Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

This was the closest thing Hilger had heard to an expression of sorrow about one of the men who had given his life in the course of saving Manny’s. Me, me, me , Hilger thought. It wasn’t just Manny. It was the state of the fucking world.

“Otherwise,” Manny went on, “I can’t continue to help you.”

Hilger sighed. Manny was always making poorly timed, even unnecessary, threats.

“I’ve already taken care of it,” Hilger said.

“And the men who tried to kill me?”

“My people will find them.”

Manny clenched his jaw and said, “Find them soon. You’re not my only friend, you know.”

Another silly threat. Hilger had seen it coming. He said, “Manny, I know you have many friends. Has any of them been as reliable as I have?”

Manny was silent for a moment, then burst out, “You told me that your friendship would protect me! That something like this would never happen!”

Hilger looked at him. For the first time in the conversation, he let some emotion creep into his voice. Part of it was for effect. But not all of it.

“Two of my best men just died protecting you,” he said. “And a bodyguard who I set you up with.”

Manny didn’t answer. Hilger found his silence characteristically petulant. Three men had just died for him, and he couldn’t even say, All right, that’s a fair point .

“If you go to other people,” Hilger went on, “it complicates my job. Give me some time to solve the problem before you do something to complicate it, all right?”

“I have other friends,” Manny said again.

Hilger sighed. Time for a reality injection.

“Manny, the people you’re talking about aren’t your friends. They’re people you know, who have interests. If those people decide that their interests are out of alignment with yours, you’ll find that they become decidedly unfriendly. How will I protect you then?”

Manny looked at him, resenting him for not being more fearful of the threat, and for making a veiled one of his own.

“Make them suffer,” he said again, demanding something to save face.

Hilger nodded. More because he was thinking of his men than out of any particular desire to appease Manny, he said, “I will.”

THERE WERE A FEW HOURS to kill before I met Dox for our evening out, so I took a cab to nearby Silom to look for an Internet café.

I rarely take down an electronic bulletin board once I’ve established it. Clients need a way to reach me, and maintaining the bulletin boards provides it. But when business necessity doesn’t justify the continued maintenance, pleasure, in the form of nagging hope, provides the necessary motivation instead. If I’d ever established a board with Midori, who had loved me, then shunned me after learning that I had killed her father, I would probably check it all the time. In lieu of a board, I commune with my hopes for Midori by listening to her CDs, four of them now, each deeper, more soulful, more daring than the last; by imagining enthusiasts applauding her piano in the dark jazz joints of lower Manhattan, for which she had left Tokyo; by whispering her name every night like a sad incantation that always summons, along with certain qualities of her spirit, the continued pain of her absence.

Checking the bulletin board I had established with Delilah, I told myself, was a mix: business and pleasure. The introduction she had provided was what led to the Manny assignment, and, if I could straighten out the aftermath of that one, there might be more where it came from. But business wasn’t really why I kept the bulletin board, or why I continued to check it almost every day. The real reason, I knew, was the stolen time we had spent together in Rio after our initial run-in in Macau and my subsequent near-death experience there.

It wasn’t just the sex, good as it had been; nor was it only her stunning looks. Instead it was something deep inside her, something I couldn’t reach. What that thing might be I couldn’t really say: regret over her role in so many killings; bitterness at her ill treatment at the hands of her organization; sorrow over the normal life, the family, that she had chosen to forgo and that probably now would be denied to her forever. She hadn’t been the perfect companion with me. She could be demanding, sometimes moody, and she wasn’t without a temper. But sweetness and perfection were the charade I assumed she played with the targets of her work. The uncertainty and the barriers that spiced her relationship with me made her feel real, and led me in the direction of trusting her. And trust, as I was discovering with Dox, is a dangerous narcotic. I thought I had weaned myself from its rapture, gotten the monkey off my back. But then I had a little taste, and that thing I’d lived without for so many years was suddenly indispensable.

I had the cab let me off at Silom Road under the Sala Daeng sky train station. The sky train had opened a few years earlier, and this was the first time I was back in Bangkok to witness its effect. I wasn’t sure I liked it. No doubt its presence made the city easier to traverse, bringing together points once rendered impractically distant by automotive gridlock. But there was a price. The overhead passage of steel tracks and concrete platforms smothered the streets below in shadow, and seemed somehow to compress and amplify the noise, the pollution, the pent-up weight of the whole metropolis. I smiled, without any mirth, because I had seen the same thing done to Tokyo with the elevated expressways, to the long-term regret of everyone bar the construction companies and their corrupt government cronies, who profited from the implementation of such schemes and who would no doubt profit again when the city planners determined that now it was time to banish those dark monstrosities they had once seen fit to invoke. By building a subway across the sky, the custodians of Bangkok had made the streets below effectively subterranean. I could imagine a time, not too distant, when the sky train would be so dramatically expanded and agglomerated with food courts and wireless shops and video outlets that life on the streets below, the pedestrians and the cars and the stores, would without conscious planning or the apportionment of blame become by default the city’s true subway, its final stop for those denizens who had fallen through the cracks and who would now lie unseen in a darkness from which they could fall no further.

I walked, zigzagging along the sois and sub-sois-the main streets and their arteries-between Silom and Surawong, passing several storefront places advertising Internet access and overseas phone calls. Most of these were tiny spaces in larger buildings that had probably gone unused until the Internet arrived and created the possibility of profit for places with a half-dozen tables and chairs and terminals. Soon enough, I found one whose looks I liked. It occupied a ground-floor niche in a gleaming Bank of Bangkok building, and seemed almost to be hiding there. Inside there were ten terminals, several of which were occupied by women who looked to me like bar girls, who were perhaps now sending e-mails to those farang customers foolish enough to provide addresses, telling interchangeable stories of sick mothers and dying water buffalos and the other reasons for this one-time-only, embarrassed request for the farang ’s dollars or pounds or yen. I chose a table that put my back to the wall. The girls, intent on their correspondence, gave me barely a glance.

Before getting started, I downloaded some commercial software from a storage site I keep and checked the terminal for keystroke monitors and other spyware. When I was sure it was clean, I went to the bulletin board I had established with Delilah, not with any more than the usual inchoate hope.