Barry Eisler - The Last Assassin

When she had first learned she was pregnant, she felt her body had betrayed her, as though she was a woman carrying the child of a soldier who had raped her in war. She had made an appointment at a clinic, determined to end the pregnancy immediately and never think of it again. But that same night, as she lay in bed staring at the ceiling, one hand half-consciously rubbing her belly, she thought maybe it was better not to act so hastily. It was still early. Why not sleep on it for a few nights, make up her mind more deliberately? The option to abort would still be there. It wasn't going away.

But those few nights turned into many. She thought ceaselessly about her circumstances. She loved living in New York, loved doing gigs here, loved the freedom of life away from Japan. And meeting men was easy enough. She saw the way they gazed at her while she played, many of them repeat customers, and she was aware of the nervous timbre of their voices when they approached her to thank her after a performance. She went out with a few, but none of them had interested her long-term.

At some point, she had come to understand that, in her late thirties, the chance for marriage and a family had probably passed. But that was okay. She concentrated on all the good things in her life and told herself that a husband and the rest would have interfered. But on those long sleepless nights after she learned she was pregnant, she realized she had been making a virtue of a necessity. Because her circumstances had seemed unchangeable, she had been motivated to accept them. But everything was different now.

She believed in fate, and this felt like fate to her. Yes, she knew she could choose to abort as she could choose to have the baby, so how could either alternative be fate, really? But she didn't care about the logic so much. It was her intuition she listened to. And her intuition told her to have the baby.

But she felt no desire to try to contact Rain. It wasn't only because of her father. It was because of what Rain was. Then, when the baby was born, her conviction that she should never tell him only deepened. From the moment the doctor brought that tiny child from her agonized, exhausted body and she heard him cry and held him hot and slick in her arms, she knew she had to keep him from the danger Rain represented.

And now that she had Koichiro, she couldn't imagine anything other than the two of them together. Her previous life, good as it was, seemed almost a dream, and the thought that she had nearly gone through with an abortion was enough to make her feel sick, as though she had once in a moment of weakness contemplated murdering her child. She would never have thought it possible, but she defined herself as this little boy's mother more than she had defined herself as anything else before.

She stood up, went into the bedroom, and watched Koichiro sleep. She realized that all her internal protests about her feelings for Rain had been window dressing, a flimsy façade that had crumbled at his first appearance. She felt a pang of guilt, as though her own feelings for this man were a betrayal of her father. But would her father have wanted her to die leaving him no grandchildren? And would he have wanted his grandchild to grow up not knowing his father? Surely Koichiro's paternity was of small significance in comparison with these larger issues. And it was true that Rain had tried to finish her father's efforts to expose corruption in the government, that this was his way of trying to rectify, even to atone for what he had done. She felt that in some inexplicable way, her father would have appreciated what Rain had done afterward. That he might even have… forgiven him.

She leaned over and kissed Koichiro's forehead, then stood looking at him again. Seeing Rain holding their baby, and for the first time seeing him cry, had softened something inside her, she knew. She didn't know what she wanted, or what she would do if Rain came back. She no longer felt sure of anything. Except for this sweet child. She would do anything to protect him. Anything in the world.

I turned left on the sidewalk at Waverly, devoid of plan or purpose. I just wanted to walk, to keep moving.

I couldn't get the image of Koichiro's face out of my mind. He was so small, so innocent in his sleep. So helpless.

Midori had been right to keep me away. The thought that my presence could put my little son in danger horrified me.

But you can change, I told myself. Maybe you already have. There's a way out. All you have to do is find it. For Koichiro.

I walked. Of course I could do it. Wasn't this what I'd been looking for? What Tatsu had always told me I needed? What was it he'd said in Tokyo the last time I saw him: You know as well as I do that you need a connection, you need something to pull you off the nihilistic path you've been treading.

Well, maybe this was it, just as he'd contended.

I could still smell Midori, still taste her on my lips. She'd been upset when she first saw me, true, but she'd left the door open just now, no doubt about that. All I had to do was figure out the right way to walk through it. I thought of Koichiro again. God, this could really work out. It could.

When I was fifteen feet from the end of the block, I heard footsteps from around the corner. I looked up and pow, before I could do anything about it, there was Eddie Wong, turning onto Waverly from Tenth right in front of me. And I'd thrown away that fucking wig. Stupid. Stupid.

If I'd been myself at that moment, I could have reacted more effectively. I would have turned my face away, retracted my antenna, passed without his even knowing.

But I wasn't myself. My body was back on the street, but my mind was still in Midori's apartment, digging out from under an avalanche of hope. Instead of looking away, for a second I stared straight at him, like a man unable to avert his eyes from the scene of a grisly accident.

He looked at me, too. And the recognition hardening on his face was undeniable. I realized he was seeing the same expression on mine.

No , I thought, no, fuck no…

Wong slowed down, his mind no doubt struggling to sort it all through. Whatever planning he had done had probably gone on the assumption that he would spot me surreptitiously, not that we would suddenly spot each other. His body was responding to his unconscious wish for more time, for a few more precious seconds to decide what to do.

I decided faster. It wasn't even a decision as such, more a reflex honed by a lifetime of killing. A reflex that had been delayed by my unaccustomed emotional state, but that now, as I recognized the threat to Midori and my child, snapped ferociously into place.

I went straight for him. As I closed the distance, his right hand moved to his coat pocket, probably where he kept the Balisong he was reputed to carry.

There's value to favoring a certain weapon and to practicing with it regularly. But there's a potential downside, too: you can come to rely on it, and to try to reach for it, when you would have been better off doing something else. This is why cops are often killed by knifers with their guns half out of their holsters. The cop sees the knife coming, but is so dependent on his pistol that he fails to recognize he's not going to have time to deploy it before he's already being stabbed. If someone has the jump on you, the better tactic is to create distance or otherwise slow down the attack and then access your favored weapon so that you'll actually have a chance to use it. Otherwise, the gun in your holster might as well have been in a safe back home.

But apparently Wong didn't know all that. He reached for the Balisong, and while he was reaching for it, I reached him.

I stepped in and blasted him across the front and right side of the neck with my right forearm, in the same instant catching his right bicep with my left hand. The neck shot might shock his brachial plexus and interrupt the functioning of his right arm. The bicep grab was backup.