Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

“Jakarta,” Manny said. “I can come to Jakarta.”

Hilger didn’t want to fly to Jakarta. Manny was being a pain in the ass.

“Sure. But I’ve got a few things here I need to wrap up first-it’ll probably take a few days. Are you sure you can’t make it to Hong Kong?”

There was a long silence. Hilger said, “Look, we can meet anywhere you want, but Hong Kong will be faster, and I’d like to get started on this right away. Anywhere in Hong Kong, fair enough?”

That closed it. The next day, they were sitting in a coffee shop off Nathan Road in Kowloon, just a fifteen-minute cab ride from Hilger’s office through the Cross-Harbor Tunnel. There weren’t quite as many white faces in Kowloon as there were in Central, where Hilger worked, but there were enough so that neither of them would stick out, and there was a lower chance that Hilger might run into someone he knew. Not that anyone would recognize Manny-it wasn’t as though the man’s face appeared on post office walls, although probably it should-but it was better to be safe. Hilger had taken the usual precautions to ensure that he hadn’t been followed, and hoped that Manny had been equally thorough. He had indulged Manny his mandatory hysteria. When he felt he had been nodding sympathetically for long enough, he began his debriefing.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Hilger commanded, and he knew that his calm would now be reassuring. “Not just that day, but every day, from the moment you arrived in Manila.”

Manny complied. When he was finished, Hilger began to drill into the details.

“You say there were two of them.”

“I think so, yes. Someone came in after the bodyguard.”

“But you didn’t see his face.”

“Not well. He was big. I think Caucasian. I’m not sure.”

Hilger considered. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you hadn’t seen him, I could have told you he was there. The first guy, the Asian, you say he was already in the bathroom, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“He’d been following you for a while before he decided to anticipate you in the bathroom. But he wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t have backup continuing to watch you. Otherwise, if he’d been wrong about you coming to the bathroom, he would have lost you.”

Manny nodded and said, “Yes, that makes sense.”

“You think you could recognize the Asian?”

Manny nodded. “If I saw him again, yes. I got a good look at his face. Can you find him? And the other one?”

Hilger thought for a moment. He said, “I have some photos I’ll show you before you leave. We’ll see if the men I have in mind are the ones you saw.”

“Then you can find them.”

Hilger knew that if he was right about the men in question, identifying them would be a trivial exercise compared with actually finding them. Still, he said, “I think so.”

Manny leaned forward. “You better. And when you find them, you make them suffer first. They were following me with my family, they might have harmed my son!”

Hilger nodded to show that Manny could count on him. He said, “And VBM? You can contact him, set up another meeting?” Letting Manny know that there was something of a quid pro quo here.

Manny shrugged. “I’ve already left him a message. But he’s not an easy man to reach. And he might be spooked when he hears about what happened in Manila.”

Hilger doubted VBM would spook that easily. Men like him tended to be tougher than that. But no sense contradicting Manny’s assessment.

“If he’s spooked, he’s spooked,” he said. “But if you told him about what my people can do for him, I think he’ll still want the meeting.”

“I told him.”

“Good. Keep trying to contact him. When you do, tell him that the people behind the problem in Manila have been taken care of. Tell him…”

“I’ll tell him that when it’s true.”

“By the time you contact him, it will be true,” Hilger said, his voice as even as his gaze.

Manny nodded, and Hilger went on.

“Tell him I’ll come to the meeting myself. That we can do it anywhere he likes. And give him my cell phone number. He should feel free to contact me directly.”

Manny nodded again and said, “All right.”

Hilger detected a slight churlishness in the set of Manny’s mouth, no doubt precipitated by Hilger’s willingness to discuss matters not directly related to Manny’s recent difficulties. Partly to continue the debriefing, partly to assuage the man, Hilger asked, “Who do you think might have been behind this?”

Manny leaned back and shrugged. “How should I know? It could have been anyone.”

“ ‘Anyone’ doesn’t help me narrow it down.”

“Who do you think?”

“Manny, I have my own ideas, but I doubt anyone is in a better position to say than you are. Are you holding something back from me? That’s going to make my job harder.”

Manny shook his head. “I’m not holding anything back. I just don’t know. It could have been the Mossad, I suppose. They might not like my choice of friends, the fucking hypocrites.”

Hilger had already thought of the Israelis. They were at the top of his short list. “Who else?” he asked.

Manny looked at him. “The CIA, of course.”

Hilger nodded. “My contacts there are already looking into that. Any others? Maybe BIN?”

“BIN?”

“The Badan. Indonesian intelligence. They’ve had a lot of problems-Bali, the Jakarta Marriott, the Australian embassy…”

“BIN, yes. Maybe. Maybe.”

Hilger realized that Manny wasn’t going to be helpful here. He was the kind of man who was uncomfortable acknowledging that he had real enemies-which, given his activities, was almost funny. It seemed that this was the first time Manny had come face-to-face with the reality that someone really, truly, wanted him dead and was actively trying to make it so. It would take Manny a while to adjust to the reality of that. In the meantime, Hilger would just have to investigate on his own. Well, he was used to doing things alone. Sometimes it was the only way to get the job done.

Hilger decided to return to the previous line of questioning, on which Manny was more useful. “You say the Asian saw you and seemed to freeze,” he said. “Could it have been your son that he saw?”

Manny scowled. “I think it was me.”

Hilger wondered about Manny’s recollection. He didn’t expect it to be particularly accurate in any event; he knew that memories of traumatic incidents rarely are. Also, Manny probably wanted to believe that the men who had come after him were vicious, subhuman killers. This would make Manny feel virtuous by comparison. That one of these men might have hesitated at the sight of a child wouldn’t fit with this view, would detract from the accompanying sense of comparative righteousness, and would likely be rejected. The mind of a man like Manny had so many ways of unconsciously pleasuring itself. You had to be careful.

“Still,” Hilger said, “I find it odd that the man seemed to hesitate at all, regardless of the reasons. Hesitation tends to be an affliction of the inexperienced.”

Manny scowled. “Maybe these men were inexperienced.”

“Inexperienced men wouldn’t have been able to drop your bodyguard and my people with him. They were all dispatched with tight shots, headshots. Take my word for it, the shooters were not inexperienced.”

“Then why? Why did he hesitate?”

Hilger shook his head. “I don’t know yet.”

“My son is traumatized,” Manny said. “He and his mother have gone to stay with her relatives in the provinces.”

“I can arrange for extra protection.”

“They’re okay where they are. But I need a new bodyguard.”