Rain Storm aka Choke Point

6

I CALLED THE Hong Kong Peninsula from a pay phone and reserved a Deluxe Harbour View room. I like the Peninsula because it occupies an entire city block in Kowloon’s Tsim Sha Tsui district, has five separate entrances, multiple elevators, and more internal staircases than you can count. Not an easy place to set up an ambush.

Also, it’s one of the best hotels in Hong Kong. And hey, it had been a rough day. A little luxury along with the usual dose of security didn’t seem objectionable.

I could imagine what Harry would have said: You trying to impress her?

Nah. It’s just about the security, I would have told him.

He would have known not to believe that. It made me miss him, and for a moment I felt bleak.

I made my circuitous way to the hotel and checked in. I paid for the room with a credit card under the name of Toshio Okabe, a sufficiently backstopped identity I use from time to time for just such transactions. A porter escorted me to room 2311. The room was on the south side of the new tower and, as promised, had a stunning view of Hong Kong across the harbor.

I shaved in the shower, then soaked for twenty minutes in the oversized tub. I’d been forced to stay mostly at more anonymous, downmarket properties to protect myself since leaving Tokyo two years earlier, and damn if a Deluxe Harbour View room at the Peninsula didn’t feel good.

I changed into a pair of charcoal gabardine trousers, a fine cotton mock turtleneck of the same color, and a pair of dark brown suede split-toe lace-ups and matching belt. Then I spent a half hour refamiliarizing myself with the hotel layout-the placement of the internal staircases and which ones could be accessed without a staff key; the positions of the numerous security cameras; the movements of security personnel. When I had decided on how I would arrange to meet Delilah while continuing to ensure my own safety, I went out.

I stopped at an Internet café. There was a message waiting from Kanezaki on the bulletin board. Six guys matching the descriptions of the ones I’d taken out had left from Riyadh for Hong Kong two days earlier. Plus, the Saudi embassy in Hong Kong was involved in the investigation of the recent deaths in Hong Kong and Macau. And Delilah had mentioned that the guy she had overheard had a Saudi accent. Apparently, she’d been telling the truth, at least about that. It looked like my erstwhile friends had indeed been Saudi. A connection with half-Algerian, Arabic-speaking Belghazi seemed likely under the circumstances. What I didn’t know was why. Or how.

The last part of the message said, “Checking on the phone numbers and on the woman. Nothing yet. Will be in touch.”

I typed, “Follow up on the Saudi connection to our friend. Monitor Riyadh to Hong Kong air traffic for movement of similar teams.” Not likely that they could have put together another unit so quickly, but it couldn’t hurt to be watching for one.

I uploaded the message, purged the browser, and left.

I thought about Delilah. European, I’d been thinking, although I hadn’t been able to place the slight accent. I’d been half-assuming, pending further information, that she was French. Partly it was her appearance, her dress, her manner. Partly it was her involvement with Belghazi, who, when he wasn’t moving around, was said to be based in Paris. Even her Arabic could fit the theory: France has a substantial Algerian population, and there is a long and violent history between the two countries. The French intelligence services, domestic and foreign, would have well-funded programs in Arabic. Delilah might have been one of their graduates.

But there was another possibility, of course, one I was beginning to think was increasingly likely. I decided to look for a way to test it.

I bought a prepaid cell phone from a wireless store, to be used later. I dropped it in a pocket, then used a pay phone to call Delilah.

“The Peninsula,” I told her. “Room five-forty-four.” I wasn’t ready to tell her the correct room number, or even the correct floor. Not with all the reasons she had for wanting to see me off. We would do this sensibly.

“Thirty minutes,” she said, and hung up.

There was a liquor store near the phone. On impulse, I went inside. I found a bottle of thirty-year-old Laphroaig for twenty-five hundred Hong Kong dollars-about three hundred U.S. Extortionate. But what the hell. I stopped at an HMV music store and picked up a few CDs. Lynne Arriale, Live at Montreux. Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley. Bill Evans Trio, Sunday at the Village Vanguard. All the next best thing to being there.

I went back to my room at the Peninsula and took two crystal tumblers and a bucket of ice from over the minibar. I set them down on the coffee table with the Laphroaig, along with a bottle of mineral water. I popped the CDs into the room’s multidisk player and chose “random” and “repeat.” A moment later, the music started coming through a pair of speakers to either side of the television. I paused for a minute, and listened to Eva Cassidy doing “Autumn Leaves,” the lyrics and the melody the more poignant by virtue of the singer’s untimely death. The song’s melancholy notes seemed to clarify, and somehow to frame, my feelings about Delilah-part pleasant anticipation at seeing her again, part deadly concern at her possible role in what had recently come at me in Hong Kong and Macau.

I used the room’s speakerphone to call the prepaid cell phone I had just bought, picked up the call, and left, closing the door behind me. I plugged a wire-line earpiece into the cell phone and listened. The music was soft but audible. As long as I could hear it in the background, I would know the connection was good.

I took the stairs down to the fifth floor. Room 544 was at the end of a hallway, with the entrance to an internal staircase opposite and about three meters ahead of it. I waited inside the doors that led to the staircase, where I could see the room through a glass panel. If anyone had managed to listen in on my call to Delilah, which was unlikely, or if she had decided to inform her people of my whereabouts, which I deemed less unlikely, I would see them coming from here. If they tried to use the staircase, as I had, I would hear them. And, if for some reason that I had completely missed, someone tried to get into my room while I was out, I would know it through the cell phone. Layers. Always layers.

Delilah arrived fifteen minutes later. As she passed my position, I checked the direction she had come from to ensure that she was alone. When I saw that she was, I opened the door and said, “Delilah. Over here.”

She turned and looked at me. She didn’t seem particularly surprised, and I wasn’t surprised at that. She was familiar with my habits and wouldn’t have expected me to just be waiting at the appointed place at the appointed time.

I held the door open as she walked past me. Harry’s detector was in my pocket, sleeping peacefully, the batteries fully juiced from an earlier daily charging. She wasn’t wired.

I led her along various stairways and internal corridors back to the room, listening in on the earpiece while we moved. All I heard from my room were the quiet notes of Lynne Arriale. Neither of us spoke along the way. We encountered no surprises.

I unlocked the door to the room and we went inside. “Sorry about the procedures,” I said, removing the earpiece. I turned off the cell phone and left it by the door.

The apology was perfunctory. So was the shrug she offered in response. I bolted the door behind us.

Feeling secure for the moment, I took in a few more details. She was wearing a midnight blue dress, something with texture, maybe raw silk. It was cut just above the knee, with three-quarter-length sleeves, an off-the-shoulder neckline, and a deep V cut in the back and front. Her shoes were patent leather stilettos with sharp toes. There was a handbag to match the shoes, and a gold Cartier watch with a gold link band encircling her left wrist. It was a man’s watch, large and heavy on her wrist, and its incongruous heft served to accentuate her femininity. Her hair was swept back and away from her face in a way that accentuated her profile. Overall the look was controlled and sleek, sophisticated and sexy. None of it, especially the shoes, would be ideal for escape and evasion, if it came to that, so I realized she must have chosen it all for some other operational imperative. There are all sorts of weapons in the world, and I reminded myself that when this woman was dressed for work she was anything but unarmed.

She reached into her purse and took out her cell phone to show me that it was turned off and unconnected to anyone who might be listening in. Then she opened the purse so I could see there was nothing else inside that might have been problematic. I nodded to show that I was satisfied.

She raised her arms away from her sides and looked at me. She smiled in that sly, subversive way she had-teasing, but also amused, and inviting the recipient of the smile to join in the amusement. “You’re not going to search me?”

I didn’t think it would be necessary. And it certainly wouldn’t be wise. If I put my hands on her body, my previous reaction, when I had watched her leaning over the bedstand in my room at the hotel in Macau, would have seemed shy and retiring by comparison. She knew that, and she was showing me that she knew.

“Why would I want to do that?” I said, aware that my heart had started a little giddyup just at the prospect. “We trust each other, right?”

She lowered her arms, letting the smile linger for a moment, maybe acknowledging that I’d handled her suggestion about as well as anyone could under the circumstances.

“Shall I take off my shoes?”

“Why?” I asked, thinking of that idiot shoe bomber who had tried to bring down a flight from Paris.

She shrugged. “Isn’t that the custom in Japan?”

Cute. A way to confirm a biographical detail, to increase or decrease the probability that the guy her people had read about in Forbes had been me. She’d have to do better than that.

“I think they do it in houses, not so much in hotels,” I said. “Either way is fine.”

She bent forward, raised her right leg behind her, and reached around to a strap at the back of her ankle. She didn’t need to touch the wall or otherwise support herself to perform this maneuver. Her balance was good. But I had already seen that, in Belghazi’s suite when she had nearly put me down with that elbow shot.

She repeated the procedure for the other shoe. In the half-light where we stood by the door I caught a tantalizing glimpse of skin and curves as the front of her dress slipped momentarily away from her body. The view wasn’t accidental, I knew, but it was undeniably good.

I took off my shoes, as well, and followed her into the room. I’d left the lights on low so that their reflection against the floor-to-ceiling window glass wouldn’t obscure the view of the harbor and the lights of the Hong Kong skyline beyond it, but still I saw her logging the room details before appreciating the panorama outside. I couldn’t help smiling at that. A civilian would never have paused before taking in that spectacular scenery.

She glanced over at the coffee table. “Laphroaig?” she asked.

“The thirty-year-old,” I said, nodding. “You know it?”

She nodded back. “My favorite. I like it even better than the forty. That sherry finish-divine.”

Not bad, I thought. I wondered what else she would know. She was obviously adept when it came to languages, clothes, spycraft. And now whiskey. Food? Wine? Poetry? Tantric sexual techniques? I tried not to speculate too much on that last one.

“Can I get you a glass?”

“I’d love one. Just a drop of water.”

I poured us each a healthy measure in the crystal tumblers, adding a drop of water to hers as she had requested. I handed her her glass, raised mine, and said, “L’Chaim,” smiling into her eyes as I did so.

She paused, looking at me. “I’m sorry?”

I smiled innocently. “ ‘To life,’ right? Isn’t that the custom in Israel?”

For one second I thought she looked angry, and then she smiled. “Kanpai,” she said, and we both laughed.

It was a good recovery. But that pause, and the momentary reaction that had followed, seemed telling.

We sat by the coffee table. Delilah took the couch with her back to the wall, her right side to the window. I took the stuffed chair next to the couch. My back was to the wall next to the window, so I didn’t have the view. But I preferred to look at her, anyway.

We sipped for a moment in silence. She was right-the thirty-year-old, finished in sherry casks, mingles ocean tang and sherry sweetness like no other whiskey, offering a nose and taste unparalleled even among Laphroaig’s other outstanding bottlings.

After a minute or two she asked, “How much do you know about me?”

“Not a lot. Mostly speculation. Probably about what you know about me.”

“You think I’m Israeli?”

“Aren’t you?”

She smiled. The smile said: Come on, you can do better than that.

I shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right. Beautiful woman, speaks Arabic, knows how to handle herself and then some, trying to set up a guy who supports various Islamic fundamentalist groups… I don’t know what I could have been thinking.”

“Is that really all you’re going on?”

“What else would there be?”

She took a sip of the Laphroaig and paused as though considering. Then she said, “No one works completely alone. Even if it’s just the people who are paying you, there’s always someone you can go to for information. If you share your theories about who I am with whomever you work for, it could make things dangerous for me.”

I hadn’t even considered that. I tend to focus only on whether a given action might create danger for me. Selfish, I suppose. But I’m alive because of it.

“We’re both professionals,” she went on. “We do what we have to. If you need information, you’ll seek it out. But what you learn might buy you little. It could cost me a great deal.”

“Why don’t you just level with me, then,” I said. “Tell me what I need to know.”

“What more do you need?” she asked, looking at me. “We’ve already learned too much by accident. We understand each other’s objectives, and we understand the situation we’re in. The more you push, the more you compromise my ability to carry out my mission. And the more dangerous you make it for me personally. The people I work with recognize all this. At some point, they may decide to overrule me when I tell them not to try to remove you.”

I put down my glass and stood up. “Delilah,” I said, my voice dropping an octave the way it does when I feel I’m seconds away from having to take decisive action, “we’re here to try to find a way to coexist. Don’t make me decide that you’re a threat.”

“Or what?” she said, looking up at me.

I didn’t answer. She put her glass down, too, then stood and faced me. “Will you break my neck? Most men couldn’t-I’m not so delicate, you know-but I know you could.”

She took a step closer. I felt an adrenaline surge and couldn’t put it in the right context. A second ago I’d reacted to her the way I reflexively do when something suddenly reveals itself as dangerous, but now…I wasn’t sure. My respiration wanted to speed up and I controlled it, not wanting her to see.

“Maybe I am a threat to you,” she said, her voice even. “Not because I want to be, but because of the situation. So? You’re a professional. Do what you have to do. Eliminate the threat.”

She took a step closer, close enough for me to smell her, to feel something coming off her body, heat or some electrical thing. I felt another adrenaline rush spreading through my chest and gut.

“No?” she asked, looking into my eyes. “Why? You know how. Here.” She reached down for my hands and brought them up to her neck. Her skin was warm and smooth. I could feel her pulse against my fingers. It was beating surprisingly hard. I could hear her breath moving in and out through her nose.

I hadn’t meant to bluff, but somehow I had. And now she was calling. Fuck.

But she wasn’t completely sure of herself. There was that rapid pulse, and the sound of her breathing.

And of mine, I realized. I looked for some way to regain the initiative, regain control of the situation. But looking into those blue eyes, seeing her face framed by my hands encircling her neck, her expression simultaneously fearful and defiant, I was having trouble.

She lowered her arms to her sides now and tilted her chin slightly upward, the posture maximally submissive, and yet, somehow, also mocking, insolent. I looked down at the shadowed hollows of her clavicles, one side, then the other, and was almost defeated by the thought of how easy it would be to sweep my hands down over her shoulders, catching the material of the dress on the way, bringing the garment and the lingerie beneath down to her wrists and belly in one smooth motion, exposing her breasts, her skin, her body.

It was there if I wanted it. I knew that, and I knew this was by design, our moves to be choreographed on her terms, where she would offer what I wanted like a kind homeowner offering milk to a starving kitten, maybe petting the little stray on the head while it greedily lapped at the leavings.

I was suddenly angry. The feline imagery helped. I removed my hands from her neck and took a careful step away from her. My mouth had gone dry. I picked up my Laphroaig. Took a swallow. Sat back down, as casually as I could.

“I was right about you,” I said, leaving her standing there. “You really can’t help yourself. This is all you’ve got.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction, and I knew I was right. I’d competed against guys like this in judo. They had one money move, a technique that always worked for them, but if you could get past that one, if you could survive it, they were off their game and couldn’t recover.

“What’s it like?” I went on, feeling more in control now. “Can you even talk to a man without trying to give him a hard-on? What are you going to do a few years from now, when your pheromones start to dry up? Because there’s nothing more to you. Maybe there was, a long time ago, but there’s nothing left now.”

Her eyes narrowed more and her ears seemed almost to flatten in an oddly feral attitude of anger. Good, I thought. I needed that.

“Are you going to sit down?” I asked, gesturing to the couch. “I’m not going to fuck you. And I’m not going to kill you. Not here, not now. It took all afternoon to get rid of that guy from the elevator, and I’m not going through that again tonight.”

She smiled in a way that made me wonder if she had just imagined herself killing me, and dipped her head toward me as if to say, All right. Touché.

She moved back to the couch and finished what was in her glass. I picked up the bottle to pour her another. She raised the glass as I did so and I noticed that both our hands were shaking. I knew she saw it, too.

“Why don’t we call that one a draw,” I offered.

She smiled and took a swallow of what I’d poured her. “I think you’re being generous,” she said.

“I’m being honest.”

She smiled again, a little more brightly this time. “You’re good, you know. Exceptional.”

“Yeah, so are you.”

She took another swallow and looked at me. “It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if we’d met under other circumstances.”

“You want it to be more interesting than it already is?” I asked. We both laughed, and the tension broke.

Then we were silent for a moment, maybe collecting ourselves, adjusting to the new dynamic. I decided to try to keep things comfortable for a while, thinking it would be useful to make her feel good after that harsh exchange. I was aware that I also just wanted the exchange to be comfortable, that I didn’t want to spar with her and certainly didn’t want to fight, and I wondered for a moment where my decision was really coming from.

“You know, you almost dropped me in Belghazi’s suite,” I said.

She shrugged. “I had surprise on my side. I don’t think you were expecting much from a naked woman.”

“Maybe not. But you used what you had at your disposal, and you used it well. Who trained you?”

The question was straightforward, and I knew she wouldn’t take it as another attempt to glean something revealing.

She looked at me for a long moment, then said, “It’s Krav Maga.”

Krav Maga is the self-defense system developed by the Israeli Defense Forces. These days it’s taught all over the world, so experience in the system certainly doesn’t mean the practitioner is Israeli. But Delilah already knew that I suspected her nationality and her affiliations. In this context, her acknowledgment served also as a tacit admission.

I wondered how best to pursue the slight opening she seemed to have deliberately created. I said, “I like Krav Maga. It’s practical.”

“It’s all in how it’s taught,” she said, nodding. “And how you train. Most martial arts are taught as religions. They’re about faith, not facts.”

I smiled. “People need to believe something, even if they have to invent it.”

She nodded again. “Even if it’s wrong. But we don’t have that luxury. We need something that works.”

We. She was getting ready to tell me something.

But don’t push it. Let her get to it the way she wants to.

“How’d they train you?” I asked.

“You know how. A lot of scenario-based conditioning. A lot of contact. My nose was broken during training, can you see it? I had it fixed, but you can still see the scars if you look closely.”

I looked, and saw a hairline mark at the bridge, the remnants of a bad break repaired by a good plastic surgeon. It wouldn’t have meant anything if you hadn’t known to look for it.

“Sounds pretty rough,” I said.

“It was. They took it further for me than for most because my missions are special. I’m alone in the field for a long time, usually without access to a weapon, or at least not to a traditional weapon.”

We were silent again. She took a sip of the Laphroaig and asked, “And you?”

“Mostly judo,” I said. “The Kodokan.” If she’d trained in Krav Maga, she would know both.

She looked at me. “I thought neck cranks were illegal in judo.”

“They are,” I said, seeing that I’d been right about her knowledge. “I learn the special stuff elsewhere. Books and videos. I used to practice it with a couple partners who shared some of my interests.”

“What else?” she asked. “The way I saw you move, you don’t learn that doing judo as a sport. Even with the extra books and videos.”

“No. You don’t. It helps to have spent a decade or so in combat. You develop a certain attitude.”

Silence again. Then she said, “So you are who I think you are.”

I shrugged. “I think you know part of it, yes.”

“Well, you know part about me, too.”

There it is, then. “You’re Israeli,” I said. “Mossad.”

She looked away and cocked her head slightly as though considering what I had said, meditating on it. Then she said, “What difference does it make who I am, who I’m with? From your perspective, none.”

She wasn’t going to tell me, I’d been wrong about that. Or maybe she already had told me, in her own oblique way, and I’d missed it. I wasn’t sure.

She took a sip of the Laphroaig and went on. “But from my perspective, your affiliations matter a great deal. The information we were able to put together on you suggested that you work for the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party. But I don’t see what interest the LDP could have in Belghazi. So I assume that, at least this time, you’re being paid by the Americans. And that concerns me.”

“Why?”

She waved her hands outward, palms to the ceiling, as if to say, Isn’t it obvious? “They’re big and factionalized,” she said, “so they’re not discreet. You have to be careful with them. You never know quite who you’re dealing with.”

“How do you mean?”

Now she put her hands on her hips, leaned back on the couch, and dropped her shoulders. The gesture read, Is he just playing dumb, or is this the genuine article? She started talking a moment later, so I figured she had decided it was #2. It shouldn’t have bothered me-on the contrary, in fact-but it did, a little. I assuaged my pride by reminding myself that it’s generally good to be underestimated.

“Did they explain to you why they want Belghazi removed?” she asked.

“They did.”

“Did you believe them?”

I shrugged. “I was barely listening.”

She laughed. “They must have told you about his arms networks, though, terrorists, fundamentalist group connections, blah, blah, blah.”

The disparaging idiom, rendered in her accented English, surprised me, and I laughed. “What, were they making it up?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. It’s all true. And I’m sure that some parts of the U.S. government are upset over it, and might even be trying to do something about it. Some parts.”

“Meaning?”

She smiled and said, “You know, you haven’t even told me your name.”

I looked at her and said, “Call me John.”

“John, then,” she said, as though testing the sound of it.

“You were saying, ‘Some parts.’ ”

She shrugged. “Let’s just say that America is a very big place. It has a lot of competing interests. Not all of them might think Belghazi is such a bad guy.”

“Meaning?” I said again.

“Have you thought about why they want you to be ‘circumspect’ about the way you go about this particular assignment?”

“I have a general idea.”

“Well, consider this.” She leaned forward and brought her hands up, her fingers slightly splayed and her palms forward, as though framing a photograph. “Whatever faction hired you, they’re being oblique. They need deniability. Who do they need deniability from? And have you considered the position this puts you in?”

The relatively marked body language was new. I was seeing a different part of her personality, maybe a part that she ordinarily kept hidden. Interesting.

I thought for a moment. “The same position I’m always in, I would say.”

“Qualitatively, maybe,” she said, waving a hand, palm down, perhaps unconsciously erasing my point. “Quantitatively, the situation might be worse. Who do you think sent the man in the elevator?”

I paused, thinking, I half thought it was you. Instead I said, “I don’t know.”

The wave stopped and she stabbed the air with her index finger. “Correct. Any number of players could now be trying to counter you. Anyone who stands to benefit from what Belghazi does.”

Or who wants to keep him alive long enough to get access to his computer, I thought. I wondered if she was telling me all this to throw me off her scent. Or maybe she was trying to emphasize the hopelessness of my situation, to encourage me to quit. Maybe.

“I’ve always known that being in this business was a poor way to win a popularity contest,” I said.

She laughed. I picked up the bottle and refreshed first her glass, then mine.

I liked her laugh. It was an odd collection of incongruities: husky, but also sweet; womanly, in the sophistication that informed it, but somehow also girlish in its delighted timbre; spiced with a hint of irony, but one that seemed grounded more in a sense of the absurd than in sarcasm or cruelty. I smiled, feeling good, and realized I was getting a little buzzed from the whiskey.

She leaned back and took a sip, pausing with the glass under her nose. I liked that, liked that she appreciated the aroma. I did the same.

“The one thing you do know,” she said, “is that someone is on to you. Do you understand what that means for me? Someone could make the connection. And I don’t operate the way you do. I don’t have the luxury of being able to hide. To do what I need to do, I need to be close, and stay close.”

So now an appeal to sentiment. A two-pronged approach: logic, to the effect that the situation had changed and I could no longer accomplish my mission; emotion, to the effect that, if I continued to try, she would pay the price.

“I understand what you’re saying,” I told her. “But I also understand where you’re coming from. The second is what gives me pause about the first.”

It made me feel a little sad to say it. Things had been so relaxed for a while. Christ, the whiskey was getting to me. I’m not usually sentimental.

“That’s fair,” she said, nodding. “Nonetheless, what I’ve told you is accurate. Do a little digging-leaving me out of it, if you can, please-and you’ll see.”

I nodded. “The digging is already happening. Discreetly, you’re not part of it.” Not entirely true, but how my inquiry to Kanezaki might affect her was something I would think about later.

I took a sip of the Laphroaig. “Anyway, I need to figure out where this leak is coming from, so I can close it.”

“You think the problem is on your side?”

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time. I learned a long time ago that democracies are dangerous to work with. They’re hindered by all those annoying checks and balances, all that meddlesome public opinion, so they have built-in incentives to find ways of doing things off the books. Sometimes it gets a little hard to follow who you’re dealing with.”

She smiled. “Want Castro whacked? Hire the Mafia.”

I smiled back. “Sure. Or, if Congress won’t cough up the appropriations, fund the Contras through the Sultan of Brunei.”

“Or bankroll almost anything by getting the Saudis to pay for it.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I see your point.”

She moved her hands up and down like a pedestrian trying to slow down an oncoming car, the gesture both impatient and suppliant. “Sorry to belabor it. But you have to understand, Nine-Eleven put America into a bad state of schizophrenia. The country committed itself to a ‘war on terrorism,’ but still pays billions of oil dollars to the Saudis, knowing that those dollars fund all the groups with whom America purports to be at war. Fifteen of the nineteen Nine-Eleven hijackers were Saudi, but no one wants to talk about that. Can you imagine the reaction if the hijackers had been Iranian, or North Korean? I think if America were a person, a psychiatrist would classify her as being in profound psychological denial. I don’t know how you can trust an employer like that.”

“Do you trust yours?” I asked.

She looked down. Her hands descended gently to her lap. After a moment, she said, “It’s complicated.”

“That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.”

She sighed. “I trust their intentions. Some of the… the policies are stupid and outmoded. But I don’t have to agree with every decision to know I’m doing the right thing.”

From her body language and her voice, I knew that my question had troubled her. But not for the reasons she had just articulated. There was something else.

“Do they trust you?” I asked.

She smiled and started to say something, then stopped. She looked down again. “That’s also… complicated,” she said.

“How?”

She looked left and right, as though searching for an answer. “They trained me and vetted me,” she said after a moment. “And I’m good at what I do. I’m resourceful and I have a track record to go on.”

She took a sip of the Laphroaig and I waited for her to go on.

“But, let’s face it, what I do, I sleep with the enemy. Literally. It’s hard for people to get past that. They wonder what it makes me feel, whether it might… infect me, or something.”

“How does it make you feel?” I asked, unable not to.

She looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I nodded and we were silent for a moment. Then I said, “You’re taking a lot of risks with this operation. Maybe more even than usual. Some people might argue that, with me in the picture, with the guy at the hotel, things have gotten unacceptably hot for you, that you should get out. But you haven’t.”

She smiled, but the smile didn’t take.

“Are you trying to prove something?” I asked. “Trying to earn someone’s respect by putting your life on the line here?”

“What would you know about that?” she asked. Her tone was a little sharp, and I suspected I was on to something.

I smiled gently. “I fought with the U.S. in Vietnam. Against ‘gooks’ and ‘zipperheads’ and ‘slopes.’ Look at my face, Delilah.”

She did.

“You see my point?” I said. “It took me years to realize why I was willing to do some of the things I did there.”

She nodded, then drained what was left in her glass. “I see. Yes, you would understand, then.”

“Are they worth it, though? They send you out on these missions, at huge risk to you, you bring back the goods, and still they don’t trust you. Why bother?”

“Why bother?” she asked, tilting her head to the side as though trying to see something she had missed in me before. “Have you ever seen an infant with its legs torn off by a bomb? Seen its mother holding it, insane with grief and horror?”

A rhetorical question, for most people. Not for me.

“Yes,” I said, my voice quiet. “I have.”

She paused, looking at me, then said, “Well, the work I do prevents some of these nightmares. When I do my job well, when we disrupt the flow of funds and matériel to the monsters who strap on vests filled with explosives and rat poison and nails, a baby that would have died lives, or a family that would have grieved forever doesn’t have to, or minds that would have been destroyed by trauma remain intact.”

She paused again, then added, “I should quit? Because my superiors who ought to know better don’t trust me? Yes, then I can explain to the bereft and the amputees and the permanently traumatized that I could have done something to save them, but didn’t, because I wasn’t treated sufficiently respectfully at the office.”

She looked at me, her cheeks flushed, her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing.

I looked back, feeling an odd combination of admiration, attraction, and shame. I took a big swallow of the Laphroaig, finishing it. I refreshed her glass, then mine.

“You’re lucky,” I said, after a moment.

She blinked. “What?”

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples for a moment. “To believe in something the way you do…” I opened my eyes. “Christ, I can’t imagine it.”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “It doesn’t feel lucky.”

“No, I’m sure it doesn’t. I used the wrong word. I should have said ‘fortunate.’ It’s not the same thing.”

I rubbed my temples again. “I’m sorry I said what I said. That you shouldn’t bother. Over the years, I’ve developed the habit of… preempting betrayal. Of thinking that the possibility of betrayal, and defending against it, is paramount. And maybe that’s true for me. But it shouldn’t be true for everyone. It shouldn’t be true for someone like you.”

For a few moments, neither of us spoke. Then she asked, “What are you thinking?”

I waited a second, then said, “That I like the way you use your hands when you talk.” Telling her part of it.

She glanced down at her hands for a second, as though checking to see whether they were doing something right then, and laughed quietly. “I don’t usually do that. You pissed me off.”

“You weren’t only doing it when you were pissed.”

“Oh. Well, I do it when I forget myself.”

“When does that happen?”

“Rarely.”

“You should do it more often.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Why?”

“You know why. You have to protect yourself.”

Her expression was so neutral that I knew she had to be consciously controlling it. She took a sip of the Laphroaig and asked, “And you? What do you do?”

“I don’t get close.”

“I told you, I don’t have that luxury.”

I looked at her and said, “I’ve never thought of it as a luxury.”

She looked back. The look was noticeably long. Definitely frank. Possibly inviting.

I got up and sat down next to her on the couch. One of her eyebrows rose a notch and she said, “I thought you just said you don’t get close.” But she was smiling a little, those warm notes of irony and humor in her eyes.

“That’s the problem with making your own rules,” I said. “There’s no one around to straighten you out when you break them.”

“I thought you said you weren’t going to fuck me.”

“I’m not.”

I looked at her for another moment, then leaned slowly forward. She watched me, her eyes focusing on mine, then dropping momentarily to my lips, and moving back to my eyes again.

I paused. Our faces were a few centimeters apart. There was the hint of rare perfume, maybe something she had bottled uniquely for her in expensive cut glass at an exclusive shop in Paris or Milan. The scent was there but you couldn’t quite get ahold of it, like the remnant of a dream upon waking, or an afterimage fading from the retina after an intense flash of light, or the memory of a face you knew and loved a lifetime earlier. Something just real enough to bring you in, to make you want to pull it closer, to get it back before it flickers away again and is irretrievably lost.

I inclined my head further and kissed her. She accepted the kiss but didn’t exactly embrace it, and after a moment I drew back slightly and looked at her.

“Some people might call what you’re doing ‘mixed signals,’ ” she said. She was smiling a little, but her tone was serious enough.

“I have a conflicted nature. All the military shrinks said so.”

“A few minutes ago you were slapping me down, remember?”

I shook my head. “That wasn’t you. It was your alter ego. I’m not interested in her.”

“How do you know you’ll be interested in what’s behind her?”

“I like what I’ve seen so far.”

She looked at me. “Maybe you were right. Maybe I can only be an actress. A poseur.”

“That would be sad if it were true.”

“You’re the one who said it.”

“I was trying to get under your skin.”

“You did.”

“Show me I was wrong.”

“I don’t know that you were.”

I looked at her legs and breasts with mock lasciviousness, then said, “All right, I’ll take the alter ego.”

She laughed, then stopped and looked at me, another long one. She leaned forward and we kissed again.

The kiss was better this time. There was an uncertainty about it, the tentativeness of a cease-fire, the sense of something moving slowly but with a lot of momentum behind it.

She opened her mouth wider and our tongues met. Again the feeling was tentative: an exploration, not a hasty charge; a testing of the waters, not a heedless plunge.

A minute passed, maybe two, and the kiss grew less cautious, more passionate; less deliberate, more a thing unto itself. It waxed and waned as though in obedience to some force that was slipping from our control. I took in all the different aspects of her mouth, each shifting through my consciousness like images illuminated by a strobe light: her tongue; her lips; her teeth; her tongue again; the delicious feel of the whole, this new threshold to so much of whoever she was.

She took my lower lip between her teeth and lips and held it there for a moment, then released it and gradually eased away. We looked at each other. She smiled.

“I like the way you taste,” she said.

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Must be the Laphroaig.”

She made a sound of agreement that was something like a purr. “That’s part of it. The other part is you.”

I smiled at her. “The exotic taste of the Orient?”

She laughed. “Just you.”

We made love on the bed. There was some jocular debate in the midst of the proceedings about who should be on top, debate that we resolved by recourse to each of the alternatives in question, along with several others. Her body was as luscious and beautiful as that glimpse in Belghazi’s suite had promised, and she moved with an unaffected experience and enthusiasm that made me think of the confidence I had first seen in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental.

We used a condom, something I assumed was one of several practical items she would typically keep in her purse. It was smart. In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I’m rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I’ve survived, I must be immune to sexually transmitted diseases. Stupid, I know. More likely, fate will indulge its taste for irony by killing me with AIDS or some other unpleasant alternative.

We lay on our sides afterward, facing each other, heads propped languorously on folded pillows. She reached over and traced my lips with a fingertip.

“You’re smiling,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. “What did you think, I was going to frown?”

She laughed. Her words, her attitude, it all felt authentic enough. But she was a pro. If she was letting her hair down, I had to assume it was tactical, a means to an end. And I still couldn’t be sure about her motives, about what she might have tried back at the Mandarin Oriental. A shame, to have that knowledge lying on the bed coldly between us, but there it was.

I asked her, “How did you get involved in your work?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes I ask myself the same thing.”

“Tell me.”

“I answered an ad in the newspaper, same as you.”

I waited. There was no sense saying more. If she didn’t want to talk about it, she wouldn’t.

We were quiet again. Then she said, “I was a skinny kid, but when I was fourteen, my body started to develop. Boys, men, started looking at me. I didn’t know why they were looking, exactly, but I liked it. I liked that I had something they wanted. I could tell it gave me a kind of power.”

“You must have driven them crazy,” I said, remembering what it was like to be that age, testosterone-poisoned and single-minded as a heat-seeking missile.

She nodded. “But I wasn’t interested in boys my age. I don’t know why; they just seemed so young. My fantasies were always about older men.”

She pulled herself a little higher on the pillow. “When I was sixteen, a friend of my father’s from the army moved to our city because of a job opportunity. He stayed with us for a couple months while he looked for an apartment and got settled. His name… I’ll call him Dov. He was forty, a war hero, dark and handsome and with the softest, most beautiful eyes. Every time I looked at him I would get a strange feeling inside and have to look away. He was always proper with me, but sometimes I would catch him looking at me the way men did, although it seemed that he was trying not to.

“When I realized he was looking at me that way, it was… exciting. Here was this man, this war hero, handsome and intelligent and so much older and more sophisticated than I was, and still I had this power over him. I started… experimenting with the power. Testing it, in a way, to try to figure out what it was. I would laugh at something he said and hold his eyes a moment too long. Or brush against him when I walked past. I didn’t intend for it to lead anywhere; I didn’t even know that it could lead somewhere with a man like Dov, or where that place might be.

“One day, when he was home and my parents were out, I put on what I thought of as my sexiest outfit-a white bikini top and matching sarong. I knocked on his door. My heart was beating hard, the way it always did when I was near him or even thought of him. I heard him say, ‘Come in,’ so I did. He was sitting at the small desk in his room, and when he saw me he stood up, then flushed and looked away. My heart started beating harder. I told him I was going to walk down to the beach-we lived near the ocean-and asked him if he wanted to go for a swim. He didn’t say anything-he just looked at me for a second, then away again. I realized I could hear his breathing. I was so young at the time, I didn’t even know what that might mean, but it excited me. And I felt awkward because he hadn’t answered me. I didn’t know what to say, so I fanned my face a little and said, ‘It’s so hot in here!’ which it suddenly was. He still didn’t say anything, he just looked at me with the oddest expression-smiling, but almost a little sick, too, as though he was in pain and trying to be brave about it-and I saw that his hands were trembling. It made me nervous that he wasn’t answering me, so, just trying to think of something to say, I said, ‘It’s okay if you don’t want to swim,’ and I realized my voice was as shaky as his hands.

“His lips moved, but no words came out. Then he reached out and touched one of my cheeks with the back of his fingers. I was surprised and took a quick step away. He pulled his hand back and told me quickly he was sorry. I didn’t know what he meant by that or why I had stepped back; all I knew right then was that I wanted him to touch me, wanted it more than anything, and without another thought I took his hands in mine and said, ‘No, no, it’s okay!’ Then he looked at me with his beautiful, dark eyes, took my face in his hands, and kissed me. It was my first real kiss and I felt like I would faint from the pleasure of it. I could hear myself moaning into his mouth and he was moaning, too. And you know what? When he put his hands on my body, just my hips and my breasts, I came. That was another first for me-I didn’t even know what was happening, I couldn’t breathe, there was this explosion of pleasure and then I was sagging against him and crying. He held me and stroked my hair and told me over and over that he was sorry, and I couldn’t speak so I just kept shaking my head and crying because it was so wonderful, he was so wonderful.”

I smiled, wanting to believe that the story was true, that she was showing me something more of the person behind what she had called the “poseur.” Maybe she was. Even if it was a pseudonym, Dov was an Israeli name. From what I could tell of the timelines, Israel’s Six Day War might have been the conflict in which he had distinguished himself. Her city by the sea? Tel Aviv? Eilat?

Or maybe it was a story she had told so many times and for so many reasons that she’d come to believe it herself. Maybe it was part of a campaign to get me to develop an attachment, to warp my objectivity, cloud my judgment.

But I could remind myself of all those unwelcome possibilities later. I didn’t see the point of dwelling on them now.

“Did he make love to you?” I asked.

“No. Not that time. Although he could have. He could have done anything with me.”

“What happened after?”

She smiled. “We promised each other that it would never happen again, that it was wrong because he was so much older and if my parents found out it would be a disaster. But we couldn’t stay away from each other. My brother was in the army then, and he was killed that year. I don’t think I could have gotten through that without Dov. He understood war and had lived through a lot of loss. He was the only one who could comfort me.”

“That must have been hell for your parents.”

“They were devastated. A lot of people didn’t think we should even have been fighting where we were, so their feeling was, ‘our beautiful son died for what?’ It wasn’t like losing someone in the other wars, which everyone knew had been forced on us. It was more like… more like just a waste. You know what I mean?”

She could only have been talking about Lebanon. If she was making all this up, it was an impressive piece of fabrication.

I looked away, thinking about my first trip stateside from Vietnam, when the best you could expect from your average fellow American when he learned you’d been in the war was polite embarrassment and a desire to change the subject. Often you could expect much worse.

I said, “One of the cruelest things a society can do is send its young men off to war with a license to kill, then tell them when they get home that the license wasn’t valid. America did the same thing in Vietnam.”

She looked at me and nodded. We were quiet for a moment. I asked, “How did things turn out with Dov?”

She smiled. “He moved away. I went to college. He has a wife and two sons now.”

“You still see each other?”

She shrugged. “Not very often. There’s his family, and my work. But sometimes.”

“Your parents never found out?”

She shook her head. “No. And he never told his wife. He’s a good man, but you know? We can’t help ourselves. There’s something there that’s just too strong.”

I nodded and said, “Most people only dream of a connection like that.”

She raised her eyebrows. “What about you?”

I looked away for a moment, thinking of Midori. “Maybe once.”

“What happened?”

Nothing really, I could have said. Just, she figured out I killed her father.

“She was a civilian,” I said, finessing the point. “She was smart enough to understand what I do, and smart enough to know that our worlds had to stay separate.”

“You never thought about trying to get out of this world?”

“All the time.”

“It’s hard, isn’t it.”

There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done. As spoken by that philosopher, my blood brother Crazy Jake.

I nodded and said, as though to his ghost, “There are things you do that you can’t wash off afterward.”

“What was it between you?”

“I screwed up. I hurt her.”

“Not that. The good part.”

“I don’t know,” I said, imagining her face for a moment, the way she would look at me. “There was this… frankness about her. In everything she did. I could always tell how I made her feel. She was experienced and sophisticated, even renowned, in her field, but somehow when I was with her I always felt I was with the person she was before all that. The real her, the core that no one else could see. I made her happy, you know? In a way that made no sense and caught me completely off guard when it started to happen. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything like that before. I can’t imagine I will again. Making her happy”-I paused, thinking it would sound corny, then said it anyway-“was the thing that made me happy.”

“You’re not happy now?”

“This very moment? I feel pretty good.”

She smiled. “Generally.”

I shrugged. “I’m not depressed.”

“That’s a pretty minimalist way of defining happiness.”

“I take pleasure in things. A good single malt, good jazz, the feeling when the judo is really flowing. A hot soak afterward. The change of seasons. The way coffee smells when it’s roasted the way it ought to be.”

“All things, though.”

I was quiet for a moment, thinking. “Yeah, mostly. I suppose that’s true.”

“Someone once said to me, ‘If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.’ ”

I looked at her, but didn’t say anything. Maybe the comment hit home.

“You don’t trust,” she said.

“No.” I paused, then asked, “Do you?”

“Not easily. But I believe in some things. I couldn’t live without that.”

We were quiet for a while, thinking our separate thoughts. I said, “You can’t do this forever. What’s next?”

She laughed. “You mean when my ‘pheromones dry up’? I don’t know. What about you?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe retire someplace. Someplace sunny, maybe by the ocean, like where you grew up. A place with no memories.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Yeah. Don’t know when I’ll get there, though.”

“Well, in your line of work, you’ve got a longer shelf life than I do, I suppose.”

I laughed. “What about a family? You’re still young.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I could give up Dov, so I’d need a pretty understanding husband.”

“Don’t tell him.”

“I’d have to not tell him about what I’ve been doing for the last dozen years, too. You know, if a man learns that you can be an actress in bed, he’ll always wonder afterward whether you’re acting with him. Men tend to be insecure about those things.”

I realized that the comment might have been directed at me. Maybe a probe, to see if I would admit to something along those lines. Better to sidestep. I said, “It must be hard being so close with someone like Belghazi, knowing what he does.”

She nodded. “You have to be able to compartmentalize. But it’s not so bad with him. He’s not one of the killers. He’s much higher up the food chain than that. Besides, he’s intelligent and not unkind. Attractive. Remember, I like men. It’s part of what makes me good at what I do.”

“But after you’ve gotten what you want from him…”

Her expression occluded slightly. “Someone else will take care of that. Maybe you, if we can manage this relationship properly.”

“How will you feel then?”

“The way I always do. But you don’t shrink from doing what’s right just because it’s not comfortable.”

I looked at her, impressed. Most people don’t realize it, but ninety percent of morality is based on comfort. Incinerate hundreds of people from thirty thousand feet up and you’ll sleep like a baby afterward. Kill one person with a bayonet and your dreams will never be sweet again.

Which is more comfortable?

Which is worse?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. In the end, you get over everything. We’re such resilient creatures.

It was strange, lying in bed with her. The room felt like a haven. I realized my ease of mind was borne both of the precautions I had taken and of my confidence that she wouldn’t have allowed herself to be followed. But also, perhaps, of some part of me that wanted to feel this way, for its own reasons, independent of the evidence of the outside world. Not a good sign, I knew. And possibly an indication that I was growing less well adapted to the game, and less able to survive in it.

Delilah got up and took a shower. She brought her purse in the bathroom with her, knowing I would have gone through it if she hadn’t. Not that I would have found anything useful. She was too careful for that.

I lay on the bed and listened to the water running. I knew there was at least a theoretical possibility that she would use her cell phone while she was in there, alerting her people to my whereabouts. My gut told me the possibility was remote, but my gut might have been feeling the effects of whiskey and lovemaking. The fact was, she would still be concerned about the danger I posed to her operation. I had to stay sensible.

When she came out she was already dressed. She looked relaxed and refreshed. I had pulled on one of the Peninsula’s plush bathrobes and was sitting on the bed, as though ready to turn in for the night.

She sat down next to me and said, “What do we do now?”

I put my hand on her thigh. “Well, I’m ready for round two, if you are.”

She laughed. “About the situation.”

“Oh, yeah. Can you send text messages with your phone?”

“Of course.”

I gave her the URL of one of my encrypted bulletin boards. “The password is ‘Peninsula,’ ” I told her. “The name of this hotel. Tell me when you’ve gotten what you need from Belghazi and where I can find him then.”

“You’ll do that?”

I shrugged. “I’m still waiting to hear from my contacts, who should be able to shed some light on who came after me and why. And how. For the moment, I don’t have access to Belghazi, anyway. Standing down seems sensible.”

“It is. Whoever was coming at you in Macau won’t have unlimited resources. It will take them time to get new forces in position.”

“I know,” I said.

“But you need to be careful. I know you know this, I know you’re a professional. But Belghazi is a dangerous man. Remember when I told you that I’ve known men who could act without compunction? Never more so than with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“In Monte Carlo, I saw him kill a man. With his feet and bare hands.”

“Yeah, he’s got a Savate background, I know.”

She shook her head. “More than a background. He has a silver glove in Savate and was a ring champion in Boxe-Francaise. He works out on sides of beef. With his kicks he can break individual ribs.”

“He ought to market it. ‘Belghazi’s meat tenderizer.’ ”

She didn’t laugh. “And he carries a straight razor.”

“Good for him,” I said.

She looked at me. “I wouldn’t take it lightly.”

“You know what they teach salesmen?” I asked, looking at her. “Don’t sell past the close. I already told you I would stand down, for now. You don’t need to keep trying to persuade me.”

She smiled, and for an instant I thought the smile looked strangely sad. “Ah, I see,” she said.

We were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Tell me, do you think I went to bed with you… tactically? To manipulate you?”

I looked at her. “Did you?”

She dropped her eyes. “That’s something you have to decide for yourself.”

There was a kiss, oddly tentative after our recent bout of passion, and then she was gone. I waited fifteen seconds, then slipped off the bathrobe and pulled on my clothes. The rest of my things were still in my bag. I waited a minute, looking through the peephole and using the SoldierVision to confirm that the corridor outside the door was empty. It was. I moved out into it, taking various staircases and internal corridors until I reached the ground floor. I used one of the rear exits, which put me on Hankow Road, cut across Nathan, and took the elevator down to the MTR. I made some aggressive moves to ensure that I wasn’t being followed. I wasn’t. I was all alone.

7

I SLEPT AT the Ritz Carlton, across the harbor. It was a shame to have to leave the Peninsula, but Delilah knew I was there, and might share that knowledge. Better to sever the potential connection.

I woke up the next morning feeling refreshed. I thought about Delilah. She badly wanted those two days of grace, the day or two during which Belghazi had “meetings in the region.” I assumed that whatever he was doing on this trip was what Delilah and her people had been waiting for. They must have been expecting that something from the trip would wind up on his computer, something important, and that’s when they would act.

But why had she tried to access it that night in his suite, then? Opportunistic, maybe. A warm-up. Yeah, could be that. But no way to be sure. At least not yet.

And all my conjecture assumed that she was telling me the truth, of course. I couldn’t really know. I needed more information, something I could use to triangulate. I hoped I’d get it from Kanezaki.

I showered and shaved and enjoyed a last soak in the room’s fine tub before going down to the front desk to check out. The pretty receptionist looked at me for a moment, then politely excused herself. Before I had a chance to consider what this could be about, she had returned with the manager, a thin specimen with a pencil mustache.

“Ah, Mr. Watanabe,” he said, using the alias I had checked in under, “we believe a man might be looking for you. A police matter, it seems. He says it is important that you contact him. He left this phone number.” He handed me a piece of paper.

I nodded, doing nothing to betray my consternation, and took the paper. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t you call me about this?”

“I’m very sorry, sir. But the man didn’t even know your name. He left a photograph at the front desk. It was only just now, when the receptionist saw you, that she realized you might be the gentleman in question.”

“Is that all? Was there anything else? Did the man leave a name?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“May I see the photo?”

“Of course.” He reached down and produced what I recognized as an excellent forgery-a digitized image of my likeness. The face in the photo wasn’t a dead ringer, but it was more than close enough.

I thanked them, paid the bill, and left, checking the lobby more carefully than I had when I had entered it. Nothing seemed out of order.

I did a series of thorough surveillance detection moves, wondering how the hell someone could have tracked me, and who it could have been. Having someone stay on you when you think you’ve gotten clean feels highly unpleasant.

When I was confident I was alone, I found a pay phone. I punched in the number the hotel had given me.

The phone on the other end rang twice. Then a voice boomed out, “Moshi moshi,” Japanese for hello, in a thick Southern twang.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. Dox.

“Well, some people think so, but no, it’s just me,” he said, with annoying good cheer. “Did I get the Japanese right?”

“Yeah, it was perfect.”

“I think you’re just saying that. But thank you anyway.”

“What do you want?”

“Ain’t you going to ask how I found you?”

“Not until I put you in another leglock.”

He laughed. “I told you, you don’t need to do that. I’ll tell you what you want to know. In person.”

I paused, then said, “All right.”

“Where are you now? Still at the hotel?”

That’s when it hit me. I knew how he’d done it.

“Yeah,” I said, testing my theory.

“Well, okay, good. I’ll come to you. Tell me, though, I don’t know Hong Kong so well, what’s the best way to get there again?”

I smiled. “Taxi.”

“Sure, that makes sense. But give me some directions. I like to know where I’m going.”

Yeah, that was it. I’d been right. “Just tell the driver the name of the hotel,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll be able to find it.”

There was a pause, during which I imagined him looking decidedly nonplussed. “Damn, what was the name of the place again?” he asked, trying valiantly.

I laughed and said nothing. After a moment, he said, “All right, all right, you got me. I’ll meet you anywhere you want.”

“Why would I want to meet you at all?”

“All right, I was out of line. Just wanted to see if I could sneak one past you, but you’re too slick. But you’ll still want to hear what I’ve got to tell you. Believe me on that.”

I thought for a moment. Of course I wanted to meet him. I needed to know what all this was about. But I would have to take precautions. Precautions that could prove fatal to Dox if things didn’t go the way I wanted them to.

“Where are you now?” I asked.

“In a coffee shop in Central, ogling a table of Chinese girls. I think they like me.”

“They must not know about your sheep proclivities,” I said.

He laughed. “Shoot, partner, not unless you told them.”

“Stay put for a while. I’ll call you back.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll call you back,” I said again, and hung up.

If this had been Tokyo, I could have told him immediately where we should meet and how. I had studied the city for the twenty-five years I’d lived there, and knew dozens of venues that would have worked. But Hong Kong was less familiar to me. I needed to map things out.

I walked to the causeway, then headed west, toward Sheung Wan, looking for the right locale. It was Sunday, and the area was animated with the chatter of thousands of the island’s Filipina maids, who were out enjoying a weekly day of relief from their labors. They sat on flattened cardboard in the shade of the long causeway ceiling and picnicked on pancit palabok and sotanghon and kilawing tanguige and other comfort food and felt, for a few brief moments, that they were home again. I liked how physical they were: the way they braided each other’s hair, and held hands, and sat so close together, like children finding solace, a talisman against something fearful, in simple human contact. Despite their transplanted lives and the loss of what they left behind, there was something childlike about them, and I thought that it was probably this seeming innocence, joined incongruously to an adult sexuality, that drove so many western men mad for Southeast Asian women. Such charms are not lost on me, either, but at that moment, desire wasn’t really what I felt for them. What I felt, dull and somehow surprising, was more akin to envy.

I continued down the causeway, then moved south into the Western District, named entirely for its position relative to Central and without reference to culture or atmosphere. In fact, characterized as it is by the craggy faces of ancient herbalists concocting snake musk and powdered lizards and other such antique pharmacopoeia; the aroma of incense from its temples and of cooking from snake restaurants and dim-sum bakeries; the cries of its fishmongers and street cleaners and merchants, Western feels significantly more “eastern” than the rest of Hong Kong.

I stopped in one of the innumerable bric-a-brac shops on Cat Street and bought several secondhand items, all of which were intended to distract the shopkeeper and would soon be discarded, save one: a gutting knife with a four-inch blade and a horn handle. The knife was nestled in a leather sheath and the blade was satisfactorily sharp.

In my wallet was an old credit card, around which I keep wrapped several feet of duct tape. Thousand and one uses, they say, one of which, it seemed, was securing a gutting knife to the underside of a causeway banister. If I saw anyone following us or detected any other signs of duplicity, I would lead Dox past the banister, retrieve the knife, and finish him with it.

I would have preferred to keep the blade on my person, but Dox wasn’t stupid, despite the appearance he cultivated, and I knew he’d be looking for signs of a weapon. Adequate concealment on my body was possible, of course, but would make for an unacceptably time-consuming deployment. Better to have the element of surprise. Likewise, it would have been sensible to wear some extra clothing, with a running suit or something similar between the outer and inner layers, which I could quickly peel off afterward if things got messy. But I knew this was also something Dox would spot. There was a compromise, though. I purchased a dark nylon jacket and a carton of baby wipes, which I stashed under a trashcan in a public restroom not far from where I had placed the knife. If I had to deal with Dox and got bloody in the process, I could duck into the restroom and quickly make myself presentable again.

I continued east on the causeway, then into the International Financial Center, which houses a large shopping mall. I wandered around until I had found a suitable setup: a third-floor vantage point overlooking a second-floor bookseller called Dymock’s. From the third floor I could monitor not only the entrance to the bookstore, but the nearby second-floor entrance to the mall and the approaches to my position, as well. If I saw something I didn’t like, I could disappear in any one of a number of directions.

I called Dox from a pay phone.

“Moshi moshi,” he said, in his thick drawl.

I wondered briefly whether I was giving Dox too much credit in thinking that his hayseed thing was only an act.

“Still ogling those girls?” I asked.

“Them and some new ones,” he said, his voice booming with good cheer. “There’s enough of me for all of ’em.”

“Meet me in the Dymock’s bookstore in the IFC shopping mall.”

“The what? I don’t…”

“Save the hillbilly stuff for someone who cares,” I interrupted. “The International Financial Center shopping mall. Second floor. At Hong Kong station on the MTR. It should take you less than fifteen minutes to get there. Longer than that and I’m gone.”

“All right, all right, no need to get unpleasant about it, I’m on my way.”

“I’ll be watching along the way, Dox. If you’re not alone, I’m going to take it personally.”

“I know, I know.”

He did know, too. We’d worked together. He’d seen what I could do.

I hung up, went back to my position, and waited.

I didn’t know the details, of course, but then I didn’t really need to. Dox knew I was in Hong Kong because that’s where I’d placed the call to Kanezaki. Somehow he’d created that photograph of me. He’d known me before and had seen me recently; maybe he had worked with a technician the way a witness works with a police sketch artist. Or maybe they had a military-era photo and had digitized it to account for the effects of plastic surgery and the intervening decades. Regardless, Dox would have taken the photo around to hotels on Hong Kong and Kowloon. He knew me, so he would start with the best and work his way down. That’s why he knew I was at a hotel, but didn’t know which one.

I realized he’d probably been to the Peninsula, too, but I had left there in too much of a hurry to bother with a formal checkout. Maybe he would have flashed some sort of government ID, U.S. Customs requesting a favor, something like that. Or maybe he even had local liaison. Sure, the Ritz manager had said something about this being a “police matter.” Maybe the Agency had asked the local gendarmerie for assistance. Great.

I shook my head a little sadly. Staying at high-end hotels when I’m moving around is one of the few luxuries I have. Now I saw that the habit had become a liability. I would have to jettison it.

I tried not to take it personally. Dox, Kanezaki, they had their reasons. They were just doing their jobs.

Well, if it got to be too much, I would just do mine. No hard feelings, guys. You know how it is.

Ten minutes later I watched him enter the shopping mall through the second-floor entrance to my right. For the moment, he seemed to be alone. If he was with anyone, they were hanging back beyond the entrance.

As he went to turn into the bookstore I called to him. “Dox. Up here.”

He looked up and smiled. “Hey there.”

“Use the escalator to your right,” I told him. “Hurry.”

He did. While he moved, I waited to see whether anyone came in the entrance behind him, trying to keep up. No one did.

When he reached the top of the escalator, I started moving. “Turn left,” I said. “Just head through the mall. I’ll be right behind you. I’ll tell you what to do next.”

“Don’t you get tired of this stuff?” he asked, giving me a hangdog look.

I watched the escalator behind him. “Go,” I said. “Now.”

He did. I watched the escalator and the entrance for a moment longer. All clear. Then I caught up to him and fell in just behind and to the right of him. Harry’s detector stayed quiet.

We came to a maintenance corridor. “Here,” I said. “Turn right.”

He did. We walked a few meters in. “Stop,” I said. “Face the wall.”

He gave me a long-suffering sigh, but did as I asked. I patted him down. No weapons. I took his cell phone, turned it off, and pocketed it.

“Will you give that back when school’s over?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “If you’re good. Now head out.”

I looked back the way we had come from. Nothing set off my radar. So far, so good.

I took him through a provocative series of maneuvers that would have forced a pursuit team into the open. If I’d seen anything, I would have taken him past the knife and ended the bullshit then and there. But he was alone.

I took him to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant deep in Pok Fu Lam, far enough from the island’s tourist areas to draw only the most intrepid sightseers. The area was arguably a slum, but I liked it. In some ways, I found its crumbling four-story buildings, their paint faded and peeling from decades of subtropical moisture, their ornate balconies and carved balustrades by contrast strangely proud, even defiant, to be more pleasing than the trademark wealth and power of the districts east. Dox, enormous, bearded, and, most of all, Caucasian, looked decidedly out of place among the other diners, but he didn’t seem to mind. The menu was entirely in Chinese, but I knew the characters and was able to point to what I wanted.

“What is this?” Dox asked, after the soup had arrived and we had begun to eat. “It’s tasty.”

“Good for you, too,” I said. “A Chinese Olympic running coach used to feed it to his star athletes.”

“Yeah? What’s in it?”

“The usual stuff. Spring water. Mountain vegetables. Turtle blood and caterpillar fungus.”

He paused, the spoon halfway to his lips. “You serious?”

“Well, that’s what it said on the menu.”

He nodded as though considering. “Those Chinese runners are quick. If it’s good enough for them, I guess I can have some, too.” He slurped the rest down with a smile.

I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen Dox dine on equally unusual fare in the field in Afghanistan. Always with relish.

When we were done with the soup, I asked him to tell me what was going on.

“Well now,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You wouldn’t believe the things they’ve trained me on. Forging ID, hacking computer networks, locks and picks, flaps and seals… And not just the training, they give me the toys! I’ve got a twenty-five-thousand-dollar color laser copier, special paper, inks, hologram kits, magnetic stripe encoders, shoot, buddy, I can whip up fake ID that’d make your hair stand up! You want something, you just let me know.”

“You didn’t come here just to make a sales pitch for fake ID, did you?” I asked.

He seemed to brighten at that, and I wondered if Dox had come to the conclusion that my occasional barbed remarks were actually terms of endearment. That would be perverse.

“I had a weird meeting with a guy the other day,” he said, grinning. “Came all the way to see me in Bangkok, where I was relaxing and revivifying at the time. Told me his name was Johnson. But his real name is Crawley. Charles Crawley. The Third. Imagine, a family that would want to perpetuate a silly name like that when they could have named him something imaginative like Dox.”

“How’d you get his real name?”

The grin widened. “Shit, I could smell lies all over that boy. So I pretended to get a call on my cell phone while we were talking. I used the phone to take his picture.”

He must have had one of the units with a built-in digital camera. In these matters it used to be that you only had to worry about the odd amateur who happened to be carrying a camcorder, like Zapruder or that guy who caught the police working over Rodney King. Now it was anyone with a damn cell phone.

I pulled out the unit I had confiscated from him. “This phone?” I asked.

He nodded. “Go ahead, take a look.”

I hit the “on” button and waited for a moment while the phone powered up. Yeah, it was an Ericsson P900, new and slick, with a built-in camera and a lot more. I handed it to Dox. He worked the buttons for a moment, then gave it back to me. I saw a surprisingly sharp image of a fine-boned, thirty-something-year-old Caucasian with curly wheat-blond hair, blue eyes, a thin nose, and thinner lips. The picture had been taken from an odd, and apparently surreptitious, angle.

“Weaselly-looking little fuck, ain’t he. I got a few more if you want to take a look. Just press that advance key there.”

I did as he indicated and scrolled through, getting a better sense of what Crawley looked like. Photos aren’t always good likenesses. If you see more than one, you increase your chances of being able to recognize the subject in person. Which I was beginning to think I might want to do.

When I was done, I turned the phone off and handed it back to Dox. He was still smiling. “If you want, I can forward the photos directly to your cell phone,” he said. “Or to an e-mail account. Hell, if you feel like having fun, we can post old Crawley’s face on any bulletin board you’d like! Dumbass didn’t even know what I was doing. Shame on him for failing to keep up with the ever-advancing march of technology.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Well, his résumé says he’s with the Consular Affairs section of the State Department.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Looks like Consular Affairs has a pretty wide-ranging brief these days.”

He smiled back. “They certainly do.”

“How’d you find this out?” I asked.

“Come on, buddy, I can’t tell you all my sources and methods! You know magicians don’t like to show how they do their tricks.”

I looked at him and said nothing.

“All right, all right, just having a little fun with you. No need to get so serious on me with those scary eyes and all. I ran the photos through a new Agency database. The database compiles images from electronic media-online versions of newspapers and magazines, video, whatever. You feed in your photo, the system goes out and tries to find a match using something called XML-entensible markup language, something like that. It’s like Google, but with pictures instead of words. I think they stole it from some start-up company.”

“It worked?” I said, thinking, Christ, what are they going to come up with next?

“Well, sure, it worked. Gave me a couple thousand false positives, though. The Agency has a little way to go before Google has any reason to panic, I’ll tell you that. But you know me, I like to party, but I can be patient, too. I went through all the hits until I came across the unforgettable face of Mr. Crawley.” He reached into his pocket and took out a piece of paper, unfolded it, and handed it to me. “See there? That’s him, standing next to the Ambassador to Jordan at a press conference the Ambassador was giving in Amman. Doesn’t he look important?”

“Very. What did he want?”

He leaned forward. “Well, here’s where it gets interesting. He told me he represented very, very, senior interests in the U.S. government. But that, for national security reasons, these interests had to maintain good old ‘plausible deniability’ about certain courses of action and couldn’t meet with me personally as a result, much as they of course would otherwise like to. Yeah, ‘certain courses of action,’ I think that was how he put it. I think he liked hearing himself talk. Anyway, he told me that there was this former undercover operative who’d gone rogue and killed a bunch of friendlies in Hong Kong and Macau, and who needed to be ‘removed,’ is what he said. I said, ‘Removed?’ Having fun with the guy now, you understand. And he nods and says, with his voice serious, the way I guess he imagines Really Important Government representatives should talk about these things, ‘We want his actions terminated.’ Lord help me, I couldn’t stop myself, I said to him, with my eyes all wide now, ‘With Extreme Prejudice?’ And he just nods once, like he was afraid if his head had gone up and down more than that it could get him into trouble.”

“And then?”

“Oh, after that, the usual praise for my past service to my country and appeals to my patriotism. You know the drill. Then he tells me he’s got twenty-five thousand dollars for me right now, and another seventy-five thousand upon completion, if I take on this little service that Uncle Sam wants of me.”

“And you said?”

“I told him it would of course be an honor to serve my country on this most auspicious occasion. He gives me a key to a coin locker, shakes my hand, thanks me-again!-for my ‘patriotism,’ and walks away. I go to the locker, and who does it turn out this ‘rogue operator’ is? Well, none other than my friend from the good old days in ’Stan, the intelligent and charming Mr. John Rain.”

I nodded, considering, then said, “Why are you telling me all this? Didn’t you say, ‘opportunity only knocks once’? Why not do the job, take the money?”

He smiled at me. The smile said, I knew you were going to say that. I supposed it made him feel good to prove that, at least on certain occasions, he was capable of thinking ahead of me.

“I’ll tell you, buddy, there are some things a marine won’t do, not even to an army type like you. I figure we veterans have to stand up for each other, since no one else seems to want to. Besides, I didn’t much care for the way old Crawley treated me. Shoot, that boy made me out for nothing but a dumb cracker, didn’t he. Just like you do, if you don’t mind my not mincing my words.”

I looked at him. “I don’t think you’re half as dumb as you act, Dox. And you might not even be as dumb as that.”

He laughed. “I always knew you loved me.”

“What about the money?”

“Shit, I’d rather take twenty-five thousand for nothing than a hundred thousand for doing something that didn’t sit right with me, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe. But won’t Crawley want the money back?”

“Well, he might, and I might like to give it to him. Trouble is, I can’t remember where I put it. Think maybe I invested it with a securities trader or some other unscrupulous type. It might already be gone.”

I smiled. “Crawley might be angry about that.”

“I expect he will be. He might even try to hire another ‘patriot’ to ‘remove’ me for taking advantage of him. But that would cost him another hundred grand. No, I think I know Mr. Crawley’s type. I think he’ll decide it’s best to just swallow the insult and live to fight another day. That is, if he lives another day. I know the news I’m giving you might make you righteous angry. It would me.”

He picked up his soup bowl, raised it to his mouth, and drained it. “Aaaaah,” he said, setting the bowl down on the table and leaning back in his chair. “Nothing like caterpillar fungus. You know, there’s one more thing. You may not have noticed it at the time, but you were always decent to me in ’Stan. I was the only one there who hadn’t served in Vietnam, and the other guys were a little cliquish, I always thought. Made me feel like I wasn’t welcome. You weren’t like that. Not that you ever acted like we were long-lost brothers, but you didn’t seem to have a problem with me, either.”

I shrugged. “You were good in the field.”

He nodded and started to say something, then looked down and swallowed. What I’d said had been as dry to me as it was true, and I wasn’t expecting any particular response in reaction. So it took me a second to realize that Dox was struggling with his emotions.

After a moment he looked at me, his eyes determined, almost fierce. “And that’s all that should count,” he said.

I thought of the rumors I’d heard in Afghanistan about how he’d had to leave the Corps after getting physical with an officer. “Somebody once tell you otherwise?” I asked.

He drummed his fingers on the table, looking into the dregs of his caterpillar soup. Then he said, “I’m a damn good sniper, man. Damn good. I’d never been in combat before ’Stan, but I knew what I could do. Top of my class at Sniper School at Quantico. But there was one instructor who had it in for me. Because, even though my skills were top-quality-spotting and target detection, stalking and movement, marksmanship-I didn’t always act like what a sniper is supposed to act like.”

I couldn’t help a gentle smile. “You’re a little more reserved than most snipers,” I said.

He smiled back. “Yeah, snipers tend to be a soft-spoken breed, it’s true. They start out that way, and their work reinforces the tendency. But I’m not like that, and never was. When I’m in the zone, I’m as stealthy and deadly as anyone. But when I’m not in the zone, I need to cut loose sometimes. That’s just who I am.”

I nodded, surprised at the sympathy I felt. “And not everyone liked that.”

He shrugged. “You know, regular military types aren’t comfortable with snipers. They think we’re cold-blooded killers, assassins, whatever. Sure, it’s okay to return fire in a mad minute firefight, or mortar someone from a mile away, but moving through the woods like a ghost? Picking up your quarry’s sign like he’s just a deer or something? Stalking him, or waiting in a hide, then blowing his brains out with Zen-like calm? You should hear the way the regulars will beg for your help when they’ve got a problem that only a sniper can solve, though. Then you’re everybody’s daddy. Of course, that’s only until the problem’s solved. Anyway, what snipers do, it all makes the hypocrites uncomfortable.”

I nodded. “I know.”

He nodded back. “I know you do. Truth is, partner, in a lot of ways, you act more like a sniper than I do. I don’t know what kind of marksman you are, but you’ve got that habit of stillness about you. And you know what it’s like to hunt humans. You don’t have a problem with it.”

There was a short stretch of silence, during which I considered his words. It wasn’t the first time I’d been the recipient of that particular “praise,” but I wanted to hear Dox’s story, not tell him mine.

After a moment, he said, “Anyway, yeah, the regular marines thought I was one of the sociopaths, and the snipers thought I was a freak. The fact that my scores were higher than theirs just pissed them off. Especially a certain officer. Now, all snipers get subjected to stress during training. When you’re trying to shoot, the instructors will be screaming at you, or playing loud music they know you hate, or otherwise trying to fuck with you. That’s all good, it produces dead shots and you better be able to deal with stress if you want your skills to work in the real world. But this guy kept doing more and more, ’cause none of the shit he was coming up with was throwing me off. Finally he started ‘accidentally’ jarring my rifle while he was screaming at me, and even though I could give a shit about the screaming, of course his bumping into my rifle was enough to throw off my shot. Well, the first time I didn’t say anything. The second time I stood up and got in his face. Which is what that fuck was hoping for. He wrote in my fitness report that I had ‘anger management’ issues and in his opinion was ‘temperamentally unsuited’ to be a sniper. When I found out about that, I busted him up good.”

I nodded, thinking of how the young eager beaver CIA officer Holtzer had been in Vietnam had run a similar game with me, and how he had elicited a similarly stupid, albeit satisfying, reaction. Holtzer had gone on to become the CIA’s Station Chief in Tokyo, and had carried a grudge all the way to the grave I finally sent him to.

“They court-martial you?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, enough people knew this guy was an asshole so that someone pulled some strings and saved me from all that. But the fitness report was permanent, and my career wasn’t going anywhere after all that. At least not until the Russians decided to try and swallow Afghanistan. Then Uncle Sam needed tainted people like me, and all was forgiven.”

“It always seemed like you had something to prove over there,” I said.

He smiled. “Well yeah, I did. You know, I had a lot of personal kills in ’Stan-three of them at over a thousand yards. Not bad for someone ‘temperamentally unsuited,’ I’d say. Carlos Hathcock would have been proud.”

Carlos Hathcock was the most successful sniper ever, with ninety-three confirmed kills in Vietnam, one of them a twenty-five-hundred-yard shot with a.50-caliber rifle, and maybe three times that many unconfirmed.

“You know, I met Hathcock once,” I said, thinking of what Dox had just said about my sniper’s stillness. “In Vietnam. Before anyone knew who he was.”

“No! You met the man?”

I nodded.

“Well, what did he say to you?”

I shrugged. “Not much. He was sitting by himself at a table in a bar in Saigon. The only empty seat was at the table, so I took it. We just introduced ourselves, really, that was all. I had a beer and left. I don’t think we exchanged more than a couple dozen words.”

“No? He didn’t say anything to you?”

I was quiet for a moment, remembering. “When I left, he told me I should be a sniper.”

“Damn, man, he saw your soul. That’s like being blessed by the Pope.”

I didn’t say anything. My army fitness reports; the darkly humorous observations of my blood brother, Crazy Jake; that parting comment from Hathcock; now Dox’s thoughts, too. I wished I could just accept their collective judgment, accept what I am. Accept it, hell. I wished I could fucking embrace it. Other people seemed able to.

We were quiet for a few moments. I asked, “Why do you suppose Crawley has gotten it into his head to try and take me out?”

“That I don’t know. All I could get out of Mr. Crawley was that bullshit about how you’d gone rogue and the details could only be distributed on a ‘need to know’ basis.”

“And you don’t need to know.”

He sighed in mock dejection. “Even though I am a ‘patriot’ and all. Kind of hurts my feelings, when I think about it. Well, there is that twenty-five grand to perk me back up if I get overly blue.”

“How did Crawley know how to contact you? Or even who you are?”

He nodded as though considering. “Well, I’m reasonably confident that our Mr. Crawley is in fact in the service of our current employer, in some capacity or other. If that’s the case, he might have access to my particulars.”

“You think Kanezaki is involved?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Can’t help thinking that, can you? He sure is in the middle of a lot of the shit, for a young guy.”

“He’s a quick study.”

“Yeah, I’ve got the same feeling. But I’ll tell you, I don’t think he’s behind this. It’s my sentimental side showing, I know, but I think that boy’s got an okay heart.”

“How long will he be able to keep it that way, working with who he works with?”

“Well, that’s a question now, I’ll admit it.”

We were quiet for a few moments. “I can reach you at the number I’ve got?” I asked.

“Anytime you want,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

“Make a few calls,” I told him. “Figure out what makes sense.”

He flashed me the grin. “You always were the cautious type.”

“It’s part of the reason I’ve lasted so long.”

“I know that. Hell, I meant it as a compliment.”

I stood and put some bills on the table. Then I held out my hand. “You’re a good man, Dox.”

He stood and smiled back, a lower wattage but more genuine version of the grin. We shook. “Watch your back now, you hear?” he said.

I nodded and left.

After making sure I was clean, I took the Peak Tramway to Victoria Peak, then walked Lugard Road through its forests of bamboo and fern. I found a quiet place and sat, listening to the cicadas.

The first thing I thought, as always, was set up.

Someone, maybe Crawley, maybe someone he works with, is after you. They get Dox to lay out a line of bullshit, knowing that I’ll come after Crawley as a result. Straight into an ambush.

No. Too uncertain. No one could count on Dox to be convincing, not to that degree.

Then they gave Dox the job for real. Plan A was he takes the job and kills me. Plan B is he spills everything to me, in which case I go after Crawley. Back to an ambush.

No. Too uncertain. When would I come at Crawley? Where? How? Besides, Crawley would have to be awfully comfortable with risk to invite retaliation from me.

Dox, or someone else, has his own reasons for wanting Crawley taken out, and he’s trying to goad you into doing it.

That one was worth chewing over, but in the end I judged it unlikely. Dox was a pretty direct guy in his way. If he wanted Crawley to go to sleep, he’d sing the lullaby himself. I would keep the possibility in mind, but it seemed in this case that the most likely explanation was also the simplest: Dox was telling me the truth.

Now what to do about it. The most direct approach would be to brace Crawley. Ask him a few questions. Use my charm.

But not yet. First, I needed to see how all of this tied in with Belghazi. A half-Arab target, an Arab assassination team, a CIA officer trying to take out a contract on me? Even for a guy like me, who’s made a few enemies along the way, it was hard to think that the timing was all just a coincidence. I wanted more information before acting, and I thought Kanezaki might be able to provide some of that.

8

I CALLED TATSU from a pay phone.

“Nanda?” I heard him say, in typically curt greeting. What is it?

“Hisashiburi,” I said, letting him hear my voice. It’s been a long time.

There was a pause. He said in Japanese, “I’ve been thinking of you.”

Coming from Tatsu this was practically sentimental. “You’re not getting mushy on me, are you?” I asked.

He laughed. “My daughters say I am.”

“Well, they would know.”

“I’m afraid they would. And you? Are you well?”

“Well enough. I need a favor.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll send you a message,” I said, referring to our electronic bulletin board.

There was a pause, then he said, “Will I be seeing you?”

“I hope so.”

Another pause. “Jaa,” he said. Well, then.

“Take care, old friend.”

“Otagai ni na,” he said. And you.

I uploaded the message at an Internet café. Then I made my way to Hong Kong International Airport. I caught a flight to Seoul, and from there to Narita International in Tokyo. And so, that very evening, I was mildly surprised at being back in Japan.

From Narita, I took a Narita Express train to Tokyo station, where I emerged to find my former city hunched up against characteristically rainy and cold late autumn weather. I stood under the portico roof at the station’s Marunouchi entrance and took in the scene. Waves of black umbrellas bobbed before me. Wet leaves were plastered to the pavement, ground in by the tires of oblivious cars and the soles of insensate pedestrians, by the weight of the entire, indifferent metropolis.

I watched for a long time. Then I turned and disappeared back into the station, borne down by a feeling of invisibility that was nothing like the one I had assiduously cultivated while living here.

I bought a cheap umbrella for an extortionate thousand yen and caught a Yamanote line train to Nishi-Nippori, where I checked into an undistinguished business hotel, one of dozens in this part of shitamachi, the scarred yet stalwart low city of old Edo. With the lights off, I could have been anywhere. And yet I was keenly aware that I was in Japan, I was in Tokyo.

I slept poorly, awaking to another gray and rainy day. I made my way to Sengoku, where I had lived for so many years before getting burned by Holtzer and having to leave for more anonymous climes.

Outside Sengoku station, I discovered that the features of an area I had remembered with some fondness had been erased. In their place had grown a McDonald’s on one corner, a Denny’s on the other. There was a chain drugstore; a chain convenience store; and other chains, all intended, no doubt, to offer increased choice and variety. A more pleasant, more efficient shopping experience. The city’s implacable engines of progress grinding on, I supposed, the homogenous expression of some increasingly senescent collective unconscious.

I reminded myself that all I owned of Sengoku were memories. The neighborhood itself was someone else’s to ruin.

I opened my umbrella, crossed the street, and walked until I passed my old apartment. And here, away from the station’s newly gaudy façade, I was surprised to find that all was almost exactly as I remembered: the gardens with their carefully tended plantings, the stone walls draped in patterns of gentle moss, the buildings of ancient wood and tile roofs, standing with dignity and determination beside their younger brick and metal cousins. Children’s bicycles were still clustered around doorways; umbrellas dripped as they always had from stands before small stores. The periphery had changed, I saw, but the core remained resolutely the same.

I laughed. What I had just seen at the station had been disappointing, but had also allowed me some compensatory sense of superiority. What I found afterward came as a relief, but carried with it a profound feeling of insignificance. Because I understood now that in Sengoku, life had just… gone on. The neighborhood was as untroubled by my loss as it had been unaware of my presence. When I had lived here, I realized, I had dared to think that perhaps I had belonged, that in some way my living here mattered. Now I could see that these thoughts had been, in their way, narcissistic. Certainly they had been mistaken.

I thought of Midori, of what she had once told me of mono no aware, what she had called the “sadness of being human,” and wished for a naked second that I could talk to her.

I took a final look around, trying to recollect the life I once had here. There was a feeling that lingered, certainly, something insubstantial that expressed its longing for corporeity in the form of a series of long sighs, but nothing I could really grasp. The interior of the town was just the same, yes, and yet, imbued with the unfair weight of my memories, it was now all hauntingly changed. I didn’t belong here anymore, and I felt like an apparition, something unnatural that was right to have left and foolish to have returned.

I walked back to the station and called Kanezaki from a pay phone.

“I was just going to upload something for you,” he said.

“Good. Where are you now?”

“Tokyo.”

“Where in Tokyo?”

There was a pause. He said, “Are you here?”

“Yes. Where are you now?”

“The embassy.”

“Good. Be outside Sengoku station in thirty minutes. Take the Mita line from Uchisaiwaicho.”

“I know how to get there.”

I smiled. “Walk up the west side of Hakusan-dori, toward Sugamo. When you get to Sugamo station, turn around and walk back. Repeat as necessary.”

“All right.”

“Come alone. Don’t break the rules.” There was no need to mention penalties.

I waited on Hakusan-dori northeast of Sengoku station, the umbrella held low to obscure my features, ready to bolt into the hive of alleys and streets behind me if something went wrong and Kanezaki violated the procedure I had established.

Twenty-five minutes later, he emerged onto the sidewalk and began walking toward me. He seemed to be alone. When he had pulled even with me, I called out to him. He looked over. I motioned that he should cross the street, and watched that no one performed the identical move behind him.

For the next half hour, I kept us moving on foot, by subway, and by taxi. Harry’s bug detector was silent. I ended the run at a place called Ben’s Café in Takadanobaba, in the relatively quiet northeast of the city.

We walked past the ivy-covered trellis and modest signage outside. Kanezaki took a deep breath as we walked through the door.

“Damn, it smells good in here,” he said.

I nodded. I find few smells as welcoming as the accumulated aroma of years of reverential coffee preparation.

“You know, if anyone ever catches on to your coffee shop and café habit,” he said, as we settled down at one of the small wooden tables, “they could probably track you.”

“Probably. Assuming they had the manpower to cover the thousand or so that I like in Tokyo.”

Actually, Ben’s had been one of my favorites, and I was glad to be back. The place has the feel of a college town coffeehouse, which in some ways it is, given the proximity of Waseda University and some smaller schools in the area. It’s got that laid-back air, the murmur of laughter and conversation always accompanying the house music at just the right, relaxing pitch; the eclectic regulars, in this case Japanese and foreign, neighborhood residents as well as sojourners from more distant corners of the city; the overflowing community bulletin board advertising support groups and theater and poetry readings. Cozy but not cramped; cool but not self-important; welcoming but not overly familiar, Ben’s would surely qualify as a Living Metropolitan Haven, if the government ever decided to grant such designations to Tokyo’s periodic sensory overload shelters.

We each ordered the house blend, a mixture of Brazilian and Guatemalan beans, roasted fresh that morning. We didn’t spend any more time on pleasantries.

“What have you got for me?” I asked him.

“This time, a lot.”

“Good.”

“To start with, the woman. Check this out. Twice before, a player we would describe as part of the terrorist infrastructure-finance and logistics, not a foot soldier-has been spotted with a striking blonde. Each time, within two months of the spotting, the guy in question is found shot to death.”

I looked at him. “Why didn’t you tell me this the first time?”

“This information isn’t indexed. I can’t just search the files for ‘hot blonde and dead terrorist infrastructure,’ okay? I came across these commonalities the old-fashioned way, by reading a lot of thick files. Which takes time.”

That was fair. “All right.”

“We don’t have anything else on this woman. No name, nothing. No one has ever made the connection before, and I probably wouldn’t have, either, if you hadn’t gotten me looking in the right direction.”

My face betrayed nothing, but I thought, This is what Delilah was afraid of.

“And?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Well, I don’t think this woman’s presence in the lives of two, and now maybe three, soon-to-be-departed infrastructure types is a coincidence. My guess is, she’s working for someone, setting these guys up.”

“One of Charlie’s Angels?”

He chuckled. “More like the Angel of Death.”

“Seems a little thin.”

He looked at me, and I realized I might have protested just a bit too much. “Maybe,” he said. “But both of the guys she was seen with were killed while traveling, not at choke points like their homes or in the company of known associates. One while passing through Vienna, the other vacationing in Belize. Meaning someone was tracking them, tracking their movements. Tracking closely.”

I shrugged. “Could be the woman, but there are other ways to triangulate on a moving target. You didn’t need to sleep with Belghazi to tell me where I could find him.”

Reasonable enough, but I could feel that he sensed I was arguing with him, and was suspicious about why. I needed to rein that shit in.

Kanezaki picked up his coffee and looked at it for a moment, then said, “There’s more. Both bad guys died of a single twenty-two-caliber gunshot to the eye. Even from close up, and the victims were hit close up, that’s a hell of a shot. Whoever pulled the trigger is confident enough to use something with low penetration power because he knows he can place one shot where it needs to go to get the job done.”

He. Interesting.

“The woman’s not the shooter?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. I think she’s the spotter. She’s like a very specialized mole. She gets vetted by the target, passes the test, gets inside. The target is still taking other precautions, of course, and thinks he’s safe. But there’s a flaw in his security, and he’s sleeping with it. Then, when the woman judges that the moment is right, she makes a phone call. That night, the guy she’s with runs into a bullet. She’s not there when it happens, and she vanishes afterward. No one knows she was involved.”

He took a sip of coffee. “You know, I once read an article about unexplained car accidents. It seems a significant percentage of automotive fatalities gets filed under ‘unknown causes.’ Broad daylight, bright sunshine, a guy flips his car and dies. A lot of times when this happens, it turns out the windows were rolled down. So one theory is, the guy is driving along, listening to the radio, enjoying the beautiful day, and a bee flies into the car. The guy freaks, tries slapping at the bee, gets distracted, boom. The bee flies away. ‘Unknown causes.’ I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.”

“Who’s she working for, then?”

“Don’t know. A lot of possibilities, because these guys have lots of enemies. Could be a business competitor, someone moving in on the weapons contracts or the cash transactions to get better access to the skim. Could be the French-they’ve got their fingers in everything and you never really know what the hell they’re doing or why. But my guess is, it’s an Israeli operation.”

I nodded, both impressed by and not particularly liking his insights. It was one thing for me to have an idea of who Delilah was, who she was with. I could use the information any way I liked, I could control the situation. It was another thing to have the CIA taking an interest. “Why?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Because the Israelis have the most constant and immediate motive to disrupt the infrastructure and they’re always trying to do so, any way they can. Because Israeli assassination teams like to work with twenty-twos-they’re small and concealable and relatively quiet. The teams that killed the Septemberists who did Munich were using twenty-twos. And because the shooter is so good. And likewise for the woman. The guys she’s setting up and knocking down aren’t lightweights, so if she’s doing what I think she’s doing, she must be damn good at it. Mossad quality.”

“You think she’s Mossad?”

He nodded. “I think she’s part of the Collections branch. Collections does the target assessment and evaluation, after a committee has decided on the hit. Specialists, called Kidon, or Bayonets, part of the special Metsada unit, are the actual triggermen. So the division of labor here, it has an Israeli feel to me. Have you seen her again?”

“No,” I said, reflexively.

He paused for a moment, then said, “I was almost hoping you had. It’s not impossible that she could have been behind whoever attacked you in Hong Kong.”

Oddly enough, the notion seemed less likely when proposed by Kanezaki than it did when I was grappling with it myself.

“They were Arabs,” I said.

“Mossad uses Arab factions all the time. False flag ops. But anyway, I don’t know for sure that she’s Israeli. I told you, she could also be working for a faction. Or she could be a freelancer.” He smiled. “You know those freelancers, they’ll work for anyone.”

“Even the CIA,” I said, not returning the smile.

“That’s true. But she’s not one of ours. I would know about it.”

“I wouldn’t overestimate how much you know about what your organization is up to. Your motto could be, ‘Don’t worry, our right hand doesn’t have a clue about the left.’ ”

He chuckled. “That can be true at times.”

We were quiet for a moment.

I didn’t want him to think I was protecting Delilah. Didn’t want him to think there was anything personal motivating me. In my experience, giving the CIA emotional information is like handing a hot poker to a sadist. Better to have him think my attempts to downplay the woman’s significance were motivated by something else.

“Anyway, I don’t think the woman is as important as I first did,” I said. “I only saw her the once. She’s probably not the one in your files. I’m sure I can handle Belghazi just fine.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You worried that, if we think someone else is going to take out Belghazi, we’ll take you off the case?”

I could have smiled. He was good-a lot better than when I’d first gotten to know him-but he had just gone for the head fake I’d offered.

I frowned, overplaying it just slightly to convince him his suspicions were right, to make the impression stick. Pretending to ignore his question out of annoyance, I said, “I want to hear what you know about the team that just came after me.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “All right, I’ll level with you. I think there’s a leak on our side. But I don’t want to say more until I’ve had a chance to run it down.”

I was getting that feeling from him, that feeling of this guy is an agent, I can run him just like they taught me down at the Farm, string him along, take him where I want him to go.

I looked at him for a long moment, letting him feel the coldness in my eyes. “ ‘I’ll level with you,’ ” I repeated, saying it slowly. “You know, I’ve never liked that phrase. To me it always sounds like, ‘Up until now I’ve been full of shit.’ ”

“No, it sounds like, ‘Up until now, I’ve been judiciously holding something back.’ ”

“If you think I can appreciate the difference, you must assume I’m capable of CIA-class subtlety,” I said, still looking at him.

His color deepened. He was remembering his security escort, the one whose neck I had broken.

“Look,” he said, raising his hands, palms forward, “I’ve seen you act precipitously before, okay? You can be very direct, and I admire you for it, it’s why you’re so good at what you do. But if I tell you something half-baked that turns out to be wrong and you go off and act on it, there are going to be very serious repercussions. For everyone involved.”

I said nothing. My expression didn’t change.

“Besides,” he went on, and his urge to keep talking satisfied me that his discomfort was increasing, “it’s not like you’ve been totally aboveboard with me either, okay? You expect me to believe you haven’t seen the woman again? I don’t buy it. Whoever she is, the one in the file or someone else, she didn’t travel all the way to Macau with Belghazi for a single cameo appearance. Trust works two ways, okay?”

Maybe I’d been wrong a moment earlier, thinking he was still a bit unseasoned. He was sharp, and getting sharper all the time. Shame on me for underestimating him.

But I’d give him a pat on the back later. For now, I needed to keep up the pressure.

“Did you have a fucking death squad come after you in the last week, Kanezaki?” I asked, my eyes still cold and direct. When he didn’t answer, I said, “No, I didn’t think so. Well, I did. In connection with a job for which you retained me. So let’s just cut the ‘love is a two-way street’ bullshit right now or I’m going to conclude that you’ve been dissembling.”

There was a long pause. Then he said, “All right. Belghazi is part of a list. A hit list. Of course, it’s not called a ‘hit list.’ Even post-Nine-Eleven, no one would use a description like that.”

I raised my eyebrows, thinking that maybe the geniuses who had once named an e-mail sniffing program ‘Carnivore’ had finally taken a class on marketing.

He took a sip of coffee. “The list is officially called the ‘International Terrorist Threat Matrix,’ or ITTM, for short. Unofficially, it’s just called ‘the list.’ It was created and is continually updated by the Agency, in our capacity as central clearinghouse for all intelligence produced by the intelligence community. Its purpose is to identify the key players in the international terrorist infrastructure. Like the FBI’s Most Wanted List, but broader. You know, a ‘Who’s Who.’ ”

“Are you still ‘leveling’ with me?” I asked.

He put his coffee down and looked left and right, as though searching for words. “See, that’s what I’m talking about, the tendency to be precipitous,” he said. “Will you just let me finish? Because I’m trying to tell you what you need to know.”

It was a fair rebuke. I said nothing, and, after a moment, he went on. “The list existed before Nine-Eleven,” he said, “but it’s been substantially revised and expanded since then. And, since then, it has also doubled as a hit list-a nice, deniable hit list, because it’s really just a wiring diagram and has been around in one form or another for a long time. So no one had to worry about giving the order to draw up a brand-new list that might make for riveting testimony in front of a hypocritical Congressional committee sometime down the road.”

“A hit list that isn’t a hit list.”

“Exactly.” He took a deep breath. “Now, a few days ago, I received a visit from a guy who works in another division of the Agency.”

“Crawley?” I asked, watching him.

His eyes widened and he flinched just slightly-not enough to make me think he was deliberately creating the response for my benefit. And he flushed, an even more involuntary reaction. A full two seconds went by. Then he said, “Look, it doesn’t matter who it was. Let’s leave names out of it, all right?”

“Sure,” I said, indulging him for the moment. His response had already been as eloquent as I could have hoped for.

“Now, this person… he wanted to see the list. Which is strange.”

“Strange, how?” I asked.

“Well, first of all, no one wants to see the list. Key people know it exists, of course, but they don’t want to know more than that. They want to be in a position to deny knowledge if it comes to that. You know, ‘oh the ITTM? Yes, I seem to remember once hearing something about a Who’s Who or something…’ That kind of thing.”

He picked up his coffee and took another sip. “Now, of course, this guy’s request was outside official channels. Just a phone call to arrange a meeting, then a personal visit at the embassy in Tokyo. No paper trail. Which tells me he was being careful.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “At first I thought the list. He wanted to be able to deny the meeting if he needed to, or, barring that, to be able to characterize it according to his ‘best recollections.’ Which, if you’ve noticed when it comes to official questioning, are never particularly good.”

“Why do you say, ‘at first’?”

“He asked a lot of general questions, but I could see that most of them were designed to hide his real interest.”

“Which was?”

“First, is Belghazi on the list. Second, did we send someone to Macau to take Belghazi out.”

I thought for a moment. “Why didn’t you mention this to me earlier? You said the visit happened several days ago.”

“I didn’t think this was something that might affect you. I thought it was just the usual bureaucratic turf fighting. This guy is part of a division that could make a claim to being responsible for Belghazi, so I figured they were ticked that another division might be operating against him. Worst case, maybe they complain to the Deputy Director, ‘Hey, Kanezaki’s playing with our marbles,’ that kind of thing. I didn’t expect something like what seems to have happened, okay?”

“What division are we talking about?”

He paused, then said, “NE. Near East Division. The Middle East.”

“What did you tell him in response to his questions?”

“That my understanding was that access to the list is granted by the Counter Terrorism Center, and that he should check with them. As to whether we were operating against Belghazi or anyone else, in Macau or anywhere else, that information was also need-to-know through the CTC.”

“His reaction?”

He shrugged. “You know, he huffed and he puffed, but what could he do?”

“What did he do?”

“My guess is he went to the CTC.”

“Would they have given him what he wanted?”

“Maybe. He’s a pretty heavy hitter. If he complained about being out of the loop on Belghazi, they might have given him information to appease him, massage his ego.”

“Why didn’t he go to the CTC first, then?”

“I think two reasons. First, because he wanted to deal with the most junior person he thought would be able to produce what he needed. Maximum intimidation, maximum low profile, maximum deniability.”

“Second?”

“Second, because I’m responsible for coordinating certain aspects of the list for Asia. Hong Kong and Macau are part of my purview. And, like I said, he seemed to have Macau on the brain.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning something happened in Macau recently that got his attention. Maybe something like, a French national who turns out to be a known independent contractor is found dead there with a broken neck. Which he asked about, specifically.”

“Yeah, you mentioned something about that. The guy was a contractor?”

“I just said so,” he said, looking at me.

He was catching on to the way I was leading him by feeding back pieces of what he’d just said. Good for him.

I smiled. “What did our friend want to know about the contractor?”

“Was he on our payroll.”

“Was he?”

“No.”

I looked at him. No way to tell whether he was lying. For now.

“Who was the contractor working for, if he wasn’t working for you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who do you think?”

He shrugged. “Why would you care? My guesses, about the woman, for example, are usually way off base.”

I laughed. “That’s true,” I said. “But I find them amusing anyway.”

He smiled, apparently having figured out that it was smart not to let me get a rise out of him. “I really don’t know,” he said. “And there are a lot of other things I don’t know, either. I’m already speculating to fill in the gaps. I think what happened was, Belghazi’s people learned about the dead French guy and got spooked. ‘Who was he? Could he have been after Belghazi? Who hired him?’ Belghazi is a professional paranoid. You know the type. I’m sure he would have investigated.”

“You’re saying there’s a connection between Belghazi and the Agency guy who visited you recently?”

He was quiet for a moment, then said, “Let me tell you about those phone numbers you gave me.”

“All right.”

“First, the cell phone you picked up operates on a plan from Saudi Telecom, although the subscriber is an obvious corporate front that hasn’t led us anywhere yet. Second, whoever was using the phone placed repeated calls to a certain Khalid bin Mahfouz, who’s a general with Saudi intelligence. Mahfouz liaises with key members of some of the groups the Saudis fund-Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah. Mahfouz controls the funding to these groups, so if he asks them for a favor-say, muscle for an unrelated job in an unrelated place, he gets what he asks for.”

“Is Mahfouz on the list?”

“I’m sorry, other than what I’ve of necessity told you, you don’t need to know who is on or not on the list.”

“Then tell me how this leads to Belghazi.”

“Belghazi makes sure Mahfouz gets a cut of all Belghazi’s weapons deals. So if Belghazi has a problem, he calls Mahfouz. Belghazi spreads around a lot of patronage. He can ask for a lot of favors.”

“All very interesting,” I said, “but so far the connections you’re offering me seem a little thin.”

“I know they’re thin. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m trying, all right? And I’m telling you things that I probably shouldn’t, partly because I owe it to you after what just happened in Hong Kong and Macau, partly because I’m concerned that, if you’re not satisfied that I’m leveling with you, you’re going to do something unwarranted, possibly involving me.”

“All right, keep going, then.”

He exhaled forcefully, his cheeks puffing out slightly as he did so. “Do you know that, in mid 2002, word leaked to the press that the semiofficial Defense Policy Board, which recommends policy to the Pentagon, had written a report concluding that, quote, ‘The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader’? The Secretary of the State was mobilized within hours to quash the report and distance it from the purported actual views of the Bush administration. Then, last summer, Bush ordered twenty-eight pages of a Congressional report on Nine-Eleven redacted, ostensibly to protect national security, in fact because the redacted portions provided details on Saudi financing of terrorist groups.”

“A conspiracy?” I asked.

He shrugged. “More like a conspiracy of silence. Everyone in Washington knows what’s going on, but bringing it up goes over about as well as a discussion of incest in the family. But the lack of discussion doesn’t make it all any less pervasive.”

He took a sip of coffee. “So here’s what I know. Fact one, someone in NE Division is very concerned that Belghazi might be on the list, and that we might have sent someone after him in Macau. Fact two, shortly after the NE Division guy visits me, six Saudis show up in Macau and Hong Kong to try and take you out. Fact three, the six Saudis are connectable to Belghazi through Mahfouz. Fact four, there are elements of the U.S. government that are intent on protecting the Saudis.”

We were quiet for a moment. “Then the speculation,” I said, “is that Crawley-sorry, the guy from NE-finds out about me and warns Belghazi, who contacts Mahfouz for help, who sends in the Saudi team?”

“Yes.”

I considered. If the facts were true, the speculation was reasonable. But I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the way Kanezaki had presented it all to me. He’d given me a few juicy tidbits, then paused to allow me to reach my own conclusions. And I could too easily imagine him taking diligent notes in a “How to Run Your Assets” course at Langley: Let the subject reach his own conclusions… the conclusions we reach ourselves are always more convincing than the ones someone else proposes… .

“How did Belghazi get on the list?” I asked. “Given that various important personages at the Agency seem less than thrilled to find him there.”

He shrugged. “Like you said, sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. And, like I said, there are plenty of people who don’t want to know more about the list than they have to. Also access is tightly controlled through the CTC in any event. The good news is, the relative lack of oversight means that the list is one of the few intelligence items out there that isn’t distorted by politics and corruption. The bad news is, the lack of the usual watered-down consensus means the product might offend some people.”

I took a sip of coffee and considered. “If Crawley found out about Belghazi being on the list and was upset about it, why not just have him removed from it?”

This time he didn’t even react to the mention of the name. “I don’t know for sure, but probably because he doesn’t want to draw too much attention to himself or his motives, whatever they are. Belghazi is practically the poster boy for terrorist infrastructure. It’s easy to use a wink and nod and a slick line of bullshit about ‘counterpart relations’ and ‘national security’ to imply that someone’s name shouldn’t be added to something like the list, that there might be repercussions if it is. It’s a lot harder to explain why you outright want the name off. You’d have a lot of explaining to do at the time. And people would remember afterward.”

“So you think the Hong Kong team came from Belghazi.”

There was a pause, then he said, “I see two possibilities. One is that the woman spotted you for what you are and didn’t want you to interfere with whatever she’s doing, so she’s behind it. Two is that Belghazi is on to you, and the team in Hong Kong came from him. But Belghazi seems the more likely of the two. I don’t think all those phone calls, or the Belghazi/Mahfouz connection, are a coincidence.”

His assessment tracked pretty closely with my own. I wondered whether he knew more than he was saying. Regardless, I didn’t see him being behind the Hong Kong/Macau team. Since I had contacted him from Rio, he’d had numerous and better opportunities to set me up, if that’s what he’d had in mind.

“Are you still tracking Belghazi?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Where is he now?”

“Still on Macau.”

I looked at him. “How do you know that?”

He shrugged. “Let’s just say there’s a certain satellite phone that Belghazi thinks is clean, that isn’t. Why are you asking?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense that he’d still be in Macau. Why is he still there, do you think?”

He shrugged. “We’ve already talked about this. He has business in the area, and he’s a gambler. We expected him to spend time at the casinos. He always does.”

I nodded. “So you’re telling me he’s still there-to gamble? This is a guy who learns that he’s been tracked to Macau, that one or maybe two contractors have been sent after him there, he’s sufficiently concerned about this chain of events to call in a favor in the form of a six-man Saudi team to eliminate the threat, the team gets wiped out and the threat is still at large, and you’re telling me he’s still there because he doesn’t want to interrupt his vacation?”

He looked at me, his cheeks flushing. After a long moment, he said, “You’re right. That was stupid of me, not changing my interpretation of his behavior in light of subsequent facts. You’re right. Let me think for a minute.”

“You can think on your own time. If you want me to continue this op, you need to share information with me, not spend more time meditating on things in solitude.”

His flush deepened, and I felt an odd twinge of sympathy. The kid was trying so hard. Managing characters like Dox and me would be tough on anyone, let alone someone as young as Kanezaki. He was actually doing well, too, and getting better all the time. He just wasn’t as good yet as he wanted to be, and that was frustrating him. But he’d get there.

“All right,” he said, “what do you want to know that I haven’t already told you?”

“First, I want to know about Crawley. I want to know his interest in this, so I can understand whether, why, and how he’s connected to Belghazi.”

“I don’t know,” he said, again not bothering to argue with me about the name. “I’m going to try to find out.”

So am I, I thought, thinking of the digital photos Dox had showed me. And I bet I can get more information than you can.

“Do that,” I said. “Now, let’s talk about Belghazi. You told me originally that he was in Southeast Asia to build up his distribution network, that Macau was just gambling, incidental to the real purpose of his trip.”

He nodded. “That seems to have been incorrect.”

“It does. So the question is, why Macau?”

He rubbed his chin. “Well, it’s got good port facilities. Likewise for Hong Kong, of course. So a possible transshipment point for the arms he’s selling to Jemaah Islamiah and Abu Sayyaf and other fundamentalist groups in the region.”

“But you’ve got other ports in the area, too. Macau itself, Singapore, Manila-”

“True, but Hong Kong is the busiest. Busiest in the world, in fact.”

“So?”

“So, if you’re trying to hide something, obscure its appearance, you might want to send it through a port that handles, say, sixteen million containers a year. A needle in a haystack. Also, these guys have learned not to rely too much on any particular facility. They ship small and distributed. Then, even if any given shipment gets interdicted, the balance gets through. And overall, the distributed approach makes it much harder to shut down the pipeline, or even to get an accurate understanding of its true size. And Belghazi has been moving around, you know. We intercepted calls from Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.”

“Yeah, I know he was off Macau at one point,” I said, remembering Delilah telling me that he had meetings in the region. I thought for a moment, wondering if there was an opportunity there. “How closely can you track him in those other cities?” I asked.

“As closely as we can in Macau. Which is to say, not very. We can only pinpoint his location for as long as he stays on the phone, and he tends to keep his calls short. Once he’s off, we only know where the call came from.”

I nodded, realizing that none of this would be enough for me to use if Belghazi’s visits in the region were short-term. My best chance was still Macau, where something special seemed to be going on, and where I’d already familiarized myself with the local terrain.

Kanezaki said, “Maybe he’s in Macau for the same infrastructure reasons that have taken him elsewhere.”

“Maybe. But the thing is, if Macau were just one of many distribution points for him, he wouldn’t be there now. The benefit wouldn’t be worth the risk, because he knows he’s been tracked there. So why? More meetings there, like the ones he’s doing elsewhere?”

He shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. Southeast Asia is big for him now because of groups like Jemaah Islamiah. You don’t have anything like that on Macau. The players, and likewise the meetings, would be elsewhere.”

“Well, something is going on there. If you can find out what that is, why he’s really there, what he’s really doing, who he’s really meeting with, I’ll have a much better chance of getting close to him again.”

“I understand.”

I nodded slowly, then looked at him. Or rather I looked through him, as though he was somehow immaterial, a thing that mattered to me only slightly, something I could leave on or turn off as easily as I might flip a light switch. I said, “Kanezaki, I hope none of what you’ve told me today is untrue.”

He looked at me, keeping his cool. “The facts are true,” he said. “The speculation is only that. Keep in mind the difference before you decide to go precipitous on me, okay?”

I nodded again, still looking through him. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said.

I LEFT KANEZAKI and made my way to the Fiorentina trattoria, a restaurant in the new Grand Hyatt hotel, where I had told Tatsu to meet me. I arrived early, as I always do, and sipped iced coffee from a tall glass while I waited. I decided that I liked the restaurant, although not without some ambivalence. It was sleek without feeling artificial, with décor of leather and wood and other natural materials; good lighting; and lots of clean, vertical lines. Still, there was something vaguely disconcerting about how suddenly it, and the surrounding hotel and shopping complex, had sprung up. None of it had been here when I was living in Tokyo, and yet here was a virtual city within the city, which the planners had christened Roppongi Hills. You could almost imagine the Titan gods of the metropolis whipping a white sheet from over their newest creation and proclaiming with a flourish and a falsely modest bow that It Was Good.

And maybe it was good. Certainly the people around me seemed to be enjoying it. Still, the place had no history, and, somehow, no context. It was attractive, yes, but it all felt fearlessly forward-looking, miraculously unmindful of the past. And therefore, I thought, oddly American.

I smiled. No wonder I felt ambivalent. It was a transplant, like me.

An hour later, I saw Tatsu walk in through the lobby entrance, pause, and scope the room. A waitress approached and said something to him, probably an inquiry about seating him, and he responded by tilting his head in her direction but without taking his eyes off the room. Then he saw me. He nodded his head in recognition and muttered something to the waitress, then shuffled over.

I smiled as he approached and rose from my seat. There was something eternally endearing about that trademark shuffle, and about the interchangeably rumpled dark suits that always accompanied it. I realized how glad I was that Tatsu and I had found a way to live under a flag of truce. Partly because he could be such a formidable adversary, of course, but much more because he had proven himself a fine friend, albeit not one above requesting a “favor” when practicality demanded.

We bowed and shook hands, then looked each other over. “You look good,” I told him in Japanese. And it was true. He’d lost a little weight, and seemed younger as a result.

He grunted, a suitably modest form of thanks, then said, “My wife has entered into a conspiracy with my doctor. She cooks differently now. No oil, no frying. I have to sneak into places like this one to satisfy my appetite.”

I smiled. “She’s on your side.”

He grunted again and looked me up and down. “You’re staying fit, I see?”

I shrugged. “I do what I can. It doesn’t get easier.”

We sat down. I said, “You know, Tatsu, that’s the most small talk I’ve ever gotten out of you.”

He nodded. “Don’t tell my colleagues. It would ruin my reputation.”

I smiled. “How’s your family?”

He beamed. “Everyone is very fine. I will be a grandfather next month. A boy, the doctor says.”

My smile broadened. “Good for you, my friend. Congratulations.”

He nodded his thanks and looked at me. “And you?”

“Me…”

“Your family.”

I looked at him. “You know there’s no family, Tatsu.”

He shrugged. “People get families by starting families.”

Tatsu had set me up with a few women not long after I’d first returned to Japan, following the Late Unpleasantness. It hadn’t worked out all that well.

“I think I’m pretty well committed to my exciting bachelor’s existence,” I told him. “You know, meet new people. See the world.”

It came out less flip than I had intended, and maybe with a slightly bitter edge.

“ ‘It doesn’t get easier,’ ” he said. “As you noted.”

I sighed. “Still trying to connect me to something larger than myself?”

“You need it,” he said, his expression serious.

Christ, just what I always wanted-a maternal Tatsu. “Information is what I need,” I said.

He nodded. “Does this mean our small talk is over?”

I laughed, surprised. “I didn’t want to exhaust you. I know you’re not accustomed to it.”

“I was just warming up.”

I laughed again, thinking, Why not.

We wound up discussing all sorts of little things: his joy at his daughter’s pregnancy, and his fear that he and his wife might look at the child as some sort of replacement for the infant son they had lost; his frustration with bureaucratic inertia, with his inability to do more to fight the corruption that he believed was poisoning Japan; the way Tokyo, the way the country, was changing in front of his eyes. And I told him some things, too: how the Agency had tracked me down; how eventually I would have to move, and painstakingly reinvent myself again; how I tried not to despair at the thought that it would all once more prove futile, partly because in the end someone would always come looking for me, partly because some restless thing inside me seemed to insist that I move on regardless. We reminisced over some of the experiences we had shared in Vietnam, when Tatsu had been seconded to the war by the Keisatsucho’s predecessor and I, because of my Japanese, was tasked with liaising with him; the people we had known there, the friends we had lost.

Once we got going, it was hard to stop. I realized how much I missed this form of companionship, how virtually nonexistent it had become in my life. And Tatsu was one of the few people, maybe the only remaining one, in fact, who knew me all the way back to the time before Vietnam and war and killing and everything else that eventually came to define me, a time that, on those infrequent occasions when I care to consider the matter, seems as disconnected and remote as a memory from early childhood.

I realized, too, that this was part of what made me so miss Midori. She made me feel like that previous incarnation, made me believe, foolishly, that I might even shed my current skin and be baptized anew in the incarnation’s unsullied body.

Not a bad dream, that one, as dreams go.

When we were done with the meal, and lingering over tea for Tatsu and a second coffee for me, he said, “I thought you might want to know that a gentleman named Charles Crawley, who has U.S. State Department accreditation, was in Tokyo recently. He contacted the Keisatsucho and made inquiries about you. Do you know this man?”

First Dox, then Kanezaki, now Tatsu. Mr. Crawley was now firmly established on my radar screen.

“I know the name,” I said. “What did you tell him?”

He shrugged. “That we had a whole file on you.”

“And then?”

Another shrug. “We gave him the file.”

I looked at him, incredulous. “You just gave him the Keisatsucho file on me?”

He looked at me and said, “Of course,” in his trademark Why do I always have to spell everything out for these people tone, then paused before saying, “The official file.”

I smiled a little at the wily bastard, relief and even some gratitude ameliorating the irritation I might otherwise have felt at him for playing with me. The “official” file would be bereft of the most meaningful information, the items Tatsu wouldn’t entrust to anyone, and especially not to his superiors, the nuggets that might reveal too much about his occasional resort to extralegal methods in his battle with Japanese corruption.

“What does the official file conclude about my whereabouts?”

“That you are most likely still in Japan. Apparently there have been several sightings in major cities-Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Sapporo.”

“Really,” I said.

He shrugged. “Of course, I have my own notions about where you might have gone instead. But why would I want to clutter up an official file with speculation?”

He was telling me that he had doctored the file. That he had done me a favor. I knew there would be a favor in return. If not today, then another time, soon.

I nodded, thinking. All right, then. “Now, what about that fucking camera network of yours?” I asked.

Tatsu had access to the world’s most advanced network of security cameras, all tied into an advanced facial recognition software system. He had used the network to find me after I had first left Tokyo and relocated to Osaka.

“No one is using it to track you. If that changes, I will let you know.”

“Thank you. Now, tell me about the man I briefed you on through the bulletin board.”

“Belghazi.”

“Yes.”

“I assume you already have plenty of background.”

“I do. Give me the recent data first.”

He nodded. “Belghazi supplies certain yakuza factions with small arms, working mostly through the Russian mob in Vladivostok. Lately he has been inquiring with these factions about you. I gather you did something to irritate him.”

“That’s possible.”

“He doesn’t seem like the kind of man one should irritate lightly.”

“I’m beginning to figure that out.”

“Would you care to tell me what you might have done to cause such grave offense?”

“I think you can guess.”

He nodded, then said, “He is not a good man. He seems to be without loyalties.”

“My detractors say the same thing about me.”

He smiled. “They are mistaken. Your problem is that you are unable to acknowledge where your loyalties lie.”

“Well, I appreciate your ongoing efforts to help me with that.”

He smiled almost demurely. “We’re friends, are we not?”

I thought for a minute. Maybe Belghazi, through his Saudi intelligence contact Mahfouz, sends the six Arabs after me in Macau and Hong Kong, as Kanezaki claimed to suspect. The team gets wiped out. Belghazi realizes the men were handicapped because of the way they stuck out there. Something big is happening on Macau or nearby, and Belghazi can’t leave just yet. Now he feels vulnerable. Vulnerable to me. He decides he needs someone with greater local expertise, someone who can blend and get the job done right. He reaches out to the yakuza.

Yeah, I could see that sequence. See it clearly.

Damn, this guy was real trouble. I was beginning to wake up to the magnitude of the problem I faced.

“Belghazi’s connection to the yakuza,” I said. “Is it close enough for them to help him with a problem elsewhere in Asia, if he asks?”

Tatsu nodded. “I would say so.”

Shit.

I realized I was going to have to take Belghazi out. Not just for the money, but simply to survive. And then I realized, He knows that. He’s putting himself in your shoes, too. Which sharpens his imperative: to eliminate you.

A vicious cycle, then. And winner take all.

All right. I needed to end this, and end it fast. I wanted this guy planted in the ground and no longer giving orders. “Natural causes,” if possible; unnatural, if not.

“How can I help?” Tatsu asked.

I thought for a moment, then said, “You can get me the particulars for my new friend.”

“Your new friend?”

I nodded. “Charles Crawley.”

9

DELILAH HAD SAID Belghazi was off Macau for a day or two, and there wasn’t much I could do for the moment with her in the way, anyway. I decided that my own brief departure would be a small enough risk to justify certain possible out-of-town gains.

I took the bullet train from Tokyo Station to Osaka, a less likely international departure point than Tokyo’s Narita. I checked the bulletin board from an Internet kiosk. The information I had asked Tatsu for was waiting for me: Charles Crawley III. Home, work, and cell phone numbers; work address, supposedly the State Department but in fact CIA headquarters in Langley and therefore unlikely to be operationally useful; and home address: 2251 Pimmit Drive, West Falls Church. Unit #811. Suburban Virginia. Most likely an apartment complex, one with at least eight floors.

I booked a nonstop ANA flight to Washington Dulles for the next morning. Then I checked into a cheap hotel in Umeda for the night. I lay in bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. Too much coffee. Too much to think about.

I got up, slipped into the yukata robe that even the lowest budget Japanese hotels can be counted on to provide, and sat in the cramped room’s single chair. I left the lights off and waited to get tired enough to fall asleep. I could tell it would be a while.

The cheap rooms are always the hardest. A little luxury can numb like anesthetic. Take the anesthetic away, and pain rushes into its absence like frigid water through a punctured hull. I felt memories beginning to crowd forward, agitated, insistent, like ghosts newly emboldened by the dark around me.

I was eight the first time I saw my mother cry. She was a strong woman-she had to be, to give up her life and career in America to become my father’s wife-and, until the moment I learned otherwise, I had assumed that she was incapable of tears.

One day, Mrs. Suzuki, our neighbor, came and picked me up in the middle of the afternoon at school, telling me only that I was needed at home. It was June and the air on the train ride back was close and hot and sticky. I looked out the window during the trip, wondering vaguely what was going on but confident that all was well and everything would be explained to me shortly.

My mother was waiting at the door of our tiny Tokyo apartment. She thanked Mrs. Suzuki, who held an extra low bow for a long moment before silently departing. Then my mother closed the door and walked me to the upholstered couch in the living room. Her manner was possessed of a ceremony, a gravity that I found odd and somehow ominous. She took my small hands in her larger ones and looked into my eyes. Hers seemed strange-weak and somehow frightened-and I glanced around, uncomfortable, afraid to look back.

“Jun,” she said, her voice unnaturally low, “I have bad news and I need you to be very brave, as brave as you can.” I nodded quickly to show her that of course she could always count on my bravery, but I sensed as children do that something was terribly wrong and my fear began to unfold, to spread out inside me.

“There’s been an accident,” she said, “and Papa… Papa has died. Nakunatta no.” He’s gone.

I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the concept of death. My paternal grandparents had a dog that had died when I was four, and my mother had explained to me at the time that Hanzu, Hans, had been very old and had gone to Heaven. But the concept that my father could be gone, gone, was too enormous for me to grasp. I shook my head, not really understanding, and it was then that my mother’s composure buckled and her tears came flooding through.

And so that afternoon I made my first real acquaintance with death, as the thing that could make my strong mother cry.

I cried with her then, terrible tears of hurt and fear and confusion. And over the weeks and months that followed, as the lack of my father, previously such a commanding figure in my life, began to take root, my acquaintance with death deepened. I came to conceive of it as the wild card in a previously ordered universe, the sudden disrupter, the leering, lurking thief.

It took about five more years for me to complete my understanding that there was no more Papa, that he was represented now only by increasingly remote memories, like a series of crude cave paintings left behind by some long-vanished people. Now death was a place, a place to which people disappeared forever when they died, a place that gradually sucked away the clarity of memory afterward for a similar one-way journey.

At nineteen, I received the military telegram informing me that my mother had gone to that place, as well. Losing her was easier. I was older, for one thing. And at that point I had seen, indeed I had delivered, a great deal of death, as a soldier in Vietnam. Most important, perhaps, I was familiar with the process, the outcome of loss. Grief held no more mystery for me than did the bleeding, stanching, and eventual healing that accompany the infliction of a survivable bodily wound.

But familiarity diminishes only fear. It does considerably less for pain.

Midori isn’t dead. Only gone. Maybe that’s why I find myself thinking of her, more often than I should. I picture her face, and remember the sound of her voice, the touch of her hands, the feel of her body. I have no such power of recall for scent, but know I would recognize hers in an instant and wish that I could breathe it in even once more before I die. I miss her conversation. We talked about things I’ve never talked about with anyone. I miss the way she would kiss me, gently, on the forehead, the lids of my eyes, again and again after we had made love.

I still say her name, my sad little mantra. I find in those incanted syllables all that I can tangibly conjure of her, and that sometimes the conjuring contents me, however briefly. Even if I can’t talk with her, I can at least talk to her. Something like that. Some consolation like that.

No, Midori isn’t dead, but I deal with her memory by approaching my feelings as those of grief. My world is paler and poorer by her absence, but isn’t this the case whenever we lose a loved one? I knew even as a teenager that my life would have been richer had my father survived my boyhood. I learned to accept this fact as immutable and, in the end, as perhaps not all that relevant. Midori wasn’t dead, but she was an impossibility, and, for the imperatives of my grief, what was the real difference?

I rubbed my hands over my eyes, wishing for sleep, for sleep’s temporary oblivion. It wouldn’t come. I would have to wait some more.

I sit in the dark of these empty rooms, and sometimes I think I can feel the presence of all the others who have done the same before me. Certainly the marks are there. The depression in the mattress, the line worn in the carpet between the bathroom and the door. Or the stains of sweat or saliva on the pillow, if you look beneath the case; or maybe of semen, of tears; sometimes of something darker, something like blood. I sit, the dark around me close but also boundless, and as my imagination slips into the vastness of that featureless bourn, I realize these marks are signs, artifacts of lives and moments that were but are no longer, like ashes in an empty hearth, or bones cast aside from some long ago supper, or a tattered shape that might have been a scarecrow in a field grown over with weeds. All just physical graffiti, unintentionally scrawled by other solitary travelers, detritus deposited by random men on their way to that common destination, and not just the marks of someone else’s passage, but portents of my own.

The hours passed. A growing weariness finally suppressed my restless ruminations. I got back in bed, and, eventually, I slept.

I TOOK the train to the airport the next morning. I called Crawley at home shortly before boarding the 12:10 flight. It was 9:45 the previous night in D.C.

Three rings. Then a nasal voice: “Yeah.” It sounded as though I might have woken him.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said in a fake falsetto. “I think I’ve dialed the wrong number.”

“Christ,” I heard him say. He hung up.

I smiled. I would have hated to fly all the way to Washington, only to learn that he was out of town.

The nonstop was a luxury. Ordinarily I prefer a more circuitous route, but this time I judged the imperative of catching Crawley while I knew where he was to be worth the risks inherent in a predictable route. Likewise, although business class was the usual compromise between comfort and anonymity, the constant travel was beginning to wear me down, and this time I flew first class. The east coast of the United States was over twelve hours away, and I wanted to be fresh when I got there.

I had already conceived the broad outlines of my plan, and now I needed to visualize the details. Once the plane had reached its cruising altitude and the annoying safety and entertainment announcements had ended, I closed my eyes and began a mental dress rehearsal of the entire operation: approach, reconnaissance, entry, waiting, action, egress, escape. Each stage of this mental walk-through revealed certain tools that would prove useful or necessary for the task at hand, and each tool became part of a growing mental checklist. Of course, additional items would be revealed during actual investigation of the target site, but those additional items would only properly present themselves in the context of an existing, organized plan.

Twenty minutes later I emerged from a deeply reflective state, knowing as well as I could, in the absence of further intelligence, what I would need and how it would work. I put the seat all the way back, covered myself with the first-class down quilt, and slept for the rest of the flight.

The plane touched down at a little before ten in the morning local time. I found a pay phone at the airport and called Crawley’s office line. There was no answer. No problem, he was probably in a meeting.

I could have called his cell phone, but that wouldn’t have told me what I needed to know-where he was. I tried him at his apartment, and was unsurprised to get his answering machine. It was a weekday and I hadn’t expected to find him at home, but one of the things you learn in war and in this business is never to assume. The day you think a house is going to be empty is the one day the owner stays home sick, or is there to let the washing machine repairman in, or has relatives visiting from out of town. You learn not to leave things like that to chance.

I rented a car with a GPS satellite navigation system and drove into D.C. for a little shopping expedition. At a hardware store, I bought twenty-five feet of clothesline, sheet plastic, Scotch tape, a roll of duct tape, and a disposable box cutter. Then a drugstore for a large tube of K-Y jelly, rubber surgical gloves, and a felt-tip pen. An optician for a pair of heavy black plastic, nonprescription eyeglasses. A wig shop for some new hair. At the Japan Information and Culture Center, I made off with a handful of flyers on upcoming JICC activities. And last stop, the Counter Spy shop on Connecticut Avenue, where I picked up a five-hundred-thousand-volt Panther stun gun, about the size of a cell phone, for $34.95 and tax.

I used the GPS nav system to pilot back to Virginia, where I did a preliminary drive-through of Crawley’s apartment complex. There was a set of metal gates at the parking lot entrance. Although they were apparently left open during the day, their presence told me that I was dealing with a place that probably had decent security. I expected access to the building would require a key, and there might be a doorman, too. I saw no security cameras in the parking lot or under the large carport in front of the entrance to the building, but I thought I might encounter a few inside. I wasn’t going to have a chance to confirm these issues beforehand, though; I would have to assume their existence and prepare accordingly. If things turned out to be easier than I had planned for, I would be pleasantly surprised.

The building was surrounded by thin suburban woods, through which there were some railroad tie stairs and trails leading to the street beyond. The West Falls Church Metro station was within walking distance from the building; presumably, the trails were used by commuters. They would do equally well for an unwelcome visitor bugging out after a failed op. There was a custodial entrance in back, a single, heavy metal door at the top of a short riser of concrete stairs. And, positioned over the door, as a deterrent to anyone who might want to break into the building through its less trafficked rear, a security camera.

I found a Nordstrom in a nearby shopping mall and bought a pair of galoshes, a gray windbreaker, a nice pair of deerskin gloves-thin enough to offer good tactile feedback; thick enough to avoid leaving fingerprints-a black wool overcoat, and a large leather briefcase. Then I stopped at a gas station near the mall, where, while engaged in a nonexistent conversation on the public phone, I tore out the listings for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean restaurants from the kiosk’s Yellow Pages. I drove around until I found a place, Kim’s Korean barbecue, that sold tee-shirts and baseball caps with the store’s logo, a bright red box around red Korean lettering. I bought a shirt and a cap, along with a large lunch to go.

I drove back to Crawley’s apartment. There was a Whole Foods organic supermarket in the strip mall across the street. I went in and fueled up with a couple of vegan sandwiches and a fruit smoothie. I washed it all down with a large coffee. It was good to eat so healthy on the job-usually the available operational menu consists of McDonald’s and, if you’re lucky, some other fast food possibilities, typically consumed cold and congealing. I enjoyed the repast, knowing it might be a while before I had a chance for another meal.

At two-thirty, I went to a pay phone and tried Crawley again at his office, ostensibly a State Department number but one I knew would in fact ring through to a CIA extension. He answered on the first ring.

“Crawley,” I heard him say.

“Hello, I’m trying to reach the public affairs press liaison office?” I said, my voice a little uncertain. The title was sufficiently bureaucratic to make me confident that there would be dozens of similarly named working groups, at the Agency and elsewhere.

“Wrong extension,” he said, and hung up.

I smiled and shook my head. People can be so rude.

I got back into the car and drove to a nearby residential street. I pulled over behind a few other parked cars and took a moment to slip on the galoshes and transfer my shopping items into the briefcase. I changed into the Kim’s tee-shirt and pulled my windbreaker on over it, leaving it unzipped so the shirt’s logo would show. The windbreaker, which I had deliberately purchased two sizes too large, would make me look smaller by comparison, awkward inside its volume, diminished. I donned the wig, the glasses, and the Kim’s cap. I checked in the rearview, and liked the unfamiliar appearance I saw there.

I drove back toward Crawley’s complex, parking in another strip mall parking lot that I would be able to reach on foot through the woods if things went sour and I had to leave in an unexpected hurry. I purged the contents of the car’s GPS nav system and shut off the ignition. Then I spent a few minutes with my eyes closed, visualizing the next steps, getting into character. When I was ready, I got out and walked to Crawley’s complex, carrying the Kim’s bag with me.

I approached through the large carport, opened one of the two sets of double glass doors with the backs of two fingers, and stepped into a vestibule defined by another set of glass doors opposite the ones I had just come through. As I extended my hand to try one of the inner doors, a buzzer sounded. I looked through the glass and saw a young Caucasian girl, shoulder-length brown hair and freckles, who looked like a college student working a part-time doorman’s gig so she could keep hitting the books while she worked. Part-time would be good. She wouldn’t know the residents, the delivery people, the feel of the place, the way a full-timer would, and would be easier to deal with as a result.

I opened the door and moved into a lobby decorated in some sort of nouveau colonial style, lots of reproduction period furniture and wood paneling and shiny brass lamps. The girl sat behind an imposing built-in desk, behind which I imagined would be electronic access controls and video feeds from security cameras.

“Delivery?” she asked, with a friendly smile.

I nodded. I had multiple contingency stories prepared for the questions and events that might follow: What apartment? Funny, they didn’t mention a delivery. Wait a moment while I buzz them. Hmm, no answer. Are you sure about that number.. .?

But instead she asked, “Are you new?”

I nodded my head again, not liking the question, wondering where it was going.

She looked through the glass doors at the carport beyond. “Because you can park under the carport for deliveries. Sometimes it’s tough to find a nearby space in the parking lot.”

“Oh. Thank you,” I said, in an indeterminate but thick Asian accent.

She looked at the logo on my shirt, then said something in a language that I couldn’t understand, but that I recognized as Korean.

Oh fuck, I thought. You can’t be serious.

“Uh, I not Korean,” I said, keeping my expression and posture uncertain, vaguely subservient, not wanting to cause offense, just a recent immigrant, and not necessarily a legal one, working a minimum wage job and trying not to fall through the cracks.

“Oh!” she said, flushing. “My boyfriend is Korean, and I thought, because of the restaurant… never mind. Sorry.”

Her embarrassment about the mistake, and my apparently embarrassed reaction to it, seemed to combine to cut off further questioning. Thank God.

“I just…” I said, gesturing vaguely to the area behind the desk, where the elevators would be.

“Yes, of course, go right ahead.” She smiled again, and I nodded shyly in return.

I snuck a peek as I passed the desk. One open textbook, front center; one video monitor, off to the side. An easy bet as to which one got her hourly-pay attention.

I knew from the position of the custodial entrance in back that the access point would be to the left of the elevators, and I headed in that direction, passing an internal stairwell on the way. There it was, a swinging wooden door. Beyond it, a short corridor, lined in linoleum, at the end of which, the exterior door.

I looked the door over quickly. I couldn’t tell if it was alarmed. Its heft, and the presence of three large locks, indicated that the building’s management might not have bothered. And even if it were alarmed, the alarm would likely be deactivated during business hours, when the door might be in use. There was a wooden doorstop on the floor, which supported the notion that there was no alarm or that it was currently disengaged. The custodians wouldn’t be able to use the doorstop otherwise.

I used the cuff of the windbreaker to open the locks and turn the knob. I opened the door and examined the jamb. No alarms. I looked outside. There were several mops propped against the exterior wall, apparently to dry there, and a number of industrial-sized, gray plastic garbage containers on wheels, too.

I thought for a moment. The girl in front was obviously more interested in her books than she was in that monitor, and I had a feeling she would be habituated to seeing maintenance men moving in and out the back door during the course of the day. It looked doable.

I propped the door open a crack with the wooden doorstop and moved back inside. When I reached the elevators, an elderly black woman hobbling along with a four-way walker was emerging from one of them. She paused and squinted down at my galoshes, then looked at me. “Raining today?” she asked.

Christ, I thought. They ought to hire you as the doorman.

I shook my head. “New shoes,” I said, still with the ersatz accent. And if you speak Korean, too, I thought, I’ll surrender here and now. “I try decide if I keep, and like this no dirty soles.” I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “Don’t tell, okay?”

She laughed, exposing a bright row of dentures. “It’ll be our secret, sonny,” she said. She waved and moved slowly off.

I smiled, glad I’d had a lesser crime to which I was able to confess.

I couldn’t very well leave with the Kim’s bag after having supposedly entered the building for the express purpose of delivering its contents, so I deposited it at the bottom of a trashcan half full of junk mail in the mailroom to the right of the elevators. Then I counted off four minutes on my watch. I didn’t want to pass the old woman again right away-she was a sharp one, and might wonder what had happened to the Kim’s bag I’d been carrying just seconds before. If I overtook her in the lobby now, the four minutes could account for a quick delivery to a low floor, if the elevators had come right away. As for the longish time it had now been since I first passed the girl at the front desk, I deemed this acceptable. The main thing was that she should see me leave. She didn’t strike me as the type who would pay attention to small discrepancies, like a deliveryman taking a little longer inside the building than might ordinarily be expected.

At four minutes, I walked out through the lobby. The old woman was gone. Maybe someone had picked her up in front. The girl at the desk looked up from her book and said, “Bye-bye.” I waved and headed out to the carport, then left into the parking lot, beyond her field of vision.

Back at the car, I put the wig, glasses, and baseball cap in the glove box, zipped up the windbreaker, and pulled on the deerskin gloves. I grabbed the briefcase and headed back to the building, this time to the back. I hugged the exterior wall as I walked, wanting to get in and out of the camera’s ambit as quickly as possible, and grabbed one of the mops and garbage cans on the way. As I reached the door, I leaned forward, as though there was something heavy in the garbage can and I was laboring to push it, and let the mop head obscure my face, which was in any event facing down as I pushed.

I pulled open the door and went straight in, pausing inside, waiting. If the girl at the front desk noticed something and came to investigate, she’d be here soon, and I wanted the door open if that happened for a maximally quick disappearing act.

I counted off thirty tense seconds, then slowly let my breath out. Good to go. She probably never even noticed the movement on the monitor. Maybe I was being overcautious.

As though such a thing were possible.

I closed and locked the door, parked the mop and garbage can next to it, and headed into the stairwell next to the elevators. A minute later I emerged on the eighth floor.

I took the JICC flyers out of the briefcase, walked down to 811, and knocked on the door. If someone answered, I would ask in Japanese-accented broken English if he or she would be interested in some of the exciting cultural activities planned by the JICC for the winter and leave one of the flyers to backstop the story. Then I would bow and depart and figure out some other way to get to Crawley.

But there was no answer. I tried the bell. Again, no answer.

I turned and taped one of the flyers to the door across the hallway from Crawley’s, placing it so that it covered the peephole. It was the middle of the day and the complex had a quiet feel to it, most of its residents, doubtless, out at work. Still, best to take no chances on someone watching through the peephole for the minute or so it might take me to get inside.

The door had two locks-the knob unit and the dead bolt above it. The knob unit would be a joke. The dead bolt was a Schlage. It looked like an ordinary five-pin, nothing particularly high security.

I put the flyers back in the briefcase and took out my key chain. On it, as always, were several slender homemade lengths of metal that I knew from experience worked nicely as picks for most household and other low-security locks. Next I took out the plastic felt-tip pen that I had picked up at the drugstore. I broke the metal pocket clip off the pen and inserted it into the knob unit, twisting it slightly to take up the slack. Then I worked one of the picks in. I had the lock open in less than ten seconds.

The dead bolt took longer, but not by much. Practice is the key. You can buy all the books and videos on lock picking that you want-and there are plenty out there-but if you want to get good, you buy the hardware, too: warded, disk tumbler, lever tumbler, pin tumbler, wafer tumbler, mushroom and spool pin tumbler, tubular cylinder, everything. You machine your own tools because the purpose-built stuff is illegal to buy if you’re not a bonded locksmith. You approximate field conditions: gloves; darkness; time limitations; calisthenics to get your heart rate up and your hands slightly shaky. It’s a lot of work. But it’s worth it when the time comes.

When I had the lock open, I dropped the picks back in my pocket and opened the door. “Hello?” I called out.

No answer.

I pulled the flyer off the door opposite and entered Crawley’s apartment, locking the door behind me.

I walked inside. Quick visual. Beige walls, beige carpet. Linoleum floor in the kitchen to my right. Large picture window and partially lowered white venetian blinds. Matching Ikea-style furniture: futon couch, lounge chairs, a glass coffee table with copies of Forbes and Foreign Affairs on it. Bookshelves jammed with serious-looking stuff on history and political science. A desk and a black leather chair. Large television set and speakers. A couple of potted plants.

There was a set of folding doors to my left. I opened them and saw a washing machine and dryer.

To my right was the kitchen. I walked in and looked around. The refrigerator held a quart-sized skim milk, some yogurt, a Tupperware container of pasta, a jar of spaghetti sauce. Everything was clean, neat, efficient. A functional place, used for making and ingesting simple meals and for nothing more than that. It seemed that Crawley lived alone. Single, or divorced with no children. Children, with visitation rights, would have meant a bigger place.

The bedroom and bathroom offered more of the same. A queen-sized bed on a platform, but only one night table next to it, with a reading lamp and digital alarm clock. In the bathroom, men’s toiletries laid out neatly around the sink. A white bath towel hung on the glass shower door, the edges lined up. I removed a glove for a moment and touched it. It was slightly damp, no doubt from this morning’s shower.

I imagined Crawley coming home this evening. How he might navigate the room would determine where I should wait. Where would he stop first? Let’s see, come inside, drop the mail on the coffee table. It was cold out; probably he would have a coat. Next stop, coat closet?

There was a large closet off the living room. I checked it. Boxes for stereo equipment. A vacuum cleaner. A set of weights under a thin coating of dust. And a thick wooden dowel for hanging clothes, running the length of the space, with a handful of unused plastic hangers dangling along it. The dowel was supported at its center by an angle brace joined to the wall. I pressed down on it and was satisfied with its strength. Perfect.

But no coats. This closet seemed to be used for longer-term storage needs. I went back to the bedroom. On the wall adjacent to the bathroom was a closet behind a pair of folding doors. I slid the doors open. Yes, this was the clothes closet. Four suits, with an empty hanger for a fifth. Five dress shirts, five more empty hangers. One shirt on his back, I assumed, four at the dry cleaners. A dozen ties. One overcoat, one waist-length leather jacket. One more empty hanger.

I could see that he was a neat man, a man who liked things to be in their proper places. All right then, drop the mail off, then straight to the bedroom, hang the coat in the closet. Likewise for the suit, maybe use the bathroom, then back to the living room for the mail, turn on CNN or C-SPAN, maybe then the kitchen for something to eat. Fine.

I went back to the storage closet and took out the stun gun. I had already tested it on the drive from D.C. and it had worked as advertised, sending out a satisfying blue arc of electricity between its electrodes at the push of a discreet side trigger. I laid out some of the plastic along the closet floor, removed the other items from the briefcase, took off the windbreaker, folded it, and placed it and the briefcase items on the plastic. I didn’t want any carpet particles on my clothes. The galoshes, which I was already wearing over my shoes, would protect my feet. Then I sat on one of the leather chairs and waited.

The room lit up briefly as the sun set outside the picture window, then gradually darkened as night came. I turned the closet light on. Night vision mode wouldn’t be useful for this; Crawley would turn the lights on when he came in and I didn’t want to have to adjust.

Every half hour I stood up and moved around to stay limber. The coffee was making its presence known, and three times I had to urinate. I used the bathroom sink for this purpose, letting the water run as I did so, avoiding the possibility that the toilet might still be running when Crawley came in and alert him to the presence of an intruder. Failing to flush would be unacceptable for similar reasons.

At eight o’clock, just after one of these quick trips to the bathroom, I heard the sound of a key in the lock. I got up noiselessly and moved to the closet. I held the door open a crack and turned off the light, the stun gun ready in my right hand.

A moment later I heard the apartment door open. The lights went on. Soft footfalls on the carpet. There he was, moving past me. Noting the curly, wheat-blond hair, the thin features I had seen in the photos Dox had taken, I watched him walk into the living room. He tossed the mail on the coffee table. I smiled. Call me psychic.

He shrugged out of an olive trench coat, grabbed a magazine, and made his way past me again, toward the bedroom. A minute passed, then another. And another.

He was taking longer to return to my position than I had expected. Then I realized: he was on the can, probably reading the magazine. I had planned to wait until he was back in the living room, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up. I picked up the spare sheet plastic and the duct tape and moved out of the closet.

I eased inside the bedroom and stood just outside the open door of the bathroom. I saw the trench coat, a suit, a dress shirt, and a tie on the bed. I set the plastic and duct tape down on the carpeting.

Another minute went by. I heard him stand up. The toilet flushed. I held the stun gun in my right hand at waist level, my thumb on the trigger. I breathed shallowly through my mouth.

I heard footsteps on the tile, then saw his profile as he emerged from the bathroom, wearing only a white tee-shirt and matching boxer shorts. I stepped in. His head started to swivel toward me and his body flinched back in surprise and alarm. I jammed the unit against his midsection and depressed the trigger. His teeth clacked shut and he jerked back into the doorjamb.

After four or five seconds, enough time to ensure that his central nervous system was adequately scrambled, I released the trigger and eased him down to the floor. He was grunting the way someone does when he’s taken a solid shot to the solar plexus. His eyes were blinking rapidly.

I laid the plastic out on the floor and rolled him onto it. I placed his arms at his sides, then I wrapped the plastic around his body and secured it with duct tape, first at wrist level, then the ankles. He started to recover, so I zapped him again with the stun gun. By the time the effects were wearing off for the second time, I had him pretty well mummified in plastic and duct tape. Other than his head and toes, he was immobilized.

I grabbed a pillow off the bed and propped it under the base of his skull so he could see me better. Also so that, if he started thrashing, he wouldn’t bruise the back of his head. My concern had less to do with consideration for him than it did with what might show up in a forensic examination.

I squatted down next to him and watched his eyes. First, they blinked and rolled. Second, they steadied and regained focus. Finally, they bulged in terrified recognition. He tried to move, and, when he found he couldn’t, he began to hyperventilate.

“Calm down,” I said to him, my voice low and reassuring. “I’m not going to hurt you.” Which I supposed was the literal truth, after a fashion.

The hyperventilating went on. “Then… then why have you tied me up?” he panted.

Not an unfair question. I decided to level with him, at least partly. “You’re right,” I told him. “Let me amend what I said. I’m not going to hurt you, if you tell me what I want to know.”

He swallowed hard and nodded. His eyes were still wide with terror, but I could see he was making an effort to pull himself together. “Okay,” he said. “All right.”

I paused to give him a moment to more fully appreciate his new reality. This guy was obviously no hard case. Sure, he was Agency, but the college-boy type, not one of the paramilitaries. The last violence he’d seen firsthand had probably been on the grade-school playground. And now, suddenly, he was tied up and helpless, with a known killer squatting next to him, looking at him like he was a frog about to be dissected. Of course he was terrified. And that was good. If I managed his terror correctly, there was a reasonable chance that he would tell me what I wanted to know.

“Well, Mr. Crawley,” I said, “I guess what we need to talk about is why a nice guy like you would want to have me killed.”

He pursed his lips and swallowed again, his breath whistling in and out of his nose. I could see that he was trying to decide how to handle this. Deny everything? Blame someone else? Confess and beg for mercy? Something in between?

Watching him trying frantically to make up his mind, weighing the pros and cons of the feeble set of options before him, I sensed he understood that I knew what he was thinking, that I had seen it all before and would know just how to handle him regardless of which route he decided to use. So he would probably know enough not to outright deny everything. No, he looked savvy to me, even shrewd. At some level, he was probably thinking, Don’t deny it, he wouldn’t be here if his information weren’t good. And if you don’t deny it, if you confess up to a point, he’ll be more inclined to believe what follows. It would be a variation of the galoshes game I had just played with the old lady with the walker. And he’d probably do a good job, too. A lot of these government guys are pretty adroit when it comes to lying.

Let’s see, I thought, making a mental bet with myself, probably it’ll be something like, “I was only following orders.”

“It’s not me,” he said, unintentionally winning me the bet. “It’s someone else.”

“Who’s that, then?”

“It’s… look, Jesus Christ, I can’t tell you these things!”

“But it’s not you.”

Hope flared in his eyes. “Yes, that’s right.”

I sighed. “Is there another Charles Crawley running around who looks and smells just like you?” I asked.

“What?”

“A twin. You don’t have a twin?”

“What? No, no I don’t.”

“I didn’t think so. But see, that’s strange. Because a guy who looks exactly like you, and also named Crawley, although he called himself Johnson, went to a special operator recently and offered him a hundred thousand dollars to take me out. Went to him personally.”

He glanced to his right, a neurolinguistic sign of imagination, not of recall. He was trying to make something up, to find a way out of the corner he had just painted himself into.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe there is someone using my name. Trying to set me up.”

I sighed again. “The operator in question was carrying a cell phone with an integrated digital camera,” I said. “He took about a half dozen pictures of you.”

His pupils dilated. He licked his lips.

“I’m afraid this isn’t going to end the way we were hoping,” I said.

“All right, all right, I’m sorry, I was just afraid. That part was me. But look, I didn’t want to do what I did, I just… I didn’t have a choice.”

“I’m listening.”

He took a deep breath. “You were hired to… to go after someone recently. The problem you have, it’s with that person.”

I shook my head in mild disgust. It’s been my experience that bureaucrats are to killing what the Victorians were to sex: they just can’t bring themselves to call it by name.

I waited, letting the pressure of silence bear down on him. But he stayed cool, resisting the urge to talk. Okay, plan B.

I picked up the stun gun and held it an inch from his eyes, then depressed the trigger. Sharp tendrils of blue electric current crackled between the electrodes, and the acrid smell of ozone cut through the air. He tried to jerk his head away, but there was nowhere for him to go.

I released the trigger. “Remember, Mr. Crawley, my assurance that I wouldn’t hurt you had a condition attached. Let’s not breach the condition, okay?”

The truth was, I didn’t want to hurt him. Fear is a better motivator than pain. Fear is all about anticipation, imagination. Pain is real and quantifiable. Once the pain starts, the person is no longer in fear of it-it’s right there, actually happening. The person might think, okay, this is bad, but I can take it. And he might even be right. So when you’re interrogating someone, once you have to start actually hurting him, you’ve already lost a lot of your leverage. I wanted to avoid all that if I could.

I set the stun gun down. “It’s important that we not hide behind euphemisms and vague references and undefined pronouns, okay?” I said, as though he was a child and I was just explaining the rules of the classroom to him. “It’s important that you tell me exactly who’s coming after me and why. If it turns out that you’re just a bit player in all this, you’ll survive the conversation.”

Now I’d opened a little door of hope for him. All he had to do to march right through it was to betray a few people around him.

Fear of pain, the hope of release. Four out of five interrogators surveyed recommended this combination for…

“Okay,” he said, nodding against the pillow, “okay. If I tell you everything I know about this, will you promise to let me go?”

Denial. A pathetic thing, really. But there are people who need it to get through the tough times. Crawley, it seemed, was one of them.

“Yes,” I said. “But remember, there’s a lot I know already. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. So I’ll know if you’re leaving something out.”

“I understand,” he said, nodding, seeing that door opening wider. “I won’t leave anything out.”

I said nothing. After a moment, he took another deep breath and said, “The man you were hired to… go after. He found out about you. That’s how this started.”

“Say his name.”

“His name?”

“What did I just tell you about being vague? Are you trying to see how far you can push me? Say his fucking name.”

There was a pause, during which he looked like he might be sick. He said, “Belghazi.”

“Good. How did Belghazi ‘find out’ about me?”

“Someone was sent to Macau to kill him. At least, he thinks someone was. A Frenchman, guy named Nuchi, an independent contractor with a lot of Middle Eastern connections. Turned up dead in Macau less than a week ago with a broken neck, at the same time that the man… that Belghazi happened to be out there. Belghazi wanted to know what had happened. Did we know who had sent the guy, that kind of thing.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That we didn’t know anything about it. Which turned out to be true. Except that, when I started looking into it, I found out that we had sent someone, just not Nuchi. We sent you.”

“But you didn’t send the other guy.”

“Who can say for sure? This shit is obviously being set up through outside channels, or you never would have been sent in the first place. But I don’t think that even the idiots behind sending you would have been so stupid as to send two operators on the same op without informing them first.”

He was getting more talkative, which was good. I wanted to keep him going, to continue to foster his new-found loquaciousness. This way, he would be used to the dynamic by the time we got to the heart of the matter, at which point the act of betraying secrets would seem to be not much more than what he had already said and done. Contrary to popular imagination, a good interrogation is much more like a seduction than it is like torture.

“Who do you think sent Nuchi, then?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nobody knows. Nuchi does contract work for various Arab governments and terrorist groups, so the most likely explanation is that he was working for one of his usual clients. Maybe someone who Belghazi cheated, maybe someone trying to muscle in on Belghazi’s sources or on his networks. It’s actually good that the guy is dead. If you did it, you ought to get a medal.”

“But instead of a medal, you warned Belghazi that I was coming after him.”

There was a pause, during which he grappled silently with the realization that I knew this, too. Where possible, you want to give the subject the impression that you already know everything he’s going to tell you. This makes him afraid to hold anything back, and helps him rationalize full disclosure: after all, he’s not divulging anything you don’t already know.

“Yes,” he said, after a moment. “We warned him.”

We, I thought. Come back to that.

“I’d like to hear more about why,” I said.

He closed his eyes, again looking as though he might be sick. “There’s a… relationship there,” he said, after a moment.

Another vague reference, I thought. But I waited to see whether he would find a way past the mental logjam caused by his desire to protect his information, on the one hand, and his desire to still be alive when I left his apartment, on the other.

“He gives us information,” he said finally. “So we… protect him.”

“So Belghazi is a CIA asset,” I said. My tone indicated that this was no great revelation to me, but in fact I was surprised.

He blanched at hearing it out loud. “In a way. He’s not on the books as an asset, he hasn’t been vetted that way, as a source he’s too sensitive and we can’t take a chance on the relationship being known outside the division. But he gives us information.”

“NE Division?” I asked, showing him again that I knew a great deal.

“Jesus,” he said. “How do you… yes, NE.”

“And the information he gives you concerns…?”

He sighed, perhaps now rationalizing at some level, Well, I’ve come this far, what can it hurt, and he probably knows most of it anyway… .

“Concerning the flow of arms, particularly WMD precursors, to groups that might use them against the United States.”

“Precursors?”

“Precursors to weapons of mass destruction. Enriched uranium. Nuclear centrifuge designs. Anthrax culture. EMPTA, a chemical used in the production of VX gas. Etcetera.”

“I’m confused,” I said. “I thought Belghazi is heavily involved in all of this.”

He shook his head. “Belghazi deals in the old-fashioned stuff. Guns and C-4 and RPGs. Stuff we’re used to, that we can live with.”

“I didn’t realize the CIA could be so accommodating.”

“Look, where do you think we get information on WMDs? From choirboys? Nobel Peace Prize winners? Sure, Belghazi is bad, but he’s an angel compared to some of the characters we’re trying to stop.”

“So he gives you information on some of the really bad guys out there…”

“And in exchange we protect him, let him continue with his trade.” He paused and looked at me. “Look, I’m cooperating. Can you untie me? I think I’m losing circulation.”

Nice try, I thought. I’d wrapped him up in such a way that the pressure of the bindings would be maximally distributed and no marks would be left. Accordingly, I knew his circulation was unimpaired.

“You’re doing well,” I said. “If you keep it up, I’ll untie you enough so that you’ll be able to get out of the rest of it by yourself, and I’ll leave.”

“All right,” he said, no doubt comforted by our rational exchange, the civilized back-and-forth of bargaining. Denial again. A guy breaks into your apartment, lies in wait, knocks you out, ties you up, but-no problem!-you’re willing to trust him to keep his word after that. At least you are if you desperately want to believe that you can trust him, glittering hope triumphing, as it often does, over the paler hues of common sense and gut instinct.

“So Belghazi gives you information, and you give him protection,” I said, hoping to jar loose additional information by reflecting back what he’d already said.

“Yes. It’s not an uncommon system. Police departments do it all the time. They couldn’t fight crime without it.”

“Belghazi is a snitch,” I said.

“Exactly.”

I noticed that he had moved us away from the specifics of the CIA’s relationship with Belghazi to a more general discussion of these sorts of relationships in law enforcement. It was nicely done. Albeit futile.

“You say you ‘protect’ Belghazi,” I said. “Tell me more about that.”

His pupils dilated and his eyes shifted right again. He didn’t want to tell me the truth, and was trying to come up with a substitute.

“I can see you don’t want to talk about this, Mr. Crawley,” I said, “and that you’re about to try to fabricate. So, before you say anything, you should know that, if I sense that you’re lying, or even being incomplete, I’m going to pull that pillow out from under your head and smother you with it. Imagine what that’ll be like.” I smiled as though I had just wished him a nice day.

He blanched, then nodded quickly. “All right. Sometimes we share information with him-say, about a rival broker, another deal that’s getting put together. Belghazi can use that kind of intelligence to scuttle the other deal, or undercut it. Twice he’s even used the information we provided to have a rival eliminated, which we generally view as a not undesirable outcome. Or if we learn that he’s being watched by a rival intelligence service, or by law enforcement, we warn him.”

I nodded. “But that’s not what you were hoping not to tell me a moment ago,” I said, my tone regretful, as though in anticipation of what I was going to have to do next.

“No, no it’s not,” he said quickly. “We also, sometimes, sometimes we put people on the ground. Oversee a transfer.”

All right, here we go. The moment of truth.

“You keep saying ‘we,’ ” I said. “Tell me who else is involved.”

He closed his eyes and nodded his head for a long moment, as though trying to comfort himself. Then he said, “There’s a former Near East Division officer. He’s a NOC, nonofficial cover, based in Hong Kong, attached to the Counter Terrorism Center. He has a lot of autonomy, and a lot of authority. The other officers stationed there give him a lot of leeway and a lot of discretion.”

“Why?”

He sighed. “The CTC guys are spooky. Area division personnel don’t really know what the CTC types are up to. Hell, I don’t generally know what they’re up to-look how CTC in Langley decided to have Belghazi eliminated, I was totally in the dark about that. Anyway, the attitude is, those CTC guys are into the black arts, maybe I don’t really even want to know. You know, they don’t talk much about what they’re up to, but they’re doing God’s work, don’t ask, don’t tell, just leave ’em alone and go out for drinks with the usual diplomatic suspects, write up an after-action report, call it a night.”

“And this guy in Hong Kong…”

“He knows about Belghazi from his days with NE.”

Finally, the link I’d been looking for: Belghazi to Mr. NOC to Crawley.

But Hong Kong… something about the Hong Kong connection was troubling me. I wasn’t sure what it was.

“Is this guy, the NOC, how you learned about me?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Tell me,” I said.

He swallowed. “Belghazi called the NOC about the dead Frenchman. The NOC checked with Headquarters CTC. He found out that Belghazi was on a list of terrorist infrastructure targets. And that we had sent someone after him in Macau.”

“He found out who?”

He nodded. “Only your name. But the Agency has a whole file on you. Once I had your name, it was easy for me to get the file from Central Records.”

“What was in the file?”

“You know, your history. A bio, suspected location, and activities.”

“What else?”

“Just an old photo. That was all.”

I thought about the photo, and about the way Belghazi had noticed me at the Lisboa. If the photo was military era, and I assumed it was, it would have been three decades out of date and wouldn’t have accounted for the plastic surgery I’d had in the interim. Still, it might have been enough for Belghazi to confirm my identity. Or they could have digitized it, worked on it to bring it up to date. Yeah, that was him, I could imagine him saying. The bastard sat right next to me in the VIP room of the Lisboa. Same night I got sick. Damn, he probably poisoned me.

Then they would have distributed copies to the Saudi team in Hong Kong and Macau. I had been right about the way that spotter was scrutinizing me.

“Who else did you check with?” I asked, hiding the irritation that was building at the thought of these idiots relentlessly, robotically, ruining the little peace I might otherwise have known.

He looked at me, wondering, I sensed, just how much I knew, how much he could try to hold back.

“People in Japan,” he said. “One of the Tokyo Station officers. Because the file said you were based there.”

“Kanezaki?”

His eyes widened. “God all-fucking mighty,” he said.

“What did Kanezaki tell you?”

“Not much,” he said, recovering a little composure. “He’s an asshole.”

I almost smiled. From my perspective, that was the best character reference Kanezaki could ever have received.

“Who else?”

“Japanese liaison-the kay, kay something.”

“Keisatsucho.” Tatsu’s outfit.

“Yeah. They had a file on you, too.”

“What do you know about a woman named Delilah?” I asked, trying to catch him off guard, see if I got a reaction.

“Delilah?”

“Blond woman, cosmopolitan, probably Israeli, maybe European. Spending time with Belghazi.”

He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of her. She’s Israeli, spending time with Belghazi?”

I looked at him, ignoring the question. I didn’t see any dissembling in his eyes.

I looked at my watch. We’d been chatting for five minutes.

“What’s Belghazi doing in Macau, anyway?” I asked.

“What he always does. Meeting with customers, making sure the shipping infrastructure is in place, overseeing a delivery, that kind of thing. Business in Hong Kong, gambling in Macau. He likes to gamble.”

I nodded, thinking. All right, Dox’s story, Kanezaki’s story, Tatsu’s story, things were checking out.

Wait a minute. Dox. That was the Hong Kong connection, the thing that had nagged at me a second earlier. Dox had been using a photo to find me there. And apparently he had some local connections, connections that were sufficient to get the hotel staff’s full attention over a “police matter.”

“Who’s the NOC?” I asked.

“I told you, a former NE Division officer, now attached to the CTC.”

“His name.”

His breathing shortened and quickened. “Please, please, don’t make me tell you that. Why would you need to know, anyway? Please, I can’t tell you something like that. I’ve told you everything else, I really have!”

I had thought that, by this point, we’d have enough momentum to get over this kind of bump. Apparently I’d been mistaken.

“Do you think, if he were in your shoes, he’d die before giving up your name?” I asked. “Because that’s what you’re choosing to do.”

“I don’t know what he’d do. I can’t… I just can’t tell you another officer’s name. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Two things,” I said. “First, I’m eighty percent certain I know who he is, and just want the confirmation.” This was a lie, of course, but I wanted to make it easier for Crawley to rationalize if rationalizing was what it was going to take. “Second, I’m only interested in him because he can get me close to Belghazi. So, in not telling me the name, you’re choosing to die to protect Belghazi, not to protect Agency personnel.”

He closed his eyes, and tears began leaking out. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry.”

Shit, his hope, real or false, was fading. My leverage would be fading with it.

“The operator you went to,” I asked, fishing now. “To have me removed. He goes by the name of Dox. Is he the NOC?”

He didn’t answer. He just continued to shake his head and silently weep. His reaction told me nothing.

“I’ll give you one more chance,” I said. “The NOC’s name. Live or die, it’s up to you.”

He didn’t answer, and I realized that at some level he might not even have heard me. He had made his decision and had already accepted the consequences. I could have tried some sort of crude torture, but was reluctant to do so. The benefits of information extracted by torture are usually minimal. The costs to the psyche tend to be significant.

Still, the next part wasn’t going to be pleasant. I’d talked with him now, interacted with him, witnessed his tears and his fear and his misguided loyalty. All guaranteed to slice through decades of suddenly soft emotional callus and remind me that it was another human being whose life I was about to take.

But I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t very well leave him alive after this encounter. He would warn Belghazi, warn the NOC in Hong Kong. And I’d mentioned Delilah, too. If he told Belghazi about her, she’d be dead that very night.

I wondered briefly if I’d mentioned her name to him to force my own hand, to clarify that, by sparing his life, I’d be ending hers.

I reminded myself that he had tried to have me killed. That, given the opportunity, he would certainly do so again.

Don’t think. Just do it.

I felt a valve closing over my empathy like a watertight bulkhead. The bulkhead would open later, I knew, as the pressure built behind it, but it would hold long enough for me to finish the matter at hand.

I picked up the stun gun and jolted him again. He jerked violently from the shock, but the pillow kept him from marking his head. After about ten seconds I released the trigger and set the unit aside.

I sat him up and got behind him. I hooked my legs over his, wrapped my arms around his neck in a hadaka-jime strangle, and dropped back to the plastic-covered floor so that my body was under his. I put the strangle in carefully, using just enough pressure to close off the carotids, but not enough to damage his trachea or to cause any bruising. He didn’t make a sound and he was unconscious within seconds. I held him that way for several minutes, until unconsciousness had deepened into death.

I got up and dragged him to the living room closet. The plastic was practically frictionless on the carpet and made the job easier.

I laid him down under the dowel in the storage closet and went back to the living room. I like to clean up as I go along-one step, one cleanup. Repeat. Makes it easier not to forget anything. I picked up the duct tape, then noticed something: a swath in the carpet where the fibers had all been pulled in the same direction by his plastic-assisted passage. I walked back and forth along the swath until it had been eradicated.

I went back to the closet, dropped the duct tape, and cut the plastic off him with the box cutter. I noticed that his boxers were damp-he’d pissed himself as he’d lost consciousness and died. Not uncommon. It was lucky he had just used the toilet or I might have had a more considerable mess to deal with.

I opened the folding doors near the entrance and turned on the washing machine. I added some detergent, then walked back to the closet, where I retrieved Crawley’s shorts and tee-shirt. I threw them into the machine. Then I grabbed a couple of washcloths from the bathroom, which I used to clean him up. These, too, went into the wash, along with the contents of a plastic laundry basket that was sitting on top of the dryer. A small detail, but you don’t want to leave loose ends, such as, Why did the dead guy wash just his boxers, a tee-shirt, and two washcloths? Why didn’t he throw in the rest of the dirty laundry, too? I also took a moment to hang his coat, suit, shirt, and tie in the clothes closet.

I pulled off the deerskin gloves I’d been wearing, went to the storage closet, and pulled on the surgical pair. I grabbed the K-Y jelly and headed to the bathroom, where I squeezed out half the tube’s contents into the sink, washing it all down with hot water. Then back to the closet, where I put Crawley’s hands on the tube to ensure that it would be personalized with his fingerprints.

I set the tube on the ground and fashioned the clothesline into a slipknot. I pulled the knot over his head and ran the other end of the line over the hanging dowel, close to the angle brace where it would be strongest. Then I used the rope to haul him up onto his knees. He listed forward a few degrees, but the rope restrained him. I tied off the end on the dowel, cut off all but about three feet of the excess, and stepped back.

Diminished oxygen supply to the brain, called cerebral anoxia, can intensify sensations, making it, for some people, a good accompaniment to masturbation. The practice is known as autoerotic asphyxiation and usually remains a secret until the enthusiast dies accidentally in the midst of the proceedings. The statistics make extreme sports look safe by comparison: somewhere from five hundred to a thousand fatalities every year in the United States alone.

I looked at Crawley for a moment. Make that a thousand and one.

I applied a measure of K-Y jelly to his right hand and his genitals, then stepped back and observed. Yeah, that looked about right. The private life of a “State Department” bureaucrat. The quintessence of buttoned-down Washington Beltway seriousness by day; periodic bouts of autoerotic asphyxiation games by night. Really, you just never know what goes on behind closed doors. Especially closed closet doors.

A sudden thought nagged me: Was he right-handed? Or left?

Hmm, should have thought to find a way to check on that earlier. Sloppy. But the hell with it, no harm done. Maybe he enjoyed himself in private ambidextrously. Who could say one way or the other? The main thing was, the CIA wouldn’t want this getting out. They’d want it dealt with quickly, quietly, and cleanly. They’d call it an embolism, a weak heart wall, something like that, and, wanting to believe this was the case, they’d repeat it until they did. Even if they had some suspicions, they would be reluctant to do anything that might cause this to leak. All of which would mean less pressure for me.

I pulled off the surgical gloves, dropped them inside out into the briefcase, and slipped once again into the deerskin pair. I eased into the overcoat. I rolled up the plastic, picked up the rest of the items, and put them in the briefcase, too, which I carried back into the living room. I looked around.

Take it backward, starting with the bathroom. I double-checked everything, then triple-checked. Nothing was out of place. No telltale signs. The washing machine was cycling through rinse. Crawley’s things would be clean soon.

One last check of the closet. Everything was in order, Crawley included. He was canted forward, the rope preventing him from tipping onto his face, his knuckles resting alongside him against the carpeting. Well, there are worse ways to go, I thought. And I’ve seen plenty of them.

Ordinarily, I work under substantial time constraints, and don’t have the opportunity for triple-checks, and certainly not for reflection, when the job is done. But this time, it seemed, I did.

I watched Crawley’s lifeless form, thinking of all the death I had seen, of the deaths I had caused, starting with that unlucky Viet Cong near the Xe Kong river so many years before. I wondered what that poor bastard would be doing today if our paths had never crossed.

Probably he’d be dead anyway, I thought. An accident or a disease or someone else would have killed him.

Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he would have lived, and today he would be married, to a pretty Vietnamese girl, a fighter, as he had been, and they would have three or four children, who would revere their parents for the sacrifices they had made during the war. Maybe his first grandchild would have been born recently. Maybe he would have wept with terrible joy as he hugged his child’s child to his own thin chest, thinking how strange life was, how precious.

Maybe.

I sighed, watching Crawley’s oddly canted form. He looked relaxed, somehow, untroubled, as cadavers often do.

In developed countries most people live their lives without ever even seeing a body, or, if they do, it’s an open-casket affair, where you have context and witness only the peaceful, ruddy-cheeked façade of the mortician’s artifice. When Mom and Dad die, they’re taken care of by strangers in a nursing home two towns over. The kids don’t have to see them go. They don’t even have to see them after. They just get a “we’re sorry to inform you” call late that night from the institution’s management, for whom such calls are as routine as putting out the weekly garbage is for a suburban homeowner. The funeral home picks up the body. The cemetery buries it. Unless you’re a professional, you might live your whole life without seeing someone in the moment of leaving his own.

People don’t know. They don’t know the way the jaw goes slack, how the skin turns instantly waxy and yellow, how readily the eyelids close when you ease them shut. They don’t know the awful smell of blood and entrails, or how, even if you can wash the stench from your skin, nothing can ever cleanse it from your memory. They don’t know a hundred other things. You might as well ask them about the mechanics of butchering the animals that become the meat on their supper tables. They don’t want to see any of that, either. And things are set up so they don’t have to.

Sometimes I can forget the divide this knowledge produces, the way it separates me from those unburdened by its weight. Mostly, though, I can’t. Midori sensed it even from the beginning, I think, although it wasn’t until later that she fully grasped its essence.

Yeah, sometimes I can forget, but never for very long. Mostly I look at the innocents around me with disdain. Or resentment. Or envy, when I’m being honest with myself. Always with alienation. Always from a distance that has nothing to do with geography.

I walked over to the door and looked through the peephole. There was nothing out there.

I let myself out, checking to ensure that the door had locked behind me. I left through the front entrance, just another resident, heading out for the evening. Someone new was at the front desk. Even if the college girl had still been there, she wouldn’t have recognized me. The light disguise I had been wearing earlier was gone, of course; but more than that, I was a different person now. Then, I had been a timid immigrant in a cheap, ill-fitting windbreaker, a visitor to the building. Now I walked as though I owned the place, a resident in a professional-looking overcoat, on his way out to a foreign car and thence to an important job at the office, a responsible position that no doubt occasionally required evening hours.

I left the building and crossed the street. I took off the galoshes, put them in the briefcase, and got in the car. I drove a few miles to another strip mall, where I changed into some of the clothes I was traveling with: gray worsted pants and an olive, lightweight merino wool crewneck sweater. I slipped the overcoat back on and was glad for its warmth.

For the next hour or so I drove around suburban Virginia, stopping at gas stations and convenience stores and fast food places, depositing a relic or two from the Crawley job at each of them until the briefcase was empty and it, too, had been discarded, in a Dumpster at a Roy Rogers. I pitched it in with the other refuse and watched a small avalanche of fast food wrappers cascade down and bury it.

I walked back to the car. The leafless trees along the road looked skeletal against the night sky beyond. I paused and stared for a long moment at that sky, at whatever might lie beyond it.

Oh, did I offend you? I thought. Go ahead, then. Take your best shot. I’m right here.

Nothing happened.

A minute passed. I started to shiver.

Suddenly I was exhausted. And hungry. I needed to get something to eat, and find a hotel.

I got in the car and pulled out onto the road again. I felt alone, and very far from home.

Wherever that might be.