Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

She paused for a moment, then said, “Oh, my God.”

“Does that mean yes?”

She nodded and looked around again, then back at me. Her face lit up in an enormous smile. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it does.”

We checked in under the rafters of the open-air entrance pavilion. A woman named Aom gave us a quick tour of the facilities-the fitness center, the library, the spa. Everything was teak and stone and seemed to rise up out of the hilly terrain as indigenous as the surrounding palm trees. I noted the presence of multiple guards, all extremely discreet. Amanpuri is a celebrity magnet, and the resort takes security seriously. Which, to me, was part of the attraction. Even if Delilah informed her people of our whereabouts, they would have a hell of a time getting in here unannounced and unobtrusive. As for Delilah herself, from what I had seen of her organization’s MO, her role was to set up the bowling pins, not to knock them down. Also, without checked bags, her ability to carry weapons would be limited. Knowing all this, and also, inevitably, influenced by the blissfully beautiful surroundings, I began to relax. I felt as though we’d been granted some sort of time-out, during which I might learn what I needed to know. Maybe I could turn the situation around, if that’s what was called for. Yeah, we’d faced a conflict of interests before and found a way to work things out. Maybe we could do it again.

Aom took us to our pavilion-number 105, with a full ocean view. The room was low-key and luxurious. The walls, floor, and simple furniture were all teak, with the porcelain of a long tub, a cotton duvet, and oversized thick towels all gleaming white by contrast. Everything seemed to glow with the golden light of the sun, which was still visible through the pavilion’s western doors.

Delilah was starving, so we decided to eat at one of the property’s two open-air restaurants. We sat along the railing overlooking the ocean. The sun was now completely below the horizon, and but for a thin line of glowing red between them the water was now as dark as the sky. The restaurant, like all Amanpuri’s facilities, wisely eschewed any piped-in music, instead allowing the breeze swaying the palm trees and the waves lapping at the beach to supply the necessary ambience.

We ordered roast duck sautéed with morning glories, soft-shelled black crab sautéed with chile paste, stir-fried mixed vegetables, and stir-fried bean sprouts with tofu and chili. I started us with a ’93 Veuve Clicquot.

“I have to tell you,” Delilah said as we ate. “I’ve been to some of the most beautiful places on earth. Post Ranch in Big Sur. The Palace in Saint-Moritz. The Serengeti Plain. But this is right up there.”

I smiled. “There aren’t many places that can make you forget everything. Everywhere you’ve been, everything you’ve done.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Where are the others? For you.”

I thought for a moment. “A few places in Tokyo, believe it or not. But they’re more like… enclaves. Oases. They can protect you from what’s outside, but you still know it’s there. This… it’s another universe.”

She took a sip of the champagne. “I know what you mean. There’s a beach in Haifa, where I grew up. Sometimes, when I’m back there, I can find a quiet spot at night. The smell of the sea, the sound of the waves… it makes me feel like I’m a girl again, innocent and unblemished. Like I’m alone, but in a good way, if you know what I mean.”

“To be unaccompanied by constant memories,” I said, quoting something a friend had once said to me, “is to find a state of grace.”

“Grace?” she asked, taking the reference literally. “Do you believe in God?”

I paused, thinking of my conversation with Dox, then said, “I try not to.”

“Does that help?”

I shrugged. “Not really. But what difference does it make, what you believe? Things are what they are.”

“What you believe makes all the difference in the world.”

I looked at her. We’d been down this road before, and I didn’t like the implicit criticism, maybe even condescension, in her comment. Then or now.

“Then you better be careful about what you believe in,” I said. “And about what it might cost you.”

She looked away for a moment. I wasn’t sure if it was a flinch.

We finished the champagne and I ordered a ’99 Lafon Volnay Santenots. Delilah had a disciplined mind, I knew, but no one does as well in the presence of wine and jet lag as in their absence. And if she were here for something “nefarious,” as Dox had put it, the discord between her feelings for me from before and her intentions for me now would be producing a strain. I wanted to do everything I could to turn that strain into a fault line, the fault line into a widening crack.

We talked more about this and that. She never let on that she knew anything about Manny, or that the botched hit in Manila had anything to do with her presence here now. And as the evening wore on, I realized I couldn’t accept that the timing of her contact had been a coincidence. So the absence of any acknowledgment had to be an omission. A deliberate omission.

If she had been anyone else, and if this had all happened just a year or two earlier, I would have accepted the truth of what I knew. I would have acted on it. Doing so would have protected my body, albeit at some cost to my soul. But sitting across the table from her, no doubt affected by the wine, as well as by the surroundings and the feelings I still had for her, I found myself looking for a different way. Something less direct, less irredeemable, something that might have as its basis hope instead of only fear.

And there was something strangely attractive about the feeling that I was taking a chance. It wasn’t anything as base as the thrill of “unsafe sex,” as Dox had suggested. It was more a sense of the possibilities, the potential upside. Not just the possibility that, if I confronted her and she cracked, she might give me information that would help me understand where I stood regarding Manny. I was aware, too, of a deeper kind of hope at work, for something more than information alone, something intangible but infinitely more valuable.

After a dessert of fruit and Thai sweets followed by steaming tureens of cappuccino, we strolled back to the pavilion. We left the lights dim and sat on a low teak couch facing the sea, present by the sound of the surf but unseeable in the darkness without. The silence in the room felt heavy to me, portentous. My previous, oblique conversational gambits had afforded me only hints and clues. I decided it was time to be more direct. My mouth felt a little dry at the prospect, part of me perhaps afraid of what I might discover.

“Did your people tell you about what they’ve involved me in?” I asked.

She looked at me, and something in her expression told me she wasn’t happy with the question. This wasn’t why we had come back to the room. It wasn’t part of the script.

“No,” she said. “Everything is ‘need to know.’ If I don’t need to know, it’s better that I don’t.”

“They sent me after a guy in Manila.”

She shook her head. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t want what’s between us to be nothing more than ‘need to know.’ If it is, we’re just gaming each other.”

“Protecting each other.”

“Would you protect me?”

“From what?”

“What if something went wrong?”

“Don’t put me in that position.”

“What if you had to choose?”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “I don’t know. What would you do?”

I looked at her. “It’s easy for me. I don’t believe in anything, remember? I can make up my own mind.”

“That’s not an answer.”