“The information we’ve been able to piece together suggests as much. The Alazans were an unusual shipment for all parties concerned. They were using unusual means of movement.”
“I got that feeling.”
“What I mean is, if we had proceeded with our original plan, we might have lost track of the shipment. That would have been disastrous. You have a lot of admirers right now among the people I work with.”
I smiled, but the smile felt sad. “I have a feeling there’s a job offer in all of this.”
“There is.”
I laughed and looked away. I’d really been hoping there, for a minute. One glimpse of a thong bikini and my brain had gone to mush. It was ridiculous.
“At least you’re not pissed that I didn’t wait for your signal,” I said.
I heard her say, “I’m not. But none of that is why I’m here.”
I wasn’t going to buy it. “Yeah?” I said.
“I’m taking a long vacation, a long decompression, standard practice after living undercover and in danger of discovery for so long. My organization is generous this way, and sensible. They understand the stresses.”
It sounded depressingly like a sales pitch. “I’m sure they do.”
“Usually I go a little crazy for a while when an assignment is finished. I travel, hook up with some handsome young thing, try to blot out recent memories with a lot of wine, a lot of passion. No one knows where I go, and no one asks. I come back when I’m ready.”
“This time?”
“This time I thought I’d spend some time with a man I met. If he’s interested.”
I looked out at the water. A breeze was kicking up whitecaps. They flashed under the sun.
“Tell me how you found me,” I said, having waited long enough.
“After Kwai Chung, priority was given to tracking you. We put together a lot of information quickly. The more we learned about you, the more we were able to find out. And we were able to access Hong Kong Customs records, going back over a year. Smart people made assumptions, technicians fed data into supercomputers. They tracked you to South America. After that, you were gone.”
“Not gone enough, it seems.”
“You forget, I know you. We spent time together. At the Oparium Café, in Macau, you ordered caipirinhas.”
I shrugged. “They’re popular all over the world.”
“You said ‘por favor’ when you ordered.”
“No.”
She nodded. “The waitress was ethnic Portuguese, so at the time I thought you were just using some trivial knowledge of the language. But, when the technicians said they had tracked you to South America, I started thinking about what you had ordered, the way you had ordered it, your accent, the Japanese community in Brazil-”
“That’s the problem with being multilingual,” I said. “You forget what the hell language you’re speaking.”
She laughed. “Tell me about it. Can you imagine what Belghazi would have said if I had greeted him, ‘Shalom’?”
We both laughed. She said, “Anyway, Rio felt right to me. Partly because of what you said about retiring to a sunny place, a place with beaches. But partly because… it just felt right. I decided to give it a try. São Paulo would have been my second choice. But a caipirinha wouldn’t taste nearly as good there, would it?”
“You want to get one now?”
She smiled. “It’s ten in the morning.”
I shrugged. “I’ve got a room at the Copacabana Palace, right behind us. We could kill some time first.”
Her smile broadened. “That sounds nice,” she said.
Maybe it was all part of some larger plan, wheels within wheels. Maybe this was the job offer, and she was my signing bonus.
I supposed I would never know. Her motives, I understood, would remain a mystery, the time I might share with her a mirage, a kaleidoscope animated by the engine of my own foolish hopes, an attractive illusion, a projection.
On the other hand, she had warned me about that guy who’d been waiting for me in my room in Macau. That was the one thing that refused to fit, the one telling detail. Because, based on everything I’d learned since, I still couldn’t see any operational benefit that she would have derived from that warning. And if operational imperatives couldn’t explain it, it had to be something else.
Watching her there on the sand, I realized I’d been evaluating her too one-dimensionally, perhaps in unconscious and unflattering reflection of the way I view myself. She had refused to answer at the time when I’d asked her why she’d warned me. She might not even have known herself. But now I thought I might know. It was the desire, in the midst of a horrible business full of deceit and killing and regret, not to be responsible for an additional death. To expiate the sins of righteous butchery by saving a single life.
I could understand that. I could even hope for it. It was a pretty slim reed on which to try to build trust, but it was something.
It was a start.
I looked at her and asked, “How long are you going to be in town?”
She smiled. “A while, I hope.”
I held out my hand. She took it and we stood. Then we walked back to the hotel.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Hong Kong, Macau, Rio, Tokyo, and Virginia locales that appear in this book are described, as always, as I have found them. The backstory of Transdniester and the Alazan missiles is real.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deepest thanks:
To my agents, Nat Sobel and Judith Weber of Sobel Weber Associates, for the conception; to my editor, David Highfill of Putnam, for the execution; and to Michael Barson and the Barsonians of Putnam, for the dissemination. What a team!
To Lori Andreini, for her continued insights into what sophisticated, sexy women like Delilah wear and how they think, and for helpful comments on the manuscript.
To my once and future sensei Koichiro Fukasawa of Wasabi Communications, for years of insight, humor, and friendship, and, as always, for helpful comments on the manuscript.
To Doug Patteson, for consistently pointing me in the right direction, for refining numerous ideas for the book’s backstory, and for his enthusiasm for John Rain generally.
To Evan Rosen, M.D., Ph.D., and Peter Zimetbaum, M.D., for once again offering (reluctant) expert advice on some of the killing techniques in this book, and for helpful comments on the manuscript.
To Ernie Tibaldi, a thirty-one-year veteran agent of the FBI, for continuing to generously share his encyclopedic knowledge of law enforcement and personal safety issues, and for helpful comments on the manuscript; to Michael Stapleton, a thirty-three-year veteran Special Agent of the FBI, for sharing his expertise on fingerprinting and DNA forensic science; and to a certain active-duty FBI agent, who must remain nameless, for sharing his expertise on defending against improvised explosive devices.
To Amelia Chan, Monica Chan, Norman Chan, Daniel Fok, and Kai Cheong Fok, for being such wonderful hosts and guides during my research visits to Macau; for training Rain in how to look like a local and blend thereby; and for sharing their many insights about the territory and the region.
To Alika Yamamura, carioca and edokko, for imparting her firsthand insights on what it means to share Japanese ethnicity and Brazilian nationality, and for furthering my understanding of Brazil and Brazilians.
To Bob Baer, for his excellent Sleeping with the Deviclass="underline" How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, to which Kanezaki owes some of his thinking regarding the U.S.-Saudi relationship, including his comments about a conspiracy of silence and “incest.”
To Gavin De Becker for The Gift of Fear, which has helped Rain (and countless others) spot subtle signs of danger and effectively deal with potential violence.