Killing Rain (7 page)

We each pulled a hat from a pocket. Mine was a baseball cap; Dox’s was for fishing. Witnesses tend to remember gross details only, such as shirt color or the presence of a hat, and elementary precautions like ours can save a lot of grief later.

We moved to the door. “Ready?” I asked.

“Right behind you, partner.”

I looked at him. He was grinning.

“Goddamnit,” I said, “we were the victims, remember? You need to look scared.”

“Man, I am scared!”

“Try to show it better,” I growled.

“Fuck, man, I’m telling you this is how I look when I’m scared!”

Our eyes locked for a moment. His grin didn’t budge.

I shook my head and said, “Here we go.”

I opened the door. The corridor was clear. No sign of Manny or the boy. Just outside the corridor, though, the mood among the dining crowd had clearly been disrupted. The people with good sense and experience with the sound of indoor gunfire were wisely heading down the escalators. The curious, the deniers, and the simply stupid were lined up and gawking. For
their benefit, I turned my head back toward the bathroom and shouted, “They’re shooting in there! Somebody call a guard!”

I heard Dox add, “I’m scared! I’m scared!”

An unhelpful thought flashed through my mind—
My partner is insane
—but I kept moving. My quick scan of the crowd hadn’t revealed my biggest concern—that individual or handful of individuals you will always encounter in a crisis who, sometimes by instinct but more often by experience, are not fleeing and not in denial, but instead calmly watching and evaluating, and perhaps looking for an opportunity to intervene. Ordinarily, these people simply make better than average witnesses later on, although sometimes they can access some deep-seated protective impulse and actually attack. I kept my head down and avoided anyone’s eyes, and we joined the crowds hurrying down the escalator. In my peripheral vision, I saw two white-shirted security guards heading up opposite us. Neither had drawn his gun; they weren’t sure what the trouble was and weren’t yet taking it fully seriously.

On the second floor, the crowd was less agitated but still distracted. People were looking around, trying to figure out what had happened, what was the disturbance, whether they needed to do anything or if they could just get back to their shopping.

We moved laterally, heading in the direction of the next set of down escalators. As we walked, we each automatically removed the hats, then, one at a time, pulled off and balled up our outer shirts, which were navy blue. Underneath we both wore a second shirt, in cream—typical Filipino attire.

“We need to split up,” I said. “Big white guy, Asian guy, that’s about as much as people are going to remember, but it’s enough to ID us right now.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Go straight to the airport. I’ll get the gear from the hotel. We’ll meet at the backup in Bangkok.”

“You saved my life back there, partner. You really did.”

“Bullshit.”

“That bodyguard would have drilled me clean if you hadn’t gotten to him first. I saw his eyes, and he meant business.”

I shook my head. There was no time to explain. And I still didn’t understand what had happened to me in there.

“Think those guys were Agency?” he asked. “They sure got there fast and they moved like pros.”

The agitation was behind us now; the next set of escalators, and the exits below, just a few meters away.

“That’s one of the things we need to find out,” I said. “But first we have to get out of Manila. I doubt Manny is going to report this to the authorities—it would mean too much attention for him. But I don’t want to stick around waiting to find out.”

We reached the escalators and paused for a moment.

“You go down here,” I said. “I want to lose the gun and the mag. I’ll drop them in a toilet tank in one of the bathrooms. With a little luck I can find some bleach or other cleaning supplies in a janitor’s cart and douse them first.”

He grinned like a schoolboy about to brag of a prank or some other exploit. “I guess I need to break my date with the girl at the concession stand,” he said.

In the craziness of the moment, half of me wanted to laugh. The other half wanted to strangle him. I looked at him for a moment, shaking my head, and in the instant before I walked away his grin actually broadened.

T
HE ARRIVALS AREA
of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport was crowded, bustling, and noisy. Tourists in tee-shirts and shorts jostled with
haredi,
the tremblers before God, in their black suits and hats. Announcements in English and Hebrew reverberated off the long concrete walls. The sun was setting beyond the western windows, and for a moment the terminal’s interior burned headache bright with its sideways orange glow.

Delilah no longer felt comfortable here. Although her employer arranged for her to return at least annually to visit her parents and other relatives, the years of living a foreign cover had pulled her inexorably from the shores of the Levant, farther and farther until finally she had lost sight of land. This was her country, but she was no longer supposed to be here. The extraordinary security measures that accompanied these visits—false
papers, disguise, countersurveillance—were testament to that. She was more comfortable now ordering
pain au chocolat
in French in Paris than she was giving instructions to a taxi driver in Hebrew in Tel Aviv. She told herself that this was the natural and perhaps not undesirable consequence of her commitment to her work, but still it was odd, to feel that you were forgetting who you are, or anyway who you used to be. The point of it all could wind up seeming so remote, so abstract. She wondered at times whether other operators were similarly afflicted, but knew she would be wise to discuss her concerns with no one. Regardless, she understood that this growing sense of estrangement from things that had once seemed inalienably hers would be known, in other endeavors, simply as the cost of doing business.

Her business was what the domestic media called
sikul memukad,
or “focused prevention,” a construction she preferred to the more straightforward “assassination.” The former was, to her thinking, more descriptive, and more associated with its purpose of saving lives than with its means of snuffing them out. She wasn’t one of the trigger pullers, but at times she wished she were. After all, the men with the guns had the easy side of the division of labor. They never had to know the target. They didn’t have to spend time with him. They certainly didn’t have to sleep with him. They got close only once, only for an instant, and then they were done and gone. Emotionally, it was the difference between parting after a one-night stand, on the one hand, and dissolving a marriage, on the other.

Still, she was quietly proud of her sacrifices, proud that she made them for her own reasons and not for the recognition of her peers. Recognition, that was funny. Notoriety would be more like it. Her superiors acknowledged her unique talents and employed them with ruthless calculation, but deep down, she knew, they looked at her as somehow stained by what they called upon her to do. The best among management was merely
uncomfortable with a woman who wormed her way into the lives of her victims, who slept with the monsters night after night, who knew even as she took them into her body that she was guiding them to their deaths. Management’s worst, she suspected, thought
whore.

Sometimes she felt coldly angry at the men who harbored such thoughts; other times, she almost pitied them. Their problem was that they couldn’t get beyond the limits of their own inherently male experience. Men were simple: they were propelled by lust. And so they assumed that women should be the same. That a woman might sleep with a man for her own, more calculating reasons, even reasons of state security, put them off balance. It made them wonder if they were as vulnerable as the woman’s victims, and this made them fidgety. If the woman was attractive, and they secretly desired her, the fidgeting became a squirm.
Whore
was their way of reassuring themselves that they were the ones in control.

She wondered why they had called her in this time. Things were going well with her current op, a straightforward “honey trap” of a certain Paris-based Saudi diplomat who had become distracted from his Wahabi religious convictions by her long, naturally blond hair, and the way it cascaded around her shoulders when she chose to wear it down; by her blue eyes, endlessly enthralled, of course, by the man’s awkward palaver; by her tantalizing Western décolletage and the porcelain skin beneath it. The man was smitten with her story of an absentee husband and her longing for true love, and was therefore nearly ready to hear the tearful tale that someone had learned of their illicit passion and was now blackmailing her with exposure—exposure that would of course encompass the Saudi himself—unless he could take certain actions, trivial in themselves, but which over time would compromise him further and further until her people would own him completely. Why recall her when she was so close?
They had used the ordinary communications channels, with no abort signals, so she knew she wasn’t in any danger, that the current op wasn’t compromised. But that only made the reasons behind the recall even more mysterious.

Her papers were in perfect order, and her Hebrew, though no longer her primary language, was still native, so she and her carry-on bag passed quickly through customs. She caught a cab outside the terminal and headed directly downtown. She needed to get to the Crowne Plaza on Hayarkon, a nice, anonymous business hotel and the site of the meeting to which she had been directed. The participants would arrive and depart separately to keep her affiliation sterile, and they wouldn’t use the same hotel for months. After the meeting, she would call her parents and go see them, then spend the night at their house in Jaffa. She never announced these visits; they understood that her work, whatever it was, precluded notice. But business first.

She changed cabs several times and used a variety of other techniques to ensure that she wasn’t being followed. When she was satisfied, she made her way to the hotel. She took the elevator directly to the fourth floor and headed toward room 416. She didn’t have to look hard—there were two crew-cut men outside it, each with an earpiece and an Uzi. The obvious security was unusual. Something was definitely up.

One of the men examined her ID. Apparently satisfied, he opened the door and then immediately closed it behind her. Inside, three men were sitting around a table. Two she recognized—Boaz and Gil. The third was older by perhaps two decades, and it took her a moment to place him. She had met him only once.

Good God. The director.
What was going on here?

“Delilah,
shalom,
” the older man said, getting up from his chair. He walked over and shook her hand, then continued in Hebrew, “Or should I say,
bonjour
? Would you prefer to use French?”

She liked that he asked. Moving in and out of cover, out of two separate identities, was stressful. She shook her head and answered him in Hebrew. “No. She’s not supposed to be here. Let’s let her sleep. She’ll wake up when she’s back in Paris.”

He nodded and smiled. “And then this will all seem like a dream.” He gestured to the other men. “You know Boaz? Gil?”

“We’ve worked together, yes,” she said. They stood, and the three of them shook hands.

Boaz was one of their best IED—improvised explosive devices—experts. She liked him a lot, as everybody did. He was serious when the situation called for it, but his default persona was boyish, at times mischievous, and he had an easy laugh that could almost be a giggle. He never came on to her, and in fact treated her as much like a sister as a colleague, which made him rare in the organization and, had the director not been present, deserving of a hug.

Gil was different—gaunt, moody, and intense. People admired Gil, but he also made them uncomfortable, and both for the same reason: he was extremely good at what he did. On two of Delilah’s assignments, Gil had been the shooter. In both instances, he had emerged from the dark to put a .22 round through the target’s eye and then disappeared without a ripple. He worked with others when he had to, but at heart, Delilah knew, he was a loner, and never more in his element than when he was silently stalking his prey.

Once, in a safe room in Vienna, he had made a pass at her. His move had been crudely direct, and Delilah hadn’t liked the underlying assumption of entitlement and expectation of fulfillment. She knew the sex would have given him a kind of power over her—that in fact this was part of the reason he wanted it—and she wasn’t about to surrender one of her few mysteries, her few levers of influence, with a colleague. Her rebuff had been as unambiguous as his proposition. It shouldn’t have been a big
deal—he was hardly the first—but on the few occasions on which she’d seen him since then, he always looked as though he was remembering, and not without resentment. There was a breed of man that was inclined to feel humiliated by a woman’s demurral, and she suspected that Gil was such a specimen.

The table was set up for four, which told her they weren’t expecting anyone else. They all sat down. The director gestured to the sandwiches. “A little something to eat?” he asked.

She shook her head, not yet comfortable. “They served dinner on the plane.”