Killing Rain (14 page)

Well, on the first front, finding out who had tried to carry out the hit, he had managed to move quickly. From the description Manny provided, Hilger had immediately suspected John Rain, who he knew had done the Belghazi job at Kwai Chung in Hong Kong last year. Hilger had been against that op, and had even tried to have Rain killed to stop it. Rain had proven a hard man to deter, though, and he’d gotten to Belghazi anyway. Which, strangely enough, turned out to have been all right: that bastard Belghazi had been trying to move radiological missiles right under Hilger’s nose. If Rain hadn’t wound up doing the job, Hilger would have had to do it himself.

What a mess that had been, though. Some of the assets he’d been so carefully cultivating had suspected he’d been involved. If it hadn’t been for Manny, he doubted he would have been able to regain their trust. And then there was the heat from the CIA, which wanted to know exactly what the hell his involvement had been and why none of the proper paperwork had been filled out. There, too, outside intervention had made the difference. His National Security Council contact had effectively bought off the Director of Central Intelligence by telling the DCI the Agency could take carte blanche public credit for stopping a terrorist operation at Kwai Chung. It had all been in the news the next
day, with the heroes of the CIA, the DCI foremost among them, standing squarely in the adulatory spotlight. And there had been some side benefit, too: because the National Security Council spoke in the name of the President, the fact that the NSC had intervened aggressively on Hilger’s behalf told the DCI that Hilger was protected, all the way to the top. The DCI, the DDO, and pretty much everyone else who mattered in the Directorate of Operations left him alone after that.

But there was a new DCI now, this guy Goss, and with all the firings and resignations, all the people who had been intimidated were now gone. The good news was that Goss didn’t have a clue, at least not yet. He had so many things he was trying to get under control that Hilger could probably fly under his radar for a while. If there were another slip, though, or if Goss took it into his head to assert himself by getting in Hilger’s face, things could get messy again. Yeah, maybe he’d be able to call in another round of favors and get the mess cleaned up, but he preferred not to have a showdown with the new management so soon. Even if Hilger won, there would be grudges after. Hunters don’t like to be interrupted in the act of pouncing on their prey.

Rain’s involvement suggested that the CIA had ordered the hit, as it had with Belghazi. The thought was almost sickening. If those idiots had any idea what Hilger was up to, of what in three short years he had managed to accomplish, they would know to get out of his way and leave him alone. Leave him alone, hell, if they had any sense of proportion they would fucking genuflect.

He drummed his fingers along the edge of the blond wooden desktop and watched the lighted barges inching like water bugs along the dark surface of the harbor a quarter mile below. He didn’t know why his men believed in him, exactly, but they did. They always had. He sensed that, at just south of forty years old, he had become a sort of father figure to them. It would be too
much to say that they worshipped him, but his opinion of them mattered hugely, as did his understanding, his forgiveness, for the things their work required them to do. He’d never had anyone like himself in his own life, but he understood the power, and the responsibility, of the position. He could pat a man on the back, sometimes literally, and tell him that it was all right, that he had done the right thing, that the images and the smells, the fears and the doubts, the corrosive effects of conscience, all these were in fact part of the man’s nobility for not having taken the easy, the common path of shying away from what needed to be done. And because no one could ever know of their quiet heroics, of the anonymous sacrifices they made, because there would never be medals or ticker-tape parades or the thanks of a grateful nation, his understanding and, when necessary, his forgiveness were all his men had to comfort them. It wasn’t enough to remove the weight, true, but it was enough to lighten it. Sometimes he wished he had someone he could turn to in a like manner, but he didn’t, and he supposed this was part of the burden of leadership, to bear the doubts, and the hard memories, alone.

Manny had said there had been another man, a big white guy. That wasn’t much to go on by itself, but Hilger had more. There had been a sniper at Kwai Chung. Maybe it had been Rain, but Hilger knew that Rain had no sniping background, and the gunman at Kwai Chung had been a pro. He’d taken the heads off those two Transdniester bagmen from far enough away so that no one had even heard the shots. That didn’t feel like Rain, who worked from close up. Hilger couldn’t be sure, but he suspected the shooter had been a CIA contractor called Dox. Hilger, through an intermediary, had tried to hire Dox to eliminate Rain and save Belghazi. Afterward, he wondered if the damn ex-Marine had decided to work with Rain instead of against him.
He knew they had “served” together in Afghanistan, helping the Muj chase out the Red Army. He’d expected Dox’s mercenary instincts to be more powerful than any sense of comradeship the man might still feel from that shared conflict, but it seemed in that respect Hilger had misjudged.

He had his own files on both these men, complete with photographs. The photo of Rain was out of date, but Hilger had used some Agency software to update it. He’d shown the photos to Manny before Manny returned to Manila, and Manny had given him a positive ID on both.

So far, so good. But who had been behind the hit was proving more difficult to divine. The CIA had been his first guess, but he hadn’t been able to find out anything there. Of course, his inquiries had to be somewhat oblique, lest someone connect him through Manny to the men who had died in Manila, but he had his sources, and all of them had come up blank. The CIA might have wanted Manny dead, but it seemed they hadn’t tried to bring it about.

Who, then? Manny hadn’t wanted to face it, but, as they’d discussed the day before, the list was anything but short. The problem was that Rain had no known connections with any of the primary suspects. He had a history with the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party and of course with the Agency, the latter dating all the way back to Vietnam, but he wasn’t known to work with anyone else. That didn’t mean there weren’t any other clients, of course; Rain was a freelancer, a mercenary. But expanding a client base in Rain’s line of work isn’t easy. You can’t just hang out a shingle, or take out a few ads. New clients come slowly, if at all.

Well, there was a fairly straightforward way to get to the bottom of this. All he had to do was ask Rain or Dox. They might not want to tell him, true, but they’d be inclined to believe him
when he said that he understood they were just contractors, that he had no personal beef with them nor any professional reason to want them removed. Hell, after he’d cleared this whole thing up, he’d be happy to have them on his team.

What would make it sound appealing was that it was very nearly true. It would be true, in fact, except they’d killed Calver and Gibbons, which did indeed make things personal. And they had scared Manny’s boy, ruining any chance that Manny might want to just let bygones be bygones, as well.

All he needed to do was get to them. A clean snatch, the back of an unmarked, unobtrusive van. A reasonable, man-to-man conversation, if possible. Electrified alligator clips attached to their scrota, if not. Either way, he would get the information he wanted.

He took a deep breath. Yes, he needed someone who could snatch them, then interrogate them. And who knew the region well enough to be able to make it all happen quickly.

There were several men he could have chosen, but one name stood out: Mitchell William Winters. The man was an expert. He had trained with the famed FBI Hostage Rescue Team and rendered more than his share of bad guys. And he had worked in Asia, doing security consulting for companies that needed such assistance in the region. Winters was into martial arts—Hilger remembered hearing about
kali
or something like that in the Philippines and Thai boxing in Bangkok. He didn’t particularly care about the karate stuff—Hilger’s choice of martial art was a SIG P229, concealed in a belly band carry, and he had yet to meet the Long Dong Do master who could block a bullet from it—but the experience in Asia would be critical.

And Winters had another plus: Hilger knew he was a graduate of an off-the-books CIA hostile interrogation program. The program was ostensibly designed to teach operators to resist torture, but it was well known in the community that, in doing so, the
program taught torture itself, and that this was its true purpose. Some people took to the course material more readily than others. Winters, Hilger knew, had a knack.

The sky was beginning to grow light behind Central off to his right. He consulted his directory, then picked up the phone.

A
FTER DINNER
, Dox insisted on heading over to the go-go bars in Patpong. I wasn’t happy about it, but I supposed I would just have to accept that the man was large enough to contain multitudes: lethal and loud; cultured and crude; profound and party-going. And what he had said earlier, about having been doing fine on his own, was of course true. Maybe I was being unfair to him. I decided I would try to trust him more. The thought was strange and uncomfortable, but it felt like the right thing to do.

I stopped by an Internet café to check on Delilah’s plans. There was a message waiting from her: she was coming in on the Air France flight, and would be arriving in Bangkok the following afternoon at 4:35. All right. I made the necessary
reservations for Dox, went back to the Sukhothai, took a hot bath in the excellent tub, got in bed, and slept.

But my sleep was restless. I dreamed that I was a little boy again, in the apartment where I had grown up, and that something was chasing me there from room to room. I called for my parents, but no one came, and I was terrified at being alone. My father had kept a
katana,
the Japanese long sword, which had belonged, he said, to his great-grandfather, on a ceremonial stand in my parents’ bedroom, and I ran in there and slammed the door behind me. Then I went to grab the
katana,
but instead of one, there were two, and I couldn’t choose which to pick up. I froze. My mind was shouting,
Just pick one! Either one!
but I couldn’t move. And then the door started to open . . .

I woke and sprang off the bed into a crouch. I remained like that for a long time, catching my breath, feeling the sweat dry on my body, trying to shake off the dream and come back to myself. Finally I straightened, used the toilet, then took another bath.

But this one didn’t help me sleep at all. I lay in bed for a long time afterward, thinking. It bothered me that I’d frozen again, even in a dream. Two swords within easy reach—an embarrassment of riches if you’re in danger, you would think. And yet I couldn’t choose either one. If I hadn’t awoken, whatever had been pursuing me in the dream would have killed me.

DOX AND I
went to the airport early the next afternoon to give ourselves time to establish a countersurveillance route and walk it through. We were using the commo gear from Manila. If Dox had to warn me of anything, he could do it at a distance and right in my ear. This would give us a better range of options than if he had been trying to protect me from afar without contact.

The area outside customs was crowded with people waiting
for arrivals: families, Thai and expat; hotel car drivers in white livery; greasy-haired backpackers in sandals with adventure-seeking friends coming in from Europe and Australia. No one set off my radar, but the area was too crowded to be sure. If there were trouble, I expected it would look Israeli. After all, part of the reason Delilah’s people had brought me in to begin with was their lack of Asian resources. The “lack” was relative, of course: through both the gemstone trade and the underground arms market to groups like the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Israel does have contacts in Thailand. Still, if they wanted to move quickly enough to take advantage of any intel Delilah might have supplied them, I didn’t think they’d be able to outsource. None of which is to say I ignored people who didn’t fit the profile, but it does help to keep certain guidelines in mind as you go.

I set up far to the right of the exit, where I would be able to see her as she emerged from customs but where she would have to look hard for me. Dox was positioned a few meters behind me and to my left, and when I casually checked in his direction, it took me a second to spot him, even though I knew him and I knew where to look. He really did have that sniper’s knack for disappearing into the background.

There were two possibilities: first, they would have someone pre-positioned outside of customs, where I had told Delilah I would meet her, along with when. Second, they would have someone on the plane with her, who would have to follow her if his presence were going to serve any purpose. Of the two, I thought the second the more likely, as well as the easier to deal with. More likely, because their probable lack of Asian resources would prevent them from getting someone in place that quickly; easier, because whoever it was would have to be close to Delilah coming off the plane and would have a hard time staying submerged once I started moving her. Either way, I wasn’t unduly worried about someone making a move inside the airport. The
levels of surveillance, security, and control over ingress and egress involved would make an airport job almost impossible to pull off cleanly.