by Barry Eisler
“He’s Israeli, and he’s doing this?” I asked.
Boaz nodded. “It’s . . . how do you say, ‘infamy’? But yes, just like everyone else, we have some people who will do anything for money. There are Israeli soldiers who’ve been prosecuted for selling weapons to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza—the same weapons that are then used to kill their own brothers in the army.”
Gil shook his head disgustedly and said, “I don’t understand why we bother prosecuting them.”
Boaz reached over and showed me another photo. “This is the Jakarta Marriott, August 2003. For this bomb, the terrorists used sulfur, potassium chlorate, gasoline, and TNT. The resulting bomb was both smaller and more powerful than the Bali device. This mixture created a shock wave and again a horrible burning effect.”
He pointed to the next photo. “The Australian embassy in Kuningan, Jakarta, September 2004. This time we have sulfur, potassium chlorate, and TNT. The mixture created a tremendous shock wave followed by fire. Again, more powerful than the Bali bomb.”
Gil said, “This is Lavi, learning by experimentation.”
Boaz said, “Lavi isn’t just disseminating his knowledge. He’s refining it. He’s briefed on the composition of these bombs, he analyzes the results, and he proposes ‘improvements.’ Lavi is one of the linchpins of a worldwide terrorist knowledge base. He helps these monsters improve their tools and tactics all over the world. What is learned in Southeast Asia is passed on in Europe, in the United States, in the Middle East.”
“How long have you known about what he’s up to?”
“Not long enough,” Boaz said. “A chance observation of a meeting with an Azahari cutout, more focused attention after that. We want him removed as soon as possible. As you understand, though, and personally I consider it unfortunate, we need deniability.”
“Otherwise,” Gil said, “the list of volunteers for this job would be long.”
It was clear to me that Gil would be first in line.
“Knowledge,” I said, musing. “How can you stop it? Isn’t the genie out of the bottle?”
“We do what we can,” Boaz said, without any trace of his characteristic good humor, and for a moment I wondered whether I had misjudged in thinking that between them Gil was the only killer. “We do our part.”
I went through the rest of the photos. Boaz gave each a place and date in a monotone: first World Trade Center attack, 1993; Buenos Aires Jewish Community Center, 1994; U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, 1998; USS Cole, 2000; others. Gil explained Manny’s behind-the-scenes involvement, and how his participation was increasing the lethality of the bombs and furthering knowledge of how to create them.
“So you see,” Boaz said when I was finished and had handed the sheaf back to Gil, “to us, eradicating Lavi is like curing a fatal disease. We can’t bring back the people he has already murdered, but we can save the lives that will be lost if his life were to continue.”
“We think you can help us,” Gil said.
Boaz added, “And we think you can do it the right way.”
I got the point. The main thing was, they weren’t looking for something foolproof, only something deniable. If they had insisted on a heart attack, I would have taken it to mean that their fundamental concern was that no questions even be asked. I would then have assumed that Manny was an unusually connected target, and would have reevaluated accordingly. Instead, they seemed willing to have questions asked, as long as the answers didn’t lead back to them.
I found it interesting that they had approached me directly. They might have used someone else, and insulated themselves with cutouts. My guess was that, in their judgment, the extra insulation afforded by the cutouts would have been outweighed by the greater chance of discovery. If Manny were to die of a headshot from a high-powered rifle, somebody might feel compelled to look very hard for whoever was behind it. Sure, there would be some insulation then, but the method of the hit would make the insulation necessary. My methods, and my track record, were such that they must have been more confident of my ultimate success. Less insulation, less need for it. A trade-off. And regardless, Delilah had brought me in. She’d pitched the work to me, she’d brokered the meeting. It would have been pointless to try to run things under a false flag after that.
The flexibility we’d agreed on was helpful, but overall I was still operating in a relatively constrained universe of possibilities. The whole thing would have been simpler if I could have just learned Manny’s routine and then positioned Dox to blow his head off from a thousand yards away. But I didn’t mind the constraints, really, and I suppose I never have. After all, they’re part of what justifies my prices. And “natural” means no investigation, perhaps not even any questions. I can slip away afterward without pursuit. And make fewer enemies in the process.
“One thing concerns me,” I said. “I don’t understand the need for deniability. With the kind of stuff he’s been up to, I would think that you or anyone else could kill Manny any way you wanted.”
They glanced at each other. Obviously I’d been right in sensing that this would be a sensitive topic.
After a moment, Boaz said, “We have reason to believe that Lavi is a CIA asset.”
In my mind, the price of the job instantly doubled.
“You have reason?” I said.
He shrugged. “We’re not positive. But obviously, if there is a relationship, we don’t want to have to apologize.”
“Why would the Agency want this guy as an asset? Why not just put him six feet under?”
“The CIA has exaggerated ideas of its own capabilities,” Gil said. “They think they can do more good running people like Lavi than they can by just killing them. They think the intelligence they get from Lavi and his type serves the ‘big picture’ and the ‘greater good.’ ”
Boaz asked, “You know A. Q. Khan?”
“The father of the Pakistani bomb,” I said. “And a whole lot of illegitimate children, too, if the news is getting it right. The Paks arrested him for running an international Nukes R Us, then pardoned him pretty much the next day.”
Boaz nodded. “Makes you wonder what you have to do to get thrown in jail over there.”
Gil said, “Khan sold his nuclear starter kit to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and others, possibly including some nonstate actors. It turns out the CIA was watching Khan for thirty years. Everything he did, he did right under their noses. Twice the CIA persuaded Dutch intelligence agents not to arrest Khan because the CIA wanted to follow his trail.”
“What about your people?” I asked. “Sounds like Khan was ripe for an accident.”
“We very stupidly deferred to the CIA on how to handle him,” Gil said. “With Khan, everyone was too clever by half. We’re not making those mistakes anymore.”
“So you think the Agency might be taking the same approach with Manny that it took with Khan.”
“Similar,” Boaz said. “Not the same. Khan was never a U.S. asset. We think Lavi might be. But either way, we’re no longer interested in trying to get these characters to lead us to other characters. That’s all just a . . . what do you say, ‘circle jerk’?”
“I think you could call it that, yeah.”
He smiled, pleased at his use of the idiom. “Well, we’ve learned from our mistakes. Now, when we find people like Lavi, we just make them dead. In this case, for the reasons we’ve shared with you, dead with discretion is preferable.”
We were all quiet for a long time. Then I said, “If this might offend the CIA, there’s more risk. The prices we discussed a few minutes ago won’t do it.”
Boaz looked at me and said, “Tell us what will.”
THREE
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS in Manila, Dox and I learned two important things. First, Manny wasn’t actually staying at the hotel. He would show up there once or twice a day, typically in the early afternoon, and sometimes again in the evening. He would stick around for about an hour, then depart again for parts unknown. Se
cond, a hotel car, one of a small fleet of four identical black Mercedes S-classes, was taking him around. We never saw the car, license plate MPH 777, except when it pulled in to deliver Manny, and then the driver would wait in the carport until Manny had reemerged. It didn’t even come back at night. Manny must have reserved it on a twenty-four-hour basis, possibly for the duration of his stay.
I was tempted to call the front desk—“Hello, this is Mr. Hartman, can you remind me, how long did I reserve the hotel car?”—which might have given us an indication of how long Manny planned to be in town. But I decided the call would be unnecessarily risky. Given Manny’s long association with the Peninsula, the staff might know his habits, perhaps even his voice.
But maybe there was a better way. Among the goodies we had brought along for the job was a miniature GPS tracking device. It was a slick unit, with an internal antenna and motion activation to preserve the battery when the car wasn’t running. If we could place it in the vehicle, we could track Manny’s movements remotely.
That day, I hired one of the cars for a trip out to Lake Taal. In a thick Japanese accent, I told the driver that I wanted to see the lake and the active volcano that had conceived it. On the fourth finger of my left hand I wore a gold wedding band, purchased for cash from a Manila street vendor. I gave the driver plenty of opportunities to see it.
The journey, my first beyond Metro Manila since arriving in the city, was strangely beautiful. We drove first past the area’s slums, shanty cities clinging precariously to the undersides of highways and train tracks, their rusted corrugated walls provisional, yet also, somehow, timeless; their inhabitants sitting, sometimes squatting, before their wretched domiciles and among chickens and foraging dogs, watching uncomplaining as the Mercedes crawled past them in the thickening morning traffic. Beyond EDSA, the highway that encircles Manila like a traffic-choked noose, the city gave way to rice fields and green hills in the distance, and I had the odd and not unpleasant sense that I was being driven back into Vietnam. We picked up speed. Goats and gaunt cows observed our passage without evident interest. We passed a thin boy riding a water buffalo alongside the highway. He ignored our passage, but I noticed that he was smiling dreamily to himself as he swayed atop the animal, and I wondered for a moment what random thoughts might have provoked such gentle rapture. The lake itself, utterly placid, surrounded the cone of an active volcano that seemed to be merely sleeping, perhaps soon to stir. Because of the earliness of the hour no tourists had yet alighted, and I was gratified to have a moment to contemplate the water, the sky, the buzz of insects, and the calls of tropical birds before heading back to the density of Manila and the weight of the operation.
Back at the hotel, Dox and I took turns monitoring the feed from in front of the elevators for a sign of Manny’s return. It was boring work, as surveillance inevitably is. This time we were lucky: he showed up at a little after two in the afternoon, having kept us waiting only a few hours. As soon as we saw him and the bodyguard moving past the camera, I walked out to the carport.
In a heavy Japanese accent and broken English, I explained to the bell captain what had happened. One of the cars had taken me out to Lake Taal, I said, and somehow I had misplaced my wedding ring during the trip. The man seemed genuinely sympathetic: he must have understood how it would look to my wife when I tried to explain that I had lost my wedding ring in Manila, a city notorious for its pleasure quarters. He examined some paperwork, then gestured to one of the cars. “There, Mr. Yamada, the one on the far left, that’s the one you were in. Please, have a look.”
I thanked him and made a show of feeling around in the gaps in the seats and looking under the floor mats. Strangely enough, my ring was nowhere to be found.
“Not there,” I said, shaking my head in apparent agitation. “You are certain . . . that is correct car? All look same.”
“Quite certain, sir.”
I rubbed a hand across my mouth. “Okay if I check others? Please?”
He nodded and offered the sympathetic smile again. “Certainly, sir,” he said.
I made sure to search license plate MPH 777 next, going through the back in the same thorough fashion I had used a moment earlier. But this time, I left behind the GPS unit, adhered to the underside of the driver-side seat. The driver was chatting with another of the hotel staff by the front door and seemed neither to notice nor to care about my brief intrusion.
My search of the third and fourth cars was similarly fruitless. I thanked the bell captain sheepishly and asked him to please call me right away if anyone found a gold wedding band. He assured me that of course he would.
If an opportunity presented itself when we were done with the op, I would retrieve the unit. If I didn’t, eventually someone would find it. But so what? The driver would be reluctant to report it lest he somehow cause trouble for himself. If he did report it, his supervisor would suffer from the same inhibitions. Even if the incident reached management, the hotel could be counted on to take the high road of not advertising that someone had been surreptitiously tracking a guest through the hotel’s own fleet. And thus do greed and shame become progenitors of complicity.
Over the next few days, we used the GPS to track Manny’s movements. He seemed to travel widely within Metro Manila, but there was one commonality: a suburb called Greenhills. He would typically arrive there in the early evening, and, although he would sometimes go out again an hour or two later, he would always return for the night.
“Why do you suppose he’s going out to the suburbs every day and not even staying in the hotel?” Dox asked as we charted his movements.
I paused and thought about that for a moment. “I’m not sure. It could have to do with security, with the multiple locations creating a shell game dynamic. But two shells isn’t much. And his timing is more regular than I would be comfortable with.”
“I reckon he’s got a woman out there.”
“He could get a woman a lot easier in Makati, near the hotel.”
“Maybe this one is love.”
I shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
Upon arriving in Manila three weeks earlier, I had rented an unobtrusive gray Honda Civic, which I had garaged at the Peninsula. In my mind, I was an advance man for a Japanese boss, scouting locations for his arrival in the city. The cover was simple, provided for a wide range of behavior, and would be difficult to disprove. The yakuza maintains a sizable presence in the Philippines, a country that supplies many of Japan’s female “entertainers,” and my story, including a reticence about details, would be adequate to survive any foreseeable inquiries.
I drove out to Greenhills late in the afternoon, before Manny’s usual arrival time. With the GPS information, we knew to within a meter where the car was stopping. It was always in front of 11 Eisenhower Boulevard, which turned out to be a brick-and-glass high-rise condominium that looked like new money. I sat and waited in the window of a Jollibee, the local McDonald’s equivalent, in a shopping mall across the street. I had noted that, with the sun overhead and continuing to move westward, the store glass was mirroring a lot of light, making it difficult to see inside from the street.
I’D SPENT TIME in Manila while with the army in Vietnam, but of course that had been long ago, and the city had changed. Enclaves like what was now called Greenhills had once been rice paddies. The city was denser now: more people, more cars, more frenzy. There was a new air of commercialism, too, with mega-malls visible from auto-choked highways and billboards advertising teeth-whitening toothpastes and modern high-rises emphasizing by contrast the eternal shantytowns and slums around them. For the three weeks before Manny arrived, I had taken in these changes while indulging myself with a Manila-and-environs refresher course. The itinerary varied, but there was certainly a theme. I might have been researching a unique guidebook, something like Trouble in Paradise: Ambush, Escape, and Evasion for the Independent Operator in Metro Manila. The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat, an army instruc
tor once told me, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson. If I ever die during an op, it won’t be because I was too lazy to prepare properly.
Manny showed up at dinnertime. I saw the black S-class round the corner on Eisenhower and pull up in front of the condo. The bodyguard got out first. He spent a moment scanning the street for trouble, but failed to spot it eating a cheeseburger behind the reflective plate glass of the Jollibee. When he was satisfied, he opened Manny’s door, his eyes still periodically roaming the street. Manny got out and the two of them walked inside. Two uniformed guards in front of the building nodded to Manny as he went past, and I realized he was well known to them. Getting to him inside, while offering certain advantages, would obviously pose a challenge. We would have to keep watching for a better opportunity.
I left the Jollibee and entered the shopping mall. I called Dox from a prepaid cell phone I had bought with cash. Dox was also using a prepaid. He had his own GSM unit, but I’d told him to keep it switched off while we were operational. There are ways of tracking a cell phone, and I didn’t know who might have had Dox’s number.
“He’s here,” I told him. “The condominium in Greenhills.”
“I know. I’m watching the little arrow moving around the computer. I saw the car pull up ten minutes ago. Anything interesting?”
“There’s a lot of security at the building. We’re going to need to watch him some more.”
“Roger that.”
“What’s the earliest he’s left the building so far?”
“Hang on a minute.” I heard the sound of the keyboard. “Oh-seven-hundred. Seems like he’s typically on his way by oh-eight-hundred.”
“All right. I’m leaving. I’ll come back in the morning. I’ve seen him arrive. Maybe I’ll learn something watching him go out.”
I returned at just before seven the next morning. It was Sunday. I ate at the Jollibee again. The morning crew was new. Even if they’d been the same as the previous afternoon, I doubted that they would have noticed me. When I want to, I have a way of just being part of the scenery.
