Killing Rain

of them and unraveled the whole fucking thing.
    Well, on the first front, finding out who had tried to carry out the hit, he had managed to move quickly. From the description Manny provided, Hilger had immediately suspected John Rain, who he knew had done the Belghazi job at Kwai Chung in Hong Kong last year. Hilger had been against that op, and had even tried to have Rain killed to stop it. Rain had proven a hard man to deter, though, and he’d gotten to Belghazi anyway. Which, strangely enough, turned out to have been all right: that bastard Belghazi had been trying to move radiological missiles right under Hilger’s nose. If Rain hadn’t wound up doing the job, Hilger would have had to do it himself.
    What a mess that had been, though. Some of the assets he’d been so carefully cultivating had suspected he’d been involved. If it hadn’t been for Manny, he doubted he would have been able to regain their trust. And then there was the heat from the CIA, which wanted to know exactly what the hell his involvement had been and why none of the proper paperwork had been filled out. There, too, outside intervention had made the difference. His National Security Council contact had effectively bought off the Director of Central Intelligence by telling the DCI the Agency could take carte blanche public credit for stopping a terrorist operation at Kwai Chung. It had all been in the news the nextday, with the heroes of the CIA, the DCI foremost among them, standing squarely in the adulatory spotlight. And there had been some side benefit, too: because the National Security Council spoke in the name of the President, the fact that the NSC had intervened aggressively on Hilger’s behalf told the DCI that Hilger was protected, all the way to the top. The DCI, the DDO, and pretty much everyone else who mattered in the Directorate of Operations left him alone after that.
    But there was a new DCI now, this guy Goss, and with all the firings and resignations, all the people who had been intimidated were now gone. The good news was that Goss didn’t have a clue, at least not yet. He had so many things he was trying to get under control that Hilger could probably fly under his radar for a while. If there were another slip, though, or if Goss took it into his head to assert himself by getting in Hilger’s face, things could get messy again. Yeah, maybe he’d be able to call in another round of favors and get the mess cleaned up, but he preferred not to have a showdown with the new management so soon. Even if Hilger won, there would be grudges after. Hunters don’t like to be interrupted in the act of pouncing on their prey.
    Rain’s involvement suggested that the CIA had ordered the hit, as it had with Belghazi. The thought was almost sickening. If those idiots had any idea what Hilger was up to, of what in three short years he had managed to accomplish, they would know to get out of his way and leave him alone. Leave him alone, hell, if they had any sense of proportion they would fucking genuflect.
    He drummed his fingers along the edge of the blond wooden desktop and watched the lighted barges inching like water bugs along the dark surface of the harbor a quarter mile below. He didn’t know why his men believed in him, exactly, but they did. They always had. He sensed that, at just south of forty years old, he had become a sort of father figure to them. It would be toomuch to say that they worshipped him, but his opinion of them mattered hugely, as did his understanding, his forgiveness, for the things their work required them to do. He’d never had anyone like himself in his own life, but he understood the power, and the responsibility, of the position. He could pat a man on the back, sometimes literally, and tell him that it was all right, that he had done the right thing, that the images and the smells, the fears and the doubts, the corrosive effects of conscience, all these were in fact part of the man’s nobility for not having taken the easy, the common path of shying away from what needed to be done. And because no one could ever know of their quiet heroics, of the anonymous sacrifices they made, because there would never be medals or ticker-tape parades or the thanks of a grateful nation, his understanding and, when necessary, his forgiveness were all his men had to comfort them. It wasn’t enough to remove the weight, true, but it was enough to lighten it. Sometimes he wished he had someone he could turn to