Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

I had to interrupt his reverie. Shake his confidence that his acceptance of death had put him in paradoxical control of the situation. Shock him out of his assumption that we were playing a binary game of live or die, life or death, with no other possibilities in between.

I pulled out my folder with my right hand and flipped it open. I grabbed his face with my left and forced him to look at me.

“No matter what happens here,” I said to him, “you are not going to die. We’re not going to kill you. You are going to live.”

I pressed the knife against his cheek, so that the point was resting just below the bottom edge of his left eye. “But if you don’t answer my questions,” I said, “I’m going to blind you. One eye, then the other. Now. How did you find us?”

The guy didn’t answer, but I could tell from his increased respiration that I had his attention, that I had hauled him back some distance from the relatively safe place to which he had tried to flee.

“Your choice,” I said, and started slowly driving the knife upward.

He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried to jerk away. Dox shoved his head against the side of the van and I kept the knife slowly going north.

The guy’s breathing worsened, approaching the cadences of panic. His eyeball was moving upward ahead of the knife. Another millimeter and it would reach the limits of its give and be skewered.

“Cell phone,” he said suddenly, panting. “We tracked a cell phone.”

I paused the knife but didn’t lower it. “Whose cell phone?”

“His. Dox’s.”

Goddamnit, I thought, I told him to keep that fucking thing off. Then: Not now. Deal with that later.

Dox said, “Hey, asshole, how do you know my name?”

I shot him a murderous shut the fuck up this is my show glance, then looked back at Perry Mason. “How did you get the number?”

“I don’t know. It was just given to me.”

Bullshit it was just given to you. “If I have to ask you again, you lose this eye.”

There was a pause, then he said, “I don’t know for sure. I was told it came from some Russian outfit.”

I knew Dox had done some work with the Russians not so long ago. I glanced at him, my eyebrows raised. He gave me a yeah, I guess that’s possible shrug in return.

All right. I had deliberately started with a question about tools and tactics, something this guy could give up without feeling he was compromising his integrity. This would warm him up, help him rationalize his responses to the tougher inquiries that would follow. We’d started with how , and that had gone well. What I really wanted to talk about was who . But I sensed he still wasn’t ready for that, not even at the cost of his eyes. As a bridge between what we had accomplished and what still remained to be done, I decided to use why .

“Why are you coming after us?” I asked.

He paused, then said, “You tried to take out an asset in Manila.”

“What asset?” His neck was stretched taut with his efforts to stay ahead of the pressure of the knife. “Lavi,” he said. “Manheim Lavi.”

“Why? Retaliation?”

I already knew the answer to that one: information, not retaliation. If it had been simple retaliation they were after, they would have just tried to kill Dox and me. They wouldn’t have bothered hiring a bunch of locals to grab us and stuff us into the back of a van. But I wanted to keep him talking just a little more before we got down to brass tacks.

“Information,” he said. “We needed to know who was behind the hit so we could straighten things out.”

“What do you mean, ‘straighten things out’?”

“We have to protect our people. If there’s a threat, we deal with the threat.”

We were running out of time. The patrons in front of the club might discover some misplaced courage and decide to interfere. And certainly the police would be here soon.

Okay, here we go. “Who is ‘we’?” I asked.

He shook his head. I pushed the knife up a fraction and he cried out.

“Last time, and then you lose this eye. Who is we?”

He started to hyperventilate. He’d been standing on the very tips of his toes and his legs were trembling. But he wasn’t answering my question.

I didn’t want to do it-not out of any misplaced squeamishness, but because once you start hurting the subject, you start to lose your leverage. Fear is the ultimate motivator, but what you’re afraid of is by definition the thing that hasn’t happened yet. Once the thing has happened, you’re not afraid of it anymore. Once I’d taken out an eye, the loss of that eye would no longer be a threat. It would be one less thing the fear of which would motivate him.

But if you threaten and then fail to act, your subsequent threats lack credibility. It’s not pretty, but that’s the way a high-pressure interrogation works.

It occurred to me that there was one more problem. Whoever was behind this guy, if he were found sans an eye or two, they would know he had died after being interrogated. They could then be expected to change their plans, their security, to protect whatever their man might have compromised under duress. And, although in fact he had compromised very little, we had his hotel room key now. That presented some interesting possibilities I would have preferred not to foreclose.

Damn, it was a dilemma. But before I had a chance to resolve it, Perry Mason started to scream. Not so much in pain, or even to call for aid, but in outrage and desperation.

Dox slammed his hand over the man’s mouth, but the screaming decided it for me. We were exposed here, and too much time had gone by since the start of the incident. It was past time for us to bug out.

I looked at Dox. He nodded and I thought he understood. I took a half step back and kneed the guy in the groin. The screaming was displaced by a grunt and his body tried to double forward, but Dox was holding him too tightly. I changed my grip on the knife so that I was holding it ice pick style, blade in, and plunged it into his upper left pectoral, just below the clavicle. I ripped down and across, lacerating the subclavian artery.

I pulled Dox aside. The man spilled to his knees. He let out a long, agonized groan and pitched forward, but managed to get his arms out and caught himself before his head hit the pavement. There wasn’t much blood-the artery was transected, and the bleeding would be mostly into his chest and lungs-but there was no question that he would be unconscious in seconds, and dead shortly after that. I stepped in and slashed him twice across the forearms and he collapsed onto his face. He lay there, moaning and writhing.

I saw that I’d gotten blood on my hands-from his mouth or his chest, I didn’t know. I pulled a handkerchief from my back pocket and cleaned up the best I could. I handed the handkerchief to Dox and gestured for him to do the same. His eyes were wide and he seemed a little stunned, but he used the handkerchief. We’d be more thorough later.

One more thing. I glanced inside the open sliding door and saw what I was looking for: cell phone tracking equipment, strapped with duct tape to one of the back seats. Other than the equipment, the interior was clean. I used the handkerchief to open the van’s passenger door, then to pop the glove compartment, hoping to find registration or some other clue to Perry Mason’s identity. There was a first aid kit inside. I opened it, and saw vials of atropine and naloxone, and syringes. Interesting. But no registration, nothing to identify the people who had rented the van.

“Come on,” I said to Dox, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for the last minute or so. “We need to get out of here.”