Barry Eisler - Killing Rain aka One Last Kill

We spent a half hour making sure we were alone, then ducked into Tsuta, a coffee shop I used to frequent in Minami Aoyama. I was glad to find Tsuta weathering the Starbucks storm. The last time I’d been here, I had been with Midori. That had been a good afternoon, strange under the circumstances but full of weird and foolish promise. And it was so long ago.

We sat down across from each other at one of the two tables and ordered espressos. I looked him over. It had been a year since I’d last seen him, and he seemed older now, more mature. There was a confidence that he’d lacked before, a new substance, a kind of weight. Kanezaki, I realized, wasn’t a kid anymore. He was managing some serious matters, and those matters were in turn molding him. As Dox’s favorite philosopher said, when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

We made small talk for a while. The table next to us was occupied by two elderly Japanese women. I doubted they could speak English, which Kanezaki and I were using-hell, I doubted they could hear much at all-but we kept our voices low all the same.

After the espressos arrived, I said, “I think it’s time for you to level with me.”

He took a sip from his demitasse, nodded appreciatively, and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

I knew he would tell me eventually. I also knew he would make me struggle for it, so that I would feel I had won something, that the information I extracted had worth. I wished we could skip the intermediate dance steps, but this was the way Kanezaki always played it.

Well, maybe there was a way we could accelerate things. “It’s probably just a coincidence,” I said, “but every time we talked or otherwise corresponded over the last few days, things I told you wound up in the Washington Post right afterward.”

He didn’t say anything, but I detected the trace of a satisfied smile.

“So,” I said, “if you want me to tell you what happened in Manila, and what just happened in Hong Kong, you’re going to have to go first.”

I picked up my demitasse and leaned back in my chair. I let the aroma play around my face for a moment, then took a small sip. Ah, it was good. Strong but not overwhelming; bitter, but not over-extracted; light, but with density in the play of flavors. I’ve drunk coffee in Paris, Rome, and Rio. Hell, I’ve even drunk it in Seattle, where the bean is a local religion. But in my mind nothing beats Tsuta.

Kanezaki waited a long time, the better to convince me that he was talking only under duress. I was halfway through my espresso when he said, “How do you know about Hong Kong?”

I knew he would crack, and I couldn’t help smiling a little. I said, “Because I just came from there.”

He looked at me and said, “Holy shit.”

“So? This time you go first.”

He sighed. “All right. Hilger was running a private op.”

“What do you mean, ‘private’?”

“Let me amend that. I should have said ‘semiprivate.’ Like the post office: private, but government-subsidized.”

He took a sip from his demitasse. “What is intelligence, to the policymakers? It’s just a product. Hell, in the community we even call it a product. We call the policymakers ‘consumers.’ And what do all consumers want?”

“Low prices?” I offered.

He chuckled. “If the consumer is rich enough so that price doesn’t matter.”

“Then choice,” I said.

He nodded. “Exactly. And if you don’t like what one store is trying to sell you, you’ll spend your money somewhere else. Look at what the White House did in the run-up to Iraq. They didn’t like what the CIA was telling them, so they set up a Pentagon unit and did their shopping there, instead.”

“So Hilger…”

“Look, think of it this way: the basis exists for a competitive, free market for intelligence. Regardless of the structure that exists by law, policymakers will always look to different factions to satisfy policymaking requirements, and develop those factions if they don’t already exist.”

I took a sip of espresso. “Hilger’s one of the factions?”

He nodded. “For almost a decade, he’s been building his own network. In a sense, he’s created a privatized intelligence service, and his product is good. A lot of policymakers have come to rely on it.”

“What happened, did the CIA get jealous?”

“That’s not the point. Sure, he was able to do things that the Agency can’t-he’s got no oversight, for one thing. But that’s exactly the problem. He’s his own extra-governmental institution.”

“And what are you doing here with me?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Hilger was corrupt. And I’m not just talking about the two million dollars he made off with from Kwai Chung last year. I’m talking about much worse than that. Remember the U.S. diplomat who was assassinated in Amman a few years ago?”

I nodded.

“That was Hilger, making his bones.”

That tracked with the conversation I had overheard in the China Club. I nodded.

“Look,” he said, “why do you think it’s so hard for us to penetrate terrorist cells? Because there’s a simple admission test: kill a high-profile American, or carry out some other atrocity. If you can do that, you’re in. Well, the CIA can’t do that.”

“But apparently, Hilger can.”

“Can and did. Hilger created access to terrorists by being a terrorist. The thing in Jordan, deals with that guy Belghazi you took out last year, black market arms, money laundering… I’ve got evidence that he knew about the Bali bombing before the fact. Two hundred people died there. The two bombings in Jakarta, too. After all that, you think he even remembered who he was or what he was trying to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s like Nixon’s ‘madman’ theory. You want people to think you’re a madman, you have to start doing mad things. In which case, you might as well be mad. What’s the difference?”

“Tell me why you were leaking to the Post .”

He shrugged. “I had to put pressure on Hilger’s network. Publicity equals pressure.”

“The first story said the men in Manila were spooks, not ex-spooks.”

“They were ex-spooks, like I told you. But if the story was that they were current, Langley would face more questions, and Hilger would feel more heat.”

“So those ‘well-placed sources’ the stories mentioned…”

“Yeah, you’re talking to him.”

I nodded in appreciation. “What about ‘Gird Enterprises’?”

“One of Hilger’s front companies, I think. We’ll know soon enough. The media is all over it now.”

“Now that you leaked it.”

“Of course,” he said, sounding and for a moment even looking very much like Tatsu.

“Are you sure that taking down Hilger was the right thing to do?” I asked. “He’d gotten pretty close to this guy Al-Jib…”

“Ali Al-Jib?” he asked, his eyes wide.

“You know any others?”

“How do you know this?”

“Because they were meeting at the China Club in Hong Kong last night.”

“They were meeting… holy shit, where is Al-Jib now?”

“I expect he’s being fished out of Victoria Harbor. Unless he was able to swim for shore with five bullets in him.”

He shook his head as though incredulous. “That was you, at the China Club?”

I shrugged.

He shook his head again. “Someone ought to give you a medal.”

“I’d settle for just getting paid. Anyway, how do you know Hilger wasn’t trying to develop Al-Jib, run him somehow? Maybe Al-Jib would have led to other sources.”

He took a breath and let it out. “Who knows what Hilger was up to with Al-Jib? The man was dirty.”