by Barry Eisler
I felt another adrenaline wave roll in, bigger than the first. “With the bodyguard?”
“No, he’s hanging back. Okay, our man is walking down the corridor to the restroom right now. Ten more seconds and he’s inside.”
“Good.”
I heard the bathroom door open. I took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled all of it through my mouth, its passage smooth and silent in counterpart to the thudding of my heart.
I looked through the gap alongside the stall door and saw Manny. He walked over to a urinal. His back was to me.
I opened the stall door. I took two silent steps forward.
Dox, in my ear: “Shit, partner, the woman and the boy are back. The boy’s heading toward you. Must have told his mom he needs to take a leak.”
Shit. Shit.
I started back into the stall. I heard no sound, but adrenaline was closing down my hearing and there must have been some noise of which I was unaware, because Manny turned his head and looked at me.
In the moment before the kill, I never look at the target’s face. My gaze tends to focus on the torso, the movement of shoulders, hips, and hands. Doing so offers the advantage of spotting defensive movement, and of avoiding having to see the target’s eyes, his expression, his fucking humanity.
But this time I looked. Maybe it was morbid curiosity. Maybe it was misplaced instinct, something that would have been noble in other circumstances, a desire to face the consequences of my deeds. Regardless, I looked.
Our eyes met. In his I saw earnestness, perhaps some surprise. No recognition. Not yet any fear.
The door opened. It was the boy.
And then I froze.
There’s no other way to put it. My thoughts were clear. Likewise, my perception. But I couldn’t move my body. I seemed rooted to the spot. I thought, absurdly, Move! Move!
Nothing happened.
I felt beads of sweat popping out on my forehead. Still I couldn’t move.
Manny looked at me, his surprise fading into concern, then to fear, then to resolution. He pulled himself back into his pants, and his right hand dipped into his front pants pocket. The word knife! flashed in my mind, but still my limbs were locked.
But it must have been some sort of panic button, not a knife. Because a second later, I heard Dox in my ear: “Shit, partner, something’s up. The bodyguard’s heading in fast.”
I couldn’t answer. I heard him say, “Are you there, man? Say something!” Then, “Fuck, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I guess you can’t answer. All right, I’m coming in.”
Manny started backing toward the door. He turned and swept the boy up in his arms. A moment later, the door flew open and the bodyguard burst inside, nearly running into the two of them. He saw my face and pulled up short, recognizing me, realizing he’d been wrong to dismiss me earlier, knowing now that he should have listened to his gut.
He shoved Manny and the boy to his right and reached behind and under his own jacket. Sweat was running down my face but I still couldn’t move a muscle.
The door burst inward again and Dox barreled into the room. The bodyguard turned, his gun coming out.
And then, finally, when I saw that he was going to get the drop on Dox, my paralysis broke. Roaring something unintelligible, I took two steps forward and grabbed the gun with both hands as it came out and around. My decades of gripping and twisting the judo and jujitsu gi have given me abnormal hand strength, and once I had gotten ahold of the guard’s gun I knew it was mine. I twisted hard, keeping the muzzle pointed away from me and Dox. The guard cried out and his hand gave. The gun went off as I took it away from him, the small room suddenly reverberating with the report.
Dox slung an arm around the guard’s neck from behind and yanked him off his feet. The man’s hands flew to Dox’s massive forearm and his feet kicked wildly. Manny and the boy slipped past them. I looked for a shot at Manny, but Dox and the guard were in the way. Manny yanked the door open and he and the boy spilled out of the room.
Dox transitioned to hadaka jime, a sleeper hold, and the guard’s struggles intensified, his body twisting and his legs churning the air.
The door crashed inward again. Two men, both Caucasian, burst into the room. Both had guns drawn.
“Down!” I shouted at Dox. But he was still struggling with the bodyguard. Still, he did the next best thing: he spun, pulling the guard in front of him like a shield.
Both men dropped to one knee, reducing the size of the target they offered, the smoothness of the move demonstrating training and experience. Dox and the bodyguard were between us—in what was about to become the crossfire.
A crazy thought zigged through my brain: How the fuck are they getting these guns in here?
His considerable muscles no doubt supercharged with adrenaline, Dox dropped one hand to the back of the guard’s belt and heaved him into the two men. He used the force of the throw to hurl himself to the floor in the other direction.
Both men tried to get clear of the oncoming mass of the bodyguard. Only one succeeded—the one nearest the door, who jerked away just in time. His partner took the impact. But in avoiding the bodyguard, the first man had been forced to momentarily give up his focus. And in that moment, I put two rounds into his chest.
The other man was on his back now, he and the bodyguard hairballed up against the wall. He was trying to reacquire me, but too late. I swiveled and squeezed off two more shots. The first hit the bodyguard in the back of the neck. The second caught the downed man in the shoulder, jerking him partway around. He recovered, started bringing the gun toward me again.
No way, shitbird, it is not your turn now. You don’t get a turn.
I moved in, keeping the gunsight on him, and pressed the trigger back twice more. The first shot caught him in the sternum, the second in the face. I tracked to the bodyguard—Pause. Breathe. Aim—and put one in the back of his head, then a final one in the head of the man I’d shot in the chest.
The room was suddenly, eerily quiet. My ears were ringing. The air was acrid with gunsmoke.
Dox was looking up at me from the floor. His eyes were wide. “Damn, man, where did you learn to shoot like that?”
I stepped over to the bodyguard and felt along his belt. There, a spare magazine. I pulled it free, ejected the current magazine, and popped in the new one. I stuck the gun in the back of my pants where it would be concealed by my shirttail. The used magazine went into my pocket. There was no time to wipe these items down and otherwise ensure that none of my DNA or anything else incriminating had adhered to them. Besides, from where we were to where we needed to get, the gun and the rounds left in the first magazine might prove handy.
“Come on,” I said, myself again. I would think about what had happened to me later. “We’ve only got a few seconds. Follow my lead now.”
“Your lead?” he asked, coming to his feet.
I struggled not to get impatient. It seemed so obvious to me. “Look, some nutcase was in here shooting up the place. Security guards are going to be converging any second. We’re running from it, same as anyone would.”
“Okay, you’re persuading me now.”
We each pulled a hat from a pocket. Mine was a baseball cap; Dox’s was for fishing. Witnesses tend to remember gross details only, such as shirt color or the presence of a hat, and elementary precautions like ours can save a lot of grief later.
We moved to the door. “Ready?” I asked.
“Right behind you, partner.”
I looked at him. He was grinning.
“Goddamnit,” I said, “we were the victims, remember? You need to look scared.”
“Man, I am scared!”
“Try to show it better,” I growled.
“Fuck, man, I’m telling you this is how I look when I’m scared!”
Our eyes locked for a moment. His grin didn’t budge.
I shook my head and said, “Here we go.”
I opened the door. The corridor was clear. No sign of Manny
or the boy. Just outside the corridor, though, the mood among the dining crowd had clearly been disrupted. The people with good sense and experience with the sound of indoor gunfire were wisely heading down the escalators. The curious, the deniers, and the simply stupid were lined up and gawking. For their benefit, I turned my head back toward the bathroom and shouted, “They’re shooting in there! Somebody call a guard!”
I heard Dox add, “I’m scared! I’m scared!”
An unhelpful thought flashed through my mind—My partner is insane—but I kept moving. My quick scan of the crowd hadn’t revealed my biggest concern—that individual or handful of individuals you will always encounter in a crisis who, sometimes by instinct but more often by experience, are not fleeing and not in denial, but instead calmly watching and evaluating, and perhaps looking for an opportunity to intervene. Ordinarily, these people simply make better than average witnesses later on, although sometimes they can access some deep-seated protective impulse and actually attack. I kept my head down and avoided anyone’s eyes, and we joined the crowds hurrying down the escalator. In my peripheral vision, I saw two white-shirted security guards heading up opposite us. Neither had drawn his gun; they weren’t sure what the trouble was and weren’t yet taking it fully seriously.
On the second floor, the crowd was less agitated but still distracted. People were looking around, trying to figure out what had happened, what was the disturbance, whether they needed to do anything or if they could just get back to their shopping.
We moved laterally, heading in the direction of the next set of down escalators. As we walked, we each automatically removed the hats, then, one at a time, pulled off and balled up our outer shirts, which were navy blue. Underneath we both wore a second shirt, in cream—typical Filipino attire.
“We need to split up,” I said. “Big white guy, Asian guy, that’s about as much as people are going to remember, but it’s enough to ID us right now.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Go straight to the airport. I’ll get the gear from the hotel. We’ll meet at the backup in Bangkok.”
“You saved my life back there, partner. You really did.”
“Bullshit.”
“That bodyguard would have drilled me clean if you hadn’t gotten to him first. I saw his eyes, and he meant business.”
I shook my head. There was no time to explain. And I still didn’t understand what had happened to me in there.
“Think those guys were Agency?” he asked. “They sure got there fast and they moved like pros.”
The agitation was behind us now; the next set of escalators, and the exits below, just a few meters away.
“That’s one of the things we need to find out,” I said. “But first we have to get out of Manila. I doubt Manny is going to report this to the authorities—it would mean too much attention for him. But I don’t want to stick around waiting to find out.”
We reached the escalators and paused for a moment.
“You go down here,” I said. “I want to lose the gun and the mag. I’ll drop them in a toilet tank in one of the bathrooms. With a little luck I can find some bleach or other cleaning supplies in a janitor’s cart and douse them first.”
He grinned like a schoolboy about to brag of a prank or some other exploit. “I guess I need to break my date with the girl at the concession stand,” he said.
In the craziness of the moment, half of me wanted to laugh. The other half wanted to strangle him. I looked at him for a moment, shaking my head, and in the instant before I walked away his grin actually broadened.
FOUR
THE ARRIVALS AREA of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport was crowded, bustling, and noisy. Tourists in tee-shirts and shorts jostled with haredi, the tremblers before God, in their black suits and hats. Announcements in English and Hebrew reverberated off the long concrete walls. The sun was setting beyond the western windows, and for a moment the terminal’s interior burned headache bright with its sideways orange glow.
Delilah no longer felt comfortable here. Although her employer arranged for her to return at least annually to visit her parents and other relatives, the years of living a foreign cover had pulled her inexorably from the shores of the Levant, farther and farther until finally she had lost sight of land. This was her country, but she was no longer supposed to be here. The extraordinary security measures that accompanied these visits—false papers, disguise, countersurveillance—were testament to that. She was more comfortable now ordering pain au chocolat in French in Paris than she was giving instructions to a taxi driver in Hebrew in Tel Aviv. She told herself that this was the natural and perhaps not undesirable consequence of her commitment to her work, but still it was odd, to feel that you were forgetting who you are, or anyway who you used to be. The point of it all could wind up seeming so remote, so abstract. She wondered at times whether other operators were similarly afflicted, but knew she would be wise to discuss her concerns with no one. Regardless, she understood that this growing sense of estrangement from things that had once seemed inalienably hers would be known, in other endeavors, simply as the cost of doing business.
Her business was what the domestic media called sikul memukad, or “focused prevention,” a construction she preferred to the more straightforward “assassination.” The former was, to her thinking, more descriptive, and more associated with its purpose of saving lives than with its means of snuffing them out. She wasn’t one of the trigger pullers, but at times she wished she were. After all, the men with the guns had the easy side of the division of labor. They never had to know the target. They didn’t have to spend time with him. They certainly didn’t have to sleep with him. They got close only once, only for an instant, and then they were done and gone. Emotionally, it was the difference between parting after a one-night stand, on the one hand, and dissolving a marriage, on the other.
Still, she was quietly proud of her sacrifices, proud that she made them for her own reasons and not for the recognition of her peers. Recognition, that was funny. Notoriety would be more like it. Her superiors acknowledged her unique talents and employed them with ruthless calculation, but deep down, she knew, they looked at her as somehow stained by what they called upon her to do. The best among management was merely uncomfortable with a woman who wormed her way into the lives of her victims, who slept with the monsters night after night, who knew even as she took them into her body that she was guiding them to their deaths. Management’s worst, she suspected, thought whore.
Sometimes she felt coldly angry at the men who harbored such thoughts; other times, she almost pitied them. Their problem was that they couldn’t get beyond the limits of their own inherently male experience. Men were simple: they were propelled by lust. And so they assumed that women should be the same. That a woman might sleep with a man for her own, more calculating reasons, even reasons of state security, put them off balance. It made them wonder if they were as vulnerable as the woman’s victims, and this made them fidgety. If the woman was attractive, and they secretly desired her, the fidgeting became a squirm. Whore was their way of reassuring themselves that they were the ones in control.
She wondered why they had called her in this time. Things were going well with her current op, a straightforward “honey trap” of a certain Paris-based Saudi diplomat who had become distracted from his Wahabi religious convictions by her long, naturally blond hair, and the way it cascaded around her shoulders when she chose to wear it down; by her blue eyes, endlessly enthralled, of course, by the man’s awkward palaver; by her tantalizing Western décolletage and the porcelain skin beneath it. The man was smitten with her story of an absentee husband and her longing for true love, and was therefore nearly ready to hear the tearful tale that someone had learned of their illicit passion and was now blackmailing her with exposure—exposure that would of course encompass the Saudi himself—unless he could take certain actions, trivial in themselves, but which over time would compromise him further and further until her people would own
him completely. Why recall her when she was so close? They had used the ordinary communications channels, with no abort signals, so she knew she wasn’t in any danger, that the current op wasn’t compromised. But that only made the reasons behind the recall even more mysterious.
Her papers were in perfect order, and her Hebrew, though no longer her primary language, was still native, so she and her carry-on bag passed quickly through customs. She caught a cab outside the terminal and headed directly downtown. She needed to get to the Crowne Plaza on Hayarkon, a nice, anonymous business hotel and the site of the meeting to which she had been directed. The participants would arrive and depart separately to keep her affiliation sterile, and they wouldn’t use the same hotel for months. After the meeting, she would call her parents and go see them, then spend the night at their house in Jaffa. She never announced these visits; they understood that her work, whatever it was, precluded notice. But business first.
She changed cabs several times and used a variety of other techniques to ensure that she wasn’t being followed. When she was satisfied, she made her way to the hotel. She took the elevator directly to the fourth floor and headed toward room 416. She didn’t have to look hard—there were two crew-cut men outside it, each with an earpiece and an Uzi. The obvious security was unusual. Something was definitely up.
One of the men examined her ID. Apparently satisfied, he opened the door and then immediately closed it behind her. Inside, three men were sitting around a table. Two she recognized—Boaz and Gil. The third was older by perhaps two decades, and it took her a moment to place him. She had met him only once.
Good God. The director. What was going on here?
“Delilah, shalom,” the older man said, getting up from his chair. He walked over and shook her hand, then continued in Hebrew, “Or should I say, bonjour? Would you prefer to use French?”
She liked that he asked. Moving in and out of cover, out of two separate identities, was stressful. She shook her head and answered him in Hebrew. “No. She’s not supposed to be here. Let’s let her sleep. She’ll wake up when she’s back in Paris.”