by Barry Eisler
He nodded, then said, “Tell you what. Best way for me to be available is for us to stick together. Why don’t you come out with me tonight?”
“No, I think . . .”
“C’mon, man, when was the last time you got yourself properly laid? Or even laid at all.”
I shook my head. “A night out with the prostitutes isn’t really my thing.”
“Who said anything about prostitutes? The local girls will be throwing themselves at you when they see you with a handsome stranger like me. And by the way, I think you’re avoiding my question.”
I thought of Delilah, but said nothing.
“C’mon, man, we can get you some of that black market Viagra.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hey, with a double dose, you’ll do fine. Plus, you’ve still got a quart of my blood sloshing around in you. That ought to be a help.”
He was reminding me of the transfusion he’d given me after I’d nearly bled out at Kwai Chung.
“I mean I don’t think I’m in the mood for One Night in Bangkok,” I said.
“What, are you worried you might have fun? Tell you what, if I see you laugh and have a good time, I promise not to tell anyone. I know you’ve got your reputation to protect.”
I thought about it. Maybe I would take a long walk through some of the city’s less-traveled boulevards. I could pass by some of the places where I had once caroused with other teenagers hardened by war, who were yet, in retrospect, still astonishingly innocent, and observe these relics to see how my memories animated or distorted them as they might exist in Bangkok today. But as I considered these possibilities, I was surprised to find I didn’t really want to be alone.
“All right!” Dox said, taking my hesitation as a yes. “We can get dinner, hit a few bars, talk to the ladies, who knows. Hey, you like jazz, right? I know a new place on Silom that’ll be right up your alley. I tend to favor the discos myself, but I know you’re a man of sophisticated tastes and I’m willing to indulge you.”
I nodded in capitulation. “All right.”
The grin got wider. “You made the right decision, Mr. Rain, and I promise you won’t regret it. You checked into the hotel yet?”
We were staying at the Sukhothai, which offered the right combination of high class and low visibility. Something like the Oriental had plenty of the first but none of the second; innumerable Bangkok hotels would have offered the opposite combination. But the Sukhothai had been built for both beauty and discretion. The property, with its acres of flower gardens and lotus ponds; its long, symmetrical lines and soft lighting; and its traditional accents of Thai architecture and art was certainly a triumph of form. But from my perspective, the hotel was also highly functional: its small, intimate lobby was utterly unlike the grand, bustling thoroughfares that greeted visitors at, say, the local Four Seasons, which was well designed for people who wanted to see and be seen, but uncomfortable for those who favored invisibility instead.
“I got an early check-in this morning,” I told him. “You?”
“The same. Nice place, too. I like those big bathtubs. You can get three people in one of them, did you know that? With all those mirrors, you can have a lot of fun. This one time . . .”
“Why don’t we meet in the lobby, then?” I said.
He grinned at the interruption. “All right. Twenty-hundred?
“You need to rest up first?”
“No, son, I need to go out and buy you that double dose of Viagra.”
Trying to get the better of Dox was a losing proposition. I signaled the waiter for the check and said, “Eight o’clock, then.”
SIX
JIM HILGER never got upset. It wasn’t that he didn’t show agitation; he simply didn’t experience it. The crazier things became around him, the calmer he felt at his center. The quality had made him one of the best combat shooters in the Third Special Forces during the first Gulf War. When someone was firing at him, it felt almost as though his personality had floated out of his body, leaving a machine to handle things in its place. He knew that, had he lived in the age of dueling, he would have been fucked with by nobody.
He knew, too, that his imperturbability was a useful leadership skill. In combat, when his men saw how calm and deadly he was, they became calm and deadly, too. And now, in his new role, he had found that his flatlined demeanor gave him power over the people he managed. The more upset they became in a crisis, the more his temperature dropped, cooling the people around him in the process. It was as though people assumed he must know something they didn’t; otherwise, he would be coming unglued, too. In fact, he doubted that he really knew more than others. It was just that he had come to rely on his own coolness, to believe that his coolness was the one thing he could count on to get him through, as it always had before. He didn’t believe in anything more than that.
When Manny had called him the day before, nearly hysterical with rage, Hilger’s calmness had been put to the test. “Just tell me what happened,” Hilger had repeated while Manny had fulminated and threatened. It took a little while, but eventually he had brought Manny around. And Jesus, a little hysteria almost seemed to be in order. Someone had tried to hit Manny in Manila, and Calver and Gibbons, two of Hilger’s best men, men from his Gulf War unit, had been killed in the process. A critical first meeting with an asset, which Hilger had been trying to set up with Manny’s help for over two years, and which Calver and Gibbons had gone to Manila to take care of, had been aborted. The whole thing was a mess.
As Manny had hyperventilated the news to him, Hilger automatically shifted into problem-solving mode.
“Where is VBM?” he asked, using the cryptonym they had established for the new asset.
“I don’t know,” Manny told him. “I don’t have an immediate way of contacting him. He probably went to the meeting site, and when we didn’t show up, he left.”
Shit. Not quite the first impression Hilger had been hoping for.
“Can you reestablish contact?” he asked. “Set up another meeting?”
That produced a minor explosion. “Another meeting? Someone just tried to kill me! In front of my family!”
Hilger realized he wasn’t demonstrating the proper priorities. All right, one thing at a time.
“Look, there’s not much we can do over the phone,” he told Manny. “We need to meet. You’ll give me every detail. And then we’ll figure out what to do.”
“But how do I know I can trust you,” Manny had whined. “How do I know you weren’t behind this?”
“Those were my people who were killed,” Hilger told him. “I can’t give you better proof than that.”
Manny wasn’t being rational. He said, “Maybe it was a trick, maybe it was a trick.”
Hilger sighed. He said,“Let’s work together and we can solve this problem the way it needs to be solved.”
There was a long pause. Hilger’s heart rate was slow and steady.
Manny said, “All right, all right.”
“Good. Where do you want to meet?” Giving Manny the choice would help ease his ridiculous suspicions.
“Not in Manila. I can come to . . .” He paused, and Hilger knew he had been about to say Hong Kong and then had thought better of it. Hong Kong was Hilger’s home base, where he lived his financial-adviser cover. Manny didn’t want to offer him any advantages just now, and, probably because he felt spiteful, was glad to deny him any convenience, as well.
“Jakarta,” Manny said. “I can come to Jakarta.”
Hilger didn’t want to fly to Jakarta. Manny was being a pain in the ass.
“Sure. But I’ve got a few things here I need to wrap up first—it’ll probably take a few days. Are you sure you can’t make it to Hong Kong?”
There was a long silence. Hilger said, “Look, we can meet anywhere you want, but Hong Kong will be faster, and I’d like to get started on this right away. Anywhere in Hong Kong, fair enough?”
That closed it. The next day, they were
sitting in a coffee shop off Nathan Road in Kowloon, just a fifteen-minute cab ride from Hilger’s office through the Cross-Harbor Tunnel. There weren’t quite as many white faces in Kowloon as there were in Central, where Hilger worked, but there were enough so that neither of them would stick out, and there was a lower chance that Hilger might run into someone he knew. Not that anyone would recognize Manny—it wasn’t as though the man’s face appeared on post office walls, although probably it should—but it was better to be safe. Hilger had taken the usual precautions to ensure that he hadn’t been followed, and hoped that Manny had been equally thorough. He had indulged Manny his mandatory hysteria. When he felt he had been nodding sympathetically for long enough, he began his debriefing.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” Hilger commanded, and he knew that his calm would now be reassuring. “Not just that day, but every day, from the moment you arrived in Manila.”
Manny complied. When he was finished, Hilger began to drill into the details.
“You say there were two of them.”
“I think so, yes. Someone came in after the bodyguard.”
“But you didn’t see his face.”
“Not well. He was big. I think Caucasian. I’m not sure.”
Hilger considered. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you hadn’t seen him, I could have told you he was there. The first guy, the Asian, you say he was already in the bathroom, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“He’d been following you for a while before he decided to anticipate you in the bathroom. But he wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t have backup continuing to watch you. Otherwise, if he’d been wrong about you coming to the bathroom, he would have lost you.”
Manny nodded and said, “Yes, that makes sense.”
“You think you could recognize the Asian?”
Manny nodded. “If I saw him again, yes. I got a good look at his face. Can you find him? And the other one?”
Hilger thought for a moment. He said, “I have some photos I’ll show you before you leave. We’ll see if the men I have in mind are the ones you saw.”
“Then you can find them.”
Hilger knew that if he was right about the men in question, identifying them would be a trivial exercise compared with actually finding them. Still, he said, “I think so.”
Manny leaned forward. “You better. And when you find them, you make them suffer first. They were following me with my family, they might have harmed my son!”
Hilger nodded to show that Manny could count on him. He said, “And VBM? You can contact him, set up another meeting?” Letting Manny know that there was something of a quid pro quo here.
Manny shrugged. “I’ve already left him a message. But he’s not an easy man to reach. And he might be spooked when he hears about what happened in Manila.”
Hilger doubted VBM would spook that easily. Men like him tended to be tougher than that. But no sense contradicting Manny’s assessment.
“If he’s spooked, he’s spooked,” he said. “But if you told him about what my people can do for him, I think he’ll still want the meeting.”
“I told him.”
“Good. Keep trying to contact him. When you do, tell him that the people behind the problem in Manila have been taken care of. Tell him . . .”
“I’ll tell him that when it’s true.”
“By the time you contact him, it will be true,” Hilger said, his voice as even as his gaze.
Manny nodded, and Hilger went on.
“Tell him I’ll come to the meeting myself. That we can do it anywhere he likes. And give him my cell phone number. He should feel free to contact me directly.”
Manny nodded again and said, “All right.”
Hilger detected a slight churlishness in the set of Manny’s mouth, no doubt precipitated by Hilger’s willingness to discuss matters not directly related to Manny’s recent difficulties. Partly to continue the debriefing, partly to assuage the man, Hilger asked, “Who do you think might have been behind this?”
Manny leaned back and shrugged. “How should I know? It could have been anyone.”
“ ‘Anyone’ doesn’t help me narrow it down.”
“Who do you think?”
“Manny, I have my own ideas, but I doubt anyone is in a better position to say than you are. Are you holding something back from me? That’s going to make my job harder.”
Manny shook his head. “I’m not holding anything back. I just don’t know. It could have been the Mossad, I suppose. They might not like my choice of friends, the fucking hypocrites.”
Hilger had already thought of the Israelis. They were at the top of his short list. “Who else?” he asked.
Manny looked at him. “The CIA, of course.”
Hilger nodded. “My contacts there are already looking into that. Any others? Maybe BIN?”
“BIN?”
“The Badan. Indonesian intelligence. They’ve had a lot of problems—Bali, the Jakarta Marriott, the Australian embassy . . .”
“BIN, yes. Maybe. Maybe.”
Hilger realized that Manny wasn’t going to be helpful here. He was the kind of man who was uncomfortable acknowledging that he had real enemies—which, given his activities, was almost funny. It seemed that this was the first time Manny had come face-to-face with the reality that someone really, truly, wanted him dead and was actively trying to make it so. It would take Manny a while to adjust to the reality of that. In the meantime, Hilger would just have to investigate on his own. Well, he was used to doing things alone. Sometimes it was the only way to get the job done.
Hilger decided to return to the previous line of questioning, on which Manny was more useful. “You say the Asian saw you and seemed to freeze,” he said. “Could it have been your son that he saw?”
Manny scowled. “I think it was me.”
Hilger wondered about Manny’s recollection. He didn’t expect it to be particularly accurate in any event; he knew that memories of traumatic incidents rarely are. Also, Manny probably wanted to believe that the men who had come after him were vicious, subhuman killers. This would make Manny feel virtuous by comparison. That one of these men might have hesitated at the sight of a child wouldn’t fit with this view, would detract from the accompanying sense of comparative righteousness, and would likely be rejected. The mind of a man like Manny had so many ways of unconsciously pleasuring itself. You had to be careful.
“Still,” Hilger said, “I find it odd that the man seemed to hesitate at all, regardless of the reasons. Hesitation tends to be an affliction of the inexperienced.”
Manny scowled. “Maybe these men were inexperienced.”
“Inexperienced men wouldn’t have been able to drop your bodyguard and my people with him. They were all dispatched with tight shots, headshots. Take my word for it, the shooters were not inexperienced.”
“Then why? Why did he hesitate?”
Hilger shook his head. “I don’t know yet.”
“My son is traumatized,” Manny said. “He and his mother have gone to stay with her relatives in the provinces.”
“I can arrange for extra protection.”
“They’re okay where they are. But I need a new bodyguard.”
This was the closest thing Hilger had heard to an expression of sorrow about one of the men who had given his life in the course of saving Manny’s. Me, me, me, Hilger thought. It wasn’t just Manny. It was the state of the fucking world.
“Otherwise,” Manny went on, “I can’t continue to help you.”
Hilger sighed. Manny was always making poorly timed, even unnecessary, threats.
“I’ve already taken care of it,” Hilger said.
“And the men who tried to kill me?”
“My people will find them.”
Manny clenched his jaw and said, “Find them soon. You’re not my only friend, you know.”
Another silly threat. Hilger had seen it coming. He said, “Manny, I know you have many friends. Has any o
f them been as reliable as I have?”
Manny was silent for a moment, then burst out, “You told me that your friendship would protect me! That something like this would never happen!”
Hilger looked at him. For the first time in the conversation, he let some emotion creep into his voice. Part of it was for effect. But not all of it.
“Two of my best men just died protecting you,” he said. “And a bodyguard who I set you up with.”
Manny didn’t answer. Hilger found his silence characteristically petulant. Three men had just died for him, and he couldn’t even say, All right, that’s a fair point.
“If you go to other people,” Hilger went on, “it complicates my job. Give me some time to solve the problem before you do something to complicate it, all right?”
“I have other friends,” Manny said again.
Hilger sighed. Time for a reality injection.
“Manny, the people you’re talking about aren’t your friends. They’re people you know, who have interests. If those people decide that their interests are out of alignment with yours, you’ll find that they become decidedly unfriendly. How will I protect you then?”
Manny looked at him, resenting him for not being more fearful of the threat, and for making a veiled one of his own.
“Make them suffer,” he said again, demanding something to save face.
Hilger nodded. More because he was thinking of his men than out of any particular desire to appease Manny, he said, “I will.”
SEVEN
THERE WERE A FEW HOURS to kill before I met Dox for our evening out, so I took a cab to nearby Silom to look for an Internet café.
I rarely take down an electronic bulletin board once I’ve established it. Clients need a way to reach me, and maintaining the bulletin boards provides it. But when business necessity doesn’t justify the continued maintenance, pleasure, in the form of nagging hope, provides the necessary motivation instead. If I’d ever established a board with Midori, who had loved me, then shunned me after learning that I had killed her father, I would probably check it all the time. In lieu of a board, I commune with my hopes for Midori by listening to her CDs, four of them now, each deeper, more soulful, more daring than the last; by imagining enthusiasts applauding her piano in the dark jazz joints of lower Manhattan, for which she had left Tokyo; by whispering her name every night like a sad incantation that always summons, along with certain qualities of her spirit, the continued pain of her absence.
