Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

I stared at that message for a long time. Then, without even being conscious of a decision having been made, I started packing a bag.

That night I checked into the Copacabana Palace Hotel, Rio’s grandest, positioned on its eponymous beach. I took an ocean-view room on the fifth floor. I had brought along a pair of binoculars-not quite the quality of the Zeiss model that I had employed at Kwai Chung, but good enough for gazing at the ocean. Or the beach.

I slept poorly. At sunup I started watching. At ten o’clock, she showed.

She was wearing a dark thong bikini, navy, almost midnight blue. I decided it would have been a crime for her to wear anything else.

She swam for twenty minutes, then lay down on a towel in the sun. She seemed to be alone, but the beach was filling up. I had no way of really knowing.

I told myself that she had no reason to try to set me up. And that was true. But the funny thing was, I just didn’t care. For the moment, I didn’t even care how she knew where, or almost where, to find me.

I pulled on a bathing suit and a hotel robe and walked out to the beach. The sun was beating down hot from overhead, and I squinted against the glare coming off the ocean and the sand. I put the robe down next to her and sat on it.

“Is this spot taken?” I asked.

She opened her eyes. They were bluer than I had ever seen them, taking on some of the hues of the sea and sky.

She smiled and sat up and looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, “You got my message.”

I nodded. “It was a surprise. Pleasant surprise.”

“You want to know how I found you.”

She was beautiful. She was just… beautiful. I said, “I want to know how you’ve been.”

She didn’t say a word. She just looked into my eyes, leaned in, and kissed me. The taste of her, the feel of her mouth, the fact of her presence, it was all like a waking dream.

I pulled back and looked around us.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I would, too, if our positions were reversed.”

I looked at her for a moment. It was good to be with someone who understood my habits. Who shared them.

She glanced at my arm and my thigh. The dressings were gone now, and the slowly healing results of Belghazi’s handiwork were clearly visible. Whoever had patched me up must have been more concerned about closing the wounds than with their subsequent cosmetic appearance. It looked as though I’d been attacked by a pissed-off lawn mower.

“I know what you did at Kwai Chung in Hong Kong,” she said.

I shrugged. “What, that thing? I read that was the CIA and Hong Kong police.”

She chuckled. “You know where those missiles were going?”

I shook my head.

“To Saudi-funded groups that would have used them against Jerusalem and Haifa and Tel Aviv. The missiles have a ten-mile range. Israel is nine miles across at her waist. They could have reached anywhere.”

“So it was the missiles you were after?”

She nodded. “We didn’t have a fix on the seller. But we were tracking Belghazi, tracking him closely, as you know. Once he took possession, the shipping information would have been in his computer. He kept everything in it. Encrypted, of course, but we have people who could have cracked it.”

“What then?”

“We would have tracked the ship that we learned was moving the missiles. Almost certainly it would have been destined for a Saudi port or to Dubai. So in the South China Sea, the ship would have been boarded by naval commandos, the cargo confirmed and appropriated.”

“Lots of pirates in that part of the world,” I noted.

“And not all ‘pirate’ activity is publicized, either. Some shipping companies would prefer to keep a theft quiet. Depending on the cargo involved, of course.”

“So it was the handoff, and the shipping information, you were waiting for.”

“Yes. If something happened to Belghazi before then, we would have lost track of the missiles. There would have been another buyer.”

I nodded, thinking. “I don’t think Belghazi was planning on moving those missiles through ordinary container port shipping. From what I understand, one of his last acts was to have them loaded into a van.”

“The information we’ve been able to piece together suggests as much. The Alazans were an unusual shipment for all parties concerned. They were using unusual means of movement.”

“I got that feeling.”

“What I mean is, if we had proceeded with our original plan, we might have lost track of the shipment. That would have been disastrous. You have a lot of admirers right now among the people I work with.”

I smiled, but the smile felt sad. “I have a feeling there’s a job offer in all of this.”

“There is.”

I laughed and looked away. I’d really been hoping there, for a minute. One glimpse of a thong bikini and my brain had gone to mush. It was ridiculous.

“At least you’re not pissed that I didn’t wait for your signal,” I said.

I heard her say, “I’m not. But none of that is why I’m here.”

I wasn’t going to buy it. “Yeah?” I said.

“I’m taking a long vacation, a long decompression, standard practice after living undercover and in danger of discovery for so long. My organization is generous this way, and sensible. They understand the stresses.”

It sounded depressingly like a sales pitch. “I’m sure they do.”

“Usually I go a little crazy for a while when an assignment is finished. I travel, hook up with some handsome young thing, try to blot out recent memories with a lot of wine, a lot of passion. No one knows where I go, and no one asks. I come back when I’m ready.”

“This time?”

“This time I thought I’d spend some time with a man I met. If he’s interested.”

I looked out at the water. A breeze was kicking up whitecaps. They flashed under the sun.

“Tell me how you found me,” I said, having waited long enough.

“After Kwai Chung, priority was given to tracking you. We put together a lot of information quickly. The more we learned about you, the more we were able to find out. And we were able to access Hong Kong Customs records, going back over a year. Smart people made assumptions, technicians fed data into supercomputers. They tracked you to South America. After that, you were gone.”

“Not gone enough, it seems.”

“You forget, I know you. We spent time together. At the Oparium Café, in Macau, you ordered caipirinhas .”

I shrugged. “They’re popular all over the world.”

“You said ‘ por favor’ when you ordered.”

“No.”

She nodded. “The waitress was ethnic Portuguese, so at the time I thought you were just using some trivial knowledge of the language. But, when the technicians said they had tracked you to South America, I started thinking about what you had ordered, the way you had ordered it, your accent, the Japanese community in Brazil-”

“That’s the problem with being multilingual,” I said. “You forget what the hell language you’re speaking.”

She laughed. “Tell me about it. Can you imagine what Belghazi would have said if I had greeted him, ‘ Shalom’ ?”

We both laughed. She said, “Anyway, Rio felt right to me. Partly because of what you said about retiring to a sunny place, a place with beaches. But partly because… it just felt right. I decided to give it a try. São Paulo would have been my second choice. But a caipirinha wouldn’t taste nearly as good there, would it?”

“You want to get one now?”

She smiled. “It’s ten in the morning.”

I shrugged. “I’ve got a room at the Copacabana Palace, right behind us. We could kill some time first.”