by Barry Eisler
“Listen,” I said over the wind that was blowing across the deck. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t care. My business was with Manny, and that business is done. As far as I’m concerned, you’re free to leave. But not if you harm the lady. Then I have to kill you, understand?”
He looked at me, his eyes desperate, but I could tell he was thinking. He couldn’t shoot Delilah. If he did, in the time it took him to bring the gun around to me I would turn him into hamburger.
“Let’s think this through,” I said. “Let’s find a way to all walk away from here. Why don’t you lower your gun a little. And then I’ll lower mine a little. And then we’ll go from there.”
He started to relax, just slightly. I thought, Okay.
“No!” Delilah shouted. “Shoot him!”
Goddamnit, I would if you would just work with me. . . .
Al-Jib’s grip around her neck tightened. “Drop the gun!” he screamed again.
Delilah was staring at me, her eyes full of rage. “Shoot him!” she rasped. “Goddamn you, shoot him!”
He was choking her, intentionally or unintentionally, I didn’t know. I realized I was losing control of the situation. He was so strung out he might pull the trigger without even meaning to. Or he might shoot just to shut her up. Or he might otherwise miscalculate.
“Drop the fucking gun!” he screamed again. “Or I swear . . .”
In one smooth motion, Delilah shrugged her head downward and slapped the gun up with her right hand. It discharged into the ceiling. I was so juiced with adrenaline it sounded like not more than a firecracker.
Al-Jib started to bring the gun back down. Delilah caught it in both hands. It discharged again.
I moved in. Delilah was between us, in front of his torso, and they were moving. I was still too far to risk the shot.
He let go of her neck and used both hands to try to wrestle the gun away from her. It didn’t work. He looked up, saw me heading toward him, and realized he had lost.
He let go of the gun and started to turn to run. But the muzzle velocity of a bullet from a .38 is eight hundred and fifty feet per second. Since I was now less than twenty feet from him, the round I fired reached him in about one-fortieth of a second, give or take. Which turned out to be slightly faster than he could move out of the way. The bullet caught him in the face. He spun around from the impact and stumbled back toward the railing. I followed him, focusing on his torso, ready to finish him off.
I heard two more shots from alongside me. They caught Al-Jib in the side. In my peripheral vision I saw Delilah walk past me, holding the Kimber in a two-handed grip, as implacable as the angel of death.
Al-Jib tried to straighten. Delilah kept moving in. She shot him twice in the head. His hands flew up and he went over the railing, into the dark water below.
For a long second, I looked at her. I was still holding the gun in a combat grip.
She stood panting for a moment, returning my look, but not in a focused way. She lowered the Kimber.
I hesitated for a moment, grappling with the knowledge that she had called Gil. Then something in her eyes, her posture, made the decision for me. I lowered the .38 and stuck it in my waistband.
I looked toward the bow. The lights of Tsim Sha Tsui were less than a minute away.
A few wordless seconds passed. Then Delilah handed me the Kimber. “Here,” she said. “I’ve got no place to conceal this, like you said. And we might need it.”
I stuck the second gun in my waistband and looked at her, trying to find words.
She said, “I had to. For you, too.”
“What do you mean, for me?”
“One day, Al-Jib and his type will detonate a nuclear weapon inside a city. A half-million people are going to die. Innocent people—families, children, babies. When that happens, it won’t be because I could have stopped it but didn’t. And you couldn’t bear that burden any more than I could. I won’t let you.”
I realized there was a lot of shouting and commotion around the side of the boat where the passengers would be exiting any minute. While we were engaging Al-Jib, I’d been too focused to notice.
Delilah and I walked forward, into the crowd. The people closest to us recognized that we had been involved in what just happened, and gave us wide berth. The farther forward we moved into the crowd, though, the less we encountered that kind of courtesy. The people closer to the front hadn’t seen what happened. They didn’t know who we were and they didn’t care. They had heard shooting and a commotion, and just wanted to get the hell off the ferry as soon as it docked. We reached a point where the crowd was so dense that we were lost in it, just two more scared passengers. We couldn’t move farther forward. We simply had to wait, along with everyone else.
A few seconds later, we were docking. The moment the boat was in position, people started surging off it. There was a lot of shouting in Chinese and I wasn’t sure what was being said. I did know that we wanted to get out of there before anyone started pointing at us.
We headed out of the pier building, past the clock tower and the crowds shopping in the area. We cut through the underpass below Salisbury Road, then headed east to the impossibly dense and crowded shopping districts around Nathan. An Asian man and a gorgeous blonde—we would be easy to pick up from a description of what had happened on the ferry, and at the China Club just before that. But I didn’t want us to split up yet. I wanted to finish this.
We reached the southeast corner of Kowloon Park and went inside. The park, set on a sprawling knoll above the streets below, was dark and, at this hour, reasonably deserted. We walked past the skeletal aviary and the silhouetted Chinese-style gardens to the Sculpture Walk, where we sat on the steps of a small amphitheater beside one of the Walk’s silent statues. I took out the prepaid cell phone, turned it on, and called Dox on the throwaway he was carrying.
He picked up immediately. “Hey, partner, I hope that’s you.”
I couldn’t help smiling at the sound of his voice. “It’s me. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m here at the bug-out point. Where are you?”
“Kowloon.”
“Pardon me for asking, but isn’t that the wrong direction?”
“Unfortunately. Delilah and I chased Al-Jib onto the Star Ferry.”
“How’d that turn out?”
“With Al-Jib dead.”
“Well, that’s a happy outcome. Another victory for the good guys, and a blow to the forces of evil. What about Delilah?”
“She’s fine. She’s right here with me.”
“Ah-ha, so that’s why you hightailed it to Kowloon. You sure we have time for that sort of thing right now?”
“I’m sure we don’t. What happened with Hilger and Gil?”
“If you’re talking about the guy who was shooting at Hilger, he’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
“Hilger shot him, and when Delilah went to help, old Ali just about fucking flew over them and headed down the stairs. After that, Gil was doing a damn fine job of returning Hilger’s fire upside down and on his back from the stairs, but eventually Hilger put another round in him and then imitated Ali’s levitation trick. He paused just long enough to turn and shoot the sumbitch point-blank in the head.”
“Goddamn, I wish we’d managed to get you a gun.”
“Yeah, I would have liked to shoot him, and the opportunity was there. I did manage to sling a chair at him from the landing as he made his getaway, at least. It knocked him down, but he kept going after that.”
“You and the chairs,” I said. “You ought to market it. ‘ Chair-fung-do.’ ”
He laughed. “Yeah, the odd piece of furniture can come in handy from time to time, I’ve discovered. Anyway, I couldn’t get to Hilger in time after he was down, seeing as he was armed and dangerous and I was only dangerous. These jobs can be awkward without a proper rifle at hand. I don’t know how you do it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Hilger’s known in the club. Hell,
he had reservations there tonight. The police are going to pick him up for sure. And then we’ll see if we were right about him running his own operation.”
“Think the powers that be will disown him?”
I paused and considered. “I’m getting the feeling he has . . . enemies. People who might like to see that happen, yeah.”
“What gives you that feeling?”
“I’m not sure. I want to check something out, and then I’ll let you know.”
“All right. Finish your quickie, and let’s meet at the airport. The old City of Life just doesn’t feel as welcoming now as it did this morning.”
“Give me an hour.”
“Sure, take as much time as you need. I don’t see any reason to hurry. It’s not like half the Hong Kong police force would be looking for someone of your description or anything like that.”
“All right,” I said, “I see your point.” I told him where he could retrieve the bug-out kit I’d put in place. He said he would grab it and be on the way.
I clicked off and looked at Delilah.
“Gil’s dead,” I said. “Dox saw Hilger shoot him in the head, point-blank.”
She nodded, her jaw set, then said, “What else?”
I briefed her on the rest of what Dox had told me.
“I’m going to meet him at the airport now,” I said. “You coming?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. I don’t have my passport.”
I didn’t say anything. I was still pissed that she had called Gil. I was trying to let it go.
“Anyway,” she said, “I need to brief my people on what just happened here. There are going to be a lot of questions.”
“You going to be able to weather it?”
“I’m not sure. Al-Jib dead will certainly help. That is a major victory, major. If he’d gotten away, I don’t know what would have happened.”
She was talking unusually fast. I noticed that her hands were trembling.
“You okay?” I asked, looking at her.
She nodded. I saw her eyes were filling up.
“You never . . .” I started to say. I paused, then went on. “That was your first time, wasn’t it.”
She nodded again and her tears spilled over. She started to shake.
My anger dissipated. I put my arm around her and pulled her close. “You did the right thing,” I said. “Just like they trained you. You’ll be okay.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I should be happy, I should be exulting that he’s dead. I mean, I was exulting, right after. But now . . .”
I kissed the top of her head. “Your mind knows what’s what. It’ll just take a little while for your gut to catch up. You’ll see.”
She wiped her face and looked at me. “I was so afraid he was going to get away. I wanted you to shoot him. When he had that gun to my head, I thought I was going to die and all I cared about was that you shoot him first, so I would know.”
I nodded. “When you’re certain you’re going to die, and you don’t, it stays with you for a long time after. Sometime I’ll have to tell you about what happened to me outside of Kwai Chung last year.”
“You never did tell me that whole story.”
“Well, are you going to give me the chance?”
She laughed a little and touched my cheek. “Let’s meet somewhere. I don’t want it to end like this. I want . . . I want that to look forward to.”
I shrugged. “I’ve got your number. And we’ve got the bulletin board.”
She smiled. “We’ll always have the bulletin board.”
I laughed. “Well, it’s not Paris, but we’ll figure something out.”
Her hand slipped around to the back of my neck and caressed me there, absently, gently. It felt good.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she said. “I wanted to say that to you in Phuket, but I didn’t. I wanted to tell you . . . how much it means to me.”
How someone could smell so good after chasing a terrorist a quarter mile, almost dying in his grasp, and then killing him, was a mystery I knew I would always savor.
“Sounds like trusting you in Phuket wasn’t the brightest move I’ve ever made,” I said.
She looked at me, her eyes fierce. “Yes, it was. And as for calling Gil tonight . . .”
I shook my head. “I understand why you did it.”
“I had to. I told him it was Al-Jib, not you, that you were helping us. But he didn’t believe me about you. And when I saw him take a shot at you . . .”
I realized I was touching her leg. I started to say, “I know, I heard you,” but she pulled me in and kissed me.
I stopped talking. The kiss went from zero to sixty in about two nanoseconds. Where we were sitting, it was very dark.
What the hell, it wasn’t like Dox had never kept me waiting.
I TOOK THE Airport Express train from Kowloon station and called Dox when I arrived. He was already there. We met on the departures level, in front of United Airlines. He was still in his suit, an attaché in each hand.
He grinned as I walked up to him. “I think this one’s yours,” he said, handing it to me. “Saw it next to a dumpster in front of the Bank of China building as I exited the premises. Unless you meant to throw it away . . .”
“No, I was just blowing the ballast to chase after Al-Jib. I’m glad to have it back. Traveling without luggage can be conspicuous.”
“And we all know how much you hate to be conspicuous,” he said, staring at my neck.
I said, “What?”
His grin achieved galactic proportions. “Partner, I believe that’s lipstick on your collar. You’ve been a bad boy. And here we are, in the middle of an operation and everything. Next thing I know, you’ll be leaving your cell phone on and trying to hump a katoey into submission and committing similar such indiscretions. If you keep this up, people are going to start suspecting you’re human, and the unpleasant burden of explaining otherwise will fall entirely to me.”
My hand wandered up to my collar. “I . . . I just . . .”
“You don’t have to explain. Combat will do that to a man, I know. Bet you didn’t even need the Viagra this time, either.”
“No, I just thought of Tiara.”
He laughed. “That’s good, you got me there, man! Damn, you’re always going to have that over me. Hey, you think the Israelites will pay us, after all this?”
“I’d say they’d better. And then some.”
“I’m sure Delilah will strenuously advocate our cause. She’s a nice lady.”
“I don’t know what her position is going to be now. They’re going to ask her a lot of questions.”
“Well, if things don’t work out for her with her people, as far as I’m concerned she’s always welcome to join our happy band of freelancers. Like I said, we’re the wave of the future. The nation-states of the world are just going to outsource all their defense needs so they can watch more television, you’ll see.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think Delilah would be comfortable as a freelancer. It’s not who she is.”
“Well, hopefully she won’t ever have to face that decision. It ain’t a happy moment in a soldier’s life, as you know.”
“No, it’s not,” I said.
“Well? Where to, from here?”
“I’ve got some business in Tokyo. On the way over here, I made a reservation on an Asiana flight that goes through Seoul. It leaves at . . .” I looked at my watch. “Oh-dark-thirty. Two hours.”
“What about Rio? You still hanging your hat there?”
“Mostly. I’ll probably head back after Tokyo.”
“Maybe I’ll come visit you there. Them Brazilian girls . . . man, don’t even get me started.”
“I try not to.”
He laughed.
“Yeah, come on down,” I said. “It would be good to see you. We can go to another adult bar.”
He laughed again. “I’d like that. I really would.”
W
e were quiet for a moment. I said, “What about you? Where are you heading?”
“Gonna go visit my folks in the States, I think. It’s been a while and I miss them.”
I nodded, trying to imagine it. I lost my parents so many years earlier that the simple concept of visiting the folks, of visiting anyone, is almost alien. But maybe I could find a way.
I said, “They’ve got a good son.”
He beamed. “They do. And I’m lucky to have them, too.” He glanced at his watch. “Got a Cathay Pacific flight that leaves for L.A. at twenty-three thirty-five. So I’d better beat feet.”
I held out my hand.
He looked at me and said, “Son, just because I was recently nearly inducted as a new member of the Accidental Katoey Love Association doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to show your feelings for me.”
Oh God, I thought. But then there I was, hugging the big bastard in the middle of the airport.
TWENTY-TWO
I SLEPT like a dead man on the trip to Seoul. There was a five-hour layover, then a short flight to Tokyo.
I wondered where I should stay. When I was living in the city, I maintained a relationship with several hotels that held a suitcase for me while I was “out of town,” just in case. But those arrangements were out of date now, and I couldn’t be sure the hotels in question would still have my gear. And even if they did, it was possible the relationship had been exposed in the interim. I decided it would be safer to do something new.
I arrived at Narita airport at a little after noon. I took the JR Express train to Tokyo station, then walked unburdened by anything other than my attaché to the Four Seasons in Marunouchi. I asked if they had any rooms available. Only a suite, they told me. I told them a suite would be fine.
For an excessive price in the lobby concession store, I bought a pair of khaki pants and a navy merino wool sweater. In the room, I showered and shaved with the razor and other amenities the hotel had thought to provide. I called housekeeping and told them I would like to avail myself of their one-hour pressing services. My suit looked like I’d been living in it.
I walked into Ginza to buy clean underwear, a fresh shirt, and a few other such necessities for the fugitive on the move. The weather was cold and crisp—my favorite in Tokyo—and the wind had a clean winter bite to it. Being back felt good. It even felt oddly right.
