But there was a new DCI now, this guy Goss, and with all the firings and resignations, all the people who had been intimidated were now gone. The good news was that Goss didn’t have a clue, at least not yet. He had so many things he was trying to get under control that Hilger could probably fly under his radar for a while. If there were another slip, though, or if Goss took it into his head to assert himself by getting in Hilger’s face, things could get messy again. Yeah, maybe he’d be able to call in another round of favors and get the mess cleaned up, but he preferred not to have a showdown with the new management so soon. Even if Hilger won, there would be grudges after. Hunters don’t like to be interrupted in the act of pouncing on their prey.
Rain’s involvement suggested that the CIA had ordered the hit, as it had with Belghazi. The thought was almost sickening. If those idiots had any idea what Hilger was up to, of what in three short years he had managed to accomplish, they would know to get out of his way and leave him alone. Leave him alone, hell, if they had any sense of proportion they would fucking genuflect.
He drummed his fingers along the edge of the blond wooden desktop and watched the lighted barges inching like water bugs along the dark surface of the harbor a quarter mile below. He didn’t know why his men believed in him, exactly, but they did. They always had. He sensed that, at just south of forty years old, he had become a sort of father figure to them. It would be too much to say that they worshipped him, but his opinion of them mattered hugely, as did his understanding, his forgiveness, for the things their work required them to do. He’d never had anyone like himself in his own life, but he understood the power, and the responsibility, of the position. He could pat a man on the back, sometimes literally, and tell him that it was all right, that he had done the right thing, that the images and the smells, the fears and the doubts, the corrosive effects of conscience, all these were in fact part of the man’s nobility for not having taken the easy, the common path of shying away from what needed to be done. And because no one could ever know of their quiet heroics, of the anonymous sacrifices they made, because there would never be medals or ticker-tape parades or the thanks of a grateful nation, his understanding and, when necessary, his forgiveness were all his men had to comfort them. It wasn’t enough to remove the weight, true, but it was enough to lighten it. Sometimes he wished he had someone he could turn to in a like manner, but he didn’t, and he supposed this was part of the burden of leadership, to bear the doubts, and the hard memories, alone.
Manny had said there had been another man, a big white guy. That wasn’t much to go on by itself, but Hilger had more. There had been a sniper at Kwai Chung. Maybe it had been Rain, but Hilger knew that Rain had no sniping background, and the gunman at Kwai Chung had been a pro. He’d taken the heads off those two Transdniester bagmen from far enough away so that no one had even heard the shots. That didn’t feel like Rain, who worked from close up. Hilger couldn’t be sure, but he suspected the shooter had been a CIA contractor called Dox. Hilger, through an intermediary, had tried to hire Dox to eliminate Rain and save Belghazi. Afterward, he wondered if the damn ex-Marine had decided to work with Rain instead of against him. He knew they had “served” together in Afghanistan, helping the Muj chase out the Red Army. He’d expected Dox’s mercenary instincts to be more powerful than any sense of comradeship the man might still feel from that shared conflict, but it seemed in that respect Hilger had misjudged.
He had his own files on both these men, complete with photographs. The photo of Rain was out of date, but Hilger had used some Agency software to update it. He’d shown the photos to Manny before Manny returned to Manila, and Manny had given him a positive ID on both.
So far, so good. But who had been behind the hit was proving more difficult to divine. The CIA had been his first guess, but he hadn’t been able to find out anything there. Of course, his inquiries had to be somewhat oblique, lest someone connect him through Manny to the men who had died in Manila, but he had his sources, and all of them had come up blank. The CIA might have wanted Manny dead, but it seemed they hadn’t tried to bring it about.
Who, then? Manny hadn’t wanted to face it, but, as they’d discussed the day before, the list was anything but short. The problem was that Rain had no known connections with any of the primary suspects. He had a history with the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party and of course with the Agency, the latter dating all the way back to Vietnam, but he wasn’t known to work with anyone else. That didn’t mean there weren’t any other clients, of course; Rain was a freelancer, a mercenary. But expanding a client base in Rain’s line of work isn’t easy. You can’t just hang out a shingle, or take out a few ads. New clients come slowly, if at all.
Well, there was a fairly straightforward way to get to the bottom of this. All he had to do was ask Rain or Dox. They might not want to tell him, true, but they’d be inclined to believe him when he said that he understood they were just contractors, that he had no personal beef with them nor any professional reason to want them removed. Hell, after he’d cleared this whole thing up, he’d be happy to have them on his team.
What would make it sound appealing was that it was very nearly true. It would be true, in fact, except they’d killed Calver and Gibbons, which did indeed make things personal. And they had scared Manny’s boy, ruining any chance that Manny might want to just let bygones be bygones, as well.
All he needed to do was get to them. A clean snatch, the back of an unmarked, unobtrusive van. A reasonable, man-to-man conversation, if possible. Electrified alligator clips attached to their scrota, if not. Either way, he would get the information he wanted.
He took a deep breath. Yes, he needed someone who could snatch them, then interrogate them. And who knew the region well enough to be able to make it all happen quickly.
There were several men he could have chosen, but one name stood out: Mitchell William Winters. The man was an expert. He had trained with the famed FBI Hostage Rescue Team and rendered more than his share of bad guys. And he had worked in Asia, doing security consulting for companies that needed such assistance in the region. Winters was into martial arts-Hilger remembered hearing about kali or something like that in the Philippines and Thai boxing in Bangkok. He didn’t particularly care about the karate stuff-Hilger’s choice of martial art was a SIG P229, concealed in a belly band carry, and he had yet to meet the Long Dong Do master who could block a bullet from it-but the experience in Asia would be critical.
And Winters had another plus: Hilger knew he was a graduate of an off-the-books CIA hostile interrogation program. The program was ostensibly designed to teach operators to resist torture, but it was well known in the community that, in doing so, the program taught torture itself, and that this was its true purpose. Some people took to the course material more readily than others. Winters, Hilger knew, had a knack.
The sky was beginning to grow light behind Central off to his right. He consulted his directory, then picked up the phone.
NINE
AFTER DINNER, Dox insisted on heading over to the go-go bars in Patpong. I wasn’t happy about it, but I supposed I would just have to accept that the man was large enough to contain multitudes: lethal and loud; cultured and crude; profound and party-going. And what he had said earlier, about having been doing fine on his own, was of course true. Maybe I was being unfair to him. I decided I would try to trust him more. The thought was strange and uncomfortable, but it felt like the right thing to do.