“Roger that,” Demeere said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
Hilger hung up. Christ, the op was coming apart. But he had to find a way to fix it. It had taken him two years to set up this meeting with VBM. And it wasn’t just the time he’d invested. It was the things he’d been forced to do to make it possible. Those things were going to haunt him forever, and if there was a God out there, Hilger knew one day there was going to be some explaining to do.
He put his elbows on his desk, closed his eyes, and rested his forehead against his fingertips. Yeah, he’d made some hard calls along the way, calls that no one should have to make. Having to take out that guy in Amman, an American, with a family, hadn’t been easy. And having to sit on information that he knew would have saved lives in Bali, in Jakarta, and elsewhere… well he was going to have to live with all of that, too.
But a lot of good was coming from it, and that was the thing to focus on. You had to look at the big picture. Were the Brits wrong not to evacuate Coventry when they discovered the Nazis were going to bomb it? If the city had been evacuated, the Nazis would have known their Enigma code had been compromised, and the whole Allied war effort would have been jeopardized. The people of Coventry had to be sacrificed so that others might live. It wasn’t pretty when you said it out loud, but that’s what had happened. The difference was, today the politicians didn’t have the balls to make those decisions. So the hard work had devolved to men like himself.
It was funny, he thought, that democracy couldn’t survive if it tried to adhere top to bottom to its own ideals. He knew that it was men like himself, working behind the scenes, on their own, doing what no one else could face, who made democracy function, who saved it from the knowledge of its own inherent hypocrisy, who kept it sleeping untroubled at night.
The irony was, Rain was a man who might understand all this. Didn’t the Japanese even have a name for it? Honne and tatemae-real truth, and societal façade? English could use a couple of words like that. Their absence from America’s lexicon was revealing: not only couldn’t we appreciate the necessity, we couldn’t even acknowledge the concept.
Rain. He imagined how good it was going to feel when he received confirmation that the man was dead. He was surprised at the intensity of the feeling. Ordinarily, these things weren’t personal for him. But three good men were down, and now he had to make that call to Elizabeth Shannon… not to mention the pressure all this was putting on his entire operation.
Yeah, he wanted him dead, all right. And Dox, too. He wondered if maybe he would have a chance to do it himself.
NINETEEN
THE FLIGHT TO HONG KONG the next morning was uneventful. After the restless night I’d just had, I was glad to sleep through most of it. I arrived at Hong Kong International feeling relaxed and refreshed and caught a cab to the Shangri-La.
I checked in, then called Dox on the prepaid unit he was carrying. He was in a cab, on his way to Kowloon.
“Stop at the bug-out point first, take care of that,” I said. “No sense in both of us being there at the same time. Then check in and get the clothes you need.”
“Will do.”
The bug-out point was a coffee shop near the Man Mo temple on Hollywood Road. When you go operational, or otherwise commit an act that the authorities are apt to frown upon if you’re caught, it’s wise to choose a backup meeting place to use if it becomes inconvenient to return to your hotel, and to preposition certain necessary items there: cash, for one thing; and a spare passport, for another, if you’re lucky or connected enough to know how to come by such things. You typically want a place that’s accessible at all hours and that offers many appropriate hiding spots: the underside of a counter or a bookshelf, the back of a bathroom cabinet, that sort of thing. Whether the op goes well or poorly, your things need to be in place for only a few hours. If the op goes really poorly, you’ve got bigger problems than someone stumbling across the stash you’ve taped to, say, the underside of a toilet in an all-night diner.
“When you’re done with that,” I said, “let’s meet on the mezzanine level of the Grand Hyatt at sixteen hundred. It’s away from the main lobby so it’s private, and you’ll look right at home there in your new threads.”
“Sounds good. You’ve got the gear?”
“And everything else.”
“All right, partner, see you soon.”
I turned off the phone and headed over to the hotel shopping arcade, where I got a haircut and a shave. I had them put a bunch of gel in my hair and slick it back-not my usual look, and not a dramatic alteration to my appearance, but lots of small changes would begin to add up. Next, a visit to an optometrist for a pair of rectangular wire-frame glasses that did a nice job of reworking the angles of my face. At the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall, one stop at Dunhill got me the rest of what I needed: single-breasted, double-vented navy gabardine suit, fitted with inch-and-a-half cuffs in fifteen minutes flat; white Sea Island cotton shirt and flat gold cuff links; brown split-toe lace-ups and navy socks; brown alligator belt and British-tan attaché case. It wasn’t terribly cold in Hong Kong, but perhaps just chilly enough to justify the purchase of a pair of brown deerskin gloves, which went into the attaché. I checked myself in the mirror before heading out of the store and liked what I saw: a well-off Japanese businessman, with international experience and taste, in the discreet employ of powerful industrial interests seeking a foothold in Hong Kong through one of its famous business institutions, the China Club. Hopefully I’d even get to keep the clothes when this was done. Hopefully they wouldn’t have any bullet holes in them.
I headed back to the hotel and filled the attaché case with the commo gear and other equipment. From the hotel, I caught a cab to the bug-out point, where I taped an extra passport and some other necessaries to the back of a cabinet in the men’s room. Then I walked until I found an Internet café, where I checked the bulletin board. No word from Kanezaki. From Tatsu, there was some interesting news. His post said:
Jim Hilger: Works as a financial adviser in Hong Kong for high net worth clients. Cannot confirm his possible CIA affiliations, although sources believe there was a connection there at some point. More recently, considered dirty. Suspected to be involved in black market arms trading, including Israeli weapons to various separatist groups in the region. Suspected of operating “Murder, Inc.” type organization, trading on former military and possible intelligence skills and contacts.
Mitchell William Winters: Gulf War I veteran, Third Special Forces. No other information.
Looking forward to seeing you. Take care of yourself.
All right, the more I learned, the more it seemed that Dox and I were right. Either Hilger was running his own show, or he was so far off the government reservation that he might as well be.
I Googled “Two Slain Americans Reported to Be CIA Officers” to follow up on the story we’d seen the day before in the Washington Post. This time there were dozens of hits-the other services were starting to pick up the story. I went to the Post’s site because they seemed to be breaking the news. There was a new story, this one headlined, “Americans Killed in Manila Connected to Mysterious Company.”
The Post had picked up the Gird Enterprises information and was running with it. They’d done some digging, and apparently the address listed in the company’s articles of incorporation was an empty suite in a New Jersey office park. The Post had contacted the law firm that had drawn up the articles; when told who was calling and why, the lawyer they reached hung up. Interesting.