The gym was a large former cottage that had been gutted, carpeted, and outfitted with the latest equipment. It had a high ceiling and large windows. Delilah glanced inside, and immediately saw Rain. He was in a corner, barefoot, in shorts and a tee-shirt, doing squats. She watched, fascinated. She knew he worked out and he’d told her a bit about his solo routines, but she’d never seen him. He was going fast now, squat, stand, squat, stand, occasionally brushing a wet strand of hair back from his eyes. She didn’t know how many he’d done before she started watching, but she counted two hundred and fifty, and then fifty more where at the end of every rep he leaped into the air.
He paused for a moment, and she sensed he was going to scan the windows. She stepped to the side and waited for a moment so he wouldn’t see her. She wanted to keep watching.
After a few seconds, she looked back inside. Rain was doing handstand push-ups, freestanding, not against the wall. Slowly this time: up, down onto his forehead, hold, then up again. She counted ten, and then he dropped over into a back bridge and did fifty more push-ups, inverted. A dark line of sweat ran down the front of his tee-shirt.
He flipped over and stood, and Delilah moved out of the way again. When she looked back inside, he was hanging from the horizontal bar of one of the machines, his hands spaced widely. She looked more closely…was he using just his fingertips? Yes, he was. He did twenty pull-ups, then dropped down and shadowboxed in front of the mirror. No, it wasn’t just shadow boxing, she realized; he was incorporating other elements, ripping and grappling movements she recognized, like some kind of customized karate kata. As he circled around, she caught a glimpse of his face. His eyes were closed, and she was surprised, even disconcerted, at the intensity of his expression. This was no dance for him, she knew; the movements were techniques he could use, had used, to kill. She wondered what, or whom, he was picturing right then that would produce such mimed ferocity, and imagined it must be Hilger.
She knew there was a dark skein of intensity deep in Rain’s nature, something that only rarely revealed itself at the surface. It was a quality that intrigued her, and, she had to admit, was part of what attracted her to him, but he never let her see it, and her only previous glimpses had been brief and inadvertent. She wondered why he was letting himself cut loose like this now, in a room with so many windows. It must have been the sense of privacy the hotel grounds fostered. Then she realized she had probably posed the wrong question: maybe he wasn’t letting himself. Maybe right now he couldn’t help it. Regardless, this was the longest she’d ever watched him unbeknownst, and it fascinated and excited her in equal measure.
After five minutes of the drills, Rain started stretching, and Delilah knew he was warming down. She eased away from the window and returned to the room.
A short while later, sitting in front of the fireplace, the lights turned low, she heard the key in the lock. She stood and watched the door open a crack, then swing wider when Rain saw it was her.
“Hey,” he said, looking her over. He was pumped from the workout and she liked the way the tee-shirt clung to him.
“Hey,” she said, smiling. She had planned on giving him a hard time about not being there when she arrived, but now she was just glad to see him.
He bolted the door, then walked over and kissed her lightly. She reached around for the back of his head, holding him there, prolonging the greeting, letting it turn into something more.
He raised his glistening arms like a doctor prepping for surgery. “I’m all wet,” he said.
She let out a little laugh. “Me, too. But I’m starving…why don’t you shower and we’ll get something to eat?”
They decided on the low-key lounge rather than the more formal dining room, and sat adjacent to each other at a corner table amid dark paneling, low light, and a wood fire. He looked good to her after a week away, casual in faded jeans, a checked oxford cloth shirt, and the cashmere blazer, his dark hair still wet from the shower. Delilah ordered filet of beef with Stilton; Rain, roast chicken with polenta, and they shared terrine of foie gras and a lobster corn custard. Rain chose a bottle of ’89 Lynch-Bages Bordeaux, and while they ate and drank, she asked him questions, and worked to sift through the responses.
“What does Hilger want?” she asked, quietly. “Why is he doing this?”
For almost a minute, Rain was silent, rolling the stem of his wineglass through his fingers, his eyes on the liquid inside. Just as Delilah thought he wasn’t going to answer, he said, “He wants me to do three jobs.”
There was no need to ask what the jobs would consist of. And she knew he wouldn’t tell her the details. In fact, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
Again he was silent for a long time. Then he said, “If I don’t do the jobs, Hilger will kill Dox. If I do the jobs, he’ll kill Dox as soon as I’m done.”
“Not just that. He might…”
“Yes, he’ll probably be using one of the jobs as a setup to take me out, too. I know. That’s why I have to find out where Dox is being held, and free him. There’s no other way he’s coming out of this alive.”
She couldn’t disagree with his assessment. She said, “You’re playing for time, then.”
Rain nodded. “Time, and information. Part of the reason I wanted to see Hilger in person was to make him move. Tracking someone who’s frozen is hard. Moving, he’ll leave a trail.”
“Has he?”
“So far, only fragments. I know he’s got Dox on a boat, and on one of our calls they were in Jakarta. He’s probably moving among various Indonesian islands, and maybe ports in nearby countries. I’m trying to narrow it down.”
She knew not to ask him whether he had already done one of the jobs. Her gut told her he had. And still it hadn’t been enough. He was going to have to do it again. God.
She took a sip of wine, thinking. “And you’re sure Dox is…”
He nodded. “I’ve spoken to him twice. The first time, Hilger did something to him to make him scream. He screamed for a long time.”
From the flatness of his tone and the stillness of his expression, he might have been describing something he’d read about in the news, not the overheard torture of a friend. What was it costing him, to recall and relate a memory like that one with such dispassion?
She took his hand and looked at him. “I’m sorry, John.”
He shook his head slightly, his eyes still on his wineglass.
“Hey,” she said. With her other hand, she reached for his chin, and gently steered his face toward hers. He met her eyes, and the flatness she saw in his actually made her flinch. She’d seen eyes like that before, on Gil, her colleague, the frighteningly efficient killer who had died in Hong Kong. But Gil’s eyes were like that all the time; it was all there was to him. It was worse to see the look on John, whom she knew so much better, whom she cared about so intimately.
He blinked, then suddenly was back, his eyes alive again. He swallowed and looked away. “You, uh, you want dessert?” he asked, glancing around for the waiter.
They finished with a Grand Marnier soufflé accompanied by glasses of an ’85 Graham’s Port, followed by French-press coffee. That look she’d seen didn’t return, but nor could she say he was being himself. It was almost as though someone was doing a good imitation of him, but the persona wasn’t quite natural, with some acting, some effort showing through it. But why? What was he hiding?
Back at the suite, Rain poured them each a healthy measure of the Glenmorangie. The fire had burned low, and she sat on the couch, the lights off, watching him kneel in the glow of the embers, moving coals, adding logs, getting it going again. After a little while, there was a good blaze, and she thought he would join her. But he didn’t. He stayed where he was, kneeling almost formally, one hand under the whiskey glass, the other on its side, watching the flames, his back to her.