“I’ll let you know when I’m ready,” I told him, rotating my head, loosening my neck.
He gave me the grin again. “I’ll be right here.”
He walked over to the wall and popped up into a headstand. Christ, he was still doing that shit.
I stretched and worked through a series of Hindu squats, neck bridges, and other calisthenics until I felt sufficiently limbered. Then I stood and signaled to Dox, who had been watching from his headstand. He dropped his legs to the floor, came to his feet, and strolled over.
“You’re good, man, I can see it. Rolling through on those neck bridges smooth. You’re staying in shape.”
Although he’d been damn effective in the field, in other contexts Dox had always talked too much for my taste. He still had the habit, it seemed. “You want to start standing, or on the ground?” I asked.
“Whatever you want, man,” he said. “It’s your place.”
If he’d intended the comment to rattle me, he’d failed. But I did feel some irritation, mild for the moment. I thought I might not be able to respond as quickly as decorum ordinarily demanded when he tapped out from a submission hold.
I nodded and started circling. He got the idea and followed suit.
We closed and I took the back of his neck in my right hand, my elbow down, pressed in against his clavicle and chest, controlling his forward movement. He grabbed a similar hold with his right and yanked my head toward his, the movement fast enough to almost be a head butt. I looked down in time to take the impact on the top of my skull, where it didn’t do anything more than hurt. My irritation edged up a notch. But before I had a chance to react further, he started muscling me with the neck hold, jerking me left, right, forward and back. He was using his hand and elbow confidently, which showed some training, and he was strong as hell.
Time to change tactics. I snapped his neck toward me, and then, as he pulled back, used the hold to launch myself into the air under him. I wrapped my legs around his waist and dragged him down to the mat. I had expected him to try to retreat from my “guard,” as the position is known in jujitsu, but instead he went the opposite way, grabbing and twisting my head in both pawlike hands and attacking the underside of my jaw with the top of his head. It felt like someone was trying to run a pile driver up through my skull. To relieve the pressure, I unlocked my ankles from around his back, brought my knees to his chest, and started pushing him away.
Once again, his reaction showed training: he wrapped his right arm around my left ankle from the inside out and dropped back to the mat, trying for what I recognized as a sambo foot lock. Sambo is a variety of Russian wrestling. It’s distinguished by, among other things, its emphasis on foot, knee, and ankle locks, some of which can be applied so swiftly and can cause such extensive damage that they’ve been outlawed from various grappling competitions.
I shot my right foot into his neck and jerked the other leg back, just barely getting it clear from between his biceps and ribs. He tried to scramble away, and as we scuffled I managed to throw my right leg over his left and across his body and to catch his left toes under my right armpit. Before he could kick free, I over-hooked his heel with the inside of my right wrist; clasped my hands together and clamped my elbows to my sides; and arched back and twisted to my left in my own little demonstration of sambo prowess, a classic heel hook.
Despite the technique’s name, the attack is to the knee joint, not the heel. The heel serves only as the lever, and I had a nice grip on Dox’s. He tried to kick with his right leg, but from this position the kicks were feeble. I twisted a fraction more and he gave up that strategy.
“Tap, tap,” he said. “You got me.”
“Who sent you here?”
“Hey, I said ‘tap!’ Come on, now!”
I twisted another fraction and he yelped. “Who sent you?” I asked again.
“You know who sent me,” he said, grimacing. “Same outfit as last time.”
“Yeah? How did they know where to look?”
“I don’t know!”
He tried to push my leg off. I squeezed my knees tighter and twisted his heel another millimeter.
“Fuck!” he said, loud enough for other people to hear. “C’mon, man, I seriously don’t know!”
His breathing was getting more labored, as much from pain as from exertion. I looked in his eyes.
“Hey, Dox,” I said, my voice calm, almost a whisper. “I’m going to count to three. If you haven’t told me what I want to know by then, I’m going to twist as hard as I can. Ready? One. Two. Thr-”
“The girl! The girl! They paid her, or something. I don’t know the details.”
I almost twisted anyway.
“What girl?”
“You know. The Brazilian chick. Naomi something.”
I was less surprised than I would have imagined. I’d have to think about that, later.
“Who’s your handler?”
“Jesus Christ, man, I’ll tell you what you want to know. You don’t have to… fuck! Kanezaki! Ethnic Japanese guy, about thirty, wire-rimmed glasses, says he knows you.”
Kanezaki. I should have known. I’d let him live when I’d first found him trying to tail me. I wondered briefly whether that had been a mistake.
I noticed that several people were watching us, including Carlinhos, the founder of the academy and its chief instructor. No one was moving to interfere, recognizing, as Brazilians do, that this problem was homem homem-man to man-and not yet their concern. Still, I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself. I released his leg and disengaged.
The tension ran out of his body and he slumped onto his back, cradling his injured knee. “Oh, man, I can’t believe you did that,” he said. “That was totally unnecessary, man.”
I didn’t respond.
“What if I really hadn’t known, huh? What then?”
I shrugged. “Surgery to reconstruct the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments and menisci, then maybe a six- to twelve-month rehabilitation. Lots of painkillers that wouldn’t work nearly as well as you’d want.”
“Shit,” he grunted. A minute or so passed. Then he sat up and looked at me. He flexed his leg and flashed his indefatigable grin.
“I almost had you, man. And you know it.”
“Sure,” I said, looking at him. “Almost.” I stood. “Where did you learn the sambo?”
The grin widened. “Since the dreaded Iron Curtain got lifted, I’ve been working some with the Ruskies.”
“They let you in, after some of the shit you pulled on them in ’Stan?”
He shrugged. “It’s a whole new world, partner, with whole new enemies. I’m helping them with their Chechen problem now, so we’re like old buddies.”
I nodded. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”
We grabbed our bags and left without changing. I still had the bug and transmitter detector Harry had once made for me. It lay quietly in my bag, powered up from its daily charging, and I knew neither Dox nor his belongings was wired. But that didn’t mean he was alone.
I took him along a circuitous series of quiet neighborhood streets. Twice we got in and out of taxis. I stayed with generic countersurveillance techniques, not wanting to take specific advantage of the area’s features lest he conclude by my intimate knowledge of the local terrain that I must be a resident. He knew what I was doing and didn’t protest.
By the time we had reached the beach at São Conrado, I knew we were clean. The rain had stopped and we strolled down to the edge of the water. The tide was receding, giving up wet sand like a defeated army abandoning terrain it could no longer control.
A minute passed. Neither of us spoke.
A ball from a nearby game of beach soccer rolled our way. Dox picked it up and threw it back at the brown-skinned kid who was chasing after it. The kid waved his thanks and went back to the game. I watched him for a moment, wondering what it would be like to grow up like that, in a city by the sea with nothing worse to do than play soccer on the sand.