"Killing Rain aka One Last Kill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eisler Barry)NINEAFTER DINNER, Dox insisted on heading over to the go-go bars in Patpong. I wasn’t happy about it, but I supposed I would just have to accept that the man was large enough to contain multitudes: lethal and loud; cultured and crude; profound and party-going. And what he had said earlier, about having been doing fine on his own, was of course true. Maybe I was being unfair to him. I decided I would try to trust him more. The thought was strange and uncomfortable, but it felt like the right thing to do. I stopped by an Internet café to check on Delilah’s plans. There was a message waiting from her: she was coming in on the Air France flight, and would be arriving in Bangkok the following afternoon at 4:35. All right. I made the necessary reservations for Dox, went back to the Sukhothai, took a hot bath in the excellent tub, got in bed, and slept. But my sleep was restless. I dreamed that I was a little boy again, in the apartment where I had grown up, and that something was chasing me there from room to room. I called for my parents, but no one came, and I was terrified at being alone. My father had kept a I woke and sprang off the bed into a crouch. I remained like that for a long time, catching my breath, feeling the sweat dry on my body, trying to shake off the dream and come back to myself. Finally I straightened, used the toilet, then took another bath. But this one didn’t help me sleep at all. I lay in bed for a long time afterward, thinking. It bothered me that I’d frozen again, even in a dream. Two swords within easy reach-an embarrassment of riches if you’re in danger, you would think. And yet I couldn’t choose either one. If I hadn’t awoken, whatever had been pursuing me in the dream would have killed me. DOX AND I went to the airport early the next afternoon to give ourselves time to establish a countersurveillance route and walk it through. We were using the commo gear from Manila. If Dox had to warn me of anything, he could do it at a distance and right in my ear. This would give us a better range of options than if he had been trying to protect me from afar without contact. The area outside customs was crowded with people waiting for arrivals: families, Thai and expat; hotel car drivers in white livery; greasy-haired backpackers in sandals with adventure-seeking friends coming in from Europe and Australia. No one set off my radar, but the area was too crowded to be sure. If there were trouble, I expected it would look Israeli. After all, part of the reason Delilah’s people had brought me in to begin with was their lack of Asian resources. The “lack” was relative, of course: through both the gemstone trade and the underground arms market to groups like the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Israel does have contacts in Thailand. Still, if they wanted to move quickly enough to take advantage of any intel Delilah might have supplied them, I didn’t think they’d be able to outsource. None of which is to say I ignored people who didn’t fit the profile, but it does help to keep certain guidelines in mind as you go. I set up far to the right of the exit, where I would be able to see her as she emerged from customs but where she would have to look hard for me. Dox was positioned a few meters behind me and to my left, and when I casually checked in his direction, it took me a second to spot him, even though I knew him and I knew where to look. He really did have that sniper’s knack for disappearing into the background. There were two possibilities: first, they would have someone pre-positioned outside of customs, where I had told Delilah I would meet her, along with when. Second, they would have someone on the plane with her, who would have to follow her if his presence were going to serve any purpose. Of the two, I thought the second the more likely, as well as the easier to deal with. More likely, because their probable lack of Asian resources would prevent them from getting someone in place that quickly; easier, because whoever it was would have to be close to Delilah coming off the plane and would have a hard time staying submerged once I started moving her. Either way, I wasn’t unduly worried about someone making a move inside the airport. The levels of surveillance, security, and control over ingress and egress involved would make an airport job almost impossible to pull off cleanly. The plane arrived ten minutes ahead of schedule, with nothing noticeably out of place in the crowd beforehand. I saw Delilah immediately as she came through. She was wearing a navy pantsuit and brown pumps, her long blond hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. A crocodile carry-on was slung across her left shoulder, the bag resting comfortably against her opposite hip. The surface brand was looks, money, confidence, style. There was a lot more to her than just that, I knew, but she wore that outward persona well. I reached into my pocket and turned off the commo gear, then turned on the mini bug detector Harry had made for me in Tokyo and that I’ve relied on since. The former would have set off the latter, and I wanted to make sure Delilah wasn’t wearing a transmitter. She looked around, saw me, and smiled. I felt something going on down south, like a slumbering dog stirring in response to an enticing aroma, and I thought, She walked over and put the bag down, then leaned in and kissed me lightly on the mouth. I put my arms around her and pulled her close. She smelled the way she did the first time I’d kissed her, clean and fresh and with a tantalizing trace of some perfume I couldn’t name. The warmth of her, the feel of her against me, her scent, it all seemed to ease in under my clothes, and in the crowded airport the embrace was suddenly private, focused, almost naked in its intimacy. She pulled her head back and looked at me, one hand resting against the back of my neck, the other dropping gently to my chest. The dog was coming fully awake now. Another minute and the damned thing would sit up and beg. I eased away and looked at her. She smiled, her cobalt eyes alight with good humor. “I guess this is when I’m supposed to ask, ‘Is that a gun in your pocket…’ ” I felt myself blush. “No, I’m definitely just glad to see you.” She laughed. “Where are we going?” The bug detector slumbered peacefully in my pocket. She wasn’t wired. I struck a casual pose, my hands in my pockets. I switched the bug detector off and powered the commo gear on. I heard a slight hiss in my ear canal where the flesh-colored unit was inserted. “A little place I know in Phuket,” I said. “Wonderful! I’ve heard it’s beautiful, but have never been. How are things there, after the tsunami?” “The place we’re going is elevated from the beach and did fine. Actually, most of the island is recovering nicely. How much time do you have?” “Three days. Maybe longer. You?” “I don’t know. I’m waiting for something. I hope it’ll take at least a few days to materialize.” “Well, let’s not waste any time. Where do we go?” “The other terminal. Our flight leaves in an hour.” I eschewed the shuttle bus, instead choosing a route that required a walk through the terminal and a descent to the level below us. She knew what I was doing but didn’t comment on it. On the level below, I flagged down a cab and had it take us to the domestic terminal. A minute after we had pulled away from the curb, I heard Dox in my ear: “All right, so far, so good. It doesn’t look like anyone’s trying to stay with you. If they are, they’re sure not being obvious. I’ll head over and see if we see any familiar faces.” The cab pulled up in front of the domestic terminal. I paid the driver, got out, and held the door for Delilah, checking behind and around us while I did. She saw what I was doing-I wasn’t trying to be subtle, and she would have spotted it anyway-and again, she didn’t comment. I logged her failure to protest as a possible source of concern. In Rio, we had moved past the point where I was treating her as a potential threat, and I knew that my willingness to relax my guard had been important to her. That my mistrust had apparently resumed should have been the source of insult, and, I knew from experience with her occasional temper, of anger. Unless, of course, she was aware of the reasons behind the resurgence and was misguidedly trying to lull me. We went inside the terminal and headed down to gate eight. A few minutes later, Dox moved in, keeping to the periphery. I heard him again in my ear: “Okay, partner, there is no way you were followed over here. Also I don’t see anyone here who was waiting outside international arrivals. So unless someone knew where you were headed and got here before us, you are in the clear. I think the next point of concern will be our destination. She might make a call or something, tell her people where you are after you’ve arrived. That way they wouldn’t have to give themselves away trying to follow you. If I was her, sorry, if I Delilah and I made some small talk about the flight. She had flown first class and had slept the whole way, and was refreshed and ready for an evening in a tropical paradise. But Dox kept jabbering, and with Delilah right there next to me, I had no way of telling him to knock it off. “And damn, man, I have got to tell you, that is one fine-looking woman! Why didn’t you say so? I would have understood right away why you wanted to see her. Hell, I’d have tried to see her myself. I would have done your countersurveillance for free, partner, if I’d known she was going to be the subject, you wouldn’t even have had to pay for my vacation. Well, too late now, a deal’s a deal.” He stopped, and I thought, Once we were on the plane I knew I was safe, at least temporarily, and I took the earpiece out, satisfied to think that Dox would now be talking only to himself. Delilah and I caught up some more. The conversation was largely small talk, but I was probing, as well. So far I had two pieces of data, and both pointed to a problem: the timing of her call, and her failure to react to my obvious security moves. The jury wasn’t in yet, but the evidence was piling up. It bothered me, at some level, that it had come to this. In Rio it had been good, it really had. I should have just been able to deal with it-she was a professional, and business is business-but yeah, it was bothering me. God, she was beautiful, though. You could see why she was so effective in her work. There was something about her, an aura, a magnetism, that I’d never encountered in anyone else. And despite my suspicions, it felt good to be with her. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the data would start to accumulate in a more favorable direction. The approach and landing were smooth, and a hotel car was waiting outside arrivals to take us to Amanpuri. The sun was getting low in the sky as we drove along Phuket’s two-lane, narrow roads toward the resort. I knew what she must be thinking: We pulled in off the resort’s winding, gated drive just as the sun was setting behind the steep, Thai-style rooflines of the bungalows and pavilions and the Andaman Sea beyond them. Palm trees swayed in silhouette to a gentle ocean breeze. A teak terrace flowed from the edge of the driveway to a long, black-bottomed pool, its surface like polished onyx against the darkening sky. In the tenuous golden light, we might have been looking at a movie set. A porter opened the car door and we got out. “Welcome to Amanpuri,” he said, pressing his palms together under his chin and bowing his head in a formal Delilah looked around, then at me. Her mouth was slightly agape. “What’s that wonderful smell?” she asked. I smiled and looked at her. “Well? Do you like it?” She paused for a moment, then said, “Oh, my God.” “Does that mean yes?” She nodded and looked around again, then back at me. Her face lit up in an enormous smile. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it does.” We checked in under the rafters of the open-air entrance pavilion. A woman named Aom gave us a quick tour of the facilities-the fitness center, the library, the spa. Everything was teak and stone and seemed to rise up out of the hilly terrain as indigenous as the surrounding palm trees. I noted the presence of multiple guards, all extremely discreet. Amanpuri is a celebrity magnet, and the resort takes security seriously. Which, to me, was part of the attraction. Even if Delilah informed her people of our whereabouts, they would have a hell of a time getting in here unannounced and unobtrusive. As for Delilah herself, from what I had seen of her organization’s MO, her role was to set up the bowling pins, not to knock them down. Also, without checked bags, her ability to carry weapons would be limited. Knowing all this, and also, inevitably, influenced by the blissfully beautiful surroundings, I began to relax. I felt as though we’d been granted some sort of time-out, during which I might learn what I needed to know. Maybe I could turn the situation around, if that’s what was called for. Yeah, we’d faced a conflict of interests before and found a way to work things out. Maybe we could do it again. Aom took us to our pavilion-number 105, with a full ocean view. The room was low-key and luxurious. The walls, floor, and simple furniture were all teak, with the porcelain of a long tub, a cotton duvet, and oversized thick towels all gleaming white by contrast. Everything seemed to glow with the golden light of the sun, which was still visible through the pavilion’s western doors. Delilah was starving, so we decided to eat at one of the property’s two open-air restaurants. We sat along the railing overlooking the ocean. The sun was now completely below the horizon, and but for a thin line of glowing red between them the water was now as dark as the sky. The restaurant, like all Amanpuri’s facilities, wisely eschewed any piped-in music, instead allowing the breeze swaying the palm trees and the waves lapping at the beach to supply the necessary ambience. We ordered roast duck sautéed with morning glories, soft-shelled black crab sautéed with chile paste, stir-fried mixed vegetables, and stir-fried bean sprouts with tofu and chili. I started us with a ’93 Veuve Clicquot. “I have to tell you,” Delilah said as we ate. “I’ve been to some of the most beautiful places on earth. Post Ranch in Big Sur. The Palace in Saint-Moritz. The Serengeti Plain. But this is right up there.” I smiled. “There aren’t many places that can make you forget everything. Everywhere you’ve been, everything you’ve done.” She raised her eyebrows. “Where are the others? For you.” I thought for a moment. “A few places in Tokyo, believe it or not. But they’re more like… enclaves. Oases. They can protect you from what’s outside, but you still know it’s there. This… it’s another universe.” She took a sip of the champagne. “I know what you mean. There’s a beach in Haifa, where I grew up. Sometimes, when I’m back there, I can find a quiet spot at night. The smell of the sea, the sound of the waves… it makes me feel like I’m a girl again, innocent and unblemished. Like I’m alone, but in a good way, if you know what I mean.” “To be unaccompanied by constant memories,” I said, quoting something a friend had once said to me, “is to find a state of grace.” “Grace?” she asked, taking the reference literally. “Do you believe in God?” I paused, thinking of my conversation with Dox, then said, “I try not to.” “Does that help?” I shrugged. “Not really. But what difference does it make, what you believe? Things are what they are.” “What you believe makes all the difference in the world.” I looked at her. We’d been down this road before, and I didn’t like the implicit criticism, maybe even condescension, in her comment. Then or now. “Then you better be careful about what you believe in,” I said. “And about what it might cost you.” She looked away for a moment. I wasn’t sure if it was a flinch. We finished the champagne and I ordered a ’99 Lafon Volnay Santenots. Delilah had a disciplined mind, I knew, but no one does as well in the presence of wine and jet lag as in their absence. And if she were here for something “nefarious,” as Dox had put it, the discord between her feelings for me from before and her intentions for me now would be producing a strain. I wanted to do everything I could to turn that strain into a fault line, the fault line into a widening crack. We talked more about this and that. She never let on that she knew anything about Manny, or that the botched hit in Manila had anything to do with her presence here now. And as the evening wore on, I realized I couldn’t accept that the timing of her contact had been a coincidence. So the absence of any acknowledgment had to be an omission. A deliberate omission. If she had been anyone else, and if this had all happened just a year or two earlier, I would have accepted the truth of what I knew. I would have acted on it. Doing so would have protected my body, albeit at some cost to my soul. But sitting across the table from her, no doubt affected by the wine, as well as by the surroundings and the feelings I still had for her, I found myself looking for a different way. Something less direct, less irredeemable, something that might have as its basis hope instead of only fear. And there was something strangely attractive about the feeling that I was taking a chance. It wasn’t anything as base as the thrill of “unsafe sex,” as Dox had suggested. It was more a sense of the possibilities, the potential upside. Not just the possibility that, if I confronted her and she cracked, she might give me information that would help me understand where I stood regarding Manny. I was aware, too, of a deeper kind of hope at work, for something more than information alone, something intangible but infinitely more valuable. After a dessert of fruit and Thai sweets followed by steaming tureens of cappuccino, we strolled back to the pavilion. We left the lights dim and sat on a low teak couch facing the sea, present by the sound of the surf but unseeable in the darkness without. The silence in the room felt heavy to me, portentous. My previous, oblique conversational gambits had afforded me only hints and clues. I decided it was time to be more direct. My mouth felt a little dry at the prospect, part of me perhaps afraid of what I might discover. “Did your people tell you about what they’ve involved me in?” I asked. She looked at me, and something in her expression told me she wasn’t happy with the question. This wasn’t why we had come back to the room. It wasn’t part of the script. “No,” she said. “Everything is ‘need to know.’ If I don’t need to know, it’s better that I don’t.” “They sent me after a guy in Manila.” She shook her head. “Why are you telling me this?” “I don’t want what’s between us to be nothing more than ‘need to know.’ If it is, we’re just gaming each other.” “Protecting each other.” “Would you protect me?” “From what?” “What if something went wrong?” “Don’t put me in that position.” “What if you had to choose?” Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “I don’t know. What would you do?” I looked at her. “It’s easy for me. I don’t believe in anything, remember? I can make up my own mind.” “That’s not an answer.” “It’s more of an answer than what you just told me.” “I told you I don’t know. I’m sorry if that wasn’t the answer you were looking for.” “I’m looking for the truth.” “You know who I am.” “That’s what I’m asking you.” She laughed. “Look, I’m like a married woman, okay? With a family I always have to return to.” I didn’t respond. After a moment she said, “So stop pretending you don’t know all this.” That sounded dangerously close to a rationalization, one with which I’m all too familiar: Of all the potential angles, the possible gambits, it seemed to me that the truth would be what she was least prepared for. The closer I got to it, the more it was putting her off her game. “You’re here only for personal reasons?” I asked her. She shifted a fraction on the couch. “Yes.” “Look in my eyes when you say that.” She did. A long beat went by. “I’m here only for personal reasons,” she said again. No. I knew her, from the time we’d spent together in Rio. If what she just said were true, my suspicions would have provoked her instantly. But now she was trying to manage her behavior in the presence of fatigue, conflicting emotions, and alcohol, and under pressure from my questions, and the unaccustomed effort was showing. I looked at her silently. She returned my gaze. A long time went by-ten seconds, maybe fifteen. I could see some color coming into her cheeks, her nostrils flaring slightly with each exhalation. All at once she looked away. I saw her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing. “Goddamn you,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Goddamn you.” She glanced around the room, her head moving in quick, efficient jerks, here and there and back again. She got up and started pacing, slowly at first, then more rapidly, her head nodding as though internally confirming something, trying to accept it. She looked everywhere but at me. “I have to get out of here,” she said, more to herself than to me. She walked over to one of the dressers, pulled open a drawer, and started shoving things into her bag. “Delilah,” I said. She didn’t answer, or even pause. She pulled open a second drawer and stuffed its contents into the bag, too. I stood up. “Delilah,” I said again. She threw the bag over her shoulder and headed toward the door. “Wait,” I said, and moved in front of her. She tried to go left around me. I stayed with her. She went right. That didn’t work either. She moved left again, more quickly. No go. She had become almost oblivious to my presence. Something had gotten in her way, she had been blindly trying to go around it. But her lack of progress forced her to change her focus, and all at once she saw that the obstacle was me. Her eyes narrowed and her ears seemed to settle back against her head. In my peripheral vision I took in a shift in her weight, a slight rotation of her hips. Then her right elbow was blurring in toward my temple. I retracted my head and shrugged my left shoulder, bringing my left hand up alongside my face as I did so. Her elbow glanced off the top of my head. Her left was already coming in from the other side. I covered up, dropped through my knees, and deflected it the same way. She shifted back and shot a left palm heel straight for my nose. I weaved off-line and parried with my right. Other side-same drill. She took two more quick shots, hooks to the head. I avoided the worst of both. She grabbed my arm and tried to drag me to the side, frustration and anger eroding her tactics. If there’s one thing my body learned in twenty-five years of judo at the Kodokan in Tokyo, it’s grounding. She might as well have been trying to move one of the room’s thick teak posts. She made a sound, half rage, half desperation. She stepped back and whipped the bag around at my head. I dissipated some of the blow’s force by flowing with it, and absorbed the rest by covering up with my shoulder, bicep, and forearm. She reloaded and swung again. Again I flowed and absorbed. She started swearing something in Hebrew and hammering at me with the bag, with no obvious goal now other than to vent her fury. I let her pound on me, taking most of the impact along my arms and shoulders. She was in shape, and it took longer than I would have liked for her to tire. But eventually the power of the blows lessened, the interval between them lengthened. She stood, the bag hanging at her side, her breath heaving in and out. I lowered my arms and looked at her. She glanced around the room. I realized she was looking for a better weapon of convenience than the bag. I tensed to grab her before she could pick up something heavy and blunt, or something sharp. She must have sensed that I was on to her. Or she didn’t see anything that looked likely to do the job. Regardless, she stopped scoping the room and looked in my eyes. Her pupils were huge and black-dilated by adrenaline. Her panting punctuated her words. “Get. The fuck. Out. Of my way.” “Not until you tell me what’s going on.” She sucked wind for a moment, then said, “Fuck you.” I looked at her. “This is going to be a long night.” “What do you want?” she asked. “I want…” I started to say. But it had only been a feint. She dropped her right shoulder and charged into me, trying to knock me off balance. The move surprised me and might have worked, but I caught her shoulders with both hands and used her body as a momentary brace. She reared up under me, looking for a head butt, and connected with my chin. My teeth slammed together, narrowly missing my tongue. Enough. I grabbed her by the biceps and shoved her against the wall. “Tell me what’s going on,” I said. She dropped the bag and tried for an uppercut to my gut. I took hold of her wrists and slammed her arms up against the wall on either side of her head. Our faces were inches apart. I felt her knee coming up and pressed my body against hers to stop it. She twisted right, then left. My cheek was pressed against hers and her smell, that perfume I liked, now mixed with sweat and fear and rage, got inside me and wrought some weird alchemy. I dropped my face to her neck, feeling first as though I was just going to brace it there, but then I was kissing her instead. I heard her say, “No, no,” but she wasn’t fighting me anymore, or at least not the same way. Keeping her arms and body pinned to the wall, I brought my face around to kiss her on the mouth. She twisted her head away. I let go of her wrists and took her face in my hands. She tried to push me away for a second, but then she was kissing me back, almost attacking me with her mouth. I ran my hands down around her breasts and squeezed her waist, her ass. I realized I was kissing her as hard as she was me. I reached up and tried to undo one of the buttons on her blouse but my hands were shaking and I couldn’t do it. Kissing me so hard I was forced to step back from the wall, she reached up and tore my shirt open the same way I had done hers. Then she reached down for my belt buckle. I looked around wildly. To our left-the dresser. I shoved her over to it. There was a stack of travel magazines on top. I swept them to the floor with my free hand. Then I bent her over the dresser, bearing down on her arm and pinning her upper torso. She struggled but the wrist hold was too tight. I stepped to her side, opened my belt, and undid my button and zipper. I stepped on the cuff of my left pants leg with my right foot and dropped my pants, stepping clear of them with my left leg as soon as they hit the floor. No way was I going to deal with her with a pair of trousers pooled around my ankles. I repeated the procedure with my right leg, then slipped off my boxers. My erection was straining upward like spring-loaded cement. I stepped between her legs and pushed up the skirt. Her breathing was more like gasping now, and so, I realized, was mine. Still pressing her down with the wristlock, I started touching her again. I don’t know what I was waiting for. Maybe I wanted to torture her a little, to torture both of us. “Do it,” I heard her gasp. “Do it, or I’ll kill you.” My heart was hammering so hard I heard it thudding in my skull. My fingers and toes were tingling. I kicked her feet farther apart, wiped some of her wetness onto myself, and entered her in one smooth motion. She gasped so loudly I felt the sound of it run back up into me, like a feedback screech through a microphone. I started driving into her, my hips sliding up and forward, my gut and ass clenching and releasing with each profound stroke. I looked down at her. The side of her face was pressed against the dresser, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth open and panting, in pain or ecstasy or both I didn’t know. Her cheek was streaked with tears. I kept going. I didn’t slow down at all. A minute went by, maybe two. I forgot who she was, who I was, why we were there. There was only the room, the heat, a singularity generating a rhythm as old as oceans. I heard a deep groan and realized it came from me. Or maybe it was hers. She opened her eyes and looked back at me, pleading for something. I let go of her wrist and took hold of her hips. She gripped the edges of the dresser and moved up onto her toes, raising her ass higher. Her lips were moving but if there were words I couldn’t hear them. Her legs were trembling. I felt her start to come and it took me over the edge. I dug my fingers more deeply into her hips. The pounding in my chest and in my head seemed to fuse together with everything else, my legs, my balls, my gut, her body beneath and before me, everything. Through it all I could hear her swearing in Hebrew again, could feel her coming in waves under me and all around me and myself coming with her. Finally it subsided. I eased down on top of her, supporting some of my weight with my arms. We stayed that way, our breathing abating, our sweat drying, coming back to ourselves. After a while, I eased myself up and stepped to the side. I touched her shoulder. She pushed herself up off the dresser and looked at me. Neither of us said anything. “You okay?” I asked, after a moment. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay.” “You want to talk?” “No, I want to get out of here.” “Is that going to help?” “No.” “Then maybe we should talk.” There was a pause. She looked down at what was left of her blouse and bra, then let them slide off her arms to the floor. She stepped out of her skirt. “Tell me one thing, okay?” she asked. “Yeah.” “Tell me that you haven’t done that before. Without a condom, I mean.” I thought of Naomi, and, even more, of Midori. “Not in a few years.” She nodded. “Good. Although at this point AIDS or whatever ought to be the least of my worries.” “Tell me what’s going on.” She walked over to the shower and took a robe off the peg next to it. She pulled it on. I walked over and did the same. We moved over to the bed and sat on it. “Those men you killed in Manila,” she said, looking at her hands. Her voice was slightly husky. “Two of them were CIA officers.” I looked at her. I saw that she was being straight with me. “Shit,” I said. She didn’t respond. After a moment I said, “How bad is it?” “My people are afraid the Agency will find you and you’ll talk. They don’t want to take that chance.” “So they sent you.” She shrugged. “What would you have done?” “You came here to set me up?” “I thought I did. Now I’m not sure.” “That’s not quite what I was hoping to hear.” “It’s the truth.” “Couldn’t pull the trigger yourself?” “What I do is hard enough.” We were silent for a minute while I digested the news. I said, “What’s next?” She brushed away a few strands of hair that were clinging to her face. “I’m supposed to call my contact, let him know when and where you’ll be vulnerable.” “What are you going to tell him?” She looked up at the ceiling and said, “I have absolutely no idea.” “What changed your mind?” I asked, and thought, I’d have to keep testing for that. I didn’t think the way her body had responded could possibly have been acting. But maybe there were a bunch of dead men out there who had all convinced themselves of the same thing. And maybe I would be a fool to assume that the body would always follow the mind. Or vice versa. There was a long silence. Then she said, “You’ve been lucky so far. I don’t know anyone who’s been luckier for longer. But nobody’s bulletproof. I can’t keep bailing you out.” “Bailing me out?” “I warned you about that guy in your room in Macau.” “I didn’t need your warning.” “No? You took it.” I let it go. “And this time?” She looked at me. “Enough, all right? You know why. I don’t want to be responsible for your death. You fucked up in Manila and I don’t know if you’re going to survive it. I just don’t want to be the one who kills you. Or helps make it happen.” “I wouldn’t want to put you out.” She glared at me. “Stop being a child. You caused this situation, and now I’m caught in it, too.” I paused and took a breath. I needed to think. There had to be a way out of this. “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 status, 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 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. |
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