Barry Eisler: Requiem for an Assassin

Anyway, it wasn’t like he pined for Delilah or anything like that. It was more like, she was just the kind of woman he wished he could meet. Smart, confident, and of course drop-dead gorgeous. Semi-mysterious, with a tasty little edge to keep you on your toes. Like what Angelina Jolie might be if she were blond and had taken up spy work for the Mossad instead of acting.

Well, he’d keep looking. And it wasn’t like he was suffering in the meantime. He had a couple of honeys tucked away in Kuta, only an hour away, and several in Bangkok and Jakarta who went into paroxysms whenever he called to say he was coming to town.

He finished urinating, then looked at himself in the mirror. He liked what he saw: just shy of six feet and a solid two hundred twenty-five pounds, with a six-pack and no fat other than a pair of moderate love handles the ladies seemed to find endearing. Exercise was the key. He liked to do something different every day: weights, the jump rope, a Cross Fit routine, some kettlebell stuff he’d learned from the Russians and bodyweight exercises Rain had shown him. He figured his body looked about ten years younger than the forty he actually was, which was good. He wanted to be able to keep chasing twenty-five-year-olds for as long as possible without feeling like a dirty old man.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to maintain himself forever, but that didn’t really bother him. He didn’t care if he lost his hair, either, although at this point it didn’t look like he was going to. There were only two things he would miss, when the time came: being able to take out a dime-size target at five hundred yards in low light, and getting it up as quick as a fourteen-year-old with a can of Crisco and a Carmen Electra video. Young enough to get wood right away, but old enough to last pretty much as long as he wanted, that was the best thing about being forty. Waiting to come until you’d given some pretty lady as much pleasure as she could stand, until she was practically dying from it and begging you for mercy, well, if there was a better high than that on this earth, he’d like to know what it could be.

Of course, when that day came, when his hands got shaky and his pecker turned weak, he’d have to remind himself he was lucky. Not everyone lived long enough to have to deal with such eventualities. He was planning to, but you never really knew. The main thing was to enjoy yourself while you could, because in the end, everybody’s moment was brief. Especially in the line of work he was in.

He walked over to the window and opened the curtain, letting the sun warm his body. God, what a vista. Nothing but blue skies, white clouds, and green rice fields dotted with coconut trees. He loved standing here and surveying his realm, not just because the view was so good, but because this was one of the few places in the world where he felt comfortable silhouetting himself this way. He’d taken out enough people through the glass of their own windows to have developed a permanent shyness about any room with a view. Sure, he could have spent a lifetime in therapy doing successive aversion training or some other bullshit to get over his nervousness, or he could just have all his windows custom-built out of aluminum oxynitride by a company called Surmet. They called their product ALON and it could stop multiple.50 caliber armor-piercing rounds, meaning an ordinary sniper bullet had about the same chance of getting through as a mosquito. How did those MasterCard ads go? “Aluminum oxynitride bullet-resistant glass-ten dollars a square inch. Peace of mind that no one’s about to blow your brains out with a scoped rifle-priceless.”

He pulled on shorts and a tee-shirt and spent an hour hitting the weights in his first-floor exercise room, then showered and made himself a giant protein smoothie for breakfast. A cup of milk, a couple bananas, papayas, mangos, and four raw eggs. The eggs were his last, he noted-he’d have to pick up some more. And he was getting low on fruit, too.

He drank it all down while using the laptop he kept on the kitchen table to catch up on the latest horseshit in the Middle East and elsewhere. A long time ago he’d been troubled over the way he’d left the Marines, but these days you couldn’t pay him enough to be part of the government. The hypocrisy of it all was enough to make you sick. He wondered how people could stand for it. If he were a philosopher king or a benevolent dictator, the only jobs he thought he might enjoy more than his current occupation, he’d have a rule that you could only authorize a war if you were actually going to go off and fight it. That’d get the politicians singing “Kumbaya” right quick.

When he was done with breakfast and the news, he checked the URL that ran a live feed from the four CCTV cameras he had positioned around the house. Everything was normal. Not that he was expecting any visitors, of course, but a little extra assurance never hurt anyone. He wished he could get a dog-for security, a low-tech little yapper was hard to beat-but he traveled too much for it to be feasible. Maybe if he settled down a little more, found a brown-skinned woman with almond-shaped eyes. Get her pregnant, raise a family, teach the kids to hunt and fish and shoot like he could. Yeah, maybe one day.

Getting dressed to go out in Bali didn’t usually mean much-this morning, just shorts, a tee-shirt, and sandals. He would have preferred to accessorize with a baby Glock or one of the other pistols he kept handy, but you always had to weigh accessibility, concealability, the likelihood of need, and the likelihood of getting busted for violating Indonesia ’s draconian gun laws. This morning, he felt the balance was against the Glock. But that didn’t mean he would be unarmed: he put a Spyderco Clipit Civilian in his front right pocket and hung a Fred Perrin La Griffe with a two-inch spear-point blade around his neck inside the shirt. He grabbed the big backpack he used for groceries, opened the garage, and took out his motorcycle, a 250cc wine-colored Honda Rebel, beat-up, dirty, and reliable as hell.

It was still morning but it was already getting hot, and the air was plenty sticky. He stood there for a moment, just appreciating the feeling of another day in paradise. He liked everything about it, the smell of the mud, even of the duck excrement that fertilized the paddies. It didn’t smell like shit to him at all, it smelled like life, real life far away from all the places covered in concrete and asphalt and choking on diesel. It smelled like the earth itself.

He pulled on his helmet, hating the thing as always because of the heat. The locals didn’t always adhere to Indonesia ’s helmet ordinances, but as an obvious foreigner he found it best to do what he could to avoid standing out, especially when standing out meant disrespecting the host country’s laws.

There was no driveway as such; just a quarter-mile-long dirt road. He fired up the bike and motored slowly forward, looking around automatically as he moved, noting the hot spots, checking to see if anything seemed out of order, if anything rubbed him the wrong way. There was no good way to get to him at the villa, which was half the point of its location and design, but the least worst place for an ambush would be somewhere along this road, and so he was always extra alert coming and going here. But nothing was at all amiss this morning, just the usual dogs barking agreeably in the background, the usual farmers sweating at their labors amid the thigh-high rice.

He turned right at the end of the road and picked up speed. A 250cc bike was small for a guy his size, but it’s what everyone around here used and the roads were too narrow and winding to go very fast anyway.

He pulled into the parking lot of the Bintang supermarket on Jalan Raya Ubud and killed the engine. The Bintang was in a two-story stone building with a wood-and-red-tile roof, surrounded by ferns and bamboo trees. It was by far the biggest market in town, and the one Dox liked when he needed more than just a few supplies. Out front were the usual complement of motorbikes, bicycles, and cars. A small dog, one of the scores that roamed Ubud unsupervised, lay in the shade under the front awning, conserving its energy in the gathering tropical heat.