“Hey, I’m not complaining.”
“We’re going to need some clothes, too,” I said. “The club is formal. There ought to be a tailor right in the InterContinental shopping arcade who can get a suit ready for you while you wait. If not, ask the concierge for a recommendation.”
He smiled. “I love Hong Kong. Fastest place on earth.”
“Just tell the tailor you want something dark and conservative, a suit,” I said. “Let him do the rest. He’ll pick a tie for you, too.”
“Hey, man, don’t you trust my sense of style?”
I thought it best not to answer. I finished up on the computer, then purged the browser again.
Dox said, “One thing occurs to me. If Winters is supposed to show up for dinner at the China Club and he doesn’t, Hilger’s going to be concerned. Or maybe Winters was supposed to check in beforehand, and when he doesn’t, Hilger might change his plans. Wasn’t that what you were worried about, why you tried to make it look like the man hadn’t died being interrogated?”
I nodded. “We’ll have to take that into account. But the fact that the meeting place was already decided is encouraging. It would have been more secure for Hilger to have just told people the general venue, and waited until the last moment to give the exact location. My guess is that VBM, whoever he is, isn’t all that reachable. Or there are some other limitations on their ability to communicate in real time. And you have to figure this meeting is related to what happened in Manila. They’ve already been disrupted there once. I doubt they’d want to cancel again just because someone didn’t show up or failed to check in. I may be wrong, and if I am we’re going to find out, but I have a feeling their dinner’s on.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll buy that. What’s the general plan?”
I started envisioning things, figuring out what more we’d need and how we were going to get it.
“Manny and Hilger,” I said. “We take them both out. Manny satisfies the Israeli contract. We get paid. As for Hilger, either he’s not CIA at all, or he is and he’s off the reservation, but either way he gets disowned postmortem. At which point, the Israelis realize that they don’t have a problem with the Agency. It gets everyone off our backs.”
“You know, though, even if the government disowns Hilger, someone might be interested in avenging him. That kind of thing has been known to happen.”
I shrugged. “I’m willing to take that chance. No matter what, Hilger is where the direct pressure is coming from right now, even more than from the Israelis. I don’t see a better way of relieving that pressure than eliminating its source.”
“Seems reasonable to me.”
Part of me wondered how I had wandered along to a point where calmly proposing that we kill two men, one of whom might be CIA, would indeed seem reasonable. I would have to ponder that in my leisure time.
“And,” I said, “since, as far as I can tell, the reason they wanted relatively ‘natural’ causes for Manny in the first place was their mistaken assumption that he was a CIA asset, we no longer have to be overly constrained in our methods.”
Dox nodded. “That makes me feel better. Where I was brought up, gentlemen just shot each other. It’s more comfortable for me.”
I nodded, then for the second time in as many minutes realized that there were people in the world who might find this kind of conversation strange, who might even be put off by it. I wondered where the new perspective was coming from. I really would have to think about that later.
“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t think we’re going to have guns.”
His face fell a little. “No guns?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think even Kanezaki could get us what we’d need on this short notice. I’m not sure it would be wise to ask just now, regardless. And my Japanese contact could help us if we were in Tokyo. For Hong Kong… not with these time constraints.”
“Well, that sucks. I was kind of picturing myself up on a rooftop with the dreaded M-40A3 and matching AN/PVS-10 nightscope. It would have been so civilized.”
I nodded. “That, or I could have just burst into their private room with a forty-five while they were enjoying the Peking duck. But maybe…”
He looked at me. “You’re thinking something devious there, partner, I can tell.”
I smiled. “I’m thinking about Hilger. He was armed last year at Kwai Chung.”
“Armed and dangerous,” he said, nodding. “That boy was a one-man killing machine. Had his primary in a waist holster or belly band, if I’m remembering correctly, and a backup on his ankle.”
“Think that was a one-time thing?”
“Hell, no. A guy like that, carry for him is routine. He’d feel naked without it.”
“And even if it’s not routine, we know he carries when he’s operational.”
“Like tomorrow night, for example.”
“For example.”
He stroked his chin and grinned. “Old Manny might be carrying, too. I would be, after what almost happened to him in Manila.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
“Nice of them, to bring the guns for us.”
I nodded. “All I need to do is get to one of them alone, from behind. Say, in a restroom.”
Dox cleared his throat. “You’re not worried about, you know, that when you see Manny like you did the last time…”
I shook my head, and felt something shift inside me like a block of frozen granite. “No,” I said. “I’m not worried at all.”
PART THREE
SEVENTEEN
BECAUSE WINTERS AND COMPANY might have tracked Dox’s cell phone earlier in the day, the Grand Hyatt was no longer secure. We took extreme care in returning, and stayed just long enough to collect our gear. Then we went to Sukhumvit, using appropriate countersurveillance measures along the way, and took rooms at the Westin. Dox, chastened by the way Winters had almost gotten to us, didn’t argue with any of this.
I showered and shaved, then took an excruciatingly hot bath, which ordinarily helps me sleep. But I was still wired from that near miss in front of Brown Sugar. I had to leave for the airport at six o’clock, and if I didn’t get some rest soon, the next chance I’d get would be on the plane.
I pulled a chair over to the window and sat in the dark, looking down at Sukhumvit Road and the urban mass beyond it. There wasn’t much of a view-the Westin isn’t tall enough and the city itself is too congested. I wished for a moment, absurdly, that I was back in my apartment in Sengoku, the quiet part of Tokyo where I’d lived until the CIA and Yamaoto had managed to track me there. I’d never realized at the time how safe I felt there, how peaceful. It seemed a long time ago, and so much had happened in between. I realized I’d never even paused to mourn having been forced to leave. Until this moment, anyway. And now I couldn’t afford the distraction.
I thought about the plan Dox and I had come up with. It seemed sound, up to a point. But I wondered why the solutions I reached for always involved violence.
Violence, my ass. You’re talking about killing.
I smiled sardonically. When all you’ve got are hammers, everything starts to look like a nail.
Maybe my default settings were just horrifyingly stunted. Or warped. Maybe there were other, better ways, ways that long and unfortunate habit was preventing me from seeing.
Yeah, maybe. But the feeling of sitting there in the dark, running through the requirements of the next day’s operation, was momentarily so familiar to me that it carried with it the oppressive weight of fate.
I’ve been killing since that first Viet Cong, near the Xe Kong river, when I was seventeen. I’d kept count for a while, but long ago lost track entirely, something that horrified Midori, rightly, I supposed, when she had asked me about it. Could it really have just been circumstances that got me started so early and kept me going so long, or was there something about me, something intrinsic?