by Barry Eisler
He answered on the first ring, and she imagined him as she always did at this stage in an operation, sitting alone in a dim hotel room, needing neither food nor other sustenance, the cell phone placed on a table or desk in front of him, silently and patiently waiting for the unit to ring so that he could venture wraith-like into the world and do what he was best at.
“Ken,” she heard him say in Hebrew. Yes.
“It’s me,” she answered. There was no response. Ignoring what she interpreted as one of his little power games, she went on. “Our friend left this morning. Packed his bags and took off.”
There was a pause, then he said, “Shit. Where are you?”
“Phuket.”
“Why didn’t you call sooner?”
“I never had a chance. I was with him the whole time.”
“Doesn’t he sleep?”
“Do you?”
There was a pause, no doubt while he tried to think of a good response. When he couldn’t, he said, “So he took you to Phuket.”
She caught the innuendo and felt a surge of anger. “You know how it is, Gil,” she said. “Some men just have the right touch with women. They know how to get what they want.”
As soon as it was out, she regretted it. Mostly, her deep-seated need not to take shit served her well, but this time it was going to hinder her. She wanted information from Gil. To get it, she had to manage him, manipulate him, not react by reflex to his constant, petty provocations. Yes, she was counterpunching, but he was still making her fight his kind of fight. The way to win was to change the game entirely.
Gil was silent on the other end of the phone, and she considered the possibility that her comment had actually wounded him. The thought softened her anger, made her feel more generous. She sensed that this feeling might be useful.
She considered. Maybe what Gil needed was just a victory in their constant verbal sparring. Maybe it would restore his sense of manhood, allow him to behave in some way other than trying to hurt her. She’d often thought that this was what the government needed to do with the Palestinians. After all, it was only after the Yom Kippur War, after giving Israel a bloody nose, that Egypt had been willing to make peace. Maybe Gil was the same. And maybe, if he found himself enjoying an unfamiliar position of success and power, he might be generous, or anyway careless, with information. Yes, that was the way to play it. Let him win.
After a moment he asked, “Well, what happened?”
“I think he got suspicious.”
“Any idea about where he’s gone?”
“No.”
“Shit,” he said again.
Shit, sure. For Gil, not being able to kill someone he had fixed in his sights must have felt like coitus interruptus.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Bangkok.”
She had expected that. She had told them she was traveling to Bangkok to meet Rain. Gil would have wanted to be as close as possible so he could move quickly.
“I have to pass through Bangkok to get wherever I’m going next,” she said. “Why don’t we meet there and I’ll brief you?” And then, as though she had only just thought of it and hadn’t actually been planning this, she added, “Or you could come here. It’s beautiful and I don’t know when either of us will have another chance.”
There was a long pause. Then he said, “It’s better if you come here.”
The pause told her he had been tempted by her suggestion of Phuket as the venue, perhaps by the way she had subtly conjoined the two of them with her use of the plural pronoun. The reply itself told her he was suspicious; otherwise, the temptation would have prevailed.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll catch the next flight and call you when I arrive. It should be just a few hours, if that.”
“Okay,” he said, and hung up.
She nodded. An unfamiliar place, just the two of them, far from the people they knew . . . all an ideal environment for getting someone to relax and open up. She had seen it many times before. Hell, John had just used it on her.
She had the hotel car take her to the airport and was able to get a Thai Air flight that left less than an hour later. She called Gil when she arrived at Bangkok airport. He asked her if she could get to the Oriental Hotel and meet him on the restaurant veranda, overlooking the river. She told him she would be there within an hour.
The midday traffic wasn’t too awful, and the ride took less than forty minutes. The moment she saw the hotel, she understood why Gil had chosen it. A classic colonial structure, it sprawled across a city block and would have entrances and exits all over. Guests could leave via cab, tuk-tuk, or some sort of river taxi adjacent to the hotel entrance. And the security, though subtle, was everywhere, in the form of surveillance cameras and guards with earpieces. All of which would make it hard to establish a choke point for an ambush, hard to carry out the ambush without being captured on videotape, and hard to follow someone out of the hotel without staying unacceptably close. Gil wasn’t just suspicious; he was downright worried that she had gone over to the other side.
For a moment, she felt the familiar indignant anger rising. Then she realized: He’s not entirely off the mark.
She walked through the lobby and out onto the veranda. Gil was leaning on the balcony as though in appreciation of the tourist-perfect river scene beyond. But he checked his back within a moment of her arrival and saw her. He straightened and nodded. As she approached, she saw him look behind her, then to his flanks. He was wearing an untucked, short-sleeved, button-down shirt, like most of the other tourists here. The difference being that, in Gil’s case, the casual local attire would make it easier for him to conceal the pistol Delilah knew he carried. Gil was right-handed, and, with the shirt out, he probably had the gun on his right hip, which she judged to be the appropriate compromise here between concealment and access. Not that her take on all this was particularly relevant at the moment—this was Gil, after all, and, even if he was an asshole, they were on the same side—but such assessments had become second nature to her, and went on in the background regardless of whom she was meeting.
“Nice place,” she said, ignoring his obvious suspicions.
He nodded and said nothing. He was coiled tight, she could feel it. She would have to find a way to calm him down.
“What do you want to do?” she asked. “Stay here? Go somewhere else?”
He looked at her for a long moment, then shrugged. “We can stay here.”
“Good. I’m hungry.”
They ate at the Verandah Restaurant overlooking the river. It was a beautiful scene, and she was able to take in all of it because Gil took the seat that put his back to the water. Having her back to the door wasn’t her favorite way to sit, but many of her targets had some security consciousness and she was used to the disadvantage. Call it an occupational hazard.
They ordered khao phad goong—they were in Bangkok, after all, and might as well take advantage of the local cuisine—and talked. She explained how things had gone with Rain since she had first met him at the airport in Bangkok. She let Gil ask the questions. At first, he indulged himself with some periodic innuendo. She had anticipated this, and planned to ignore it, but after a few annoying jabs she found herself saying, “Look, can we just be professional about this?” That seemed to sober him, and she realized that her reaction, more genuine than the gambit she had originally planned, had been the better choice. From then on, he kept the bullshit in check, and she answered his questions as forthrightly as he would expect. She wanted this to feel more like a debriefing than a briefing. That would be more comfortable for him. It would make him feel in charge.
He glanced around frequently. To an outsider, it would have looked like he was enjoying his exotic surroundings, trying to take it all in. Or perhaps that he was waiting for someone, looking up from time to time to see if the other party had arrived. But she knew where it was coming from. And she didn’t like that it wasn’t going away. She decided to call him on it.
“Am I making you nervous?” she asked, during one of his perimeter checks, with a friendly, slightly amused smile.
He looked at her. “No.”
Her smile broadened, but its gentleness remained. “I thought for a moment that you didn’t trust me.”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
That, she suspected, was the sad truth.
“But me, in particular,” she said, as though this was something she regretted.
“It’s not personal.”
“Are you sure?” Her tone had just the right mixture of sadness and uncertainty.
He shook his head, afraid or unwilling to go there. “What would have tipped him off?” he asked.
She recognized that the gambit hadn’t succeeded. It was all right, she would keep playing it by ear. She shrugged. “He’s naturally paranoid. Up until my suggestion of a private beach, he’d been in charge of the arrangements. Someone else proposing the time and place . . .”
“You shouldn’t have been in such a hurry. That’s what spooked him.”
Ordinarily, that kind of comment would cause her to go for the jugular. That’s what Gil was expecting, and prepared to deal with. But she’d sparred with him enough today. If he wanted to push hard, she would just step out of the way. Let’s see him keep his balance then.
“I know,” she said, looking down as though this was a difficult admission, as though he had worn her out. “I’m sorry. I should have been more subtle with him. It’s my fault.”
There was a pause while Gil digested this. Then he said, “It’s not like you, that’s all. Your instincts are usually good.”
Ostensibly a compliment, but really a way of demonstrating that it was his purview and prerogative to judge. And therefore, again, a comment that would ordinarily set her off.
She smiled wanly, as though both appreciative of his expression of confidence and embarrassed by what had precipitated it, then looked away.
After a moment, he said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll find another way.”
Her earlier realization that she had hurt him had softened her, and now her apparent surrender was having the same effect on him. Good.
She looked at him and said, “Thanks.”
He shook his head and looked away as though embarrassed by her gratitude. She saw her opening and said, “Gil. Why are you always so . . . hostile to me?”
His expression was of someone trying to look perplexed and not quite pulling it off. “Hostile to you? I’m not hostile.”
“Come on, you know you are. I can feel it all the time.”
He shook his head again. “Look, I’ve got a job to do and I’m serious about it. I don’t always have time to be diplomatic. Some people don’t understand that.”
Sure, that’s part of it, she thought, respecting his instinct for offering up something that wasn’t untrue, but simply half true.
She offered a self-conscious laugh. “Okay, maybe I’m being too sensitive.”
“You’ve got a hard job, too,” he offered. “I know that.”
She looked down, as though his kindness had touched some deep part of her psyche, as though she wanted to tell him something more, but didn’t know how to find the words. She noted that he hadn’t done one of his visual scans in almost a minute.
They were halfway to a connection. She knew he would be finding the prospect attractive, and wouldn’t want her to pull back from it now.
“I’ll put up another message on the bulletin board,” she said. “Tell him I’m offended that he would leave me like that. Maybe I can get him to meet me again.”
Gil nodded. She sensed that he would have preferred to stay on a less operational track. That he might unconsciously be willing to jump through a few hoops to get back to it.
“Or maybe we could get a lead from the CIA,” she went on. “They’re looking for him, too. Have they made any inquiries with us?”
“No.”
“No? I would have thought they might check with friendly intelligence services.”
“Not yet.”
She nodded, then said, “You know, I was thinking about something. It’ll sound strange, but . . . Are we sure those men were CIA?”
He nodded, probably enjoying the feeling of having information that she lacked, enjoying being in a position where she would have to ask him. “We’re sure,” he said.
“Because, you know how the Americans are. It would be hard for them to run a guy like Lavi. If Congress found out, someone could get in trouble.”
Gil laughed. Making fun of CIA fecklessness was like fishing in a barrel. And the joke had reminded him subtly that, c’mon, Gil, we’re not like that. We’re on the same team.
“Look,” he said. “About a year ago, when we first got suspicious about what Lavi might be up to, I led the team that monitored him with spot surveillance and electronically. We saw him meet more than once with an American who I knew in the first Gulf War as Jim Huxton, but who now seems to go by Jim Hilger. At the time, Hilger was with America’s Third Special Forces. The two Americans who Rain killed in Manila were part of Hilger’s unit. After the war they all left the military to work for the CIA.”
She was surprised that his ties went back so far. “You . . . worked with them?”
He nodded. “Targeting Hussein’s mobile SCUD missile launchers. I don’t know what else they were up to. They certainly didn’t tell us about it.”
She considered. “They told you they were going into the CIA?”
He shrugged. “You know. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. But Hilger’s behavior with Lavi confirms it, not that any confirmation was necessary. We’ve got electronic intercepts. Hilger has a CIA cryptonym: ‘Top Dog.’ You want to know the crypt they gave Lavi?”
She nodded.
“ ‘Jew-boy,’ ” he said.
“Wow.”
He shrugged again. “That’s how we know.”
“Do we know what those men were doing with Lavi in Manila?”
“We don’t. We didn’t know they were going to be there, obviously, or we would have warned Rain off.”
“What do you think the Agency was getting from Lavi?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it was, they weren’t sharing it with us. If they were, we might have decided Lavi was more useful alive than dead, at least for a while. As it is, the government just wants people like Lavi . . .” He waved a hand as though throwing something away, disposing of it.
“So someone else can take his place,” she said, with a genuinely sad smile.
“You know how it is. Disrupt and deprive is the name of the game. Taking out Lavi will disrupt networks that rely on him. And deprive them of his expertise.”
She nodded. Now was the moment to return the conversation to its more personal flavor. She would oblige him, but not in the way he was hoping.
“Remember that time in Vienna?” she asked, looking at him.
He returned her look but didn’t answer. She knew he wanted to say “yes” to get her to continue, but that he was afraid that uttering the word would be to confess to something he didn’t want to acknowledge.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to. But I can’t. With colleagues, I have to have distance. Otherwise I would lose my mind. Can you understand?”
He nodded uncomfortably. What else could he do?
“I admire you for what you do,” she went on. “I know it must be difficult. I just . . . just wanted to tell you that.”
The subtext was, there are so many other things I would like to say. Feeling admired, even desired, couldn’t help but soften him. Or fail to distract him from the more substantive inquiries she had just made.
“It’s okay,” he said, and gave her a fleeting and hesitant smile.
She had gotten him to agree that nothing was going to happen this time. And to hope, by implication, that there might be a time in the future.
She gave him a smile of her own. Men were so easy.
THIRTEEN
BACK IN BANGKOK, Dox and
I checked into the Grand Hyatt Erawan on Ratchadamri. It wasn’t as discreet a hotel as the Sukhothai, but I’m not usually comfortable using the same place twice in a row. What it lacked in low-key charm, though, the Erawan made up for operationally: it offered multiple entrances and exits on two floors and a significant security infrastructure in the form of guards and cameras. Ordinarily, surveillance and security are a hindrance to me and I try to avoid them. But this time, I wanted to be someplace that would offer obstacles to anyone who might think to visit me unexpectedly. Not that anyone knew where I was, but I always sleep better with multiple layers in place. And if one of those layers takes the form of 300-thread count cotton sheets . . . well, there aren’t so many perks to this profession. I take them when I can.
There was nothing to do now but wait, and I let Dox talk me into another evening on the town. I had enjoyed our meal together a few nights before, enjoyed it much more than the usual solitary night in a hotel room, and he didn’t have too hard a time persuading me. This time, though, I got to choose the venue.
I headed down to the lobby to meet him at eight o’clock as we had agreed. He was early again, and again looked very much the local expat in an untucked, short-sleeved, cream-colored linen shirt and jeans. He seemed to be absorbed in a book. As I got closer I noticed the title: Beyond Good and Evil.
“You’re reading Nietzsche?” I asked, incredulous.
He looked at me. “Well, sure, why not?”
I struggled for a moment, concerned that whatever I said next would be insulting. “Well, it’s just . . .”
He smiled. “I know, I know, everybody thinks a southern boy can’t be intellectual. Well, my father worked for a big pharmaceutical company, and I grew up in Germany, where he was posted. I studied old Friedrich in school, and I liked him. All that stuff about the will to power and all. When I read it now, it comforts me.”
“Who’da thunk it,” I said, imitating his twang.
He laughed. “Hey, how did you even recognize what I was reading, cowboy? That’s more than I would have expected.”