by Barry Eisler
He nodded and smiled. “And then this will all seem like a dream.” He gestured to the other men. “You know Boaz? Gil?”
“We’ve worked together, yes,” she said. They stood, and the three of them shook hands.
Boaz was one of their best IED—improvised explosive devices—experts. She liked him a lot, as everybody did. He was serious when the situation called for it, but his default persona was boyish, at times mischievous, and he had an easy laugh that could almost be a giggle. He never came on to her, and in fact treated her as much like a sister as a colleague, which made him rare in the organization and, had the director not been present, deserving of a hug.
Gil was different—gaunt, moody, and intense. People admired Gil, but he also made them uncomfortable, and both for the same reason: he was extremely good at what he did. On two of Delilah’s assignments, Gil had been the shooter. In both instances, he had emerged from the dark to put a .22 round through the target’s eye and then disappeared without a ripple. He worked with others when he had to, but at heart, Delilah knew, he was a loner, and never more in his element than when he was silently stalking his prey.
Once, in a safe room in Vienna, he had made a pass at her. His move had been crudely direct, and Delilah hadn’t liked the underlying assumption of entitlement and expectation of fulfillment. She knew the sex would have given him a kind of power over her—that in fact this was part of the reason he wanted it—and she wasn’t about to surrender one of her few mysteries, her few levers of influence, with a colleague. Her rebuff had been as unambiguous as his proposition. It shouldn’t have been a big deal—he was hardly the first—but on the few occasions on which she’d seen him since then, he always looked as though he was remembering, and not without resentment. There was a breed of man that was inclined to feel humiliated by a woman’s demurral, and she suspected that Gil was such a specimen.
The table was set up for four, which told her they weren’t expecting anyone else. They all sat down. The director gestured to the sandwiches. “A little something to eat?” he asked.
She shook her head, not yet comfortable. “They served dinner on the plane.”
Gil took a sandwich and bit into it. Boaz picked up the teapot and smiled at her. “Tea, then?” he asked.
She smiled back and extended him her cup. “Thank you.”
Boaz poured for everyone. They all sat silently for a few moments, sipping. Then the director said, “Delilah, let me explain why you’ve been called in. You may have been wondering, eh?”
She nodded. “A bit, yes.”
“We’ve had a problem in Manila. We think you can help solve it.”
We’ve had a problem, she thought. Wasn’t that what those Apollo 13 astronauts had said as their spaceship was breaking apart? And his use of the inclusive pronoun, that was interesting, and vaguely worrisome, too.
“All right,” she said, wondering what was coming.
“Recently we used a contractor for a job in Manila. A part-Japanese fellow named John Rain.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, I brokered that introduction.”
She wondered for a moment why the director was playing dumb with her. If the problem were serious enough to warrant his presence at this meeting, he would have been fully briefed on all the details, including Delilah’s early involvement. He must have been testing her, looking for opportunities to gauge her reactions.
“Yes, of course,” he went on. “You met Rain in Macau. The Belghazi op.”
“Yes.”
“Everything we were able to learn about this man, including your own evaluation, indicated that he was extremely reliable.”
Including your own evaluation. Something had gone wrong, and she was going to take some heat for it.
“Yes,” she said again, sensing that it would be better to say less.
He paused to take a sip of tea, and she recognized that he was attempting to draw her out with his silence. She resisted the urge to speak and instead took a sip of tea herself. After a moment, he went on.
“The man Rain was hired to remove is named Manheim Lavi. He goes by ‘Manny.’ An Israeli national, currently residing in South Africa. He has contacts in the Philippines, and, it now seems, a second family there. Recently we learned that he had turned traitor. He has been sharing bomb-making expertise—extensive expertise—with our enemies.”
The director wouldn’t be telling her any of this if she didn’t need to know. Nothing formal was being said, but she was being brought in on the op. He had mentioned her “evaluation” to let her know she was partly to blame for whatever the problem was; the information he was now sharing was to inform her she would be responsible for the problem’s resolution.
She looked at Gil. “Why did you use a contractor? Why outsource the operation?”
“Manny is connected,” Gil replied. “We believe he’s a CIA asset. The CIA doesn’t take kindly to ‘friendly’ intelligence services erasing its people.”
“So instead you brought in a contractor who screwed something up?”
Gil’s eyes narrowed slightly, and she smiled at him to let him know he had definitely just received a “Fuck you” for talking down to her. And her response served another purpose: it indicated to the director that, although she knew Rain, she had no interest in downplaying whatever his screwup had been or in otherwise protecting him.
“You told us he would be reliable,” Gil said, and she was gratified by the touch of petulance in his voice.
The director waved a hand like a father dismissing a squabble among children at the dinner table. “It doesn’t matter how we got here. What matters is what we do next.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment, and the director continued. “Rain tried to hit Manny in a restroom in a Manila shopping mall. Manny got away, but Rain killed three other people. A bodyguard.” He paused and looked at her. “And two CIA officers.”
He paused to let it sink in. Delilah said nothing, but thought, Oh my God. She asked, “Can the CIA connect the mess to us?”
“That,” the director said, “is the question.”
“Here’s what we know,” Boaz said. “Rain called in yesterday to brief us. He told us he had followed Manny and his family into a Manila shopping mall. Manny was with a woman and a boy. When the woman and the boy seemed to leave the scene, Rain anticipated that Manny would use the restroom, and moved there ahead of him to wait. Manny came in, but then the boy showed up. When Rain saw the boy, he hesitated.”
“Apparently, Rain won’t harm women or children,” Gil added.
Delilah looked at him. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“It depends on how badly he’s screwed things up.”
Delilah turned back to Boaz. “And then?”
“Then the bodyguard burst in. Rain thinks Manny hit a panic button. Rain disarmed the guard just as the two CIA men arrived. Rain didn’t know who they were, and still doesn’t, so far as we know. But they were armed, too.”
Gil said, “Rain managed to kill everyone but Manny.”
Delilah looked at him. “The boy?”
Gil shrugged as though this was irrelevant. “Not the boy, either.”
She looked at Boaz again. “How good a look did Manny and the boy get at Rain?”
“Rain says he’s not sure.”
Gil added, “That’s bullshit. How could this have gone down without someone seeing his face? Someone got a good look, and Rain knows it. Otherwise he would have just told us he got away clean. Anyway, it’s in his interest to downplay his exposure here. We have to assume if he acknowledges Manny got any kind of a look, it means Manny got a damn good look.”
She couldn’t argue with any of that. She nodded.
“So here’s what’s happening right now,” Gil went on. “Manny is freaked out. He’s sitting down with his CIA handlers. They’re showing him photos of known Asiatic operators. That should be a stack about what, three or four photos high? If they have pictures of Rain, and Manny can ID him, the
CIA is going to be hunting for him. Hunting hard.”
She saw where this was going. A refrain started buzzing through her mind: Shit, shit, shit. She said nothing.
“Manny has lots of enemies,” Gil continued, “but I think we can safely assume that, when the CIA draws up a list, we’ll be at the top. So if they get to Rain, our status will change from ‘prime suspect’ to ‘proven culprit.’ ”
The room was silent for a moment. The director looked at Delilah and sighed. “You understand what’s at stake here?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Not just your career,” he went on. “Not just theirs.” He glanced at Boaz, then Gil, letting the comment sink in, then back to her. “Not just mine. We would only be the first casualties. The government would quickly and rightly sacrifice us to try to contain the damage. But if the damage couldn’t be contained . . . there’s no telling. It could affect billions of dollars in aid from the United States. Not to mention arms deliveries. Access to satellite imagery and other intelligence cooperation. Do you understand? This is not an organization problem. It’s a geopolitical problem. We have to get it under control.”
“I understand,” she said.
He nodded as though satisfied, then said, “Tell me, how well do you know this man?”
She should have seen this coming. Now she understood.
She shrugged. “Our paths crossed in Macau. Some people”—she looked at Gil—“wanted to take him out there because he was after Belghazi and might have killed him before we acquired what we were after. I argued there were better ways to manage him.”
“You were wrong,” Gil said. “It’s true things turned out well, but that was all luck. Rain might have killed Belghazi before we had what we needed.”
“I was managing him,” Delilah said, and immediately realized her mistake in letting Gil goad her.
“You spent time with him, then?” the director asked.
She shrugged again. “I told you, yes. I persuaded him to stand down for a while, for long enough. Then we tracked him to Rio. I traveled there and made the pitch. Boaz and Gil took it from there. This is all in the file.”
“How did you contact him at the time, again?” Gil asked.
Fuck Gil and his games. “Did you not review the file?” she asked, with an innocent smile.
He clenched his jaw and tried to recover. “It was an electronic bulletin board, wasn’t it?”
“Are you asking because you don’t remember? It’s not like you to forget details, Gil. Usually you remember everything.”
His jaw clenched again. She knew he would be hating her for one-upping him in front of the director, especially in this insinuating way, and at the moment the knowledge was deeply satisfying.
“Can you contact him now?” Gil asked, abandoning his losing game.
“I don’t know. I suppose so, if he’s kept the bulletin board and still checks it.”
Gil started to say something, but the director held up a hand. “Delilah. Do you know this man in any way not reflected in the file?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. Although of course she did, but damned if she would answer the question without at least having him endure the discomfort of asking it.
“Did you ever have a . . . personal relationship?”
She paused, then said, “I’m not going to answer that.”
In her peripheral vision, she saw both admiration and sympathy in Boaz’s eyes. In Gil’s she saw surprise that she would doom herself this way, something he would never have had the integrity to do himself. Poor Gil. He didn’t understand that her advantage in this game was that, for her, the stakes were so much lower. Gil was moving up in management. He wanted a career here. She knew that was impossible for her. In just a few years, she would be too old to do what she did, and then they would give her a desk job or a training position and she would be bypassed, ignored, and forgotten. Under the circumstances, what did she have to lose?
The director drummed his fingers on the table, then said, “I’m not asking you for personal reasons. I’m asking you professionally. Because the information will affect the way we proceed in a very serious matter.”
Delilah looked him in the eyes. “I’m still not going to answer. I’m not going to let you cross that line today. If I do, you’ll cross it again tomorrow.”
He looked at her for a long moment, then smiled at her chutzpah and pressed no further. She gave him credit for that. But why would he press? In her refusal, she had already answered his question.
Gil looked confused, then nonplussed. Had she actually just scored points with the director?
“Delilah,” Boaz said. “Do you think . . . Can you get close to Rain?”
“You mean, can I set him up?”
Boaz nodded.
“I’m not sure. I can try.”
The three of them settled slightly in their seats as though a bit of tension had been suddenly drained from their bodies, and in that instant she understood completely the nature of the conversation that had preceded her arrival: Do you think she slept with him? Will she do this? Can we trust her?
“But why do you need me?” she asked. “You’ve met him, presumably you have a means of contact?”
“If we ask for a meeting now,” Boaz said, “he’ll be suspicious. We need something to lower his guard.”
“He might be suspicious with me, too,” she said. “Under the circumstances.”
“We’re counting on you to dissolve his suspicions,” Gil said. “You’re the best at that.” His tone indicated that her abilities, although useful, also were somehow suspect.
She looked at him, but ignored the comment. “How are you going to do it?”
Gil waved as though it would be nothing. “You contact him. Go somewhere with him, a romantic getaway. When the moment is right, you contact me.”
“Who’s the shooter?”
“I am.”
“He knows your face. How are you going to get close?”
“He’ll never see me.”
She almost laughed. “You don’t understand who you’re dealing with.”
“He’s a fuckup. He’s going down.”
She thought of the way Rain had dealt with that guy in the elevator on Macau. He had gone from calmly talking to her to breaking the man’s neck without anything in between.
“If he sees you,” she said, “he’ll know I set him up.”
“Do it yourself, then.”
She didn’t answer.
“He won’t see me,” Gil said. “Anyway, you know how to handle yourself.”
There was a long silence. She was used to making hard decisions quickly and under pressure, and by the time the director spoke, she had already made up her mind.
“You’ll do this?” he asked, looking at her, his expression open, his tone affable.
“When have I ever refused?” she replied.
“Never,” Gil said, and in those two syllables she heard an echo of whore.
She looked at him. When she spoke, her voice was frozen silk.
“Well, there was one time, Gil.”
He flushed, and she smiled at him, twisting the knife.
The director, pretending to ignore what he fully understood, said, “It’s settled, then.”
FIVE
THE DAY AFTER the Manny debacle, I made my way to the Bangkok Baan Khanitha restaurant on Sukhumvit 23, the backup Dox and I had agreed upon in case things went sideways—as indeed they had.
I chose an indirect route to get to the restaurant, as much to indulge an incipient sense of nostalgia as for my usual security reasons. Sukhumvit, I saw, had changed enormously in the decades since the concentrated time I had spent here during the war, yet in its essential aspects it was still the same. There had been no high-rises back then, true, and certainly no glitzy shopping malls, and the traffic, although chaotic, had not yet reached today’s level of biblical-style calamity. But the smell of the place, the vibe, then and now, was all low-level c
ommerce, much of it sexual. In my mind, Sukhumvit has always been about lasts: the last party of the last evening that everyone wants to prolong because tomorrow it’s back to the war; the last chance for nocturnal behavior that will surely be the source of regret in the light of the oncoming day; the last desperate stop for those women whose charms, and therefore their prices, have fallen short even of the standards of nearby Patpong.
I walked along Sukhumvit Road, letting the crowds carry me and flow past me, then carry me along again. My God, the area had grown. I’d been back several times since the war, of course, and had even done a job here once, a Japanese expat, but somehow my frame of reference, which was over three decades out of date, seemed unwilling to oblige the area’s changing topography. There were vendors back then, yes, but not this many. Now they had overgrown the sidewalk and were selling every manner of bric-a-brac: ersatz luggage, knockoff watches, pirated DVDs, tee-shirts proclaiming “Same-Same” and “No Money, No Honey.” Hawkers wheedled and cajoled, competing with the hum of the crowd, the roar of passing bus engines, the distinctive, sine-wave growl of motor scooters and tuk-tuks weaving back and forth through the constipated traffic. I smelled diesel fumes and curry, and thought, Yes, same-same, it all really is, and was surprised at an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss I couldn’t name. Nothing looked the same here, but to me it smelled the same, and the dissonance was confusing.
I walked on. And then, with a burst of mixed pleasure and horror, I came upon an artifact: the Miami Hotel, which was still here at the top of Soi 13. Squalid and moldering from the moment it went up in the late sixties to house U.S. troops on R&R, the hotel now felt like an architectural middle finger extended to the rich, upscale Bangkok that was growing up around it. As I moved past, I caught a glimpse of a grizzled expat looking out from one of its windows onto the street below, his expression that of a man serving a life sentence for a crime he doesn’t understand, and I thought it possible that I had just seen one of the original inhabitants, as stubborn and anachronistic as the hotel itself. I walked. Arabs and Sikhs in turbans smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee under the corrugated eaves of collapsing storefronts. Prostitutes lurked in the vestibules of massage parlors, passersby ignoring their sad eyes and desperate smiles. An amputee, filthy and in rags, rattled a cup at me from the sidewalk where he lay. I gave him some baht and moved on. Half a block later, the vendors’ tables parted momentarily and I saw a sign for the Thermae Bar & Coffee House, the lowest of the low, which had once housed the women who serviced the Miami’s soldiers. I wondered if its patrons still called it, appropriately and inevitably, the Termite. The original building, it seemed, had been torn down, but the Termite had been reborn, demonstrating in its reincarnation that although the body might fade and die, the spirit, for better or worse, is eternal.
