Rain Storm aka Choke Point

1

THE AGENCY HAD hired me to “retire” Belghazi, not to protect him. So if this didn’t go well, their next candidate for a retirement package would probably be me.

But the way I saw it, saving Belghazi from the guy I now thought of as Karate would be doing Uncle Sam a favor. After all, Karate could fail to make it look natural, or get caught, or do some other sloppy thing, and then there would be misunderstandings, and suspicions, and accusations-exactly the kinds of problems the Agency had hired me to avoid.

Of course, there was also the matter of my getting paid. If Karate got to Belghazi first and I couldn’t claim credit, I might be out of a check, and that wouldn’t be very fair, would it?

I thought of this guy as Karate because my suspicions about him had first jelled when I saw him doing karate kata, or forms, in the gym of the Macau Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where we were both staying and where Belghazi was soon to arrive. Avoiding the facility’s tangle of Lifecycles and Cybex machines, he had focused instead on a series of punches, blocks, and kicks to the air that, to the uninitiated, might have looked like some kind of martial dance routine. Actually, his moves were good-smooth, practiced, and powerful. They would have been impressive in any twenty-year-old, but this guy looked at least twice that.

I do some similar solo exercises myself, from time to time, although nothing so formal and stylized. And when I do work out this way, I don’t do it in public. It draws too much attention, especially from someone who knows what to look for. Someone like me.

In my line of work, drawing attention is a serious violation of the laws of common sense, and therefore of survival. Because if someone notices you for one thing, he’ll be inclined to look more closely, at which point he might notice something else. A pattern, which would have remained quietly hidden, might then begin to emerge, after which your cloak of anonymity will be methodically pulled apart, probably to be rewoven into something more closely resembling a shroud.

Karate also stood out because he was Caucasian-European was my guess, although I couldn’t pinpoint the country. He had close-cropped black hair, pale skin, and, when he wasn’t busy with Horse Stance to Spinning Back Kick Number Two in the Mandarin Oriental gym, favored exquisitely thin-soled loafers and sport jackets with hand-rolled lapels. Macau’s population of about a half million is ninety-five percent Chinese, with only a small Portuguese contingent remaining to remind anyone who cares that the territory, now a Chinese Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong, was not so long ago a Portuguese colony, and even the millions of annual gambling tourists are almost all from nearby Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China, so non-Asians don’t exactly blend.

Which is part of the reason the Agency had been so eager for me to take on the Belghazi assignment to begin with. It wasn’t just that Belghazi had become a primary supplier to various Southeast Asian fundamentalist groups whom, post-9/11, Uncle Sam had come to view as a serious threat. Nor was it simply my demonstrated knack for the appearance of “natural causes,” which in this case would be necessary because it seemed that Belghazi had protectors among certain “allied” governments whom Uncle Sam preferred not to offend. It was also because the likely venue for the job would require invisibility against an Asian background. And, although my mother had been American, my face is dominated by my father’s Japanese features-the consequence of genetic chance, augmented years ago by some judicious plastic surgery, which I had undergone to better blend in in Japan.

So between the conspicuous ethnicity and the kata moves, Karate had managed to put himself on my radar screen, and it was then that I began to notice more. For one thing, he had a way of hanging around the hotel: the gym, the café, the terrace, the lobby. Wherever this guy was from, he’d come a long way to reach Macau. His failure to get out and see the sights, therefore, didn’t make a lot of sense-unless he was waiting for someone.

Of course, I might have suffered from a similar form of conspicuousness. But I had a companion-a young Japanese woman-which made the “hanging around” behavior a little more explainable. Her name was Keiko, or at least that was how she billed herself with the Japanese escort agency through which I had hired her. She was in her mid-twenties, too young for me to take seriously, but she was pretty and surprisingly bright and I was enjoying her company. More important, her presence made me look less like some kind of intelligence operative or lone-wolf killer assessing the area, and more like a forty- or fifty-something Japanese who had taken his mistress to Macau, maybe for a little gambling, maybe for a lot of time alone at a hotel.

One morning, Keiko and I went down to the hotel’s Café Girassol to enjoy the breakfast buffet. As the hostess led us to a table, I scanned the area for signs of danger, as I do by habit whenever entering a room. Hot spots first. Back Corner One: table of four young Caucasians, two male, two female, dressed for a hike. Accents Australian. Threat probability low. Back Corner Two: Karate. Hmm. Threat probability medium.

Keep the eyes moving. Complete the sweep. Wall tables: empty. Window seats: elderly Chinese couple. Next table: three girls, fashionable clothes, confident postures, probably Hong Kong Chinese, young professionals on a quick holiday. Next table: pair of Indian men in business attire, sunny Punjabi accents. Nothing that rubbed me the wrong way.

Back to Karate’s vicinity with an oblique glance. He had his back to the wall and an unobstructed view of the restaurant’s entrance. His seating position was what I would have expected from a pro; his focus on the room offered further evidence. I noticed that he had a newspaper open in front of him, although he wasn’t bothering to read it. He would have been better off without the reading material: then he could have scoped the room as though he was bored and had nothing better to do than people-watch.

Or he should have brought a friend, as I had. I could feel him looking at us at one point, and was glad to have Keiko there, smiling into my eyes like a satisfied lover. The smile was convincing, too. She was good at her job.

Who was he waiting for, though? I might have assumed the answer was me-“only the paranoid survive,” I think some Silicon Valley type once said-but I was pretty sure I wasn’t it. Too many chance sightings followed by… nothing. No attempts to follow me, no attempt to recognize my face, no hard-eyed, that’s him kind of feeling. After over a quarter century in the business and a lot of incidental training before that, I’m sensitive to these things. My gut told me he was after someone else. True, it wasn’t impossible that he was only told where and when, with information on who to be provided subsequently, but I deemed that scenario unlikely. Not many operators would agree to take this kind of job without first knowing who they were going up against. It would be hard to know how to price things otherwise.

If the matter had been local-say, a Triad dispute-it was unlikely that a white guy would have been brought in for the job. The Triads, Chinese “secret societies” with deep roots in Macau and the mainland, tend to settle their affairs themselves. Adding up the available data, therefore, and taking myself off the short list of possible targets, I was left with Belghazi as the most likely recipient of Karate’s attentions.

But who had hired him? If it had been the Agency, it would have been a violation of one of my three rules: no women or children, no acts against non-principals, no B-teams. Maybe my old friends from the government thought that, because they had managed to track me down in Rio, I was vulnerable, and that they could therefore treat my rules as mere guidelines. If this was indeed their assumption, they were mistaken. I had enforced my rules before, and would do so again.

That afternoon, I made a point of strolling past the gym with Keiko, and, sure enough, there was my friend, earnestly kicking the air at the same time as the day before. Some people just need a routine, and refuse to accept the consequences of predictability. In my experience, these people tend to get culled, often sooner, sometimes later. It’s a Darwinian world out there.

Seeing an opportunity, I checked the sign-in sheet. His name was illegible, but he had written his room number clearly enough: 812. Hmmm, a smoking floor. Unhealthy.

I asked Keiko if she wouldn’t mind shopping by herself for a little while. She smiled and told me she’d be delighted, which was probably the truth. She might have thought I was going off for a taste of the area’s sumptuous buffet of prostitutes. No doubt she assumed I was married-the resulting associated paranoia of which would explain any countersurveillance moves she might have noticed-and I doubted that she would have found the notion of additional philandering excessively shocking.

Watching her walk out the front entrance to catch a cab into town, I felt an odd surge of affection. Most people would think of someone in Keiko’s line of work as being anything but innocent, but at that moment, to me, innocence practically defined her. Her job was to offer me pleasure-and she was doing very well at it-and for her, our presence in Macau was no more complicated than that. She was as oblivious to the deadly dance playing out around her as a sheep grazing in a field. I told myself that she would go home with that innocence intact.

I called 812 from the lobby phone. There was no answer. A good sign, although not proof-positive: someone might have been in the room and not answering the phone, or Karate might have written down an incorrect room number, which I certainly would have done. Still, it was worth a look.

I stopped in my room to pick up a few items I would need, then took the elevator to the seventh floor. From there, I took the stairs, the less trafficked route, and therefore the one less likely to present problems like witnesses. On my left wrist, concealed under the baggy sleeve of a fleece pullover, was a device that looked like a large PDA, secured with Velcro. The device, which saw its initial deployment in the second Gulf War, is called SoldierVision. It takes a radar “picture” of a room through walls and feeds the resulting image back to the wrist unit. Not exactly something you might pick up at your local hardware store, and definitely one of the advantages of working with Christians In Action again.

Earlier in my stay I had taken the trouble of securing a master key for just this sort of occasion, although at the time it was Belghazi I had in mind, not Karate. The hotel used punched-hole mechanical key cards, the kind that look like slightly thickened, plain gray credit cards with patterns of two-millimeter holes cut in them. It also used, as part of its campaign to “Protect Our Environment!”, a system whereby the key had to be inserted into a wall slot next to the door for the room lights to become operable. When you withdrew the key in preparation for leaving the room, there was about a one-minute delay before the lights would go out. The maids carried master keys, of course, and it had been easy enough to walk past a room that was being cleaned, pull the maid’s master from the reader, make an impression in a chunk of modeling clay I’d picked up in a local toy store, and replace the key, all in about six seconds. Using the impression as a template, all I had needed to do was punch the appropriate additional holes in my room key, fill in the inappropriate ones with fast-setting epoxy clay, and presto, I had the same access as the hotel staff.

Karate’s room was on the left of the corridor. I used the SoldierVision to confirm that it was empty, then let myself in with my homemade master. I wasn’t unduly concerned about disturbing the room’s contents in a way that might tell Karate someone had entered in his absence-the daily maid service could account for that.

I walked in and sniffed. Whoever he was, he’d been taking full advantage of his stay on the smoking floor. The room was thick with the lees of strong tobacco-Gauloises or Gitane, something like that-which you can smell outside those Tokyo bistros whose fervently Francophile patrons believe that emissions from a Marlboro or a Mild Seven might ruin the pleasant illusion of an afternoon in a Latin Quarter café.

I pulled on a pair of gloves and did a quick search of the closet and drawers, but found nothing remarkable. The small room safe was closed and locked, probably with his identification and other goodies inside. There was a Dell laptop on the desk, but I didn’t have time to wait for its Windows operating system to boot. Besides, if he had enabled the boot log feature, he would see that someone had fired up the laptop in his absence and would get suspicious.

I picked up the room phone and hit the key for room service. Two rings, then a Filipina-accented voice said, “Yes, Mr. Nuchi, how may I help you?”

“Oh, I think I hit the wrong button. Sorry to disturb you.”

“Not at all, sir. Have a pleasant day.”

I hung up. Mr. Nuchi, then. Who liked French cigarettes.

But no other clues. Nothing even to confirm my suspicion that this guy was a pro, and possibly a rival. Well, there were other ways I might learn more.

I pulled an adhesive-backed transmitter from one of my pockets, peeled off the tape cover, and secured it in a suitably recessed spot along the bottom edge of one of the dressers. The unit was battery-operated and sound-activated. With luck, it would get a good enough feed for me to understand any conversation it picked up. But even short of that, it would help me figure out when Karate was coming and going, and therefore make it easier for me to learn more by following him.

I walked back to the door, used the SoldierVision to confirm that the hallway was clear, and left. The whole thing had taken about four minutes.

BELGHAZI ARRIVED early that evening. I was enjoying a cocktail with Keiko in the lobby, where I had a view of the registration desk, and made him in an instant. He was swarthy, the legacy of an Algerian mother, and his hair, which had been long and unruly in the CIA file photo, was now shaved close to the scalp. I put him at about six feet and a hundred and eighty-five pounds. Dense, muscular build. He was wearing an expensive-looking blue suit, from the cut maybe Brioni or Kiton, and a white shirt open at the collar. In his left hand he gripped the handle of what looked like a computer briefcase, something in black leather, and I caught a flash of gold chain encircling his wrist. But despite the clothes, the accessories, the jewelry, there was no element of fussiness about him. On the contrary: his presence was relaxed, and powerful. He looked like the kind of man who wouldn’t have to raise his voice when speaking to his subordinates, who would command the attention of strangers with only a look or a gesture. Someone who wouldn’t need to threaten violence to get what he wanted, if only because the hint of it would always be there, in the set of his posture, the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice.

Even if I hadn’t had access to the file photo, the long-distance feel I had developed for this guy from his bio would have been enough for me to make him. Belghazi, first name Achille, had been born of a French army officer stationed in Algeria during France ’s “pacification” efforts there, and of a young Algerian woman whom the officer brought back to Paris but did not take as his wife. Illegitimate status hadn’t seemed to slow Belghazi down, though, and he had excelled in school, both academically and athletically, making a name for himself afterward as a photojournalist. His fluent Arabic had made him a natural for covering conflicts in the Arab world: the Palestinian refugee camps, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the first Gulf War. Playing on his contacts among the combatants, and on those he developed at the same time among foreign military and intelligence services, Belghazi had become a conduit for small arms deliveries to various Middle Eastern hot spots. His operation had grown organically as his supply-side and customer-side contacts broadened and deepened. His latest efforts were concentrated in Southeast Asia, where various emerging fundamentalist and separatist groups within the region’s sizeable Muslim populations provided a growing customer base. He was known to have a taste for the finer things, too, along with a serious gambling habit.

He was with two large men, also in suits and similarly swarthy, whom I made as bodyguards. One of them started a visual security sweep, but Belghazi didn’t rely on him. Instead, he did his own evaluation of the room and its occupants. I watched in my peripheral vision and, when I saw that he was finished and had turned his attention to the front desk, I looked over again.

A striking blonde had just come through the front doors. She was wearing a black pant suit and pumps. Practical, but classy. What you’d see on a traveler carrying a first-class ticket. She was tall, too, maybe five-nine, five-ten, with long legs that looked good even in pants, and a ripe, voluptuous body. A porter followed her in, gripping a pair of large Vuitton bags. He paused near her and leaned forward to ask something. She raised a hand to indicate that he should wait, then started her own visual sweep of the room. I hadn’t expected that, and quickly returned my attention to Keiko until the blonde’s gaze had passed over us. When I glanced over again, she was standing beside Belghazi, her arm linked through his.

Something about her presence was as relaxed and, in its way, as commanding as his. Everything about her seemed natural: her hair, her face, the curves beneath her clothes.

A minute later she, the porter, and one of the bodyguards headed toward the elevators. Belghazi and the other bodyguard remained at the front desk, discussing something with the receptionist.

The front door opened again. I glanced up and saw Karate.

Christ, I thought. The gang’s all here. I wondered half-consciously whether he’d been tipped off somehow.

Karate walked slowly through the lobby. I saw his gaze move to Belghazi, saw his eyes harden in a way that would mean nothing to most people but that meant a great deal to me. From this gaze I understood that Karate wasn’t looking at a man. No. What I saw instead was a hunter acquiring a target.

And, I knew, but for my long-practiced self-control, had anyone been watching me as I confirmed my suspicions about why Karate was here, they would have seen an identical involuntary atavism ripple across my own features.

A few minutes passed. Belghazi and his man finished at the front desk and made their way to the elevator. I gave them four minutes, then told Keiko I needed to use the restroom and would be right back.

I went to a house phone and asked the operator to connect me to the Oriental Suite. There were only two suites in the hotel-the Oriental and the Macau -and, judging from his file, I had a feeling Belghazi would be occupying one of them.

No answer at the Oriental. I tried again, this time asking for the Macau.

“Hello,” a man’s voice answered.

“Hello, this is the front desk,” I said, doing a passable imitation of a local Chinese accent. “Is there anything we can do to make Mr. Belghazi’s stay with us more comfortable?”

“No, we’re fine,” the voice said.

“Very good,” I said. “Please enjoy your stay.”

THAT NIGHT, while Keiko was out, I sat in the hotel room and used an earpiece to listen in on Karate. He was in his room, from the sound of it watching CNN International Edition. Go to sleep, or go out: I would take my cue from him. I was already dressed in a pair of charcoal worsted pants, navy pullover, and comfortable, rubber-soled walking shoes in case we wound up with the second option, a night on the town.

I looked out at the massive cranes and earth moving equipment that Macau was using to build yet more bridges to China ’s Guangdong province, the low mountains of which crouched a few kilometers distant. The machines rose from the harbor like mythological creatures provoked from the seabed, hulking, misshapen, slouching toward land but held fast by the muck below.

The cranes reminded me of Japan, where I’d lived most of my adult life and where reclaiming land from the sea for the construction of redundant bridges and unneeded office parks is a national sport. But where the ubiquitous construction in Japan always felt familiar, almost comforting in its obviousness, here the excess was mysterious, even vaguely menacing. Who made the decisions? Who rigged the environmental impact statements to ensure that the projects were approved? Who profited from the kickbacks? I didn’t know. In many ways, Macau was a mystery.

I had spent the previous three weeks here, moving from hotel to hotel, keeping a low profile, getting a solid feel for the place. Before accepting the Belghazi assignment, I hadn’t known much more about the place than what I picked up from reading the Far Eastern Economic Review: Portugual’s return of the territory to China in 1999 had been amicable, as these things go, and the territory’s five percent ethnic Portuguese population was unusually well integrated, speaking Cantonese and mixing with the locals in a way that might make most British-derived Hong Kongers blush; its service economy was staffed largely by Filipinos and Thais; for a territory that until recently had been the ball in a five-hundred-year game of Great Power Ping-Pong, it had an unusually firm sense of its own identity.

At the end of my three-week sojourn, I knew much more: how to dress, walk, and carry myself to look like one of the millions of visitors from, say, Hong Kong; the layout and rhythms of the stores and streets; the codes and mores of the casinos. All of which would confer an important advantage in the job at hand.

I heard the phone ring in Karate’s room. The television went quiet.

“Allo,” I heard him say. A pause, then, “Bien.”

French, then, as I had suspected from the nicotine permeating his room. And with a cultured Parisian accent. My French was mostly left over from high school, and the receiver reception was muffled and obscured by periodic static. This was going to be tough.

“Oui, il est arrivé ce soir.”

That I understood. Yes, he arrived tonight.

Another pause. Then, “Pas ce soir.” Not tonight.

Pause. Then, “Oui, la réunion est ce soir. Ensuite cela.” Yes, the meeting is tonight. Then after that.

Pause. A thicket of words I couldn’t pick apart, followed by, “Tout va bien.” Everything is fine. Another impenetrable thicket. Then, “Je vous ferai savoir quand ce sera fait.” I’ll let you know when it’s done.

Click. Back to CNN.

A half hour later, the TV went off again. I heard his door open and close. He was going out.

I grabbed a dark windbreaker and took the stairs to the ground floor. A professional could be expected to use the rear entrance, which would represent the less trafficked, less predictable alternative, and I ducked out through the back doors on the assumption that this was the route Karate would be using. There were three exits back here-one from the hotel, one from the beauty parlor, one from the restaurant-but all of them fed into the same courtyard, which in turn fed onto a single walkway, meaning a single choke point.

There was an open-air parking garage next to the hotel. I walked into it and hugged the wall, obscured by bushes lining the wall’s exterior.

He appeared a minute after I’d gotten in position. The streetlights illuminated him and cast shadows into the garage where I stood silently by. I watched him stroll past me down the tree-lined walkway in the direction of the Avenida da Amizade, named, like most of Macau ’s thoroughfares, by the Portuguese centuries earlier. The soft drape of his navy sport jacket was too stylish for his surroundings-dress in Macau, I had learned, was almost slacker casual-but I supposed that as a white island in an Asian sea he was going to stand out regardless.

Past the parking garage he turned right into an alley. I glanced back at the hotel exit-all quiet. So far he seemed to be alone, with no countersurveillance to his rear. I moved out to follow him. He reached the Avenida da Amizade and waited for a break in the traffic before crossing. I hung back in the shadows and waited.

On the other side of the street he turned left, looking back over his shoulder, as any pedestrian would, to check for oncoming traffic before crossing. I permitted myself the trace of a smile. His “traffic check” was an unobtrusive bit of countersurveillance. It was nicely done, casual, and I saw from the quality of the move that I was probably going to have a hard time following him solo.

He moved down the wide boulevard in the direction of the Hotel Lisboa, the territory’s biggest casino and best-known trolling ground for prostitutes, and after a moment I crossed the street and trailed after him. The streetlights around us were widely spaced, with ample pools of darkness between them for concealment, and Karate couldn’t have spotted me even had he looked backward to do so.

A few hundred meters farther on, he cut down the steps of an underground passageway. The passageway was H-shaped, its lengths running parallel to the Amizade and its middle running perpendicular beneath it. I moved just a little more quickly to close the gap, and arrived at the entrance in time to see him disappearing into the middle of the tunnel and under the street.

Now I faced a dilemma. If I followed him in and he glanced back, he would make me. If I stayed put and he emerged on the opposite side of the street and hurried on to develop distance, I could easily lose him.

I thought for a moment. Until now, his countersurveillance had been subtle, disguised as ordinary pedestrian behavior. But he was abandoning subtlety now: after all, a pedestrian out for a stroll doesn’t typically cross a street one way and then, a short stretch later, cross back. He knew what he was doing. The question was, which way would he play it? Double back, to catch a follower? Or hurry out the other side, to lose him?

If I had been working with a team, or even just a teammate, there wouldn’t have been a problem. We would have just tag-teamed him in, knowing that if one of us got spotted, the other would fall into place after. But this time I didn’t have that luxury. All I had was instinct and experience, and these were telling me that the tunnel move was a feint, an attempt to draw a follower into the tunnel, weed him out of the crowd, then turn around and catch him. So I moved past the passageway on the right, hiding in the shadows of one of the avenue’s stunted palm trees, hoping I was right.

Fifteen seconds went by. Thirty.

If I had been wrong, this was my last chance to try to cross the street. If I waited until he had emerged, he would see me coming.

Just another second, just another second, c’mon, asshole, where are you…

Boom, there he was, moving up the vertical side of the H, still on my side of the street. I let out a long, quiet breath.

He strolled another hundred meters along the Avenida da Amizade, then cut right. I did the same, in time to see him turn left, down a scooter-choked alley walled in by office buildings to either side. I fell in behind him, window unit air conditioners buzzing like insects in the dark around us.

Three minutes later we arrived at the Lisboa. I followed him in, wondering whether he was hoping to use its many entrances and exits as part of a preplanned surveillance detection route. If so, he’d made a mistake. The Lisboa was too crowded at night; a pursuer could stay close in here without your ever knowing it. Even if he’d had a team positioned for countersurveillance, the nighttime crowds would present insurmountable opportunities for concealment. Maybe he’d designed this route during the day, when the hotel was less crowded? That would have been a mistake, too. Times of day, days of the week, changes of season, changes of temperature-all can make for an environment dramatically different from the one you originally reconnoitered.

I moved in closer and stayed with him, knowing that if he snaked off into the crowded, multilevel hive of the casino I might easily lose him. But he avoided the gaming area, strolling instead in a slow, clockwise loop around the ground floor’s shopping arcade, where clusters of prostitutes from nearby Guangdong province circled like hungry fish in a spherical aquarium. We moved with them, past gamblers flush with fresh winnings, whom the girls eyed with bold invitation, eager to retrieve a few floating scraps from the casino food chain; past middle-aged men from Hong Kong and Taiwan with sagging bodies and febrile eyes, their postures rigid, caught in some grim purgatory between sexual urgency and commercial calculation; past security guards, inured to the charms of the girls’ bare legs and bold décolletage and interested only in keeping them moving, circling, forever swimming through the murk of the endless Lisboa night.

Karate left the building through a secondary exit. I still wasn’t sure what he had hoped to accomplish by going inside. The shopping arcade, like the hotel itself, was too crowded for meaningful surveillance detection. Maybe he had planned this part of the route poorly, as I had initially speculated. Or maybe he had simply been window-shopping in anticipation of indulging himself later that night. Not impossible: even professionals occasionally slip, or pause to fulfill some human need.

His subsequent behavior supported the “indulgence” hypothesis: after the Lisboa, I didn’t spot him doing anything further to check his back. He must have satisfied himself with the provocative tunnel stunt. It wasn’t an ineffective move, actually, and probably would have been enough to flush someone else. Hell, it would have flushed me, if my instincts had been a little less sharp or if I hadn’t done my three weeks of homework.

He continued northwest on the Avenida Henrique. The street was straight, dark, and heavily trafficked, and I was able to follow him from far back. My eyes roved constantly, searching the hot spots, the places I would have set up countersurveillance or an ambush. Nothing set off my radar.

At Senado Square, the area’s main pedestrian shopping commons, he turned right. The square would be crowded, even at this evening hour, and I increased my pace to ensure that I wouldn’t lose him. There he was, moving up the undulating lines of black and white tile, to the left of the illuminated vertical jets of the square’s central fountain, along the low, pastel-colored porticos of the Portuguese-style storefronts, incongruous amid the surrounding Asian sounds and scents. I followed from about ten meters back. Hong Kong pop blared urgently from a storefront. The smells of roasted pork and sticky rice wafted on the air. Thick groups of shoppers drifted back and forth around us, chatting, laughing, enjoying the comfortable closeness of the arcade and the carefree camaraderie of the evening.

We moved off Senado and onto quieter streets. Karate browsed among the street stalls-fruit, lingerie, traditional Thai costumes at three for a Hong Kong dollar-but bought nothing. He seemed to be heading in the direction of St. Paul’s, the site of a once-splendid Portuguese church, over the centuries gutted again and again by fire, and standing now only as a sad façade, a haunted relic, illuminated at night like a bleached skeleton propped at the apex of a long series of steep stairs, where it broods in ruined majesty over the city that has grown like weeds around it.

Gradually our surroundings became more residential. We passed wide, open doorways. These I checked automatically, but they offered no danger, only miscellaneous domestic scenes: four elderly women absorbed in a game of mahjong; a group of boys surrounding a television; a family at the supper table. We passed an old shrine, its red paint peeling in the tropical moisture. Incense from the brazier within pervaded my senses with the recollected emotions of childhood.

Karate reached the corner of the street and turned right. In this warren of dim alcoves and alleyways, I could easily lose him if he developed distance, and I increased my pace to stay with him. I turned the same corner he had gone past a moment earlier-and nearly ran right into him.

He’d turned the corner and stopped-a classic countersurveillance move, and hard to beat if you’re working solo. No wonder he’d been taking it easy: the tunnel stunt had been a false finish to the run, and I’d fallen for it. Shit.

I felt an adrenaline dump. Audio faded out. Movement slowed down.

Our eyes locked, and for a suspended second we stood totally still. I saw his brow begin to furrow. I’ve seen this guy, I knew he was thinking. At the hotel.

His weight shifted back into a defensive stance. His left hand pulled forward the left lapel of his jacket. His right reached toward the gap.

Toward a weapon, no doubt. Shit.

I stepped in close and grabbed his right lower sleeve with my left hand, pulling it away from his body to prevent him from deploying whatever he had in his jacket. With my right I took hold of his left lapel and thrust it up under his chin. His reaction was good: he stepped back with his left leg to regain his balance and open up distance, from which he might be able to employ something from his karate arsenal. But I wasn’t going to give him that chance. I caught his right heel with my right foot and used my fist in his throat to shove him back in kouchigari, a basic judo throw. His balance ruined and his foot trapped, he went straight back, his left arm pinwheeling uselessly. I maintained my tight hold on his right arm and twisted counterclockwise as we fell, keeping my right elbow positioned squarely over his diaphragm, nailing it hard as we hit the pavement.

I scrambled to his right side, raised my right hand high, and shot a hammer-fist toward his nose. His reflexes were good, though, despite the shock of hitting the ground. He turned his head and deflected the blow with his left hand.

Still, he was out of his element on the ground, and quickly made a mistake. Rather than dealing with the immediate threat-my dominant position and freedom to attack-he went for his weapon again. I swam my right arm inside his right and jerked it back into a chicken wing. He sensed an opening and tried to sit up, but I felt that coming. Using the chicken wing to arrest his forward momentum, I swept my left arm around his head counterclockwise, from front to back, locked my hands behind his near shoulder blade, and leaned back, the back of my arm pressing down against his face. The move bent his neck back to the limit of its natural range of motion and took his shoulder half out of its socket, but I went no further. I only wanted to make him comply, not kill him. At least not yet.

“Who are you working for?” I said.

In response, he only struggled. I put some additional pressure on his neck, but quickly relaxed it, lest he conclude that I was trying to finish him, in which case I couldn’t reasonably expect him to cooperate.

He got the message and the struggling stopped. Not likely that he practiced any kata that involved being held on the ground in a neck crank. “Je ne comprends pas,” I heard him say, his body tense in my grip.

Bullshit you don’t comprehend, pal, I thought. I just heard you watching CN fucking N.

“Pour… Pour qui travaillez-vous?” I tried asking.

“Je ne comprends pas,” he said again.

All right, the hell with it. I squeezed again, harder than before, holding the pressure a second longer this time before backing off.

“Last time,” I said in English. “Tell me who you work for or you’re done.”

“All… all right,” I heard him say, his voice muffled by my arm across his face. I leaned forward slightly to hear better.

As I did so, he arched into me and jerked sharply upward with his right arm, trying to get clear of the chicken wing, to reach whatever he had in his jacket. I shifted to the left and yanked the arm back hard. But his move had only been a feint, and as I shifted I saw, too late, that his true intention had been to reach for his belt with his other hand. Before I could stop him, in one smooth motion he had popped a button on the leather and yanked free the buckle, which was attached to a double-edged steel blade.

Fuck. Without thinking I arched savagely back, pressing my left forearm hard across the back of his neck and squeezing with the strength of both arms. There was a split instant of raw corporeal resistance, and then his neck snapped and his body spasmed in my arms. The knife clattered to the ground.

I laid him out on the pavement and quickly patted him down. My hands were shaking from the effects of adrenaline. I was suddenly aware of my heart, pounding crazily inside me. Damn, that had been a nice move. He’d nearly gotten away with it.

He was traveling light: no wallet, no ID. Just his hotel key in a pants pocket and there, in a shoulder holster, what he’d been reaching for when he saw me. A Heckler & Koch Mark 23. Attached to it, a Knights Armament suppressor, one of the two models H &K approves for the Mark 23.

A belt knife and a silenced H &K. I doubted that he just waltzed them through airport security on his way to Macau, although I supposed it was possible the security guards were too preoccupied with nail clippers and cuticle scissors to notice. Still, my guess was that the mysterious Mr. Nuchi had local contacts, and that the weapons had been waiting for him or were otherwise procured after he had arrived. I filed the thought away for later consideration.

There was nothing else that could tell me more about who he was or who had sent him. Or who he had been on his way to meet.

I stood and glanced around me. Left, right. Nothing. The street was graveyard still.

I moved off into the shadows, my head reflexively sweeping right and left as I walked, searching for danger. I left the weapons, having little use for them in the current operation and not wishing to contaminate myself with anything connected to what the police might find at the crime scene. After a while, my pulse began to slow.

Who the hell was he? Who had he been on his way to meet? I hated the feeling of knowing so little about him. A name-Nuchi-which might have been an alias. And a probable nationality. But no more.

But I supposed that, overall, it wasn’t a bad outcome. I was nearly certain that, regardless of who had sent him, Karate had been here to take out Belghazi. That was no longer a possibility.

And things certainly could have turned out worse. If he’d had that H &K out when I’d first turned the corner, instead of reaching for it afterward, it might have been me lying back there in the dark.

I stayed on the narrow streets, the dark alleys. My pulse slowed more. My hands settled. The buildings to either side seemed to grow taller, and the weak light dimmer, until I felt as though I was zigzagging along the channel of a steep ravine, a dark urban gorge cut through the faded concrete façades by a long-vanished river. The rusted fire escapes were escarpments of rock, the hanging laundry tangled vines, a lone sodium-arc roof light a yellowed, gibbous moon.

I made my way back to the hotel. By the time I reached the rear entrance, my heart rate was normal again. I started thinking ahead, thinking about Belghazi.

Right, Belghazi. The main event. No more sideshows. I’d get close, do it right, and get out. After that, a big payday. Big enough so that afterward I would get clear of this shit forever.

Or at least for a reasonably long while.

2

THE NEXT MORNING, Keiko and I enjoyed another leisurely breakfast in the hotel’s Café Girassol, then whiled away an hour browsing the hotel shops, all of which offered splendid views of the lobby. But Belghazi never showed.

Around noon, I went to an Internet café to check the electronic bulletin board that I was using to communicate with Tomohisa Kanezaki, my contact inside the CIA. Before going further, I downloaded a copy of security software and installed it, as I always do, to confirm that the terminal I was using was free of “snoopware”-software, some commercial, some hacker-devised, that monitors keystrokes, transmits screen images, and that can otherwise compromise a computer’s security. Hackers love to remotely place the software on public terminals, like the ones you see in airports, libraries, copy shops, and, of course, Internet cafés, from which they then harvest passwords, credit card numbers, bank accounts, hell, entire online identities.

This one was clean. I checked the bulletin board. There was a message waiting: “Call me.”

That was all. I logged out and left.

Outside, I turned on the encrypted cell phone the Agency had provided me, punched in the number I had memorized, and started walking to make it harder for anyone to triangulate.

I heard a single ring on the other end, then Kanezaki’s voice. “Moshi moshi,” he said.

Kanezaki is an American sansei, or third-generation Japanese, and he likes to show off his language skills. I rarely indulge him. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, conceding. “I’ve been trying to call you.”

I smiled. Kanezaki was part of the CIA, which in my book rendered him automatically untrustworthy. Of course, he probably had the same misgivings about me. But in Tokyo I had declined a contract that his boss wanted to take out on him, and in fact had warned him about it. You’d have to be a world-class ingrate not to appreciate a favor like that, and I knew Kanezaki felt he owed me. He’d feel that way not just because of what I had done, but also because he was much more American than Japanese, and Americans, whose self-image is so tied up with “fairness,” wind up making themselves suckers for the concept. His sentiment would take us only so far, of course-in my experience, one of the guiding principles of human relations seems to be “what have you done for me lately”-but it was something, a small antidote against the potential poison of his professional affiliations.

“Unless I’m talking on it,” I said, “I leave this thing turned off.”

“Saving the battery?”

“Guarding my privacy.”

“You’re the poster boy for paranoia,” he said, and I could see him shaking his head on the other end. I smiled again. In some ways I liked the kid in spite of his choice of employer. I’d been impressed by the countermeasures he’d taken against his boss after my warning, and some part of me enjoyed being able to watch his development from naïve idealist to increasingly seasoned player.

“Our friend just got in,” he said.

“I know. I saw him last night.”

“Good. You know, we’re tracking him. If you’d leave the cell phone on, we might be able to contact you with some timely information.”

Although I didn’t know for sure, I suspected the Agency had been keeping tabs on Belghazi through a compromised cell or satellite phone. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

“Sure,” I said, my tone neutral to the point of sarcasm.

There was a pause. “You’re not going to leave it on,” he said, his tone half-resigned, half-bemused.

I laughed.

“We’d have a better chance of success if we could work together,” he said, earnest as ever.

I laughed again.

“All right, do it your way,” he said. “I know you will anyway.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. It would really be nice if you could account for some of those disbursements.”

“C’mon, we’ve been over this. I need the cash to get into the high rollers’ rooms. I saw a guy from China drop a million U.S. at one of the baccarat tables the other night. That’s where our friend plays. I need to get near him, and they don’t allow spectators. Or low rollers.”

He was probably just giving me a hard time to try to make me feel like I’d won something. I knew this whole program was as off the books as anything the Agency had ever run. The last thing Kanezaki or his superiors would want would be a paper trail for the General Accounting Office to follow.

“What if you actually win something?” he said.

“I’ll be sure to report it as taxable income.”

He laughed at that, and I said, “We’re done?”

“Sure. Oh, just one more thing. A little something. Last night someone got killed in your neighborhood.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Broken neck.”

“Ouch.”

“You would know.”

I knew what he was thinking. Kanezaki had once watched me take someone out with a neck crank.

“Actually, I wouldn’t know,” I said. “But I can imagine.”

I heard a snort. “Just remember,” he said, “even if we’re not there in the room with you, we’re still watching.”

“I’ve always suspected that you guys self-select for voyeurs.”

“Very funny.”

“Who’s being funny?”

There was a pause. “Look, it might be that I owe you. But not everyone here feels that way. And you’re not just dealing with me. Okay? You need to watch yourself.”

I smiled. “It’s always good to have a friend.”

“Shit,” I heard him mutter.

“If I need anything, I’ll contact you,” I told him.

“Okay.” A pause, then, “Good luck.”

I pressed the “end” key, purged the call log, and turned the unit off.

He hadn’t seemed particularly perturbed about the late Karate. Possibly indicating that the CIA wasn’t affiliated with him. Or maybe there was an affiliation, and Kanezaki-san was simply out of the loop.

I kept walking. Macau breathed around me, deeply, in and out, like a winded animal.

IN THE EVENING, Keiko and I decided to enjoy a little gambling at the Lisboa. I couldn’t continually set up for Belghazi in the hotel lobby without drawing attention to myself. And trying to wire his room the way I had Karate’s would have been too risky-if his bodyguards swept for bugs and found something, they might harden their defenses. So I decided my best shot at intercepting him would be not to follow, but to anticipate him.

This can be easier than it might sound. All you have to do is put yourself in the other party’s shoes: if I were him, what would I do? How would I look at the world, how would I feel, how would I behave? Just good, sound, Dale Carnegie stuff. Appreciating the other guy’s viewpoint, that kind of thing. I’m-okay-you’re-okay. I’m-okay-you’re-going-to-die.

Performing this exercise with someone as security-conscious as Belghazi, though, is tough, because the security-conscious tend to eschew patterns in favor of randomness. Random times; random routes; when possible, random destinations. They deliberately avoid getting hooked on anything-lunch at a certain restaurant, haircuts at a certain barber, bets on the horses at a certain track-that the opposition can dial into.

But Belghazi’s security consciousness wasn’t perfect. His behavior suffered from what software types call a “security flaw”-in this case, his compulsion to gamble.

That compulsion was probably part of what had enabled the Agency, and, perhaps, Karate, to track him to Macau to begin with. It was the same compulsion I was now working with to get inside his head. Because, if you’re addicted to high-stakes baccarat and you’re in Macau for a few days, there’s really nowhere but the Lisboa. Everything else feels small-time.

Belghazi would know better, of course. And maybe he’d heed that knowledge and put his chips down someplace less exciting, less glamorous, less predictable. But I didn’t think he would. If he had that kind of self-control, he wouldn’t be playing the tables in the first place. No, he’d gamble, all right, and rationalize by telling himself that there was nothing to worry about, that no one knew he was in Macau anyway, that besides, he always traveled with the bodyguards, just in case.

Keiko and I enjoyed a dinner of Macanese cuisine-an exotic mix of Portuguese, Indian, Malay, and Chinese influences-at the O Porto Interior, a charming but somewhat out-of-the-way restaurant. The location gave me ample opportunity to check our backs on the way to our meal, and also afterward, when we got in a cab and headed to the Lisboa.

I had spent time in all of Macau’s casinos, of course, while reconnoitering the territory, but that had been only part of my preparation for the Belghazi operation. I needed to be comfortable not just with gambling in Macau, but with gambling generally, and I wanted more exposure to the tics and rites of the subculture so that I could better absorb them, reflect them back, achieve the proper level of invisibility as a result. Macau was a start, but I knew that the persona I was inhabiting-moneyed Japanese gaming enthusiast-would lack crucial verisimilitude if the persona in question had never set eyes on Las Vegas.

So I had spent a week there, staying at the Four Seasons on the south end of the strip because it seemed to be the only good hotel that could be accessed without first fording a casino floor, and I knew I would need refuge from the smoke and the noise and the frenzy. I played baccarat at the upscale Bellagio; roulette at the off-strip Rio; craps at the fading Riviera, whose attempts to match the gayness and glitter around her felt forced, artificial, like makeup layered on by a woman who recognizes that she was never beautiful to begin with and has now, in addition, grown colorless and old.

When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I would wander off into the desert west of the strip and walk. The noise faded quickly. The lights took longer to escape, and even after miles they still obscured the stars in the desert sky. But eventually it would all come to seem sufficiently inconsequential in the distance, and I would stop and look back on what I had left behind. Standing silently on those indigenous reefs of sand, breathing the still, desiccated air, I decided that the improbable town I now beheld was a sad and lonely place, the shows and the restaurants and the neon all just a gaudy bandage wrapped around some irrefutable psychic wound, the city itself a bizarre and passing spectacle in the eyes of the reptiles that watched as I did unblinking from afar, who must have understood in their primitive consciousness and from this distant vantage that soon enough it would all be scrub and sand again, as it had always been before.

The reprieve was inevitably brief. I would return to the strip and all would be excess: Hummers purchased on tax breaks for use on flat asphalt, without even a pothole to challenge them; quarter-mile-long buffets vacuumed down by impossibly corpulent diners; pensioners drugged by a lifetime of television and enticed to this place by a craving for more spectacle, more and ever more.

I had thought that 9/11 might have changed some of this, might have been the occasion for reflection, for focus. But if the trauma of attack had produced any such effect, the benefits had been short-lived. Instead, during my mercifully brief time stateside, I saw that nothing had really changed. Sacrifice was the duty only of the few, who were of course hypocritically lauded by the many, the latter barely pausing in their infantile partying to wish the soldiers good luck at war.

But none of it mattered to me. I had seen it all before, when I had first returned from Vietnam. I’d done my bit of soldiering. It was someone else’s problem now.

Keiko and I got out of the cab in front of the Lisboa, and I felt my alertness bump up a notch. I don’t like casinos, in Macau, Las Vegas, or anywhere else. The entrances and exits tend to be too tightly controlled, for one thing. The camera and surveillance networks are the best in the world, for another. Every move you make in a gaming hall is recorded by hundreds of video units and stored on tape for a minimum of two weeks. If there’s a problem-a guy who’s winning too much, a table that’s losing too much-management can review the action and figure out how they were being scammed, then take steps to eliminate the cause.

But it’s not just the operational difficulties. It’s the atmosphere, the scene. For me, gambling when there’s no hope of affecting the odds always carries a whiff of desperation and depression. The industry recognizes the problem, and tries to compensate with an overlay of glitz. I suppose it works, up to a point, the way a deodorizer can mask an underlying smell.

We went in through a set of glass doors and rode a short escalator up to the main gaming hall. There it was, triple-distilled, a circular room of perhaps a thousand square meters, jammed tight with thick crowds shifting and sliding like platelets in a congealing bloodstream; high ceilings almost hidden above clouds of spot-lit, exhaled tobacco smoke; a cacophony of intermingled shouts of delight and cries of despair.

Keiko wanted to play the slot machines, which was fine, freeing me as it did to roam the baccarat rooms in search of Belghazi. I gave her a roll of Hong Kong dollars and told her I’d be back in a few hours. More likely, if things went according to plan, I would go straight to the hotel. In which case, when we hooked up again, I’d tell her that I’d looked for her but couldn’t find her, and had assumed that she’d gone back ahead of me.

I set out for the stairs that would take me out of the low-stakes pit and up to the high rollers’ rooms above. I passed rows of pensioners, each mechanically communing with a slot machine, and I thought of pigeons taught to peck a lever in exchange for a random reward. Next, several interchangeable roulette tables, the troupe hovering around them younger than the slot players they would eventually become, their jaws set, eyes shining in cheap ecstasy, lips moving in silent entreaty to the selfsame gods that even at the utterance of these foolish prayers continued to torment their worshipers with Olympian caprice.

I bought chips with four hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars-about sixty thousand U.S. I’d already squeezed Kanezaki for that much and more in “expenses”-the disbursements of which he had complained earlier. Then I wandered from room to room, never actually going inside, until I found what I was looking for.

Outside the Lisboa’s most exclusive VIP room, on the fifth floor, the highest in the casino, were the two bodyguards, flanking the entrance. Belghazi must have felt sufficiently safe inside not to bother himself arguing about the “no spectators” rule. And sure, the guards could effectively monitor the entrance this way, and deal appropriately with anyone they deemed suspicious.

Unfortunately for them, I’m not a suspicious-looking guy. And their presence told me exactly where to go.

I walked right past them and into the room. Only one of the three baccarat tables was in play. The rest were empty, save for their dealers, of course, who stood with postures as crisp as the starched collars of their white shirts, ready for the players who would surely drift in as the evening deepened into night; and for a few attractive Asian women whom I made as shills, there to attract passing high rollers with their bright smiles and plunging necklines.

I glanced over at the active table. There they were, Belghazi and the blonde, both dressed tastefully and a bit more stylishly than the other players: Belghazi in a white shirt, open at the neck, and navy blazer; the blonde in a white silk blouse and black bolero. Most of the fourteen player slots were taken, but Belghazi and his girlfriend had empty seats to either side of them. They were the only foreigners in the room, and had probably taken the isolated seats so as not to offend anyone who might consider a foreigner’s presence unlucky. I didn’t have such qualms. Quite the contrary tonight, in fact.

I’d been in this room before, and had seen bets of as high as one hundred thousand U.S. for a single hand. Some of the patrons here, I knew, might gamble all night, and on into the next night. A few of Belghazi’s cohorts, their eyes glassy, their complexions pasty beneath the chandelier lighting, looked as though they might have done just that.

The dealer turned over the player’s hand and cried out, “Natural eight!” An excited murmur picked up around the table: eight was a “natural,” and could be beaten only by a nine. The round would be decided based on the cards already on the table-nothing new could be dealt. With almost painful deliberation, the dealer next turned over the bank’s cards, calling out, “Natural nine!” as he did so. There was an outburst of cheers and curses, the former by those who had bet on the bank’s hand that round, the latter by those who had bet on the player’s. As the dealer passed the cards across the table to the other two dealers, who began paying off the winning bets, many of the players dipped their heads and began marking up the pads the casino had provided, attempting to discern some pattern in the randomness, a lucky streak they might lunge at and manage to grab.

I walked over and took the seat to Belghazi’s right, so that he would naturally look away from me to talk to the blonde or to follow the action of the player in Seat 1, who was designated to act as the bank. I noticed the computer briefcase, nestled against his leg where he would feel it if it were somehow to move.

He turned to me. “I’ve seen you, haven’t I,” he said in French-accented English, his dark eyes narrowing a fraction. The effect was half attempt at recollection, half accusation. The blonde glanced over and then away.

This was a slight breach of high roller etiquette, which is generally predicated on respect for the other players’ anonymity. “Maybe at the tables downstairs,” I answered, concealing my surprise. “I have to build up the bankroll a bit before a trip to the VIP rooms.”

He shook his head twice, slowly, and smiled, still looking into my eyes. “Not downstairs. At the Oriental. With a pretty Asian woman. She’s not with you tonight?”

“You’re staying at the Oriental?” I asked, sidestepping his inquiry as would any self-respecting philanderer who’d just been questioned about his mistress by a stranger.

“It’s a good hotel,” he replied, doing a little sidestep-ping of his own.

I was impressed. I had been taking care not to stand out or to otherwise become memorable, and he had spotted me anyway. He was well-attuned to his environment, to the patterns that might at some point make the difference between winning and losing. Or living and dying.

The dealer advised us that it was time to place our bets. “Yes,” I said, putting down the minimum of about U.S. ten thousand on the bank, “but this is the place for baccarat.” Belghazi nodded and put down fifty thousand on player, then turned to the banker to watch the hand get dealt. I saw from this movement that he wasn’t truly concerned about me. If he had been, he wouldn’t have turned his back. No, he had only been reflexively probing, firing into the tree line, checking to see whether he’d hit anything and whether anyone fired back.

The banker handed the first card to the dealer. As he did so, I leaned forward and crossed my hands, my right fingers settling across the Traser P5900 I was wearing on my left wrist. On the underside of the watch was a thumbnail-sized squib containing a little cocktail, one unlikely to be served by the casino’s bar girls. The concoction in question consisted primarily of staphylococcus aureus-a rapid-onset food poisoning pathogen-and chloral hydrate, a compound that causes nausea, disorientation, and unconsciousness within one to four hours. The first would get Belghazi back to the hotel in a hurry. The second would ensure that he slept soundly, if not terribly comfortably, when he got there. I eased the squib free and held it at the junction of my right middle and forefinger. I’d wait for the right moment-one of Belghazi’s head-turns, or a big win or loss for one of the players, or some other distraction-and then make my move.

I realized there was an important side benefit to my plan: the symptoms of staph infection are so acute, and set in so quickly, that there was a good chance Belghazi would return to the hotel room without, or at least ahead of, the blonde. And, even if she came back with or only shortly behind him, he might very well send her away for a while, so he could endure the effects of his rebelling stomach in privacy.

I won the first round. So far so good: I didn’t know how long this would take, and, even with baccarat’s favorable odds and leisurely pace of play, Kanezaki’s money wouldn’t hold out forever.

A pretty attendant came by. Belghazi ordered a tonic water. At fifty thousand a hand, I supposed he wanted to exercise a little alcohol discipline. I followed suit.

The blonde leaned toward Belghazi and said, “Je vais essayer les tables de dés. Je serai de retour bientôt.” I’m going to try the craps tables. I’ll be back in a little while. She got up and left.

Perfect. I stole a glance, just a quick one, the kind Belghazi would find neither surprising nor disrespectful. She was wearing a black skirt to match the bolero. Her legs were stunning, and she walked with the unpretentious confidence of someone who long ago came to understand that she is beautiful and today finds the fact neither remarkable nor worthy of flaunting.

Belghazi doubled his bet on the next round. I stayed with the minimum. This time we both won.

The attendant came by with the drinks, carrying them perched on a silver tray. She placed Belghazi’s on the table next to him, then leaned forward and moved to do the same with mine. He was watching the banker, who was getting ready to deal. Now.

I half rose from my seat, reaching for my drink with both hands as though concerned that I not spill it during the transfer. As my right hand passed over Belghazi’s glass, I paused for an instant and squeezed, and the seal at the squib’s bottom, thinner than the surrounding plastic, parted silently and released the contents within. I used my torso to obscure the move from above, where the overhead cameras might otherwise have recorded it. Done. I eased back into my seat, tonic water in hand.

Belghazi ignored his drink during the next round, and during the one after. The ice in his glass was melting, and I began to grow concerned that one of the attendants would come and replace it. I had another squib, of course, but didn’t want to have to repeat the risky maneuver of getting it into his glass.

As it turned out, there was no need. At the end of the fifth hand, he picked up his glass and drank. One swallow. A pause, then another. He put the glass down.

That was enough. It was time for me to go. I played one more hand, then collected my chips. “Good luck,” I said to him, moving to stand.

“So soon?” he asked.

I’d been there less than an hour-a twinkling, by the standards of the room’s diehards. He was still probing, I saw. He had a cop’s instinct for irregularities. I nodded and smiled. “I’ve learned to quit while I’m ahead,” I told him, holding up my chips.

He smiled back, his gaze cool as always. “Yes, that’s usually wise,” he said.

On my way out of the casino I stopped to use one of the restrooms. A full bladder would be a nuisance later this evening, and I also wanted to thoroughly wash my hands. Staph is nasty stuff, and I had no wish to consume some of it inadvertently.

I took a cab to the Oriental and went straight to my room. Keiko was out, presumably still gambling with the money I’d given her. I grabbed what I needed from the safe, placed it in a small backpack I’d brought along for just this occasion, and went straight to Belghazi’s suite. He would start feeling sick shortly and could be expected to return soon after that, and I needed to let myself in ahead of him. If he got in first, he might engage the dead bolt-low tech, but inaccessible from the exterior-and I would lose this opportunity.

I used the SoldierVision before going in. The blonde had said she was going to play craps, but people change their minds. The room was empty. I let myself in with my homemade master key. It would have been nice if I could have just stood in the closet or lain down under the bed, but those would be among the first places the bodyguards would check if they performed even a cursory sweep. Instead, I moved quickly to the larger of the suite’s two bathrooms. I saw two sets of toiletries arranged across the expansive marble countertop around the sink-Belghazi’s, presumably, and the blonde’s.

There was a vertical slab of marble joined to the front edge of the countertop, extending about a quarter of the distance to the floor. I took a SureFire E1e mini-light from the backpack-three inches, two ounces, fifteen bright white lumens-squatted, and looked under the slab. Hot and cold water pipes ran down from the sink handles above and disappeared into the wall. I saw the curved bottom of the ceramic sink, and an attached drainage pipe snaking down, then up, then, with the other pipes, into the wall behind.

I smiled. If Belghazi had taken a more modest room, I wouldn’t have been able to get away with this, and would have had to come up with something less optimal. As it was, the countertop was sufficiently grand to leave a sizeable gap between the back of the vertical marble façade and the underside of the sink basin behind it. It would be a bit of a squeeze, but there was just enough room in there for a man of my size.

I reached into the backpack and took out a specially designed nylon sling, which, unfurled, looked something like an uncomfortably thin black hammock with four aluminum cams on its ends. I squatted down again, held the SureFire in my mouth, and looked for places to secure the cams. I could have replaced the cams with suction cups or with several other means of attachment, but there was no need: the marble countertop must have weighed at least a couple hundred pounds, and it was buttressed by a series of wooden supports, each of which provided a convenient gap for a cam. I attached the cams, tightened the horizontal straps of the sling, then hauled myself and the backpack up into it. I lay on my side, curled around the curve of the sink, the backpack tucked under my upper arm. It was uncomfortable, but not intolerable. I’d certainly put up with worse, and didn’t expect to have to wait long in any event.

I knew that the bodyguards, if they were any good, were likely to inspect the suite before Belghazi entered. But I also knew that, in his current condition, Belghazi would want to be alone and would therefore probably order them out-if he allowed them in at all-before they had done a thorough sweep. Still, ever the good Boy Scout, I was equipped with a CIA-designed,.22-caliber single shot pistol, artfully concealed inside the body of an elegant Montblanc Meisterstück pen, which I now removed from the backpack. If pressed, I would use the disposable pen to drop whoever was closest to me and, in the ensuing melee, improvise with whoever might be left. Of course, if it came to this, I wouldn’t be paid, so the gun was only for an emergency.

I didn’t have to wait long. Twenty minutes after I had gotten in position, I heard the door to the suite open. A light came on in the outer room. Then the sound of feet, rapidly approaching. The door to the toilet stall slammed against the wall, followed immediately by the sounds of violent retching.

Another set of footsteps. A male voice: “Monsieur Belghazi.. .”

The bodyguard, I assumed. There was more retching, then Belghazi’s voice, low and ragged: “Yallah!” I didn’t know the word, but understood what he was saying. Get out. Now.

I heard the bodyguard walk off, then the sound of the exterior door opening and closing. Belghazi continued to groan and retch. In his haste he hadn’t bothered to turn on the bathroom light, but there was some illumination from the suite beyond and I could make out shadows under the sink where I was suspended.

I heard a metallic thump on the marble floor and wondered what had caused it. Then I realized: his belt buckle. Staph causes diarrhea, and he was struggling to keep up with the onset of symptoms. The sounds and smells that followed confirmed my diagnosis.

After about ten minutes I heard him stumble out of the room. The bedroom light went off. A safe assumption that he had collapsed into bed.

I raised my arm slightly and looked at the illuminated dial of the Traser. I would give him another half hour-long enough to ensure that the chloral hydrate had been largely processed through his system and therefore maximally difficult to detect, but not so long that he might start to wake up. The staph would turn up in a pathologist’s exam, of course, but staph occurs naturally, if unfortunately, in food, so its presence postmortem wouldn’t be a problem. With luck, in the absence of any other likely explanation, the staph might be blamed for the heart attack Belghazi was about to suffer.

In fact, the heart trouble would be the result of an injection of potassium chloride. I would try for the axillary vein under the armpit, or perhaps the ophthalmic vein in the eye, both hard-to-detect entry points, especially with the 25-gauge needle I would use to go in. An injection of potassium chloride is a painless way to go, recommended, at least implicitly, by suicidal cardiologists the world over. The potassium chloride depolarizes cell membranes throughout the heart, producing a complete cardiac arrest, immediate unconsciousness, and rapid death. Postmortem, other cells in the body naturally begin to break down, releasing potassium into the bloodstream, and thereby rendering undetectable the presence of the very agent that got the ball rolling to begin with.

Twenty minutes passed, with no sound other than Belghazi’s occasional insensible groans. I rolled out of the harness and lowered myself silently to the floor. Just a few more minutes, and I would begin preparing the injection. I had a small bottle of chloroform that I would use if he started to stir during the procedure.

I heard a card key sliding into the suite’s door lock. I froze and listened.

A moment passed. I heard the door open. It clicked closed. The light went on in the bedroom.

I reached into the backpack and withdrew the Montblanc. I heard the sound of footsteps in the room. Belghazi, softly groaning. Then a woman’s voice: “Achille, tu vas bien?” Achille are you all right? To which Belghazi, clearly out of it, continued only to groan in reply.

The blonde, I thought. I slipped the pen into my left hand and used my right to ease out my key chain, and the shortened dental mirror I keep on it. I padded silently to the edge of the door and angled the mirror so that I could see the suite’s bedroom reflected in it.

It was her, as I had expected. She must have had her own key.

I grimaced. Bad timing. Another ten minutes and this would have all been over.

I watched her shake Belghazi once, then harder. “Achille?” she said again. This time there wasn’t even a groan in response.

I saw her take a deep breath, hold it for a beat, then gradually push it out, her chin moving in, her shoulders dropping as she did so. Then she strode quickly and quietly over to a wall switch and cut the lights. The room was now lit only by the ambient glow of buildings and streetlights without. I watched her glance at the room’s gauze curtains, which were closed.

She moved to a desk across from the bed. I glanced over and saw Belghazi’s computer case, the one I had seen him with in the lobby and then again in the casino. Interesting.

She unzipped the case and took out a thin laptop, which she opened. Then she walked over to the bed, gingerly took one of the pillows from next to Belghazi’s head, came back to the desk, and held the pillow over the laptop’s keyboard. It took me a second to figure out what she was doing: muffling any chimes or other music heralding that the operating system was stirring to life. A nice move, which showed some forethought, and maybe some practice. She wouldn’t have known where Belghazi had left the volume of the machine when he had last used it; if it had been turned up, the computer’s musical boot tones might have disturbed his slumber.

After a few minutes, the trademark Windows logo appeared on the screen, the accompanying notes barely audible under the cushion of fluffy down pressed southward from above. The woman paused for a moment, then removed the pillow and returned it to its original place on the bed. I noted that she hadn’t tossed it on the floor, or otherwise thrown it randomly aside. She was keeping the room as she found it, which is to say the way Belghazi had left it, down to the details. Another sign that she had good instincts, or that she was trained. Or both.

The woman walked back to the desk and pulled a cell phone from her purse. She spent a moment configuring it in some fashion, then pointed it at the laptop. She started working the phone’s keypad.

Several minutes went by. She would input some sequence on the phone’s keypad, look at the laptop for a few seconds, and repeat. Occasionally she would glance at Belghazi. I could see the laptop screen while she was doing this and it hadn’t changed. My guess was that the computer was password-protected, that her “cell phone” was more than it seemed, and that she was using the device to interrogate the laptop by infrared or by Bluetooth, most likely trying to generate a password or otherwise get inside.

Five minutes went by, then another five. We were getting to the point where Belghazi might have metabolized enough of the drug to regain consciousness. Another five minutes, ten at the most, and I would have to abort.

But how? I wasn’t worried about getting out. Belghazi wouldn’t be in any kind of condition to stop me, even if he were fully awake when I made my departure, and I didn’t expect that the woman would pose a significant obstacle. But if Belghazi saw me, especially after making my acquaintance at the Lisboa earlier that evening, or if the woman reported that there had been an intruder, I would be facing an even tougher security environment. I’d have a hell of a time getting a second chance.

I heard Belghazi groan. The woman froze and glanced at him, but he stirred no further. Still, she must have decided he might be waking up, because a second later she dropped the cell phone back in her purse, set the purse on the floor, and logged off the laptop, using the pillow as she had before to eliminate any farewell melody. When the screen had gone dark, she closed the lid and placed it back in its case, returned the pillow to the bed, and began to undress.

Shit.

The situation was deteriorating. I couldn’t count on her to get to sleep quickly enough, or to stay asleep deeply enough, to enable me to slip out unnoticed. Hell, from what I’d seen so far, she looked like she might sleep as lightly as I do. Also, from the care she had displayed so far, I knew she would have engaged the suite’s interior dead bolt, that most likely she would have done so deliberately, as part of a mental checklist, and that she would therefore remember doing it. If she found it disengaged in the morning, she would be more likely to conclude that someone had been in the room than she would be to doubt her recollection.

Kill them both? Impossible to do “naturally,” under the circumstances. Kanezaki had stressed that payment was conditioned on no evidence of foul play, so I wouldn’t use overt violence unless I had to. Besides, what I do, I don’t do to women or children. There had been one recent exception, but that had been personal. I had no such extenuating issues at work with Belghazi’s companion. On the contrary, I found myself liking this woman. It wasn’t just her looks. It was her moves, her self-possession, her air of command. And the instincts and brains I thought I had just silently witnessed.

There was one possibility. It was risky, but certainly no worse than the other alternatives among my currently meager range of options.

I waited until the woman had fully disrobed, the moment when she would feel maximally helpless and discomfited. She was just moving toward the bed, presumably to get into it, when I strode into the bedroom.

She startled when she saw me, but overall kept her composure. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked in a low voice, in some sort of European-accented English. She stressed the “you” in the question, and sounded more accusatory than afraid.

“You know me?” I whispered back, thinking, What the hell?

“From the casino. And I’ve seen you in the hotel. Now what are you doing here?”

Christ, she was as observant as he was. “Any luck with Belghazi’s computer?” I asked, trying to regain the initiative. My gaze was focused on her torso, the area I always watch, after confirming that the hands are empty, because aggressive movement tends to originate in the midsection. In this instance, though, the view was distracting. She looked even better naked than she had in the black couture I had seen her in earlier.

She kept her cool. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I flashed the SoldierVision, still secured to my wrist, and bluffed. “Really? I’ve got it all right here on low-light video.”

She glanced at the device, then back to me. “On a SoldierVision? I didn’t know they recorded video.”

Damn, she knew her hardware. Whoever she was, she was good, and I needed to stop underestimating her. “This one does,” I said, improvising. “So why don’t we make a deal? I don’t know who you’re working for, and I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, this never happened. You didn’t see me, and I didn’t see you. How does that sound?”

She was silent for a long moment, seemingly oblivious to her nakedness. Then she asked, “Who are you with?”

I smiled. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

She was silent again. My gaze dropped for a moment. Her body was beautiful: simultaneously muscular and curvaceous, like a figure skater’s or that of an unusually tall gymnast, with delicate, pale skin that seemed to glow faintly in the light diffused through the curtains.

I looked up again. She was watching my eyes. “You’re probably bluffing about that video,” she said, her voice even, “but I can’t take the chance. I can’t let you leave with it.”

I was impressed by her aplomb. I nodded my head in Belghazi’s direction. “He’s going to come out of it any minute now. If he wakes up and I’m here, it’ll be bad for both of us.”

She rolled her eyes as though exasperated and said, “I’m going to get dressed.”

I almost bought it. It seemed natural enough-she was naked in front of a stranger, she wanted to put clothes on. But her nakedness hadn’t seemed to bother her a moment earlier. And exasperation wasn’t an expression she wore very convincingly.

“Don’t,” I said sharply. The pen was in my pocket now, and I wouldn’t be able to deploy it in time. Even if I could have, pointing a Montblanc at someone tends to be less attention-getting than, say, employing a Glock 10-millimeter for the same purpose. I wouldn’t have been able to use the pen to control her, only to shoot her, and I didn’t want to do that.

She ignored me. I saw that she was going for her purse, not her clothes.

She must have had a weapon there. I closed the distance in two long steps and kicked the purse aside. As I did so, she straightened and I saw her left elbow whipping around toward my right temple. By reflex I moved in closer to get inside the blow and started to get my hands up. Her elbow missed the mark. But she instantly snapped her hips the other way and caught me with the other elbow, from the opposite side. Boom. I saw stars. Before she could chain together another combination, I dropped down, wrapped my left arm around her closest ankle, and drove my shoulder into her shin. She went down hard on her back.

To keep her from landing an axe kick with her free leg or otherwise attacking with her feet, I got a hand on her thigh and shoved away from her. I stood and backed up, watching her carefully.

“Are you crazy?” I said, my voice low. “What’s he going to think if you wake him up?” That was the point, though, wasn’t it. If she’d wanted, or been willing, to wake him, she already would have done so. She didn’t want him to know about me, maybe because of the “video,” maybe for other reasons, as well. Trying to take me out had been a calculated risk. Then there would only be one side of the story afterward.

There was a dull throbbing in my head where she’d connected. I moved over to the purse and picked it up to make sure she couldn’t try to get to it again. I didn’t know what was inside: lipstick Mace, edged credit cards, a pen-gun like mine, maybe.

Belghazi groaned again. I’d need at least a few minutes to prepare him for the injection, even assuming I could do it without interference from my new sparring partner, and it looked like I’d run out of time.

“It would have been nice if we could have met under different circumstances,” I said, rubbing my sore left temple, taking a step toward the door.

“How are you going to get past the bodyguard?” I heard her say.

That off-balanced me. I had expected them to depart after they saw Belghazi to his room.

I aimed the SoldierVision at the wall and checked the monitor. Sure enough, there was a human image just on the other side of the door. Oh, shit.

“Give me the video,” she said, “and I’ll send the guard away. You can go.”

I shook my head slowly, trying to figure out a way to improvise out of this.

Belghazi groaned again. She glanced at him, then back to me. “Look,” she whispered sharply, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re obviously no friend of his. You’ve figured out that I’m not his friend, either. Maybe we can help each other.”

“Maybe,” I said, looking at her.

“But show me some good faith. Give me the video.”

I shook my head again. “You know I can’t. You wouldn’t, in my place.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “I don’t think there even is a video. So when he wakes up, it’s going to be your word against mine. And I promise, he’ll be inclined to believe me, not you.”

I shrugged. “What if I told him to check the boot log on his computer? I’m sure Belghazi has it enabled. Or to take a good look at your ‘cell phone’?”

She didn’t have an answer to that one.

“But I agree that we can help each other,” I said. “And here’s how we can do it. I’m going to hide again. You get the bodyguard in here, tell him Belghazi seems really sick, he’s been throwing up and is barely conscious, and you need to get him to a hospital. You and the bodyguard walk him out of here. No one’s going to search the room after he’s been in it, and as soon as you’re gone, I’ll be gone, too. You can have the video after that.”

She was silent for a long moment. If I were caught here now and Belghazi got ahold of the “video,” or if I blabbed about his boot log or her cell phone, her cover, whatever it was, would be blown for certain. If I were to leave with the “video,” she’d be taking a risk, but she might be okay. She understood these odds, and she knew that I understood them, too.

“How do I contact you?” I asked, closing the deal.

She pursed her lips, then said, “You can look for me in the casino after eight tomorrow night.”

“The Lisboa?”

“No, here, the Oriental.”

“What do I call you?”

She looked at me, her eyes coolly angry. “Delilah,” she said.

Belghazi groaned again. I nodded once and moved quickly back to the bathroom. I took out the Meisterstück, then hauled myself back into the sling under the sink.

A moment later, I heard the door to the suite open, followed by a muffled conversation in French. Delilah’s voice and a man’s. I heard them come into the suite, where they started trying to rouse Belghazi. I could pick out a few words in French: “sick,” “hospital,” “doctor.” Then Belghazi’s voice, low and groggy: “Non, non. Je vais bien.” No, no, I’m fine. Delilah’s voice, closer now, urging him to see a doctor. More demurrals, also closer.

Shit, he had gotten up and they were coming my way. I willed myself to relax and breathed silently through my nose.

“Je vais bien,” I heard him say again from just outside the bathroom. His voice sounded steadier now. “Attendez une minute.” I heard his feet lightly slapping the marble floor, coming closer. Then the sound of a faucet turning, of water coursing through the pipes around me. I turned my head and looked down. A pair of feet and lower legs stood before the sink. If I’d wanted to, I could have reached down and touched them. I noted two bare lines running the length of his shinbones, where the hair had been worn away, along with a slight rippling effect in the surface of the bone itself-both signature deformations of Thai boxers and other practitioners of hardcore kicking arts. The bones enlarge in response to the trauma of repeated blows, eventually developing into a nerveless and brutally hard striking surface. Belghazi’s file had said something about Savate-a French style of kickboxing. It looked like that information had been correct.

I heard him splashing water on his face, groaning “merde” as he did so. Then the rhythmic sounds of a hasty scrub with a toothbrush-an ordinary enough urge after vomiting.

The sounds of the toothbrush stopped. The water was turned on again. Then something clattered to the floor, practically underneath me.

I turned my head and saw it: he had dropped the toothbrush. Fuck.

My heart rate, which had been reasonably calm under the circumstances, kicked into overdrive. Adrenaline surged from my midsection into my neck and limbs. I tightened my grip on the Meisterstück. I breathed shallowly, silently. My body was perfectly still.

Belghazi knelt and reached for the toothbrush. I saw the top of a close-cropped scalp; the bridge of a nose, bent from some long-ago break; the upper plane of a pair of prominent cheekbones; his shoulders and back, thickly muscled, covered with dark hair.

All he had to do was glance up, and he would see me.

But he didn’t. His fingers closed around the toothbrush and he straightened. A moment later the water stopped running, and he padded out of the bathroom.

I heard voices again from the bedroom, but could only make out a bit of what they were saying. It seemed that Belghazi was adamant about not seeing a doctor. Christ, I was going to have to spend the night slung up under the sink like a rock climber sleeping alongside a mountain.

I heard Delilah’s voice. Something about “médecine.” The door to the suite opened and closed.

Two minutes passed. Silence from the suite. Then the sounds of footsteps, rapidly approaching. Someone burst into the bathroom and blew past me into the toilet stall. The stall door slammed, followed immediately by the sounds of Belghazi retching.

I heard Delilah’s lighter footsteps. She headed straight for the sink and squatted down so she could see me. She must have given it some thought and realized that this would be the only decent place to hide. Again I was impressed.

“I’ve sent the guard to get some medicine,” she whispered. “This will be your only chance.”

Without a word I rolled out of the harness and dropped silently to the floor on one hand and the balls of my feet. I started to reach up to undo the equipment, but Delilah stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “Leave the rig,” she said. “There’s no time. I’ll take care of it later.”

From behind the stall door, Belghazi exclaimed, “Merde!” and retched again. I nodded at Delilah and headed for the exit. She followed me closely. I paused before the door and used the SoldierVision to confirm that the hallway was clear before leaving.

I moved into the empty corridor. She shut the door behind me without another word.

3

I’D BEEN LIVING in Brazil for almost a year when they finally got to me. It had rained that day, the sky full of oppressive, low-lying clouds that clung to Rio’s dramatic cliffs like smoke from some faraway calamity.

After leaving Tatsu in Tokyo, I had finished preparing Yamada-san, the ice-cold alter ego I had created as an escape hatch for the day my enemies might succeed in tracking me to Japan, as indeed they had, for his departure to São Paulo. São Paulo is home to some six hundred thousand of Brazil’s approximately one million ethnic Japanese, the largest such community outside Japan, and the kind of place in which a recent arrival like Yamada-san might easily lose himself.

Yamada found a suitable apartment in Aclimação, a residential neighborhood near Liberdade, São Paulo’s Japanese district, from which he made the necessary arrangements to establish his new business of shipping high-quality, low-cost Brazilian judo and jujitsu uniforms to Japan-a business which, if conditions were favorable, he might one day expand to include additional exportable items. Many of his neighbors were of Korean and Chinese extraction, which suited Yamada because such Asian faces made it easier for him to blend. A more heavily Japanese setting, such as that of Liberdade itself, would have conferred the same advantages, but could have been problematic, as well, because Japanese neighbors would have been more inclined to probe the specifics of his background, and to discuss it among themselves afterward. To the extent that he did need to share some of his past with his Japanese neighbors, Yamada would explain that he was from Tokyo, a simple sarariiman, or salary man, who had suffered the double indignity of being laid off by one of Japan’s electronics giants and then being abandoned by his wife of twenty years, for whom he could no longer provide as she expected. It was a sad, although not uncommon story in those difficult economic times, and Yamada’s neighbors, with typical Japanese restraint, would nod sympathetically at the telling of his lament and press for no further details.

Yamada obsessed over the study of Portuguese-tapes, tutors, television, music, films, even a series of professional women, because, Yamada knew, there is no more natural or productive route to the acquisition of a language than the sharing of a pillow. Every few weeks, he would leave town to travel, to acquaint himself firsthand with his adopted land: the vast cerrado, the central plains, with its handful of frontier towns and vanishing Indian tribes, and its bizarre, planned city, Brasília, stuck on the land as though by extraterrestrials in imitation of an earthen metropolis; the prehistoric enormity of Amazonas, where the scale of everything-the trees, the water lilies, and, of course, the river itself-first diminishes and then extinguishes the traveler’s sense of his own human significance; the baroque art and architecture of Minas Gerais, left behind like a conflicted apology by the miners who centuries earlier had raped the region’s land for its diamonds and gold.

Yamada avoided Bahia and in particular its capital, Salvador. Rain knew a woman there, a beautiful half-Brazilian, half-Japanese named Naomi, with whom Rain had enjoyed an affair in Tokyo and to whom he had made a promise when she was forced to flee to Brazil. Yamada wanted to go to her there, but at the same time hesitated to do so, finding himself unsure, at some level, of whether he was attempting to forestall the inevitable or simply hoping to relish the anticipation of its arrival. Occasionally Yamada was troubled by such thoughts, but his new surroundings, exotic after so many years in familiar Japan, his travels, and his constant study of the language, were all strongly diverting.

Yamada’s linguistic progress was excellent, as one might expect of a man who already spoke both English and Japanese as a native, and after six months he judged himself ready to relocate to Rio; more specifically, to Barra da Tijuca, known throughout Rio simply as Barra, a middle- and upper-middle-class enclave extending for some nineteen kilometers along Rio’s southern coast. He chose a suitable apartment at the corner of the Avenida Belisário Leite de Andrade Neto and the Avenida General Guedes da Fontoura. It was a good building, with entrances on each of the streets it faced, and nothing but other residences all around, therefore offering, had Yamada been inclined to reflect on such matters, multiple points of egress and no convenient areas from which some third party might set up surveillance or an ambush.

In Barra the Yamada identity finally began to feel truly comfortable. Partly it was that I’d lived as Yamada for so long at that point; partly it was that the São Paulo stopover had been only one step removed from Japan, and therefore from those enemies who were trying to find me there; partly it was the inherent difficulty of feeling uncomfortable for long in Rio, its rhythms, indeed its life, defined as they are by the culture of its beaches.

In my new environs I became a Japanese nisei, one of the tens of thousands of Brazil’s second-generation ethnic Japanese, who had decided to retire to Rio from São Paulo. My Portuguese was good enough to support the story; the accent was off, of course, but this was explainable by virtue of having grown up in a Japanese household and having spent much of my childhood in Japan.

I was intrigued at how distant a notion Japan seemed to present to my nisei cousins. It seemed that, when they looked in the mirror, they saw only a Brazilian. If they thought about it at all, I imagined, Japan must have felt like a coincidence, a faraway culture and place not much more important than the other such places one reads about in books or sees on television, something that meant a great deal to their parents or grandparents but that wasn’t particularly relevant to them. I found myself somewhat envious of the notion of forgetting where you had come from and caring only about who you are, and liked Brazil for offering a culture that would foster such a possibility.

And Barra offered this culture triple-distilled. My nisei story was thin, I knew, but it didn’t really matter. Barra, the fastest growing part of the city, its skyline increasingly crowded with new high-rises, its neighborhoods ceaselessly changing with departures and arrivals, is much more focused on the future than it is with anyone’s particular past. It’s the kind of place where, a month after you’ve been there, you’re considered an old-timer, and I had no trouble fitting in.

Rio, home to a sports- and fitness-mad population, has numerous health food outlets, and it was easy for me to indulge my taste for protein shakes and acai fruit smoothies. These, along with antioxidants, fish oil, and other dietary supplements, enhanced my recovery times and enabled me to adhere to a regimen of five hundred daily Hindu squats, three hundred inclined sit-ups, three hundred Hindu push-ups, and other esoteric body weight calisthenics that maintained my strength and flexibility.

I varied my mornings and evenings training at Gracie Barra, jujitsu’s modern Mecca, where the fecund Gracie family had taken the teachings of a visiting Japanese diplomat and adapted them into a system of ground fighting so sophisticated that the art is now more firmly established in Brazil than it ever was in Japan. I trained frequently and hard, having missed the opportunity to do so during the year I had spent underground in Osaka and in São Paulo thereafter. The academy’s young black belts were impressed with my skills, but in truth their ground game was stronger than mine-although certainly less ruthless, if applied in the real world-and I relished the opportunity to once again polish and expand my personal arsenal.

In the afternoons I would ride an old ten-speed out to one of the city’s more isolated beaches-sometimes Grumari, sometimes even less accessible slivers of sand, which I reached on foot, where only the most determined surfers, and perhaps some nude sunbathers, might venture. After a month my skin had become dark, like that of a true carioca, or Rio native, and my hair, brown like my mother’s now that I no longer dyed it black to make myself look more Japanese, grew streaked like a surfer’s.

Sometimes I would swim out to one of the nearby islands. I would sit on those deserted outcroppings of gray and green and consider the rhythm of waves against rock, the occasional sighing of the wind, and my mind would wander. I would think of Midori, the jazz pianist I had accidentally met and then deliberately spared after killing her father, a man whose posthumous wishes I had tried to carry out later, an effort that had perhaps earned ambivalence, but that could never lead to forgiveness, from the daughter. I would remember how on that last night she had leaned in from astride me and whispered I hate you even as she came, the newly acquired certainty of what I had done to her father damning the passion she otherwise couldn’t prevent, and I would wonder foolishly if she might ever play in one of Rio’s jazz clubs. And I would look back on my new city and see it as an island, not unlike the one from which I viewed it: a beautiful place, to be sure, but still one of exile, sometimes of regret, ultimately of loneliness.

I kept the apartment in São Paulo. I took care to travel there from time to time to maintain appearances, and managed Yamada’s new export operation remotely, mostly by e-mail. Some simple commercial software turned the lights on and off at random intervals during preset hours so that it looked as though someone was living there, and so that the electric bills would be consistent with full-time residency. A faucet opened to a continual slow drip accomplished the same end with regard to water bills. In addition, I stayed from time to time in various short-term hotel/apartments elsewhere in Rio, adding a certain shell game dynamic to the other challenges a pursuer might face in attempting to locate me.

But all this security cost money, and, although I had saved a good deal over the years, my means were not unlimited, and what I did have was kept in a variety of anonymous offshore accounts that effectively paid no interest. Dividend-paying stocks and IRAs and 401(k)s weren’t part of the plan. I told myself that after a couple of years, or a few, when the trail someone might try to follow had grown cold, and their potential motivations sufficiently remote, I might be able to scale back on some of the precautions that posed such a burden to my finances.

Time passed. And, much as I enjoyed it, Rio came to feel like a way station, not a destination; a breather, not the end of the march. There was an aimlessness to my days there, an aimlessness that my focus on jujitsu alleviated but didn’t dispel. From time to time I would remember Tatsu telling me you can’t retire, spoken with equal parts confidence and sadness, and those words, which I had first taken to be a threat and then understood to be merely a prediction, came in my memory to bear the weight of something else, something more akin to prophecy.

I grew restless, and my restlessness proved fertile ground for memories of Naomi. The way she had whispered come inside in my ear on that first long night together. The way she would slip into Portuguese when we made love. The way she had offered to try to help Harry, who had been not just an asset of mine, but a rare friend, an offer that had been as sincere as it was ultimately useless. And the way I had promised her the last time I saw her that I would find her in Brazil, that I wouldn’t leave her waiting and wondering what had ever happened to me.

The way you did Midori.

I’ve paid for that one, thank you.

It had been good with Naomi, that was the thing. Warm and sweet and emotionally uncomplicated. It wasn’t what I had with Midori, or almost had, but I was never going to have that again and preferred to spend as little time as possible flagellating myself over it. Going to her would be selfish, I knew, because in Tokyo our involvement had almost gotten her killed, and, despite the change of venue and all my new precautions, it was far from impossible that something like that could happen again. But I found myself thinking of her all the time, wondering if somehow it could work. Japan was far away. I was Yamada now, wasn’t I? And Naomi was whoever she was in Brazil. We could start over, start afresh.

I should have known better. But we all have stupid moments, rationalization, even blindness, born of weakness and human need.

Naomi’s Japanese mother had died many years earlier, but she had told me her father’s name, David Leonardo Nascimento, and had let me know that I could find him in Salvador. Nascimento is a common name in Brazil, but there was no Leonardo, David, in the Salvador white pages, to which I had access via a Rio public library. An Internet search proved more productive: David Leonardo Nascimento, it seemed, was the president of a Salvador-based company with real estate, construction, and manufacturing interests.

I could have simply called and asked how I might get in touch with Naomi, but I didn’t want too long a gap between the time when I contacted her and the time when we might actually meet. I told myself that this preference was logical, the outgrowth of my usual security concerns, but I knew at some level that it was driven also by personal factors. I didn’t want to have to catch up over the phone, to answer questions about where I was and what I was doing, to explain my long delay in tracking her down. Better to get it all out of the way in person.

Salvador was a two-hour flight from Rio, and in making my way through this new city I was struck, as always when traversing colossal Brazil, by the contrasts among the land’s regions. Salvador, nearer the equator, was hotter than Rio, the air somehow richer, moister. In Rio, the ubiquitous granite cliffs seem to offer glimpses of the land’s strong skeleton; in Salvador, everywhere there was red earth, more akin to a soft covering of skin. And the people were darker-hued: a reflection of the area’s African heritage, which revealed itself also in the baroque carving of the town’s colonial churches; in the blood-pounding beat of its candomblé music; in the flowing, dancing moves of its capoeiristas, with their hypnotizing mixture of dance, fighting, and gymnastics, all set to the tune of the stringed berimbau and the mesmerizing beat of the conga.

Nascimento was well buffered by secretaries, and there was a fair amount of back and forth before I was able to actually get ahold of him. When I did, he told me that Naomi had left word with him about a friend from Japan, someone named John, but that this had been some time ago. I acknowledged the delay and waited, and after a moment he told me that his daughter was living in Rio, working at a bar called Scenarium, on the Rua do Lavradio. He gave me a phone number. I thanked him and went straight to the airport, smiling at the irony. All these months of avoiding Salvador, only to learn that Naomi and I were living practically as neighbors.

That evening, after taking steps to ensure that I wasn’t being followed, I caught a cab to Lapa, the neighborhood around Scenarium, among the oldest in the city. I got out a few blocks away, per my usual practice, and waited until the cab had departed before moving in the direction of the bar.

I made my way along antique streets composed of rows of cobblestones convulsed over the centuries into valleys and hillocks by the ceaseless stirrings of the earth below. A few widely spaced streetlights offered weak respite against the surrounding gloom, and passing figures appeared indistinct, insubstantial, like phantoms from the area’s colonial past, shifting in confusion among the faded façades and broken balconies, lost souls trying to locate once-thriving addresses that existed now only as monuments to dilapidation and disuse. Here and there were signs of new life-a repaired balustrade, a reglazed set of windows-and somehow these small portents made the shattered relics on which they blossomed a strangely vibrant foreground to the modern high-rises towering beyond: tenacious, more resolute, the ravaged sockets of their empty doors and windows seeming almost to smile at the prospect of the eventual passing of their newer, taller peers, who would age without inspiring any of the devotion that promised to restore these ancients to the vigor of their youth.

I turned onto the Rua do Lavradio and saw Scenarium. The bar occupied all three floors of two adjacent buildings, the façades of each suffering, like so many of their brethren in the area, from considerable age and neglect. The light and music emanating from the interior were startlingly vibrant and alive by contrast. A long queue of cars waited in the street in front, as though in awe or homage. I stood before the large, open entranceway for a moment, surprised to note that my heart was beating rapidly, remembering the concentrated time I had spent with Naomi in Tokyo, and how long it had been since I had promised I would be in touch.

I walked in and glanced around. Hot spots first, by instinct and long habit: seats facing the entrance, partially concealed corners, ambush positions. I detected no problems.

I moved inside. The interior was vast, and decorated like a Hollywood prop warehouse. Everywhere there were antiques and curios: iron cash registers, a red British telephone booth, a cluster of parasols, busts and statues, shelves of colored bottles and jugs. Even the tables and chairs looked vintage. Had it been less capacious, it would have felt cluttered.

The ceilings were high and of bare wood, the walls stone and alabaster. In the center of the room, about ten meters in, the ceiling disappeared and the room was open to the second and third floors above. Below this space, a three-man band was performing “De Mais Ninguém,” “No One’s But Mine,” Marisa Monte’s modern classic of choro, a style that might loosely be thought of as Brazilian jazz, given that both choro and jazz are based on improvisation and the mixture of African and European musical elements. But choro, though less widely known, is in fact older than jazz, and has a distinct and sometimes melancholy sound of its own. The crowd, clustered around warrens of wooden tables and five across at couches along the walls, was singing along passionately.

I made my way to a staircase in back, which I took to the second floor. This, too, was crowded with diners, and no less replete with ancient odds and ends, but was somewhat less boisterous than the area below.

The third floor was quieter still. For a few moments, I leaned against the railing surrounding the open center of the floor, gazing down at the band, at the patrons at the tables before the stage, and at the waiters crossing between, and felt an odd sadness descend, both remote and heavy, as though I was watching this lively scene not so much from on high but rather from an impossibly detached and alienated distance.

A waiter came by and asked in Portuguese if he could bring me anything.

“I’m looking for Naomi,” I told him.

“She’s downstairs, in the office,” he said. “Who shall I tell her is looking for her?”

I paused, then said, “Her friend from Japan.”

He nodded and moved off.

I walked over to the end of the room and out onto one of the balconies overlooking the Rua do Lavradio. I leaned against the railing, pitted and worn as driftwood, and felt the old surreal calm steal over me, the kind I always feel just before the final moments of a job, like a sniper relaxing into his shot. There was nothing I could do now. It would turn out the way it would turn out.

A few minutes passed. I heard the floorboards behind me creaking with someone’s rapid approach. I turned and saw Naomi, her hair longer than it had been in Tokyo, her caramel skin darker, and when she saw that it was me her face lit up in an enormous smile and she made a sound of almost childlike delight, and then she was in my arms, pulling me close and squeezing hard.

She smelled the way I remembered, sweet, and somehow also wild, her own scent, which I will always associate with heat and wet and tropical ardor. Her body felt good, too, petite but ripe in all the right places, and her shape, suddenly in my arms, along with her scent, flooded my mind with a jumble of conflicted memories.

She pulled back after a long moment and glanced down at what she had already felt was there, then punched me in the shoulder, hard. Her face was mock-angry, but I saw some real distress in her eyes, as well.

“Do you know how many times I promised myself I wouldn’t do that?” she asked in her Portuguese-accented English.

“How many?”

“A lot. Most recently as I was coming up the stairs over there.”

“I’m glad you didn’t listen.”

“Why didn’t you call me? Why did you wait so long? I thought that maybe you weren’t interested. Or that, after everything that had happened, something bad had happened to you.”

“You were wrong about the first one, but were almost on the mark with the second.”

“What happened?”

Her green eyes were so earnest. It made me smile. “I had to settle some things in Tokyo,” I said. “It took a while.”

“You came all the way from Tokyo?”

“I’ve been moving around a lot.”

“Are we going to keep secrets after everything that happened between us?”

“Especially after that,” I said, telling her the truth. But she looked hurt, so I added, “Let’s just spend a little time together first, okay? It’s been a while.”

There was a pause. She nodded and said, “You want a drink?”

I nodded back. “Love one.”

“A single malt?” she asked, remembering.

I smiled. “How about a caipirinha, instead?” The caipirinha is Brazil’s national cocktail. It’s made with cachaça-a Brazilian liquor made from distilled sugar-cane juice-along with lime, sugar, and ice, and I’d grown fond of the drink during my time in the country.

“You know a lot about Brazil,” she said, looking at me.

I realized it might have been safer to go with the single malt, which she had been expecting. “Go ni itte wa, go ni shitagae,” I said with a shrug, switching to Japanese. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

She smiled. “It’s a good choice,” she said. “We make a great caipirinha.”

I raised my eyebrows. “ ‘We’?”

Her smile widened. “I’m one of the owners.”

“I’m impressed,” I said, looking around and then back to her. “How did that happen?”

She smiled and said, “First, the caipirinha.”

We sat near the windows, open to the air outside, in the semidark of the third floor. A waiter brought us a pitcher of caipirinha and two glasses, and, as Naomi had promised, the drink was expertly made: astringent but sweet, cold and strong, redolent of the tropics. Unlike whiskey, with its decades of associations, the taste of caipirinha holds no memories for me.

I asked her how she wound up coming to own a place like Scenarium, and she explained that it was part serendipity, part her father’s connections. The government was investing in restoring the Lapa district-which explained some of the renovations I had noticed-and was offering tax breaks to new businesses in the area. She had some money saved, and some entertainment business expertise, from her time in Tokyo, so her father had put her in touch with a group that was hoping to open a bar/restaurant.

“What about you?” she asked me. “What have you been doing?”

I took a sip of caipirinha. “Figuring some things out. Trying to get a new business going.”

“Something safer than the last one?”

She didn’t know the specifics. Just that whatever I did had a tendency to put me in touch with some shady characters and that it had nearly gotten both of us killed in Tokyo. “If I’m lucky,” I told her.

“It looks like you’re staying in shape,” she observed.

I smiled. “Pilates.”

“And you’re tan. You get that dark in Tokyo?”

She was zeroing in. I should have expected that.

Maybe you did. Maybe you wanted that.

But I wasn’t ready to tell her. “You know how it is, with all that fluorescent lighting,” I said.

She didn’t laugh. “I’m getting the feeling that you’ve been in Rio for a while.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Why did you wait so long?” she went on after a moment. “To look me up. I’m not mad. And only a little hurt. I just want to know why.”

I drank some more and considered. “I can be a danger to the people I get close to,” I said after a moment. “Maybe you noticed that, in Tokyo.”

“That was a long time ago. In another place.”

I nodded, thinking of Holtzer, the late CIA Chief of Tokyo Station, and how he’d reappeared in my life in Tokyo like a resurgent disease, very nearly managing to have me killed in the process. Of how the Agency had patiently watched Midori, hoping she would lead them to me. “It’s never that long ago,” I said.

We were quiet for a while. Finally she asked, “How long will you be in Rio?”

I looked around. “I don’t want to complicate your life,” I said.

“You came all the way out here to tell me that? You should have just sent me a damn postcard.”

I had tried to resist her charms in Tokyo because I knew it would all end badly. None of that had changed.

Yet here I was.

“I’d like to stick around for a while,” I told her. “If that’s okay with you.”

She offered me a small smile. “We’ll see,” she said.

We made love that night, and again and again on the nights that came after. She had a small high-rise apartment near the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, just slightly removed from the crowded beaches and trendy boutiques of Ipanema. From one of her windows there was a view of nearby Corcovado, or Hunchback Mountain, topped by the massive, illuminated statue of Christo Redentor, Christ the Redeemer, his head bowed, his arms outstretched in benediction to the city below him, and on some nights I would gaze out upon this edifice while Naomi slept. I would stare at the statue’s distant shape, perhaps daring it to do something-strike me down if it wanted, or show some other sign of sentience-and, after an uneventful interregnum, I would turn away, never with satisfaction. The statue seemed to mock me with its muteness and its immobility, as though offering the promise, if of anything, not of redemption, but rather of a reckoning, and at a time of its choosing, not of mine.

One rainy morning, about a month after I’d gone to see Naomi at Scenarium and started spending time with her, I left her apartment for a workout at Gracie Barra. It was a Friday, and training would be in shorts and tee-shirts, without the heavy cotton judogi. I took the stairs to the third floor, kicked off my sandals, and stepped onto the mat.

On the far side of the room a heavily muscled Caucasian man was hanging from the bar in front of the cartoon Tasmanian Devil that serves as the academy’s logo and mascot. He was barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of navy shorts, and his torso gleamed under a coating of oily sweat. He saw me come in and dropped to the floor, the move smooth and silent despite his bulk.

The sandy-colored hair was longer now, longer even than the ponytail he had once sported, and he wore a goatee that had originally been a full beard, but I recognized him immediately. I knew him only as Dox, his nom de guerre. He was an ex-marine, one of their elite snipers, and, like me, had been recruited by the Reagan-era CIA to equip and train the Afghan Mujahideen, who were then battling the invading Soviet army. We had each spent two years with what Uncle Sam at the time affectionately referred to as the Muj, more recently regarded with less warmth as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and I hadn’t seen him, or missed him, since then.

He walked over, a grin spreading as he approached. “Wanna roll around a little?” he asked in the hayseed twang I remembered.

I noted that he had no place to conceal a weapon or transmitter. I wondered whether the attire had been chosen deliberately, to reassure me. Dox liked to play the hick, and a lot of people bought the act, but I knew he could be subtle when he wanted to be.

This was obviously not a social call, but I wasn’t concerned for my immediate safety. If Dox had any ill intent, the third floor of Gracie Barra would be a poor place to carry it out. He was an obvious foreigner, would have checked in at the front desk, and would be dealing with dozens of witnesses.

“Let me warm up first,” I said, without returning his grin.

“Shit, man, I’m already warmed up. Pretty soon I’m going to be warming down. Been here almost an hour, waiting for someone new to train with.” He jumped up and down a few times on his toes and flexed his considerable arms back and forth.

I looked around. Although morning classes at Barra tend to be more sparsely attended than the evening equivalent, there were about twenty people practicing on the mat, some within earshot. I decided to hold off on the questions I wanted to put to him.

“Why don’t you go with one of these guys?” I asked, looking over at some of the other men who were training.

He shook his head. “I already went with a few of them.” He smiled, then added, “Don’t think they liked me. Think they find me… unorthodox.”

“Unorthodox” was in fact the origin of the nom de guerre. He had been one of the younger guys in our happy few, having left his beloved Corps under cloudy circumstances not long before. There was a rumor that he had roughed up a superior officer, although Dox himself never spoke of it. Whatever it had been, it did seem to impel the young man-who, unlike most of his peers in Afghanistan, had been just a little too young for service in Vietnam-to try to prove himself. He liked to accompany the Muj on ambushes despite his “train only” mandate, and was well respected because of it. He made his own way, developing a reputation for unusual, even bizarre tactics, usually involving improvised explosive devices that left the Soviets firing at an enemy that had long since faded back into unreachable mountain caves. Nor did he confine himself to training new snipers-he went out and did some hunting himself.

His physical conditioning methods, I remembered, were also unconventional: he lifted weights with fuel drums, and would sometimes stand on his head, his hands laced behind his neck, for a half hour or more. A lot of people had underestimated him because of his unusual habits, his good ol’ boy routine. I wasn’t going to make that mistake.

“I’ll let you know when I’m ready,” I told him, rotating my head, loosening my neck.

He gave me the grin again. “I’ll be right here.”

He walked over to the wall and popped up into a headstand. Christ, he was still doing that shit.

I stretched and worked through a series of Hindu squats, neck bridges, and other calisthenics until I felt sufficiently limbered. Then I stood and signaled to Dox, who had been watching from his headstand. He dropped his legs to the floor, came to his feet, and strolled over.

“You’re good, man, I can see it. Rolling through on those neck bridges smooth. You’re staying in shape.”

Although he’d been damn effective in the field, in other contexts Dox had always talked too much for my taste. He still had the habit, it seemed. “You want to start standing, or on the ground?” I asked.

“Whatever you want, man,” he said. “It’s your place.”

If he’d intended the comment to rattle me, he’d failed. But I did feel some irritation, mild for the moment. I thought I might not be able to respond as quickly as decorum ordinarily demanded when he tapped out from a submission hold.

I nodded and started circling. He got the idea and followed suit.

We closed and I took the back of his neck in my right hand, my elbow down, pressed in against his clavicle and chest, controlling his forward movement. He grabbed a similar hold with his right and yanked my head toward his, the movement fast enough to almost be a head butt. I looked down in time to take the impact on the top of my skull, where it didn’t do anything more than hurt. My irritation edged up a notch. But before I had a chance to react further, he started muscling me with the neck hold, jerking me left, right, forward and back. He was using his hand and elbow confidently, which showed some training, and he was strong as hell.

Time to change tactics. I snapped his neck toward me, and then, as he pulled back, used the hold to launch myself into the air under him. I wrapped my legs around his waist and dragged him down to the mat. I had expected him to try to retreat from my “guard,” as the position is known in jujitsu, but instead he went the opposite way, grabbing and twisting my head in both pawlike hands and attacking the underside of my jaw with the top of his head. It felt like someone was trying to run a pile driver up through my skull. To relieve the pressure, I unlocked my ankles from around his back, brought my knees to his chest, and started pushing him away.

Once again, his reaction showed training: he wrapped his right arm around my left ankle from the inside out and dropped back to the mat, trying for what I recognized as a sambo foot lock. Sambo is a variety of Russian wrestling. It’s distinguished by, among other things, its emphasis on foot, knee, and ankle locks, some of which can be applied so swiftly and can cause such extensive damage that they’ve been outlawed from various grappling competitions.

I shot my right foot into his neck and jerked the other leg back, just barely getting it clear from between his biceps and ribs. He tried to scramble away, and as we scuffled I managed to throw my right leg over his left and across his body and to catch his left toes under my right armpit. Before he could kick free, I over-hooked his heel with the inside of my right wrist; clasped my hands together and clamped my elbows to my sides; and arched back and twisted to my left in my own little demonstration of sambo prowess, a classic heel hook.

Despite the technique’s name, the attack is to the knee joint, not the heel. The heel serves only as the lever, and I had a nice grip on Dox’s. He tried to kick with his right leg, but from this position the kicks were feeble. I twisted a fraction more and he gave up that strategy.

“Tap, tap,” he said. “You got me.”

“Who sent you here?”

“Hey, I said ‘tap!’ Come on, now!”

I twisted another fraction and he yelped. “Who sent you?” I asked again.

“You know who sent me,” he said, grimacing. “Same outfit as last time.”

“Yeah? How did they know where to look?”

“I don’t know!”

He tried to push my leg off. I squeezed my knees tighter and twisted his heel another millimeter.

“Fuck!” he said, loud enough for other people to hear. “C’mon, man, I seriously don’t know!”

His breathing was getting more labored, as much from pain as from exertion. I looked in his eyes.

“Hey, Dox,” I said, my voice calm, almost a whisper. “I’m going to count to three. If you haven’t told me what I want to know by then, I’m going to twist as hard as I can. Ready? One. Two. Thr-”

“The girl! The girl! They paid her, or something. I don’t know the details.”

I almost twisted anyway.

“What girl?”

“You know. The Brazilian chick. Naomi something.”

I was less surprised than I would have imagined. I’d have to think about that, later.

“Who’s your handler?”

“Jesus Christ, man, I’ll tell you what you want to know. You don’t have to… fuck! Kanezaki! Ethnic Japanese guy, about thirty, wire-rimmed glasses, says he knows you.”

Kanezaki. I should have known. I’d let him live when I’d first found him trying to tail me. I wondered briefly whether that had been a mistake.

I noticed that several people were watching us, including Carlinhos, the founder of the academy and its chief instructor. No one was moving to interfere, recognizing, as Brazilians do, that this problem was homem homem-man to man-and not yet their concern. Still, I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself. I released his leg and disengaged.

The tension ran out of his body and he slumped onto his back, cradling his injured knee. “Oh, man, I can’t believe you did that,” he said. “That was totally unnecessary, man.”

I didn’t respond.

“What if I really hadn’t known, huh? What then?”

I shrugged. “Surgery to reconstruct the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments and menisci, then maybe a six- to twelve-month rehabilitation. Lots of painkillers that wouldn’t work nearly as well as you’d want.”

“Shit,” he grunted. A minute or so passed. Then he sat up and looked at me. He flexed his leg and flashed his indefatigable grin.

“I almost had you, man. And you know it.”

“Sure,” I said, looking at him. “Almost.” I stood. “Where did you learn the sambo?”

The grin widened. “Since the dreaded Iron Curtain got lifted, I’ve been working some with the Ruskies.”

“They let you in, after some of the shit you pulled on them in ’Stan?”

He shrugged. “It’s a whole new world, partner, with whole new enemies. I’m helping them with their Chechen problem now, so we’re like old buddies.”

I nodded. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”

We grabbed our bags and left without changing. I still had the bug and transmitter detector Harry had once made for me. It lay quietly in my bag, powered up from its daily charging, and I knew neither Dox nor his belongings was wired. But that didn’t mean he was alone.

I took him along a circuitous series of quiet neighborhood streets. Twice we got in and out of taxis. I stayed with generic countersurveillance techniques, not wanting to take specific advantage of the area’s features lest he conclude by my intimate knowledge of the local terrain that I must be a resident. He knew what I was doing and didn’t protest.

By the time we had reached the beach at São Conrado, I knew we were clean. The rain had stopped and we strolled down to the edge of the water. The tide was receding, giving up wet sand like a defeated army abandoning terrain it could no longer control.

A minute passed. Neither of us spoke.

A ball from a nearby game of beach soccer rolled our way. Dox picked it up and threw it back at the brown-skinned kid who was chasing after it. The kid waved his thanks and went back to the game. I watched him for a moment, wondering what it would be like to grow up like that, in a city by the sea with nothing worse to do than play soccer on the sand.

“We done with the spy stuff?” Dox asked me.

I nodded, and after a moment he went on.

“Nice setup you got going here,” he said. “Good weather, the ocean… And man, the women! I’ve been falling in love maybe three times a day. First morning, I got to my hotel, girl at the reception desk, man, they practically had to resuscitate me she was so fine.”

“You could be a travel writer,” I told him.

“Hey, I’d take it. It’s tough for guys like us, you know? You get a certain résumé, you only get hired for certain jobs.”

“You seem to be doing all right,” I observed.

He kicked some sand and looked out at the ocean. “Sure is nice here, though. You been here long?”

The hayseed accent was getting thicker. I wasn’t going to fall for it, but no sense calling him on it, either. Better to have him assume that I was underestimating him the way he was used to being underestimated.

“Couple months,” I told him. “I move around a lot. So people like you can’t find me.”

He frowned. “C’mon, what else was I going to do? The lucky ones find a gig bodyguarding rich assholes, doing threat assessments, living the good life in the guest quarters of a house in Brentwood, hardening the soft targets who should have gotten culled early on to improve the gene pool like nature intended. The really lucky ones teach Hollywood types how to act like soldiers, or they get to blow shit up for the cameras. The unlucky ones? Mall security guards and rent-a-cops. I didn’t get a shot at the first, and fuck the second. So here I am.”

“Why not go with Blackwater, one of those outfits?”

He shrugged. “I tried it. But I discovered that the corporate world just didn’t offer me appropriate financial opportunities. And you know what they say about opportunity, buddy. It only knocks once.”

We were silent again for a moment. I asked, “Why’d they send you?”

He reached down and rubbed his knee. “You know why. We know each other, they figure you trust me.” He smiled. “Don’t you?”

“Sure,” I told him. “Completely.”

“Well, that’s it,” he went on, pretending he was too slow to understand sarcasm. “Plus, I figure they want you to hear from me that what they’ve got in mind is real, get you interested that way. I’m like a customer reference, you know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said again.

“Okay, so here’s the score. I’ve been doing some work for Uncle Sam, deniable shit, off the books. High risk, high ‘they’ll fuck you in the end’ potential, but lucrative.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They thought you might be interested. But contacting you wasn’t my idea, by the way. I didn’t even know you were still around, man. A lot of people we knew in ’Stan, they’re not breathing so much these days.”

“Whose idea, then?”

“Look, there’s a program. Something new, something big. They’re hiring people like me and you, paying good money, is what I’m saying.”

“Dox, do you know what a ‘pronoun’ is?”

He frowned. Then his face brightened. “Ah, I know what you mean. I keep saying ‘they’ and shit like that. Not telling you who really.”

I looked at him and waited.

He smiled and shook his head. “C’mon, man, you know who ‘they’ is. Christians In Action.” He shivered in mock excitement. “The Company.”

“Right.”

“They’ve got some sort of new mandate. You should hear it from them.”

“I’d like to hear it from you first.”

“Hey, I don’t have all the details. And I can’t give you the specifics about what I’ve been up to. I’ll just tell you that they’re paying me a lot of money to make certain people who are causing problems stop causing problems. They want to make the same offer to you.”

“Through your handler?”

He nodded. “I’ve got a number for you to call.”

I wrote the number down in code, then left him there and made my way back to Naomi’s apartment. The move was predictable, and I took extensive precautions. The caution was mostly reflex, though. If they’d wanted to kill me, they wouldn’t have sent someone I knew to contact me first. They would have known that doing so would only tune up my alertness, possibly even convince me to run.

No, I had a feeling Dox’s story was straight. But no sense being sloppy, regardless.

I thought on the way to Naomi’s about what Dox had told me. The Agency must have connected the bodies outside Naomi’s Tokyo apartment with the contemporaneous death of Yukiko, the ice bitch who had set up and then disposed of Harry after the yakuza had used him to find me. They knew, despite the absence of real proof, that I’d been involved in all those killings. They knew that Naomi and Yukiko had both been dancers at the same Nogizaka club. It wouldn’t be too great a leap to deduce, from the pieces they had, a connection between Naomi and me.

I used the intercom at the front entrance. Naomi was surprised that I was back, but she buzzed me in. I took the stairs. She was waiting, holding the door open for me.

I went in. The room smelled of brewing coffee. Her hair hung wet against the shoulders of a white terry-cloth robe-she had just gotten up and out of the shower, it seemed.

“Someone was following me this morning,” I told her.

“Following you?” she asked.

“Yeah. Not in a good way.”

“A mugger?”

“Not a mugger. A pro. Someone who knew just where to go.”

She looked at me, her expression more frightened than confused.

“Tell me what’s going on, Naomi.”

There was a long pause, then she said, “I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Tell who?”

“I don’t know exactly. They call every month or so. It started when I came back to Brazil from Tokyo. Someone came to Scenarium and started asking me about you.”

“Describe him.”

“He called himself Kanematsu. American, but ethnic Japanese. He had slicked hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Thirtyish, I think, but younger-looking. He told me he was with the U.S. government and that he was a friend of yours but wouldn’t say more than that.”

Kanezaki again, operating under a pseudonym. “What did you tell him?” I asked.

She looked at me, her expression an odd mixture of vulnerability and defiance. “I told him I knew you, yes, but that I didn’t know where you were or how to find you.”

If that was true, it was also smart. If she’d denied even knowing me they would have known she was lying. They would have assumed the rest was a lie, too, and might have started to pressure her.

“And after that?”

She shrugged. “I get a call once a month or so. Always from the same guy. And I always tell him the same thing.”

I nodded, considering. “What did they offer you?” I asked.

She looked down, then back at me. “Twenty-five thousand U.S.”

“Just for putting them in touch with me?”

She nodded.

“Well, it’s good to be appreciated,” I said. “Did the guy you met leave you any way of contacting him?”

She got up and walked into her bedroom. I heard a drawer open, then close. She came back and wordlessly handed me a card. It included an e-mail address and a phone number. The latter had a Tokyo prefix. It was the same number I had just gotten from Dox.

“Twenty-five thousand is a lot of money,” I said, flipping the card around in my fingers.

She stared at me.

“You were never tempted to take it?” I asked.

Her eyes narrowed. “No.”

“Not even with everything you’ve invested in the restaurant? That kind of cash would be a big help.”

“You think I’m going to give you up?” she asked, her voice rising. “For money?”

I shrugged. “You never told me about any of this. Until I pressed you.”

“I was afraid to tell you.”

“And you kept the card. A keepsake? Souvenir?”

There was a pause. She said, “Fuck you, then.”

I told myself I should have seen this coming.

I told myself it was all right, that I wasn’t disappointed, that it was better this way.

I wondered in a detached way whether it was all part of some cosmic punishment for Crazy Jake, the blood brother I had killed in Vietnam. Or perhaps for the other things I’ve done. To be periodically tantalized by the hope of something real, something good, always knowing at the same time that it was all going to turn to dust.

Maybe she didn’t tell them anything. Maybe they nailed you some other way.

Then why didn’t she say anything to you? And why did she keep that card?

I had convinced myself that, in Rio, I had become safe enough to see her. I realized now that I’d been wrong. The disease I carried was still communicable.

And still potentially fatal. Because, even if I could trust her to stay quiet, the Agency was watching her. She had become a focal point, a nexus, just like Harry had been. And Harry had wound up dead. I didn’t want that to happen to her.

Well, now for the hard part. You don’t have to like it, a boot camp instructor had once told me. You just have to do it.

I looked at her for a long moment. Her eyes were angry, but I saw hope in them, too. Hope that I would put my arms around her and pull her close, apologize, say I’d just been startled, that I’d been out of line.

I got up and looked into those beautiful green eyes, now widening with surprise, with hurt. I wondered if she could see the sadness in mine.

“Goodbye, Naomi,” I said.

I left. I told myself again that I wasn’t disappointed, that I wasn’t even terribly surprised. I learned a long time ago not to trust, that faith is to life what sticking your chin out is to boxing. I told myself it was good to get some further confirmation of the essential accuracy of my worldview.

I took extra precautions to ensure I wasn’t being followed. Then I went to a quiet beach near Grumari and sat alone and looked out at the water.

Don’t blame Naomi, I thought. Anyone would have given you up.

Not Midori, was the reply. And then I thought, No, you’re just trying to turn her into something too good to be true, something impossible.

But maybe she really was that good, and now I was just trying to dampen it, debase it, cheapen the consequence of what I’d lost.

I guess you can never really know, I thought. But then how do you decide?

Doesn’t matter how it gets decided. Just that you do the deciding.

I shook my head in wonder. Midori was still throwing me off, all these months later and half a world away. Making me doubt myself, my judgments.

What does that tell you?

That one I didn’t answer. I already knew.

I sat and thought for a long time. About my life in Rio. About how Naomi had come into it, and how she was then suddenly gone. About what I ought to do now.

A breeze kicked up along the sand. I felt empty. The breeze might have been blowing straight through me.

I supposed I could just leave it all behind me. Bolt for the exit again, go somewhere new, invent another Yamada.

I shook my head, knowing I wasn’t ready for that, not so soon after the last time. The thought of doing it all again felt like nothing but dread.

Which made the conclusion that followed suspect, a possible rationalization. The conclusion went like this: It would be better to know what they want, anyway. To take the initiative, rather than passively waiting for whatever they have in mind.

All right then. I left the beach, and called Kanezaki from a pay phone. There was a decent chance they would track the call to Rio, but they obviously already knew I was here.

The phone rang twice. “Yeah,” I heard him say. He sounded groggy.

It was early afternoon in Rio, and Tokyo was twelve hours ahead. “Hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, recognizing my voice. “I had to get up to answer the phone, anyway.”

I was surprised to hear myself chuckle. “Tell me what you want.”

“Can we meet?”

“I’m in Rio for a few more days,” I told him. “After that I won’t be reachable.”

“All right, I’ll meet you in Rio.”

“Glad I was able to provide you with the excuse.”

There was a pause. “Where and when?”

“Have you got a GSM phone, something you use when you travel?” Unlike Japanese cell phones, a GSM unit would work in Brazil and most of the rest of the world.

“I do.”

“All right. Give me the number.”

He did. I wrote it down, then said, “I’ll call you on this number the day after tomorrow, when you’re in town.”

“All right.”

I hung up.

Two days later, I called him. He was staying at the Arpoador Inn on the Rua Francisco Otaviano in Ipanema, an inexpensive hotel located right on Ipanema’s famous beach.

“How are we going to do this?” he asked.

“Have a cab take you to Cristo Redentor, Christ the Redeemer,” I told him. “From there, head southwest on foot along the road through the Parque Nacional da Tijuca, the national park. I’ll find you in there. Start out from the statue in one hour.”

“All right.”

An hour later I had made myself comfortable on a trail overlooking the road through the national park, about a kilometer from the statue. Kanezaki appeared on time. I watched him pass my position, waited to ensure that he was alone, then cut down to the road and caught up with him from behind.

“Kanezaki,” I said.

He spun, startled to hear my voice so close. “Shit,” he said, perhaps a little embarrassed.

I smiled. He looked a little older than he had the last time I had seen him, leaner, more seasoned. The wire-rimmed glasses no longer made him look bookish. Instead, they gave his face… focus, somehow. Precision.

The bug detector was silent. I patted him down, took his cell phone for safekeeping, and nodded my head toward the trail from which I had just descended. “This way,” I said.

I led him back to a secondary road in the park, where we walked until we found a cab. A few deft countersurveillance maneuvers later, we were comfortably ensconced in the Confeitaria Colombo, a coffee shop founded in 1894 that, but for the tropical atmosphere and the surrounding sounds of animated Portuguese, can convey the illusion of an afternoon in Vienna. I used English to order a basic espresso, not wanting Kanezaki to see any more of my familiarity with the local terrain, and he followed suit.

“We want your help again,” he told me, as soon as the espressos had arrived and the waitress had moved off. Right to the point. Like Tatsu. I knew there was a relationship there, each believing the other to be a source, with Tatsu’s view being the more accurate. I wondered if Kanezaki was emulating the older, more experienced man.

“Like you wanted it last time?” I asked, my eyebrows arched slightly in mild disdain.

He shrugged. “You know I was in the dark about all that as much as you were. This time it’s straightforward. And sanctioned.”

“Sanctioned by whom?”

He looked at me. “By the proper authorities.”

“All right,” I said, taking a sip from the porcelain demitasse. “Tell me.”

He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “After Nine-Eleven, Congress took the shackles off the Agency. There’s a new spirit in the place. We’re pushing the envelope again, going after the bad guys-”

“The few, the proud…” I interjected.

He frowned. “Look, we’re really making a difference now-”

“Be All You Can Be…” I started to sing.

His jaw clenched. “Do you just enjoy pissing me off?” he asked.

“A little bit, yes.”

“It’s petty.”

I took another sip of espresso. “What’s your point?”

“I wish you’d just listen.”

“So far I’ve listened to five clichés, including something about shackled envelopes. I’m waiting for you to actually say something.”

He flushed, but then nodded and even managed a chuckle. I smiled at his composure. He had matured since I had last seen him.

“Okay,” he said. “Remember that Predator drone that took out Abu Ali and five other Qaeda members with a Hellfire missile in Yemen in November 2002? That was one of ours.”

“That’s what was in the papers,” I said.

“Well, what’s not in the papers is the full extent of this kind of clandestine activity. The Agency has won a tug-of-war with the Pentagon over who’s responsible for these things. The Pentagon tried, but they can’t move fast enough to act on the intelligence we produce. So we’ve been tasked with the action ourselves. And we’re doing it.”

I waited for him to go on.

“So now we have a new mandate: no more Nine-Elevens. No more sneak attacks. We’ve been charged with doing whatever it takes-and I mean whatever-to disrupt the international terrorist infrastructure: the financiers, the arms brokers, the go-betweens.”

I nodded. “You want me for the ‘whatever’ part.”

“Of course,” he said, almost impatiently, and this time I was sure he’d gotten the habit from Tatsu, who had a way of uttering those two syllables as though barely managing to avoid instead saying, Are you always this obtuse?

He took a sip from his cup. “Look, some of the individuals in question enjoy a lot of political protection. Some of them, in fact, are technically U.S. citizens.”

“ ‘Technically’?”

He shrugged. “They could be classified as enemy combatants.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

“What?” he asked.

I smiled. “Just thinking about the way the end justifies the means.”

“Sometimes it does.”

“Their end, or only yours?”

“Let’s save the philosophical discussion,” he said. “The point is, even post-Nine-Eleven, even in the current, security-minded climate, it wouldn’t do to just take some of these people out. Certainly not with a Hellfire missile. Better if their demise were to look… you know, natural.”

“Assuming that I were interested, and I’m not, what would be in it for me?”

“You’re not interested? You’re going to a lot of trouble to meet me, for someone who’s not interested.”

A year ago my protestation would have flustered him. Now he was counterpunching. Good for him.

“It’s no trouble. I was here because of a woman. When I found out she was working for you, I had to break things off. So here I am, killing a few days before heading home.”

If he was surprised to learn that I knew about his connection with Naomi, he didn’t show it. He looked at me and said, “Some people think Rio is your home.”

I returned his stare, and something in my eyes made him drop his gaze. “If you want to play fishing games with me, Kanezaki,” I said, “you’re just wasting time. But if I think your I-took-a-course-at-Langley-on-verbal-manipulation-techniques bullshit contains an element of threat, I’ll take you out before you even have a chance to beg me not to.”

I felt fear flow off him in a cold ripple. I knew what he had just seen in his mind’s eye: the way I had broken his bodyguard’s neck, an act that would have looked as casual to Kanezaki as unzipping to take a leak. Which is exactly the way I had wanted him to see it. And remember it.

“The money could set you up well,” he said, after a moment.

“I’m already set,” I answered, which was a lie, unfortunately.

We were both quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Look, I’m not doing any verbal manipulation here. Or at least no more than you’d expect. And I’m definitely not threatening you. I’m just telling you that we could really use your help to accomplish something important, and that you could make a lot of money in the process.”

I suppressed a grin. It was nicely done.

“Tell me who and how much,” I said. “And we’ll see if there’s anything worth discussing after that.”

The target was Belghazi, of course. The first of many, Kanezaki told me, if I was interested. Two hundred thousand U.S. a pop, delivered any way I wanted, fifty thousand upfront, the rest upon successful completion. On expenses I’d be out of pocket, which minimized paperwork-and paper trails-for the bean-counting set, a rule we wound up having to change somewhat given the sums I needed to operate in the VIP rooms of the Lisboa. The only catch was that it absolutely had to look natural.

It was about what I would have guessed. Enough to create the incentive, but not so much that I wouldn’t be tempted to do it again later. Not a bad deal for them, really-about the cost of a Hellfire or two, and a lot less than a cruise missile. And more deniable than either.

“I’ll think about it,” I told him. “And while I’m thinking, pay Naomi what you owe her.”

“She didn’t hold up her end,” he said, shaking his head, not bothering to deny the connection. “So she’s out of luck.”

“What was ‘her end’?”

“She was supposed to contact us if you contacted her.”

I looked at him. “If she didn’t contact you, how…”

“Voice analysis. Like a lie detector. We used it every time I called her. Every time I asked whether you’d shown up, she said no. On the last time, the machine detected significant stress patterns.”

“So you knew she was lying.”

“Yeah. We sent people to watch her. You know the rest.”

I looked away and considered. So she had been telling me the truth-she really hadn’t given me up. Damn.

Or maybe she had, and Kanezaki was just protecting her. There was no way to know, and I supposed there never would be.

“Pay her anyway,” I said.

He started to protest, but I cut him off. “She still led you to me, even if it was inadvertent. Pay her the fucking finder’s fee.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, after a moment.

I wondered briefly whether this was bullshit, too, designed to make me feel that I’d won something. Again, no way to know.

“I’ll contact you,” I said. “If you’ve paid her, we’ll talk more. If you haven’t, we won’t.”

He nodded.

I thought about adding something about leaving her alone, some threat. But all an admonition would accomplish would be to reveal, more than I already had, that I cared, thereby making Naomi more interesting to them. Better to say nothing, and simply steer clear of her thereafter.

Maybe you could have trusted her after all. The thought was tantalizing.

And sad.

It didn’t matter. Even if there had been some possibility of trust, my reflexive assumptions, my accusations, had extinguished it.

I thought of an apology. But there are things that just aren’t subject to an “I’m sorry” or a “please forgive me” or a “really, I should have known better.”

Let it go, I thought. The twenty-five grand would have to do.

“Now tell me about Dox,” I said.

He shrugged. “I needed someone you knew, so you could see that the program, and the benefits of the program, were real. If it weren’t for that, then, other than your history, you would never have known about him.”

“Are there others?”

He looked at me over the top of his glasses. The look said, You know better than to ask something like that.

I looked back.

After a moment, he shrugged again and said, “I’ll just say that men like you and Dox are rare. And even he can’t operate in some of the places you can. Asia, for example. Also he tends to be a little less subtle in his methods, meaning not well suited for certain jobs. Okay?”

We left it at that. He gave me the URL for a secure bulletin board. I called him a few days later on his Japanese cell phone. He was back in Tokyo. He told me Naomi had gotten the money.

I used a pay phone to call her at Scenarium. The club was noisy in the background. She said, “I didn’t want the fucking money. I could have had it, but I didn’t want it.”

“Naomi…” I started to say. I didn’t know what I was going to add. But it didn’t really matter. She had already hung up.

I looked at the phone for a long time, as though the device had somehow betrayed me. Then I put it back in its cradle. Wiped it down automatically. Walked away.

I went to an Internet café and composed a message. The message was brief. The salient part was the number of an offshore account, to which they could transfer the fifty thousand down payment.

I heard laughter and looked up. Some kids at the terminal next to me, playing an online game.

I wondered for a moment how I had gotten here.

And I wondered if maybe this is what Tatsu had meant when he said I could never retire. That I would inevitably ruin every other possibility.

We shall not cease from exploration, some poet wrote. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.

How incredibly fucking depressing.

4

AFTER LEAVING BELGHAZI’S suite, I took a long, solitary walk along the waterfront. I wanted to think about what had just happened, about what I wanted to happen next.

Delilah. Who was she? How would her presence affect my operation? The same questions, of course, that she would be asking about me.

I knew from her deportment that she was trained. Therefore likely to be working with an organization, rather than on some sort of private mission. And that, despite public appearances, she was no friend of Belghazi’s. She was with him because she wanted something from him, something he kept, or that she thought he kept, on his laptop, but that she hadn’t yet managed to get.

I considered. By conspiring to get me out of the suite, she had sided, at least temporarily, with me. We shared a secret. That secret might become the basis for cooperation, if our interests were sufficiently aligned.

But she also had reason to view me as a threat. There was some hard evidence of her operation against Belghazi, in the form of her dual-purpose cell phone and the boot log on Belghazi’s computer, which the wrong people could find if they knew where to look. If someone like me were to steer them to it, for example.

I realized that my knowledge of that potentially damning evidence gave Delilah a reason to want me out of the way. “Out of the way” might take a variety of different forms, of course, but none of them would be particularly attractive from my standpoint.

Still, it wouldn’t make sense for her to do anything too aggressive without first trying to learn more. If she had struck me as stupid or inexperienced, I might have concluded otherwise. But she’d obviously been around for a while, and she was smart. I thought I could reasonably expect her to play things accordingly.

I smiled. You mean, to play it the way you would. Yes, that was probably true.

Again, she would be coming to similar conclusions, mutatis mutandis, as the lawyers like to say, about me.

So the risk of a meeting seemed manageable. Moreover, avoiding her, and losing an opportunity to acquire additional information, would make proceeding against Belghazi more difficult, possibly more dangerous. Not an easy call, but in the end I decided to go see her at the Mandarin casino.

I used the cell phone to call Kanezaki. It was late, but he answered after only one ring.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Is it a coincidence, or do you just enjoy calling me in the middle of the night?”

“This time it’s both.”

“What do you need?”

“Information,” I said. “Anything you have on a woman I ran into, although I don’t have much for you to go on. She uses the name Delilah, probably among others. I think she’s European, but I’m not sure what nationality. She’s tall, blond, striking looks.”

“You need this information operationally, or are you trying to get a date?”

Maybe he thought that busting my chops would foster “camaraderie.” Or that it would otherwise put us on a more equal footing. Either way I didn’t care for it.

“Also, she’s shacking up with our friend,” I said.

“That’s not much to go on.”

“Is there an echo on this line?” I asked, my voice an octave lower. It seemed he’d recently learned the value of playing up the difficulty of accomplishing whatever he was tasked with, the better to play the hero when he subsequently pulled it off. He was overusing the technique the way a child overuses a new word.

There was a pause that I found satisfying, then he said, “I’m just saying that it might be hard to find anything useful with the particulars you’ve given me.”

“I’m not interested in your assessment of how difficult it might be. What I need is the information. Can you get it or not?”

There was another pause, and I imagined him reddening on the other end of the line. Good. Kanezaki seemed to be getting the idea that I worked for him. Although I supposed this sort of misapprehension was probably common enough among the world’s newly minted Secret Agents, I didn’t like being the subject of it. It might be beneficial for him occasionally to be reminded that I work for myself. That he was a stagehand, not one of the actors.

I heard a voice in the background, muffled but audible. “That’s John, isn’t it,” the voice said. “Let me talk to him!”

Christ, I knew that twang. It was Dox.

There was an exchange that I couldn’t make out, followed by a hiss of static and a clatter. Then Dox was on the phone, his voice booming and full of amusement.

“Hey, buddy, sounds like you’re having yourself a good time there! Are we talking blonde, or brunette? Or Asian? I love those Asian ladies.”

He must have snatched the phone over Kanezaki’s protests. Secret Agents get no respect.

“What are you doing out there?” I asked, smiling despite myself.

“Oh you know, just a meeting with my handler. Going over this and that. What about you? Guess you decided to take advantage of Uncle Sam’s magnanimity. Good for you, and tough luck for the bad guys.”

“You mind putting him back on the phone?”

“All right, all right, no need to act short with me. Just wanted to say hello, and welcome aboard.”

“That was good of you.”

There was a pause, then Kanezaki’s voice came back on. “Hey.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a little date of your own out there,” I said, unable to resist.

“I wouldn’t call it that.” He sounded glum.

I chuckled. “Not unless you’ve done hard time with a cellmate named Bubba.”

He laughed at that, which was good. I needed him to understand who was in charge, but didn’t want to beat him down too hard. His goodwill, his naïve sense of fairness, was a potential asset, and not something to toss away needlessly.

“I’ll check the bulletin board,” I told him. “If you find anything about the woman, just put it up there.”

“Okay.”

I paused, then added, “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, and I thought he might be smiling.

AT ABOUT six o’clock the following evening, I dropped by the Mandarin casino. Delilah had said eight, but I like to show up for meetings early. It helps prevent surprises.

I used the street entrance, preferring to avoid the hotel for the moment. Keiko was out, but I wanted to minimize the chances of my running into her while she was coming or going. I walked up the escalator, nodded agreeably to the guards, and went inside.

The room was large, and largely empty. The pace would pick up later in the evening. For now, the action comprised just a few lonely souls. They seemed lost in the expanse of the room, their play joyless, desultory, as though they’d been looking for a livelier party and found themselves stuck with this one instead.

I spotted Delilah instantly. She was one of a handful of people quietly attending the room’s lone baccarat table, and the only non-Asian in sight. She was dressed plainly, in black pants and a black, shoulderless top. Her hair was pulled back and I saw no signs of makeup or jewelry. If she’d been trying to downplay her looks, though, she hadn’t been notably successful.

I checked the usual hot spots and saw nothing that set off any alarms. So far, my assessment that she wouldn’t yet do anything precipitous seemed correct. But it was too soon to really know. After all, the casino, with its cameras, guards, and other forms of security, would have made a poor place for an ambush. An attack, if one were to come, would happen later.

I bought a handful of chips, then took a seat next to her.

“Early for baccarat,” I said, meaning it’s early for our appointment, but trying to be oblique in case anyone nearby spoke English.

“For both of us, it seems,” she replied, putting her chips down on player and looking up at me sidelong.

I smiled, then placed a bet on the bank. “I hate to get a late start. You get there, the place is already filled up, the odds aren’t as good.”

She returned the smile, and I got my first good look at her eyes. They were deep blue, almost cobalt, and they seemed not only to regard, but somehow to assess, with intelligence and even some humor.

“Yes, early is better,” she said. “It’s a good thing not everyone realizes it. Otherwise you could never beat the crowds.”

I noted that her English, though accented, was idiomatic. She would have learned it young enough to pick up the idiom, but not quite young enough to eradicate the accent.

The banker dealt the cards. I said, “Looks like we’re the only ones who recognize the advantages of a timely arrival.”

She followed my gaze, then looked back at me. “Let’s hope so.”

The dealer turned over the cards. Delilah won, I lost. She collected her chips without looking at me, but made no attempt to hide her smile.

I wanted to get her someplace where we could talk. The casino was a good starting point because it offered us a relatively safe, neutral venue. Also, it provided automatic cover for action: if anyone, Belghazi, for example, saw us here, our presence together would look like a coincidence, each of us presumably having arrived separately for a few rounds of cards or the dice. A corner table in a bar, or a park bench in the shadows, or a walk along the harbor, would offer none of these advantages. But we weren’t going to get anywhere at the baccarat table. Besides, I was losing money.

“I was thinking about going somewhere for a drink,” I said. “Care to join me?”

She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Sure.”

We left through the street exit. As soon as we were out of earshot of the casino’s few patrons, she said, “Not the hotel bar. I’m too well known here. We’ll get a taxi in front of the hotel and go somewhere else. There’s not much chance that any of my acquaintances will show up right now, but just in case, we ran into each other in the Mandarin casino. It was dead. I mentioned that I was going to try the Lisboa. You asked if I wouldn’t mind you catching a cab over with me. Okay?”

I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I’d already concluded that she was trained. To that assessment I now added a probable minimum of several years of field experience.

“Okay,” I said.

I took us to the Oparium Café, a place I’d found near the new Macau Cultural Center along the Avenida Baia Nova while waiting for Belghazi and getting to know the city. The ground floor featured an oppressively loud band playing some sort of acid-funk and a bunch of deafened teenagers gyrating to the beat. Not the kind of place you’d find someone unfamiliar with the area, especially someone whose tastes ran to things like the Macau Suite at the Mandarin Oriental.

We went upstairs, where it was darker and quieter, and sat at a corner table in a pair of oversized beanbag chairs. The other seating consisted mostly of couches, some of them occupied by couples, a few of them locked in intimate embraces that the shadows only partially obscured. A pretty Portuguese waitress brought us menus. They were written in Chinese and Portuguese. Delilah smiled and said, “I’ll have what you’re having.”

In the dim light her eyes looked more gray than blue. I liked the way the lighting softened her features, the way it rendered her eyes, even her smile, alluringly ambiguous.

I glanced at the menu and saw that they didn’t serve any single malts worth drinking. Instead I ordered us a couple of caipirinhas, which I knew from recent experience would be delicious in the tropical heat.

The waitress departed. We were quiet for a moment. Then Delilah leaned toward me and, looking into my eyes, asked, “Well? You have something you want to give me?”

I looked at her. Why was it that her question seemed suffused with double entendre? She was attractive, of course, more than attractive, but that wasn’t all of it. She had a way of looking at me with a sort of confident sexual appreciation, that was it. As though she was seeing me just the way I might hope a desirable woman would see me.

And she made it seem so natural, so real. I would have to be careful.

“Like what?” I asked, curious to see her reaction if I hit a few back at her.

“Do I need to be more explicit?” she asked, maybe suggestive again.

I wondered what response she was expecting. I knew that my information about her cell phone and the computer boot log would make her view me as a potential threat. And she would probably expect me to try to exploit the video, to hang its existence over her head as a way of protecting myself. I decided to surprise her.

“The thing about the video was a bluff,” I told her. “I think you know that. I was afraid that, without it, you might take a chance on waking Belghazi.”

She paused, then said, “You’re not concerned that, without it, I might take other chances now?”

I shrugged. “Sure I am.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

I looked at her. “I’m not a threat to you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “This is like, what, a dog showing its belly?”

I smiled. “Well, I’ve already seen yours.”

She smiled back. “Yes, you have.”

The smile lingered, along with her eyes, and I felt something stirring down south. But I thought, Don’t be stupid. This is how she plays it, how she gets people to drop their guard.

“Well, you don’t have a video for me,” she said, after a moment. She was still looking into my eyes. “So what do we do next?”

The stirring worsened. I decided I’d have been better off if I could have just removed the damned thing and left it in a drawer for the evening.

But I saw a less extreme means of defending myself.

I thought for a moment about the scores of other men she would have played before me, about how, in her eyes, I was just a new fool, another mark to be led by his dick and manipulated. The thought irritated me, which was what I needed. It short-circuited my unavoidable mechanical reaction and gave me back some of the air I wanted to project.

“Hey, Delilah,” I said softly, letting her see a little coldness in my eyes, “let’s cut the shit. I’m not here to flirt with you. We might be able to help each other, I don’t know. But not if you keep trying to play me like I’m some testosterone-addled fourteen-year-old and you’re my date at the prom. Okay?”

She smiled and cocked her head, and of course her poise only added to her appeal. “Why would I be trying to play you?” she asked.

I wanted to snap her out of this mode, move her outside her comfort zone. So far, I hadn’t managed.

“Because you’re good at it,” I said, still looking at her, “and people like to do what they’re good at. Hell, if they gave out Academy Awards for what you do, I think you’d get Best Actress.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction, but other than that she kept her cool. Still, I thought I might be heading in the right direction.

“You seem to have a rather low opinion of yourself,” she said.

I smiled, because I’d been half expecting something like that. Most men won’t do anything that could lessen their perceived chances of taking a gorgeous woman to bed. They’re horrified even at the thought that something might accidentally dim the temporary glow of an attractive woman’s sexual adulation, lest all those longing looks be exposed as farce, deflating the always fragile façade of the needy male ego. Delilah knew the dynamic. She had just explicitly acknowledged, even invoked it.

“Actually, I have a rather high opinion of myself,” I said. “But I’ve seen you working Belghazi, and he’s smarter than most. I know what you can do, and I want you to stop doing it with me. Assuming you can stop, of course. Or have you been running this game for so long that you can’t help yourself?”

For the first time I saw her lose a little poise. Her head retracted a fraction in a movement that was not quite a flinch, and her eyes dilated in a way that told me she’d just received a little helping of adrenaline.

“What do you want, then?” she asked, after a moment. Her expression was neutral, but her eyes were angry, her posture more rigid than it had been a moment earlier. The combination made her look quietly dangerous. I realized this was my first peek at the person behind the artifice, my first chance to see something other than what she wanted me to see.

The crazy thing was, it made her look better than ever. It was like seeing a woman’s real beauty after she’s removed the makeup that only served to obscure it, a glimpse of a geisha the more stunning shorn of her ritual white camouflage.

“The same thing you do,” I told her. “I want to make sure we don’t trip all over each other trying to do our jobs and both get killed in the process.”

“And what are our jobs?”

I smiled. “This is going to be tricky, isn’t it,” I said.

“Very,” she said. Her expression had transitioned from I’m-pissed-and-trying-not-to-show-it to something reserved and unreadable. I knew what I’d said had rattled her, although I wasn’t sure precisely what nerve I’d managed to touch, and I admired her swift recovery.

“Why don’t we start with what we know,” I said. “You want something from Belghazi’s computer.”

She raised her eyebrows but said nothing. That hint of incongruous good humor was back in her eyes.

“But you haven’t managed to get it yet,” I went on. “Belghazi keeps the computer with him all the time. When you finally got a crack at it, you couldn’t get past the password protection.”

“We should talk about the other things we know,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Like what you want with Belghazi.”

I shrugged. “I’ve got other business with Belghazi. What’s on his computer doesn’t interest me.”

“Yes, you seemed uninterested in his computer. More interested in him.”

I said nothing. There was no advantage in confirming any of her insights.

“And he was right there. Unconscious. Helpless. I asked myself, ‘Why did this man leave without finishing what he came for?’ ”

“You don’t know what I came for,” I said, but of course she did.

“You’d knocked me down, and I obviously didn’t have a weapon,” she said, looking at me. “I couldn’t have done anything to prevent you. And you knew it. But you didn’t follow through.”

I shrugged, still looking for a way to throw her off. “Maybe I didn’t want to harm a naked woman,” I said.

She shook her head. “I’ve known some hard men, men who can act without compunction. I recognize the type.”

“I wasn’t expecting you. You startled me.”

She smiled, and I knew I wasn’t changing her diagnosis. “Maybe. Or maybe your ‘business’ with Belghazi has to be carried out in a… circumspect way. So that no one would know that any business was done. And you couldn’t pull that off with someone else in the room.”

I hadn’t expected her to follow this line of reasoning. I’m usually good at putting myself in the other person’s shoes, anticipating his next move. But she had outplayed me on this one. Time to try to regain some initiative, give myself a second to think.

“It’s funny, I’m asking myself some of the same things about you,” I said. “For example, ‘Why hasn’t she or her people just taken the computer and run?’ ”

She smiled just a little, maybe conceding the point.

“Let me guess,” I went on. “If Belghazi realized that the information on the computer had been compromised, he would implement countermeasures. No, let me amend that. Because if Belghazi were the only one you were worried about, you’d just put him to sleep yourself and take the briefcase at your leisure. So he’s not the only one who might take countermeasures if it’s discovered that the computer has been compromised. There are others, people or organizations who would be affected by the information you’re trying to acquire. And when you acquire it, it’s critical that they not know. Is that about it? Maybe I’m not the only one whose moves might have to be ‘circumspect.’ ”

She cocked her head slightly as though I’d finally started to say something interesting. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, stealing is easy. Stealing without the victim knowing he’s been robbed, this takes some doing.”

The waitress brought our caipirinhas in frosted glasses and moved away. Delilah tipped hers back and took a long sip. “Like you,” she went on. “Killing is easy. Killing and making it look like something else? That would require some… artistry.”

She used “this” and “that” slightly mechanically, as I would expect from someone who had acquired English later in life. “Stealing” was “this.” “Killing” was “that.” The first was hers, the other, mine. I didn’t think these verbal cues were deliberate. I took them as small, additional signs that my conclusions about what she was after were correct.

We were silent for several moments, each digesting what the other had said, reassessing the situation.

She said, “It seems that we’re in mirror-image positions. Maybe we can help each other.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” I told her, although I thought I did.

She shrugged. “Your presence makes it difficult for me to do my job. My presence makes it hard for you to do yours. Mirror images.”

“Your mirrors might be a little distorted,” I said, taking a swallow of the caipirinha. “If something happens to you, Belghazi would be alarmed. Or his demise might not look ‘circumspect.’ But if something happens to me…”

Her smile broadened in a way that reminded me of Tatsu, the way he would be pleased when I made a connection he was expecting would be beyond me, and I knew that she was well aware of this flaw in her “mirror image” theory.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s true. My people made the same point when we discussed the situation. Some of them wanted to send a team in to remove you.”

“Did you tell them they’d have to get in line?”

She laughed. “I told them I thought that kind of hostile action would be a mistake. I saw the way you assessed the room when you came into the casino. I see the way you subtly check your back all the time. Even this table, you chose it because it was in the corner. So you could sit with your back to the wall.”

“And you, too.”

“You knew I wouldn’t let you put my back to the stairs, especially after you chose the place. This was a compromise.”

“That’s true.”

“Anyway, you’ve got that weight about you, the feel of experience and competence, even though I think you’re adept at concealing it. I told my people that removing you wouldn’t be easy and would probably involve a mess. The kind of mess that could alert Belghazi that something was wrong. He has very keen instincts, as I think you know. I doubt that anyone has gotten as close to him as you did.”

“Only you.”

She smiled, and I saw the bedroom eyes again. “I have resources that you don’t.” She took a sip of caipirinha. “So I think my description of our positions as ‘mirror image’ is apt.”

“All right. What do you propose?”

She shrugged. “I told my people that moving against you would be a poor option, although we couldn’t rule it out if you insisted on behaving unreasonably. If you gave us no choice.”

I looked at her, letting her see some coldness again. “I doubt that your people were able to get you any background on me,” I told her, “but if they had, they would have told you that I react poorly to threats. Even irrationally.”

“I’m not threatening you.”

“Convince me of that.”

“Look, you know what we want from Belghazi. And we know what you want. Stand down for a few days. Let me get what I need. When I have it, I can get you access.”

“I already have access.”

She shook her head. “That was one in a million. You or someone else must have put something in what he was eating or drinking. If that happens to him again, he’s going to know something is wrong. He’ll react accordingly, stiffen his defenses. And he moves around a lot. You tracked him here, all right, but are you sure you could track his next move?”

She sipped again. “But if you work with me, you have someone on the inside. Once we have what we need, we don’t care what happens to him.”

I thought for a moment. There was something obvious here, something she was avoiding. I decided to test it.

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Help me get close, and I’ll do what I’m here to do. You can take his computer when I’m done.”

She shook her head. “That won’t work.”

“Why not?”

She shook her head again. “It just won’t. I can’t tell you why. We have to do it my way. Give me a little time, and then I’ll help you.”

It was what I thought. The information on Belghazi’s computer would lose its value if Belghazi died before Delilah accessed it.

I looked at her and said, “Even if I needed your help, and I don’t, why would I trust you? Once you’ve gotten what you wanted from the computer, you’d just walk away.”

She shrugged. “But that’s your worst case, isn’t it? You wait a few days and then I’m out of your way. Your best case, though, is that I stick around to help you. And I’ll tell you why you can believe me. Because it would be very much to our advantage if, after we acquire what we need from his computer, Belghazi were to expire naturally. As opposed to… violently.”

“You’d have to be pretty confident that I could make that happen.”

She shrugged again. “Your behavior in his suite tells me that you intend for it to happen that way. And if you are who we think you are, we’re also confident that you have the capability.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“You were right, I had my people run a background check on you,” she went on. “I didn’t have too much for them to go on: Asian male, about fifty, American-accented English, adept at close-quarters combat, good with surreptitious entry, very cool under pressure.”

“Sounds like something you came across in the personals,” I said.

She ignored me. “And probably intending to put Belghazi to sleep in a way that would look natural.”

“Any response?” I asked, my tone mild.

“We had nothing specific in our files,” she said, “but we did come up with some interesting information from open sources, primarily Forbes magazine. A series of articles written by a reporter named Franklin Bulfinch, who died not so long ago in Tokyo. His articles suggested that there is an assassin at work in Japan, an assassin expert at making murder look like anything but.” She paused, looking at me. “I think we may be dealing with this man.”

Whoever they were, they were good, no doubt about it. I liked the way they used open sources. Your typical intelligence service suffers from the belief that if it’s not stamped Top Secret and not nestled between the service’s own mauve-hued folders, it’s not worth considering. But I’ve been privy to some of the secret stuff, as well as to the work of the Bulfinches of the world. I know the spooks would learn more reading Forbes and The Economist than the magazines would learn from perusing “intelligence assessments.”

“How long are we talking about?” I asked.

“Not long. Two days, maybe three.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can’t tell you that. But we know.” She took a sip of caipirinha. “Just trust me.”

I laughed.

She retracted her head in mock indignation. “But I trusted you. I got you out of his suite, didn’t I?”

“When you thought I had a videotape. That’s not trust, it’s duress.”

She smiled, her eyes alight with humor. “You need me to get to him, and you can’t get to him while I’m in the way. This means you’ll have to trust me. Why use an ugly word like ‘duress’?”

I laughed again. What she said was true. I didn’t have a lot of attractive alternatives. I would have to try “trusting” her.

Because direct means of contact would be unacceptably dangerous, we agreed that, if I needed to see her, I would place a small, colored sticker just under the buttons in the Oriental’s four elevators. I had seen the stickers in a local stationery store. The elevator placement would enable me to leave the mark in private, would give Delilah the opportunity to check for it several times a day without going out of her way or otherwise behaving unusually, and would be so small and discreetly placed that anyone who didn’t know what to look for could be expected to take no notice. She would do the same if she needed to see me. The meeting place would be the Mandarin Oriental casino; the time, evening, when Belghazi liked to gamble at the Lisboa.

“I don’t see how Belghazi would hear that we left the casino together tonight,” she said. “But just in case, we’ll use the original story, that I told you I was going to the Lisboa and you asked if we could share a taxi. There are taxis lined up in front of the Oriental all evening, so even if he were inclined to do so, he would never be able to check the story.”

“There are cameras all over the Lisboa casino,” I said, wanting to see how many moves ahead she was thinking. “There won’t be a record of your having gone in tonight.”

“I know. But he has no access to those security tapes. Even if he did, I would tell him that I wanted to get rid of you because you seemed a little too interested, so I went shopping in the hotel arcade, instead. There are no cameras there.”

“What about me?” I asked, already knowing the answer but enjoying her thoroughness.

She shrugged. “You’re Asian, much harder to pick out of the crowd, so it would be harder to be certain that you weren’t there tonight. And even if they could be certain, how would I know why you had decided not to go in? Maybe you hadn’t wanted to go to the Lisboa tonight at all, you were only trying to pick me up. Maybe you were discouraged when I brushed you off, and left.”

I took a long swallow from my glass. “Which would also explain our failure to acknowledge each other if we happen to pass each other in, say, the Mandarin lobby. Ordinarily people who’ve shared some time at the baccarat table and a cab afterward wouldn’t act like strangers afterward.”

She smiled, apparently pleased that I was keeping up with her. “Maybe you were unhappy about the results of our meeting and are in a bit of a sulk?”

“Maybe. But you can’t count on any of this. Even when there’s a reasonable explanation for something, people can overlook it and go straight to assuming the worst.”

“Of course. But again, the overwhelming odds are that no one noticed us and no one cares. The rest is just backup.”

I nodded, impressed. I knew her explanations would go even deeper, positioning her for increasingly remote possibilities. Belghazi learns she was seen in this bar with me; she tells him she was bored because he was gone so much. When I invited her, she came along, then thought better of it. She had lied to him because she didn’t want him to be jealous or to think poorly of her. Confessing to some lesser offense to obscure the commission of the actual crime.

Yeah, she was good. The best I’d come across in a long time.

“I’ll leave first,” she said, getting up. She didn’t need to explain. We didn’t want to be seen together. She started to open her purse.

“Just go,” I told her. “I’ll take care of it.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Our first date?” She said it only with that attractively wry humor, not playing the coquette.

I smiled at her. “Maybe you better pay up after all. I don’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

She looked at me for a moment, as though considering whether to say something. But in the end she only smiled, then turned and left. I imagined her checking the street through the windows downstairs before moving through the door.

I finished my caipirinha. The couples on the couches continued in their embraces, their soft laughter just reaching me above the music from the ground floor.

I paid the bill and left. I wondered if Keiko would be waiting for me back at the room.

Strangely enough, I hoped the answer was no.

5

KEIKO AND I spent the next two days doing the things tourists do. We visited Coloane Village and Taipu. We went to the top of the Macau Tower. We toured Portuguese churches and national museums. We gambled in the Floating Casino. Keiko seemed to enjoy herself, although she was a pro and I couldn’t really know. For me, it all felt like waiting.

I found myself wishing I didn’t need the cover Keiko provided. She was a sweet girl, but much as I enjoyed her body I had tired of her company. More important, I didn’t like that Belghazi and Delilah both knew that I was staying at the Mandarin. The risk was manageable, of course: Belghazi had no way of knowing that I presented a threat, and Delilah had reason to refrain from moving against me, at least for the time being. The risk was also necessary: if Belghazi somehow learned that I had checked out of the hotel but saw me again in Macau, it would look strange to him, suspicious. I knew he was attuned to such discrepancies. So I had to stay put, and simply stay extra alert to my surroundings.

Twice we took the TurboJet ferry to Hong Kong. I gave Keiko money to indulge herself in the island’s many boutiques, a small salve for what I recognized as my recent remoteness. While she shopped, I wandered, observing, imitating, practicing the Hong Kong persona that helped me blend here and in Macau: the walk, the posture, the clothes, the expression. I bought a pair of nonprescription eyeglasses, a wireless, sleek-looking design that you see everywhere in Hong Kong and only rarely in Japan. I picked up one of the utilitarian briefcases that so many Hong Kong men seem to carry at all times, part of the local culture, I think, being comprised of a constant readiness to do business. I bought clothes in local stores. I was confident that, as long as I didn’t open my mouth, no one would make me as anything but part of the indigenous population.

At the outset of the second of these Hong Kong excursions, I noticed an Arab standing in the lobby of the Macau Mandarin Oriental as we moved through it. He was new, not one of Belghazi’s bodyguards. I noted his presence and position, but of course gave no sign that he had even registered in my consciousness. He, however, was not similarly discreet. In the instant in which my gaze moved over his face, I saw that he was looking at me intently, almost in concentration. The way a guy might look, in a more innocent setting, at someone he thought but wasn’t entirely sure was a celebrity, so as not to appear foolish asking the wrong person for an autograph. In my world, this look is more commonly seen on the face of the “pedestrian” who peers through the windshield of a car driving through a known checkpoint, his brow furrowed, his eyes hard, his head now nodding slightly in unconscious reflection of the pleasure of recognition, who then radios his compatriots fifty meters beyond that it’s time to move in for the kidnapping, or to open up with their AKs, or to detonate the bomb they’ve placed along the road.

General security for Belghazi, maybe. Watching hotel comings and goings, looking for something out of place, someone suspicious.

But my gut wouldn’t buy that. And I don’t trust anything more than I trust that feeling in my gut.

Delilah, I thought. I felt hot anger surging up from my stomach. I don’t get suckered often, but she had suckered me. Lulled me into thinking that our interests could be aligned.

But they were aligned, that was the thing. What she had told me made sense. Moving against me, rather than trusting me to wait as I had told her I would, was unnecessarily risky. And even if she had decided to take the risk, she would know not to be so obvious. A non-Asian, standing in the lobby of the hotel, getting all squinty-eyed and flushed with excitement at my appearance? Not on her team. She was good, and she knew I was good. She wouldn’t have used such a soft target approach.

But I might have been missing something. I couldn’t be sure.

Drop it. Work the problem at hand.

Okay. Keiko and I kept moving, smiling and talking, just a couple of happy tourists, wandering around in a daze. I might have turned around and taken us out through the back entrance. But that would have interfered with the spotter’s sense that I was clueless, and that sense might offer some small advantage later. Besides, I didn’t think they’d move against me in a public place, if a move was what this was about. Macau is a peninsula, after all, and they’d want a venue that would enable them to slip away. So I stayed with the front entrance, where we caught a taxi for the brief ride to the Macau Ferry Terminal.

We arrived and got out of the cab. I didn’t see anything in front of the building that set off my radar. The lobby of the first floor, likewise. But the place to pick someone up here would be the second floor, where passengers boarded. If you wanted to know whether someone was traveling to Hong Kong, the departure lounge would be the only real choke point in the complex.

And that’s exactly where I saw the second guy, another Arab, this one a bearded giant with a linebacker’s physique. He was wearing an expensive-looking jacket and shades and standing off to the side of one of the ATMs in the lobby, the machine offering both cover for action and a clear view of the departure area. Again, I offered no sign that I had noticed anything out of the ordinary.

The Arabs stuck out sufficiently to make me wonder for a moment whether they might have been deliberate distractions-decoys to mask the other, in this case Asian, players. Possible, I decided, but not likely. No one else was setting off my radar. And flying all these guys in from wherever would have been an expensive and time-consuming way to gain the marginal advantage of distraction they might offer. No, I sensed instead that the momentary problem I faced was probably no deeper than what was immediately apparent. Sure, these guys knew they stuck out. They just didn’t give me enough credit to understand that I would find their sticking out highly relevant, and to act appropriately. They didn’t grasp the critical fact of how I would interpret their relative conspicuousness. Shame on them.

The ferry ride to Hong Kong lasted an hour. There were no Middle Eastern types on board, or anyone else who rubbed me the wrong way.

We presented our passports to the customs authorities at the Shun Tak terminal in Hong Kong, then moved into the main lobby outside the arrivals gate.

I spotted the third one immediately. Another Arab, long hair, mustache, navy suit, white shirt open at the collar, stylish-looking pair of shades. Unlike the majority of the people waiting here to greet passengers from Macau, who were standing right in front of the arrivals exit, he was leaning casually against the railing at the back of the open-air center of the lobby. Apparently, my new friend was afraid to get too close, afraid he’d get spotted. In trying to find a less conspicuous position, though, he’d only made himself stand out more.

We took the down escalator at the front of the lobby. On the floor below, we had to walk around to the opposite side, then turn one hundred eighty degrees to catch the next escalator down. As we made the turn, I saw our pursuer, who I now thought of as Sunglasses, riding the escalator we had just used.

I paused to take a look in the window of a cigar store before catching the second escalator down. I moved so that Keiko was facing me, her back to the window.

“Keiko,” I said in Japanese, “do me a favor. Take a look behind us. Just glance around, okay? Don’t let your eyes linger on any one person. Tell me what you see.”

She looked past me and shrugged. “I don’t know, lots of people. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Do you see a foreigner? Arabic-looking guy? Don’t stare, just take a quick peek, then look at other people, look at the stores. You’re just bored waiting for me to finish window-shopping and you’re looking around, okay?”

“What’s going on?” she asked, and I heard some concern in her voice.

I shook my head and smiled. “Nothing to worry about.” I stepped into her field of vision to make her stop scoping the lobby, then placed my hand on her lower back and started moving her along with the pressure of my palm. “Okay, don’t look back. Just tell me what you saw.”

“There was an Arab man in a suit.”

“What was he doing?”

“Talking on a cell phone. I think he was watching us, but he looked away when he saw me looking around. Do you know him?”

“Sort of. It’s a little hard to explain.”

What did Ian Fleming say? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. And I don’t believe in waiting for even that much evidence. It was past time to act.

We caught a cab on the ground floor. I held the door as Keiko got in. Out of my peripheral vision I saw our friend loitering in front of a 7-Eleven a few meters from the taxi stand. I knew that, as soon as I was in and the door had closed behind me, he would be getting a cab of his own.

I used my dental mirror as we pulled away and saw that I had been right. Keiko watched me but didn’t say anything. I wondered what she was thinking. The driver didn’t seem to notice. He was absorbed in the variety show he had on the radio, the announcer’s voice frantic with artificial hilarity.

I had the driver take us to the Citibank next to the Central MTR subway station. One of my alter egos keeps a savings account with Citi. I carry his ATM card whenever I go out.

We went inside the bank, and Keiko waited while I withdrew fifty thousand Hong Kong dollars-about seven thousand U.S. The amount was over the ATM limit and I had to take care of it at the teller window. The clerk put the money in an envelope. I thanked him and walked over to Keiko.

“How about some shopping?” I asked her, showing her the bulging envelope. We were surrounded by Hermès, Prada, Tiffany, Vuitton, and others that I knew she craved. “I’d like to buy you some new things, if you want.”

She smiled and her eyes lit up. “Hontou?” she said. Really? Probably she was glad that whatever that weirdness with the Arab guy was seemed to be over.

I walked us to the Marks & Spencer up the street, a destination that interested me less because of the store’s wares than because of its design. The front was all plate glass, and offered a clear view of the street outside. Keiko and I browsed among the silk and cashmere, and I watched Sunglasses and two recently arrived companions setting up outside, two in front of the HSBC bank, the other in front of a Folli Follie jewelry store.

The way they were assembling, I was getting the feeling that they were no longer just in “following” mode. If they had been, they wouldn’t have positioned themselves so closely together-a configuration that tends to be counterproductive for surveillance, but has certain advantages for a hit. They were getting ready, ready to move, and they wanted their forces in place, concentrated, good to go when the moment was right.

All right, time for me to head out. Alone.

I walked over to Keiko and took her gently by the arm.

“Keiko, listen to me carefully. Something bad is going on. I’ll tell you what you need to know to get out of it.”

She shook her head slightly as if to clear it. “I’m sorry?”

“There are some men following me. The Arab with the cell phone is one of them. They intend to do me harm. If you’re with me, they’ll harm you, too.”

She gave me a hesitant smile, as though hoping I was going to smile back and tell her the whole thing was a joke. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t… I don’t understand.” The smile widened for a second, then faltered.

“I know you don’t, and I don’t have time to explain. Here, take this.” I handed her the envelope. “There’s enough in there to get you back to Japan, and then some. You’ve got your passport. Get to the airport and go.”

“Are you… is it that you’re not happy with me?” she asked, still thinking like a professional. But of her profession, not of mine.

“I’ve been very happy with you. Look at me. What I’m telling you is the truth. You need to get away from here now if you don’t want to get hurt. It’s me they’re after. They don’t care about you.” Before she could ask any more questions, I added, “Here’s what you need to do. Stay put for ten minutes. I’m going to leave and those men will follow me. After ten minutes, you leave, too. Go into one of the women’s stores nearby. Tell them you’re being hassled by a guy and want to lose him. He’s following you, waiting for you outside. They’ll let you out the back, which the men won’t be expecting. If it doesn’t work at the first one, try another.”

“I don’t-”

“Just listen. Use cabs. Go into stores that men don’t visit-lingerie, things like that. That’ll make it harder to follow you because I don’t think these guys work with women. Go in the front and out the back. Take a lot of elevators. It’s hard to stay with someone in an elevator without getting spotted. Stay in public places.”

She shook her head. “Why would… I don’t-”

“I don’t think anyone will follow you. You don’t matter to them. But I want to make sure, all right? I don’t want to take chances. When you know you’re alone, get to the airport and leave Hong Kong on the first flight you can get. Then go to Japan. Go home. You’ll be safe there.”

She shook her head again. “I have… I have things at the hotel. I can’t just go.”

“If you go back to the hotel, they’ll pick you up again and follow you in the hope that you’ll lead them to me.”

“But-”

“Your things aren’t worth dying over, Keiko. Are they?”

Her eyes widened.

“Are they?” I asked, again.

She shook her head. In agreement or disbelief, I couldn’t tell.

I wanted to go, but she needed to hear one more thing. “Keiko,” I said, looking at her closely, “in a few minutes, certainly in an hour, this conversation will start to seem unreal. You’ll convince yourself that I was making this all up, trying to get rid of you, something like that. You’ll be tempted to go back to the Mandarin to try to find me. I won’t be there. I can’t go back any more than you can. You seem like a smart girl and you’ve got a lot of good things ahead of you. Don’t be stupid today. This isn’t a game.”

I turned and left. I’d done all I could do. She would either act tactically or she wouldn’t.

I headed for the MTR subway’s Central Station. I didn’t know if they were armed, and the way they were configured around me I couldn’t be confident of dropping all three and getting away clean. Also, there were a number of uniformed policemen in the area. The police presence would likely inhibit my friends for the moment, as it was inhibiting me. I decided to take them sightseeing someplace, somewhere casual where we could all let our hair down.

This would be tricky. From the way they had been following us, my gut told me they were waiting for the right venue to act. Someplace unusually empty, or someplace extremely crowded. Someplace that would give them a chance to act and then get away without being stopped, or even remembered by witnesses. Until they found that place, I could expect them to continue to refrain. If they thought they were losing me, though, or if they sensed that I was playing with them in some way, they might decide the hell with it and do something precipitous.

I hoped I was right about them. It was hard to be sure. I was used to dealing with western intelligence services and yakuza, not potential fanatics spawned by the culture that had once invented arithmetic but whose most notable recent contribution to world civilization was the suicide bomber.

I took the escalator down to the MTR station, maintaining a brisk pace to make it harder for them to overtake me in case I had been wrong about where they might make their move. The station was filled with surveillance cameras, and for once I actually welcomed their presence. Unless Larry, Moe, and Achmed wanted whatever they had in mind to be captured on video, they would have to wait a little longer. And a little longer was all I needed.

That is, if they even noticed the cameras, of course. Assuming your enemy is intelligent can be as dangerous as assuming he’s stupid.

A Tsuen Wan-bound train pulled in and I got on it. My friends entered the same car on the other end. I’d been right, at least so far. They were hanging back, not yet wanting to get too close, not yet realizing that I’d already spotted them.

I decided to take them to Sham Shui Po, a colorful community in West Kowloon, one of the many areas I had spent some time getting to know while setting up for Belghazi, contingency planning for circumstances like the one at hand. On a more auspicious occasion, we might have been hoping to take in the two-thousand-year-old Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb or the century-old Tin Hau Temple. Or bargain hunting on Cheung Sha Wan Road, the area’s “Fashion Street,” where garment manufacturers sell directly to the public. Or hunting for secondhand electronic goods and pirated CDs and DVDs in the area’s outdoor flea markets. But today I wanted to offer them something a little more special.

I stepped off the train at Sham Shui Po station, moved through the turnstiles, and took the C1 exit to the street. The teeming scene in front of the station made familiar Tokyo look deserted by comparison. The street stretching out before me between rows of crumbling low-rises and slumped office buildings looked like a river of people gushing through a ravine. Cars jerked through congested intersections, pedestrians flowing around them like T-cells attacking a virus. Laundry and air-conditioning units hung from soot-colored windows, high-tension wires sagged across overhead. Signs in Chinese characters leered from buildings like lichens clinging to trees, their paint gone to rust, colors faded to gray. Here was an emaciated, shirtless man, asleep or unconscious in a lawn chair; there was a plumper specimen, leaning against a lamppost, clipping his fingernails with supreme nonchalance. An indistinct cacophony blanketed the area like fog: people shouting into cell phones, street stall hawkers exhorting potential customers, cars and horns and jackhammers. A couple of pigeons soared from one rooftop to another, flapping their wings in seeming amusement at the seething mass below.

My friends would be trying to take all this in, process it, decide what it meant for them and for their chances of getting away with what they were here to do. It would take them a few minutes to work all that out. They didn’t know that a few minutes was all they had left.

I browsed the open-air stalls and popped in and out of a few electronics stores, checking unobtrusively as I did so to ensure that my friends weren’t getting too close, that they hadn’t yet made up their minds. To them, it would look like I had left Keiko shopping for clothes while I indulged a taste for computer gadgets and pirated software. And I did make a couple of purchases as I browsed. A pair of athletic socks-thick, knee-length, light gray. A plain navy baseball cap. And a dozen Duracell look-alike D-cell batteries. All for about twenty Hong Kong dollars. I smiled at the bargains to be had in Sham Shui Po.

While we walked, I shoved the baseball cap in a back pocket. Then, working in front of my waist and mostly by feel to ensure that my pursuers wouldn’t see, I pushed my left hand into one of the socks and pulled the other sock over it, doubling them up. I slipped eight of the batteries inside, discarding the rest in a trashcan, and tied off the sock just above the batteries to make sure they would stay clumped together. I wrapped the open end of the sock around my right hand twice like a bandage, using three fingers to secure it and holding the weighted end between my thumb and forefinger. As I turned a corner, I released the weighted end. It dropped about twenty centimeters, stopping with a heavy bounce as the batteries reached the limit of the material’s extension. I looped the material around my right hand until the weighted end nestled into my palm, then hooked my thumbs into my front pockets as I walked, concealing the improvised flail from the men behind me.

I took them in a counterclockwise arc that ended at a three-story food market half a kilometer from the station entrance. I went inside, checking as I did so to make sure that they were still an appropriate distance behind me. I had no trouble picking them out of the crowd. They were the only non-Asians around.

Which was a problem for them, but not an insurmountable one. The market was so massively crowded and clamorous that, if they could get close, they could put a knife in a kidney or a silenced bullet through my spine without anyone noticing when it happened or remembering it afterward. If I were in their shoes, this was the place I’d make my move.

I moved up one of the alleys of food stalls toward the escalators I knew were at the other end. Meat hung from hooks around me, the air sharp with the smell of fresh blood. Butchered eels writhed on bamboo serving plates, their severed halves twitching independently. Mouths on disembodied fish heads slowly opened and closed, the gills behind them rippling, trying still to draw breath. Hawkers gestured and shouted and coaxed. Masses of shrimp and crabs and frogs twitched in wire baskets. A severed goat’s head twirled from a hook, its teeth clenched in final rictus, its dead eyes staring past the tumult at some bleak and final horizon.

I broke free of the thick crowd just before I reached the escalator. I took it two steps at a time, dodging past the stationary riders, knowing the men behind me would read my sudden acceleration as a sign that I’d made them and was trying to escape. As soon as they cleared the crowds as I had, they would pursue. And if they caught me, they wouldn’t take another chance. They would act.

At the top of the escalator, I looked back. There they were, at the bottom, trying to squeeze past the people in their way. Perfect.

There was a double set of green doors just ahead and on the left. They were propped open; beyond them was a loading area in front of a freight elevator. At the top of the escalator I shot ahead, out of the field of vision of the men behind me, and ducked left into the loading area. I moved left again and hugged the wall, wedged partly behind one of the open doors, looking out through the gap at the hinged end. From here I would see them as they moved past. I tested the door and found it satisfyingly mobile and heavy. If they saw me and tried to move inside, I’d slam the door into them and attack with the flail as best I could. But it would be better if they went past me entirely.

They did. I watched them moving through the gap in the door. When the last had gone by, I took three deep breaths, giving them another couple of seconds.

I moved out. Adrenaline flowed through my gut and limbs. There they were, stopped where the corridor ended in a “T,” looking left and right, trying to make out which way I had gone among the thick crowds of shoppers to both sides. They were clustered up tight, the guy in the middle slightly ahead of the other two. Probably they thought proximity would afford them safety in numbers. In fact, they were turning themselves into a single target.

When I was six meters away, the one in the center and slightly ahead of the other two started to turn. Maybe to consult; maybe, if he had any sense, to check his back. I increased my pace, hurrying now, needing to close the distance before he turned and saw that his understanding of who was hunting and who was hunted had become suddenly and fatally inaccurate.

When I was four meters out, the lead guy completed his turn. He started to say something to one of his comrades. Then his eyes shifted to me. His head froze. His eyes widened. His mouth started to open.

Three meters. I felt a fresh adrenaline dump in my torso, my limbs.

His partners must have seen his face. Their shoulders tensed, their heads began to turn.

Two meters. The guy to my right was closest. He was turning to his left, toward whatever had made his partner start to bug out. I saw the left side of his face as he came around, slowly, everything moving slowly through my adrenalized vision.

One meter. I stepped in with my left foot, bringing my left arm up across my body, partly as defense, partly as counterbalance. I let my right hand drift back, the flail uncoiling on the way, then whipped my arm around, the palm side of my fist up, my elbow leading the way, my hips pivoting in as though I was doing a one-armed warm-up with a baseball bat. The weighted end sailed around and cracked into the back of his skull with a beautiful bass note thud. For a split instant, his body completely relaxed but he stayed upright-he was out on his feet. Then he started to slide down to the ground.

The flail swung past him, my body coiling counterclockwise with the continued momentum of the blow, the flail wrapping itself halfway around my thigh. The guy to my left had now completed his turn. I saw him look at me, the universal expression for “oh shit” moving across his face, his right hand going for the inside of his jacket. Too late. I snapped my hips to the right and backhanded the flail around. He saw it coming, but was too focused on deploying his weapon and couldn’t concentrate on getting out of the way. It caught him in the side of the neck-not as solid a shot as his buddy had received but good enough for my purposes. I saw his eyes lose focus and knew I’d have at least a couple seconds before he was back in the game.

The third guy was smarter, and had more time and space to react. While I was dealing with the other two, he had stepped back and gotten himself out of swinging range. He was groping inside his jacket now, his eyes wide, his movements frantic. The flail was passing between us, back to my right side. I saw him pulling something out of the jacket with his right hand. I let the flail’s momentum bring it around and under, releasing my grip at the last instant and sending the whole thing sailing toward him like a softball pitch aimed at the batter. He saw it coming and jerked partly out of the way, but it caught him in the shoulder. He stumbled and managed to get out a silenced pistol, a big one, trying at the same time to regain his balance. But his motor skills were suffering from a large and probably unfamiliar dose of adrenaline, and the long silencer made for an equally long draw. He bobbled the gun, and in that second I was on him.

I caught the gun in my left hand and used my right foot to blast his legs out from under him in deashi-barai, a side foot sweep that I had performed tens of thousands of times in my quarter century at the Kodokan. I went down with him, keeping my weight over his chest, increasing the impact as he slammed into the floor. I felt the gun go off as we hit the ground, heard the pffft of the silenced report and a crack as the round tore into the wall behind me. Keeping control of the gun, making sure it was pointed anywhere but at me, I rose up to create an inch of space between our bodies, spun my left leg over and past his head, and dropped back in juji-gatame, a cross-body armlock. I took the gun from him and broke his elbow with a single sharp jerk.

The second guy had now recovered enough to get a gun out. But, like his partner, he was adrenalized and having trouble with fine motor movements. His hand was shaking and he hesitated, perhaps realizing that if he pulled the trigger he might hit his partner, over whose torso my legs were crossed and whose ruined right arm was pulled tight across my chest.

I straightened my right arm and focused on the front sight, placing it on the second guy’s torso, center mass. The gun was a Glock 21 in.45 caliber. Healthy stopping power. I willed myself to slow it down, make it count.

The guy under me jerked and my aim wavered. Fuck. I squeezed my legs in tighter and leaned back closer to the floor, trying to offer the second guy a reduced profile. I knew from experience that bullets tend to skim close to the ground rather than bounce off it. The guy under me would function as a human sandbag for any shots that hit the deck short of our position.

The second guy moved the gun, trying to track me, the movements overlarge and shaking. Then, maybe because he saw the cool bead I was drawing on him, his nerve broke. He started shooting in a spray-and-pray pattern, his eyes closed, his body hunching forward involuntarily. Pffft. Pffft. Pffft. Small clouds of dust kicked up along the concrete around me, puffing out lazily in my adrenalized slow-motion vision. I heard the sounds of ricochets. Someone screamed.

Slow. Aim. Breathe…

I double-tapped the trigger. The first round caught him in the shoulder and spun him around. The second missed, going off into the wall near the ceiling. I compensated and fired again. This time I nailed him in the back near the spine and dropped him to the floor.

I lurched to my feet and moved toward him. Around us, people were running from the scene, pushing up against the mass of other shoppers. The immediate area was suddenly empty.

I walked up to the one I had just dropped. He was on his stomach, writhing, groaning something unintelligible. I shot him in the back of the head.

The first one I’d hit with the flail was flat on his back, his legs splayed back under him, seemingly unconscious. I shot him in the forehead.

I turned to the last one. He was on his ass, scrambling away from me on his feet and good arm. His face was green with pain and terror. I shot him in the chest and he collapsed to the ground, his legs still kicking. I took three long steps forward and shot him again, in the forehead. His head rocketed back and he was still.

I looked around. Pandemonium now. Screams and shouting and panic.

I needed to get the hell out. But I also needed information. Under other circumstances, I would have tried to keep one of them alive for questioning, but in a public place like this that course was impossible.

I scooped up the flail and shoved it into one of the outer pockets of the navy blazer I was wearing. I was glad I’d thought to tie the thing off-if I hadn’t, the batteries might have rolled all over the place after I’d thrown it, with my fingerprints on them.

I walked over to the last guy I’d shot and opened his jacket. Cashmere. The label under the breast pocket proclaimed Brioni. This guy was wearing three or four thousand bucks on his back. The shirt, admittedly not shown to its best advantage soaked in blood, looked similarly fine. His neck was adorned with a nice gold chain. His pockets, though, were empty. Nothing but a wad of Hong Kong dollars and a packet of fucking breath mints. Smart, not carrying ID. If they get pinched, they dummy up, call the embassy, maybe, get bailed out. But which embassy? Whose?

I went to the next guy, knowing this was taking too long, hating the risk. Another Brioni jacket, along with a gold Jaeger-LeCoultre watch. But that was all.

The third guy had a cell phone clipped to his belt. Yeah, that was him, the one Keiko and I had passed at Shun Tak terminal. Sunglasses. I pulled the phone free and opened his jacket. More Brioni. More empty pockets, save for the shades from which he had derived his short-lived nickname. The pants pockets were empty, too.

I looked up, then behind me. The corridors were packed with fleeing people. A stampede panic tends to feed on itself long after the originating cause is gone. Probably most of these people didn’t even know what they were running from, hadn’t seen or heard anything. My escape routes weren’t going to open up anytime soon.

Elevator, I thought. I ducked into the loading area and pressed the down button with a knuckle. I stood there for an agonizingly long time, feeling exposed, until the damn thing finally arrived. The doors opened. I stepped inside, hit the ground floor and “close” buttons. The doors slid shut and the elevator lurched downward.

I pulled the baseball cap out of my pocket and jammed it down onto my head. I pocketed the cell phone, slid the gun into my waistband, and shrugged off the blazer, exposing the white shirt underneath. In the immediate aftermath, witnesses would remember only gross details-color of the clothes, presence of a necktie, that sort of thing. The new hat and disappeared jacket would be enough to get me out of here. I pulled out the shirttails and let them fall over the gun.

The elevator doors opened. It was calmer down here, but there was an unusual agitation in the crowd and it was clear that something had happened. I moved down one of the corridors, easing past shoppers who were looking behind me, searching to see what was going on back there. My pace was deliberate but not attention-getting. I kept my face down and didn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

By the time I had reached the entrance where we had first come in, the collective rhythm of the people around me was normal, just food shoppers absorbed in the serious business of picking out the freshest fish or the most delectable cut of meat. I moved past them and into the street.

I folded the jacket and slipped the gun inside it, wiping it down as I walked, making sure I covered all the surfaces. I did it by feel. Barrel. Trigger guard. Trigger. Butt.

Fingerprints were only part of the problem, of course. When you’re stressed, you sweat. Sweat contains DNA. Likewise for microscopic dead skin cells, which, like sweat, can adhere to metal. If you’re unlucky enough to get picked up as a suspect, it’s inconvenient to have to explain why your DNA is all over the murder weapon. The dead men’s clothes, which I had touched while searching them, were less of a problem. They wouldn’t take prints, and I probably hadn’t handled them sufficiently to leave a material amount of sweat or skin cells behind.

I turned into an alley choked with overflowing plastic garbage containers. An aluminum leader ran down the side of one of the alley walls and into an open drain beneath. I moved the leader out of the way and dropped the gun into the drain, seeing a satisfying splash as I did so. I checked behind me-all clear. I committed the batteries to the same final resting place, wiping each with the socks as I did so, then moved the leader back into position and walked on. Unlikely that the gun or batteries would ever be discovered where I had left them. Even if they were found, the water would probably wash away any trace DNA. And even if DNA were present, they’d need me in custody as a suspect to get a match. A good, layered defense.

There was still a potential problem with witnesses, of course. I didn’t stick out here the way the Arabs had, but I didn’t exactly fit in, either. It’s hard to explain the clues, but they would be enough for the Sham Shui Po locals to spot, and perhaps to remember. My clothes were wrong, for one thing. I had been dressed for a day of lunch and shopping in Central, not for the hivelike back alleys of my current environs. The locals here were dressed more casually. And what they were wearing fit differently, usually not that well. Like the area itself, the colors on their clothes were slightly dulled. These people weren’t getting their delicates dry cleaned, starched, and returned on hangers. They weren’t laundering their things in Tide with Bleach and Extra Stain Removing Agents and Advanced Whiteners, or drying them on the gentle cycle in microprocessor-controlled driers. They hung their things on lines, where they would evaporate into the polluted air around. These and other differences would tell. Whether witnesses would be able to articulate them, I couldn’t say. So I needed to take every possible measure to ensure that it wouldn’t matter if they could.

I turned a corner, balled up the jacket, and stuffed it deep into a ripe pile of refuse in a metal container. I unbuttoned the shirt I was wearing and gave it a similar burial. I was now wearing only pants and a tee-shirt, and looked a little more at home.

I made a few aggressive moves to ensure that I wasn’t being followed, then took the MTR to Mong Kok, where I found a drugstore. I bought soap, rubbing alcohol, hair gel, and a comb. Next stop, a public restroom, reeking of what might have been decades-old urine, where I shit-canned the baseball cap and changed my appearance a little more by slicking my hair. I used the alcohol and soap to remove any traces of gunpowder residue that could show up on my hands under UV light. By the time I walked out of the lavatory, I was starting to feel like I had things reasonably well covered.

I bought a cheap shirt from a street vendor, then found a coffee shop where I could spend a few minutes collecting myself. I ordered a tapioca tea and took a seat at an empty table.

My first reaction, as always, was a giddy elation. I might have died, but didn’t, I was still here. Even if you’ve been through numerous deadly encounters, in the aftermath you want to laugh out loud, or jump around, shout, do something to proclaim your aliveness. With an effort, I maintained a placid exterior and waited for these familiar urges to pass. When they had, I reviewed the steps I had just taken to erase the connection between myself and the dead Arabs, and found them satisfactory. And then I began to think ahead.

Three down. That was good. Whoever was coming after me, I had just significantly degraded their forces, degraded their ability and perhaps also their will to fight. The paymasters must not have had ready access to local resources. If they had, they wouldn’t have sent a bunch of obvious out-of-towners. Now, when word got back that the last three guys who signed up for this particular mission had all wound up extremely dead as a result, they might have a harder time recruiting new volunteers.

My satisfaction wasn’t solely professional, of course. The fuckers had been trying to kill me.

I took out the cell phone. Christ, I’d forgotten to turn it off while I moved. Shame on me. Getting sloppy. All right, let’s see if I’d just created a problem for myself.

The unit was an Ericsson, the T230. It had a SIM card, meaning it was a GSM model, usable pretty much everywhere but Japan and Korea, which employ a unique cell phone standard. I examined it for transmitters and didn’t find any. I thought for a minute. Did the T230 incorporate emergency services location technology? I tend to read almost compulsively to stay on top of such developments, but even so things slip through the cracks. No, the T230 wasn’t that new a model. I was okay on that score, too.

Still, I knew that some intelligence services had refined their cell phone tracking capabilities to the point where they could place a live cell phone to within about twenty feet of its actual location. Any worries on that score? Probably not. Whoever was coming after me had limited local resources. I doubted they would have the contacts or expertise that tracking the phone would require.

Under the circumstances, I decided it would be worth hanging onto the unit, and leaving it powered on. It could be interesting to see who might call in.

I checked the stored numbers. The interface was in Arabic, but the functions were standardized and I was able to navigate it without a problem.

The call log was full-he hadn’t thought, or hadn’t had time, to purge it. I didn’t see any numbers I recognized. But the guy I’d taken it from had been talking to someone when I spotted him at Shun Tak station. Unless he’d made or received ten calls in the interim, there would be a record inside the phone of the numbers he’d dialed and of those that had dialed him. I had a feeling that some of those numbers would be important.

I drank my tea and left. I took out Kanezaki’s cell phone and called him from it, moving on foot as the call went through.

“Moshi moshi,” I heard him say.

“It’s me.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’m concerned about something.”

“What?”

“Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong.”

“What?”

“Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong.”

“I heard you. Are you serious?”

I didn’t detect anything in his voice, but it was hard to tell over the phone. And he was smoother now than when I’d first met him.

“You think I make this shit up to amuse you?” I said.

There was a pause, then he asked, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just concerned.”

“Are you in danger now?”

“Not from the three who were after me.”

“You mean-”

“They’re harmless now.”

Another pause. He said, “You’re concerned about how they found you.”

“Good for you.”

“It wasn’t me.”

I already half-believed that, I supposed. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have warned him by calling. Or I would have conceived of the call simply as a way to lull him, to set him up. I couldn’t imagine why he would have turned on me, but you never have the full picture on things like that. Circumstances change. People develop reasons where they had none before.

“Who else knew I was in Macau?” I asked. “They tracked me from there. One of them was waiting to pick me up when I arrived at Shun Tak in Hong Kong.”

“I don’t… Look, I have absolutely no reason to try to fuck you. No reason. I don’t know who they were or how they got to you. But I can try to find out.”

“Convince me,” I said.

“Give me what you’ve got. Let me see what I can do.”

I decided to give him a chance. I didn’t see any down-side. I also didn’t see a good alternative.

“They look Arab to me,” I said. “Maybe Saudi. They dress like they’ve got money. One of them was carrying a cell phone with an Arabic interface, and was using it to make or receive calls while they were following me. I’ll put all the numbers from the phone’s log on the bulletin board. You can run those down. They had at least one partner on Macau, probably more, and probably all of them transited Hong Kong recently. They were sloppy, they might all have arrived at the same time, maybe even on the same plane.”

“That’s a lot. I can work with that. You think there’s a connection with our friend?”

Belghazi. There were only a few Arabs in my life, and they were all recent arrivals. Although my thinking might not go down well with the antiprofiling crowd in the U.S., it was hard not to suspect that they were all connected.

But I didn’t see anything to be gained from speculating aloud. “You tell me,” I said.

“I’ll try.”

“You need to convince me,” I said again.

We’d known each other long enough for him to understand my meaning. “How do I contact you?” he asked.

“I’ll check the bulletin board.”

“It would be more efficient if you would just leave the cell phone on.”

“I’ll check the bulletin board.”

He sighed. “Okay. And you can always call me at this number. Give me twelve hours. Anything else?”

“The blonde?” I asked.

“Nothing. Still working on it.”

I hung up.

I found an Internet café, where I uploaded the information to the bulletin board. Then I sat for a minute, thinking.

The three guys who had come after me here in Hong Kong were obviously in touch with someone in Macau. In fact, I was pretty damn sure that the one with the cell phone, Sunglasses, had called his Macau contact to confirm that I had arrived. The guy in Macau would now be waiting for news of the operation. The bodies of his buddies had only been cooling for about an hour now. Chances were good that he wouldn’t have heard yet of their tragic demise. He certainly wouldn’t be expecting, and he wouldn’t be prepared, to see me in Macau without first getting a heads-up from Hong Kong. And, even if he had somehow heard about the way things had turned out here, the last thing he would expect me to do would be to head straight back to the place where the ambush had obviously initiated: the Macau Mandarin Oriental.

In either case, I realized I had an opportunity to surprise someone. Which is always a nice thing to be able to do.

I headed back to Shun Tak to catch the next ferry to Macau. I tried not to think too much about what I was about to do. Charging an ambush is counterinstinctive: when your lizard brain identifies the direction the threat is coming from, it wants you to run away.

But your lizard brain doesn’t always know best. It tends to focus on short-term considerations, and doesn’t always adequately account for the value of unpredictability, of deception, of surprise. Of taking a short-term risk for a longer-term gain.

The hour-long ferry ride felt long. Maintaining a razor-edge readiness is exhausting, and, once the mad minute is over, the body badly wants to rest and recuperate. I tried to clear my mind, to take myself down a few levels-enough to recover, but not so much that I would be less than ready for whatever I might encounter on Macau.

With about twenty minutes to go, the cell phone rang. I looked down at it and saw that the incoming number was the same as the one last dialed. Almost certainly the Macau contact, then, checking in, wanting to know what had happened. I ignored the call.

We arrived at the Macau Ferry Terminal and I walked out into the arrivals lobby. The lobby was too crowded for me to know whether I had a welcoming committee. That was okay, though. One of the advantages of Macau is that you can access the city from the first floor of the ferry terminal-either by foot on the sidewalks, or by taxi-or you can go to the second floor and use the extensive series of causeways. If you’re waiting for someone at the ferry terminal, therefore, you have to be just outside the arrivals area, ready to move out or up, depending on the route taken by your quarry. So even though I couldn’t spot a pursuer yet, it would be easy for me to flush him if he was there.

I took the escalator to the second floor, where I paused in front of one of the ATMs as though withdrawing some cash-a common enough maneuver for visitors heading for the casinos. I glanced back at the escalator I had just used, and saw an Arab coming up it. The big bastard, the bearded giant I’d noticed that morning. The shades and expensive jacket looked familiar at this point. Christ, they might as well have worn uniforms. Hi, my name’s Abdul, I’ll be your assassin today.

They must have gotten nervous when the Hong Kong team had failed to check in, and put this guy back in position to be on the safe side. That, or he’d been waiting here all day. It didn’t matter. He’d seen me. His next move would be to telephone his Macau partners, if he hadn’t already. Which would be the end of the surprise I wanted to share with them all. I would have to improvise.

If he was surprised to see me, and I imagined he was, he didn’t show it. He looked around, his demeanor casual, a simple tourist just arrived in Macau and taking in the wonders of the ferry terminal.

Why didn’t they call me first? I knew he’d be wondering. They were supposed to call me when he was on his way back, just as I called them to alert them that he was coming.

Because dead people don’t use phones, pal. You’ll see in a minute.

I walked out onto the open-air plaza in front of the entrance to the second floor and walked a few meters toward the causeway. Then I stopped and looked behind me.

He had just come through the doors on the right side of the plaza and was starting to raise his cell phone to his face when I turned back. When he saw me, he lowered the cell phone and stopped as though suddenly interested in the nonexistent view.

I nodded my head at him and gave a small wave of acknowledgment, the gesture communicating, Oh there you are, good. I started walking over.

His head turtled in a fraction and his body tensed in the internationally approved reaction to being spotted on surveillance. It’s hard to describe, but it looks a little like what a gowned patient does when the doctor picks up a long instrument and advises, This might be a little uncomfortable. He looked around, then back to me, doing a decent imitation of someone wondering, Huh? Was that me you were waving to? Do we know each other?

I walked straight up to him and said in a low voice, “Good, you’re here. They told me you’d be waiting on the first floor, by arrivals, but I didn’t see you.”

He shook his head. His lips twitched, but no sound came out.

“There’s been a mistake,” I said. “I’m not the guy you want.”

His lips twitched some more.

Shit, I thought, he doesn’t understand you. Hadn’t counted on that.

“You speak English, right?” I said. “They told me we could use English.”

“Yes, yes,” he stammered. “I speak English.”

I glanced quickly left and right as though suddenly nervous, then back at him, my eyes narrowed in sudden concern. “You’re the right guy, right? They told me someone would be waiting for me.”

“Yes, yes,” he said again. “I am the right guy.”

So many “yeses” in a row. We’d established the proper momentum.

A group of three Hong Kong Chinese emerged from the terminal. I watched them walk past us as though I was concerned that they might hear us, then said, “Let’s talk over there.” I gestured to the external wall of the terminal, where we could stand without being seen from inside the building. I walked the few steps over and waited. A moment later, he followed.

Damn, if I could maneuver him just a little more, get him to a slightly quieter place, I might even manage to interrogate him. That would be ideal, but also far riskier than the relatively straightforward approach I had in mind. I considered for a moment, then decided it wouldn’t be worth it.

“From the look on your face,” I said, “I’m getting the feeling that you haven’t heard.”

“Heard what? I’m sorry, I’m not understanding you.”

The Hong Kong group was now out of earshot and still walking away. The plaza was momentarily empty.

“Yes, I can see that,” I said. “All right, let’s just go back to the hotel. We’ll straighten everything out there.”

That sounded harmless enough. His compatriots would be positioned at the hotel. They could explain to him what the hell was going on. Besides, he was half a head taller than me, and probably outweighed me by forty or fifty pounds. What did he have to worry about?

He nodded.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said. I moved as though to walk off toward the causeway, then turned back to him. “Good God, is that bird shit on your shoulder?” I asked, staring as though in disbelief.

“Hmm?” he said, his gaze automatically going to the spot I had indicated.

That’s the trouble with wearing four-thousand-dollar cashmere jackets. You panic at the littlest things.

As he turned his face back toward me, I shot my left hand behind his neck and snapped his head forward and down. At the same instant, I swept my right arm past his neck and around it, encircling it clockwise, bringing my right forearm under his chin and catching it with my left hand. The back of his head was now pinned against my chest. I tried to arch back, but the bastard was so big and strong that I couldn’t get the leverage I needed.

I felt his hands on my waist, groping, trying frantically to push me away. All the muscles of his neck had popped into sharp and cablelike relief. We struggled like that for a long couple of seconds. Twice I tried to shoot in with my hips, but that was exactly the movement he was in mortal fear of at the moment and I couldn’t get past his massive arms.

Okay, change of plans. I took a long step back, jerking him forward and down. He lost tactile contact with my hips and flailed with his arms, trying desperately to reacquire me. Too late. I dropped to my back under him and arched into a throw. There was a moment of structural resistance, and it seemed that the musculature of his neck bulged out even larger. Then I felt his neck snap and his body was sailing over me, suddenly limp and lifeless.

I twisted to my right and he hit the concrete past me and to the side with a thud that felt like a small earthquake. I let go and scrambled to my feet. He was on his back, his head canted crazily to one side, his tongue protruding, the limbs twitching from some last, random surge of electrical signals to the muscles.

This time I didn’t bother checking the pockets. I had a feeling I wouldn’t find anything more useful than what I had already, and didn’t want to take a chance on being seen with or even near the corpse.

I moved off, across the plaza and down the causeway, my heart slamming bass notes through my torso and down to my hands and feet. I breathed deeply through my nose, trying not to let my internal agitation break through to the surface, where it might be noticed and draw attention.

Someone was leaning over the railing up ahead, smoking a cigarette. As I got closer I saw who it was: the spotter from the Mandarin Oriental lobby, the one who’d gone all squinty-eyed on me that morning. He was looking past me, maybe trying to figure out what had happened to his buddy, who should have been trailing in my wake. As I got closer he turned his head back to center, just a guy hanging out on the causeway, enjoying a cigarette, taking in the scenery, watching the traffic cruising up and down the four-lane street beneath him. Thinking his biggest problem right then was finding a way to avoid having me spot him for what he was.

Thinking wrong.

I kept my head down as I approached him, acting distracted, oblivious to his existence. I’d been moving quickly and did nothing now to alter my pace. My heart was still hammering and I felt a fresh adrenaline dump moving in like rolling thunder.

When I was about a meter away from him and beyond the range of his peripheral vision, I took a deep step in, dropped into a squat just behind him, and wrapped my arms tourniquet-tight around his legs just above the knees. I felt his body go rigid, heard him suck in a breath. In my adrenalized, slow-motion vision, I logged every detail: the height of the guardrail; rust marks on the metal; chewing gum ground black into the cement tiles from which his feet were about to fatally separate.

I exploded up and out and launched him into the air over the railing. His arms flailed and he shrieked as he went airborne, a high, atavistic sound of sheer animal panic, and I felt a spasm of terror rip through his body as I let him go. The cigarette tumbled out of his mouth. His limbs swam crazily, uselessly, against the air around him. Then he was gone, below my field of vision. The shriek continued, cut off a second later by the sound of a resounding, dull thud twenty feet below. Tires screeched. Another thud. Crunching sounds. More screeching tires. Then silence.

I continued on my way to the New Yaohan department store. As the causeway curved right, the accident scene became visible. Traffic was stopped, and a number of people were clustered around something on the ground. Really, they ought to make those guardrails higher. It’s dangerous.

Two people, Chinese civilians, were heading toward me. Shit. I averted my eyes and changed my posture, dropping my shoulders, adopting a more rolling gait, giving them a persona to remember, a persona that wasn’t mine. I felt them looking at me closely as I passed. They might have seen what had happened; if they had, they would be in mild denial about it and trying to come up with some other explanation for the evidence of their senses, what the psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” and “reality testing.”

I briefly considered heading straight back to the terminal and returning to Hong Kong. Two bodies, two potential witnesses… the police might not be happy. But I decided to take the chance. The bodies were of foreigners, and so unlikely to produce undue domestic alarm. And Macau was no stranger to gangland killings, killings that the authorities had worked hard to downplay lest they inhibit the lucrative gambling tourism trade. If they could quickly rule these deaths “accidental” or otherwise act to minimize fallout, I expected they would.

I kept walking. From here I could take a variety of routes, and if anyone else was following me they’d have to be set up close by. I saw no one. I’d still watch my back, make the appropriate evasive moves to be certain, but, for a few precious minutes, I was reasonably sure that I wasn’t being followed. If there was anyone left that I might ambush, they would likely be at the hotel.

Keeping my head down and my pace brisk but not attention-getting, I cut through the New Yaohan, moved down the causeway to the street, and walked the ten minutes to the Mandarin Oriental. As I reached the back entrance, the cell phone buzzed. I looked at the display, and saw one of the numbers I had seen in the phone’s call log. Shit, five down, but someone was still left, checking in, wanting an update, or instructions, or just the sound of a familiar voice in an unfamiliar country.

I went inside. If they had someone else in position it would be here, the other place where they could reasonably expect to pick me up. Maybe another Arab, sitting in the spacious lobby, calling from a cell phone, waiting for a friend to show up.

I used the back entrance, checking the hot spots along the way. So far, so good.

I walked in through the café entrance. Because I hadn’t seen anyone in back, I knew they weren’t covering the entrances. That meant the next choke point would be the elevators. And there was only one spot where you could wait without drawing attention and watch the elevators: at the end of the café closest to the lobby. As I moved inside, that was the first spot I checked.

Delilah was sitting there, wearing a black skirt and a cream-colored silk blouse, a pot of tea and an open book on the table in front of her.

Son of a bitch, I thought. I was right. My first reaction, when spotting the Arab surveillance in the lobby earlier that day, had been to suspect her. I had tried to talk myself out of that. Now I realized I should have just accepted it. You don’t give people the benefit of the doubt. Not in this line of work.

She glanced over and saw me coming before I’d reached her.

“I’ve been waiting for you all day, damn it,” she said.

That brought me up short. “I’ll bet you have,” I said, looking around.

“Yes, I have. To tell you not to go to your room. There’s someone in there.”

I looked at her closely. “Yeah?”

She looked back. “You don’t believe me?”

I was suddenly unsure again. Which was frustrating. Ordinarily, I know exactly what to do, and I do it.

“Maybe I do,” I said. “Let me see your cell phone.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. Then she shrugged. She reached into her purse and pulled out a Nokia 8910, the sleek titanium model.

I popped open the sliding keypad and the screen lit up. The service provider was Orange, a French company, and the interface was in French. I checked the call log. No entries-she’d purged it. No surprise there. She was smart. I turned the unit off, then back on. As it powered back up, the phone number appeared on the screen. I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t one of the ones I’d seen on the unit I’d taken from the guy at Sham Shui Po.

The exercise proved nothing, though. She might have had another phone with her. I could ask for her purse, rifle through it. But then, when I didn’t find anything, I’d wonder if she hadn’t just left the other phone in her room, or hidden it somewhere, or whatever. I knew she was in the habit of thinking several moves ahead.

I handed the unit back to her. “Who’s in my room?”

“I’m not sure. My guess is it has something to do with your reasons for being in Macau.”

“If you’re not sure-”

“I overheard him in the lobby of the hotel this morning. He was speaking in Arabic, so he assumed no one around could understand him.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You speak Arabic?”

By way of answering, she said something suitably incomprehensible. It sounded Arabic to me.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me what you overheard.”

“He said he would wait in your room in case you returned unexpectedly from Hong Kong. He didn’t use names, but I don’t know who else they could be talking about.”

I considered. It’s not all that hard to get into a hotel room if you have some imagination and know what you’re doing. I would have known he was in there before I entered, of course. That morning, while Keiko waited for me in the lobby, I’d taped a hair across the bottom of the doorjamb, as I do whenever possible before leaving a place where I’m staying. I’d hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door to make sure the maids didn’t spoil the setup. If the hair was broken when I returned, I’d know that someone had been in the room, and might still be there.

“Why are you warning me, then?” I asked.

She looked away for a long moment, then back at me. “I think your cover is blown,” she said. “Forget about this job. Leave Macau.”

A contrivance? A way to get me out of her hair? Maybe. But if she really did have a confederate in there, warning me could easily get him killed, which your standard confederate ordinarily won’t appreciate. And if the room was empty, I’d be sure to find out when I checked it, and I’d know the whole thing had been a ruse.

“It would serve your interests if I walked away from this,” I said. “So you’ll have to forgive me if I doubt your motives.”

“I don’t care what you think about my motives. I could have let you go into your room. Then you wouldn’t walk away, you’d be carried out. My interests would be served in either case. So do what you want. I have to go.”

She stood up and started walking toward the elevators.

“Wait a second,” I said, moving with her.

She ignored me, then stopped in front of the elevators. “I don’t want to be seen with you,” she said. “Just go.”

“Look,” I started to say. I heard the ping of an arriving elevator and we both glanced over. The doors opened.

Another Arab started to come out. He saw us. He looked at my face, then to Delilah. He froze. His mouth dropped open.

He’d clearly recognized me. He’d also clearly seen that I’d been chatting with Delilah. The way he’d looked from me to her-he was connecting us.

He started to step back into the elevator. His hand reached out for the buttons.

It happened fast. I didn’t think about it, didn’t think about the risk. I leaped into the elevator and bodychecked him into the wall. His head slammed against the wood paneling and bounced off. He got his arms up on the rebound and grabbed at me. I returned the favor, catching his shoulders with an inside grip and shooting a knee into his balls. He doubled over with a loud grunt. I stepped behind him and slipped my left arm around his neck in hadaka-jime, the inside of my elbow pressing up against his trachea, my biceps digging into his carotid. I put the same side hand over my right biceps and brought my right hand to the back of his head. I squeezed hard. He struggled wildly for less than three seconds, then went limp, the blood supply to his brain interrupted.

Delilah had stepped into the elevator with us. The doors were closing-she must have pressed the button. “Five,” I said. “Hit five.”

She did as I asked. But had she moved inside to help this guy, then hesitated when she saw that it was impossible? I wasn’t sure.

As soon as the doors closed, I released the choke and hoisted his limp body onto my shoulder. If we were seen now and we played it right, someone might think I was just carrying a friend who’d passed out from too much drinking. Not an ideal scenario, but less problematic than being seen dragging the guy by his ankles with his face blue and contorted.

“That’s him,” she said. “The one I overhead in the lobby.”

I nodded. Maybe it was true. Maybe he’d gotten antsy when no one was checking in or returning his calls, and had decided to move on.

Second floor. Third. Fourth. No stops along the way.

The doors opened on five and we filed out and started walking down the hallway. Still all clear.

I felt the guy’s limbs begin to move in what I recognized as a series of myotonic twitches. It happens sometimes when someone emerges from an unconsciousness induced by blood flow interruption. I’d seen it many times training judo at the Kodokan and recognized the signs. He was waking up. Shit.

I leaned forward and dumped him on the ground. His arms and legs were jerking now, his eyes starting to blink.

I stood behind him and sat him up. Then I leaned over his left side until we were almost chest to chest, wrapped my right arm around his neck from front to back, grabbed my right wrist with the other hand, and arched up and back. His arms flew up, then spasmed and flopped to his sides as the cervical vertebrae separated and his neck broke.

I took hold of one of his jacket lapels and stepped in front of him. Lifting and hauling back on the lapel, I went to my knees, snaked my head under his armpit, then stood, shrugging him up by degrees until I had him up in a fireman’s carry. I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out my room key. “Here,” I said, flipping it to Delilah. “Five-oh-four. Open the door.”

She caught it smoothly and headed off down the hallway.

I stayed with her. I wanted to see whether that hair had been disturbed. I stopped her outside the door and squinted down to see.

The hair was broken. Which didn’t prove anything more than her cleared cell phone had; it simply failed to prove that she had been lying about someone being in my room.

My next thought, of course, was bomb. The guy goes in, plants it, gets out. No timer, because they didn’t know when I was coming back. It would be rigged, to the door, a drawer, something like that. Backup in case the ambush in Hong Kong failed.

Delilah must have been thinking the same thing. That, or she was doing a good job acting. She was running her fingers lightly along the doorjamb, tracking closely with her eyes. I didn’t think a device, if there was one, would be triggered to the door. First, you’d need sophistication to pull it off: mercury switches, vibration switches, a way of arming the device electronically afterward for safety. Simpler means would require time spent outside the door, where the technician could be seen. In all events, working with the door would likely mean less time and less privacy than would be offered by the many other possibilities inside.

Still, it paid to check. Triggering a device to the door would ordinarily leave some evidence in the jamb, where the bomb maker would have placed something that would close a circuit when the door was opened.

Delilah stopped, apparently satisfied, and put the key in the lock. She pushed open the door wide enough to move inside-no wider than someone who had, say, taped a mercury switch vertically to the floor behind the door would have opened it to leave. She paused for a moment, then opened it wider. We went in, looking for trip wires along the way.

The door closed behind us. I set the body down next to it and we each quickly examined the room. Mercury switches, pressure release switches, photocell switches… there are a lot of ways to rig a room. The main thing is to look for anything unusual, anything out of place. We checked the desk chair, the edges of every drawer, the closet doors, the minibar cabinet, the underside of the bed, the drapes, the television. Neither of us spoke. The sweep took about ten minutes.

I stopped a moment before she did. She was bending forward, her back to me, running her fingers along the edge of the bedstand drawer. The black skirt was pulled taut across her ass, the exposed back of her legs deliciously white by contrast.

She stood up and looked at me. Her brow was covered with a light sheen of perspiration. The silk of her blouse shimmered and clung in all the right places.

“That was too close,” she said, shaking her head. “This has to stop.”

I nodded, looking at her. I couldn’t tell if the thumping in my chest was from the exertion of killing, hoisting, and carrying Elevator Boy, or from something else. My awareness of her shape, of her skin, made me think maybe it was option #2. Horniness is a common reaction of the postcombat psyche, Eros reasserting over Thanatos. If I didn’t change my lifestyle soon, I might not live long. But I’d never have to worry about Viagra, either.

“No one saw us,” I said, pulling myself back from the direction my body and the reptile portions of my brain wanted to go in, focusing on the situation. “And there are no cameras in the elevators or hallways.”

“I know that,” she said.

“All right. Tell me what you know about this.”

“Nothing more than what I just told you.” She inclined her head toward the figure slumped on the floor by the door. “Saudi. I could tell by his accent.”

“You speak Arabic well enough to recognize regional accents?”

She shook her head at the question. “We can talk about that another time. The only thing we need to talk about now is getting you off Macau. I’ve had enough of you fucking up my operation.”

I felt some blood drain from my face. “I’m fucking up your operation?” I said, my voice low. “I could as easily-”

“I was almost just seen with you,” she said, her hands on her hips, her eyes hot and angry, “by someone who until I can be convinced otherwise I will assume is working for Belghazi. Do you understand what will happen to me if he comes to suspect me?”

“Look, I didn’t ask you to-”

“Yes, you’re right, I should have just let you walk into that man’s ambush. I should have, too. You would be gone, and that’s what I need.”

“Why, then?” I said, thinking that maybe I’d have more luck finishing my sentences if I kept them short.

She looked at me, saying nothing.

“Why did you warn me?”

Her nostrils flared and her face flushed. “It’s none of your business why I do or don’t do something. I made a mistake, all right? I should have just stood aside! If I could do it over and do it differently, I would!”

She stopped herself, probably realizing that she had been raising her voice. “I want you to leave Macau,” she said, more quietly.

I wondered for a moment whether her outburst had been born of frustration. Frustration that whatever she had just set up to get rid of me had failed to get the job done.

“I know how you feel,” I said. “Because I want the same thing from you.”

She shook her head once, quickly, and grimaced, as though what I had said was ridiculous. “We both understand the situation. We’ve already discussed it. Even if our positions were symmetrical before, they’re not any longer. He’s on to you. Even if I were to leave, and I won’t, you can’t finish what you came here to do.”

“I don’t know that.”

“My God, what more proof do you need?”

I stopped for a moment and thought. She was probably right, of course. But I still hadn’t heard back from Kanezaki. I might learn more from him. And maybe from her, too, if I could find a way to get her to tell me.

She wanted me to be gone. Wanted it so much that whatever had happened in the elevator might have been a bungled attempt to make it happen. Regardless, a minute ago the issue had caused her to lose some of her considerable cool.

Which created a bargaining chip. I decided to play it.

“Meet me later,” I said. “I’m going to check on a few things in the meantime, and then we’ll fill each other in. If I’m convinced at that point that I’ve got no chance of finishing this properly, I’ll walk away.”

“I’m not meeting you again. It’s too dangerous.”

“Not if we do it right.”

There was a pause, then she said, “Tell me what you have in mind.”

“Where’s Belghazi right now?”

“He’s off Macau.”

“Where?”

“He has meetings in the region. I’m not supposed to know where.”

Not being supposed to know and not knowing were quite different things. She was afraid that, if she told me, I might try to go after him. Not an unreasonable concern.

“When will he be back?” I asked.

“He wasn’t sure. A day, maybe two.”

“All right. Take a trip to Hong Kong. Tonight. There are lots of Caucasians there and it’s much bigger than this place. You’ll have an easier time blending in. If he asks, you tell him Macau started to feel small, you got bored, you wanted to do some shopping, take in the sights.”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “Where do I find you?”

“I haven’t decided that yet. Give me your cell phone number and I’ll call you from a pay phone. Ten o’clock tonight. I’ll tell you where then.”

She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. I grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper from next to the telephone and wrote down the number she gave me, in code, as always, so that she wouldn’t be compromised if I were ever found with the paper.

She walked to the door. I watched her glance down at the body as she stepped over it. She checked through the peephole, opened the door a crack, looked through it, and moved out into the corridor. The door closed quietly behind her.

I had to be careful now. I knew there were only two possible reasons that she’d agreed to meet me. One, because she was afraid that, if she didn’t, I might go after Belghazi again and screw things up for her. In this sense, I was coercing her, and I was aware that coercion is an inherently dangerous way to gain someone’s cooperation.

Two, she wanted another shot at using a little coercion herself.

I realized that she hadn’t even asked what I was going to do about the dead guy. I decided to take that as a compliment: she knew I would handle it and hadn’t felt the need to inquire.

In the end, it took me the rest of the afternoon to make Elevator Boy disappear as he needed to. I could have simply left him in the room, but doing so would have undone all my efforts to disconnect myself from the other dead Arabs. Hmm, the police would be saying, three dead Saudis in Hong Kong, another two near the Macau Ferry Terminal, and now this one, in a hotel room? Dumping him in one of the Oriental’s stairwells would have been a marginal improvement, but it would still mean the police would focus on the hotel where I had been staying. I didn’t want that kind of attention. Sure, I’d checked in under an appropriate alias and could have just evaporated, counting on the alias to break the connection between the perpetrator and the crimes, but I decided that the risk of bringing that much heat down on the alias was greater than the risk of cleaning up the mess and avoiding the heat entirely.

Of course, the “cleaning up the mess” option involved a bit more than just tidying up after a dinner party. I had to shop for proper luggage, in this case a Tumi fifty-six-inch wardrobe, billed as “The Goliath of Garment Bags”; sheet plastic to prevent contamination of the interior of the bag during transportation; and plenty of towels to absorb any leakage. As for the packing itself, suffice to say that Elevator Boy, although not a particularly large man, wasn’t just a couple of suit jackets, either, and I had to make a few unpleasant adjustments to get the desired fit. The Goliath worked as advertised, though, and I was able to wheel it and its unusually heavy load out of the hotel, eschewing offers of assistance from two bellhops along the way. Under the causeway a kilometer or so from the hotel, I ducked behind a pillar and unloaded the Goliath’s contents, then continued on my way, wheeling the bag along behind me with considerably less effort than before. I left it far from the body and the hotel, at the other end of the causeway, where I knew someone would quickly and happily “steal” it, marveling at his good luck in acquiring such expensive, high-quality luggage, and saying nothing to anyone about where it had come from.

Back at the room, I took an extremely long, extremely hot shower. I changed, packed my things, and headed down to the lobby. At the hotel checkout counter, I told them that my plans had changed suddenly, that I needed to check out earlier than planned. They told me they would still have to charge me for that evening. I told them I of course understood their policy.

I took a cab to the ferry terminal. I saw no police barricades, technicians sniffing for evidence, or other evidence of official interest in what had happened here earlier. On the contrary, in fact: it seemed that things had been quickly cleaned up and returned to normal. I had been right about law enforcement priorities on Macau.

I went to the TurboJet counter to buy a ticket. The ticket clerk informed me that only first-class seats were available on the next departing ferry. I told her first class would be wonderful.

Once aboard, I settled into my first-class seat and watched the lights of Macau fade into the distance. I felt myself beginning to relax.

Yeah, there were problems. There had been a breach in the security I depend on to do my work and get away alive afterward. And, although the evidence was so far circumstantial, it looked like Belghazi was on to me, which would make it a hell of a lot harder to get close to him and finish what I had started.

The thing in the elevator had been a close call, too. But it had turned out all right. Maybe that was an omen. Nothing like a little luck to give you that wonderful sense of well-being. That, and having killed and survived someone trying to do the same to you.

I smiled. Maybe I would write a self-help book. Live off the proceeds.

I would worry about the problems later. There was nothing I could do about them on the ferry. My relaxation deepened, and I actually indulged a light snooze on the ride over. I woke up refreshed. The Hong Kong skyline was already looming before me, its proud towers eclipsing the silhouetted hills behind them, dense crystals of light that seemed to have erupted out of the earth to embrace the sky and dominate the harbor.

The City of Life, the local tourist board liked to call it. It seemed a fair description to me. At least for the moment.