by Barry Eisler
“What did they tell you happened in Manila?” I asked.
“Only what you told them. That you tried to hit Lavi in a restroom but his son came in and got in the way. Then the bodyguard and the other two guys burst in and Lavi and the boy got away.”
“Yeah, that’s about right.”
“Why don’t you give me your perspective, with details?”
I told her, leaving Dox out of it.
When I was finished, she said, “That tracks with everything my people told me. At least they were being straight.”
“Do they know what Manny was doing with Agency operators?”
“If they do, they didn’t tell me. Other than to say that Lavi is a known CIA asset.”
Something was nagging me, jostling for my attention. I parsed the facts, tried to identify the assumptions. Then I realized.
“How do your people know those men were CIA?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
I thought for a moment, then said, “From what your people told me, Manny is a world-class bad guy. Not the kind of person the Agency can acknowledge is on the payroll. In fact, even post nine-eleven, employing a character like Manny is highly illegal. If it got out, there would be a lot of embarrassment. The people involved would probably have to take a fall.”
“I don’t understand.”
I nodded. “No, you don’t, and your people might be having the same problem. You all work for a small, tightly knit organization that operates with little oversight and few constraints. But the CIA isn’t like that. I’ve worked with them on and off for years and I know. They’ve been ripped apart again and again—the Church Commission, the purges under Stansfield Turner, now again with this guy Goss—and they’ve developed a Pavlovian aversion to risk. Should they be recruiting terrorists? Absolutely. But if you’re the guy who does it, if you recruit, run, and God forbid pay someone who has American blood on his hands, and if the paperwork has your name on it, the first time some Congressional committee starts trying to assert its prerogatives, or the first time someone needs a sacrificial lamb, or the first time you make a bureaucratic enemy, you will absolutely be crucified.”
“You’re assuming they were running Lavi. They might have been there to kill him, like you were.”
I shook my head. “That wasn’t it. The way they rushed into that bathroom after Manny hit the panic button, they’d spotted trouble and were on their way to protect him. Trust me, I know the difference.”
“All right, so they weren’t there to harm him.”
“That’s right. You see what I’m getting at? Something’s not right here. Manny’s not like some Second Secretary in the Chinese Consulate that everyone wants to take the credit for. He’s an explosives guy, a terrorist with American blood on his hands. If someone’s running Manny at the CIA, they’re going to treat him like he’s radioactive. They wouldn’t send two officers to meet with him face-to-face. It doesn’t make sense.”
She looked at me. “If they weren’t CIA . . .”
“Then I don’t have a problem with the CIA. Or at least no more of a problem than usual. Maybe the situation is more fluid than it seems right now. Maybe I can take another crack at Manny.”
“I see your point.”
“Can you find out how your people know what they think they know?”
She glanced to her right, a neurolinguistic sign of construction. She was imagining how she was going to go about this. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
“What are you going to tell Gil?” I asked, trying to plug into exactly what she was envisioning.
“That . . .”
She looked at me, realizing what I’d done and how she had slipped. But the damage was done and she went on. “I’ll call him in the morning. I’ll tell him I’d suggested we go snorkeling at a certain beach at a certain time, and that the suggestion had made you suspicious. That when I woke up you were gone.”
I figured it would be Gil. A killer knows a killer.
“Will he believe that?” I asked.
“He’ll suspect. But it’ll buy us time.”
“Do you trust him?”
She frowned. “He’s very . . . committed.”
“Yeah, I got that feeling.”
“But he’s a professional. He does what he does for a reason. Take away the reason, and he’ll move on to the next thing that keeps him awake at night.”
I nodded. Her assessment tracked with my own.
She rubbed her eyes. “I need to sleep.”
I leaned over and touched her cheek. I looked in her eyes, wanting to know what I would see there.
Whatever it was, it was good enough. There was nothing more to say. We turned off the light and got under the covers. For a long time I listened to her breathing in the dark. After that I don’t remember.
DELILAH SLEPT DEEPLY for two hours, then woke from jet lag. She lay on her side and watched Rain sleep. God, what a mess.
She had come here convinced that he had screwed up and that there was no other way to solve the problem he had caused except for him to die. That he knew the risks and so in some ways deserved the outcome. But she realized now that all of this had been rationalization, psychic defense against an involvement she dreaded. Seeing him hadn’t clouded her judgment, it had cleared it.
They’d hired him for a job, and he’d done the best he could without a lot to go on. What did they want him to do, slaughter a child? Had it come to that? With Gil, she knew, it had. If she confronted him, Gil would talk about “greater evil and lesser evil” and “collateral damage” and “theirs and ours.” She didn’t buy any of that. She didn’t want to. That Rain was still able to make the moral distinction after so much time in the business—more time than Gil—impressed her. It gave her hope for herself. She wasn’t going to help set him up for acting in a way even Gil, if pressed, would publicly profess was right. Yes, there was a problem, but the director, Boaz, Gil . . . they had simply proposed the wrong solution. She saw that now. All she had to do was find a better way. She felt confident that she could. If she couldn’t . . . No, she didn’t want to go there. Not unless she had to.
She was aware, on some level, that she was rationalizing, that her people would view her determination to find a third way as a betrayal. She didn’t care. They weren’t always as smart as they liked to think. And their investment was different than hers. To them, Rain was not much more than a piece on a chessboard. To her, he had become much more than that.
She liked him a lot, more than she had liked someone in a long time. The sex was good—God, better than good—but that was only part of it. She was also . . . comfortable with him. Until she had spent time with him in Rio, she hadn’t noticed the absence of that kind of comfort in her life. It had disappeared so long ago, and she had been so overwhelmed with so many other things at the time, that it had never occurred to her to mourn its loss.
There had been many affairs, more than she could count. But none of those men, not one, knew what she did. No matter how intense the infatuation, no matter how satisfying the sex, she was always aware that they didn’t, couldn’t, really know her. They couldn’t understand her convictions, sympathize with her doubts, soothe her frustrations, ameliorate the periodic ache in her soul. No wonder she tended to tire of them quickly.
Rain was different. From early on she realized he knew exactly what she did, although she had never spelled it out for him. He seemed to understand her without her ever needing to explain herself. He was patient with her moods. He knew, yes, but he didn’t judge her. More than that, she sensed that he even admired her beliefs, the personal sacrifices she made for the cause that defined her. She had identified the absence of, and the longing for, a cause of his own as one of the key attributes of his persona, and remembered, with a slight pang of conscience, how she had reported on this to her people as something potentially exploitable.
There was comfort, too, in context: there was no uncertainty about their s
tatus, no foolish hopes about where this might be leading. There could be no hurt or recriminations about why someone hadn’t called or had to break an engagement. Even their different affiliations, and the potential conflicts of interest those affiliations might present, as indeed they had, were understood. In French they would call it sympa, simpatico. In English, the banal but perhaps more descriptive “same sheet of music.” In its quiet way, it was really quite wonderful.
All of this mattered to her, but there was something more important, more improbable, still: she knew he trusted her. Of course he never abandoned his tactics, she wouldn’t expect that. His moves were as subtle as she’d ever seen, and usually disguised as ordinary behavior, but she knew what he was doing. Meeting her at the gate in Bangkok and taking her to the domestic terminal by taxi had been a particularly nice, albeit undisguised, way to play it. If Gil or anyone else had been with her, the game would have been over right there. She suspected that there were other layers, possibly involving electronics, in his countermeasures, layers she hadn’t detected. And she was aware from time to time that his “innocent” questions involved hidden meanings and traps. But all of this was reflex for him, habit. She sensed the tactics were his way of reassuring himself that he hadn’t gone soft, that he was still protected, that he wouldn’t be so foolish as to trust someone like her.
She never would have told Gil or anyone else, but she knew from the moment they asked that Rain would take the meeting. She wondered what series of rationalizations he must have employed in agreeing to see her in Bangkok. Probably he told himself that it would be worth the risk because she might be able to tell him more about Lavi. And maybe he had been hoping for something like that, but she knew the real reason. The real reason was trust.
Watching him sleep, she felt a surge of gratitude so strong it brought tears to her eyes. She wanted to wake him with a kiss, hold his face in her hands and look in his eyes and thank him, really thank him, so that he could understand how much that trust, which not even the men she worked with extended to her, was worth. She smiled faintly at the ridiculous urge and waited for it to pass.
He was a strange man in many ways, and she found his strangeness appealing. Sometimes what she saw in his eyes reminded her of what had settled into her parents’ after her brother had been killed in Lebanon. She found herself moved by that look, and by the way he would force it away if he saw her watching too closely. Once she had asked him if there had ever been a child. He told her no. She hadn’t pressed, sensing that whatever equivalent events could produce that expression had to be approached gradually and obliquely, if at all.
She knew the odds were against them, but she didn’t want to think about that now. She thought instead about how, when things were fixed, they would make up for how they had almost been set against each other. They’d been together in Macau, Hong Kong, now Thailand. All his territory. And, of course, Rio, which was somewhat of a neutral corner. She found herself wanting to take him to Europe, which felt like home now even more than Israel. Maybe Barcelona, or the Amalfi Coast. Somewhere he had never been, somewhere their time together would be fresh and unburdened by memory.
She watched him. She had never known a man who slept so silently. It was almost unnerving, that someone could be stealthy even in his sleep.
After a long time, she joined him.
TEN
I WOKE UP EARLY the next morning. Delilah was still sleeping. I got out of bed and padded silently over to the living area, sliding shut the teak doors that divided it from the sleeping area behind me. I picked up my cell phone and inserted one of the spare SIM cards I had purchased in Bangkok, effectively giving the phone a new identity. Then I went into the toilet stall, closed the door behind me, and turned the unit on. I needed to make two calls, and for the moment I wanted to keep them private. Ordinarily I prefer not to use a cell phone from a fixed location, but with the new SIM card the unit would be sterile. And the conversations would be brief.
First Tatsu, my old friend and nemesis at the Keisatsu-cho, the Japanese FBI. Tatsu owed me a lifetime of favors for having taken out Murakami, a yakuza assassin he’d wanted dealt with extrajudicially, and it was time for me to call one of those favors in.
His cell rang only once. Then I heard his voice. Never one to waste words or even syllables, he said only, “Hai.”
“Hello, old friend,” I said in Japanese.
There was a pause, and I imagined a rare smile. “Hello,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
“Too long.”
“Are you in town?”
“No.”
“Then you are calling for information.”
“Yes.”
“What do you need?”
“Four days ago there was a shootout in a Manila shopping mall. I want to know everything you can tell me about the men who died there.”
Tatsu would be wondering whether I’d been involved, but he knew there would be no point in asking. “All right,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Everything is good?” he asked.
“The usual.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
I chuckled. “Thank you, my friend.”
“Call me if you’re ever in town. We can make small talk.”
I smiled. Tatsu was congenitally incapable of small talk, something I used to rib him over.
“We’ll do that,” I said.
“Jaa.” Well then.
“Jaa.” I hung up.
The next call, I knew, would be more problematic. Higher risk, but also higher reward.
I punched in the number and waited while the call went through. I told myself that, if the men in Manila really had been CIA, I was in a world of shit anyway and the call couldn’t do much to worsen my position. If they weren’t, though, a call to the CIA itself would be my best chance of finding out.
This time, too, the phone was answered promptly with a curt “Hai.” I smiled, wondering briefly whether Tatsu was mentoring this young man. I suspected he was.
Tomohisa Kanezaki was a third-generation Japanese American and rising star at CIA Tokyo Station. We had found ourselves involved in several of the same off-the-books projects over the last couple years, and, as was the case with Tatsu, we had managed to work out what seemed to be a mutually beneficial modus vivendi. It was time to test the limits of that ambiguous relationship.
“Hey,” I said to him in English, knowing he would recognize the greeting and my voice.
There was a pause, then he said in English, “I’ve been wondering when you would get in touch.”
“Here I am.”
“Looking for work?”
“Have you got any?”
“Not like we did. The post–nine-eleven urgency is beginning to fade. For a while there, we were really in a take-no-prisoners mindset, but that’s going now. Shit, if we were the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, we’d call what we’ve got now a ‘catch and release’ program.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“I’m sorry to say it.”
“I’m not looking for work anyway.”
“No?”
“No. I’m staying out of that business. It’s too dangerous.”
He laughed.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“Sure.”
“I heard there was a shooting recently. In a Manila shopping mall.”
There was a pause, then he said, “I heard the same thing.”
Shit. I couldn’t imagine he would have heard about the shooting if the CIA weren’t in some way involved. Maybe I shouldn’t have called him. Well, too late now.
“You know anything about the deceased?” I asked. “I heard they were company men.”
There was another pause. Then: “They were ex-company.”
Ex-company. Interesting.
“You know what they were doing there?” I asked.
“I don’t.”
“I think I might know something. If I tell you, can you see
what you can find out?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
Not exactly a binding promise, but I’d take what I could get.
“They were there for a meeting with a guy named Manheim Lavi. Israeli national, resident of South Africa. Check your files, you’ll find out who he is.”
There was a pause. “How do you know this?” he asked.
It was only reflex. He knew I wouldn’t answer.
“Check your files,” I said again.
“I know who Manny is.”
I should have realized. When we were last in touch, Kanezaki had been responsible for a number of antiterrorism initiatives in Southeast Asia. If he knew his brief, and of course he did, Manny would be very much on his radar screen.
“All right. Any ideas about why some ex-company guys would be meeting with him in Manila?”
“All I know is that they were named Calver and Gibbons. They retired from the Agency two years ago. They were with NE Division—the Middle East. I didn’t know them while they were here, but enough people did to make their deaths pretty big news. Everybody’s talking about it.”
“If you can find out more, I’d like to know. Who they reported to when they were with the government, what they were up to lately. That kind of thing.”
There was a pause. “Tell me you weren’t involved in this,” he said.
“I told you, I’m not doing this stuff anymore.”
“Yeah? What are you doing instead?”
“I’m thinking about the greeting card industry.”
“That’s funny. You going to wear a shoe phone?”
I smiled. “Anything you can tell me, I’d be grateful.”
“You know where to look,” he said. Meaning the bulletin board.
“Thanks.”
“And don’t forget. This isn’t a one-way street. I’m taking a lot of chances here. I expect good information in return.”
“Of course.” I clicked off and shut the unit down.
I pulled on a pair of shorts and did my daily two hundred and fifty Hindu push-ups, five hundred Hindu squats, several minutes of neck bridges, front and back, and a variety of other bodyweight calisthenics and stretches. What you can get done with nothing more than a floor, your bodyweight, and gravity in thirty minutes of nonstop activity would put the fitness equipment industry out of business if people caught on.