Killing Rain Part 11

I looked down at her. The side of her face was pressed against the dresser, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth open and panting, in pain or ecstasy or both I didn't know. Her cheek was streaked with tears. I kept going. I didn't slow down at all.

A minute went by, maybe two. I forgot who she was, who I was, why we were there. There was only the room, the heat, a singularity generating a rhythm as old as oceans.

I heard a deep groan and realized it came from me. Or maybe it was hers. She opened her eyes and looked back at me, pleading for something. I let go of her wrist and took hold of her hips. She gripped the edges of the dresser and moved up onto her toes, raising her a.s.s higher. Her lips were moving but if there were words I couldn't hear them. Her legs were trembling. I felt her start to come and it took me over the edge. I dug my fingers more deeply into her hips. The pounding in my chest and in my head seemed to fuse together with everything else, my legs, my b.a.l.l.s, my gut, her body beneath and before me, everything. Through it all I could hear her swearing in Hebrew again, could feel her coming in waves under me and all around me and myself coming with her.

Finally it subsided. I eased down on top of her, supporting some of my weight with my arms. We stayed that way, our breathing abating, our sweat drying, coming back to ourselves.

After a while, I eased myself up and stepped to the side. I touched her shoulder.

She pushed herself up off the dresser and looked at me. Neither of us said anything.

"You okay?" I asked, after a moment.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm okay."

"You want to talk?"

"No, I want to get out of here."

"Is that going to help?"

"No."

"Then maybe we should talk."

There was a pause. She looked down at what was left of her blouse and bra, then let them slide off her arms to the floor. She stepped out of her skirt.

"Tell me one thing, okay?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Tell me that you haven't done that before. Without a condom, I mean."

I thought of Naomi, and, even more, of Midori. "Not in a few years."

She nodded. "Good. Although at this point AIDS or whatever ought to be the least of my worries."

"Tell me what's going on."

She walked over to the shower and took a robe off the peg next to it. She pulled it on. I walked over and did the same. We moved over to the bed and sat on it.

"Those men you killed in Manila," she said, looking at her hands. Her voice was slightly husky. "Two of them were CIA officers."

I looked at her. I saw that she was being straight with me.

"s.h.i.+t," I said.

She didn't respond. After a moment I said, "How bad is it?"

"My people are afraid the Agency will find you and you'll talk. They don't want to take that chance."

"So they sent you."

She shrugged. "What would you have done?"

"You came here to set me up?"

"I thought I did. Now I'm not sure."

"That's not quite what I was hoping to hear."

"It's the truth."

"Couldn't pull the trigger yourself?"

"What I do is hard enough."

We were silent for a minute while I digested the news. I said, "What's next?"

She brushed away a few strands of hair that were clinging to her face. "I'm supposed to call my contact, let him know when and where you'll be vulnerable."

"What are you going to tell him?"

She looked up at the ceiling and said, "I have absolutely no idea."

"What changed your mind?" I asked, and thought, Maybe you haven't, though. Maybe this is just the best set-up you've ever pulled off.

I'd have to keep testing for that. I didn't think the way her body had responded could possibly have been acting. But maybe there were a bunch of dead men out there who had all convinced themselves of the same thing. And maybe I would be a fool to a.s.sume that the body would always follow the mind. Or vice versa.

There was a long silence. Then she said, "You've been lucky so far. I don't know anyone who's been luckier for longer. But n.o.body's bulletproof. I can't keep bailing you out."

"Bailing me out?"

"I warned you about that guy in your room in Macau."

"I didn't need your warning."

"No? You took it."

I let it go. "And this time?"

She looked at me. "Enough, all right? You know why. I don't want to be responsible for your death. You f.u.c.ked up in Manila and I don't know if you're going to survive it. I just don't want to be the one who kills you. Or helps make it happen."

"I wouldn't want to put you out."

She glared at me. "Stop being a child. You caused this situation, and now I'm caught in it, too."

I paused and took a breath. I needed to think. There had to be a way out of this.

"What did they tell you happened in Manila?" I asked.

"Only what you told them. That you tried to hit Lavi in a restroom but his son came in and got in the way. Then the bodyguard and the other two guys burst in and Lavi and the boy got away."

"Yeah, that's about right."

"Why don't you give me your perspective, with details?"

I told her, leaving Dox out of it.

When I was finished, she said, "That tracks with everything my people told me. At least they were being straight."

"Do they know what Manny was doing with Agency operators?"

"If they do, they didn't tell me. Other than to say that Lavi is a known CIA a.s.set."

Something was nagging me, jostling for my attention. I pa.r.s.ed the facts, tried to identify the a.s.sumptions. Then I realized.

"How do your people know those men were CIA?" I asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know. I didn't ask."

I thought for a moment, then said, "From what your people told me, Manny is a world-cla.s.s bad guy. Not the kind of person the Agency can acknowledge is on the payroll. In fact, even post nine-eleven, employing a character like Manny is highly illegal. If it got out, there would be a lot of embarra.s.sment. The people involved would probably have to take a fall."

"I don't understand."

I nodded. "No, you don't, and your people might be having the same problem. You all work for a small, tightly knit organization that operates with little oversight and few constraints. But the CIA isn't like that. I've worked with them on and off for years and I know. They've been ripped apart again and again-the Church Commission, the purges under Stansfield Turner, now again with this guy Goss-and they've developed a Pavlovian aversion to risk. Should they be recruiting terrorists? Absolutely. But if you're the guy who does it, if you recruit, run, and G.o.d forbid pay someone who has American blood on his hands, and if the paperwork has your name on it, the first time some Congressional committee starts trying to a.s.sert its prerogatives, or the first time someone needs a sacrificial lamb, or the first time you make a bureaucratic enemy, you will absolutely be crucified."

"You're a.s.suming they were running Lavi. They might have been there to kill him, like you were."

I shook my head. "That wasn't it. The way they rushed into that bathroom after Manny hit the panic b.u.t.ton, they'd spotted trouble and were on their way to protect him. Trust me, I know the difference."

"All right, so they weren't there to harm him."

"That's right. You see what I'm getting at? Something's not right here. Manny's not like some Second Secretary in the Chinese Consulate that everyone wants to take the credit for. He's an explosives guy, a terrorist with American blood on his hands. If someone's running Manny at the CIA, they're going to treat him like he's radioactive. They wouldn't send two officers to meet with him face-to-face. It doesn't make sense."

She looked at me. "If they weren't CIA . . ."

"Then I don't have a problem with the CIA. Or at least no more of a problem than usual. Maybe the situation is more fluid than it seems right now. Maybe I can take another crack at Manny."

"I see your point."

"Can you find out how your people know what they think they know?"

She glanced to her right, a neurolinguistic sign of construction. She was imagining how she was going to go about this. "I'll see what I can do," she said.

"What are you going to tell Gil?" I asked, trying to plug into exactly what she was envisioning.

"That . . ."

She looked at me, realizing what I'd done and how she had slipped. But the damage was done and she went on. "I'll call him in the morning. I'll tell him I'd suggested we go snorkeling at a certain beach at a certain time, and that the suggestion had made you suspicious. That when I woke up you were gone."

I figured it would be Gil. A killer knows a killer.

"Will he believe that?" I asked.

"He'll suspect. But it'll buy us time."

"Do you trust him?"

She frowned. "He's very . . . committed."

"Yeah, I got that feeling."

"But he's a professional. He does what he does for a reason. Take away the reason, and he'll move on to the next thing that keeps him awake at night."

I nodded. Her a.s.sessment tracked with my own.

She rubbed her eyes. "I need to sleep."

I leaned over and touched her cheek. I looked in her eyes, wanting to know what I would see there.

Whatever it was, it was good enough. There was nothing more to say. We turned off the light and got under the covers. For a long time I listened to her breathing in the dark. After that I don't remember.

DELILAH SLEPT DEEPLY for two hours, then woke from jet lag. She lay on her side and watched Rain sleep. G.o.d, what a mess.

She had come here convinced that he had screwed up and that there was no other way to solve the problem he had caused except for him to die. That he knew the risks and so in some ways deserved the outcome. But she realized now that all of this had been rationalization, psychic defense against an involvement she dreaded. Seeing him hadn't clouded her judgment, it had cleared it.

They'd hired him for a job, and he'd done the best he could without a lot to go on. What did they want him to do, slaughter a child? Had it come to that? With Gil, she knew, it had. If she confronted him, Gil would talk about "greater evil and lesser evil" and "collateral damage" and "theirs and ours." She didn't buy any of that. She didn't want to. That Rain was still able to make the moral distinction after so much time in the business-more time than Gil-impressed her. It gave her hope for herself. She wasn't going to help set him up for acting in a way even Gil, if pressed, would publicly profess was right. Yes, there was a problem, but the director, Boaz, Gil . . . they had simply proposed the wrong solution. She saw that now. All she had to do was find a better way. She felt confident that she could. If she couldn't . . . No, she didn't want to go there. Not unless she had to.

She was aware, on some level, that she was rationalizing, that her people would view her determination to find a third way as a betrayal. She didn't care. They weren't always as smart as they liked to think. And their investment was different than hers. To them, Rain was not much more than a piece on a chessboard. To her, he had become much more than that.

She liked him a lot, more than she had liked someone in a long time. The s.e.x was good-G.o.d, better than good-but that was only part of it. She was also . . . comfortable with him. Until she had spent time with him in Rio, she hadn't noticed the absence of that kind of comfort in her life. It had disappeared so long ago, and she had been so overwhelmed with so many other things at the time, that it had never occurred to her to mourn its loss.

There had been many affairs, more than she could count. But none of those men, not one, knew what she did. No matter how intense the infatuation, no matter how satisfying the s.e.x, she was always aware that they didn't, couldn't, really know her. They couldn't understand her convictions, sympathize with her doubts, soothe her frustrations, ameliorate the periodic ache in her soul. No wonder she tended to tire of them quickly.

Rain was different. From early on she realized he knew exactly what she did, although she had never spelled it out for him. He seemed to understand her without her ever needing to explain herself. He was patient with her moods. He knew, yes, but he didn't judge her. More than that, she sensed that he even admired her beliefs, the personal sacrifices she made for the cause that defined her. She had identified the absence of, and the longing for, a cause of his own as one of the key attributes of his persona, and remembered, with a slight pang of conscience, how she had reported on this to her people as something potentially exploitable.

There was comfort, too, in context: there was no uncertainty about their status, no foolish hopes about where this might be leading. There could be no hurt or recriminations about why someone hadn't called or had to break an engagement. Even their different affiliations, and the potential conflicts of interest those affiliations might present, as indeed they had, were understood. In French they would call it sympa, simpatico. In English, the ba.n.a.l but perhaps more descriptive "same sheet of music." In its quiet way, it was really quite wonderful.

All of this mattered to her, but there was something more important, more improbable, still: she knew he trusted her. Of course he never abandoned his tactics, she wouldn't expect that. His moves were as subtle as she'd ever seen, and usually disguised as ordinary behavior, but she knew what he was doing. Meeting her at the gate in Bangkok and taking her to the domestic terminal by taxi had been a particularly nice, albeit undisguised, way to play it. If Gil or anyone else had been with her, the game would have been over right there. She suspected that there were other layers, possibly involving electronics, in his countermeasures, layers she hadn't detected. And she was aware from time to time that his "innocent" questions involved hidden meanings and traps. But all of this was reflex for him, habit. She sensed the tactics were his way of rea.s.suring himself that he hadn't gone soft, that he was still protected, that he wouldn't be so foolish as to trust someone like her.

She never would have told Gil or anyone else, but she knew from the moment they asked that Rain would take the meeting. She wondered what series of rationalizations he must have employed in agreeing to see her in Bangkok. Probably he told himself that it would be worth the risk because she might be able to tell him more about Lavi. And maybe he had been hoping for something like that, but she knew the real reason. The real reason was trust.

Watching him sleep, she felt a surge of grat.i.tude so strong it brought tears to her eyes. She wanted to wake him with a kiss, hold his face in her hands and look in his eyes and thank him, really thank him, so that he could understand how much that trust, which not even the men she worked with extended to her, was worth. She smiled faintly at the ridiculous urge and waited for it to pa.s.s.

He was a strange man in many ways, and she found his strangeness appealing. Sometimes what she saw in his eyes reminded her of what had settled into her parents' after her brother had been killed in Lebanon. She found herself moved by that look, and by the way he would force it away if he saw her watching too closely. Once she had asked him if there had ever been a child. He told her no. She hadn't pressed, sensing that whatever equivalent events could produce that expression had to be approached gradually and obliquely, if at all.

She knew the odds were against them, but she didn't want to think about that now. She thought instead about how, when things were fixed, they would make up for how they had almost been set against each other. They'd been together in Macau, Hong Kong, now Thailand. All his territory. And, of course, Rio, which was somewhat of a neutral corner. She found herself wanting to take him to Europe, which felt like home now even more than Israel. Maybe Barcelona, or the Amalfi Coast. Somewhere he had never been, somewhere their time together would be fresh and unburdened by memory.