Requiem for an Assassin

1

JIM HILGER and his team sat hunched over a group of surveillance photos in a budget hotel room in Kuta, on Bali ’s famed west coast. The late-afternoon monsoon rains had given way to a clear night sky, and the adjacent beach was still noisy with revelers-Australians, drinking away the last night of a holiday before returning to the grind back home; American frat kids, a bit more adventurous than their peers in Fort Lauderdale, lured to Kuta by true stories of cheap accommodations and oceanside discos and like-minded young people searching for sin; dark-skinned Balinese beauties in bikini tops and sarongs, looking for rich white boyfriends, or, failing that, a night or even an hour in exchange for a proper tip in convertible currency. In fact, the hotel was a popular stop for tourists who had found a local “date” nearby and were in a hurry to consummate the transaction, and the high turnover, cash basis, and reluctance of patrons to meet each other’s eyes made places like this one good expedient safehouses, not just here in Indonesia, but in many other countries where Hilger operated. Sex could be a good cover for secrecy; salaciousness, for murder.

For security, the five of them had arrived one by one earlier that evening at staggered times, and, so as not to stand out, each had come accompanied by an appropriately nubile Balinese companion. Indeed, Hilger knew that two of the men had arrived early enough to fully indulge the cover their temporary girlfriends provided, but Hilger was untroubled by their behavior. He had commanded men in war and understood their needs, and besides, he would rather they get a taste of the local fauna early so they would be less inclined to chase after it late at night. The man they were hunting was dangerous, and Hilger wanted everyone sharp.

Hilger knew the man as Dox, said to be short for “unorthodox,” a nom de guerre the man had acquired during his unsung service in Reagan-era Afghanistan. Once upon a time, Dox had been a Marine sniper, one of the best, but these days worked freelance. Hilger had used him three times. On the first two occasions, Dox had performed superbly. The third had been a disaster, and was what the present operation was all about.

“Look at this,” the man sitting across from Hilger said, pointing at a photo taken through a 500mm lens. “We’ve seen him coming and going from his villa. It’s isolated. I think we could take him there.”

Hilger nodded. The man’s suggestion was sensible. His name was Demeere-a big, blond Belgian bastard and veteran of his country’s Détachement d’Agents de Sécurité. The DAS guys provided security at Belgian embassies. They were trained by Belgian special forces, comfortable in urban environments, and typically multilingual. Demeere had been one of their standouts. As adept in a particularly rigorous form of tai chi as he was with a knife, he had, over the years, assisted Hilger with four successful “renditions” of terror suspects, and Hilger knew his counsel was worth considering.

“I like the villa,” the man behind Demeere said. “Go with what you know, that’s what I say.”

It took some effort on Hilger’s part not to grimace. Demeere, whose back was to the speaker, evinced slightly less facial control.

Hilger looked up and observed the man for a moment. He was standing apart from the rest of them, leaning against the wall by the window while the others sat across from each other on the room’s twin beds. No one responded to his comment. Even pointing out its vapidity would have been more engagement than any of them seemed willing to grant him.

The man liked to refer to himself as Drano, and Hilger hadn’t liked that from the start. Nicknames bestowed by comrades were an honor. If you tried to invent one for yourself, it was a joke, a sign of narcissism and an underlying lack of confidence. Hilger had known better at the time, but he’d lost so many men in the last two years that he’d ignored the warning from his gut as he went about restaffing. Stupid. Never time to do it right, always time to do it over.

The guy had come highly recommended, true. Former Navy SEAL, combat duty in Afghanistan. But that kind of background was merely necessary, and not always sufficient, for what Hilger demanded of his men. Anyway, even among SEALs there was an occasional loser. Apparently, it had been Hilger’s bad luck to come across one of them.

The man to Demeere’s left rotated his bald head, breaking the silence by cracking the joints in his neck. “Better to wait,” he said, looking first at Demeere, then at Hilger, and ignoring Drano completely. “His villa would be convenient, sure, but it’s no coincidence he built the place in the middle of all those rice paddies. You know how long it’ll take us to slog all the way through to his house? If he’s got sensors deployed and sees us coming, he’ll turn us into fertilizer one at a time. And I don’t want to go in on that zigzagging little access road, either. He knows that’s the only approach, he’s got to have it rigged. And trying to set up there while he’s gone would be worse. I guarantee you he’s got layered systems that would warn him. Better to take him on unfamiliar ground. The downside is more potential witnesses and the other risks you get rendering someone in public, but overall our odds are better.”

The man’s name was Frank Garza, but he was known in Hilger’s organization as Pancho, the name given him by his Mexican mother. While Demeere had a deceptively placid exterior, Pancho tended to radiate a not-to-be-fucked-with aura that he had a hard time concealing. A former All-Marine boxing champion, he also had a fourth degree black belt in Kenpo. One night he and Demeere had gotten into a sparring match that had started out playful and then become serious. To Hilger, it had been like watching an irresistible force and an immovable object. If Hilger hadn’t stopped it, the two of them might have crippled each other and destroyed a hotel room in the process.

“The question is, how much time do we have,” the fifth man said, leafing through the photographs. “That town he lives in, Ubud, isn’t exactly huge, so sooner or later he’ll wind up where we want him. But if we need to move fast, we have to go where we know he’ll be. Right now that means the villa.”

The man’s name was Guthrie. His boyish good looks had made for excellent cover during his service as a Federal Air Marshal, and the training he’d received then, along with ferocious natural ability, made him their best combat shooter. Unlike Demeere and Pancho, he was no martial artist, but nor did he believe in fighting, preferring to settle disputes amicably with the Wilson Combat.45 he carried in a belly band under an untucked shirt.

Hilger nodded, considering. There was a lot he hadn’t told them yet. They all hailed from careers in need-to-know environments, and understood his reticence. But maybe he had given them too little. At this point, keeping them in the dark made them unable to properly weigh the costs and benefits, to plan effectively. Yes, he decided. They needed to understand…if not the full picture, then at least a larger part of it.

“You’re all being too cautious,” Drano said, still leaning against the wall and looking down on them as though bored, or in judgment.

Hilger looked up, liking neither the man’s tone nor his choice of “you’re” instead of “we’re.” The other men glanced at one another. Their expressions were too subtle to be called disgusted, but Hilger knew disgust was what they felt. This was hardly the first time Drano had insisted on offering his unsolicited and useless “expertise,” and they were sick of his weak bullshit. The man had been a mistake. And if Hilger didn’t deal with it soon, his men would rightly judge him for it.

“Really,” Hilger said, mildly.

“Really,” Drano said, nodding his head aggressively. “One man, night-vision goggles, just before dawn, a kerosene bomb on that thatched roof of his. We take him when he runs outside.”

“You going to take the neighbors, too?” Hilger asked, his tone even milder now, bordering on gentle. “They’ll come out when they see fire. And do you know which way Dox’ll run? Tell us, so we can be in position. Oh, and police and firefighters, we can expect a few of them to show up, so we’ll need a plan for that, too. And the attention we’ll get during and after from a nocturnal blazing Ubud villa, we’d all appreciate any pointers you could offer us there. This is all assuming you don’t trip a sensor and get your head blown off on the approach to the house, of course. But you could probably bat the bullet out of the air with your own dick if it came to that, right?”

The man shrugged, too stupid, or proud, to admit his mistake. “Sometimes you have to take a chance if you want to get something done,” he said.

The other men weren’t even looking at Drano now. In fact, they’d been making their distrust apparent through body language for a while now, and Drano had picked up on it. It was why he was standing apart-he knew he wasn’t welcome. And the stupid criticism was really just a misguided bid for attention, to be accepted among company to which he aspired to belong.

Hilger suddenly recognized the reason he’d been withholding information from the men, information they needed to plan the operation. It was because he knew this bozo was untrustworthy. And rather than fix the problem, he’d been living with it, hoping it would magically take care of itself. Now that he realized it, he was quietly furious at his own weakness. But all right, better late than never. The man had to go.

He turned to Demeere. “How are we staffed for this?”

“Three is the bare minimum,” Demeere said without hesitating, and Hilger knew from the readiness of the answer that the big Belgian already understood. “Four is comfortable. Five is a hundred percent.”

Hilger nodded. “All right. Then we’re in good shape.” He glanced behind Drano. “Close those drapes, will you?” he said. “They’re open at the edges, it’s sloppy.”

Drano turned and adjusted the drapes. Even without all the other faults that had combined to disqualify him, the cluelessness he displayed right then would have been enough.

In the two seconds during which Drano’s back was turned, Hilger reached with his right hand for the SIG P232 he kept as backup in an ankle holster; grabbed a pillow with his left; and pulled the pillow around the muzzle of the gun, holding the ends tight at his right wrist so that the gun was completely enclosed within it. He raised both arms, aiming at Drano’s head.

Drano turned back. He saw the pillow and the way Hilger was holding it. Without giving him time to process the information or react in any way, Hilger pressed the trigger. There was the crack of a muffled gunshot, and a small, dark hole appeared in Drano’s forehead. His body jerked as though something had shocked him, then he buckled and collapsed to the floor.

The sound of the shot was loud, but not terribly so. The P232 was chambered in.380, a smaller round than the.357 Hilger carried in his primary, a full-size P226. He had chosen the backup just now precisely for its reduced noise profile. And of course the pillow muffled some of the report. Maybe some guy in the next room would look up and wonder what he’d just heard, but when there was no follow-up, he’d happily go back to fucking and sucking and whatever else he was doing that brought him here in the first place.

Drano was lying on his back now, his legs folded under him, his eyes open. A small trickle of blood began to run down his face from the hole in his forehead. Not much, though. The other reason Hilger had selected the P232 was to lessen the chance of the round blowing out the back of Drano’s head, which would have made a mess.

Demeere pulled several tissues out of a box on the nightstand, knelt, and, with his thumb, wadded the paper into the forehead hole, stanching the trickle of blood. Hilger nodded slightly in admiration. There was nothing flashy about Demeere. There didn’t need to be; he was rock solid. How many men could prevent a mess as calmly as he just did?

Hilger collected and pocketed the spent casing, then decocked the pistol and returned it to his ankle. The room was quiet for a moment while they listened for sounds of disturbance, for any sign that someone might want to investigate. There were none.

Pancho said, “Looks like Drano’s gone down the drain.”

Pancho and Demeere laughed. Only Guthrie looked at all discomfited. But he hadn’t been with Hilger as long as the other men.

“Well,” Pancho said, “I’m glad that’s done. Been wanting to do it myself.”

Hilger nodded. “I should have taken care of it sooner.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pancho said with a shrug. “It’s not the kind of thing I’d want you doing lightly.”

They laughed again. After a moment, Hilger said, “We’ll pull up the van when we’re done. Load him in, take him to the boat, punch holes in him and dump him at sea. We’ll be better with just the four of us than we would have been with a weak link like that one.”

Everyone nodded. Demeere tossed a blanket over the corpse and sat back on the bed.

“All right,” Hilger said, after a moment. “Dox…isn’t the ultimate objective. If he were, we could take our time. But our interest in him is secondary.”

Pancho hunched forward, his head dropping as though he were zeroing in for a knockout. “Access agent, then?”

Hilger nodded. “An unwilling one.”

“Who’s the primary?” Pancho asked.

Hilger looked at Demeere, who he suspected had already guessed.

Demeere said, “John Rain.”

Pancho looked at Hilger. “The freelancer? The one who took out Winters?”

Hilger nodded. “And Calver and Gibbons, too. Those losses were why I had to dig so deep and bring in a mistake like Drano. It’s hard to find good people.”

Pancho returned his gaze to Demeere. “How’d you know?”

Demeere shook his head to indicate he wasn’t privy to any knowledge Pancho lacked. “I didn’t. I guessed.”

Pancho cracked his knuckles and stared at Demeere as though considering how much credence to give the man’s response.

Guthrie said, “Rain…this is the Japanese assassin, right?”

Demeere nodded. “Half Japanese. His mother was American. But he looks Japanese. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. I’ve never seen him. Not many people have.”

Hilger said, “I have.”

The third time Hilger had used Dox, the man was supposed to eliminate Rain. Dox knew Rain from Afghanistan, a connection Hilger thought would enable the former sniper to get close enough to do the job. He’d gotten close enough, all right, so close that Rain and Dox had joined forces and then in the space of a single year had torn apart two of Hilger’s operations. True, it hadn’t been personal-neither man had understood what those operations were really about-but Hilger’s losses had been considerable. Among other things, he had been forced to abandon the Hong Kong cover he had been living and relocate to Shanghai.

Also, at the disastrous conclusion of that second blown op, Dox had leveled Hilger from behind with a chair launched from the top of a riser of stairs. It could have been worse-if Dox had been properly armed, Hilger would be dead now. As it was, the massive bruise from the impact had lasted for a month; the memory, considerably longer. Hilger couldn’t deny that he took some pleasure in imagining how he would soon squeeze Dox for the information he wanted.

Pancho was still staring at Demeere. The half-Mexican was a reliable operator, but prone to feel slighted easily and to react with anger.

Hilger decided to cut short a possible argument. “Demeere was in charge of the op to try to render Rain out of Bangkok. He was running Winters and a local team there. That’s how he knew just now. How he guessed.”

Pancho eased back an inch on the bed. “How’d it go down?”

“We don’t know all the details,” Demeere said. “It seems Rain spotted the ambush Winters had set, and attacked. Two of the locals got away. Two others Rain killed with a knife. Winters was found in an alley with defensive wounds on his arms and a slashed subclavian artery. Bled out internally.”

“Rain beat Winters in a fucking knife fight?” Pancho asked. “I knew Winters. He had a kali background. Trained in the Philippines. He was good with a blade.”

“Rain’s had a lot of training, too,” Hilger said. “Judo. Boxing. Edged weapons when he was with Special Forces. And a hell of a lot of practical experience.”

Pancho nodded as though considering. Demeere looked at him and asked, “Does that make you nervous?”

Pancho returned the look. “No.”

Demeere offered a slight, chilly smile. “It should.”

Pancho smiled back. “Maybe Rain just got lucky. Or maybe Winters wasn’t being run properly.”

Guthrie said, “Anyway, the point is, Winters was good.”

Demeere, his eyes still on Pancho, said in lightly accented but otherwise perfect English, “Fuck-all good.”

“What about Calver and Gibbons?” Guthrie asked.

“Shot to death,” Hilger said. “In a Manila restroom, while they were trying to protect an agent in another op.”

Pancho looked at Hilger. “So you’re looking for payback. To take Rain out.”

Hilger shook his head. “I want him to do a job.”

Pancho squinted and pursed his lips as though thinking. Hilger didn’t know whether he was confused or disappointed or both.

“If he’s freelance,” Guthrie asked, “why not just hire him, through channels?”

“Two problems,” Hilger said. “First, I don’t know how to contact him. I tried to locate him, and couldn’t even find where he is. At one point he was known to be in Tokyo, then supposedly in São Paulo or Rio. The reports are all several years out of date, though, and I doubt he’s still living in either country. And even if he were, it wouldn’t be enough to go on. Brazil has the world’s largest Japanese expatriate community. Rain would be invisible there. More so in Japan. He always kept a low profile, but these days he might as well be a ghost.”

Guthrie said, “What’s the second problem?”

Hilger shrugged. “For now, let’s just say that I doubt what I want him for is something he’d do voluntarily. Dox is his friend, one of only a few. That means Dox knows how to contact him, and it means Dox is the leverage to make Rain cooperate.”

“They’re that close?” Guthrie said.

Hilger nodded. “I saw Dox carry Rain over his shoulder out of a firefight at Kwai Chung harbor in Hong Kong. Five million dollars in play, and Dox walked away from it to save his partner when he got hit. So I’d say they’re close, yeah.”

Pancho said, “What you’ve got in mind, the thing you want Rain for, you can’t handle in-house?”

Again, Hilger detected disappointment. He shook his head. “Rain is the right resource for this. We just have to get to him.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Guthrie said, “How much time do we have, then? To snatch Dox.”

Hilger shuffled through a few more of the photos, looking for a pattern. He felt something beginning to cohere.

“We can give it a few more days,” Hilger said. “If we haven’t had an opening at that point, we can work the villa angle. But I agree with Pancho, it’s high risk and I’d prefer something else. The main thing is that we take him totally unaware. Because without the element of surprise, taking him alive and functioning is going to be bloody. Close quarters he’s not Rain, but believe me, he’s plenty dangerous.”

Pancho squinted. “Rain is that good?”

Hilger nodded, remembering how Rain had tracked him to Hong Kong. No one had ever turned the tables on Hilger like that before, and Hilger knew he was lucky to have survived it. The experience had spooked him, he had to admit, and for this, along with his more concrete rationales, he wasn’t going to let Rain continue to roam the earth when the current operation was done.

“He must be getting old,” Guthrie said. “He’s a Vietnam vet, isn’t he?”

Hilger nodded. “He went in late, though, when he was seventeen, so he’s young for that conflict. But even if his best years are past him, tell me, do you know of anyone else who’s survived in this business, on his own, with no organization to protect him, for as long as Rain?”

The room was silent.

“There’s a reason he’s survived all this time,” Hilger went on. “And it’s not luck. No one stays lucky that long. It’s because he’s good. He’s better than all the people he’s killed, and he’s killed plenty-more than we have all together. So you don’t want to think of him as old, or slow, or used up, or burnt out, or anything else he wants you to think so you’ll underestimate him. You do, and you’ll wind up another one of his statistics.”

“Like Winters,” Demeere said.

“Like Winters,” Hilger said, looking at each of them. “We don’t want any more losses like that. So we’re going to be patient for a few more days. With three of us on motorcycles and one in the van, we can cover the likely spots and converge quickly on wherever Dox is spotted. Like Guthrie said, Ubud’s not that big a town.”

Everyone nodded, accepting the matter as settled, at least temporarily. Pancho tilted his head toward the body on the floor. “You want me to bring around the van?”

Hilger nodded and started to collect the surveillance photos. They all stood.

Guthrie asked, “Where do you think we’ll spot him?”

Hilger considered one of the photos. “Look at this guy. If he weren’t such a good sniper, he’d probably be playing professional football. How much does a guy like this eat every day?”

Demeere smiled and said, “Plenty.”

Hilger nodded. “Exactly. I don’t know what kind of food supplies he’s got laid in, but sooner or later, he’s going to have to go out for more. That’s what we’re waiting for.”