Killing Rain

given to you. “If I have to ask you again, you lose this eye.”
    There was a pause, then he said, “I don’t know for sure. I was told it came from some Russian outfit.”
    I knew Dox had done some work with the Russians not so long ago. I glanced at him, my eyebrows raised. He gave me a yeah, I guess that’s possible shrug in return.
    All right. I had deliberately started with a question about tools and tactics, something this guy could give up without feeling he was compromising his integrity. This would warm him up, help him rationalize his responses to the tougher inquiries that would follow. We’d started with how, and that had gone well. What I really wanted to talk about was who. But I sensed he still wasn’t ready for that, not even at the cost of his eyes. As a bridge between what we had accomplished and what still remained to be done, I decided to use why.
    “Why are you coming after us?” I asked.
    He paused, then said, “You tried to take out an asset in Manila.”
    “What asset?” His neck was stretched taut with his efforts to stay ahead of the pressure of the knife. “Lavi,” he said. “Manheim Lavi.”
    “Why? Retaliation?”
    I already knew the answer to that one: information, not retaliation. If it had been simple retaliation they were after, they would have just tried to kill Dox and me. They wouldn’t have bothered hiring a bunch of locals to grab us and stuff us into the back of a van. But I wanted to keep him talking just a little more before we got down to brass tacks.
    “Information,” he said. “We needed to know who was behind the hit so we could straighten things out.”
    “What do you mean, ‘straighten things out’?”
    “We have to protect our people. If there’s a threat, we deal with the threat.”

    We were running out of time. The patrons in front of the club might discover some misplaced courage and decide to interfere. And certainly the police would be here soon.
    Okay, here we go. “Who is ‘we’?” I asked.
    He shook his head. I pushed the knife up a fraction and he cried out.
    “Last time, and then you lose this eye. Who is we?”
    He started to hyperventilate. He’d been standing on the very tips of his toes and his legs were trembling. But he wasn’t answering my question.
    I didn’t want to do it—not out of any misplaced squeamishness, but because once you start hurting the subject, you start to lose your leverage. Fear is the ultimate motivator, but what you’re afraid of is by definition the thing that hasn’t happened yet. Once the thing has happened, you’re not afraid of it anymore. Once I’d taken out an eye, the loss of that eye would no longer be a threat. It would be one less thing the fear of which would motivate him.
    But if you threaten and then fail to act, your subsequent threats lack credibility. It’s not pretty, but that’s the way a high-pressure interrogation works.
    It occurred to me that there was one more problem. Whoever was behind this guy, if he were found sans an eye or two, they would know he had died after being interrogated. They could then be expected to change their plans, their security, to protect whatever their man might have compromised under duress. And, although in fact he had compromised very little, we had his hotel room key now. That presented some interesting possibilities I would have preferred not to foreclose.
    Damn, it was a dilemma. But before I had a chance to resolve it, Perry Mason started to scream. Not so much in pain, or even to call for aid, but in outrage and desperation.
    Dox slammed his hand over the man’s mouth, but thescreaming decided it for me. We were exposed here, and too much time had gone by since the start of the incident. It was past time for us to bug out.
    I looked at Dox. He nodded and I thought he understood. I took a half step back and kneed the guy in the groin. The screaming was displaced by a grunt and his body tried to double forward, but Dox was holding him too tightly. I changed my grip on the knife so that I was holding it ice pick style, blade in, and plunged it into his upper left pectoral, just below the clavicle. I ripped down and across, lacerating the subclavian artery.
    I pulled Dox aside. The man spilled to his knees. He let out a long, agonized groan and pitched forward, but managed to get his arms out and caught himself before his head hit the pavement. There wasn’t much blood—the artery was transected, and the bleeding would be mostly into