Barry Eisler - Requiem for an Assassin

“Boezeman lives in Amsterdam. Go there. Brace him. Find out what Hilger’s been up to and help me stop it.”

“Don’t you have real secret agents who are paid to do this kind of thing?”

“Yeah, we have lots of them. All I have to do is fill out the necessary paperwork explaining where my intel comes from-that means you, by the way. Except…oh, shit…no one knows about you. Since the first time you helped me with my treasonous boss in Tokyo, I haven’t reported our contacts, which is a felony, by the way. I’ve shredded files on you-oops, another felony. But I’m sure the bureaucrats who run the CIA and are beholden to Hilger will be happy to overlook all that and do whatever I ask of them in Amsterdam or anywhere else as long as I say please.”

He was quiet for a moment, breathing hard.

“Look,” I said. “It’s not that I don’t want to help. But we had a deal. You help me with Dox, I take out Hilger.”

“You’re breaking the deal. You’re letting Hilger walk away. I’m saying okay, just help me in Amsterdam, instead.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“You killed two people. Both with families. Don’t you even want to try to prevent whatever all that was intended to foster?”

I wasn’t even aware of crossing the room. It was like I was gone for a second, and when I came back, I had him against the wall, my hand gripping his shirt, my forearm jammed against his throat.

“I did that for my friend,” I snarled. “Not to help Hilger, or anyone else. For my friend. Because I didn’t have a choice.”

“Does that mean you don’t care?” he rasped, his mouth a grimace.

I held him there a second longer, then let him go. He coughed and massaged his throat, but he didn’t take his accusing eyes off me.

“Tell me something,” I said. “The difference between you and Hilger.”

He cleared his throat and swallowed. “The ends, Rain. It’s all about the ends.”

I looked at him. “I bet he’d say the same thing.”

“He’d be right.”

We stood there for a moment in silence. Finally, I said, “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

“You sound like Tatsu. And you’re manipulating me the way he did, too, you bastard.”

He smiled. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, he would have said that, too.”

I borrowed his shower, changed into fresh clothes, and got ready to head out. “I’ve got some things to do,” I said. “I’ll leave my bag here, if that’s okay. Why don’t you load the gear into your van and reconnoiter the yacht club. Don’t get too close. You don’t need to know the interior layout. That’s my job. You do need to know the streets, ingress, egress, everything.”

He started to say something, but I cut him off. “Sorry,” I said. “I know you know that. I’ll meet you back here in two hours.”

He smiled and held out his hand. I shook it. He started to say something again, and again I cut him off.

“Don’t tell me to do the right thing,” I said. “I already told you I’d think about it. Don’t sell past the close.”

He looked at me. “What, are you psychic now?”

I frowned. “What, then?”

“I was just going to say good luck. Is that okay?”

I told him it was. We were going to need it. And so was Dox.

I DID A ROUTE from the hotel to make sure I was still clean. Then I stopped at Orchard Towers, a nondescript office complex in the city’s shopping district. No one would know from the utter diurnal blandness of the place that every night it was overrun by a raucous throng of calculating prostitutes and eager johns. For now, the wall-to-wall bars in the basement and on the first two floors were shuttered, and the atrium was quiet enough to be in a coma. I took the escalator to an Internet shop I knew on the second floor.

I used one of the terminals to check out the Republic of Singapore Yacht Club, first through the club’s own website, then from the air with Google Earth. Amazing, the information that’s publicly available these days. Not long ago, you needed a top secret clearance to access Keyhole satellite photographs. Not anymore.

The club had berths for about seventy boats of varying sizes. A long pier extended out from the marina facilities, with five perpendicular quays leading off it. Kanezaki had said Ocean Emerald was a thirty-footer. That meant the boat could have been in any of the perpendicular berths. I would try to find a way to narrow it down. Even if I couldn’t, five general possibilities wasn’t insurmountable.

The club also had three restaurants and a bar; twenty-eight guestrooms; and boat rentals. All of which meant that, however exclusive the place might otherwise be, they welcomed, and were used to, visitors on the premises.

So far, so good. I called Boaz from a pay phone.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“A food court, in a shopping center at the corner of Orchard and Scotts.”

“You know where Orchard Towers is?”

“Orchard Road?”

“Yeah, a half-mile west of you, across the street from the Hilton. Meet me out front in five minutes. You in a car or on foot?”

“On foot.”

“All right. See you in five.”

Five minutes didn’t give him a lot of time to scramble an ambush team, if that’s what this was about. But I still wasn’t going to wait exactly where I’d told him.

I headed out and walked a hundred yards east, then ducked into an alley. I put my back to the east side of a loading dock, where anyone moving west would have to look backward to see me. Four minutes later, I watched Boaz go past. He was wearing shorts, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and sandals, and a large backpack was slung over both shoulders. He might have been a European tourist on his way to a hostel somewhere.

I eased out, checking behind and across the street. I didn’t see any problems.

“Boaz,” I called out.

He turned, keeping his hands at his sides.

“Ah, I didn’t think you’d be where you told me,” he said.

“Just come this way. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

He complied. We cut down Claymore Road. I glanced behind as we moved. No one was following.

Harry’s bug detector was buzzing in my pocket. “You have a mobile phone?” I asked him.

“Of course.”

“Reach for it slowly and turn it off.”

He shrugged and slipped his hand into one of the front pockets of his shorts. Harry’s detector fell silent.

“Are you armed?” I asked.

“Only with something sharp. Nothing that goes bang.”

I steered us into another alley. “Face the wall,” I said. “I’m going to pat you down.”

“I don’t see how we can accomplish our objectives with this level of mistrust,” he said, his expression grave.

“Boaz, a year ago, your organization was trying to kill me. Turn around.”

He shrugged. While I patted him down, he said, “That was situational, you know, and personally I regretted it.”

He was wearing an FS HideAway knife in a sheath around his neck, the same kind Delilah had introduced Dox to a year earlier. For the moment, I didn’t bother with the backpack. He couldn’t access it quickly enough for anything in it to present a threat.

“I’ll let you keep the knife,” I said, straightening. “Just don’t reach for your neck suddenly. What’s in the backpack?”

He smiled. “Camera gear. Take a look.”

“I will as soon as we’re settled. Come on, let’s keep moving.”

“You’re wasting time,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m alone. And if I weren’t, I wouldn’t have a team follow me now. I’d have them waiting wherever Hilger is, as soon as you told me. They would know to expect you there eventually.”