“How so?”
“Well, shit. I can get work pretty much anytime I want it…there’s so much from the CIA and the Pentagon I’m not even taking anything from foreign clients anymore. I’m just tired of playing whack-a-mole with Achmed, I guess. I mean, what’s the point of being in the fire brigade, if the people you’re working for keep tossing matches on the underbrush? I should be glad, I realize-the big bad Global War on Terror means a nice annuity for people like you and me. What the hell, maybe it’s a midlife crisis. Maybe I should just buy a fancy car.” He took a healthy swallow of the Bombay Sapphire he was drinking, then said, “What about you and Delilah? How’s that going?”
I was drinking a 2007 Emilio’s Terrace from Napa Valley I’d discovered, strangely enough, in Bangkok. It was a cabernet and still young, but the fruit was delicious anyway. I felt vaguely sad for a moment to imagine how it might taste when it was really ready, in another decade or so. I looked at the dark liquid in the glass and said, “It’s not.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I left her in Paris. I’m back in Tokyo.”
“Back in Tokyo?” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I thought you loved Paris. Hell, I thought you loved Delilah.”
I sighed. “She wouldn’t leave the Mossad. I don’t know how many times I told her that one of us in the life and the other trying to leave it was making me insane. I finally just…I gave her an ultimatum.”
“I think I can tell by where you’re living these days how that worked out.”
I drummed my fingers on the table. “Probably for the best.”
“I don’t know. Thought you two had something special, tell you the truth.”
I nodded. The three of us had been through a lot together: first, as opposing players on hair triggers; then, when the Mossad had brought me in to take out a rogue Israeli bomb maker named Manheim Lavi, on the same team; and then, most improbably, watching each other’s backs for reasons that had nothing to do with national interests and everything to do with personal allegiances. What had bloomed between Delilah and me, I knew, was as improbable as it was precious.
“You think about her?” he asked.
I looked away. “What do you think?”
“Well, what was it about her being in the life you didn’t like, exactly? I’m in the life, and you seem to tolerate me.”
“I don’t live with you.”
“Is that really the critical difference?”
“Yeah, it is. I was trying to learn…how to relax over there. You know? New city, nobody knows me, nobody’s looking for me. I just want to take it down a notch, not always feel like I need to be looking over my shoulder. Well, how am I ever going to manage that when I’m around someone whose job could bring a shitstorm onto us at any minute, and once actually did?”
He frowned. “Someone made a run at y’all in Paris?”
I nodded, remembering. “Paris is a bitch.”
He dipped his head gravely and looked at me. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime. But partner, you, relaxing? That I’d like to see. Go ahead, do it for me, just for a minute. But let’s bet on it first. I could use the money.”
I didn’t answer. I hated when he pulled the psychoanalysis shit with me. I hated it more when there was substance to his observations.
“Anyway,” he went on, “here you are, back in the life but without Delilah. Even with me as a dinner companion, it doesn’t seem like such a great bargain, if you want my opinion. Which I know you don’t, but there it is.”
“I’m not ‘back in the life.’ Someone tracked me down. I’m trying to straighten it out. It’s not like I have much choice.”
I expected him to laugh at my protestations, which would have been classic Dox. That he didn’t irritated me even more.
“What?” I said.
He raised his eyebrows in mock innocence. “I didn’t say anything.”
“I know. It’s not like you. What are you thinking?”
He leaned back and scratched his belly. “Just that…maybe you were more bothered by what Delilah does in the life than you were by the life itself.”
I didn’t answer. Delilah did a lot of things for the Mossad. But chief among them were long-term honey trap operations with high-value targets. She was a gorgeous natural blonde, intelligent, confident, and sophisticated, and she knew how to work all of it. I doubted they’d ever had anyone on the payroll as effective as she was, not that they ever appreciated her for it. In fact, she’d told me the missions they sent her on-to literally sleep with the enemy-made her continually suspect, even stained in the eyes of management. Which was part of the reason I found it maddening she wouldn’t quit. What did she owe them? Why was she loyal? They didn’t deserve her.
“You going to tell me it never bothered you, her going off for a month at a time without being able to tell you where or who with? You going to tell me you never woke up alone in your big bed in the middle of the night, wondering if right then, at that very moment, she might be straining the gravy with-”
“‘Straining the gravy’?”
“Yeah, it means-”
“Forget it, I can imagine.”
“It’s all right, it means-”
“You made your point.”
He grinned. “I wasn’t being too oblique?”
“No, you weren’t being too oblique.”
The grin widened, for the most part his usual shit-eater but with some sympathy in it, too. I might have argued further, but what would have been the point? Like Kanezaki, he could think what he wanted. What mattered at the moment was, he was armed-a Wilson Combat Supergrade Compact. I’d asked him how he’d managed to procure it so soon after arriving from Bali, and he’d smiled and told me only, “The old underground redneck railroad.” It was comforting to know he had my back in the Beverly Wilshire now, amid the ambient music piped in from the high ceiling, the oblivious background chatter, the incongruous tinkling of quality silverware cutting fine food on high-end china.
Forty minutes after I’d been seated, I saw a black man come in through the restaurant entrance. Older than I remembered, of course, his head hairless now, the body thicker with age but obviously still powerful. He spoke briefly with a hostess, who gestured to where I was sitting and then led him over. I watched as they approached, noting that he was carrying what looked like a ballistic nylon computer case but that otherwise his hands were empty, and that the red, short-sleeved, collared shirt he wore, tucked into a pair of khaki trousers, would offer relatively poor opportunities for concealed carry. He was dressed to reassure me, but I’d still check his ankles and for any telltale irregularities in the fit of his clothes, and watch the entrances to see who came in behind him.
I stood as they came near and shook his hand when he offered it. When the hostess had moved off, he said, “John Rain. Goddamn, but I don’t think you’ve changed a bit. What’s your secret?”
“Avoiding trouble, mostly.”
He laughed. “You’re keeping busy, is what I hear.”
“Not recently, no.”
“Well, I hope we can change all that. Shame for a man like you to be idle.”
We sat down and he placed the computer case on the table between us. He glanced around the restaurant, his gaze settling momentarily on Dox. He might have pretended not to recognize him, but because I assumed he had access to military photos, that would have put me on edge. So it was smart of him instead to say, “I imagine he’s supposed to shoot me if things here go sideways.”
I was glad he acknowledged it. If he’d invited Dox over, I would have had to spell things out. “Something like that.”
“An understandable precaution. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. I left my men outside, and I myself am unarmed.” He slid his seat back from the table and eased up his pants legs. Nothing but socks, from ankle to bulging calf. “Okay? I’m just here to talk.”
