosives guy, a terrorist with American blood on his hands. If someone’s running Manny at the CIA, they’re going to treat him like he’s radioactive. They wouldn’t send two officers to meet with him face-to-face. It doesn’t make sense.”

She looked at me. “If they weren’t CIA…”

“Then I don’t have a problem with the CIA. Or at least no more of a problem than usual. Maybe the situation is more fluid than it seems right now. Maybe I can take another crack at Manny.”

“I see your point.”

“Can you find out how your people know what they think they know?”

She glanced to her right, a neurolinguistic sign of construction. She was imagining how she was going to go about this. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

“What are you going to tell Gil?” I asked, trying to plug into exactly what she was envisioning.

“That…”

She looked at me, realizing what I’d done and how she had slipped. But the damage was done and she went on. “I’ll call him in the morning. I’ll tell him I’d suggested we go snorkeling at a certain beach at a certain time, and that the suggestion had made you suspicious. That when I woke up you were gone.”

I figured it would be Gil. A killer knows a killer.

“Will he believe that?” I asked.

“He’ll suspect. But it’ll buy us time.”

“Do you trust him?”

She frowned. “He’s very… committed.”

“Yeah, I got that feeling.”

“But he’s a professional. He does what he does for a reason. Take away the reason, and he’ll move on to the next thing that keeps him awake at night.”

I nodded. Her assessment tracked with my own.

She rubbed her eyes. “I need to sleep.”

I leaned over and touched her cheek. I looked in her eyes, wanting to know what I would see there.

Whatever it was, it was good enough. There was nothing more to say. We turned off the light and got under the covers. For a long time I listened to her breathing in the dark. After that I don’t remember.

DELILAH SLEPT DEEPLY for two hours, then woke from jet lag. She lay on her side and watched Rain sleep. God, what a mess.

She had come here convinced that he had screwed up and that there was no other way to solve the problem he had caused except for him to die. That he knew the risks and so in some ways deserved the outcome. But she realized now that all of this had been rationalization, psychic defense against an involvement she dreaded. Seeing him hadn’t clouded her judgment, it had cleared it.

They’d hired him for a job, and he’d done the best he could without a lot to go on. What did they want him to do, slaughter a child? Had it come to that? With Gil, she knew, it had. If she confronted him, Gil would talk about “greater evil and lesser evil” and “collateral damage” and “theirs and ours.” She didn’t buy any of that. She didn’t want to. That Rain was still able to make the moral distinction after so much time in the business-more time than Gil-impressed her. It gave her hope for herself. She wasn’t going to help set him up for acting in a way even Gil, if pressed, would publicly profess was right. Yes, there was a problem, but the director, Boaz, Gil… they had simply proposed the wrong solution. She saw that now. All she had to do was find a better way. She felt confident that she could. If she couldn’t… No, she didn’t want to go there. Not unless she had to.

She was aware, on some level, that she was rationalizing, that her people would view her determination to find a third way as a betrayal. She didn’t care. They weren’t always as smart as they liked to think. And their investment was different than hers. To them, Rain was not much more than a piece on a chessboard. To her, he had become much more than that.

She liked him a lot, more than she had liked someone in a long time. The sex was good-God, better than good-but that was only part of it. She was also… comfortable with him. Until she had spent time with him in Rio, she hadn’t noticed the absence of that kind of comfort in her life. It had disappeared so long ago, and she had been so overwhelmed with so many other things at the time, that it had never occurred to her to mourn its loss.

There had been many affairs, more than she could count. But none of those men, not one, knew what she did. No matter how intense the infatuation, no matter how satisfying the sex, she was always aware that they didn’t, couldn’t, really know her. They couldn’t understand her convictions, sympathize with her doubts, soothe her frustrations, ameliorate the periodic ache in her soul. No wonder she tended to tire of them quickly.

Rain was different. From early on she realized he knew exactly what she did, although she had never spelled it out for him. He seemed to understand her without her ever needing to explain herself. He was patient with her moods. He knew, yes, but he didn’t judge her. More than that, she sensed that he even admired her beliefs, the personal sacrifices she made for the cause that defined her. She had identified the absence of, and the longing for, a cause of his own as one of the key attributes of his persona, and remembered, with a slight pang of conscience, how she had reported on this to her people as something potentially exploitable.

There was comfort, too, in context: there was no uncertainty about their status, no foolish hopes about where this might be leading. There could be no hurt or recriminations about why someone hadn’t called or had to break an engagement. Even their different affiliations, and the potential conflicts of interest those affiliations might present, as indeed they had, were understood. In French they would call it sympa, simpatico. In English, the banal but perhaps more descriptive “same sheet of music.” In its quiet way, it was really quite wonderful.

All of this mattered to her, but there was something more important, more improbable, still: she knew he trusted her. Of course he never abandoned his tactics, she wouldn’t expect that. His moves were as subtle as she’d ever seen, and usually disguised as ordinary behavior, but she knew what he was doing. Meeting her at the gate in Bangkok and taking her to the domestic terminal by taxi had been a particularly nice, albeit undisguised, way to play it. If Gil or anyone else had been with her, the game would have been over right there. She suspected that there were other layers, possibly involving electronics, in his countermeasures, layers she hadn’t detected. And she was aware from time to time that his “innocent” questions involved hidden meanings and traps. But all of this was reflex for him, habit. She sensed the tactics were his way of reassuring himself that he hadn’t gone soft, that he was still protected, that he wouldn’t be so foolish as to trust someone like her.

She never would have told Gil or anyone else, but she knew from the moment they asked that Rain would take the meeting. She wondered what series of rationalizations he must have employed in agreeing to see her in Bangkok. Probably he told himself that it would be worth the risk because she might be able to tell him more about Lavi. And maybe he had been hoping for something like that, but she knew the real reason. The real reason was trust.

Watching him sleep, she felt a surge of gratitude so strong it brought tears to her eyes. She wanted to wake him with a kiss, hold his face in her hands and look in his eyes and thank him, really thank him, so that he could understand how much that trust, which not even the men she worked with extended to her, was worth. She smiled faintly at the ridiculous urge and waited for it to pass.

He was a strange man in many ways, and she found his strangeness appealing. Sometimes what she saw in his eyes reminded her of what had settled into her parents’ after her brother had been killed in Lebanon. She found herself moved by that look, and by the way he would force it away if he saw her watching too closely. Once she had asked him if there had ever been a child. He told her no. She hadn’t pressed, sensing that whatever equivalent events could produce that expression had to be approached gradually and obliquely, if at all.

She knew the odds were against them, but she didn’t want to think about that now. She thought instead about how, when things were fixed, they would make up for how they had almost been set against each other. They’d been together in Macau, Hong Kong, now Thailand. All his territory. And, of course, Rio, which was somewhat of a neutral corner. She found herself wanting to take him to Europe, which felt like home now even more than Israel. Maybe Barcelona, or the Amalfi Coast. Somewhere he had never been, somewhere their time together would be fresh and unburdened by memory.

She watched him. She had never known a man who slept so silently. It was almost unnerving, that someone could be stealthy even in his sleep.

After a long time, she joined him.

TEN

I WOKE UP EARLY the next morning. Delilah was still sleeping. I got out of bed and padded silently over to the living area, sliding shut the teak doors that divided it from the sleeping area behind me. I picked up my cell phone and inserted one of the spare SIM cards I had purchased in Bangkok, effectively giving the phone a new identity. Then I went into the toilet stall, closed the door behind me, and turned the unit on. I needed to make two calls, and for the moment I wanted to keep them private. Ordinarily I prefer not to use a cell phone from a fixed location, but with the new SIM card the unit would be sterile. And the conversations would be brief.

First Tatsu, my old friend and nemesis at the Keisatsu-cho, the Japanese FBI. Tatsu owed me a lifetime of favors for having taken out Murakami, a yakuza assassin he’d wanted dealt with extrajudicially, and it was time for me to call one of those favors in.

His cell rang only once. Then I heard his voice. Never one to waste words or even syllables, he said only, “Hai.”

“Hello, old friend,” I said in Japanese.

There was a pause, and I imagined a rare smile. “Hello,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

“Too long.”

“Are you in town?”

“No.”

“Then you are calling for information.”

“Yes.”

“What do you need?”

“Four days ago there was a shootout in a Manila shopping mall. I want to know everything you can tell me about the men who died there.”

Tatsu would be wondering whether I’d been involved, but he knew there would be no point in asking. “All right,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Everything is good?” he asked.

“The usual.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

I chuckled. “Thank you, my friend.”

“Call me if you’re ever in town. We can make small talk.”

I smiled. Tatsu was congenitally incapable of small talk, something I used to rib him over.

“We’ll do that,” I said.

“Jaa.” Well then.

“Jaa.” I hung up.

The next call, I knew, would be more problematic. Higher risk, but also higher reward.

I punched in the number and waited while the call went through. I told myself that, if the men in Manila really had been CIA, I was in a world of shit anyway and the call couldn’t do much to worsen my position. If they weren’t, though, a call to the CIA itself would be my best chance of finding out.

This time, too, the phone was answered promptly with a curt “Hai.” I smiled, wondering briefly whether Tatsu was mentoring this young man. I suspected he was.

Tomohisa Kanezaki was a third-generation Japanese American and rising star at CIA Tokyo Station. We had found ourselves involved in several of the same off-the-books projects over the last couple years, and, as was the case with Tatsu, we had managed to work out what seemed to be a mutually beneficial modus vivendi. It was time to test the limits of that ambiguous relationship.

“Hey,” I said to him in English, knowing he would recognize the greeting and my voice.

There was a pause, then he said in English, “I’ve been wondering when you would get in touch.”

“Here I am.”

“Looking for work?”

“Have you got any?”

“Not like we did. The post-nine-eleven urgency is beginning to fade. For a while there, we were really in a take-no-prisoners mindset, but that’s going now. Shit, if we were the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, we’d call what we’ve got now a ‘catch and release’ program.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“I’m sorry to say it.”

“I’m not looking for work anyway.”

“No?”

“No. I’m staying out of that business. It’s too dangerous.”

He laughed.

“I need a favor,” I said.

“Sure.”

“I heard there was a shooting recently. In a Manila shopping mall.”

There was a pause, then he said, “I heard the same thing.”

Shit. I couldn’t imagine he would have heard about the shooting if the CIA weren’t in some way involved. Maybe I shouldn’t have called him. Well, too late now.

“You know anything about the deceased?” I asked. “I heard they were company men.”

There was another pause. Then: “They were ex-company.”

Ex-company. Interesting.

“You know what they were doing there?” I asked.

“I don’t.”

“I think I might know something. If I tell you, can you see what you can find out?”

“I’ll do what I can.”

Not exactly a binding promise, but I’d take what I could get.

“They were there for a meeting with a guy named Manheim Lavi. Israeli national, resident of South Africa. Check your files, you’ll find out who he is.”

There was a pause. “How do you know this?” he asked.

It was only reflex. He knew I wouldn’t answer.

“Check your files,” I said again.

“I know who Manny is.”

I should have realized. When we were last in touch, Kanezaki had been responsible for a number of antiterrorism initiatives in Southeast Asia. If he knew his brief, and of course he did, Manny would be very much on his radar screen.

“All right. Any ideas about why some ex-company guys would be meeting with him in Manila?”

“All I know is that they were named Calver and Gibbons. They retired from the Agency two years ago. They were with NE Division-the Middle East. I didn’t know them while they were here, but enough people did to make their deaths pretty big news. Everybody’s talking about it.”

“If you can find out more, I’d like to know. Who they reported to when they were with the government, what they were up to lately. That kind of thing.”

There was a pause. “Tell me you weren’t involved in this,” he said.

“I told you, I’m not doing this stuff anymore.”

“Yeah? What are you doing instead?”

“I’m thinking about the greeting card industry.”

“That’s funny. You going to wear a shoe phone?”

I smiled. “Anything you can tell me, I’d be grateful.”

“You know where to look,” he said. Meaning the bulletin board.

“Thanks.”

“And don’t forget. This isn’t a one-way street. I’m taking a lot of chances here. I expect good information in return.”

“Of course.” I clicked off and shut the unit down.

I pulled on a pair of shorts and did my daily two hundred and fifty Hindu push-ups, five hundred Hindu squats, several minutes of neck bridges, front and back, and a variety of other bodyweight calisthenics and stretches. What you can get done with nothing more than a floor, your bodyweight, and gravity in thirty minutes of nonstop activity would put the fitness equipment industry out of business if people caught on.

When I was done, I got in the shower. I lathered up to shave and winced when I touched my cheek. I checked in the mirrored surface of the shower door and saw that my cheek was bruised. Then I noticed that my forearms were black and blue, too. Damn, I was lucky that bag hadn’t been filled with something heavier. And that I’d turned my face away from her head butt in time.

Delilah joined me just as I finished shaving. She looked at my cheek and said, “Ouch.”

I looked at her. “Don’t worry, I accept your apology.”

She gave me an odd look-half smile, half glare. “You deserved it,” she said. “And then some.”

I decided to respond to the smile, not the glare. I put my arms around her and pulled her close.

Some time passed before I got to finish showering. This time was slower, and a lot more tender. Thank God.

Afterward, Delilah stayed in the shower. I changed into jeans and an olive polo shirt and packed my bags.

I sat on the couch and waited for her. When she was done, she walked out into the suite naked. No makeup, wet hair. She looked great. I wished I could have had more time with her. Well, maybe there would be another chance. If we were lucky.

She pulled on a pair of navy silk shorts and a cream linen blouse. She sat next to me and brushed some wet hair back from her face.

“I’ve got some preliminary information,” I told her.

She raised her eyebrows, and I went on. “I have a contact at the Agency. According to him, those men weren’t active duty. They were retired.”

She frowned. “What did you expect? You called the CIA, and your questions confirmed your guilt. Your contact reacted by lulling you, telling you there’s less to worry about than you first thought. That’s exactly what you would expect him to say.”

She had a devious mind. Probably she thought I was telling her this so she would feed it to Gil and company, maybe get them to rethink. She was discounting the information accordingly.

I shook my head. “I’ve known this guy for a while. I don’t think he would play it that way.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“Check on your end. We’ll see if we can resolve the apparent discrepancy. If we can find proof, or something like proof, maybe your people will get them to change their assessment before things turn really ugly.”

She nodded slowly as though considering, then said, “I meant to tell you-I saw a big man, sandy-colored hair, outside the arrivals area in Bangkok and then again after dinner here. Did you notice him?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head automatically as though it was no big deal and probably just a coincidence. Damn, she’d caught me by surprise there.

She nodded. “I thought it was odd that he was at the airport in Bangkok at the same time we were, and then here afterward, but that he wasn’t on our flight.”

“Maybe he was waiting for someone and they caught a later flight.”

She looked at me. “I’m surprised I spotted an incongruity and you didn’t. I know you’re attuned to the environment.”

Fuck. I knew she had me. Still, I struggled for a moment longer. I said, “I guess I’m not as sharp as I used to be.” Given the less than adroit way I had just handled her probe, my words rang worryingly true.

“If you didn’t know him and you hadn’t noticed, I would have expected you to be more alarmed to learn of his presence,” she said, relentless.

I didn’t say anything. Dox was blown. There was nothing I could do.

“Who is he?” she asked.

I sighed. “My partner.”

She nodded as though she had already known, as indeed she had. “He was with you in Manila?”

I shrugged. There was nothing to say.

“You might as well call him, then. We should talk.”

I realized I had never been with Dox in front of civilized company. The prospect made me uncomfortable.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

But she misunderstood my reticence. “It would be more efficient for us to put our heads together.”

For the second time in as many days, I thought, Nothing good can come of this.

And for the second time I found myself saying, “All right.”

I took out my cell phone and called him. He answered immediately. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“Peachy,” I said, the code word to tell him that everything was indeed okay, that I wasn’t under duress. “But my friend noticed you at the airport, and again here. She’d like to meet you.”

“Oh man, how did she notice me? You must have told her.”

“I didn’t. She just noticed you.”

“How? Damn, this is embarrassing.”

I looked at Delilah. She was smiling slightly, enjoying what she must have been making of the other side of the conversation.

“I told you, she’s good,” I said.

“Yeah, apparently so. You going to give me a hard time about this?”

“God, yes.”

There was a pause. “All right. I reckon I’ve got that coming. But not in front of her, okay? This is embarrassing enough.”

“All right.”

“Promise me.”

Christ. “I promise.”

“Okay, where do you want to do this?” The tone was of a little boy resigned to a spanking.

“I think my room would be best. No sense the three of us being seen together.”

He sighed. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

I clicked off. Delilah asked, “Was he upset?”

I shrugged. “Embarrassed.”

She smiled. “I would be, too.”

“I promised him I wouldn’t be hard on him in front of you.”

Her smile broadened. “That’s what you were promising?”

I nodded and added innocently, “But that was only me. You didn’t promise anything.”

She chuckled and said, “There’s a streak of cruelty in you, I see.”

I looked at her.“How did you make him? Really.”

“I told you, the incongruities. But also… he’s a big man, but when you look at him, it’s almost like he’s not there.”

I nodded. I saw no sense in telling her about his sniping background. I said, “He’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Most of the time he’s as loud and obnoxious as an ambulance siren. But when he goes dark, he can damn near disappear.”

“That’s what tipped me. I didn’t notice him, but then I noticed that I didn’t notice, you know what I mean? I took a second look, and realized how big he is. That’s what told me he was a pro. It’s not easy for a big man to make himself fade away like that. Even for a small one, it’s rare.”

There was a knock at the door. I walked over, stood to the side, and leaned over to glance through the peephole. It was Dox.

I opened the door. He nearly blotted out the sun behind him. I turned and waved him inside.

Delilah stood. Dox looked at her a little sheepishly. Then he turned to me. His eyes widened slightly at the sight of my bruised cheek. His glance dropped to the wear and tear on my arms. His face lit up in his trademark grin.

“Well, I don’t know what ya’ll were doing last night, but I hope it was consensual,” he said.

Shit, I thought. Well, Dox had to be Dox. There was nothing anyone could do about it.

Delilah looked at him. Her expression was somewhere between mild amusement and gentle reproach. “Really, is that any way to introduce yourself?” she asked softly, holding Dox’s eyes.

Dox returned her look, and something strange came over him. The grin faded away and color crept into his cheeks. He dropped his hands in front of his pants as though he was holding a hat there, and said, “Um, no. No, ma’am, it’s not.”

I thought, What the hell?

She gave him an encouraging that’s better smile and held out her hand. Her head was high, her posture erect and formal. “I’m Delilah,” she said.

He reached for her hand and shook it once, his head bowing slightly as he did so. “People call me Dox.”

She raised her eyebrows. “ ‘Dox’?”

He nodded, and I noticed him unconsciously straighten, mirroring her posture. “It’s short for ‘unorthodox,’ ma’am. Which some people seem to think I am.”

Good God, it was like watching a ferocious-looking dog charge into a room, then roll over to have its belly scratched.

Her eyes twinkled with understanding and shared good humor. “You don’t seem unorthodox to me,” she said.

Dox’s expression was almost grave. “Well, I’m not,” he said. “I’m the normal one. It’s all those other folks who are unorthodox.” He paused, then added, “Although I do kind of like the nickname. I’ve had it for a long time. You can use it, if you like.”

She smiled. “I will. And please call me Delilah.”

He nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am.” He reddened, and I could imagine him thinking, Dumbass. “Delilah, I mean.”

“Why don’t we sit down?” I said.

Dox turned to me as though suddenly remembering that I was in the room. He nodded. Then he turned to Delilah and gestured to the couch like the perfect southern gentleman. She smiled and walked over. I sat next to her. Dox took the chair and pulled it around so he was facing us.

Delilah and I briefed him on what we had discussed the night before and on what I had learned that morning.

When we were done, he said, “I knew those boys were hitters from the way they moved. And I was afraid they might be of the CIA persuasion. Too bad, really. Ordinarily, I try to make it a habit not to offend spy organizations and their ilk.”

“That’s the question,” I said. “What organization we’ve really offended.”

“What about your people?” Dox asked, turning to Delilah. “John tells me you’re with the Mossad, or one of their affiliates.”

She raised her eyebrows and glanced at me. “Is that what he says?”

Dox shrugged. “Professional outfit, if you don’t mind my saying so. I worked with some Israeli snipers some years back.”

Snipers. Shit, he might as well have handed her his CV.

“What did you think?” she asked.

“I liked them a lot. Arrogant badasses-uh, guys, I mean-with every reason to be. They taught me as many tricks as I did them.” He broke out in the grin. Talking about sniping was more familiar territory for him. He glanced at me and said, “It takes a special kind of karma to offend the CIA and the Mossad, and both at the same time. If it had happened to someone else, I’d be laughing about it.” Then he looked at Delilah and his expression sobered again. “I sure hope you can do something to help us out of this situation we’re in before it gets any nastier.”

Delilah nodded. “I’ll try.”

Dox bowed his head. “Well, I’m grateful to you. So’s my partner.”

Delilah looked at me. “How do I contact you?”

I gave her one of the cell phone SIM card numbers. I would leave the phone off most of the time so that no one could track it. But I could check the voice mail from time to time securely enough, and more frequently and easily than I could the bulletin board.

“All right,” I said. “Time to beat a hasty retreat. I’ll take care of the checkout.”

Dox and I stood up. I leaned over Delilah and kissed her.

“Thank you,” I said.

She shook her head. “Don’t thank me yet.”

ELEVEN

HILGER HAD GOTTEN back to his apartment on Lugard Road in the Mid-Levels at well past sunrise that morning. He was sleeping with the aid of a black eyeshade when his cell phone rang on the bed stand next to him. He sat up instantly, pulled off the eyeshade, and blinked at the light coming through his bedroom window. He breathed in and out hard and cleared his throat. He had a feeling he knew who might be calling, even though there was no rational reason for his confidence.

He picked up the phone and said, “Hilger.”

“Hello, Mr. Hilger. Our mutual friend gave me your number.”

The voice was soft and assured, lightly Arabic-accented. Hilger smiled. He had been right. It was VBM.

“Good,” Hilger said. “Thank you for calling.”

“This line is secure?” the voice asked.

“Absolutely,” Hilger responded.

The voice stayed oblique anyway. “It seems there was a problem in Manila.”

“Yes, there was,” he responded, staying oblique himself to keep the man comfortable. “Our mutual friend has enemies, as you know.”

“And?”

“The problem has been resolved.” It didn’t feel like a lie because he expected it to be true soon. Hell, maybe it was true already.

“All right.”

“If you’re still in the area, I hope we can still meet. I’d like to come to the meeting personally.”

“You weren’t able to make it personally last time?”

The man was pressing. Maybe he was the petty type. Maybe he was just testing Hilger’s mettle. It didn’t matter. Hilger said, “I wasn’t. But perhaps that’s for the best.”

He heard the man chuckle. All right, that was good.

“Where do you propose we meet?” the voice asked.

“Why don’t you come here, to Hong Kong? You’ll be my guest. I’ll put you up in the best hotel. We can charter a boat, go to the horse races, whatever you like.”

“I’m afraid I’ll be pressed for time.”

Yes, the man was the petty type. He wanted to show that he was setting limits, that he was in charge. But the main thing was that he had implicitly agreed to the substance of what Hilger had proposed. The trick now was to close on that substance and at the same time let the man feel he was in control.

“I understand,” Hilger said. “Still, if your schedule permits, I think you’ll find a first-class, all-expenses-paid visit to Hong Kong to be very enjoyable.”

There was a pause, and he could feel the man considering. In Hilger’s experience, the wealthy were typically the cheapest, greediest people on the planet. With the people he had behind him, this guy could probably buy half of Hong Kong, yet he was salivating at the prospect of someone buying a tiny part of it for him.

“We’ll see,” the voice said.

Hilger knew that meant yes. He smiled and said, “Why don’t I make a few arrangements and post them on the bulletin board. Would tomorrow for dinner be possible? We can discuss business then, and after, if you have time, you can stay for a few days as my guest.”

“Dinner tomorrow will work,” the man said, committing to the only part Hilger gave a shit about.

“Excellent,” Hilger said. “I’ll make the arrangements and post them right away.”

“Very good.” The man hung up.

Hilger got up and walked over to his desk. He fired up his laptop, then spent a few minutes thinking. With Calver and Gibbons gone, it made sense to bring Winters to the VBM meeting. Winters was coming to Hong Kong anyway, to brief Hilger on what he got from Rain and Dox. VBM might not like the slight surprise, but at that point he wouldn’t back out. It would be worth temporarily ruffling the man’s feathers to have backup at the meeting, and to have someone to whom he could delegate after. And he’d still need Manny there to offer his imprimatur. That would make a nice party of four. Hilger knew just the place.

He spent the next hour on the phone and the Internet, making the arrangements, alerting the players. When he was done, he checked one of the secure bulletin boards.

Son of a bitch, he thought, feeling a flush of pride at the quality of the men he worked with. There had been a break, a bit of luck that had enabled Hilger’s people to track Dox to Bangkok. The man had made a mistake, and it was going to cost him. If Rain was with him, as Hilger was betting he was, it would cost them both.

His phone rang again.

“Hilger,” he said.

“It’s me,” the caller said.

Hilger recognized the slightly nasal voice on the other end. His contact on the National Security Council.

“Go ahead.”

“We’ve got a new problem.”

Hilger waited.

The contact said, “I got a call this morning. A reporter from the Washington fucking Post.”

Hilger’s concern expressed itself in a feeling of almost deliciously cool calm.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to know about a rumor that the men in Manila were CIA officers and had died while meeting with a known terrorist.”

“Did he have anything else?”

“Not that he said.”

“Maybe he was fishing.”

“I doubt it. His information was pretty accurate in certain respects. I think it’s more likely that he has a source.”

Shit, someone was putting together the pieces pretty quickly.

“He’s going to run a story?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet. I think he’s looking for more information, corroboration.”

“Then we still have time.”

“Listen, I used up a lot of capital to straighten things out after Kwai Chung. I don’t know if I can do that again.”

Hilger breathed once, in and out. He said, “You won’t have to.”

“You need to put this thing to sleep quickly,” the voice answered. “We can’t afford the scrutiny. Not again.”

Yeah, no shit.

“It’s being handled today,” Hilger told him. “I’ll call you when it’s done.”

“Okay. Good.”

Hilger clicked off. He looked at his phone, wondering how it was going in Bangkok. For a moment, he thought that maybe he should have been there himself, to oversee things. But no. Winters was the best. Hilger had seen him in action and it wasn’t a pretty sight. But the man got results.

Hilger glanced at his desk clock. Maybe he was getting those results right now.