The Last Assassin

While we waited for Delilah, I took out the plans and drew a grid over them. Top to bottom, I lettered A through K. Left to right, I numbered one through twenty-four. When I was done, we had a convenient and reliable way of discussing every position in the club.

A few minutes later, there was a knock. Dox looked through the peephole, then opened the door. It was Delilah.

'Well, hello there,' he said. 'Ain't you a sight for sore eyes.'

She was, too. She was wearing a black cocktail dress made of some kind of embroidered lace, with a satin capelet thrown over her shoulders. She had on high-heeled shoes, but not stilettos, which would have been too much, and was carrying a black silk beaded evening bag. Her hair was pulled back, and she had employed just a little smoky gray eye shadow and a hint of gloss on her lips.

'Dox,' she said, smiling. She came in and he closed the door behind her. Then she turned and kissed him on both cheeks, European style. I saw the dress had an exceptionally low-cut, open back. The revealed skin and musculature of her back was gasp-inducing erotic, and the material below hugged her ass exactly right – as though her body, not the dress, was responsible for the arresting effect. The overall impression was sophisticated, confident, and sexy as hell.

I saw Dox blushing from the kiss and could have laughed. She'd had that effect on him the first time he saw her in Phuket, and it had never gone away.

'Honey,' he said, 'if they don't offer you a job on the spot tonight, they are either crazy or blind or both.'

Her smile widened. She looked him over and said, 'You kept the beard off. You look great.'

'Well, someone once told me I have good bones, and that was the end of that.'

She laughed, then turned to me and nodded. I nodded back.

The room was noticeably quiet for a moment. Dox looked at Delilah, then at me. 'I don't mean to pry,' he said, 'but I'm detecting some animosity in the air. Is this little tiff the two of you seem to be having going to make it hard for us to work together?'

Delilah and I looked at each other and said in stereo, 'No.'

Dox nodded. 'Good, I feel reassured already.'

The room was quiet for another moment. To fill the silence, I said to Delilah, 'You look good. You bring that outfit with you?'

She shook her head. 'There are so many French designers in Tokyo, I might as well have been shopping in Paris.'

I passed out sandwiches and we ate sitting on the double beds. Dox did a nice job of keeping the conversation going, asking Delilah what she thought of Tokyo, things like that.

'I like it,' she said. 'I slept for a few hours, then spent the afternoon and evening shopping and riding the trains. For some reason I didn't expect to see so many westerners.'

'Depends on where you are in the city,' I said. 'Where we're going to be operating, you won't look out of place at all. In some of the eastern and outlying areas, you would.'

She nodded. 'I did a walk-through past the club. Minami Aoyama is what, upscale boutiques and restaurants?'

'That's about right,' I said. 'Classy and cool. Perfect venue for Whispers.'

'Right next to Roppongi, too,' Dox added. 'Which is my favorite part of town.'

Roppongi is one of the city's entertainment districts, the premier place for foreign men chasing Japanese women, and Japanese women who want to be chased.

Delilah looked at him. 'I've heard about Roppongi. I strolled around a bit, but it didn't seem like much.'

Dox grinned. 'It's different at night.'

Delilah smiled. 'I reckon it is,' she said in her best southern drawl.

That broke Dox up. I didn't share his reaction.

'All right, here's the plan,' I said. 'Delilah, you go to the club tonight. You want to get inside and see as much as possible. Ideally, you'll find a way to get invited back for tomorrow night, when Yamaoto will be there with Big Liu. But at a minimum, you can confirm certain critical details just by getting inside tonight.'

'How confident are you that I'm going to be able to just walk in there?' she asked. 'From the way you've described the place, it sounds like they're pretty careful people.'

'There's no way to find out except to try,' I said. 'But I have a feeling it'll be easier than you think. It's not a big cash business, so they're not concerned about getting knocked over. Even if there were a lot of cash, it's a yakuza operation, who's going to rob it? And whatever other trouble they might be looking for and trying to screen out, it doesn't look like you.'

'What about language? I speak about three words of Japanese.'

'English will be fine. Almost all their members will speak at least a little. And even if their English is terrible, it'll make them feel cosmopolitan to use it with you.'

Dox added, 'I've, uh, heard there are plenty of foreign hostesses in Japan who don't speak Japanese. 'Course I don't know for sure. John's really the one to ask about that.'

I shot him a look, then said to Delilah, 'In fact… in fact, you should stay with French. It'll make you that much more exotic, and anyone there using English will be more comfortable talking in front of you if they think you can't understand. Yeah, whoever you encounter, try French first, and if they can't understand it, switch to basic, struggling, screwed-up, heavily accented English. Play it right and they might actually start to feel protective, want to take care of you.'

She nodded. 'Okay.'

'Now, assuming you can get in, and I think you can, the things we're most interested in at this point are ways of ingress and egress, whether doors open in or out, presence of emergency lighting systems…'

'I know how to case a room.'

Whatever tensions we were dealing with personally, I wasn't going to let them cause us to go about this half-assed.

'I know you do,' I said. 'But can we go through this anyway? It'll help me feel sure I'm not missing anything.'

She caught the reference to the conversation we'd had on the way from the airport and knew I was being diplomatic to the point of sarcasm. But she also knew I was right. She nodded and said nothing.

I unfolded the floor plans and spread them out on the bed. 'Here's the club,' I said. 'Familiarize yourself with the layout. We need to confirm that these plans are current and otherwise accurate, and to know all the relevant aspects of the local terrain that don't show up here in two dimensions.'

She gave me a slow nod that said, I'm not stupid, you know.

'I'm not talking down to you,' I said, trying to rein in my frustration. 'I know you know all this. But it's better to say it out loud and not to assume. You know that, too.'

Dox said, 'He does it to me all the time, too. He's a repressed man, and I've come to realize that micro-management is one of his few ways of expressing affection. Once you realize that, you'll actually start to like it. I know I do.'

Delilah closed her eyes and laughed. I supposed I should have been grateful to Dox for managing the tension in the room, but it was irritating to see them getting along like old friends while I could hardly find anything to say to her that didn't provoke an angry response.

'Start with the entrance,' I said. 'How do you get in? Do the doors open freely, or does someone need to buzz you in from inside? Is there a camera out front? Security? All I could see when I reconnoitered was a pair of valets.'

I pointed to the plans. 'Now we go inside. This space inside the front entrance – I would guess there's a hostess or hostesses waiting there, probably to check coats and lead customers into the club itself. There might also be security. Maybe an additional set of doors. And here, this small room opposite the entrance doors. Probably a back office. It would be good to know what and who is in there.'

'Got it.'

'Now this big space,' I said. 'Presumably it's the main room. I'm guessing tables, booths… Is it cluttered? Spacious? Are there clear fields of fire? If there are obstructions, I want to know where.'

'Okay.'