Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

And in that instant I realized I had lost track of his other arm. It had disappeared from my view. My stomach lurched with the knowledge. Then, as that lurch rolled sickeningly through me, his right arm flashed into view, light glinting off the surgical steel he was holding in it. A second razor, deployed after the attacker had been lulled by disarming him of the first. Malice .

I clamped his head tighter with my right leg and squeezed my knees together, increasing the pressure on his ruined elbow. He screamed again, but he was fighting for his life now and wasn’t going to be stopped by pain alone. He slashed at my thigh with the razor. I tried to grab his wrist but missed, and the blade cut deep into my quadriceps. He pulled back, then immediately cut me again. There was no pain, really, adrenaline taking care of that for the moment, but a gout of blood spouted out of the wounds. He slashed again. Again I missed the grab, and this time he cut my wrist. The next time I caught him. Immediately I shifted my leg off his head and blasted a hammer fist into his face, snapping my body forward to generate momentum and getting my weight into the blow. Once. Twice. Again.

I felt his body go limp and the razor dropped from his hand. I transferred his wrist to my left hand and groped for the razor with my right. There it was, on the ground, next to his thigh. I grabbed it carefully and slid off him. His face was a bloody mess and he was groaning, seemingly semiconscious.

I knelt beside him and hooked the fingers of my free hand under his jawline. I hauled his head back and raised the razor.

A voice cried out sharply in Japanese from behind me. “ Yamero !” Stop!

I froze, thinking, What the fuck ?

I looked back over my shoulder. Two serious-looking Japanese stared back at me, each with a pistol pointing at my face. “ Yamero !” one of them said again. “ Kamisori otose !” Drop the razor!

I did as he asked and started to stand. My right leg wobbled, then went out under me. I looked down and saw why. My thigh was gashed wide open and spurting blood. My wrist was doing the same.

I sank down to my knees and looked at them. “You must be Belghazi’s new yakuza friends, is that right?” I asked them in Japanese.

They ignored me. Beside me, Belghazi stirred.

He must have had them positioned up the road as backup, and they’d moved in when the shooting started. Maybe they’d been accompanying him since Macau. Sure, he knew I would be looking for Arabs again, and he’d even supplied a few-distractions at the periphery, diverting me from the real players. Tatsu had been right.

Belghazi groaned and sat up, then got unsteadily to his feet. I watched him, my face impassive. I was already kneeling, and now I placed my hands calmly across my bloody thighs, the fingers pressed lightly together and pointed in at forty-five degrees. I drew my head and shoulders up into seiza , or natural posture, the formal attitude of traditional Japanese culture, an integral element of martial arts, of the tea ceremony, and, perhaps most of all, of the dignified moments before seppuku , or ritual suicide.

Belghazi rocked on his feet, cradling his broken arm, blood running down his face from a gash in his forehead. It looked like one of the hammer fists had broken his nose. His body convulsed, then he leaned forward and vomited. His men watched and said nothing.

He spat a few times and wiped his face with his good hand. For a few moments he stood leaning that way, catching his breath. Finally he straightened and said to me in English, his voice ragged, “How have you been tracking me?”

I ignored him. It seemed that my luck had finally run out. I expected no help from Dox. There was a bag with five million dollars in it being contested in front of his position. I couldn’t reasonably expect him to abandon it. I was alone now, fittingly enough, and I had no good options.

“Tell me how you have been tracking me, and I promise to kill you quickly. If you don’t, I will make you suffer.”

My mind began to drift. I barely heard his questions. The urgency of his tone seemed strange to me, irrelevant. I wondered at some level whether I was suffering from the effects of blood loss.

“I will ask you a final time,” he was saying. I noticed that he had picked up the razor. “Then I will slice your face apart.”

I looked out at the harbor and had the oddest sense that I was connected with it somehow, that my spirit was leaving my body and expanding outward. I was vaguely surprised at how unafraid I was. Death catches everyone eventually, and I had never harbored any illusions about its ability to catch me. That it had hesitated so long to do so seemed born more of a desire to mock me than of any real inclination to wait. Death had tired of that game, and had finally moved in to collect what we all owe.

Well, come and get it , I thought. Go ahead, take what’s yours. Choke on it .

There was a strange sound, softer than the pop of a champagne cork, louder than the fizzing of a seltzer bottle. I looked over and was surprised to see a fine mist erupting out of one of the yakuza ’s heads. Probably I should have done something about that. But the event seemed to have little to do with me.

The other yakuza had turned to look at his partner, whose body was sliding straight to the ground like a suddenly liquefying pole. The yakuza ’s mouth was hanging open, as though in shock or incomprehension. But only for a second. Because then his head was erupting, too.

Even in his battered condition, Belghazi recognized what had happened. He was able to process it, and somehow to react. He turned and began to run. But something unseen knocked him down. He landed on his face, and immediately pulled himself to his feet. He staggered for a second, then got an unsteady foot in front of him. Something knocked him down again. This time he didn’t get up.

I looked out at the harbor again. Wherever I was going, I was already halfway there. All the commotion around me seemed trivial, even silly. I wished it would stop and leave me alone.

I heard soft footfalls to my right. I sighed and looked over. It was Dox. He had approached through the hole in the fence and was moving smoothly toward us, the rifle shouldered and pointed downrange.

Maybe he’d recovered the five million. If so, it would be time to tie up loose ends. Belghazi. Then, I supposed, me. Game over.

I looked out at the harbor again, feeling myself slipping toward it, into it. The water was warm. The feeling was not at all unpleasant.

“You all right?” I heard Dox ask. I looked over. I saw his eyes move to Belghazi’s prone form, then scan left and right, then back again.

I didn’t answer. The question might have been cruel, given what he was about to do to me, yet somehow it struck me as almost funny. I looked at him and smiled.

“That mean yes?” he asked, pulling abreast of me now. He raised the rifle to eye level. There was a soft crack and a flash from the end of the suppressor.

I looked over at Belghazi. He was totally still. Dox had put a last round into his head.

I felt tired, so tired. The ground underneath me was soaking wet and warm, and for a moment I thought I was back near the Xe Kong river, where I had killed that young Viet Cong. He, too, had been lying on earth saturated with his own blood, and in that instant it was as though I was seeing the world through his eyes. As though he was calling to me from across time, from across the grave.

Dox was looking at me now. I saw concern in his expression. He lowered the rifle.

Suddenly I was confused.

“I thought I was dead,” I said, trying to explain. My voice sounded odd to me, slow and unnaturally low.