Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

The audio cut out. There was a hiss, and Dox was back in my ear. “Saw Hilger pull some bug-detection gear from an attaché,” he said. “Glad we’re using video. I’m gonna go dark for ten minutes or they might pick up the signal.”

“Good,” I said. The transmitters broadcast on radio frequency, which is present in the background in any urban location, and we were using low signal strength, boosted outside the room by the repeaters I’d put in place. So the concern wasn’t the transmitters’ ambient presence, only their susceptibility to a deliberate sweep, which might follow the signal they emitted like a trail of electronic bread crumbs. Once the sweep was completed, we could safely come back online.

After ten minutes, I heard Dox again. “Okay, here we go. I’ll switch you over.”

Another hiss, and I was listening to Hilger and Manny again. Manny was saying, “He knows he’s important. It’s going to his head.”

Hilger chuckled.

“I mean it, that’s why he’s late. He’s just showing us that he can make us wait for him, and that he knows we’ll put up with it. Arabs. This is just like them.”

“Let’s remember that we’re all friends tonight, all right?” Hilger said. “No nationalities around this table. No stupid allegiances.”

I thought I heard the sound of glasses clinking.

They were quiet after that. Ten minutes passed, then I heard the sound of a knock on their door, of chairs being pushed back. Hilger said, “Hello, Mr. Eljub. Welcome.”

At last, I thought. Mr. VBM.

“Ali, hello,” Manny said. “Glad you could make it.”

“Please, call me Ali,” a new voice said, in accented English that I had trouble placing. Arab, maybe, with something European behind it. Whoever he was, he must have been talking to Hilger. Manny had already presumed. Or else they knew each other.

“Ali, welcome,” Hilger said again. “Please, have a seat.”

I heard chairs being moved around. Hilger said, “You had a good flight, I hope?”

“Uneventful. But slow. There’s so much airline security these days!”

This provoked a laugh. Hilger said, “And the hotel?”

“I don’t think I can complain about a suite at The Four Seasons. Thank you for taking care of it.”

“My pleasure.”

I heard another knock at their door. Hilger said, “Yes.”

There was a woman’s voice, asking them about drinks.

“Shall we order?” the man called Ali said. “I’m starving.”

“Yeah, it’s gotten pretty late for dinner,” Manny said, and I thought, Not just a whiner. Passive-aggressive, too . Not that my growing distaste for him would be a factor one way or the other. I wasn’t feeling anything right now other than the usual, slightly heightened focus of being in the middle of an op. And I was going to keep it that way until after it was too late to make a difference.

“All right, let’s,” Hilger said. “Ali, let me suggest the…”

There was a hiss. Dox cut in: “We’ve got something interesting here, partner. Listen to your lady.”

Delilah said, “It’s not Eljub. It’s Al-Jib. Ali Al-Jib.”

“I don’t know the name,” I said. “Should I?”

“What about A. Q. Khan?” she asked.

Khan again. “Yeah, I know of Khan,” I told her, thinking of my conversation with Boaz and Gil in Nagoya. “Pakistani scientist, nuclear starter kit, et cetera. It was in the news a little over a year ago, then it died down, right? The outgoing CIA director, George Tenet, was bragging about it.”

“Yeah, how Christians In Action was down Khan’s throat and up his ass and in some other hard-to-reach places, too,” Dox added.

“I think it was more like ‘inside his residence, inside his facilities, inside his rooms,’ ” Delilah said. “But yes, that was the propaganda the U.S. was putting out. They were hailing Khan’s arrest as a great victory. But then why is the U.S. still investigating his network? Why is the International Atomic Energy Agency doing the same?”

“Oh, you know,” Dox said. “In these matters, the government usually continues the investigation just to determine whether what they’ve achieved is merely a ‘great victory,’ or if it could in fact be more accurately described as a ‘historic triumph.’ I’m sure they don’t think the network’s still operational after all that clever spying they did to stop it.”

“It is operational,” Delilah said. “Despite the arrests. It’s like Al Qaeda-the leadership is damaged, but then new, less centralized actors begin to emerge in its place.”

“Al-Jib?” I asked.

“Exactly. Ali Al-Jib is part of this new generation. He was educated in East Germany, the Central Institute of Nuclear Research in Rossendorf. There are more like him, men who were trained behind the Iron Curtain and then lost to the world’s intelligence services in the turmoil following the end of the Cold War. A lucky find of some Soviet-era documents pointed us in the right direction.”

“Maybe we should switch the frequency back to Hilger and company,” I said. “Not that this isn’t interesting, but we don’t want to get distracted.”

“You don’t understand,” Delilah said. “Al-Jib is a dangerous man, very dangerous. What Lavi does with conventional explosives, Al-Jib is trying to do with nuclear weapons. We’ve been hunting him for a long time and he is exceedingly difficult to track. We can’t let him walk out of here tonight.”

“Look,” I said, “he sounds like he’s another problem child, it’s true. But we’ve got our hands full as it is. Hilger and Manny are the primaries. That’s going to be hard enough to do. Let’s not complicate it by rearranging our priorities in the middle of the proceedings.”

“You don’t understand,” she said again.

“I do understand. These aren’t my decisions to make. Your people hired me to do a job, I’m doing it. If they wanted to hire me to do Al-Jib, too, they should have brought it up sooner and I would have priced it in. And they damn well shouldn’t have turned on me after one little hitch in Manila.”

“Is that what this is about?” she said. “You won’t do this… out of spite?”

“I won’t do it because it’s not sensible to do it. We’ve got two targets already. If I put Al-Jib at the head of the line, it reduces the chances that I’ll be able to get to the other two. So let’s just stick to the plan.

“Jeez, partner,” Dox said. “I don’t know.”

“Goddamnit,” I said, “what happened to all that ‘The judge and the executioner, they’re different roles’ shit you were spouting at me the other day?”

“I think I meant that more as a guideline than a rule, man,” he said. “And this feels like, you know, an exigency.”

We were all quiet for a moment. I thought, This is exactly what I’m talking about, we’re arguing about this idiot Al-fucking-Jib instead of monitoring what’s going on in the room. Getting distracted, jeopardizing the whole operation .

“If the opening is there,” I said, “I’ll take him out. But Hilger and Manny are still the priority. Okay?”

There was a pause, then Delilah said, “Okay.”

“Good. Now switch the frequency back. Please.”

We went back to Hilger and company. It sounded like Hilger was making a sales pitch. Something about diversified investments, Asian emerging markets equities, average yields of over twenty-five percent.

“What about your commission?” Al-Jib asked.

“The twenty-five percent yields are after my commission, which is twenty percent.”

“Twenty percent. Is that in keeping with American SEC regulations?”

“Not at all. But then, not much of what I can do is likely to be approved by the SEC.”