Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

“Sanctioned by whom?”

He looked at me. “By the proper authorities.”

“All right,” I said, taking a sip from the porcelain demitasse. “Tell me.”

He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “After Nine-Eleven, Congress took the shackles off the Agency. There’s a new spirit in the place. We’re pushing the envelope again, going after the bad guys-”

“The few, the proud…” I interjected.

He frowned. “Look, we’re really making a difference now-”

“Be All You Can Be…” I started to sing.

His jaw clenched. “Do you just enjoy pissing me off?” he asked.

“A little bit, yes.”

“It’s petty.”

I took another sip of espresso. “What’s your point?”

“I wish you’d just listen.”

“So far I’ve listened to five clichés, including something about shackled envelopes. I’m waiting for you to actually say something.”

He flushed, but then nodded and even managed a chuckle. I smiled at his composure. He had matured since I had last seen him.

“Okay,” he said. “Remember that Predator drone that took out Abu Ali and five other Qaeda members with a Hellfire missile in Yemen in November 2002? That was one of ours.”

“That’s what was in the papers,” I said.

“Well, what’s not in the papers is the full extent of this kind of clandestine activity. The Agency has won a tug-of-war with the Pentagon over who’s responsible for these things. The Pentagon tried, but they can’t move fast enough to act on the intelligence we produce. So we’ve been tasked with the action ourselves. And we’re doing it.”

I waited for him to go on.

“So now we have a new mandate: no more Nine-Elevens. No more sneak attacks. We’ve been charged with doing whatever it takes-and I mean whatever-to disrupt the international terrorist infrastructure: the financiers, the arms brokers, the go-betweens.”

I nodded. “You want me for the ‘whatever’ part.”

“Of course,” he said, almost impatiently, and this time I was sure he’d gotten the habit from Tatsu, who had a way of uttering those two syllables as though barely managing to avoid instead saying, Are you always this obtuse ?

He took a sip from his cup. “Look, some of the individuals in question enjoy a lot of political protection. Some of them, in fact, are technically U.S. citizens.”

“ ‘Technically’?”

He shrugged. “They could be classified as enemy combatants.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

“What?” he asked.

I smiled. “Just thinking about the way the end justifies the means.”

“Sometimes it does.”

“Their end, or only yours?”

“Let’s save the philosophical discussion,” he said. “The point is, even post-Nine-Eleven, even in the current, security-minded climate, it wouldn’t do to just take some of these people out. Certainly not with a Hellfire missile. Better if their demise were to look… you know, natural.”

“Assuming that I were interested, and I’m not, what would be in it for me?”

“You’re not interested? You’re going to a lot of trouble to meet me, for someone who’s not interested.”

A year ago my protestation would have flustered him. Now he was counterpunching. Good for him.

“It’s no trouble. I was here because of a woman. When I found out she was working for you, I had to break things off. So here I am, killing a few days before heading home.”

If he was surprised to learn that I knew about his connection with Naomi, he didn’t show it. He looked at me and said, “Some people think Rio is your home.”

I returned his stare, and something in my eyes made him drop his gaze. “If you want to play fishing games with me, Kanezaki,” I said, “you’re just wasting time. But if I think your I-took-a-course-at-Langley-on-verbal-manipulation-techniques bullshit contains an element of threat, I’ll take you out before you even have a chance to beg me not to.”

I felt fear flow off him in a cold ripple. I knew what he had just seen in his mind’s eye: the way I had broken his bodyguard’s neck, an act that would have looked as casual to Kanezaki as unzipping to take a leak. Which is exactly the way I had wanted him to see it. And remember it.

“The money could set you up well,” he said, after a moment.

“I’m already set,” I answered, which was a lie, unfortunately.

We were both quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Look, I’m not doing any verbal manipulation here. Or at least no more than you’d expect. And I’m definitely not threatening you. I’m just telling you that we could really use your help to accomplish something important, and that you could make a lot of money in the process.”

I suppressed a grin. It was nicely done.

“Tell me who and how much,” I said. “And we’ll see if there’s anything worth discussing after that.”

The target was Belghazi, of course. The first of many, Kanezaki told me, if I was interested. Two hundred thousand U.S. a pop, delivered any way I wanted, fifty thousand upfront, the rest upon successful completion. On expenses I’d be out of pocket, which minimized paperwork-and paper trails-for the bean-counting set, a rule we wound up having to change somewhat given the sums I needed to operate in the VIP rooms of the Lisboa. The only catch was that it absolutely had to look natural.

It was about what I would have guessed. Enough to create the incentive, but not so much that I wouldn’t be tempted to do it again later. Not a bad deal for them, really-about the cost of a Hellfire or two, and a lot less than a cruise missile. And more deniable than either.

“I’ll think about it,” I told him. “And while I’m thinking, pay Naomi what you owe her.”

“She didn’t hold up her end,” he said, shaking his head, not bothering to deny the connection. “So she’s out of luck.”

“What was ‘her end’?”

“She was supposed to contact us if you contacted her.”

I looked at him. “If she didn’t contact you, how…”

“Voice analysis. Like a lie detector. We used it every time I called her. Every time I asked whether you’d shown up, she said no. On the last time, the machine detected significant stress patterns.”

“So you knew she was lying.”

“Yeah. We sent people to watch her. You know the rest.”

I looked away and considered. So she had been telling me the truth-she really hadn’t given me up. Damn.

Or maybe she had, and Kanezaki was just protecting her. There was no way to know, and I supposed there never would be.

“Pay her anyway,” I said.

He started to protest, but I cut him off. “She still led you to me, even if it was inadvertent. Pay her the fucking finder’s fee.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, after a moment.

I wondered briefly whether this was bullshit, too, designed to make me feel that I’d won something. Again, no way to know.

“I’ll contact you,” I said. “If you’ve paid her, we’ll talk more. If you haven’t, we won’t.”

He nodded.

I thought about adding something about leaving her alone, some threat. But all an admonition would accomplish would be to reveal, more than I already had, that I cared, thereby making Naomi more interesting to them. Better to say nothing, and simply steer clear of her thereafter.

Maybe you could have trusted her after all . The thought was tantalizing.

And sad.

It didn’t matter. Even if there had been some possibility of trust, my reflexive assumptions, my accusations, had extinguished it.

I thought of an apology. But there are things that just aren’t subject to an “I’m sorry” or a “please forgive me” or a “really, I should have known better.”