Killing Rain

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 assessment 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. God, 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 causedexcept 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 sex was good—God, 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 sex, 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