Free Killing Rain by Barry Eisler Page A

moment, then smiled at her chutzpah and pressed no further. She gave him credit for that. But why would he press? In her refusal, she had already answered his question.
    Gil looked confused, then nonplussed. Had she actually just scored points with the director?
    “Delilah,” Boaz said. “Do you think . . . Can you get close to Rain?”
    “You mean, can I set him up?”
    Boaz nodded.
    “I’m not sure. I can try.”
    The three of them settled slightly in their seats as though a bit of tension had been suddenly drained from their bodies, and in that instant she understood completely the nature of the conversation that had preceded her arrival: Do you think she slept with him? Will she do this? Can we trust her?
    “But why do you need me?” she asked. “You’ve met him, presumably you have a means of contact?”
    “If we ask for a meeting now,” Boaz said, “he’ll be suspicious. We need something to lower his guard.”
    “He might be suspicious with me, too,” she said. “Under the circumstances.”
    “We’re counting on you to dissolve his suspicions,” Gil said. “You’re the best at that.” His tone indicated that her abilities, although useful, also were somehow suspect.
    She looked at him, but ignored the comment. “How are you going to do it?”
    Gil waved as though it would be nothing. “You contact him. Go somewhere with him, a romantic getaway. When the moment is right, you contact me.”
    “Who’s the shooter?”
    “I am.”
    “He knows your face. How are you going to get close?”

    “He’ll never see me.”
    She almost laughed. “You don’t understand who you’re dealing with.”
    “He’s a fuckup. He’s going down.”
    She thought of the way Rain had dealt with that guy in the elevator on Macau. He had gone from calmly talking to her to breaking the man’s neck without anything in between.
    “If he sees you,” she said, “he’ll know I set him up.”
    “Do it yourself, then.”
    She didn’t answer.
    “He won’t see me,” Gil said. “Anyway, you know how to handle yourself.”
    There was a long silence. She was used to making hard decisions quickly and under pressure, and by the time the director spoke, she had already made up her mind.
    “You’ll do this?” he asked, looking at her, his expression open, his tone affable.
    “When have I ever refused?” she replied.
    “Never,” Gil said, and in those two syllables she heard an echo of whore.
    She looked at him. When she spoke, her voice was frozen silk.
    “Well, there was one time, Gil.”
    He flushed, and she smiled at him, twisting the knife.
    The director, pretending to ignore what he fully understood, said, “It’s settled, then.”

FIVE

    T HE DAY AFTER the Manny debacle, I made my way to the Bangkok Baan Khanitha restaurant on Sukhumvit 23, the backup Dox and I had agreed upon in case things went sideways—as indeed they had.
    I chose an indirect route to get to the restaurant, as much to indulge an incipient sense of nostalgia as for my usual security reasons. Sukhumvit, I saw, had changed enormously in the decades since the concentrated time I had spent here during the war, yet in its essential aspects it was still the same. There had been no high-rises back then, true, and certainly no glitzy shopping malls, and the traffic, although chaotic, had not yet reached today’s level of biblical-style calamity. But the smell of the place, the vibe, then and now, was all low-level commerce, much of it sexual. In my mind, Sukhumvit has always been about lasts: thelast party of the last evening that everyone wants to prolong because tomorrow it’s back to the war; the last chance for nocturnal behavior that will surely be the source of regret in the light of the oncoming day; the last desperate stop for those women whose charms, and therefore their prices, have fallen short even of the standards of nearby Patpong.
    I walked along Sukhumvit Road, letting the crowds carry me and flow past me, then carry me