Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

“Very good.” The man hung up.

Hilger got up and walked over to his desk. He fired up his laptop, then spent a few minutes thinking. With Calver and Gibbons gone, it made sense to bring Winters to the VBM meeting. Winters was coming to Hong Kong anyway, to brief Hilger on what he got from Rain and Dox. VBM might not like the slight surprise, but at that point he wouldn’t back out. It would be worth temporarily ruffling the man’s feathers to have backup at the meeting, and to have someone to whom he could delegate after. And he’d still need Manny there to offer his imprimatur. That would make a nice party of four. Hilger knew just the place.

He spent the next hour on the phone and the Internet, making the arrangements, alerting the players. When he was done, he checked one of the secure bulletin boards.

Son of a bitch, he thought, feeling a flush of pride at the quality of the men he worked with. There had been a break, a bit of luck that had enabled Hilger’s people to track Dox to Bangkok. The man had made a mistake, and it was going to cost him. If Rain was with him, as Hilger was betting he was, it would cost them both.

His phone rang again.

“Hilger,” he said.

“It’s me,” the caller said.

Hilger recognized the slightly nasal voice on the other end. His contact on the National Security Council.

“Go ahead.”

“We’ve got a new problem.”

Hilger waited.

The contact said, “I got a call this morning. A reporter from the Washington fucking Post .”

Hilger’s concern expressed itself in a feeling of almost deliciously cool calm.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to know about a rumor that the men in Manila were CIA officers and had died while meeting with a known terrorist.”

“Did he have anything else?”

“Not that he said.”

“Maybe he was fishing.”

“I doubt it. His information was pretty accurate in certain respects. I think it’s more likely that he has a source.”

Shit, someone was putting together the pieces pretty quickly.

“He’s going to run a story?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet. I think he’s looking for more information, corroboration.”

“Then we still have time.”

“Listen, I used up a lot of capital to straighten things out after Kwai Chung. I don’t know if I can do that again.”

Hilger breathed once, in and out. He said, “You won’t have to.”

“You need to put this thing to sleep quickly,” the voice answered. “We can’t afford the scrutiny. Not again.”

Yeah, no shit.

“It’s being handled today,” Hilger told him. “I’ll call you when it’s done.”

“Okay. Good.”

Hilger clicked off. He looked at his phone, wondering how it was going in Bangkok. For a moment, he thought that maybe he should have been there himself, to oversee things. But no. Winters was the best. Hilger had seen him in action and it wasn’t a pretty sight. But the man got results.

Hilger glanced at his desk clock. Maybe he was getting those results right now.

DELILAH WAITED AN HOUR to make sure that Rain and Dox had sufficient time to depart, then called Gil on his cell phone.

He answered on the first ring, and she imagined him as she always did at this stage in an operation, sitting alone in a dim hotel room, needing neither food nor other sustenance, the cell phone placed on a table or desk in front of him, silently and patiently waiting for the unit to ring so that he could venture wraith-like into the world and do what he was best at.

“Ken,” she heard him say in Hebrew. Yes.

“It’s me,” she answered. There was no response. Ignoring what she interpreted as one of his little power games, she went on. “Our friend left this morning. Packed his bags and took off.”

There was a pause, then he said, “Shit. Where are you?”

“Phuket.”

“Why didn’t you call sooner?”

“I never had a chance. I was with him the whole time.”

“Doesn’t he sleep?”

“Do you?”

There was a pause, no doubt while he tried to think of a good response. When he couldn’t, he said, “So he took you to Phuket.”

She caught the innuendo and felt a surge of anger. “You know how it is, Gil,” she said. “Some men just have the right touch with women. They know how to get what they want.”

As soon as it was out, she regretted it. Mostly, her deep-seated need not to take shit served her well, but this time it was going to hinder her. She wanted information from Gil. To get it, she had to manage him, manipulate him, not react by reflex to his constant, petty provocations. Yes, she was counterpunching, but he was still making her fight his kind of fight. The way to win was to change the game entirely.

Gil was silent on the other end of the phone, and she considered the possibility that her comment had actually wounded him. The thought softened her anger, made her feel more generous. She sensed that this feeling might be useful.

She considered. Maybe what Gil needed was just a victory in their constant verbal sparring. Maybe it would restore his sense of manhood, allow him to behave in some way other than trying to hurt her. She’d often thought that this was what the government needed to do with the Palestinians. After all, it was only after the Yom Kippur War, after giving Israel a bloody nose, that Egypt had been willing to make peace. Maybe Gil was the same. And maybe, if he found himself enjoying an unfamiliar position of success and power, he might be generous, or anyway careless, with information. Yes, that was the way to play it. Let him win.

After a moment he asked, “Well, what happened?”

“I think he got suspicious.”

“Any idea about where he’s gone?”

“No.”

“Shit,” he said again.

Shit, sure. For Gil, not being able to kill someone he had fixed in his sights must have felt like coitus interruptus.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Bangkok.”

She had expected that. She had told them she was traveling to Bangkok to meet Rain. Gil would have wanted to be as close as possible so he could move quickly.

“I have to pass through Bangkok to get wherever I’m going next,” she said. “Why don’t we meet there and I’ll brief you?” And then, as though she had only just thought of it and hadn’t actually been planning this, she added, “Or you could come here. It’s beautiful and I don’t know when either of us will have another chance.”

There was a long pause. Then he said, “It’s better if you come here.”

The pause told her he had been tempted by her suggestion of Phuket as the venue, perhaps by the way she had subtly conjoined the two of them with her use of the plural pronoun. The reply itself told her he was suspicious; otherwise, the temptation would have prevailed.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll catch the next flight and call you when I arrive. It should be just a few hours, if that.”

“Okay,” he said, and hung up.

She nodded. An unfamiliar place, just the two of them, far from the people they knew… all an ideal environment for getting someone to relax and open up. She had seen it many times before. Hell, John had just used it on her.

She had the hotel car take her to the airport and was able to get a Thai Air flight that left less than an hour later. She called Gil when she arrived at Bangkok airport. He asked her if she could get to the Oriental Hotel and meet him on the restaurant veranda, overlooking the river. She told him she would be there within an hour.

The midday traffic wasn’t too awful, and the ride took less than forty minutes. The moment she saw the hotel, she understood why Gil had chosen it. A classic colonial structure, it sprawled across a city block and would have entrances and exits all over. Guests could leave via cab, tuk-tuk, or some sort of river taxi adjacent to the hotel entrance. And the security, though subtle, was everywhere, in the form of surveillance cameras and guards with earpieces. All of which would make it hard to establish a choke point for an ambush, hard to carry out the ambush without being captured on videotape, and hard to follow someone out of the hotel without staying unacceptably close. Gil wasn’t just suspicious; he was downright worried that she had gone over to the other side.