Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

He paused to take a sip of tea, and she recognized that he was attempting to draw her out with his silence. She resisted the urge to speak and instead took a sip of tea herself. After a moment, he went on.

“The man Rain was hired to remove is named Manheim Lavi. He goes by ‘Manny.’ An Israeli national, currently residing in South Africa. He has contacts in the Philippines, and, it now seems, a second family there. Recently we learned that he had turned traitor. He has been sharing bomb-making expertise-extensive expertise-with our enemies.”

The director wouldn’t be telling her any of this if she didn’t need to know. Nothing formal was being said, but she was being brought in on the op. He had mentioned her “evaluation” to let her know she was partly to blame for whatever the problem was; the information he was now sharing was to inform her she would be responsible for the problem’s resolution.

She looked at Gil. “Why did you use a contractor? Why outsource the operation?”

“Manny is connected,” Gil replied. “We believe he’s a CIA asset. The CIA doesn’t take kindly to ‘friendly’ intelligence services erasing its people.”

“So instead you brought in a contractor who screwed something up?”

Gil’s eyes narrowed slightly, and she smiled at him to let him know he had definitely just received a “Fuck you” for talking down to her. And her response served another purpose: it indicated to the director that, although she knew Rain, she had no interest in downplaying whatever his screwup had been or in otherwise protecting him.

“You told us he would be reliable,” Gil said, and she was gratified by the touch of petulance in his voice.

The director waved a hand like a father dismissing a squabble among children at the dinner table. “It doesn’t matter how we got here. What matters is what we do next.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment, and the director continued. “Rain tried to hit Manny in a restroom in a Manila shopping mall. Manny got away, but Rain killed three other people. A bodyguard.” He paused and looked at her. “And two CIA officers.”

He paused to let it sink in. Delilah said nothing, but thought, Oh my God . She asked, “Can the CIA connect the mess to us?”

“That,” the director said, “is the question.”

“Here’s what we know,” Boaz said. “Rain called in yesterday to brief us. He told us he had followed Manny and his family into a Manila shopping mall. Manny was with a woman and a boy. When the woman and the boy seemed to leave the scene, Rain anticipated that Manny would use the restroom, and moved there ahead of him to wait. Manny came in, but then the boy showed up. When Rain saw the boy, he hesitated.”

“Apparently, Rain won’t harm women or children,” Gil added.

Delilah looked at him. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“It depends on how badly he’s screwed things up.”

Delilah turned back to Boaz. “And then?”

“Then the bodyguard burst in. Rain thinks Manny hit a panic button. Rain disarmed the guard just as the two CIA men arrived. Rain didn’t know who they were, and still doesn’t, so far as we know. But they were armed, too.”

Gil said, “Rain managed to kill everyone but Manny.”

Delilah looked at him. “The boy?”

Gil shrugged as though this was irrelevant. “Not the boy, either.”

She looked at Boaz again. “How good a look did Manny and the boy get at Rain?”

“Rain says he’s not sure.”

Gil added, “That’s bullshit. How could this have gone down without someone seeing his face? Someone got a good look, and Rain knows it. Otherwise he would have just told us he got away clean. Anyway, it’s in his interest to downplay his exposure here. We have to assume if he acknowledges Manny got any kind of a look, it means Manny got a damn good look.”

She couldn’t argue with any of that. She nodded.

“So here’s what’s happening right now,” Gil went on. “Manny is freaked out. He’s sitting down with his CIA handlers. They’re showing him photos of known Asiatic operators. That should be a stack about what, three or four photos high? If they have pictures of Rain, and Manny can ID him, the CIA is going to be hunting for him. Hunting hard.”

She saw where this was going. A refrain started buzzing through her mind: Shit, shit, shit . She said nothing.

“Manny has lots of enemies,” Gil continued, “but I think we can safely assume that, when the CIA draws up a list, we’ll be at the top. So if they get to Rain, our status will change from ‘prime suspect’ to ‘proven culprit.’ ”

The room was silent for a moment. The director looked at Delilah and sighed. “You understand what’s at stake here?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Not just your career,” he went on. “Not just theirs.” He glanced at Boaz, then Gil, letting the comment sink in, then back to her. “Not just mine. We would only be the first casualties. The government would quickly and rightly sacrifice us to try to contain the damage. But if the damage couldn’t be contained… there’s no telling. It could affect billions of dollars in aid from the United States. Not to mention arms deliveries. Access to satellite imagery and other intelligence cooperation. Do you understand? This is not an organization problem. It’s a geopolitical problem. We have to get it under control.”

“I understand,” she said.

He nodded as though satisfied, then said, “Tell me, how well do you know this man?”

She should have seen this coming. Now she understood.

She shrugged. “Our paths crossed in Macau. Some people”-she looked at Gil-“wanted to take him out there because he was after Belghazi and might have killed him before we acquired what we were after. I argued there were better ways to manage him.”

“You were wrong,” Gil said. “It’s true things turned out well, but that was all luck. Rain might have killed Belghazi before we had what we needed.”

“I was managing him,” Delilah said, and immediately realized her mistake in letting Gil goad her.

“You spent time with him, then?” the director asked.

She shrugged again. “I told you, yes. I persuaded him to stand down for a while, for long enough. Then we tracked him to Rio. I traveled there and made the pitch. Boaz and Gil took it from there. This is all in the file.”

“How did you contact him at the time, again?” Gil asked.

Fuck Gil and his games. “Did you not review the file?” she asked, with an innocent smile.

He clenched his jaw and tried to recover. “It was an electronic bulletin board, wasn’t it?”

“Are you asking because you don’t remember? It’s not like you to forget details, Gil. Usually you remember everything.”

His jaw clenched again. She knew he would be hating her for one-upping him in front of the director, especially in this insinuating way, and at the moment the knowledge was deeply satisfying.

“Can you contact him now?” Gil asked, abandoning his losing game.

“I don’t know. I suppose so, if he’s kept the bulletin board and still checks it.”

Gil started to say something, but the director held up a hand. “Delilah. Do you know this man in any way not reflected in the file?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. Although of course she did, but damned if she would answer the question without at least having him endure the discomfort of asking it.

“Did you ever have a… personal relationship?”

She paused, then said, “I’m not going to answer that.”

In her peripheral vision, she saw both admiration and sympathy in Boaz’s eyes. In Gil’s she saw surprise that she would doom herself this way, something he would never have had the integrity to do himself. Poor Gil. He didn’t understand that her advantage in this game was that, for her, the stakes were so much lower. Gil was moving up in management. He wanted a career here. She knew that was impossible for her. In just a few years, she would be too old to do what she did, and then they would give her a desk job or a training position and she would be bypassed, ignored, and forgotten. Under the circumstances, what did she have to lose?