Pancho eased back an inch on the bed. “How’d it go down?”

“We don’t know all the details,” Demeere said. “It seems Rain spotted the ambush Winters had set, and attacked. Two of the locals got away. Two others Rain killed with a knife. Winters was found in an alley with defensive wounds on his arms and a slashed subclavian artery. Bled out internally.”

“Rain beat Winters in a fucking knife fight?” Pancho asked. “I knew Winters. He had a kali background. Trained in the Philippines. He was good with a blade.”

“Rain’s had a lot of training, too,” Hilger said. “Judo. Boxing. Edged weapons when he was with Special Forces. And a hell of a lot of practical experience.”

Pancho nodded as though considering. Demeere looked at him and asked, “Does that make you nervous?”

Pancho returned the look. “No.”

Demeere offered a slight, chilly smile. “It should.”

Pancho smiled back. “Maybe Rain just got lucky. Or maybe Winters wasn’t being run properly.”

Guthrie said, “Anyway, the point is, Winters was good.”

Demeere, his eyes still on Pancho, said in lightly accented but otherwise perfect English, “Fuck-all good.”

“What about Calver and Gibbons?” Guthrie asked.

“Shot to death,” Hilger said. “In a Manila restroom, while they were trying to protect an agent in another op.”

Pancho looked at Hilger. “So you’re looking for payback. To take Rain out.”

Hilger shook his head. “I want him to do a job.”

Pancho squinted and pursed his lips as though thinking. Hilger didn’t know whether he was confused or disappointed or both.

“If he’s freelance,” Guthrie asked, “why not just hire him, through channels?”

“Two problems,” Hilger said. “First, I don’t know how to contact him. I tried to locate him, and couldn’t even find where he is. At one point he was known to be in Tokyo, then supposedly in São Paulo or Rio. The reports are all several years out of date, though, and I doubt he’s still living in either country. And even if he were, it wouldn’t be enough to go on. Brazil has the world’s largest Japanese expatriate community. Rain would be invisible there. More so in Japan. He always kept a low profile, but these days he might as well be a ghost.”

Guthrie said, “What’s the second problem?”

Hilger shrugged. “For now, let’s just say that I doubt what I want him for is something he’d do voluntarily. Dox is his friend, one of only a few. That means Dox knows how to contact him, and it means Dox is the leverage to make Rain cooperate.”

“They’re that close?” Guthrie said.

Hilger nodded. “I saw Dox carry Rain over his shoulder out of a firefight at Kwai Chung harbor in Hong Kong. Five million dollars in play, and Dox walked away from it to save his partner when he got hit. So I’d say they’re close, yeah.”

Pancho said, “What you’ve got in mind, the thing you want Rain for, you can’t handle in-house?”

Again, Hilger detected disappointment. He shook his head. “Rain is the right resource for this. We just have to get to him.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Guthrie said, “How much time do we have, then? To snatch Dox.”

Hilger shuffled through a few more of the photos, looking for a pattern. He felt something beginning to cohere.

“We can give it a few more days,” Hilger said. “If we haven’t had an opening at that point, we can work the villa angle. But I agree with Pancho, it’s high risk and I’d prefer something else. The main thing is that we take him totally unaware. Because without the element of surprise, taking him alive and functioning is going to be bloody. Close quarters he’s not Rain, but believe me, he’s plenty dangerous.”

Pancho squinted. “Rain is that good?”

Hilger nodded, remembering how Rain had tracked him to Hong Kong. No one had ever turned the tables on Hilger like that before, and Hilger knew he was lucky to have survived it. The experience had spooked him, he had to admit, and for this, along with his more concrete rationales, he wasn’t going to let Rain continue to roam the earth when the current operation was done.

“He must be getting old,” Guthrie said. “He’s a Vietnam vet, isn’t he?”

Hilger nodded. “He went in late, though, when he was seventeen, so he’s young for that conflict. But even if his best years are past him, tell me, do you know of anyone else who’s survived in this business, on his own, with no organization to protect him, for as long as Rain?”

The room was silent.

“There’s a reason he’s survived all this time,” Hilger went on. “And it’s not luck. No one stays lucky that long. It’s because he’s good. He’s better than all the people he’s killed, and he’s killed plenty-more than we have all together. So you don’t want to think of him as old, or slow, or used up, or burnt out, or anything else he wants you to think so you’ll underestimate him. You do, and you’ll wind up another one of his statistics.”

“Like Winters,” Demeere said.

“Like Winters,” Hilger said, looking at each of them. “We don’t want any more losses like that. So we’re going to be patient for a few more days. With three of us on motorcycles and one in the van, we can cover the likely spots and converge quickly on wherever Dox is spotted. Like Guthrie said, Ubud’s not that big a town.”

Everyone nodded, accepting the matter as settled, at least temporarily. Pancho tilted his head toward the body on the floor. “You want me to bring around the van?”

Hilger nodded and started to collect the surveillance photos. They all stood.

Guthrie asked, “Where do you think we’ll spot him?”

Hilger considered one of the photos. “Look at this guy. If he weren’t such a good sniper, he’d probably be playing professional football. How much does a guy like this eat every day?”

Demeere smiled and said, “Plenty.”

Hilger nodded. “Exactly. I don’t know what kind of food supplies he’s got laid in, but sooner or later, he’s going to have to go out for more. That’s what we’re waiting for.”

2

DOX WOKE WITH a long, pleasant groan. He stretched out across the king bed, curling his toes, liking the feel of the cotton sheets against his body. From the sun on the gauze curtains, it must have been past seven. He’d slept late. But why not? He wasn’t on a job. He deserved to take it easy. Taking it easy was what Bali was all about. Hell, it was why he’d come here. It was why he’d built this villa.

He got up and walked naked across the sisal rug to the bathroom to take a leak. It was funny, when he’d first imagined this place, he thought it would be the ultimate bachelor pad. But now that it was done, he found he was reluctant to share it. Bedding down with someone inside a place he’d built himself would feel more intimate than he was ready for. Or rather, he hadn’t met anyone yet who he was ready to be that intimate with. He wanted to meet someone good, someone right, but of the many women he’d known and enjoyed, he just couldn’t get that close with any of them. There was Rain’s lady, of course, Delilah, and a man would have to be gay or in a coma not to have some kind of thing for her, but even acknowledging to yourself that you had a hankering for your bro’s woman was a dangerous thing. And doing anything to act on it would be an unpardonable sin, not to mention a declaration of war against the kind of man you’d have to be insane to want for an enemy.

Anyway, it wasn’t like he pined for Delilah or anything like that. It was more like, she was just the kind of woman he wished he could meet. Smart, confident, and of course drop-dead gorgeous. Semi-mysterious, with a tasty little edge to keep you on your toes. Like what Angelina Jolie might be if she were blond and had taken up spy work for the Mossad instead of acting.

Well, he’d keep looking. And it wasn’t like he was suffering in the meantime. He had a couple of honeys tucked away in Kuta, only an hour away, and several in Bangkok and Jakarta who went into paroxysms whenever he called to say he was coming to town.