Reasonable enough, but I could feel that he sensed I was arguing with him, and was suspicious about why. I needed to rein that shit in.
Kanezaki picked up his coffee and looked at it for a moment, then said, “There’s more. Both bad guys died of a single twenty-two-caliber gunshot to the eye. Even from close up, and the victims were hit close up, that’s a hell of a shot. Whoever pulled the trigger is confident enough to use something with low penetration power because he knows he can place one shot where it needs to go to get the job done.”
He. Interesting.
“The woman’s not the shooter?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I think she’s the spotter. She’s like a very specialized mole. She gets vetted by the target, passes the test, gets inside. The target is still taking other precautions, of course, and thinks he’s safe. But there’s a flaw in his security, and he’s sleeping with it. Then, when the woman judges that the moment is right, she makes a phone call. That night, the guy she’s with runs into a bullet. She’s not there when it happens, and she vanishes afterward. No one knows she was involved.”
He took a sip of coffee. “You know, I once read an article about unexplained car accidents. It seems a significant percentage of automotive fatalities gets filed under ‘unknown causes.’ Broad daylight, bright sunshine, a guy flips his car and dies. A lot of times when this happens, it turns out the windows were rolled down. So one theory is, the guy is driving along, listening to the radio, enjoying the beautiful day, and a bee flies into the car. The guy freaks, tries slapping at the bee, gets distracted, boom. The bee flies away. ‘Unknown causes.’ I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.”
“Who’s she working for, then?”
“Don’t know. A lot of possibilities, because these guys have lots of enemies. Could be a business competitor, someone moving in on the weapons contracts or the cash transactions to get better access to the skim. Could be the French-they’ve got their fingers in everything and you never really know what the hell they’re doing or why. But my guess is, it’s an Israeli operation.”
I nodded, both impressed by and not particularly liking his insights. It was one thing for me to have an idea of who Delilah was, who she was with. I could use the information any way I liked, I could control the situation. It was another thing to have the CIA taking an interest. “Why?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Because the Israelis have the most constant and immediate motive to disrupt the infrastructure and they’re always trying to do so, any way they can. Because Israeli assassination teams like to work with twenty-twos-they’re small and concealable and relatively quiet. The teams that killed the Septemberists who did Munich were using twenty-twos. And because the shooter is so good. And likewise for the woman. The guys she’s setting up and knocking down aren’t lightweights, so if she’s doing what I think she’s doing, she must be damn good at it. Mossad quality.”
“You think she’s Mossad?”
He nodded. “I think she’s part of the Collections branch. Collections does the target assessment and evaluation, after a committee has decided on the hit. Specialists, called Kidon, or Bayonets, part of the special Metsada unit, are the actual triggermen. So the division of labor here, it has an Israeli feel to me. Have you seen her again?”
“No,” I said, reflexively.
He paused for a moment, then said, “I was almost hoping you had. It’s not impossible that she could have been behind whoever attacked you in Hong Kong.”
Oddly enough, the notion seemed less likely when proposed by Kanezaki than it did when I was grappling with it myself.
“They were Arabs,” I said.
“Mossad uses Arab factions all the time. False flag ops. But anyway, I don’t know for sure that she’s Israeli. I told you, she could also be working for a faction. Or she could be a freelancer.” He smiled. “You know those freelancers, they’ll work for anyone.”
“Even the CIA,” I said, not returning the smile.
“That’s true. But she’s not one of ours. I would know about it.”
“I wouldn’t overestimate how much you know about what your organization is up to. Your motto could be, ‘Don’t worry, our right hand doesn’t have a clue about the left.’ ”
He chuckled. “That can be true at times.”
We were quiet for a moment.
I didn’t want him to think I was protecting Delilah. Didn’t want him to think there was anything personal motivating me. In my experience, giving the CIA emotional information is like handing a hot poker to a sadist. Better to have him think my attempts to downplay the woman’s significance were motivated by something else.
“Anyway, I don’t think the woman is as important as I first did,” I said. “I only saw her the once. She’s probably not the one in your files. I’m sure I can handle Belghazi just fine.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You worried that, if we think someone else is going to take out Belghazi, we’ll take you off the case?”
I could have smiled. He was good-a lot better than when I’d first gotten to know him-but he had just gone for the head fake I’d offered.
I frowned, overplaying it just slightly to convince him his suspicions were right, to make the impression stick. Pretending to ignore his question out of annoyance, I said, “I want to hear what you know about the team that just came after me.”
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “All right, I’ll level with you. I think there’s a leak on our side. But I don’t want to say more until I’ve had a chance to run it down.”
I was getting that feeling from him, that feeling of this guy is an agent, I can run him just like they taught me down at the Farm, string him along, take him where I want him to go.
I looked at him for a long moment, letting him feel the coldness in my eyes. “ ‘I’ll level with you,’ ” I repeated, saying it slowly. “You know, I’ve never liked that phrase. To me it always sounds like, ‘Up until now I’ve been full of shit.’ ”
“No, it sounds like, ‘Up until now, I’ve been judiciously holding something back.’ ”
“If you think I can appreciate the difference, you must assume I’m capable of CIA-class subtlety,” I said, still looking at him.
His color deepened. He was remembering his security escort, the one whose neck I had broken.
“Look,” he said, raising his hands, palms forward, “I’ve seen you act precipitously before, okay? You can be very direct, and I admire you for it, it’s why you’re so good at what you do. But if I tell you something half-baked that turns out to be wrong and you go off and act on it, there are going to be very serious repercussions. For everyone involved.”
I said nothing. My expression didn’t change.
“Besides,” he went on, and his urge to keep talking satisfied me that his discomfort was increasing, “it’s not like you’ve been totally aboveboard with me either, okay? You expect me to believe you haven’t seen the woman again? I don’t buy it. Whoever she is, the one in the file or someone else, she didn’t travel all the way to Macau with Belghazi for a single cameo appearance. Trust works two ways, okay?”
Maybe I’d been wrong a moment earlier, thinking he was still a bit unseasoned. He was sharp, and getting sharper all the time. Shame on me for underestimating him.
But I’d give him a pat on the back later. For now, I needed to keep up the pressure.
“Did you have a fucking death squad come after you in the last week, Kanezaki?” I asked, my eyes still cold and direct. When he didn’t answer, I said, “No, I didn’t think so. Well, I did. In connection with a job for which you retained me. So let’s just cut the ‘love is a two-way street’ bullshit right now or I’m going to conclude that you’ve been dissembling.”
There was a long pause. Then he said, “All right. Belghazi is part of a list. A hit list. Of course, it’s not called a ‘hit list.’ Even post-Nine-Eleven, no one would use a description like that.”