Killing Rain (33 page)

A
FEW MINUTES LATER
, I heard Delilah. “Hey, John. Just checking the gear.”

“I hear you.”

“Good. We’re in the bar. We’ve got a nice table in the far corner. You can talk to us anytime. We’ll monitor the transmitters and let you know what’s going on. Any problems, just let us know.”

“Okay,” I said.

Dox said, “We’ll switch off now so we don’t bore you with our pretend conversations about strategic partnership opportunities in Asia and how we’re getting traction with our paradigm shifts and inflection points. Unless you want to listen in, just to make sure I’m behaving myself with your girlfriend.”

“Please, shut it down,” I said.

He laughed. “Okay. Remember, we can still hear you, so if you need anything, just speak up.”

“Okay.”

He cut out.

I waited for nearly an hour in silence. Three times, someone came in to use the restroom. Each time, I checked to see if it was Manny or Hilger. It was possible that one or both of them might stop in on their way to the private dining room, in which case Delilah and Dox wouldn’t be able to warn me. But it was always someone else.

The closet was fairly roomy, and I was able to move around a bit, do a few squats and stretches. There was a time when I could go to top speed without a warm-up, but that sort of thing was getting harder lately, and I wanted to stay limber.

I was doing some isometric neck exercises when Dox came back on. “Okay, partner,” he said, “our guests have arrived. They’re being seated right now.”

“How many?”

“Two, it looks like. Hilger and Manny. Hang on, let me change frequencies and listen in for a minute.”

A moment later, he came back on. “Yeah, it’s just the two of them. Hilger asked the hostess to escort ‘Mr. Eljub’ when he arrives. So it looks like it’s going to be just the three of them. You were right, Hilger didn’t change the plans.”

“ ‘Eljub,’ ” Delilah said.

I asked, “What of it?”

“I’m . . . not sure. Just wondering who the mystery guest might be.”

“I’m more concerned about where he’s sitting. And about whether he gets up.”

“Of course.”

I said, “Dox, can you switch the audio so that I can listen in, too?”

“I can, but then you won’t be able to hear Delilah and me.”

“That’s okay. You can cut back in anytime you think you need to.”

“Gotcha. Okay, here you go.”

There was a hiss, and then I was listening to Manny and Hilger. Hilger’s voice I remembered from listening to him through a parabolic microphone in front of Kwai Chung. He had a memorably slow, confident, reassuring way of speaking. Manny’s voice was higher; his tone, higher-strung. It sounded as though he was complaining to Hilger about security, specifically about having to leave his bodyguard outside.

“He can do you more good monitoring the entrance than he could have in here,” Hilger told him.

I wondered if he believed that—there were pros and cons, as I saw it—or if he was just trying to placate Manny, who struck me as a bit of a whiner.

Manny said, “I don’t think so. Anyway, after what happened in Manila, I feel more comfortable with him close by.”

“I’ve told you, I’m known at this club and I don’t have a bodyguard. If we post a man outside the door, it’s only going to make the staff curious about who I’m entertaining. Curiosity is the last thing we need tonight.”

“He could have just eaten with us. The staff wouldn’t know his role.”

“That’s true, but then we wouldn’t be able to speak freely. Look, I told you, Rain is in Bangkok. We almost had him there yesterday. He’s on the run now, and my men are pursuing him. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

For a moment I wondered anew whether Hilger’s operation was in fact CIA. He certainly sounded like the government, describing an “almost had him” as a comforting sign of success. I sensed he would have been right at home spouting off about “catastrophic successes” and the other such doublespeak of the age.

Manny said, “I want to know when you get him.”

“Of course.”

Well, Hilger’s going to have a little explaining to do to Manny later tonight,
I thought. On the other hand, if things went as planned, Hilger wouldn’t be any more able to explain than Manny would be to listen.

The audio cut out. There was a hiss, and Dox was back in my ear. “Saw Hilger pull some bug-detection gear from an attaché,” he said. “Glad we’re using video. I’m gonna go dark for ten minutes or they might pick up the signal.”

“Good,” I said. The transmitters broadcast on radio frequency, which is present in the background in any urban location, and we were using low signal strength, boosted outside the room by the repeaters I’d put in place. So the concern wasn’t the transmitters’ ambient presence, only their susceptibility to a deliberate sweep, which might follow the signal they emitted like a trail of electronic bread crumbs. Once the sweep was completed, we could safely come back online.

After ten minutes, I heard Dox again. “Okay, here we go. I’ll switch you over.”

Another hiss, and I was listening to Hilger and Manny again. Manny was saying, “He knows he’s important. It’s going to his head.”

Hilger chuckled.

“I mean it, that’s why he’s late. He’s just showing us that he can make us wait for him, and that he knows we’ll put up with it. Arabs. This is just like them.”

“Let’s remember that we’re all friends tonight, all right?” Hilger said. “No nationalities around this table. No stupid allegiances.”

I thought I heard the sound of glasses clinking.

They were quiet after that. Ten minutes passed, then I heard the sound of a knock on their door, of chairs being pushed back. Hilger said, “Hello, Mr. Eljub. Welcome.”

At last,
I thought.
Mr. VBM.

“Ali, hello,” Manny said. “Glad you could make it.”

“Please, call me Ali,” a new voice said, in accented English that I had trouble placing. Arab, maybe, with something European behind it. Whoever he was, he must have been talking to Hilger. Manny had already presumed. Or else they knew each other.

“Ali, welcome,” Hilger said again. “Please, have a seat.”

I heard chairs being moved around. Hilger said, “You had a good flight, I hope?”

“Uneventful. But slow. There’s so much airline security these days!”

This provoked a laugh. Hilger said, “And the hotel?”

“I don’t think I can complain about a suite at The Four Seasons. Thank you for taking care of it.”

“My pleasure.”

I heard another knock at their door. Hilger said, “Yes.”

There was a woman’s voice, asking them about drinks.

“Shall we order?” the man called Ali said. “I’m starving.”

“Yeah, it’s gotten pretty late for dinner,” Manny said, and I thought,
Not just a whiner. Passive-aggressive, too.
Not that my growing distaste for him would be a factor one way or the other. I wasn’t feeling anything right now other than the usual, slightly heightened focus of being in the middle of an op. And I was going to keep it that way until after it was too late to make a difference.

“All right, let’s,” Hilger said. “Ali, let me suggest the . . .”

There was a hiss. Dox cut in: “We’ve got something interesting here, partner. Listen to your lady.”

Delilah said, “It’s not Eljub. It’s Al-Jib. Ali Al-Jib.”

“I don’t know the name,” I said. “Should I?”

“What about A. Q. Khan?” she asked.

Khan again.
“Yeah, I know of Khan,” I told her, thinking of my conversation with Boaz and Gil in Nagoya. “Pakistani scientist,
nuclear starter kit, et cetera. It was in the news a little over a year ago, then it died down, right? The outgoing CIA director, George Tenet, was bragging about it.”

“Yeah, how Christians In Action was down Khan’s throat and up his ass and in some other hard-to-reach places, too,” Dox added.

“I think it was more like ‘inside his residence, inside his facilities, inside his rooms,’ ” Delilah said. “But yes, that was the propaganda the U.S. was putting out. They were hailing Khan’s arrest as a great victory. But then why is the U.S. still investigating his network? Why is the International Atomic Energy Agency doing the same?”

“Oh, you know,” Dox said. “In these matters, the government usually continues the investigation just to determine whether what they’ve achieved is merely a ‘great victory,’ or if it could in fact be more accurately described as a ‘historic triumph.’ I’m sure they don’t think the network’s still operational after all that clever spying they did to stop it.”

“It is operational,” Delilah said. “Despite the arrests. It’s like Al Qaeda—the leadership is damaged, but then new, less centralized actors begin to emerge in its place.”

“Al-Jib?” I asked.

“Exactly. Ali Al-Jib is part of this new generation. He was educated in East Germany, the Central Institute of Nuclear Research in Rossendorf. There are more like him, men who were trained behind the Iron Curtain and then lost to the world’s intelligence services in the turmoil following the end of the Cold War. A lucky find of some Soviet-era documents pointed us in the right direction.”

“Maybe we should switch the frequency back to Hilger and company,” I said. “Not that this isn’t interesting, but we don’t want to get distracted.”

“You don’t understand,” Delilah said. “Al-Jib is a dangerous
man, very dangerous. What Lavi does with conventional explosives, Al-Jib is trying to do with nuclear weapons. We’ve been hunting him for a long time and he is exceedingly difficult to track. We can’t let him walk out of here tonight.”

“Look,” I said, “he sounds like he’s another problem child, it’s true. But we’ve got our hands full as it is. Hilger and Manny are the primaries. That’s going to be hard enough to do. Let’s not complicate it by rearranging our priorities in the middle of the proceedings.”

“You don’t understand,” she said again.

“I do understand. These aren’t my decisions to make. Your people hired me to do a job, I’m doing it. If they wanted to hire me to do Al-Jib, too, they should have brought it up sooner and I would have priced it in. And they damn well shouldn’t have turned on me after one little hitch in Manila.”

“Is that what this is about?” she said. “You won’t do this . . . out of spite?”

“I won’t do it because it’s not sensible to do it. We’ve got two targets already. If I put Al-Jib at the head of the line, it reduces the chances that I’ll be able to get to the other two. So let’s just stick to the plan.

“Jeez, partner,” Dox said. “I don’t know.”

“Goddamnit,” I said, “what happened to all that ‘The judge and the executioner, they’re different roles’ shit you were spouting at me the other day?”

“I think I meant that more as a guideline than a rule, man,” he said. “And this feels like, you know, an exigency.”

We were all quiet for a moment. I thought,
This is exactly what I’m talking about, we’re arguing about this idiot Al-fucking-Jib instead of monitoring what’s going on in the room. Getting distracted, jeopardizing the whole operation.

“If the opening is there,” I said, “I’ll take him out. But Hilger and Manny are still the priority. Okay?”

There was a pause, then Delilah said, “Okay.”

“Good. Now switch the frequency back. Please.”

We went back to Hilger and company. It sounded like Hilger was making a sales pitch. Something about diversified investments, Asian emerging markets equities, average yields of over twenty-five percent.

“What about your commission?” Al-Jib asked.

“The twenty-five percent yields are after my commission, which is twenty percent.”

“Twenty percent. Is that in keeping with American SEC regulations?”

“Not at all. But then, not much of what I can do is likely to be approved by the SEC.”

Al-Jib laughed. “I have to tell you, your proposal is interesting and I think there is a lot you might be able to do for my people, but I would not have agreed to meet you. Not even with the people who vouched for you. Your former affiliations are too . . . suspect. There are people who believe you are still in the employ of the U.S. government.”

“That impression can be useful in my work. I don’t go out of my way to dispel it.”

“I understand. Still, it can be hard for men to trust each other even when they are from the same village. When they come from such different villages as ours, the suspicions linger, do they not?”

“They do. But I hope the test you devised was adequate to ease your doubts.”

“More than adequate. Killing a U.S. diplomat in Amman . . . there are some things that a U.S. government agent simply cannot do.”

Hilger laughed. “It was a creative solution. I’m glad it worked.”

“You never told me one thing, though. How did you manage to have the Jordanians blame Al Qaeda for the man’s death?”

“That was a case of someone rounding up the ‘usual suspects,’ ” Hilger replied. “When a senior member of USAID is assassinated, someone has to be blamed. Who better than AQ?”