Killing Rain (10 page)

“Of course. And they’re also a potential channel of information.”

“About who those shooters were.”

“Etcetera.”

We ate quietly for a few minutes. Then Dox said, “There’s one thing I want to ask you.”

I raised my eyebrows and looked at him.

“When I got in there, I was surprised Manny was still vertical. I know what you can do up close with your hands. You were alone with him for long enough.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You going to tell me what happened?” he asked.

I looked away. “I don’t know, exactly.”

“Are you leveling with me, partner?” I heard him say.

I paused, then said, “I don’t know. He came in, his back was to me, I moved out of the stall. Then you told me the boy was coming. I went to move back into the stall before the boy came in, but I must have made a sound, because Manny turned. I looked in his eyes . . .”

“Whoa, why’d you look in his eyes, man?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Shoot, man, when I look through the scope, I never look in the eyes. Or if I do, I just look at one of them, and then all I see is a bull’s-eye, you know what I mean? I never see a man. Only a target.” He looked at me, then added, “If you see a man, you might . . . hesitate.”

I thought of several things to say, but none of them came out.

He took a sip of iced coffee and looked upward as though contemplating something. Then he said, “Well, each of us has
only so much courage in the well. You draw from it too many times, eventually you come up dry. I’ve seen it before. I guess one day it’ll happen to me, too.” He paused, then smiled and added, “Although probably not.”

“That’s not what happened,” I said.

“Then what?”

I looked at the wall, images flickering against it as though it were a screen. “It was something about the boy. Seeing him with his family . . . I don’t know.”

There was a pause. He said, “Sounds like you spent a little too much time watching them this week, man.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Well, that happens. It can make it hard, it’s true.”

I felt like an idiot. What was wrong with me? Why had I frozen? Why couldn’t I explain to a man I’d fought alongside, a man I trusted?

Trust,
I thought. The word felt slippery in my mind, dangerous.

“That’s not it,” I said. “Or, it’s not the only thing.”

“What else?”

I shook my head and exhaled hard. “I haven’t had a partner in a long time.”

“Hang on now, this is my fault?”

I shook my head again. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just . . . I didn’t trust you before, when you first came for me in Rio.”

“Yeah, I got that feeling.”

“But then, after what you did at Kwai Chung . . . I saw that I’d been wrong. That’s hard for me.”

“Guess I should’ve just shot you and taken the money for myself. At least that way you’d have been right not to trust me.”

“Did you think about it?”

He laughed. “Jesus, man, you almost sound hopeful.”

“Did you?”

He shook his head. “Not even for a minute.”

“Goddamnit. I knew it.”

“You want an apology?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“You don’t owe me anything. Like I said at the time, I know you’d have done the same for me. Wait, don’t respond to that, it’ll spoil my reverie.”

The waiter came by and cleared away our plates. We ordered mango and sticky rice for dessert. I watched the man leave.

There was something I wanted to ask Dox, something I’d been thinking about, on various levels, for a long time, and particularly after Manila. It wasn’t something I’d ever said out loud before, and I found myself reluctant to bring it up. Partly because doing so might make it feel more real; partly because it would probably all seem so silly to Dox. But I’d told him a lot already. I wanted to finish it.

“I’ve got a question for you, too,” I said, looking at him.

He pushed his chair away, leaned back, and laced his fingers together across his belly. “Sure.”

“You ever . . . you ever bothered by what we do?”

He smiled. “Only when I’m not paid promptly.”

“I’m serious.”

He shrugged. “Not usually, no.”

“You don’t ever feel like . . .” I chuckled. “You know, like God is watching?”

“Oh, sure he’s watching. He just doesn’t care.”

“You think?”

He shrugged again. “I figure he’s the one who made the rules. I’m just playing by ’em. If he doesn’t like the way things have turned out down here on planet Earth, he ought to speak his mind. I would if I were him.”

“Maybe he is speaking his mind, and no one’s listening.”

“He ought to speak a little more clearly, then.” He looked up and added, “If you don’t mind my saying so.”

I studied my hands for a moment. “It bothered me, thinking about that boy losing his father.”

“ ’Course it did. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be the good man you are. That’s why it’s best not to get too close to the target. ‘If it inhabits your mind, it can inhibit your trigger finger,’ as one of my instructors once told me.”

“Yeah, that’s the truth.”

“The thing is, you can’t make the decisions and also carry them out, you know what I mean? The judge and the executioner, they’re different roles. The judge does what he does, and then the executioner carries things out. That’s the way it is. We’re just doing what we’re supposed to.”

“That’s an interesting way to look at it,” I said, feeling uneasy.

“It’s the only way. I didn’t know you were such a philosopher, partner. In fact, I think this is the most I’ve ever heard you talk.”

“Sorry.”

“No need to apologize. But I do think that pondering too deeply might not be highly recommended for men such as ourselves. We might start thinking we’re the judges or something, and where would we be then?”

The waiter brought the mango and sticky rice. It was good, but my mind was elsewhere.

Dox asked, “Well, what’s the next step? With Manny, I mean.”

I considered. “We can’t get close to him again the way we did. He got too good a look at me, for one thing, and I think we can expect him to be taking extra precautions, for another.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing.”

“We need a new variable, something to shake things up. And the only one I see coming our way is information from Boaz and Gil. If they can find out the affiliations of the two guys we took out in that restroom, we might have something to go on. Otherwise I think the op is dead.”

“So nothing to do but wait and see what the Israelites can offer.”

“That’s right.”

He leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Well, in my not inconsiderable experience, there’s nowhere in the world better to wait around than here in Bangkok.”

I sighed, feeling like a parent about to remonstrate with a teenager. “We still have work to do. You’re not going to be useful drained of all bodily fluids and nursing a binge hangover.”

He laughed. “Yes, Mom.”

“Look, just be available in case I get a call and we need to move quickly.”

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.”

J
IM 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.”