Requiem for an Assassin (8 page)

I watched him, dumbfounded, on some level, that he was still alive, that I’d managed to hold back. He swallowed and his right hand drifted to his throat, rubbing it, caressing the undamaged skin. He was breathing hard.

The hostess turned the corner and pulled up short. She hadn’t seen what had happened a second earlier, but she could feel the aftermath. I glanced at her and said, “Give us a minute.” She nodded and backed away.

I looked at Hilger. “Let’s go.”

He shook his head. “Out of the question,” he rasped.

“You’re not thinking clearly,” I said, a part of me shouting
It’s not too late—just step back in and fucking finish him!
“If I wanted to kill you, you’d be bleeding out right now. You said it yourself: I can’t touch you while you’re holding Dox. I’m the one who has to worry about surprises, not you. There’s no reason we can’t walk out of here together. Unless you want to keep me here because you’ve got backup you told about this meeting place. In which case, I’m going to assume this was a setup.”

What I’d said was logical. Which is why I wanted him to refuse. If he did, I would have no choice. I could butcher him and whatever happened to Dox after wouldn’t be my fault.

He didn’t say anything. He might have been considering my point. He might have been thinking about the hostess, and wondering whether she was freaked out enough to call the police. He might have seen in my eyes how much I was hoping he would refuse. Regardless, after a moment he nodded.

We left Saigon Tax through the garage entrance, heading southwest on Le Loi and then turning left on Pasteur. I flagged down a cab and had it take us to the Ben Thanh Market, a labyrinthine produce emporium stretching out over an entire city block. I watched behind us as we moved, but couldn’t be sure amid all the motorcycles that no one was following us. Inside the market, there were hundreds of Vietnamese, shuffling along. Hilger and I moved fast and directly, and I didn’t see anyone trying to match our pace, but still, I wasn’t as sure as I usually am, or as I like to be. I reminded myself Hilger had been in the city only for a day. Hiring and deploying local talent that fast would have been a hell of a stretch.

Hilger kept up and didn’t give me any more trouble. We got another cab on the Le Thanh Ton side of the market, which I had take us to the Park Hyatt. The route gave me another opportunity to check behind us, when we turned right on Hai Ba Trung. I didn’t think I saw anyone follow us from the market, but…damn it, there were just so many motorcycles, and so many dark stretches of street, and so many of the riders were wearing face masks against the pollution. Did I see that guy earlier, the skinny one in the white tee-shirt, with the black bandanna around his face? Or had that been someone else?

We rode in silence. I noted again that, whatever was motivating Hilger to do all this, it had to be powerful. But what?

I hadn’t counted on so much motorcycle traffic. When I was here during the war, it had been mostly cars, along with jeeps and lumbering deuce-and-a-halfs, of course. The countersurveillance environment was tougher now. I would have to use extraordinary caution later, when I left the meeting. But at least I’d be safe inside. The reason I had chosen the hotel, Saigon’s newest and most deluxe, was that it offered the kind of camera surveillance, guards, and other security that would inhibit an on-the-premises hit.

The cab deposited us at the midpoint of a semicircular driveway. Twin bellmen opened the hotel’s wide double doors and welcomed us. We made our way to the lobby lounge along polished wood floors and muted Persian rugs. There was some jockeying for position as we chose where to sit. In the end, we wound up adjacent to each other at a table along the exterior wall, both of us facing the expansive, two-storied room. The lounge was lit softly by several hammered-metal chandeliers high overhead, and we were surrounded by the sounds of conversation and laughter from the mostly expat crowd around us. It was a safe scene, and therefore surreal.

We sat silently for a few moments, each trying to wait the other out. A pretty waitress broke the standoff by coming to our table and handing us menus. “My name is Ngan,” she said. “May I bring you something to drink?”

Hilger surprised me by asking, “Are you hungry?”

In fact, I was. I’d been keyed up all afternoon and evening, and hadn’t realized that my
pho
lunch was long gone. And now that the immediate danger was under control, my stomach was demanding attention.

I nodded warily.

“Why don’t you order for us,” he said. “You know the cuisine better than I do.”

I took a quick glance at the menu and selected a variety of spring rolls and dumplings. Hilger surprised me again by ordering a beer. I stayed with orange juice.

Neither of us spoke until Ngan had returned with the drinks and food. When she was gone, Hilger took a sip of his beer and said, “It must feel strange for you to be back here.”

I figured the comment was an elicitation ploy, an attempt to draw something out of me. But I wasn’t sure what. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Memories. My place was the desert. I was in Iraq for the first go-round, and now, you put me someplace with a lot of sand and superheated dry wind, and bam, I go all the way back, body and soul. Like I never left. People who haven’t had that kind of experience…they don’t understand. It’s like they live in two dimensions and you live in three.”

I knew what he was talking about. The part of you that’s formed in battle will always respond to being back on the battlefield. And when you return, I was learning, it feels as though some fitfully sleeping part of you stirs to wakefulness, while the person you thought you were surrenders as quietly as a dream. Maybe that was the paranoia I was feeling. That older self, the self that had kept me alive in the jungle, in places and circumstances where so many other men had died.

We started in on the spring rolls. A table full of Americans to our right erupted in loud laughter at something one of their party had said. Hilger glanced over and shook his head.

“Look at those people,” he said. “Think they own this place, don’t they, think they own the world. Makes me sick sometimes.”

I watched them for a moment, and found I couldn’t disagree. What I saw was a collection of overfed, overprivileged sheep who were born to whatever they had and whose only understanding of real fear and privation was what they received from images broadcast on CNN between commercial breaks for smile-whitening toothpaste and mountain-fresh fabric softeners. They condescended to the locals because the locals needed their money and had to serve them to get it. They didn’t understand that the service was like what the staff provides to the inhabitants of a nursing home. They confused stoicism with passivity, service with servility, the current world order with some ordained plan. They didn’t realize the people they looked down on now were going to own them a little later this century. Or, at the rate the West was going, maybe just bury them, instead.

He popped a dumpling into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed it. He shook his head. “Makes me wonder why I bother.”

I looked at him, intrigued that he was able to laugh and break bread with someone who not an hour earlier had very nearly executed him. I didn’t read this as weakness. On the contrary, Hilger’s easy recovery from our earlier encounter suggested a long and comfortable acquaintance with violence. And more than that, a man so ruthlessly adept at compartmentalizing the personal and the professional that he would be capable of almost anything. If he deemed something necessary, I expected he would act with little compunction and even less warning.

“Why do you bother?” I asked.

He looked away, and for a moment his gaze was distant. I wondered what he was seeing.

“Because things are broken,” he said. “People used to think broken meant a system that could only respond to a crisis. But that’s not broken. Broken is a system that can’t
even
respond to a crisis.”

“What crisis are you talking about?”

He took a swallow of beer. He glanced at me, then shook his head as though disappointed. “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Why don’t you try me?”

“I’m talking about America. The wheels are coming off, haven’t you noticed? And what are you supposed to do if you care? Join a protest march? A letter to your gerrymandered congressman? What?”

It’s been my experience that people who can express their political views only in metaphors and passionate generalizations are fanatics. Hilger might have been one of them. Or maybe he was trying to obscure his true affiliations, or his lack of any at all. Or this whole conversation was his attempt to draw me out, to gather intelligence about me. Or all of the above.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What are you supposed to do?”

Therapists call it reflection: repeating the patient’s words, rephrased as a question. I had dealt with enough Army shrinks back in the day to find the technique stupid and annoying, and it’s so basic that even machines have been programmed to do it. But it can create a sense of empathy, or in this case its illusion, and draw a subject out.

It didn’t work with Hilger. He said only, “What you can.”

Which in his case, I gathered, was a lot.

I waited, hoping he would add something I could use. After a moment, he said, “It’s too bad it has to be this way with us. I respect you. We ought to be able to work together. I work with a lot of guys like you.”

“Like me how?”

He shrugged. “Smart. Independent. With the insight to understand the way things really work.”

I felt the manipulation, but didn’t know where he was trying to steer me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sure you do. You know democracy’s just a pretty picture. And that to ensure its survival and preserve its appearance, certain men have always done things that no one else can know.”

“Assassinations.”

“Exactly.”

“Coups.”

“Sure.”

“Kidnapping?”

He shrugged. “We call them ‘extraordinary renditions.’”

“Abu Ghraib.”

He shook his head. “I’m not talking about Abu Ghraib. AG was exactly the way not to go about it. People say what happened there is immoral. Shit, it’s worse than immoral. It’s incompetent. The whole thing was nothing but a fishing expedition. Widespread and sanctioned. And once it got out, predictably, we had to bend over backward in the other direction because of all the media scrutiny.”

“I thought the VP said waterboarding was a ‘no-brainer.’ And that was after AG.”

“Believe me, the right people had a lot more freedom before AG. Anyway, the VP doesn’t know what he’s talking about. None of them do. That’s the point. With guys like that in the limelight, more than ever you need the right things done in the dark.”

Okay, so this was “you and I are the pros and everyone else is incompetent.” If he thought that would save him when this was done, he was wrong.

I looked at him. “Yeah? How do you know when it’s right?”

He returned the look. “When it’s necessary.”

“And when is that?”

“When you need something, and there’s no other way to get it.”

“How did you know there was no other way here? You never asked me.”

“Some things you just know.”

“Why don’t you ask me now.”

He shook his head. “Now I’m not asking. I’m telling you. That’s why I had to go through Dox. Because it has to get done.”

A long silent moment passed. I tried not to think of Dox. It helped me keep the latent lust to kill Hilger momentarily on a leash.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me what you want.”

He glanced around, then leaned forward. “Three jobs, like I told you. When you’re done with the first, I’ll give you the second. When you’re done with the second, I’ll give you the third. When you’re done with the third, I’ll release Dox.”

I looked at him. When I spoke, it was half directed at Hilger, half to appease the iceman.

“If you do anything permanent to him,” I said, “you know I’ll find you. And you know what I’ll do to you.”

He offered a faint, humorless smile. “You’re being generous. You’re going to try to find me the moment I let him go, if not before.”

“There’s something you need to understand. I’ve been trying to get out of the life. If I have to revert to protect a friend, I will. But I don’t want to go any further than I have to. Yeah, right now I’m upset. I don’t like the way you got me to the negotiating table. But if you play it straight from here, we might all be able to walk away from this.”

There was a lot of truth in there. Which made it the best kind of lie.

Hilger nodded, but that was all. I didn’t know whether he’d bought it.

“Let me talk to him again,” I said.

He shook his head. “You’ve talked to him once. You can talk to him again after. After each one.”

Something told me I wasn’t going to win on this point and I let it go. I rotated my head, cracking the neck joints. “All right,” I said, “the first one. Who, where, when, how.”

“Who is Jan Jannick, Dutch national, male, forty-five years old. Where is the San Francisco Bay Area, where he’s temporarily resident. When is within five days from today. And how is something that absolutely looks natural.”

The appearance of natural causes is my specialty, and the reason I’ve always been able to charge a premium. Except, of course, when I’m working under duress, when my fees tend to be…waived. I assumed it was the “naturalness” imperative that made Hilger need me, but there might have been more.

“Why natural?”

“You know why. I don’t want anyone asking questions.”

“I’m asking why you don’t want the questions.”

“That’s not something you need to know.”

I thought for a moment. “Five days to get to San Francisco, track this guy, find him, identify a pattern, select an opportunity, plan for an escape…there’s no way. You know that.”

“We already have a lot of the information you’ll need. Home and work addresses, things like that. It’ll save you time. I’ll upload it to the bulletin board.”

“Even so…”

“Jannick is a civilian. He has no surveillance consciousness at all, no security, no clue. He’s as soft a target as you’ve ever gone after. The only trick is making it look natural. That’s why I want you.”