by Barry Eisler
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 b
roken,” 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?”