The Killer Collective

by Barry Eisler

  They came to a corner restaurant called Bar du Marché. “Let’s grab that table,” Rain said, pointing to one under the edge of a bright red-and-white awning. “It’s usually packed.”

  Rain ordered her the cappuccino she had asked for and an espresso for himself, along with a basket of bread. As soon as he switched to French with the waiter, she saw that interesting transformation again—a persona that was subtly different from what she’d seen before. And focusing on that helped her shake off the weight of the past.

  “Your French sounds really good,” she said when the waiter was gone. She knew that complimenting men was a great way to get them to talk—interrogators called it ego up—and she wondered if she could get him to open up a little.

  He shrugged. “I lived here for over a year. And all I really did was study the language, and watch French movies, and chat with bartenders.”

  No mention of Delilah, who she assumed must have been instrumental in his progress. She had expected him to call the woman as soon as they landed—they were carrying Carl’s satellite phone—but maybe he wanted to wait until everyone else arrived.

  “Still,” she said, “your accent just now sounded authentic. You must have a gift for languages.”

  “I don’t know about that. What about you? Do you speak any French?”

  “Un peu. I studied it in my senior year of high school.”

  “Just your senior year?”

  It was interesting, how deftly he had flipped the conversation so the focus was on her. Well, she had given him the opening. And anyway, sometimes you had to give a little to get a little.

  She nodded. “When I got to the States, I spoke no English, so I had to concentrate on that.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Carl didn’t tell you?”

  He smiled, probably at the way she called him Carl. “He’s told me almost nothing about you, other than that you’re a Seattle sex-crimes detective, that you can handle yourself—which is a compliment Dox does not give lightly—and that you saved his life in Thailand.”

  She nodded. As close as these two men were, Carl treated her business as her business. It didn’t surprise her. It just made her feel . . . grateful.

  “He saved mine, too,” she said.

  Rain didn’t respond, so she went back to his question. “Anyway. I grew up in a little village in the hills of Chiang Rai province in Thailand.”

  “And then where in America?”

  “A town called Llewellyn. In Idaho.” Where she would never go back.

  “That must have been some culture shock.”

  She nodded. “You could say that.”

  They were quiet after that. Some people would have kept pressing. Rain, she could see, sensed not to. She wondered again what kind of childhood he’d had. But if she asked him, she couldn’t very well object to his asking her.

  The waiter brought their coffees and bread. He spoke with Rain for a moment, chuckled, and moved off.

  “What was it?” Livia said.

  “He wanted to know where I’m from.”

  She laughed. It was a kind of in-joke among Asians in the States, whites constantly asking them where they were from, as though they were some alien, exotic species that couldn’t have been born and bred in America like anyone else.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I like to pretend I’m Parisian.”

  She laughed again. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  She poured two generous portions of brown sugar into her cappuccino, stirred, and took a sip. “Wow,” she said. “That’s good. And Seattle’s no slouch when it comes to coffee.”

  Rain took a sip of his espresso and waited.

  “I could be wrong about this,” she said. “But I noticed you’re carrying yourself differently here. In the hotel, you seemed foreign. Not American foreign. I think . . . Japanese. And walking around here, and talking to the waiter . . . again, not American. But not Japanese, either. Maybe that’s why the waiter asked you.”

  He nodded and took another sip of espresso, and she realized he wasn’t going to respond to an implied question. Whether out of discipline, or some native reticence, or both, she wasn’t sure.

  “Am I just imagining it?” she said. “And on the assumption I’m not, what is it?”

  He set down the espresso and picked up a croissant. “It started as a game for me,” he said. “A long time ago. I’d watch people and see if I could guess where they were from. And then I’d ask what I was going on. Clothes? Shoes? Eyeglasses? Accessories? Haircut? Posture, body language, gait, expression? If you pay enough attention, it’s amazing what you can see.”

  She was intrigued. “So you watched for the details.”

  He nodded. “And then started trying to imitate. To see if I could fool people. I’d make up whole stories about my past—my parents were rich. My parents were poor. I grew up here. I grew up there. And see if I could bring off the role convincingly.”

  “It was a game?”

  “Well, it was a game for high stakes, given the things I was mixed up in. But you know how Dox can just disappear sometimes, even though he’s a big guy?”

  She nodded. She’d seen it, if that was the right way of putting it, in Thailand, when he’d shot the last two men she’d been after.

  He tore off a piece of the croissant. “He’s better at that than I am. My thing is more about blending. Just making myself part of the scenery. I give people . . . what they expect to see. And what people expect to see, they don’t notice or remember.”

  For a second, she flashed on what it was like growing up in the Lone house. Doing everything she could to make Fred Lone not see her. Looking down. Hardly breathing. Pretending to be a chair.

  But none of it had worked.

  He started chewing the piece of croissant he’d torn off. Then he smiled. “That is just . . . so delicious. There’s great food in Tokyo, but you’d be hard pressed to find a croissant like this one.”

  She barely heard him. “The thing you said, about imitating . . . do you think it’s something anyone can do?”

  “I wouldn’t say anyone. But I think . . . people with a talent for acting. I think it’s something like that.”

  She nodded. She wondered why she had never broken it down before the way he had just described. She did some of what he’d talked about, she knew. But not so systematically.

  “So you have to be . . . a chameleon?” she said.

  “Yes, but it’s more than that. A chameleon just changes on the surface. What I’m talking about . . . it has to come from inside. Because if only the surface changes, incongruities seep through. You have to feel it, you have to be convinced by it. It has to seem real. There’s still this place inside you that knows the truth, but that place is sealed off way down deep. It doesn’t touch anything else.”

  Livia knew all about sealing things off down deep. She wondered if Rain ever felt as . . . different as she did. As cut off.

  As fucked up.

  And she wondered why he was telling her so much. Certainly this was more than she’d ever heard him talk before. Did he feel a connection? Did he sense the dragon inside her? Could he see what others overlooked, because a kindred creature dwelled in him?

  He took another bite of the croissant, then chased it with the last of his espresso, smiling a little at the pleasure of it.

  “You really love it here, don’t you?” she said.

  The question seemed to catch him off guard. He started to answer, then stopped and just said, “Yes.”

  She wondered if whatever he loved about the city was tied up with Delilah. Meaning maybe she should drop it. But instead she said, “What is it about Paris?”

  The waiter came by. Rain ordered another espresso, then gestured to her cappuccino. “Another?”

  She looked at the waiter and said, “Oui. Un cappuccino, s’il vous plaît.”

  Rain laughed. “You’re picking it up already.”


  They were quiet. If he didn’t want to answer, it was okay, she wasn’t going to press more than she already had.

  But after a moment he said, “A friend who loves Paris once told me, ‘There aren’t many things we humans need to do. We need to eat, we need to drink, we need to make love. And the French attitude is, okay, we should do those things very well.’”

  She found the notion lovely, and before she could stop it, it invoked Nason again. She blinked back the tears and laughed to cover her reaction, but she knew he’d seen it anyway.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve just been dealing with . . . a lot.”

  He shook his head quickly. She liked that he did nothing beyond that to reassure her. It was so minimalist it felt genuine. And, of course, respectful.

  “Can I ask you something else?” she said.

  He smiled. “Are you this polite when you’re interrogating suspects, too?”

  She laughed. “No. But I’m not interrogating you.” Which wasn’t completely true.

  He didn’t respond, so she said, “Was the friend Delilah?”

  The waiter brought their coffees and moved off. Rain said, “Yes.”

  She looked at him. “Thank you for agreeing to get in touch with her.”

  He nodded. “I should have done it a long time ago. So thank you for giving me a reason. Let’s just hope it works out.”

  He took a sip of the fresh espresso. “Can I ask you something?”

  She thought, Payback is a bitch.

  “Of course.”

  “What’s up with you and Dox?”

  She didn’t like the question. And though it wasn’t fair after how relatively forthcoming he had been with her, she said, “Why are you asking?”

  He didn’t get irritated that she had refused to answer and had instead asked a question of her own. He just sipped his espresso. He was very . . . patient, she realized. In control of himself. She couldn’t help but admire it.

  “I’ve known Dox for a long time,” he said. “He loves women. Loves them. But I’ve never seen him the way he is with you.”

  She shook her head, stymied for a response.

  “He’s one of the toughest men I’ve ever known,” he went on. “I mean, he likes to play the clown and all that, but he’s been through shit that would have broken most people—really, broken them, okay?—and all it’s done is increase his joie de vivre. But that’s just the surface. You know how it is. The worst bruises are down deep. Where no one else can see them.”

  She nodded. Yes, if there was one thing she knew, it was that.

  “You know that Yeats poem?” he said. “‘The Cloths of Heaven’?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t.”

  He glanced up for a moment, then said:

  “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

  Enwrought with golden and silver light,

  The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

  Of night and light and the half light;

  I would spread the cloths under your feet:

  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

  I have spread my dreams under your feet;

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

  He stopped and sipped his espresso. She waited, then said, “That’s a beautiful poem.”

  He nodded. “I like it, too.”

  “Another one you read to fall asleep to?”

  “Be careful with him,” he said. “He’s not unbreakable. At least not with you.”

  She felt paralyzed. Ordinarily, someone telling her what to do or not do made her want to push back. But it wasn’t like that with Rain. He wasn’t being territorial. He wasn’t trying to dominate her. He just cared about his friend.

  The problem was, she did, too. She just didn’t know how. Or what to do about it.

  At the same time, it was interesting that he wasn’t criticizing her for getting Carl involved in all this. He seemed to take that as a matter of course. It was as though he accepted the risk of getting killed as just a potential cost of doing business. His concerns weren’t primarily matters of the body. They were matters of the heart.

  “I don’t want to hurt him,” she said. “And . . . I don’t want to get hurt, either.”

  He smiled—an exceptionally sad smile. “It would be nice if there were some guarantees in these things, wouldn’t it?”

  He finished his espresso and stood. “I guess that’s as good a segue as any,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, okay?”

  “Where are you going?”

  He took Carl’s sat phone from the pack he was carrying. “Probably to go get hurt.”

  chapter

  thirty-six

  DELILAH

  Delilah was enjoying a cappuccino at La Caféothèque, a place she liked not far from her apartment in Le Marais. The café was best in the morning, when it was quiet and she could linger at one of the wooden tables in a window seat and read for as long as she wanted. There were a number of others she sometimes visited—Le Peloton, Strada Café, Le Barbouquin in Belleville, and of course when she was in the mood for a stroll, there was always Dose in the Latin Quarter and especially Numéro 220—but La Caféothèque was her favorite, and more and more, she enjoyed starting her mornings there.

  Once upon a time, she’d needed to be careful about a predictable routine, but these days security was no longer so much of a concern. She was still on Mossad’s payroll—technically still part of the service, technically still an Israeli. But they didn’t want her home, and she couldn’t really blame them. She’d been good, yes, she’d been part of a succession of ops that had entrapped or led to the elimination of numerous terrorist financiers and other enablers. But she’d caused a fair amount of trouble, too. For a while, there had been intemperance and acrimony, even some threats. But all that seemed over with now, replaced by a kind of cold peace.

  Which on balance wasn’t bad. The legend she lived, as a local fashion photographer, was self-sustaining, with real clients and real referrals. Her expenses were minimal. She had a weakness for some of the local designers, and when she traveled, she stayed in the best hotels. But those were her only real indulgences. Her apartment was comfortable but modest. She didn’t even own a car, or want one. The monthly stipend they sent her all went to a retirement account, which was funny because come on, in every way that mattered she was retired already.

  But retirement was fine, really. She was realistic. She was in her forties now, and while she still got a lot of attention, over time it had become more a matter of manner and sophistication, which could be managed, than of raw beauty, which was an elemental force. In some ways, it was a relief. Ten years earlier, she couldn’t have read a book in a café without a half dozen men interrupting her. These days, there were fewer distractions.

  She supposed she should be grateful for the way things had turned out. The cold peace, and the stipend, and the security and freedom she had. But it was hard not to feel some bitterness, too. She had slept with the enemy—literally, and repeatedly, and she had done it well. And her reward was suspicion and distaste, a sense among the men who ran the organization that she was dirty, and tainted, and fundamentally a whore. A necessary evil to be used for the greater good, and then disposed of at some unspoken expiration date.

  She took a sip of her cappuccino and smiled, knowing she was being silly. What did she want, a management position at headquarters? Would she rather be trapped in a windowless office in Tel Aviv, or free, here in the city she loved more than any other? The last time she’d been back, for her father’s funeral, she had felt like an alien. And since her mother had predeceased him, and her only brother had died in Lebanon when Delilah was just a girl . . . what was there to go back for? Paris was her home now, and she was a country of one within it.

  John had once mentioned the parable of a Taoist sage, who awoke from a dream of being a butterfly and wondered if he was not then a butterfly dreaming he was a man. It was on one of those nights in her apartm
ent, their lovemaking done and overtaken by languor, the large windows open, the breeze cool on their skin. He felt like a killer, he had told her, who had awakened from a beguiling dream of being a weightless, innocent young man. But when he was with her, he’d said . . . that weightlessness sometimes felt real again. He would always look away when he told her things like that, as though he was embarrassed or ashamed or afraid to see how she might react. And she would listen, and reassure him with a touch, or a kiss, and sometimes they would make love again. And now it was those nights that had become a dream.

  She was still in love with him, she knew. She hadn’t thought it was something she was capable of, not after everything she’d done in her work with Mossad. She’d been so shocked by it that for a long time, she’d been in denial. And when she’d finally acknowledged it to him, it had been good. They’d lived together, here in Paris. He’d changed. His paranoia seemed to subside, his combat reflexes began to relax.

  But they couldn’t find a way to meet in the middle. There was never any stasis. As soon as he felt he’d gotten out, he started pressuring her to do the same. And she couldn’t. She wasn’t ready. She hated the work, she hated the people, but she knew what she did saved lives. Her brother had died for that, she’d told John. She wasn’t going to quit just because a few people were mean to her at the office.

  And then he’d issued an ultimatum, and they had a stupid fight, and then he was gone. And she’d be damned if she was going to beg him to come back.

  Besides, it wasn’t as though she didn’t have distractions. She still saw Kent from time to time. He was usually able, and always willing, to drop everything and meet her somewhere if she wanted company. But that was part of the problem. He was too attached. Kent was a player, she knew, and probably had a dozen women he saw when he traveled on his official duties with MI6. The strange thing was, she didn’t mind. In some ways, she wished he would fall for one of them. It would be an easy and elegant way for their own increasingly tenuous relationship to come to a dignified end.