Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

We each ordered the house blend, a mixture of Brazilian and Guatemalan beans, roasted fresh that morning. We didn’t spend any more time on pleasantries.

“What have you got for me?” I asked him.

“This time, a lot.”

“Good.”

“To start with, the woman. Check this out. Twice before, a player we would describe as part of the terrorist infrastructure-finance and logistics, not a foot soldier-has been spotted with a striking blonde. Each time, within two months of the spotting, the guy in question is found shot to death.”

I looked at him. “Why didn’t you tell me this the first time?”

“This information isn’t indexed. I can’t just search the files for ‘hot blonde and dead terrorist infrastructure,’ okay? I came across these commonalities the old-fashioned way, by reading a lot of thick files. Which takes time.”

That was fair. “All right.”

“We don’t have anything else on this woman. No name, nothing. No one has ever made the connection before, and I probably wouldn’t have, either, if you hadn’t gotten me looking in the right direction.”

My face betrayed nothing, but I thought, This is what Delilah was afraid of .

“And?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Well, I don’t think this woman’s presence in the lives of two, and now maybe three, soon-to-be-departed infrastructure types is a coincidence. My guess is, she’s working for someone, setting these guys up.”

“One of Charlie’s Angels?”

He chuckled. “More like the Angel of Death.”

“Seems a little thin.”

He looked at me, and I realized I might have protested just a bit too much. “Maybe,” he said. “But both of the guys she was seen with were killed while traveling, not at choke points like their homes or in the company of known associates. One while passing through Vienna, the other vacationing in Belize. Meaning someone was tracking them, tracking their movements. Tracking closely.”

I shrugged. “Could be the woman, but there are other ways to triangulate on a moving target. You didn’t need to sleep with Belghazi to tell me where I could find him.”

Reasonable enough, but I could feel that he sensed I was arguing with him, and was suspicious about why. I needed to rein that shit in.

Kanezaki picked up his coffee and looked at it for a moment, then said, “There’s more. Both bad guys died of a single twenty-two-caliber gunshot to the eye. Even from close up, and the victims were hit close up, that’s a hell of a shot. Whoever pulled the trigger is confident enough to use something with low penetration power because he knows he can place one shot where it needs to go to get the job done.”

He. Interesting.

“The woman’s not the shooter?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. I think she’s the spotter. She’s like a very specialized mole. She gets vetted by the target, passes the test, gets inside. The target is still taking other precautions, of course, and thinks he’s safe. But there’s a flaw in his security, and he’s sleeping with it. Then, when the woman judges that the moment is right, she makes a phone call. That night, the guy she’s with runs into a bullet. She’s not there when it happens, and she vanishes afterward. No one knows she was involved.”

He took a sip of coffee. “You know, I once read an article about unexplained car accidents. It seems a significant percentage of automotive fatalities gets filed under ‘unknown causes.’ Broad daylight, bright sunshine, a guy flips his car and dies. A lot of times when this happens, it turns out the windows were rolled down. So one theory is, the guy is driving along, listening to the radio, enjoying the beautiful day, and a bee flies into the car. The guy freaks, tries slapping at the bee, gets distracted, boom. The bee flies away. ‘Unknown causes.’ I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.”

“Who’s she working for, then?”

“Don’t know. A lot of possibilities, because these guys have lots of enemies. Could be a business competitor, someone moving in on the weapons contracts or the cash transactions to get better access to the skim. Could be the French-they’ve got their fingers in everything and you never really know what the hell they’re doing or why. But my guess is, it’s an Israeli operation.”

I nodded, both impressed by and not particularly liking his insights. It was one thing for me to have an idea of who Delilah was, who she was with. I could use the information any way I liked, I could control the situation. It was another thing to have the CIA taking an interest. “Why?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Because the Israelis have the most constant and immediate motive to disrupt the infrastructure and they’re always trying to do so, any way they can. Because Israeli assassination teams like to work with twenty-twos-they’re small and concealable and relatively quiet. The teams that killed the Septemberists who did Munich were using twenty-twos. And because the shooter is so good. And likewise for the woman. The guys she’s setting up and knocking down aren’t lightweights, so if she’s doing what I think she’s doing, she must be damn good at it. Mossad quality.”

“You think she’s Mossad?”

He nodded. “I think she’s part of the Collections branch. Collections does the target assessment and evaluation, after a committee has decided on the hit. Specialists, called Kidon, or Bayonets, part of the special Metsada unit, are the actual triggermen. So the division of labor here, it has an Israeli feel to me. Have you seen her again?”

“No,” I said, reflexively.

He paused for a moment, then said, “I was almost hoping you had. It’s not impossible that she could have been behind whoever attacked you in Hong Kong.”

Oddly enough, the notion seemed less likely when proposed by Kanezaki than it did when I was grappling with it myself.

“They were Arabs,” I said.

“Mossad uses Arab factions all the time. False flag ops. But anyway, I don’t know for sure that she’s Israeli. I told you, she could also be working for a faction. Or she could be a freelancer.” He smiled. “You know those freelancers, they’ll work for anyone.”

“Even the CIA,” I said, not returning the smile.

“That’s true. But she’s not one of ours. I would know about it.”

“I wouldn’t overestimate how much you know about what your organization is up to. Your motto could be, ‘Don’t worry, our right hand doesn’t have a clue about the left.’ ”

He chuckled. “That can be true at times.”

We were quiet for a moment.

I didn’t want him to think I was protecting Delilah. Didn’t want him to think there was anything personal motivating me. In my experience, giving the CIA emotional information is like handing a hot poker to a sadist. Better to have him think my attempts to downplay the woman’s significance were motivated by something else.

“Anyway, I don’t think the woman is as important as I first did,” I said. “I only saw her the once. She’s probably not the one in your files. I’m sure I can handle Belghazi just fine.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You worried that, if we think someone else is going to take out Belghazi, we’ll take you off the case?”

I could have smiled. He was good-a lot better than when I’d first gotten to know him-but he had just gone for the head fake I’d offered.

I frowned, overplaying it just slightly to convince him his suspicions were right, to make the impression stick. Pretending to ignore his question out of annoyance, I said, “I want to hear what you know about the team that just came after me.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “All right, I’ll level with you. I think there’s a leak on our side. But I don’t want to say more until I’ve had a chance to run it down.”