Barry Eisler - Requiem for an Assassin

“How long are we talking about?” I asked.

“Forty-eight hours. Check the bulletin board then.”

He clicked off.

I called Kanezaki from a pay phone. “You get it?” I asked.

“I got it. He’s in Jakarta. Or at least he was during the time you had him on the phone.”

I was gripping the phone hard. “Where in Jakarta?”

“Pluit, it looks like. The marina.”

“Can you be more precise than that?”

“What do you want, an address? All I know is he was near a cell tower in Pluit. Without a formal request to the NSA, which will create a lot of questions and take a month to process anyway, I can’t triangulate. I can only give you a radius around a single tower. From what I can see, either he was in Pluit, or he was a little way out in the Java Sea.”

I was quiet for a moment. He was right, I wasn’t being reasonable. But damn, to feel like I was that close to having him in my sights…

“He’s got our friend on a boat,” I said. “They probably docked in Jakarta to make the call, maybe use an Internet café, whatever. But with the boat, they could move anywhere, and keep moving. There are ten million people in Jakarta alone. Leave Jakarta, and you’ve got seventeen thousand islands, only six thousand of them inhabited, and probably twenty thousand miles of coast. And that’s all assuming he stays somewhere in Indonesia and doesn’t move on. Shit, this isn’t much better than knowing he’s in Asia.”

“It’s another piece,” Kanezaki said, after a moment. “Like you said.”

I sighed. He was right again. “Is this anything you can use with what you’ve already got?” I said. “The visas, the previous known location, the government backing?”

“I doubt it. I don’t have a way to search travel records by location, only by names. It doesn’t look like our friend was traveling as himself. So it’s slow going.”

“All right,” I said, trying not to be frustrated. We had so many pieces…but they still added up to nothing. I fought the urge to just go to Jakarta, see what I could find there. Without more information it would be useless.

“What about you?” he asked. “You learn anything on the call? Anything new we can work with?”

“No. Well…maybe one of the people who’s holding Dox is or was a Marine. I think Dox was trying to indicate that, but I’m not sure.”

“All right, I’ll see if that gets us anywhere.”

Even as he said it, I knew it was unlikely. It was almost nothing.

“Anyway, that’s all,” I said. “Hilger told me he’d upload details about the next assignment two days from now.”

“Two days from now? You’re doing it again, aren’t you? Giving yourself time to…”

“I’m not doing anything. He told me the person isn’t in position yet and wouldn’t be for forty-eight hours. I’ve got nothing to do but wait. If you could come up with something in that time, it sure would be handy.”

“Otherwise…”

“Yeah, that’s right. Otherwise we get to number two on the list.”

“Jesus,” I heard him breathe.

“Don’t ‘Jesus’ me,” I growled. “I’m not going to let something happen to my friend.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Bullshit. I don’t want to hear it. Not unless you’ve ever once gotten your own hands bloody. Have you? Ever? Or do you only send out other people for the nasty stuff so you can sleep like a fucking baby at night?”

A long moment went by. Then he said, “I wasn’t judging you. I was just…a little awed. That’s all. I’m trying to help, okay?”

I watched people strolling past me. A group of teenagers, laughing through orthodontic-perfect smiles, sauntering in distressed jeans that probably cost two hundred dollars a pair. Men whose faces bore the marks of nothing worse than overstretched mortgage worries beat back by too much Botox. Women with bare liposuctioned midriffs and Herculean plastic breasts. A river of well-fed selfishness, a contagion of insecure conceit. I hated them. I hated all of them.

“You there?” I heard Kanezaki ask.

“Yeah.”

“If you don’t mind my saying, and you probably will, you seem like you’re on a short fuse lately.”

“You’re right, I mind.”

“I’m only bringing it up because…”

“Because what?”

“Never mind.”

“What? Just say it.”

He sighed. “Don’t push away the people who are trying to help you. You can’t afford it. And neither can our friend who’s in trouble.”

“Oh, now you’re trying to help me. Not use me. Help me.”

“Look, there’s something I want out of this, yes. I’ve been upfront with you about it. But that doesn’t mean…”

“That’s exactly what it means,” I shouted. “Exactly. When are you going to grow up and realize you can’t fucking have it both ways?”

I slammed down the phone and clenched my hands into fists, fighting the urge to smash something. A sound rumbled up out of my throat. It might have been a snarl.

I looked up and saw three husky college kids watching from five yards away. White, dressed like gangsta wannabes. I realized they had stopped because of my outburst.

“Chill, dude,” one of them said.

I stood perfectly still. Inside, a war raged: the need to avoid trouble so I could focus on Dox; the overwhelming urge to slaughter the three creatures looking at me like I was an animal in the zoo. I imagined myself tearing into them like a lawn mower up on its back wheels, slashing, ripping, gutting. I could almost hear their high-pitched wails of terror and surprise, could practically smell the hot blood pouring out of them. I gritted my teeth into an insane smile and stood staring at them, panting with the effort of holding back, praying for one of them to say something, do something, to tip the balance and make me lose control.

One of them smacked Mr. Chill on the back of the head and gave him a shove. “Let’s go, man,” he said. And Mr. Chill, perhaps guided by some reptile-brain recognition of the image of a predator just before it pounces, nodded and silently complied. The three of them walked away, and somehow I managed to let them.

I glanced around. A few other people in the area were studiously looking elsewhere. Goddamnit, I’d drawn attention to myself. Stupid. I pulled out a handkerchief and wiped down the phone receiver, obscuring the act with my torso, then walked away, keeping my head down.

I found another pay phone and called the toll-free number for Hilton hotels. Their property in Beverly Hills had a room available tonight, did I want that? I told them I did, and would be there shortly. One night was fine. I was just passing through.

I had the car for a week anyway, so I decided to hold on to it. It beat figuring out the bus system, or trying to get around by cabs. I had nowhere to go for two days. I might as well stay here.

The nav system took me onto the Santa Monica Boulevard and east toward Beverly Hills. I drove through alternating patches of feeble yellow light and serene urban darkness, the interior of the Mercedes strobing weakly with each passing lamppost. Fragments without were illuminated, revealed, then gone again: a shuffling homeless man, glancing up at me as indifferently as a sea creature outside a passing bathysphere. Shuttered storefronts, graffitied walls, construction sites suffocating under profusions of slapped-on posters. A homeless woman, sunk to her side in the shadows, her head in her hands, another soul swallowed up by the city.

A few miles from the hotel, as concrete gave way to palm trees and graffiti to the shiny windows of boutiques, I turned on my old cell phone to check the voice-mail account. Part of me hoped for a message from Delilah. Part of me dreaded it.

What I got, though, wasn’t a message. Just a second after I fired up the phone, it buzzed. I checked the readout, surprised, and saw that Delilah was calling me right then.