Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

Sometimes she felt coldly angry at the men who harbored such thoughts; other times, she almost pitied them. Their problem was that they couldn’t get beyond the limits of their own inherently male experience. Men were simple: they were propelled by lust. And so they assumed that women should be the same. That a woman might sleep with a man for her own, more calculating reasons, even reasons of state security, put them off balance. It made them wonder if they were as vulnerable as the woman’s victims, and this made them fidgety. If the woman was attractive, and they secretly desired her, the fidgeting became a squirm. Whore was their way of reassuring themselves that they were the ones in control.

She wondered why they had called her in this time. Things were going well with her current op, a straightforward “honey trap” of a certain Paris-based Saudi diplomat who had become distracted from his Wahabi religious convictions by her long, naturally blond hair, and the way it cascaded around her shoulders when she chose to wear it down; by her blue eyes, endlessly enthralled, of course, by the man’s awkward palaver; by her tantalizing Western décolletage and the porcelain skin beneath it. The man was smitten with her story of an absentee husband and her longing for true love, and was therefore nearly ready to hear the tearful tale that someone had learned of their illicit passion and was now blackmailing her with exposure-exposure that would of course encompass the Saudi himself-unless he could take certain actions, trivial in themselves, but which over time would compromise him further and further until her people would own him completely. Why recall her when she was so close? They had used the ordinary communications channels, with no abort signals, so she knew she wasn’t in any danger, that the current op wasn’t compromised. But that only made the reasons behind the recall even more mysterious.

Her papers were in perfect order, and her Hebrew, though no longer her primary language, was still native, so she and her carry-on bag passed quickly through customs. She caught a cab outside the terminal and headed directly downtown. She needed to get to the Crowne Plaza on Hayarkon, a nice, anonymous business hotel and the site of the meeting to which she had been directed. The participants would arrive and depart separately to keep her affiliation sterile, and they wouldn’t use the same hotel for months. After the meeting, she would call her parents and go see them, then spend the night at their house in Jaffa. She never announced these visits; they understood that her work, whatever it was, precluded notice. But business first.

She changed cabs several times and used a variety of other techniques to ensure that she wasn’t being followed. When she was satisfied, she made her way to the hotel. She took the elevator directly to the fourth floor and headed toward room 416. She didn’t have to look hard-there were two crew-cut men outside it, each with an earpiece and an Uzi. The obvious security was unusual. Something was definitely up.

One of the men examined her ID. Apparently satisfied, he opened the door and then immediately closed it behind her. Inside, three men were sitting around a table. Two she recognized-Boaz and Gil. The third was older by perhaps two decades, and it took her a moment to place him. She had met him only once.

Good God. The director. What was going on here?

“Delilah, shalom ,” the older man said, getting up from his chair. He walked over and shook her hand, then continued in Hebrew, “Or should I say, bonjour ? Would you prefer to use French?”

She liked that he asked. Moving in and out of cover, out of two separate identities, was stressful. She shook her head and answered him in Hebrew. “No. She’s not supposed to be here. Let’s let her sleep. She’ll wake up when she’s back in Paris.”

He nodded and smiled. “And then this will all seem like a dream.” He gestured to the other men. “You know Boaz? Gil?”

“We’ve worked together, yes,” she said. They stood, and the three of them shook hands.

Boaz was one of their best IED-improvised explosive devices-experts. She liked him a lot, as everybody did. He was serious when the situation called for it, but his default persona was boyish, at times mischievous, and he had an easy laugh that could almost be a giggle. He never came on to her, and in fact treated her as much like a sister as a colleague, which made him rare in the organization and, had the director not been present, deserving of a hug.

Gil was different-gaunt, moody, and intense. People admired Gil, but he also made them uncomfortable, and both for the same reason: he was extremely good at what he did. On two of Delilah’s assignments, Gil had been the shooter. In both instances, he had emerged from the dark to put a.22 round through the target’s eye and then disappeared without a ripple. He worked with others when he had to, but at heart, Delilah knew, he was a loner, and never more in his element than when he was silently stalking his prey.

Once, in a safe room in Vienna, he had made a pass at her. His move had been crudely direct, and Delilah hadn’t liked the underlying assumption of entitlement and expectation of fulfillment. She knew the sex would have given him a kind of power over her-that in fact this was part of the reason he wanted it-and she wasn’t about to surrender one of her few mysteries, her few levers of influence, with a colleague. Her rebuff had been as unambiguous as his proposition. It shouldn’t have been a big deal-he was hardly the first-but on the few occasions on which she’d seen him since then, he always looked as though he was remembering, and not without resentment. There was a breed of man that was inclined to feel humiliated by a woman’s demurral, and she suspected that Gil was such a specimen.

The table was set up for four, which told her they weren’t expecting anyone else. They all sat down. The director gestured to the sandwiches. “A little something to eat?” he asked.

She shook her head, not yet comfortable. “They served dinner on the plane.”

Gil took a sandwich and bit into it. Boaz picked up the teapot and smiled at her. “Tea, then?” he asked.

She smiled back and extended him her cup. “Thank you.”

Boaz poured for everyone. They all sat silently for a few moments, sipping. Then the director said, “Delilah, let me explain why you’ve been called in. You may have been wondering, eh?”

She nodded. “A bit, yes.”

“We’ve had a problem in Manila. We think you can help solve it.”

We’ve had a problem, she thought. Wasn’t that what those Apollo 13 astronauts had said as their spaceship was breaking apart? And his use of the inclusive pronoun, that was interesting, and vaguely worrisome, too.

“All right,” she said, wondering what was coming.

“Recently we used a contractor for a job in Manila. A part-Japanese fellow named John Rain.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, I brokered that introduction.”

She wondered for a moment why the director was playing dumb with her. If the problem were serious enough to warrant his presence at this meeting, he would have been fully briefed on all the details, including Delilah’s early involvement. He must have been testing her, looking for opportunities to gauge her reactions.

“Yes, of course,” he went on. “You met Rain in Macau. The Belghazi op.”

“Yes.”

“Everything we were able to learn about this man, including your own evaluation, indicated that he was extremely reliable.”

Including your own evaluation. Something had gone wrong, and she was going to take some heat for it.

“Yes,” she said again, sensing that it would be better to say less.