Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

I caught a tuk-tuk for the final leg over to Sukhumvit 23. Dox and I were supposed to meet at the restaurant at noon, but I arrived early to scope the area out, as I always do on those rare occasions when I agree to a face-to-face meeting. A sneak preview tends to prevent surprises. In this case, though, the surprise was already waiting for me, in the form of Dox. Resplendent in a cream-colored silk shirt, he was sitting in one of the cushioned teak chairs at the back corner of the main room sipping some tropical concoction from a tall glass through a long straw, and looking, I had to admit, utterly at ease and at home in his surroundings.

“I knew you’d get here early,” he said, grinning. He put down the drink and got up from the table. “Didn’t want to be rude, keeping you waiting.”

I walked over, looking around the restaurant as I moved. The clientele was about half local, half foreign, and all seemingly more interested in the Baan Khanitha’s excellent traditional Thai food than in whatever might be going on around them. I realized, though, that I was doing my security check out of habit, not because I thought Dox would have brought trouble. And then I was surprised, almost stunned, to realize that I trusted someone this way. I looked at him, and my discomfort must have showed, because he raised his eyebrows and said, “You all right, man?”

I gave him a nod that was half exasperation, half pleasure at seeing him after our scrape in Manila. “Fine. I’m fine.”

I reached for his hand, but he ignored it, instead clapping his arms around me and pulling me in for a hug. Jesus , I thought. I patted his back awkwardly.

He stepped back from me, looked at my face, and laughed. “Hey, man, you’re blushing! You don’t have a crush on me or something, do you?”

I ignored him. “Any problems on the way over?”

He laughed again. “No problems. Hey, it’s good to see you, man, even if you’re starting to have unnatural feelings for me. You want to eat here, or should we go somewhere else? I recommend we stay. The poo nim pad gra pow is the best in the city.”

I looked around again. Dox might have known his poo nim , whatever that was, but his tradecraft wasn’t always up to my standards. Although in fairness, I don’t know whose would be.

“You’re leaving your cell phone off, right?” I asked.

“Yeah, Mom, I’m leaving it off. Disappointing all the ladies who want to reach me.”

“You sure you weren’t followed?”

He rolled his eyes. “C’mon now, you’ve got to get over this lone-wolf, international-man-of-mystery shit. You can’t live like that twenty-four-seven. It’ll bum you out, man, I’ve seen it happen.”

“Does that mean you weren’t followed?”

He frowned. “Yeah, that’s what it means. You know, I might not be quite the urban ghost you can be, but I do know how to be careful. I’ve made my way doing this fucked-up thing of ours for a long time on my lonesome, and I’m still breathing even though there are plenty of people who’d rather I wasn’t.”

“Weren’t.”

He clasped his hands to his head and said, “Somebody save me, my partner’s a schoolmarm!”

I raised my hands in surrender. “All right, all right.”

“ ‘John Rain, killer and grammarian.’ You ought to put it on a business card.”

“All right,” I said.

“ ‘Use the subjunctive correctly or he’ll take your life.’ ”

Jesus, I thought, looking around. “Look, let’s just eat here,” I said.

“Well, thank God. I’m starving.”

We sat down at his table. The waiter came over and Dox ordered the food. He knew what he was doing-even his Thai seemed passable. We also asked for a couple of iced coffees. It had been a long few days.

“Okay, what’s the status?” Dox asked, when the waiter had departed. “I hope the Israelites aren’t pissed.”

I had told him who the client was. They, of course, didn’t know about Dox. They didn’t need to.

“I’m not entirely sure,” I said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning as soon as I was out of Manila, I contacted my friends Boaz and Gil. I told them what had happened. They seemed to take it in stride. They were disappointed that Manny got away, and concerned that he would harden his defenses now. But they were reassured that I had made it out of there without further incident.”

“You mean without being caught and implicating them.”

“Yes.”

“They’re probably a little despondent that you weren’t just killed in the fracas.”

“It’s just business.”

“Wishing it is just business. Trying to bring it about is different.”

“I don’t think we need to worry about that. It wouldn’t be worth it to them. It looks like I’m clear of it, so they are, too.”

“Yeah? Whatever happened to the professional paranoid we all know and love?”

“I’m being careful. I told you what I think is likely, but I don’t assume anything.”

“What did you tell them happened?”

“That two unknown players that I hadn’t managed to spot popped onto the scene and turned it into a shooting gallery. That said players were good and might have been CIA.”

“What did they say to that?”

“Like I said, they were concerned. But they’ll verify the body count easily enough. It’s in all the English-language Philippine newspapers today.”

“You checked?”

I nodded. “Spent the morning online.”

“Well, what do the papers say?”

“One dead Filipino, two dead foreigners whose identities are being checked. Witnesses seem to think there were two shooters. Both Asian.”

He smiled. “Both Asian, huh?”

I nodded. “Even in the best of circumstances, people don’t see straight. Add adrenal stress, they don’t remember what the hell they saw. They could be searching for Martians right now. Boaz and Gil are looking into the dead men’s identities, too. When they learn more, they’ll tell us. In the meantime, we just have to monitor the situation and wait.”

The waiter brought over our food and departed. Poo nim turned out to be sautéed soft-shelled crab. Dox hadn’t been exaggerating. It was excellent, soft and fresh and redolent of basil.

“I think they were Agency,” Dox said.

“They could have been, I don’t know. You didn’t see them before heading into the bathroom?”

“Sure, I saw them. They were sitting in the food court, just the two of them. But they didn’t look like hitters to me. Although I admit I might have been distracted by what was going on with Manny and the bodyguard, and not paying attention to the little signs like I might have otherwise. What about you?”

“The same. Damn, they were low-key, I’ll give them that.” I dug into the crab. “My guess is they were hooked up with Manny in some way. They weren’t there to harm him, otherwise they would have looked to drop him as he exited the bathroom, like I did. They were trying to protect him.”

“Yeah, I kind of picked up on that. More bodyguards?”

“Maybe. But we hadn’t seen them earlier. I think they were there for a meeting.”

“With Manny?”

“Yeah. They didn’t look like locals, so figure they were staying at a hotel-maybe the Peninsula, the Mandarin Oriental, the Shangri-La. They’re all a stone’s throw from the Ayala Center, and that’s where Manny took his family for lunch, even though Greenhills shopping center would have been closer.”

“So he has lunch with the family, says good-bye, the woman and the boy leave, and he gets down to business with the people who are waiting for him.”

“Yes. And when they see a huge, goateed, dangerous-looking guy busting into the bathroom along with Manny’s bodyguard, they realize something’s going down. They go in, too.”