The Last Assassin

4

I wasn't pressed for time, so I flew indirectly, which is always safer. I cleared customs at Dulles, outside Washington. The Watanabe identity I had created to get me to Brazil three years earlier was still functional, and it took me through customs without a hitch. From there, it was just a short flight to New York.

Despite my oblique approach, when I arrived at JFK, I scanned the crowd outside the arrivals area, then followed a circuitous route through the airport that would draw out any surveillance and render it visible. Arrival areas are natural choke points, typically with lots of waiting people who unintentionally offer good concealment for an ambusher, and I always go to a higher level of alertness, and engage in appropriate countermeasures, at this point when I'm traveling.

When I was confident I was alone, I went outside. I emerged to a cold and rainy New York afternoon. The sky was lead gray, and it looked like the rain might turn to wet snow any minute.

I hadn't been here in several years. My childhood was divided between Tokyo and upstate New York, and Manhattan was the first big American metropolitan center I ever saw or spent significant time in. Since then, I've been back on business any number of times, but never business like this.

The cab line wasn't long. When it was my turn, I got in and told the driver to take me to the Ritz Carlton Battery Park. I'd made a reservation from Barcelona, but hadn't wanted to mention that over the phone when I was talking to Dox. Maybe I was loosening up a little, as he'd suggested. But some habits die hard.

I watched through the fogging windows as we drove. The cab's wipers beat relentlessly, thump-thump, thump-thump, and I heard thunder in the distance. We crossed into Manhattan, and what pedestrians there were all had their heads down in the hoods of raincoats and under the canopies of umbrellas, their shoulders hunched as though by the weight of some ominous circumstance.

I thought I was going to be excited when I arrived here, but I wasn't. Instead I felt scared.

When you live your life in danger, you're afraid a lot of the time. But you develop a system for dealing with it. You favor certain tools, you refine your tactics, and with success you come to trust both. You learn to focus more on the approach than on the destination, and that keeps the fear at bay. Gearing up calms you down.

So as we pulled up to the hotel, I tried to focus on how I would get to Midori, the kind of thing I'm comfortable with, and not on what I would do afterward, about which I had no idea.

I checked in and headed to my room on the twelfth floor. I liked what I saw: spacious layout, high ceilings, and a wall-to-wall window overlooking the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor. Somehow the location felt right: Manhattan, yes, but at a safe distance, literally the water's edge, not the tangled inland terrain where I might easily find myself confused or lost or worse. I unpacked, showered, and called housekeeping to have my laundry picked up. Then I grabbed a hotel umbrella and headed out to do a few evening errands.

I walked north on West Street, the rain beating steadily against the umbrella. A few financial district commuters hurried past me, but the area was otherwise dark and deserted. At Vesey, I walked up a gray riser of stairs and cut east along an elevated walkway. Water dripped from the corrugated roof into puddles on the concrete. On the left, through chain mesh fencing, clusters of construction equipment lay dormant in dust and darkness. I moved to the right and paused for a moment before the metal wall like a visitor in front of a hospital curtain, then looked down through a gap. Below me, frozen in the glow of sodium arc lamps as unflinching as those of any coroner's examination room, was the enormous hole where the towers had burned. At first glance, it was just a large construction site, much like any other. And yet the air was undeniably heavy with the enormity of what had produced this amputated place and the contorted walkways around and above it. The debris had been cleared, the equipment positioned, the lights turned on… and then, it seemed, some odd rigor had taken hold. The dead had been carted away but the land had yet to be resettled, and so the area felt sad and pernicious, a purgatory, an inbetween. I looked around and noticed other people who had similarly paused to observe the strange urban absence, and realized the mood of the site was infectious. I moved on.

I kept walking until I reached Tribeca, where the lights and laughter from restaurants and clubs pulled me from the pall that had gripped me farther south. I started to think operationally. The first item I needed was a mobile phone. Ordinarily I eschew mobiles. I've never liked the idea of carrying something that's quietly tracking and in fact broadcasting my location — especially after revelations about the NSA's post-9/11 eavesdropping program — and I prefer to rely on electronic bulletin boards and, when necessary, random pay phones. But now I needed something I could use to communicate quickly with Dox. Well, a prepaid mobile ought to be secure enough for the short time I'd be using it.

I would have preferred to purchase a unit without identifying myself, but governments all over the world, including Uncle Sam, are cracking down on the anonymous purchase of prepaid cell phones because terrorists seem to like them. Still, using the Watanabe ID, I was able to pick up a pair of slim Nokias with five hundred prepaid minutes apiece at a Cingular store in Chinatown, along with two sets of wireless earpieces.

Next on my shopping list was a folding knife. I'd left the Benchmade behind in Barcelona because to get it on the plane I would have had to check a bag, which I prefer not to do. Finding a replacement in New York, however, was tricky. The local laws governing concealed knives are so stringent that I couldn't find a store that sold anything other than the small Swiss Army variety. I had just about decided to rig up a kitchen knife in a shoulder harness when I came across the right kind of street vendor, a bald black man of indeterminate age with a megawatt smile and secrets in his eyes, who sold me a Strider folder with a four-inch recurve blade.

Next I stopped in an army/navy store and found a gray windbreaker that would be so anonymous in the city as to make me invisible. I also grabbed a plain black umbrella and dumped the blue logo-sporting Ritz Carlton model in a cluttered corner of the store. A navy baseball cap and a navy shoulder pack completed the ensemble, and, thus properly provisioned, I continued north. I adopted a steady gait, not too fast, not too slow, someone with business in whatever neighborhood I was moving through, a reason for being there, but nothing important enough to hurry over.

Tatsu had gotten me Midori's address, an apartment on Christopher Street in the West Village. His position, high up in the Keisatsucho, had its advantages when it came to acquiring information, even if the quid pro quo was an occasional off-the-books 'favor.' Tatsu's ends were noble, but he certainly believed they justified a wide range of means.

The last time I had seen Midori was in Tokyo, more than two years earlier. She had tracked me down to confront me over what had happened to her father, and I admitted what I had done. And somehow, in the midst of it all, her grief and rage and confusion, we had still fallen into bed one last time. I've thought about that night a lot since then. I've replayed it, dissected it, mined it for meaning. But it always ends the same way: Midori, leaning in close from above me, shuddering as she came and whispering I hate you through her tears.

Well, we were going to find out how profound that sentiment really was. And how permanent.

I headed up Sixth Avenue all the way to Christopher, where I made a left. Of course I had already familiarized myself with these routes using various Internet maps, but there's never a substitute for direct experience with the local terrain. There it was, on the other side of the street, a seventeen-story building, prewar, from the look of it, with a doorman in a long coat standing under a green awning out front. In this light and these clothes, and with the umbrella held low against the weather, I wasn't worried about being spotted, and I slowed. I looked at the building and imagined where I might set up if I were the one waiting here for myself. There weren't a lot of great spots. There was no parking on this section of the street, so vehicle surveillance was out. And the restaurants and gay bars Christopher Street is known for were too far from the apartment to be useful.

There was the doorman, of course. It wasn't impossible that someone had gotten to him, bribed him to keep an eye out for the Asian man in some file photo. I filed him for later consideration.

I kept walking. The bars at the end of the street had some people in front of them, mostly smokers, but no one who was in a position to watch Midori's building or who otherwise felt wrong to me. I noted that several of the places offered live music, and wondered if Midori had chosen the neighborhood in part because of its proximity to her nightly gigs. Probably she had. I thought about taking a look inside, just to see if anyone caused a radar ping, but as always there was a cost-benefit equation at work and this time it argued against being too thorough. Anyone who was here to watch Midori would have to do so from close by her apartment, not from within one of the neighborhood watering holes. And if there were anyone relevant in one of these places, he could as easily spot me as I could spot him. Indoors, I wouldn't have the windbreaker and umbrella to hide behind.

I zigzagged my way south. It was hard to say what it meant that I hadn't spotted anyone tonight. It could be they were focusing more on her public performances, or that she was out at the moment and they knew it. I'd have to know more before I could safely close in.

I stopped at a SoHo bistro for a quick dinner and moved on. According to her website, Midori had a four-night appearance coming up at a jazz club called Zinc Bar on the corner of Houston and La Guardia. The club took me a minute to find, even though I knew the address. It was hidden below street level at the bottom of a steep set of stairs, and the gold letters announcing its existence were only visible when you were directly in front of the place.

I walked down, went through the red curtains, paid the five-dollar cover, and moved inside.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark, but when they had I was pleased to see that the place was exactly what I was hoping for. The room was a long rectangle with a bar to one side and tables along the other. The stage was set up at the far end. If someone were here watching Midori, Dox would have no trouble spotting him.

I hadn't planned to stay, but I liked the guy who was playing, a guitarist and vocalist named Ansel Matthews, so I ordered an eighteen-year-old Macallan, then sat listening and musing in the semidarkness. I pictured Midori playing in this very room just a few nights hence, and my heart kicked faster.

I spent the next three days walking ceaselessly through lower Manhattan, getting comfortable with the rhythms of its neighborhoods, reacquainting myself with the layout of the streets. The city felt remarkably safe these days. A few times, very late at night, I passed some rough-looking individuals, but my vibe was different without Delilah by my side, and the natives here had no trouble reading it and steering clear as a result.

On one of these excursions, on a garbage-strewn, graffiti-covered street on the Lower East Side at close to two in the morning, I passed an unmarked door just as a well-dressed couple was leaving it. I realized there was a bar or club inside, and, on uncharacteristic impulse, I pressed the buzzer on the building's façade. A moment later there was the sound of a lock releasing, and I pulled the door open. It was pitch-dark beyond, and it took me a moment to realize I was looking at a curtain. I moved past it and encountered another. I parted this one as well, and found myself standing at the far end of a quietly spectacular bar.

It was a single room, with a brick wall on one side and plaster and some sort of hammered metal on the other. There were about eight booths, lit mostly by candlelight, with a small wood and metal bar in between them. Soft music I couldn't identify but immediately liked played in the background, mingling with quiet laughter and conversation. The bartender, a pretty woman in her mid-twenties, asked if I had a reservation. I admitted I didn't, but she told me it was fine, I could have a seat at the bar anyway.

The place, I learned, was called Milk & Honey. The bartender, who introduced herself as Christi, asked me what I did, and I found I didn't want to lie to her. I told her I'd rather hear about the bar, and she and a colleague, Chad, explained that Milk & Honey existed to provide the best cocktails in Manhattan and the right atmosphere in which to enjoy them. They squeezed their own juice and prepared their own tinctures and even carved their own ice — it was that kind of place. I enjoyed myself so much that I wound up staying for three of their stunning mixes — including a caipirinha made with Pot Still rum and infused with muddled concord grapes. All were prepared with a level of care and enthusiasm I had never seen outside Japan.

I imagined taking Midori here, with no reason or circumstance other than our desire to be together. We'd never had that before, I realized. Initially, I'd used her for information about her father. Then I'd gone on the run with her, protecting her from the people who'd hired me to kill him. Finally, when she was safe, she'd hunted me down to confront me over her suspicions about who I was and what I had done. All of it had been so intense, we'd never had a chance to just relax, to see what it was between us.

What it was between us? I thought. You killed her father.

Jesus. What the hell was I thinking? I was never going to be able to take her here, here or anywhere else. This was crazy, it was never going to work.

I wanted to get out, get the next plane to anywhere and forget that Midori lived here, forget everything. What I had with Delilah was good. I was an idiot for doing anything to risk it.

But I had to see the child. I had to know.

The problem was, it wasn't just Delilah I was risking. It was much more than that, and I knew it.

But I couldn't think of the stakes now. I couldn't fully face them.