by Barry Eisler
“Good.”
“Any new info?”
“Yes. It sounds like those men really were CIA. Gil knew them in the first Gulf War. They were all part of the same unit, headed by a man named Jim Huxton, now Jim Hilger.”
Hilger again. Okay.
“What else?”
“Hilger was observed in multiple meetings with Lavi. And he uses CIA cryptonyms. Hilger is ‘Top Dog.’ Lavi is ‘Jew-boy.’ ”
“Well, that’s not very politically correct, is it?”
She chuckled.
“I’m serious. You think you could use a crypt like that at a U.S. government agency? Christ, the Transportation Security Administration can’t even do an extra check on a Saudi chanting verses from the Koran and mumbling ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he boards a plane, you think the CIA can call an asset ‘Jew-boy’?”
“That’s a good point.”
I picked up the Treo and looked at the date book. “TD” and “JB” suddenly took on a whole new meaning.
“What about ‘VBM’?” I asked.
“ ‘VBM’?”
“Yes, probably another crypt.”
“It doesn’t mean anything to me. Gil didn’t mention it. Just the two I told you. Why?”
“I’m not sure. Anyway, the two you got were helpful. Thanks.”
“Helpful, how?”
I paused and considered. My sense was that she could be useful, maybe even necessary, but I wanted a chance to think about it before I asked.
“You sure you can’t meet?” I asked.
“It’s not a good idea. I don’t want Gil to get more suspicious than he already is.”
“How much time are you spending with him?”
There was a pause. She said, “Are you jealous?”
“Yeah, I think I am.”
“That’s nice. I like that.”
Damn, I really would have liked to see her. Oh, well. The good news was that her demurral made me trust her. If she’d said no, then allowed me to persuade her, I would have smelled a set-up. Delilah wasn’t the wishy-washy type.
“My information is that those guys weren’t spooks,” I said. “They were ex-spooks. Most recently with an outfit called ‘Gird Enterprises.’ That mean anything to you?”
“It doesn’t. Did you try Google?”
For a moment I was easily able to understand why Dox sometimes got annoyed with me for asking questions that to him must have seemed obvious. “Of course,” I said. “There’s nothing.”
“I’ll look into it,” she said. “You sure about those guys, though?”
“Not sure, no. But I’ve got two independent sources, one of them in the organization itself, and their information tracks. My guess is that your people have it wrong, although I don’t know why.”
“I don’t know what more I can do on that one. I’ve already asked. If I press further, they’ll know something’s up.”
There was a pause. “How long will you be in Bangkok?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’m supposed to post something on our bulletin board about how I’m angry and hurt that you took off, that I want to see you again. I can probably wait a couple days or so to see if you’ll contact me.”
“Then let me check on a few things, use the information you gave me. I’ll be in touch.”
“Don’t keep me out of this. I’m in too deeply already.”
She had good antennae. “I won’t keep you out,” I said.
I imagined her thinking, Like hell. But what could she say.
“I’ll be in touch,” I told her.
There was a pause. She said, “You better be.” And clicked off.
I briefed Dox on the cryptonyms and everything else.
“Hilger, Manny, the dear departed Mr. Winters, and the mysterious Mr. VBM,” he said. “Damn, partner, sounds like Hong Kong is going to be the place to be.”
“Yeah, but if we go there, are we taking on the whole CIA? Or something else?”
“Well, let’s consider. We’ve got the Israelites telling us one thing, and Kanezaki and your Japanese contact telling us something different. Whose information do you trust more?”
I shrugged. “Kanezaki’s in the best position to know.”
“I agree with that, as long as he’s playing it straight.”
“Plus we’ve got the independent confirmation.”
“Agreed again. So what could have led the Israelites astray?”
I thought for a minute. “One, someone could be lying. Two, and more likely, I think, someone’s just made a mistake. Which isn’t so hard to imagine. I mean, Delilah said that Gil knew Hilger and the other two guys when they joined the Company. Then, during surveillance, Gil saw Hilger with Manny. He naturally assumes Hilger is still with the Agency and that Manny is an asset. When the two guys get killed while meeting with Manny, it reinforces the existing assumption that they were active-duty CIA. No one thinks to ask, Have these people moved on to something else? And they can’t make too many inquiries because the whole thing is so sensitive. Plus, there’s this media leak we just saw in the Washington Post. They might have seen that, too. More reinforcement of a mistaken assumption.”
He nodded for a long moment, as though thinking. Then he said, “You know, maybe we’re being too limited with this either/or perspective we’ve adopted.”
I looked at him, intrigued.
“I mean, look at us,” he went on. “Are we CIA? No, not really, we’re contractors. But the CIA uses us from time to time. And it ain’t just us. Hell, these days you’ve got Halliburton and Blackwater and DynCorp and Vinnell and Kroll-Crucible . . . these outfits are springing up all over, and it can be hard to tell where the government ends and the private sector begins.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Plus you’ve got the government turning everybody into a bounty hunter by offering twenty-five million for Osama’s scrawny ass.”
“Capitalism at work,” I said. “Supply and demand.”
“I know. Hell, when I was watching us shock and awe the Iraqis on CNN when we first went in, I kept expecting the announcer to say, ‘This sortie brought to you by Kellogg’s Rice Krispies,’ or something like that. It just ain’t as clear as it used to be.”
I nodded. “You know who is the third largest contributor of forces to the coalition there, after the U.S. and the Brits?”
“Private contractors, son, no doubt about it. We’re the wave of the future. Ought to form a union.”
I nodded. “The U.S. doesn’t go out of its way to advertise it, but yeah.”
“Well, that’s what I’m talking about.”
He rubbed his chin as though considering something.
“But on balance,” he went on, “I don’t think we’re dealing with Uncle Sam here. Not with the Thais, not with the Jew-boy thing. And like you said, Christians In Action has a fairly dismal record of being able to run really bad guys like Manny. Plus your Japanese contact, plus Kanezaki, both say those guys in Manila were ex-spooks, not current. That’s independent confirmation, far as we know.”
“What about that Washington Post report?”
He shrugged. “Some reporter, fishing. Making the same mistake the Israelites made.”
I nodded. “Can’t disagree with any of that.”
“Plus Hilger did abscond with that two million dollars from Kwai Chung.”
“I’m not sure which way that cuts. He could still be government, just dirty.”
“That’s kind of what I’m getting at. What I think is, Hilger is Agency, but he’s wandered a tad off the reservation.”
I considered. “That would be a very interesting possibility.”
“Damn straight it’s interesting. If I’m right, and the news gets out, the Agency would likely disown Hilger like the wayward child he is. I’ve seen it happen.”
“He would be vulnerable to that, it’s true.”
“So you agree with what I’m saying?”
“I do.”
“Think we ought
to go to Hong Kong?”
I looked at him. “I think we ought to leave in the morning. Bangkok’s feeling a little hot after Brown Sugar, anyway.”
I checked a few sites and found a Thai Air flight leaving at 8:00 that morning. I looked at my watch—less than seven hours away. Good. I wanted us out of the country before Hilger got news of what had happened to his man Winters, or at least before he had a chance to react to it. I reserved a seat for me, then one on an 8:25 Cathay Pacific flight for Dox. It would be more secure for us to travel separately. To be doubly sure, I used one of the backup false identities we were traveling under just in case Hilger had thought to put a customs hit on our names. I booked rooms for us in a couple of big, anonymous hotels—the InterContinental on Kowloon for Dox and the Shangri-La on Hong Kong Island for me.
“Glad to see we’re going deluxe,” Dox said, as I made the reservations.
“The China Club is members only,” I said. “We need hotels that can get their guests in.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining.”
“We’re going to need some clothes, too,” I said. “The club is formal. There ought to be a tailor right in the InterContinental shopping arcade who can get a suit ready for you while you wait. If not, ask the concierge for a recommendation.”
He smiled. “I love Hong Kong. Fastest place on earth.”
“Just tell the tailor you want something dark and conservative, a suit,” I said. “Let him do the rest. He’ll pick a tie for you, too.”
“Hey, man, don’t you trust my sense of style?”
I thought it best not to answer. I finished up on the computer, then purged the browser again.
Dox said, “One thing occurs to me. If Winters is supposed to show up for dinner at the China Club and he doesn’t, Hilger’s going to be concerned. Or maybe Winters was supposed to check in beforehand, and when he doesn’t, Hilger might change his plans. Wasn’t that what you were worried about, why you tried to make it look like the man hadn’t died being interrogated?”
I nodded. “We’ll have to take that into account. But the fact that the meeting place was already decided is encouraging. It would have been more secure for Hilger to have just told people the general venue, and waited until the last moment to give the exact location. My guess is that VBM, whoever he is, isn’t all that reachable. Or there are some other limitations on their ability to communicate in real time. And you have to figure this meeting is related to what happened in Manila. They’ve already been disrupted there once. I doubt they’d want to cancel again just because someone didn’t show up or failed to check in. I may be wrong, and if I am we’re going to find out, but I have a feeling their dinner’s on.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll buy that. What’s the general plan?”
I started envisioning things, figuring out what more we’d need and how we were going to get it.
“Manny and Hilger,” I said. “We take them both out. Manny satisfies the Israeli contract. We get paid. As for Hilger, either he’s not CIA at all, or he is and he’s off the reservation, but either way he gets disowned postmortem. At which point, the Israelis realize that they don’t have a problem with the Agency. It gets everyone off our backs.”
“You know, though, even if the government disowns Hilger, someone might be interested in avenging him. That kind of thing has been known to happen.”
I shrugged. “I’m willing to take that chance. No matter what, Hilger is where the direct pressure is coming from right now, even more than from the Israelis. I don’t see a better way of relieving that pressure than eliminating its source.”
“Seems reasonable to me.”
Part of me wondered how I had wandered along to a point where calmly proposing that we kill two men, one of whom might be CIA, would indeed seem reasonable. I would have to ponder that in my leisure time.
“And,” I said, “since, as far as I can tell, the reason they wanted relatively ‘natural’ causes for Manny in the first place was their mistaken assumption that he was a CIA asset, we no longer have to be overly constrained in our methods.”
Dox nodded. “That makes me feel better. Where I was brought up, gentlemen just shot each other. It’s more comfortable for me.”
I nodded, then for the second time in as many minutes realized that there were people in the world who might find this kind of conversation strange, who might even be put off by it. I wondered where the new perspective was coming from. I really would have to think about that later.
“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t think we’re going to have guns.”
His face fell a little. “No guns?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think even Kanezaki could get us what we’d need on this short notice. I’m not sure it would be wise to ask just now, regardless. And my Japanese contact could help us if we were in Tokyo. For Hong Kong . . . not with these time constraints.”
“Well, that sucks. I was kind of picturing myself up on a rooftop with the dreaded M-40A3 and matching AN/PVS-10 nightscope. It would have been so civilized.”
I nodded. “That, or I could have just burst into their private room with a forty-five while they were enjoying the Peking duck. But maybe . . .”
He looked at me. “You’re thinking something devious there, partner, I can tell.”
I smiled. “I’m thinking about Hilger. He was armed last year at Kwai Chung.”
“Armed and dangerous,” he said, nodding. “That boy was a one-man killing machine. Had his primary in a waist holster or belly band, if I’m remembering correctly, and a backup on his ankle.”
“Think that was a one-time thing?”
“Hell, no. A guy like that, carry for him is routine. He’d feel naked without it.”
“And even if it’s not routine, we know he carries when he’s operational.”
“Like tomorrow night, for example.”
“For example.”
He stroked his chin and grinned. “Old Manny might be carrying, too. I would be, after what almost happened to him in Manila.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
“Nice of them, to bring the guns for us.”
I nodded. “All I need to do is get to one of them alone, from behind. Say, in a restroom.”
Dox cleared his throat. “You’re not worried about, you know, that when you see Manny like you did the last time . . .”
I shook my head, and felt something shift inside me like a block of frozen granite. “No,” I said. “I’m not worried at all.”
PART THREE
SEVENTEEN
BECAUSE WINTERS AND COMPANY might have tracked Dox’s cell phone earlier in the day, the Grand Hyatt was no longer secure. We took extreme care in returning, and stayed just long enough to collect our gear. Then we went to Sukhumvit, using appropriate countersurveillance measures along the way, and took rooms at the Westin. Dox, chastened by the way Winters had almost gotten to us, didn’t argue with any of this.
I showered and shaved, then took an excruciatingly hot bath, which ordinarily helps me sleep. But I was still wired from that near miss in front of Brown Sugar. I had to leave for the airport at six o’clock, and if I didn’t get some rest soon, the next chance I’d get would be on the plane.
I pulled a chair over to the window and sat in the dark, looking down at Sukhumvit Road and the urban mass beyond it. There wasn’t much of a view—the Westin isn’t tall enough and the city itself is too congested. I wished for a moment, absurdly, that I was back in my apartment in Sengoku, the quiet part of Tokyo where I’d lived until the CIA and Yamaoto had managed to track me there. I’d never realized at the time how safe I felt there, how peaceful. It seemed a long time ago, and so much had happened in between. I realized I’d never even paused to mourn having been forced to leave. Until this moment, anyway. And now I couldn’t afford the distraction.
I thought about the plan Dox and I had come up with. It seemed sound, up to a point. But I wondered why the solutions I reached for always involved
violence.
Violence, my ass. You’re talking about killing.
I smiled sardonically. When all you’ve got are hammers, everything starts to look like a nail.
Maybe my default settings were just horrifyingly stunted. Or warped. Maybe there were other, better ways, ways that long and unfortunate habit was preventing me from seeing.
Yeah, maybe. But the feeling of sitting there in the dark, running through the requirements of the next day’s operation, was momentarily so familiar to me that it carried with it the oppressive weight of fate.
I’ve been killing since that first Viet Cong, near the Xe Kong river, when I was seventeen. I’d kept count for a while, but long ago lost track entirely, something that horrified Midori, rightly, I supposed, when she had asked me about it. Could it really have just been circumstances that got me started so early and kept me going so long, or was there something about me, something intrinsic?
So many people seemed to recognize that I was a killer. Tatsu. Dox. The army shrinks. Carlos Hathcock, the legendary sniper I’d once met in Vietnam.
Why fight it? I thought. Just accept the evidence.
I remembered something from a childhood visit to church. Matthew, I think, where Jesus said:
Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.
I chewed on that for a moment. Then:
Bullshit. God doesn’t care. Like Dox said, if he did care, he would have done something by now.
If he did do something, would you even know what it was? Would you be paying attention?
I would if he fucking smote me, or whatever. Which is what I would do.
Maybe that was the point, though. All this time, I’d been expecting—hell, demanding—that God smite me down for my transgressions. And prove himself to me thereby. But what if God weren’t really in the smiting business? What if smiting were all man-made, and God preferred to communicate in more subtle ways, ways that men like me chose to pretend weren’t even there?
I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees, and looked at my hands as though they might offer me some answer. I wished I could get tired. I wanted so much to just sleep.