“Because they were meeting at the China Club in Hong Kong last night.”
“They were meeting… holy shit, where is Al-Jib now?”
“I expect he’s being fished out of Victoria Harbor. Unless he was able to swim for shore with five bullets in him.”
He shook his head as though incredulous. “That was you, at the China Club?”
I shrugged.
He shook his head again. “Someone ought to give you a medal.”
“I’d settle for just getting paid. Anyway, how do you know Hilger wasn’t trying to develop Al-Jib, run him somehow? Maybe Al-Jib would have led to other sources.”
He took a breath and let it out. “Who knows what Hilger was up to with Al-Jib? The man was dirty.”
I took a sip from the demitasse. “So what happens to him now?”
He shrugged. “I don’t think he has much of a chance, but I don’t have all the information yet. What happened at the China Club?”
I told him, leaving out Dox’s and Delilah’s involvement.
He sat silently while I briefed him, shaking his head as though incredulous. When I was done, he said, “You did Manny, too. Unbelievable. You really should get a medal.”
“I wish I’d thought to come to you a week ago and ask what it would be worth to you for me to take these guys out. I probably could have retired on it.”
“That would be a tragic loss. Guess I can’t ask you who you were working for this time?”
“Guess you’re right.”
“It’s okay. I can imagine.”
“You can imagine all you want.”
“Well, from what you’ve told me, I don’t think Hilger can survive this. His supporters are all going to be running for cover.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I get the feeling this guy is a survivor. Look at the way he turned things around at Kwai Chung last year, and made off with two million U.S. in the process. I wouldn’t underestimate him.”
“I’m not,” he said.
I finished my espresso and set down the demitasse. “Are you still in touch with Tatsu?” I asked.
“A bit,” he said, his tone guarded, and I knew they were in touch a lot.
I nodded. “Spend time with him. He’s walked the narrow path you seem to be on for a long time, and somehow he hasn’t managed to fall off. That’s rare. You should try to learn his secret.”
“What path are you talking about?”
“The one where the end justifies the means.”
He nodded.
“Well,” I said, getting up, “seeing as I’ve just eliminated two of the entries on Uncle Sam’s nonexistent terrorism hit list, I guess I can count on you to pay for the coffee?”
He stood and smiled. “My pleasure.”
I looked at him. “Is this on you, though? Or the government?”
“It’s on me.”
I nodded. “That’s what I thought.”
I held out my hand and we shook. “Ki o tsukero yo,” I said. Be careful.
“So shimasu,” he told me. I will.
TWENTY-THREE
HILGER SAT in the Dragonair departures area at Hong Kong International, waiting for his flight to Shanghai. The sun was up and he was exhausted.
It had been a long night. Deleting the files hadn’t required much time. They were all electronic, after all. And collecting his essential gear hadn’t been a problem, either, as much of it was kept in a bag that served as the civilian equivalent of the bug-out kits they had been taught to use in the military. It had been the phone calls that had taken a while. There were the people in his network, who needed to be warned. There were the family members, who needed to be prepared. And there were the politicians, who needed to be importuned. Each set of calls had been more difficult than the one that preceded it.
He wasn’t worried about himself. He’d been ready for a day like this, and his backup systems had worked well. Even if they hadn’t, and he’d been forced to take a fall or even worse, he could have handled it. What was hard to come to grips with was the total unraveling of his op. He’d been so close to achieving so much. America was in mortal danger, and wasn’t doing enough to safeguard against it. With his operation crippled, he thought the worst was now inevitable.
He’d read an article once, about the wildfires they have every few years in Southern California. Some expert was explaining that, because of the encroachment of suburban development on woodlands, the small fires nature employed to clear out the underbrush were no longer permissible. As a result, year after year, the underbrush got thicker and drier and more ready to combust. Sooner or later, the expert said, something will always set that underbrush off. It’s almost mathematically certain.
He looked at a WMD attack on America in much the same terms. There was so much post-Soviet matériel out there, and so many fanatics who wanted to use it, that it was just a matter of time. But no one wanted to accept this fact, any more than the Los Angeles suburban homeowners wanted to accept that a little annual soot on their wood siding might be a small price to pay to avoid a fucking holocaust. It was just how people’s minds worked. There wasn’t much you could do about it.
He shook his head, disgusted. It all made him think of the way municipalities install traffic lights. After a certain number of auto fatalities at a given intersection, the politicians say, “Hmm, we ought to put in a light there.” They were going to do the same thing when New York had disappeared under a mushroom cloud.
Or maybe he was giving the idiots too much credit. Hell, losing New York… maybe they would just pause for a minute, then go back to renaming French fries and prohibiting gay marriage and the other priorities of the day.
Yeah, the politicians were in thrall to Big Oil, or brain-dead, or both. If anyone was going to prevent a cataclysm, it would be Hilger, and the team he had built.
He sighed. Al-Jib was one of his linchpins. If Hilger just could have learned a little more about the man’s contacts, where his knowledge had been disseminated, they might actually have been able to stuff some of the fucking genie back in the bottle. But not now. Al-Jib probably wouldn’t touch Hilger after this. That is, assuming the man was still alive. The blonde in the China Club, whoever she was, had taken off after him like a hungry lioness hot on a gazelle.
Well, there were little silver linings in the cloud. When his pissant National Security Council contact had started back-pedaling about whether the White House could support Hilger in the face of another mess, Hilger had just told the man what a shame it would be when Hilger’s client list came to light, with the contact’s name and those of several other prominent political personages on it. The helpless silence that had followed that warning was one of the most satisfying sounds Hilger had ever heard. The contact’s plan of simply saying “I have no recollection of that event, Senator,” and “I don’t recall that meeting, Senator,” and “I can’t imagine I would have done that, Senator, because that would be wrong,” suddenly just wasn’t going to be adequate, and the piece of shit knew it.
Hilger had gone on to explain that he was no Edwin Wilson. If he went down, lots of people would be coming with him, first among them Mr. NSC contact. Do I need to explain further? Hilger had asked. No, the contact had told him in a tight, emasculated voice. He had made himself perfectly clear.
Wilson had been an operative the Agency allegedly fired back in 1971, but who had gone on acting like a spook afterward, carrying out assassinations, laundering money, and selling plastic explosives to countries like Libya, until he was jailed in 1983. Wilson claimed that he’d never left the Agency and that the whole thing had been a sanctioned op; the government, predictably, claimed he was fabricating. Hilger didn’t know the truth-that information would be very closely held, just as it was for him-but he suspected the whole thing had been an op. After all, how do you get close to a man like Kaddafi? By selling him what he wants. There were people who understood this principle then, just as there were people, like Hilger, who understood it today.