He started to say something, but I cut him off. “Sorry,” I said. “I know you know that. I’ll meet you back here in two hours.”

He smiled and held out his hand. I shook it. He started to say something again, and again I cut him off.

“Don’t tell me to do the right thing,” I said. “I already told you I’d think about it. Don’t sell past the close.”

He looked at me. “What, are you psychic now?”

I frowned. “What, then?”

“I was just going to say good luck. Is that okay?”

I told him it was. We were going to need it. And so was Dox.

28

I DID A ROUTE from the hotel to make sure I was still clean. Then I stopped at Orchard Towers, a nondescript office complex in the city’s shopping district. No one would know from the utter diurnal blandness of the place that every night it was overrun by a raucous throng of calculating prostitutes and eager johns. For now, the wall-to-wall bars in the basement and on the first two floors were shuttered, and the atrium was quiet enough to be in a coma. I took the escalator to an Internet shop I knew on the second floor.

I used one of the terminals to check out the Republic of Singapore Yacht Club, first through the club’s own website, then from the air with Google Earth. Amazing, the information that’s publicly available these days. Not long ago, you needed a top secret clearance to access Keyhole satellite photographs. Not anymore.

The club had berths for about seventy boats of varying sizes. A long pier extended out from the marina facilities, with five perpendicular quays leading off it. Kanezaki had said Ocean Emerald was a thirty-footer. That meant the boat could have been in any of the perpendicular berths. I would try to find a way to narrow it down. Even if I couldn’t, five general possibilities wasn’t insurmountable.

The club also had three restaurants and a bar; twenty-eight guestrooms; and boat rentals. All of which meant that, however exclusive the place might otherwise be, they welcomed, and were used to, visitors on the premises.

So far, so good. I called Boaz from a pay phone.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“A food court, in a shopping center at the corner of Orchard and Scotts.”

“You know where Orchard Towers is?”

“Orchard Road?”

“Yeah, a half-mile west of you, across the street from the Hilton. Meet me out front in five minutes. You in a car or on foot?”

“On foot.”

“All right. See you in five.”

Five minutes didn’t give him a lot of time to scramble an ambush team, if that’s what this was about. But I still wasn’t going to wait exactly where I’d told him.

I headed out and walked a hundred yards east, then ducked into an alley. I put my back to the east side of a loading dock, where anyone moving west would have to look backward to see me. Four minutes later, I watched Boaz go past. He was wearing shorts, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and sandals, and a large backpack was slung over both shoulders. He might have been a European tourist on his way to a hostel somewhere.

I eased out, checking behind and across the street. I didn’t see any problems.

“Boaz,” I called out.

He turned, keeping his hands at his sides.

“Ah, I didn’t think you’d be where you told me,” he said.

“Just come this way. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

He complied. We cut down Claymore Road. I glanced behind as we moved. No one was following.

Harry’s bug detector was buzzing in my pocket. “You have a mobile phone?” I asked him.

“Of course.”

“Reach for it slowly and turn it off.”

He shrugged and slipped his hand into one of the front pockets of his shorts. Harry’s detector fell silent.

“Are you armed?” I asked.

“Only with something sharp. Nothing that goes bang.”

I steered us into another alley. “Face the wall,” I said. “I’m going to pat you down.”

“I don’t see how we can accomplish our objectives with this level of mistrust,” he said, his expression grave.

“Boaz, a year ago, your organization was trying to kill me. Turn around.”

He shrugged. While I patted him down, he said, “That was situational, you know, and personally I regretted it.”

He was wearing an FS HideAway knife in a sheath around his neck, the same kind Delilah had introduced Dox to a year earlier. For the moment, I didn’t bother with the backpack. He couldn’t access it quickly enough for anything in it to present a threat.

“I’ll let you keep the knife,” I said, straightening. “Just don’t reach for your neck suddenly. What’s in the backpack?”

He smiled. “Camera gear. Take a look.”

“I will as soon as we’re settled. Come on, let’s keep moving.”

“You’re wasting time,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m alone. And if I weren’t, I wouldn’t have a team follow me now. I’d have them waiting wherever Hilger is, as soon as you told me. They would know to expect you there eventually.”

I looked at him, disturbed by the truth of his words. Goddamnit, I was in a box. And Delilah had caused it.

“We want Hilger,” he said. “Why would we want you? That situation is over. Our interests are aligned now.”

All right, the hell with it. I didn’t have a choice.

“What do you have for me?” I asked.

He broke out in a big, boyish grin. “Wait’ll you see it.”

We took a cab to a hawker’s market, one of the outdoor food courts that dot the city and serve cheap, delicious Singaporean food. The centers are popular and can be crowded and noisy well past midnight, but we were ahead of the lunchtime crowd and had no trouble getting a table. We sat on plastic chairs under the shade of a big beach umbrella and enjoyed skewers of chicken and beef satay washed down with mango juice. While we ate, Boaz invited me to take a look in the backpack, which he had placed on the concrete floor between us.

I did. As he’d mentioned, the pack seemed to be full of camera equipment: a Nikon camera body, a variety of lenses, portable lighting equipment, a tripod, and battery packs.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

He gave me the boyish grin again. “Have you heard of an ‘active denial system’?”

“No. Should I have?”

“ADS is the Pentagon’s name for a nonlethal millimeter wave energy weapon. America’s troops have used it in Iraq.”

“Okay…” I said, getting interested.

“It shoots electromagnetic radiation at ninety-five gigahertz. Boils moisture in the skin, but only to a depth of one sixty-fourth of an inch. So it hurts like hell, but doesn’t cause damage.”

I glanced down at the backpack. “Your guys have developed a portable version.”

“Correct. The Pentagon’s unit, which they had developed by Raytheon, is truck-mounted. Very powerful-the range is over a kilometer-but big. What I’ve got here has to be employed close up, but you can carry it on your back.”

“It goes through walls?” I asked, doubtful.

“That’s…the tricky part. You can adjust the frequency. Shorter-range frequencies go through walls, yes. But they also cause more damage.”

“So if you don’t calibrate it right…”

“Right, you can cook the hostages along with the terrorists. It looks bad on TV after. Do it right, though, and no one gets worse than a sunburn.”

I nodded. “What does it feel like?”

He smiled. “You want to try?”

“Just tell me.”

He laughed. “A wise decision. I had it done to me-once. It feels like your skin is on fire, simple as that. The Sayeret Matkal had a little competition. Five thousand shekels to anyone who could group three rounds in a five-inch cluster from ten yards away while being hit with the beam. This is a joke for these men, they’re expert shooters. Ordinarily they group in one inch from much farther.”

“What happened?”

He laughed again. “They couldn’t shoot at all. They were too busy writhing and running away. No one asked to try twice. When word got around about what it felt like, people stopped volunteering.”