Killing Rain (2 page)

Five minutes later there was a knock on my door. I padded quietly over and flipped up the small piece of cardboard I had taped over the peephole—no sense blocking the light from behind with my approach and alerting a visitor to my presence—and looked through. It was Dox. I opened the door. He came inside wearing his indefatigable grin.

“You’re smiling like that, you better have good news,” I said, closing the door behind him.

The grin broadened and he nodded. “That, and I’m just happy to see you, partner, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

I gave him a nod in return, knowing that anything more would encourage him. I couldn’t pretend to fully understand Dox. In many ways he was a contradiction, a conundrum. He was a talker, for one thing—not a breed I’ve ever been particularly comfortable around—and a loud one at that. And yet every other sniper I’ve known, and I’ve known more than a few, has been reserved, even taciturn. Every environment has a certain flow to it, a rhythm, a connectivity, and snipers instinctively and habitually enter into that flow without disturbing it. But Dox liked to stir things up—in fact, his nom de guerre was short for “unorthodox,” an accolade awarded by consensus in Afghanistan, where the Reagan-era CIA had sent men like us to arm and train the Mujahedeen against the invading Soviets. His constant boisterous clowning there had put me off at first, and I’d initially figured him for nothing but a braggart. But when I’d seen his effectiveness and coolness under fire, I knew I’d been wrong. When he settled behind the scope of his rifle, there was an eerie transformation, and the good ol’ boy persona would fade away, leaving in its shadow one of the most focused, deadly
men I’ve ever met. I didn’t understand the opposing forces that combined to create his character, and I knew I would never have trusted him but for what he’d done at Kwai Chung. Of course, that single act couldn’t eradicate my lifelong tendency to doubt, but it seemed in a way to have eclipsed it, or at least to have created an uncomfortable exception.

We walked into the room. I sat down at the small desk and flipped open the Mac PowerBook I’d brought along for the festivities. It came out of sleep mode and I typed in the password. Dox handed me the camera.

“You sure you got a shot of the page with Manny’s name on it?” I asked.

He gave me a theatrical sigh. “There you go, hurting my feelings again.”

“Does that mean you got it?”

He sighed again. “Didn’t I tell you I’d get it?”

I attached the camera to the laptop. I hit the “sync” key, then glanced at him and said, “Let’s see if I have to apologize for my outrageous lack of faith in your infallibility.”

“Don’t worry, partner, I’ll be gracious about it. I hate to see a grown man grovel.”

It took just a few seconds for the images to download. The first of them was an alphabetical listing of hotel guests, A through F. I closed the image and opened the next one. G through M. Including one Randolph Hartman, Room 914. Bingo.

“How’d you get the clerk to give you a shot of G through M?” I asked. “You’re checked in under Smith, right?”

“Yeah, Mr. Smith first told the clerk that he couldn’t remember his room number, but that she could charge the Snickers bar he was buying to Mr. Herat.”

Cute. Herat is one of the northern cities of Afghanistan.

“And then?”

“Well, the nice young lady—pretty little thing, by the way, and I think she liked me—she flipped to the page with the H names on it and told me there was no Mr. Herat registered at the hotel. I told her, ‘That’s odd . . . Oh, wait a minute, that’s right, the room is under my name, not my partner’s.’ Should be under Smith, I told her, and okay, now I’m remembering, it’s room 1107, Ayala Tower. Which is indeed where Mr. Smith is staying.”

I looked at him. “Did she seem suspicious?”

He rolled his eyes. “Shoot, partner, I was trying to buy a damn candy bar, not cash a check. She couldn’t have cared less. Besides, it was pretty obvious she was distracted by her blossoming feelings for me. I think I might stop by again later, see what time she leaves work.”

“Hey,” I said, looking at him, “if you need to get off, Burgos Street is a two-minute cab ride from here. I don’t want you trying to make it with the hotel staff. That kind of shit gets noticed.” Even as I said it, though, I realized it would be pointless. Dox was genetically wired to be conspicuous. In some ways, I supposed, the tendency could be an asset. In an environment like this one, Dox came across more like an ugly American tourist than an undercover operator. He was hiding in plain sight.

He shrugged. “All right, don’t get your panties in a wad. It’s just that I hate to disappoint the pretty ones, is all.”

“ ‘The pretty ones’?” I said, still annoyed. “Dox, you’d fuck an alligator if it would hold still for you.”

“That is not true, partner, Marines do not engage in congress with reptiles. We prefer whenever possible that our partners be mammalian.”

I gave up. “Oh, okay. I don’t know how these rumors get started.”

“Lot of nasty people in the world, man, that’s all,” he said,
giving me the grin. “I mean a sheep is one thing, but an alligator? I’m surprised you’d think so little of me.”

I didn’t know how Dox was able to maintain his constant good cheer even as he prepared to go operational. When I’m gearing up, I get serious, even dour. Harry, my martyred hacker friend, had always been nervous helping me with ops, and had often provoked an unfamiliar clownishness in me. But Dox and I seemed to polarize the opposite way.

But he’d done well so far. I wasn’t yet confident in his social engineering skills. He was too consistently brash, too direct, and, I had to admit to myself, his style was just too different from mine. Getting Manny’s room number had been a test. I’d resisted the urge to tell him how to go about it, and he had come up with something close to what I’d thought of myself. More important, something that worked. It wouldn’t come easily to me, but I’d have to try to give him more slack as we went along, as he continued to prove himself.

“Let’s see,” I said, closing my eyes. “He’s in nine-fourteen. That’s around the corner from the elevators. Unless the bodyguard is positioned at the elevators while Manny is in his room, I ought to be able to get some video in place.”

“Yeah, nice having a way to know when he’s leaving. I hate hanging around in the open, waiting for someone to go out.”

In the dark, though, I knew Dox could wait for days. He had the kills to prove it.

I opened my laptop bag and took out a camera, a wireless unit about twenty millimeters square and weighing less than an ounce. I clicked it on, then worked the laptop’s keyboard for a minute, watching as the screen filled with input from the unit. “It’s transmitting all right from here,” I said, “but at nine hundred megahertz it’s only rated to about a thousand feet. I might have to install a couple of repeaters along the way. You wait here and
monitor the screen. Tell me if you’re getting reception and the right view of the elevators once I’ve got it in place.”

“Roger that.”

We took earpieces from the laptop bag and slipped them in place. I walked over to the door and checked through the peephole. The hallway was empty.

I walked out, hearing a loud clack as the door closed behind me. “You there?” I asked quietly.

“Roger that,” I heard back. Okay, the commo gear was still working.

I took the elevator down to the lobby level, not wanting to go to Manny’s floor directly from mine. To satisfy anyone who might be watching through the dome security camera peeking down from the elevator ceiling, I got out and bought a pack of gum at the gift shop, then came back and headed up to the ninth floor. There were no stops along the way, and a minute later the doors opened on nine. I walked out and looked around. The hallway was empty.

There was a wooden credenza against the wall opposite the elevators with a mirror behind it. I walked over, supported myself against the credenza with my left hand, and ran the fingers of my right through my hair. There was another dome camera mounted on the ceiling in front of the elevators, and if anyone was watching right then, all they would see was a man concerned with his appearance. In fact, I had slipped the adhesive-backed unit underneath the left edge of the credenza, where it would have a wide-angle view of the approach to the elevators.

“How’s the image?” I asked quietly.

“No go. Too grainy. Signal’s falling off before it reaches the receiver. I think we need the repeater to boost it.”

“Okay. Hang on.”

I walked down the hallway for a few paces, then returned to the elevator, just another hotel guest who’d absentmindedly gotten off on the wrong floor. This time, I stopped on six. As I got off, I checked my room key and looked around in slightly theatrical confusion, thinking,
Gosh, these floors all look the same, where was I staying again?
just in case someone was watching. Then I placed a repeater in front of the elevators the same way I had put the camera in on Manny’s floor.

The moment I clicked it on, I heard Dox’s voice: “Okay, there we go. Now that’s a beautiful view.”

I moved out of the way. “The approach to the elevators?”

“Yeah, and it beats the wide-angle shot of your crotch I was getting a minute ago. Someone should call
America’s Funniest Home Videos.
”

I thought about a retort, but then this was exactly what he wanted. I let it go and walked back to the room.

T
HE TWO MEN
who’d offered me the Manny job a week before had never explicitly acknowledged their affiliations. They might have been Mossad; they might have been attached to one of the elite Israeli military units, like the Sayeret Matkal. All I knew was that they were compatriots of Delilah, who had vouched for them. Her involvement had been enough to convince me to meet them.

Delilah and I had first crossed paths in Macau, where we discovered we were both focused on Achille Belghazi, an arms merchant I had been hired to kill but whom Delilah’s people needed alive for the extraction of critical intelligence. We’d managed to create an uneasy truce, though, and things had worked out well in the end. Very well, if you included the month Delilah and I
had spent together in Rio afterward, before she had to return to her world and I to mine.

But despite our personal chemistry, I didn’t trust Delilah completely: she was an operator, after all, with her own professional agenda. So I had insisted that her people travel to Nagoya, a large Japanese city two hundred miles west of Tokyo. For me, Nagoya would be native terrain, but for a couple of visiting Israelis, and any uninvited guests they might decide to bring, it would be unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and they would be reassuringly conspicuous there. Tokyo might have served my purposes instead, but I preferred to travel there infrequently. It had been two years since I’d faced off with Yamaoto, the puppet-master behind much of Japan’s endemic corruption, but I knew the man had a long and bitter memory and would be looking for me in Tokyo. Nagoya was better.

My prospective clients followed my instructions, and on the appointed day and time we met at Torisei, a small
yakitoriya
in Naka-ku. Yakitori is down-home Japanese fare, primarily chicken, other meats, and vegetables grilled over an open charcoal barbecue and served on wood skewers. It’s usually supplemented by
chazuke,
a soupy mixture of tea and rice, and always washed down with copious portions of beer or hot sake.
Yakitoriya
tend to be small, cozy, and unpretentious, and are often located near subway stations to make it easier for their
sarariman
and student patrons to duck in for a quick meal at a corner table or the easy camaraderie of the counter.

I was sitting in a tea shop across the street, wearing an unobtrusive
sarariman
-style navy suit and reading the
Asahi Shimbun,
a Japanese-language daily paper, when they arrived. I saw them approach from the north, pause to glance at Torisei’s sign, and go inside. Although they were out of their element in Nagoya, they didn’t refer to directions or other written instructions to confirm that they’d found the place, and I sensed from
this that they were accustomed to operating sterile, something that in professionals becomes a habit.

I waited and watched the street. After ten minutes, I got up and followed them in. As I parted the establishment’s blue
noren
curtains, I was thinking in Japanese and maintaining a Japanese persona. In my peripheral vision, I saw that they had taken one of the small tables. They both looked up when I arrived, but I ignored them. I expected Delilah would have given them a description, but I doubted that would be enough for them to pick me out if I wanted to stay anonymous. I took a seat at the counter, facing them and with the entrance door to my right. I ordered
yaki-onigiri
—grilled rice balls—and an Asahi Super Dry, opened my paper, and started to read. After a few minutes, when I felt they would have concluded I wasn’t of interest, I glanced around.

I liked what I saw. They were dressed neatly, blazers but no ties, and seemed relaxed and comfortable in the doubtless unfamiliar environment. But for a slightly heightened sense of alertness that only someone like me would have recognized, they could have been a couple of visiting European tourists, or businessmen pleased to have discovered an authentically Japanese place to eat after a day of interminable meetings in some generic office conference room.