Barry Eisler: The Last Assassin

I thought I was going to be excited when I arrived here, but I wasn't. Instead I felt scared.

When you live your life in danger, you're afraid a lot of the time. But you develop a system for dealing with it. You favor certain tools, you refine your tactics, and with success you come to trust both. You learn to focus more on the approach than on the destination, and that keeps the fear at bay. Gearing up calms you down.

So as we pulled up to the hotel, I tried to focus on how I would get to Midori, the kind of thing I'm comfortable with, and not on what I would do afterward, about which I had no idea.

I checked in and headed to my room on the twelfth floor. I liked what I saw: spacious layout, high ceilings, and a wall-to-wall window overlooking the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor. Somehow the location felt right: Manhattan, yes, but at a safe distance, literally the water's edge, not the tangled inland terrain where I might easily find myself confused or lost or worse. I unpacked, showered, and called housekeeping to have my laundry picked up. Then I grabbed a hotel umbrella and headed out to do a few evening errands.

I walked north on West Street, the rain beating steadily against the umbrella. A few financial district commuters hurried past me, but the area was otherwise dark and deserted. At Vesey, I walked up a gray riser of stairs and cut east along an elevated walkway. Water dripped from the corrugated roof into puddles on the concrete. On the left, through chain mesh fencing, clusters of construction equipment lay dormant in dust and darkness. I moved to the right and paused for a moment before the metal wall like a visitor in front of a hospital curtain, then looked down through a gap. Below me, frozen in the glow of sodium arc lamps as unflinching as those of any coroner's examination room, was the enormous hole where the towers had burned. At first glance, it was just a large construction site, much like any other. And yet the air was undeniably heavy with the enormity of what had produced this amputated place and the contorted walkways around and above it. The debris had been cleared, the equipment positioned, the lights turned on… and then, it seemed, some odd rigor had taken hold. The dead had been carted away but the land had yet to be resettled, and so the area felt sad and pernicious, a purgatory, an inbetween. I looked around and noticed other people who had similarly paused to observe the strange urban absence, and realized the mood of the site was infectious. I moved on.

I kept walking until I reached Tribeca, where the lights and laughter from restaurants and clubs pulled me from the pall that had gripped me farther south. I started to think operationally. The first item I needed was a mobile phone. Ordinarily I eschew mobiles. I've never liked the idea of carrying something that's quietly tracking and in fact broadcasting my location – especially after revelations about the NSA's post-9/11 eavesdropping program – and I prefer to rely on electronic bulletin boards and, when necessary, random pay phones. But now I needed something I could use to communicate quickly with Dox. Well, a prepaid mobile ought to be secure enough for the short time I'd be using it.

I would have preferred to purchase a unit without identifying myself, but governments all over the world, including Uncle Sam, are cracking down on the anonymous purchase of prepaid cell phones because terrorists seem to like them. Still, using the Watanabe ID, I was able to pick up a pair of slim Nokias with five hundred prepaid minutes apiece at a Cingular store in Chinatown, along with two sets of wireless earpieces.

Next on my shopping list was a folding knife. I'd left the Benchmade behind in Barcelona because to get it on the plane I would have had to check a bag, which I prefer not to do. Finding a replacement in New York, however, was tricky. The local laws governing concealed knives are so stringent that I couldn't find a store that sold anything other than the small Swiss Army variety. I had just about decided to rig up a kitchen knife in a shoulder harness when I came across the right kind of street vendor, a bald black man of indeterminate age with a megawatt smile and secrets in his eyes, who sold me a Strider folder with a four-inch recurve blade.

Next I stopped in an army/navy store and found a gray windbreaker that would be so anonymous in the city as to make me invisible. I also grabbed a plain black umbrella and dumped the blue logo-sporting Ritz Carlton model in a cluttered corner of the store. A navy baseball cap and a navy shoulder pack completed the ensemble, and, thus properly provisioned, I continued north. I adopted a steady gait, not too fast, not too slow, someone with business in whatever neighborhood I was moving through, a reason for being there, but nothing important enough to hurry over.

Tatsu had gotten me Midori's address, an apartment on Christopher Street in the West Village. His position, high up in the Keisatsucho, had its advantages when it came to acquiring information, even if the quid pro quo was an occasional off-the-books 'favor.' Tatsu's ends were noble, but he certainly believed they justified a wide range of means.

The last time I had seen Midori was in Tokyo, more than two years earlier. She had tracked me down to confront me over what had happened to her father, and I admitted what I had done. And somehow, in the midst of it all, her grief and rage and confusion, we had still fallen into bed one last time. I've thought about that night a lot since then. I've replayed it, dissected it, mined it for meaning. But it always ends the same way: Midori, leaning in close from above me, shuddering as she came and whispering I hate you through her tears.

Well, we were going to find out how profound that sentiment really was. And how permanent.

I headed up Sixth Avenue all the way to Christopher, where I made a left. Of course I had already familiarized myself with these routes using various Internet maps, but there's never a substitute for direct experience with the local terrain. There it was, on the other side of the street, a seventeen-story building, prewar, from the look of it, with a doorman in a long coat standing under a green awning out front. In this light and these clothes, and with the umbrella held low against the weather, I wasn't worried about being spotted, and I slowed. I looked at the building and imagined where I might set up if I were the one waiting here for myself. There weren't a lot of great spots. There was no parking on this section of the street, so vehicle surveillance was out. And the restaurants and gay bars Christopher Street is known for were too far from the apartment to be useful.

There was the doorman, of course. It wasn't impossible that someone had gotten to him, bribed him to keep an eye out for the Asian man in some file photo. I filed him for later consideration.

I kept walking. The bars at the end of the street had some people in front of them, mostly smokers, but no one who was in a position to watch Midori's building or who otherwise felt wrong to me. I noted that several of the places offered live music, and wondered if Midori had chosen the neighborhood in part because of its proximity to her nightly gigs. Probably she had. I thought about taking a look inside, just to see if anyone caused a radar ping, but as always there was a cost-benefit equation at work and this time it argued against being too thorough. Anyone who was here to watch Midori would have to do so from close by her apartment, not from within one of the neighborhood watering holes. And if there were anyone relevant in one of these places, he could as easily spot me as I could spot him. Indoors, I wouldn't have the windbreaker and umbrella to hide behind.

I zigzagged my way south. It was hard to say what it meant that I hadn't spotted anyone tonight. It could be they were focusing more on her public performances, or that she was out at the moment and they knew it. I'd have to know more before I could safely close in.