I nodded, thinking. All right, Dox’s story, Kanezaki’s story, Tatsu’s story, things were checking out.
Wait a minute. Dox. That was the Hong Kong connection, the thing that had nagged at me a second earlier. Dox had been using a photo to find me there. And apparently he had some local connections, connections that were sufficient to get the hotel staff’s full attention over a “police matter.”
“Who’s the NOC?” I asked.
“I told you, a former NE Division officer, now attached to the CTC.”
“His name.”
His breathing shortened and quickened. “Please, please, don’t make me tell you that. Why would you need to know, anyway? Please, I can’t tell you something like that. I’ve told you everything else, I really have!”
I had thought that, by this point, we’d have enough momentum to get over this kind of bump. Apparently I’d been mistaken.
“Do you think, if he were in your shoes, he’d die before giving up your name?” I asked. “Because that’s what you’re choosing to do.”
“I don’t know what he’d do. I can’t… I just can’t tell you another officer’s name. I’m sorry, I can’t.”
“Two things,” I said. “First, I’m eighty percent certain I know who he is, and just want the confirmation.” This was a lie, of course, but I wanted to make it easier for Crawley to rationalize if rationalizing was what it was going to take. “Second, I’m only interested in him because he can get me close to Belghazi. So, in not telling me the name, you’re choosing to die to protect Belghazi, not to protect Agency personnel.”
He closed his eyes, and tears began leaking out. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry.”
Shit, his hope, real or false, was fading. My leverage would be fading with it.
“The operator you went to,” I asked, fishing now. “To have me removed. He goes by the name of Dox. Is he the NOC?”
He didn’t answer. He just continued to shake his head and silently weep. His reaction told me nothing.
“I’ll give you one more chance,” I said. “The NOC’s name. Live or die, it’s up to you.”
He didn’t answer, and I realized that at some level he might not even have heard me. He had made his decision and had already accepted the consequences. I could have tried some sort of crude torture, but was reluctant to do so. The benefits of information extracted by torture are usually minimal. The costs to the psyche tend to be significant.
Still, the next part wasn’t going to be pleasant. I’d talked with him now, interacted with him, witnessed his tears and his fear and his misguided loyalty. All guaranteed to slice through decades of suddenly soft emotional callus and remind me that it was another human being whose life I was about to take.
But I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t very well leave him alive after this encounter. He would warn Belghazi, warn the NOC in Hong Kong. And I’d mentioned Delilah, too. If he told Belghazi about her, she’d be dead that very night.
I wondered briefly if I’d mentioned her name to him to force my own hand, to clarify that, by sparing his life, I’d be ending hers.
I reminded myself that he had tried to have me killed. That, given the opportunity, he would certainly do so again.
Don’t think. Just do it.
I felt a valve closing over my empathy like a watertight bulkhead. The bulkhead would open later, I knew, as the pressure built behind it, but it would hold long enough for me to finish the matter at hand.
I picked up the stun gun and jolted him again. He jerked violently from the shock, but the pillow kept him from marking his head. After about ten seconds I released the trigger and set the unit aside.
I sat him up and got behind him. I hooked my legs over his, wrapped my arms around his neck in a hadaka-jime strangle, and dropped back to the plastic-covered floor so that my body was under his. I put the strangle in carefully, using just enough pressure to close off the carotids, but not enough to damage his trachea or to cause any bruising. He didn’t make a sound and he was unconscious within seconds. I held him that way for several minutes, until unconsciousness had deepened into death.
I got up and dragged him to the living room closet. The plastic was practically frictionless on the carpet and made the job easier.
I laid him down under the dowel in the storage closet and went back to the living room. I like to clean up as I go along-one step, one cleanup. Repeat. Makes it easier not to forget anything. I picked up the duct tape, then noticed something: a swath in the carpet where the fibers had all been pulled in the same direction by his plastic-assisted passage. I walked back and forth along the swath until it had been eradicated.
I went back to the closet, dropped the duct tape, and cut the plastic off him with the box cutter. I noticed that his boxers were damp-he’d pissed himself as he’d lost consciousness and died. Not uncommon. It was lucky he had just used the toilet or I might have had a more considerable mess to deal with.
I opened the folding doors near the entrance and turned on the washing machine. I added some detergent, then walked back to the closet, where I retrieved Crawley’s shorts and tee-shirt. I threw them into the machine. Then I grabbed a couple of washcloths from the bathroom, which I used to clean him up. These, too, went into the wash, along with the contents of a plastic laundry basket that was sitting on top of the dryer. A small detail, but you don’t want to leave loose ends, such as, Why did the dead guy wash just his boxers, a tee-shirt, and two washcloths? Why didn’t he throw in the rest of the dirty laundry, too? I also took a moment to hang his coat, suit, shirt, and tie in the clothes closet.
I pulled off the deerskin gloves I’d been wearing, went to the storage closet, and pulled on the surgical pair. I grabbed the K-Y jelly and headed to the bathroom, where I squeezed out half the tube’s contents into the sink, washing it all down with hot water. Then back to the closet, where I put Crawley’s hands on the tube to ensure that it would be personalized with his fingerprints.
I set the tube on the ground and fashioned the clothesline into a slipknot. I pulled the knot over his head and ran the other end of the line over the hanging dowel, close to the angle brace where it would be strongest. Then I used the rope to haul him up onto his knees. He listed forward a few degrees, but the rope restrained him. I tied off the end on the dowel, cut off all but about three feet of the excess, and stepped back.
Diminished oxygen supply to the brain, called cerebral anoxia, can intensify sensations, making it, for some people, a good accompaniment to masturbation. The practice is known as autoerotic asphyxiation and usually remains a secret until the enthusiast dies accidentally in the midst of the proceedings. The statistics make extreme sports look safe by comparison: somewhere from five hundred to a thousand fatalities every year in the United States alone.
I looked at Crawley for a moment. Make that a thousand and one.
I applied a measure of K-Y jelly to his right hand and his genitals, then stepped back and observed. Yeah, that looked about right. The private life of a “State Department” bureaucrat. The quintessence of buttoned-down Washington Beltway seriousness by day; periodic bouts of autoerotic asphyxiation games by night. Really, you just never know what goes on behind closed doors. Especially closed closet doors.
A sudden thought nagged me: Was he right-handed? Or left?
Hmm, should have thought to find a way to check on that earlier. Sloppy. But the hell with it, no harm done. Maybe he enjoyed himself in private ambidextrously. Who could say one way or the other? The main thing was, the CIA wouldn’t want this getting out. They’d want it dealt with quickly, quietly, and cleanly. They’d call it an embolism, a weak heart wall, something like that, and, wanting to believe this was the case, they’d repeat it until they did. Even if they had some suspicions, they would be reluctant to do anything that might cause this to leak. All of which would mean less pressure for me.