Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

The director drummed his fingers on the table, then said, “I’m not asking you for personal reasons. I’m asking you professionally. Because the information will affect the way we proceed in a very serious matter.”

Delilah looked him in the eyes. “I’m still not going to answer. I’m not going to let you cross that line today. If I do, you’ll cross it again tomorrow.”

He looked at her for a long moment, then smiled at her chutzpah and pressed no further. She gave him credit for that. But why would he press? In her refusal, she had already answered his question.

Gil looked confused, then nonplussed. Had she actually just scored points with the director?

“Delilah,” Boaz said. “Do you think… Can you get close to Rain?”

“You mean, can I set him up?”

Boaz nodded.

“I’m not sure. I can try.”

The three of them settled slightly in their seats as though a bit of tension had been suddenly drained from their bodies, and in that instant she understood completely the nature of the conversation that had preceded her arrival: Do you think she slept with him? Will she do this? Can we trust her ?

“But why do you need me?” she asked. “You’ve met him, presumably you have a means of contact?”

“If we ask for a meeting now,” Boaz said, “he’ll be suspicious. We need something to lower his guard.”

“He might be suspicious with me, too,” she said. “Under the circumstances.”

“We’re counting on you to dissolve his suspicions,” Gil said. “You’re the best at that.” His tone indicated that her abilities, although useful, also were somehow suspect.

She looked at him, but ignored the comment. “How are you going to do it?”

Gil waved as though it would be nothing. “You contact him. Go somewhere with him, a romantic getaway. When the moment is right, you contact me.”

“Who’s the shooter?”

“I am.”

“He knows your face. How are you going to get close?”

“He’ll never see me.”

She almost laughed. “You don’t understand who you’re dealing with.”

“He’s a fuckup. He’s going down.”

She thought of the way Rain had dealt with that guy in the elevator on Macau. He had gone from calmly talking to her to breaking the man’s neck without anything in between.

“If he sees you,” she said, “he’ll know I set him up.”

“Do it yourself, then.”

She didn’t answer.

“He won’t see me,” Gil said. “Anyway, you know how to handle yourself.”

There was a long silence. She was used to making hard decisions quickly and under pressure, and by the time the director spoke, she had already made up her mind.

“You’ll do this?” he asked, looking at her, his expression open, his tone affable.

“When have I ever refused?” she replied.

“Never,” Gil said, and in those two syllables she heard an echo of whore .

She looked at him. When she spoke, her voice was frozen silk.

“Well, there was one time, Gil.”

He flushed, and she smiled at him, twisting the knife.

The director, pretending to ignore what he fully understood, said, “It’s settled, then.”

THE DAY AFTER the Manny debacle, I made my way to the Bangkok Baan Khanitha restaurant on Sukhumvit 23, the backup Dox and I had agreed upon in case things went sideways-as indeed they had.

I chose an indirect route to get to the restaurant, as much to indulge an incipient sense of nostalgia as for my usual security reasons. Sukhumvit, I saw, had changed enormously in the decades since the concentrated time I had spent here during the war, yet in its essential aspects it was still the same. There had been no high-rises back then, true, and certainly no glitzy shopping malls, and the traffic, although chaotic, had not yet reached today’s level of biblical-style calamity. But the smell of the place, the vibe, then and now, was all low-level commerce, much of it sexual. In my mind, Sukhumvit has always been about lasts: the last party of the last evening that everyone wants to prolong because tomorrow it’s back to the war; the last chance for nocturnal behavior that will surely be the source of regret in the light of the oncoming day; the last desperate stop for those women whose charms, and therefore their prices, have fallen short even of the standards of nearby Patpong.

I walked along Sukhumvit Road, letting the crowds carry me and flow past me, then carry me along again. My God, the area had grown. I’d been back several times since the war, of course, and had even done a job here once, a Japanese expat, but somehow my frame of reference, which was over three decades out of date, seemed unwilling to oblige the area’s changing topography. There were vendors back then, yes, but not this many. Now they had overgrown the sidewalk and were selling every manner of bric-a-brac: ersatz luggage, knockoff watches, pirated DVDs, tee-shirts proclaiming “Same-Same” and “No Money, No Honey.” Hawkers wheedled and cajoled, competing with the hum of the crowd, the roar of passing bus engines, the distinctive, sine-wave growl of motor scooters and tuk-tuks weaving back and forth through the constipated traffic. I smelled diesel fumes and curry, and thought, Yes, same-same, it all really is , and was surprised at an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss I couldn’t name. Nothing looked the same here, but to me it smelled the same, and the dissonance was confusing.

I walked on. And then, with a burst of mixed pleasure and horror, I came upon an artifact: the Miami Hotel, which was still here at the top of Soi 13. Squalid and moldering from the moment it went up in the late sixties to house U.S. troops on R &R, the hotel now felt like an architectural middle finger extended to the rich, upscale Bangkok that was growing up around it. As I moved past, I caught a glimpse of a grizzled expat looking out from one of its windows onto the street below, his expression that of a man serving a life sentence for a crime he doesn’t understand, and I thought it possible that I had just seen one of the original inhabitants, as stubborn and anachronistic as the hotel itself. I walked. Arabs and Sikhs in turbans smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee under the corrugated eaves of collapsing storefronts. Prostitutes lurked in the vestibules of massage parlors, passersby ignoring their sad eyes and desperate smiles. An amputee, filthy and in rags, rattled a cup at me from the sidewalk where he lay. I gave him some baht and moved on. Half a block later, the vendors’ tables parted momentarily and I saw a sign for the Thermae Bar & Coffee House, the lowest of the low, which had once housed the women who serviced the Miami’s soldiers. I wondered if its patrons still called it, appropriately and inevitably, the Termite. The original building, it seemed, had been torn down, but the Termite had been reborn, demonstrating in its reincarnation that although the body might fade and die, the spirit, for better or worse, is eternal.

I passed a vendor selling knives, and took the opportunity to arm myself with a knockoff Emerson folder with a wooden handle and a four-inch, partially serrated blade. For a long time I had gotten by without carrying a weapon, and I had liked it this way. For one thing, you tend to comport yourself differently when you’re armed, and there are people who can spot the signs. Also, my lawsey, lawsey civilian cover would have been compromised somewhat if I’d been picked up carrying, say, a folding karambit or other concealed cutlery. And then there’s the matter of blood, which can get all over you and severely compromise your attempts to blend with the crowd after a close encounter. But I sensed that the balance of costs and benefits was changing now. I wasn’t as fast as I once was, for one thing. Or as durable, for another. I wondered whether what had happened to me in that restroom with Manny, also, was in part the consequence of age. I had needed Dox to bail me out there, as he had at Kwai Chung a year earlier. On top of all this, being back in Sukhumvit was itself a reminder that I had aged in the intervening years, and that things I had once ably done with my hands might now be accomplished more effectively with tools.