Requiem for an Assassin

9

THE NEXT DAY, I continued to familiarize myself with the terrain: the patterns of traffic (there weren’t any); presence of security (in front of banks, jewelry stores, and higher-end hotels); the best vantage points (the Rex, Saigon Tax, some of the hotel restaurants). I looked for anything out of place, any signs of a setup. I experimented with different personas. As an American, and carrying a map, I was assailed with offers of rides on motorcycles and in cyclos; as a Japanese, less so; when I’d bought some local clothes and started imitating the walk, the posture, the expressions of the natives, I was left alone entirely.

I had a lunch of pho noodle soup and watermelon juice, then bought a camera tripod to augment the Nikon D70 digital SLR I had brought with me. I finished mapping things out and was satisfied. After that, I had nothing to do but wait.

AT SIX O’CLOCK that evening, the sun had set, but the air was still hot and wet. The back and chest of my shirt were dark with sweat, the shifting crowds and insectile drone of motorcycles close upon me. I stopped in an ice cream shop around the corner from the Rex to rest and wait. I bought a cone and enjoyed it, along with the scant, periodic relief offered by a lone oscillating ceiling fan. Thirty people were crammed into the seats around me, but they paid me no heed. I’d picked up the local vibe and faded right into it.

My phone buzzed. I glanced at the readout-Dox’s mobile-and picked up. “Yeah.”

“I’m here,” Hilger said. “In the city. Where are you?”

I put a fifty-thousand dong note on the table and started moving. “District One. You?”

“The same. Where are we going to do this?”

I kept moving, watching the sidewalk and street. “You know the HSBC building?”

“No, but I’m sure I can find it.”

“Ask anyone. You can see it from most of District One-there aren’t many high-rises. There’s a coffee shop on the ground floor. Meet me there in ten minutes.”

I clicked off and headed into the Rex. Two minutes later, I was in my third-floor balcony perch. No one had fixed the lightbulb. I set up the camera and tripod, then looked down at the statue of Ho through the 400mm telephoto lens. I could see every detail. If anyone asked, I was just a Japanese photography hobbyist, trying to capture the essence of the plaza below me. But I didn’t expect to be challenged. The Rex was never that kind of place.

Ten minutes later, my phone rang again. It was Hilger. “You’re not here,” he said.

“I got nervous. I wanted something more public.”

There was a pause. “Don’t fuck with me, Rain. If I abort this meeting, your friend is going to die.”

That was a bluff. Whatever he wanted from me, he wanted it badly enough to have come this far. I could safely take him along a little farther.

“I’m not fucking with you,” I said. “Just walk to the City Hall, the huge French building a block south of you. There’s a plaza in front of the building with a statue of Ho Chi Minh. Lots of people around. Meet me in front of the statue.”

Two minutes later, he showed. Through the camera lens, I could see everything in the brightly lit plaza, even the beads of perspiration on Hilger’s face. His right side was to me. I didn’t see an earpiece. So far, so good.

This time I called him. “Are you there yet?” I asked.

He looked around. “Yeah, I’m here. Why aren’t you?”

“I’m being careful.”

“You’re being too careful. You’re going to blow this whole thing.”

“How do I know you’re not setting me up?

“You’re the one who asked for this meeting, remember?”

There was a pause. I said, “There’s a shopping center right in front of you, if your back is to City Hall. Saigon Tax, the one with the big Motorola sign on the façade, across the street from the Sheraton. With a Citibank building visible behind it. I’m inside, in the Góc Saigon café. Rooftop of the shopping center. Come on up and you can find me.”

I watched him glance behind, then to the sides, then up at the buildings around him. I waited, and was rewarded with a close view of his left ear-empty, like his right. His eyes swept right over the dark spot where I stood. That’s right, I thought. I might be here. Or in Saigon Tax. Or in a room at the Sheraton. Or maybe I set up video in one of the vans in front of the Rex and I’m watching you remotely. Or I’m not watching you at all. The point is, you don’t fucking know.

He clicked off without a word and headed up the plaza, toward Saigon Tax. I tracked him through the camera for a moment, then watched the plaza unaided.

A few seconds later, I spotted a burly blond guy moving casually behind Hilger and in the same direction. I looked through the camera and saw that his eyes were everywhere, taking in all the details, his head tracking slowly left and right as he walked. The visual alertness was out of sync with the casual gait, and I made him as Hilger’s backup. I made him so fast, in fact, that I wondered for a moment whether he was supposed to serve not just as backup, but also as a distraction. The idea is, the opposition knows you’re looking for backup, or for surveillance, or whatever, so it serves up exactly what you expect. And because you’ve now spotted the danger you knew was going to be there, your mind unconsciously closes to other, less obvious possibilities. I knew there was going to be something…oh, there it is! is the mindset of amateurs and others without much hope of longevity in this business. I knew there was going to be something…there’s one, now where are the others? is the mindset of survivors.

The guy kept gliding forward like a panther, confident, balanced. He was wearing rectangular, wireless glasses, and felt vaguely European to me. I wondered if he was the one who had picked up the phone when I first called from Paris. There was a readiness about him, not just in his alertness but in his balance, his stride. If I had to take him out, I would definitely use a tool, along with as much surprise as I could muster.

I snapped a dozen photos, then examined the plaza for any other possibles in Hilger’s wake. This was the hotel district, and there were foreigners around, but none of them tickled my radar. They were either too old, or too flabby, or with women and children. Most relevantly, none of them had that quality, no matter how subtle, of exceptional awareness that’s almost impossible to conceal when you’re moving and operational. I folded up the tripod, put it in my backpack, and headed up to the Rex’s rooftop bar. Concealed behind a garden that hadn’t existed back in the day, I had a perfect view of the sidewalk in front of Saigon Tax. Mr. Blond was waiting on the sidewalk outside.

If Hilger was willing to let Mr. Blond drift that far behind him, he really must have been confident I wouldn’t try to take him out while he held Dox. Or else Mr. Blond really was a distraction, in which case someone more subtle would shortly follow Hilger into the building. I waited, but saw no one I identified as a problem.

I headed down an internal staircase, cut southwest on Le Loi, then crossed the street with fifty other pedestrians, motorcycles buzzing around us. On the other side of the street was a parking garage with its own entrance into Saigon Tax. I slipped inside, checking hot spots as I moved. Nothing rubbed me the wrong way. I turned a corner and waited. No one came in behind me. I waited for another minute, making sure Hilger had time to get to the restaurant ahead of me.

I entered Saigon Tax and used one of the internal staircases, pausing at the balcony of each successive floor to look above and below. Still nothing out of place. I continued to the fourth floor, where I cut across to the northeast side of the building, scanning as I moved. Still clear.

I came to the stairs that led to the Góc Saigon. I took one last look around. All clear. Okay.

I turned off my phone and turned on the other miniature bit of electronics I was carrying, a bug detector my martyred friend Harry, a hacker adept at kluging together all kinds of improvised devices, had made for me in Tokyo. If Hilger was wired, the detector would vibrate in my pocket and let me know. I headed up the steps to the restaurant.

The place sprawled out in an L shape, partly under a roof, mostly under the dark Saigon sky. Wood floors, slatted wooden tables and chairs, twinkling lights strung out across plantings like Christmas ornaments. Diners, but only a handful because it was still early, and none who appeared to have just arrived.

A hostess approached. I glanced at her, saw she wasn’t a threat, and went back to scanning the restaurant. The woman offered to seat me. I shook my head but otherwise ignored her and kept moving.

I hadn’t seen Hilger yet, so if he was here, he must be around the corner, in the short end of the L. I kept close to the inner wall, came to the edge, and snuck a quick peek around. There he was, sitting in the corner, his back to the concrete wall, his feet planted under him, ready to move, his head up and his eyes alive. The surrounding tables were all empty, this end of the L momentarily deserted.

He stood when he saw me coming and took a step back from the table, but slowly, showing me his hands. They were empty, the fingers splayed slightly. I approached him in the same nonthreatening way.

I moved toward him until I was in front of his table, then turned and faced him so my side was to the corner of the L. I wanted to be able to see anyone who came in after me and still have time to react.

He angled slightly away from me so that I was facing more of his left side than his front. He rubbed his chin with his left hand, the forearm vertical across his body, the other hand touching his elbow. I noted from the stance that he was right-handed, confirming my recollection of what I’d learned while witnessing his pistol craft at the China Club and at Kwai Chung the last two times we’d crossed paths. Although it was intended to look thoughtful and nonthreatening, the stance covered up most of his vital points. He was concerned I might attack. He was right to be.

Not for the first time, it occurred to me that he must be highly motivated to incur the risks he was running. I wondered what he was after, and who he could be working for.

“Let’s go,” I said.

He looked doubtful. “Where?”

“Someplace else. You might have called someone and told him where we are.”

“I’m alone.”

I wasn’t going to tip my hand by asking about Mr. Blond. “That’s good to hear,” I said. “Indulge me anyway.”

I’m not getting any younger, but I have still two advantages. First, I’ve always been unusually quick-partly the result of genetics, partly of obsessive training. Second, I can go from stonelike stillness to explosive violence without any of the usual precursors. The signs people know to look for-obvious ones, like shouting, gesticulating, and other posturing, and less obvious ones, like the face going white and the pupils dilating-I don’t exhibit, or have learned to mask. I can hurt you, or worse, and the only sign you’ll have of what’s coming is that I was close enough to do it.

Hilger didn’t know that. I was close, sure, but the sum total of his experience would be telling him that there’d be some warning, some noticeable transition, and that therefore he would have the necessary moment to react. So it really wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t ready for what happened next.

“You need to…” he started to say.

I closed the distance with one long step, my lead hand feinting for his face. His eyes popped open in surprise and his arms flinched upward-away from my trailing knee, which arced up and slightly around on the way to its abrupt run-in with his balls. He made a sound you might describe as vomitus interruptus and doubled over into me. I shoved him into the wall and had the folder open against his neck in an instant. The edge might not have offered longevity, but it was plenty sharp at the moment, and I pressed it against his carotid, the pressure just short of breaking the skin, my fist in his Adam’s apple, my left hand securing his right wrist and keeping it away from anything he might have in his pocket.

“Hands up, shitbag,” I breathed. “Against the wall, alongside your head. Move for a weapon and I’ll open you down to your spine.”

Beyond my substantive need to check him for weapons, it was important that I give him an option other than resistance or death. If he were convinced I was going to kill him, I couldn’t expect cooperation. As it was, he decided to comply. He grimaced and slowly got his arms up against the wall. His head was pressed back, his chin tucked in against my fist, his nostrils flaring with his breathing. His eyes were narrowed to slits, coldly observing me.

I stared back at him, and realized with a start how close I was to doing it. Grab his hair, shove his head to the left, rip right, sidestep to avoid the spray. Walk outside, fillet Mr. Blond before he had a chance to react. Go Keyser Söze on them, let the remnants of Hilger’s team understand who they were fucking with and what was coming for them next.

“I don’t check in, my men do Dox,” he said, as though reading my thoughts. “It’s automatic.”

Maybe, I thought. Or maybe your men let Dox go at that point, to mollify me. What good is he to them, anyway, if you’re dead? Yeah, let him go. A quitclaim, a peace offering.

Jesus. I wanted to kill him so badly I was actually panting a little. And rationalizing everything else, even Dox’s life, to give myself permission.

Do it. Just fucking do it. End it now and you can walk away.

I imagined Dox, helpless somewhere, cut off, in pain, and somehow the thought stayed my hand. My whole body trembling with ambivalence, I turned Hilger around and patted him down. He was carrying two knives, a folder and a belt unit. I pocketed both. Next, Dox’s mobile phone. I turned it off and pocketed it, too. Other than a roll of dong and greenbacks, he was carrying nothing else, not even a wallet.

I backed away from him, closing the knife as I moved. I put it back in my pants, noting that Harry’s bug detector had stopped vibrating the moment I had turned off Dox’s phone. Hilger was clean.

I watched him, dumbfounded, on some level, that he was still alive, that I’d managed to hold back. He swallowed and his right hand drifted to his throat, rubbing it, caressing the undamaged skin. He was breathing hard.

The hostess turned the corner and pulled up short. She hadn’t seen what had happened a second earlier, but she could feel the aftermath. I glanced at her and said, “Give us a minute.” She nodded and backed away.

I looked at Hilger. “Let’s go.”

He shook his head. “Out of the question,” he rasped.

“You’re not thinking clearly,” I said, a part of me shouting It’s not too late-just step back in and fucking finish him! “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be bleeding out right now. You said it yourself: I can’t touch you while you’re holding Dox. I’m the one who has to worry about surprises, not you. There’s no reason we can’t walk out of here together. Unless you want to keep me here because you’ve got backup you told about this meeting place. In which case, I’m going to assume this was a setup.”

What I’d said was logical. Which is why I wanted him to refuse. If he did, I would have no choice. I could butcher him and whatever happened to Dox after wouldn’t be my fault.

He didn’t say anything. He might have been considering my point. He might have been thinking about the hostess, and wondering whether she was freaked out enough to call the police. He might have seen in my eyes how much I was hoping he would refuse. Regardless, after a moment he nodded.

We left Saigon Tax through the garage entrance, heading southwest on Le Loi and then turning left on Pasteur. I flagged down a cab and had it take us to the Ben Thanh Market, a labyrinthine produce emporium stretching out over an entire city block. I watched behind us as we moved, but couldn’t be sure amid all the motorcycles that no one was following us. Inside the market, there were hundreds of Vietnamese, shuffling along. Hilger and I moved fast and directly, and I didn’t see anyone trying to match our pace, but still, I wasn’t as sure as I usually am, or as I like to be. I reminded myself Hilger had been in the city only for a day. Hiring and deploying local talent that fast would have been a hell of a stretch.

Hilger kept up and didn’t give me any more trouble. We got another cab on the Le Thanh Ton side of the market, which I had take us to the Park Hyatt. The route gave me another opportunity to check behind us, when we turned right on Hai Ba Trung. I didn’t think I saw anyone follow us from the market, but…damn it, there were just so many motorcycles, and so many dark stretches of street, and so many of the riders were wearing face masks against the pollution. Did I see that guy earlier, the skinny one in the white tee-shirt, with the black bandanna around his face? Or had that been someone else?

We rode in silence. I noted again that, whatever was motivating Hilger to do all this, it had to be powerful. But what?

I hadn’t counted on so much motorcycle traffic. When I was here during the war, it had been mostly cars, along with jeeps and lumbering deuce-and-a-halfs, of course. The countersurveillance environment was tougher now. I would have to use extraordinary caution later, when I left the meeting. But at least I’d be safe inside. The reason I had chosen the hotel, Saigon’s newest and most deluxe, was that it offered the kind of camera surveillance, guards, and other security that would inhibit an on-the-premises hit.

The cab deposited us at the midpoint of a semicircular driveway. Twin bellmen opened the hotel’s wide double doors and welcomed us. We made our way to the lobby lounge along polished wood floors and muted Persian rugs. There was some jockeying for position as we chose where to sit. In the end, we wound up adjacent to each other at a table along the exterior wall, both of us facing the expansive, two-storied room. The lounge was lit softly by several hammered-metal chandeliers high overhead, and we were surrounded by the sounds of conversation and laughter from the mostly expat crowd around us. It was a safe scene, and therefore surreal.

We sat silently for a few moments, each trying to wait the other out. A pretty waitress broke the standoff by coming to our table and handing us menus. “My name is Ngan,” she said. “May I bring you something to drink?”

Hilger surprised me by asking, “Are you hungry?”

In fact, I was. I’d been keyed up all afternoon and evening, and hadn’t realized that my pho lunch was long gone. And now that the immediate danger was under control, my stomach was demanding attention.

I nodded warily.

“Why don’t you order for us,” he said. “You know the cuisine better than I do.”

I took a quick glance at the menu and selected a variety of spring rolls and dumplings. Hilger surprised me again by ordering a beer. I stayed with orange juice.

Neither of us spoke until Ngan had returned with the drinks and food. When she was gone, Hilger took a sip of his beer and said, “It must feel strange for you to be back here.”

I figured the comment was an elicitation ploy, an attempt to draw something out of me. But I wasn’t sure what. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Memories. My place was the desert. I was in Iraq for the first go-round, and now, you put me someplace with a lot of sand and superheated dry wind, and bam, I go all the way back, body and soul. Like I never left. People who haven’t had that kind of experience…they don’t understand. It’s like they live in two dimensions and you live in three.”

I knew what he was talking about. The part of you that’s formed in battle will always respond to being back on the battlefield. And when you return, I was learning, it feels as though some fitfully sleeping part of you stirs to wakefulness, while the person you thought you were surrenders as quietly as a dream. Maybe that was the paranoia I was feeling. That older self, the self that had kept me alive in the jungle, in places and circumstances where so many other men had died.

We started in on the spring rolls. A table full of Americans to our right erupted in loud laughter at something one of their party had said. Hilger glanced over and shook his head.

“Look at those people,” he said. “Think they own this place, don’t they, think they own the world. Makes me sick sometimes.”

I watched them for a moment, and found I couldn’t disagree. What I saw was a collection of overfed, overprivileged sheep who were born to whatever they had and whose only understanding of real fear and privation was what they received from images broadcast on CNN between commercial breaks for smile-whitening toothpaste and mountain-fresh fabric softeners. They condescended to the locals because the locals needed their money and had to serve them to get it. They didn’t understand that the service was like what the staff provides to the inhabitants of a nursing home. They confused stoicism with passivity, service with servility, the current world order with some ordained plan. They didn’t realize the people they looked down on now were going to own them a little later this century. Or, at the rate the West was going, maybe just bury them, instead.

He popped a dumpling into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed it. He shook his head. “Makes me wonder why I bother.”

I looked at him, intrigued that he was able to laugh and break bread with someone who not an hour earlier had very nearly executed him. I didn’t read this as weakness. On the contrary, Hilger’s easy recovery from our earlier encounter suggested a long and comfortable acquaintance with violence. And more than that, a man so ruthlessly adept at compartmentalizing the personal and the professional that he would be capable of almost anything. If he deemed something necessary, I expected he would act with little compunction and even less warning.

“Why do you bother?” I asked.

He looked away, and for a moment his gaze was distant. I wondered what he was seeing.

“Because things are broken,” he said. “People used to think broken meant a system that could only respond to a crisis. But that’s not broken. Broken is a system that can’t even respond to a crisis.”

“What crisis are you talking about?”

He took a swallow of beer. He glanced at me, then shook his head as though disappointed. “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Why don’t you try me?”

“I’m talking about America. The wheels are coming off, haven’t you noticed? And what are you supposed to do if you care? Join a protest march? A letter to your gerrymandered congressman? What?”

It’s been my experience that people who can express their political views only in metaphors and passionate generalizations are fanatics. Hilger might have been one of them. Or maybe he was trying to obscure his true affiliations, or his lack of any at all. Or this whole conversation was his attempt to draw me out, to gather intelligence about me. Or all of the above.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What are you supposed to do?”

Therapists call it reflection: repeating the patient’s words, rephrased as a question. I had dealt with enough Army shrinks back in the day to find the technique stupid and annoying, and it’s so basic that even machines have been programmed to do it. But it can create a sense of empathy, or in this case its illusion, and draw a subject out.

It didn’t work with Hilger. He said only, “What you can.”

Which in his case, I gathered, was a lot.

I waited, hoping he would add something I could use. After a moment, he said, “It’s too bad it has to be this way with us. I respect you. We ought to be able to work together. I work with a lot of guys like you.”

“Like me how?”

He shrugged. “Smart. Independent. With the insight to understand the way things really work.”

I felt the manipulation, but didn’t know where he was trying to steer me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sure you do. You know democracy’s just a pretty picture. And that to ensure its survival and preserve its appearance, certain men have always done things that no one else can know.”

“Assassinations.”

“Exactly.”

“Coups.”

“Sure.”

“Kidnapping?”

He shrugged. “We call them ‘extraordinary renditions.’”

“Abu Ghraib.”

He shook his head. “I’m not talking about Abu Ghraib. AG was exactly the way not to go about it. People say what happened there is immoral. Shit, it’s worse than immoral. It’s incompetent. The whole thing was nothing but a fishing expedition. Widespread and sanctioned. And once it got out, predictably, we had to bend over backward in the other direction because of all the media scrutiny.”

“I thought the VP said waterboarding was a ‘no-brainer.’ And that was after AG.”

“Believe me, the right people had a lot more freedom before AG. Anyway, the VP doesn’t know what he’s talking about. None of them do. That’s the point. With guys like that in the limelight, more than ever you need the right things done in the dark.”

Okay, so this was “you and I are the pros and everyone else is incompetent.” If he thought that would save him when this was done, he was wrong.

I looked at him. “Yeah? How do you know when it’s right?”

He returned the look. “When it’s necessary.”

“And when is that?”

“When you need something, and there’s no other way to get it.”

“How did you know there was no other way here? You never asked me.”

“Some things you just know.”

“Why don’t you ask me now.”

He shook his head. “Now I’m not asking. I’m telling you. That’s why I had to go through Dox. Because it has to get done.”

A long silent moment passed. I tried not to think of Dox. It helped me keep the latent lust to kill Hilger momentarily on a leash.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me what you want.”

He glanced around, then leaned forward. “Three jobs, like I told you. When you’re done with the first, I’ll give you the second. When you’re done with the second, I’ll give you the third. When you’re done with the third, I’ll release Dox.”

I looked at him. When I spoke, it was half directed at Hilger, half to appease the iceman.

“If you do anything permanent to him,” I said, “you know I’ll find you. And you know what I’ll do to you.”

He offered a faint, humorless smile. “You’re being generous. You’re going to try to find me the moment I let him go, if not before.”

“There’s something you need to understand. I’ve been trying to get out of the life. If I have to revert to protect a friend, I will. But I don’t want to go any further than I have to. Yeah, right now I’m upset. I don’t like the way you got me to the negotiating table. But if you play it straight from here, we might all be able to walk away from this.”

There was a lot of truth in there. Which made it the best kind of lie.

Hilger nodded, but that was all. I didn’t know whether he’d bought it.

“Let me talk to him again,” I said.

He shook his head. “You’ve talked to him once. You can talk to him again after. After each one.”

Something told me I wasn’t going to win on this point and I let it go. I rotated my head, cracking the neck joints. “All right,” I said, “the first one. Who, where, when, how.”

“Who is Jan Jannick, Dutch national, male, forty-five years old. Where is the San Francisco Bay Area, where he’s temporarily resident. When is within five days from today. And how is something that absolutely looks natural.”

The appearance of natural causes is my specialty, and the reason I’ve always been able to charge a premium. Except, of course, when I’m working under duress, when my fees tend to be…waived. I assumed it was the “naturalness” imperative that made Hilger need me, but there might have been more.

“Why natural?”

“You know why. I don’t want anyone asking questions.”

“I’m asking why you don’t want the questions.”

“That’s not something you need to know.”

I thought for a moment. “Five days to get to San Francisco, track this guy, find him, identify a pattern, select an opportunity, plan for an escape…there’s no way. You know that.”

“We already have a lot of the information you’ll need. Home and work addresses, things like that. It’ll save you time. I’ll upload it to the bulletin board.”

“Even so…”

“Jannick is a civilian. He has no surveillance consciousness at all, no security, no clue. He’s as soft a target as you’ve ever gone after. The only trick is making it look natural. That’s why I want you.”

“If he’s that easy, anyone could have done it the way you want.”

“He’s only one of three, remember. And you’re wrong about just anyone being able to do it. Making it look natural is harder than hell, except in the movies, and you know it. You’ve got a talent. It’s why we’re here.”

There was a lot he wasn’t telling me, of course. So all I could do was continue to engage him, continue to try to gather the information that would get Dox out of this. After all, I understood profoundly that Hilger would kill Dox the moment I was done with whatever he wanted doing. Even if I were inclined to give Hilger a pass for his transgression, he couldn’t count on one from Dox. And if Dox and I came after him together, his prospects would be bleak indeed.

Hilger, of course, could do this math as well as I could. And the ruthlessness I sensed in his poise would turn the situation into a simple equation for him, an equation for which the solution set would be obvious, and therefore imperative.

He knew I knew all this. Which meant the third target might be fictitious. I would kill the first two to buy time, thinking I had one more to go before Hilger killed Dox, but in fact I’d have unwittingly finished the whole job at the second target, at which point Dox would die. The third job, then, would be a setup. They’d feed me coordinates on some easy-to-track civilian on terrain they knew well, and when I showed up to take out the red herring, I’d walk into an ambush. Meaning, in effect, that the third target would be me.

Or maybe I’d be the second. Maybe Jannick was Hilger’s only objective, and when he was done, so was Dox. So was I. There were a lot of possibilities, none of them good.

“Are you satisfied?” Hilger asked, as though reading my thoughts.

“With what?”

“With having looked in my eyes. Trusting me to let Dox go when this is done.”

“No. I don’t trust you to do that. But I learned something else from your eyes.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

From his tone, I knew he was concerned that I might have picked up some piece of information he didn’t want me to have. Why else would I have insisted on a meeting? Trusting someone because of what you see in his eyes is a load of shit, although the latest bozo in the White House claimed to have managed a view of Vladimir Putin’s soul that way. And it was clear after what happened in Góc Saigon that I wasn’t going to kill him. What else could I have been after, if not information?

I thought of Mr. Blond. Maybe I’d lost him. Maybe not. Maybe there had been others I hadn’t spotted. I realized now that I’d been wrong in thinking Mr. Blond, and any others, were only backup for Hilger, or part of a setup. More likely, they were a plan B. If I refused to follow instructions, they would have tried to kill me here. Then they would do Dox immediately after.

I took a deep breath, then let it go. “I learned I don’t have a choice.”

He nodded. “You got that right.”

I stood up and took out his knives. I wiped them off with a napkin-I don’t like leaving my fingerprints on weapons-and placed them on the table. He made no immediate move for them, which was smart. I put Dox’s phone on the table, too. There was no way Hilger would have been stupid enough to have used it for any sensitive calls, so there was nothing to gain by taking it. And I wanted a way to reach him quickly if necessary.

“When will the information be on the bulletin board?” I asked.

“It’s there now.”

I looked at him. For the moment, the urge to kill him had faded into the background, like what happens when you get so hungry your appetite temporarily dissipates.

“I’ll be in touch when it’s done,” I said.

He nodded. “I know.”

I turned and walked away. He could damn well pay for the spring rolls himself.