Killing Rain

evacuate Coventry when they discovered the Nazis were going to bomb it? If the city had been evacuated, the Nazis would have known their Enigma code had been compromised, and the whole Allied war effort would have been jeopardized. The people of Coventry had to be sacrificed so that others might live. It wasn’t pretty when you said it out loud, but that’s what had happened. The difference was, today the politicians didn’t have the balls to make those decisions. So the hard work had devolved to men like himself.

    It was funny, he thought, that democracy couldn’t survive if it tried to adhere top to bottom to its own ideals. He knew that it was men like himself, working behind the scenes, on their own, doing what no one else could face, who made democracy function, who saved it from the knowledge of its own inherent hypocrisy, who kept it sleeping untroubled at night.
    The irony was, Rain was a man who might understand all this. Didn’t the Japanese even have a name for it? Honne and tatemae —real truth, and societal façade? English could use a couple of words like that. Their absence from America’s lexicon was revealing: not only couldn’t we appreciate the necessity, we couldn’t even acknowledge the concept.
    Rain. He imagined how good it was going to feel when he received confirmation that the man was dead. He was surprised at the intensity of the feeling. Ordinarily, these things weren’t personal for him. But three good men were down, and now he had to make that call to Elizabeth Shannon . . . not to mention the pressure all this was putting on his entire operation.
    Yeah, he wanted him dead, all right. And Dox, too. He wondered if maybe he would have a chance to do it himself.

NINETEEN

    T HE FLIGHT TO HONG KONG the next morning was uneventful. After the restless night I’d just had, I was glad to sleep through most of it. I arrived at Hong Kong International feeling relaxed and refreshed and caught a cab to the Shangri-La.
    I checked in, then called Dox on the prepaid unit he was carrying. He was in a cab, on his way to Kowloon.
    “Stop at the bug-out point first, take care of that,” I said. “No sense in both of us being there at the same time. Then check in and get the clothes you need.”
    “Will do.”
    The bug-out point was a coffee shop near the Man Mo temple on Hollywood Road. When you go operational, or otherwisecommit an act that the authorities are apt to frown upon if you’re caught, it’s wise to choose a backup meeting place to use if it becomes inconvenient to return to your hotel, and to preposition certain necessary items there: cash, for one thing; and a spare passport, for another, if you’re lucky or connected enough to know how to come by such things. You typically want a place that’s accessible at all hours and that offers many appropriate hiding spots: the underside of a counter or a bookshelf, the back of a bathroom cabinet, that sort of thing. Whether the op goes well or poorly, your things need to be in place for only a few hours. If the op goes really poorly, you’ve got bigger problems than someone stumbling across the stash you’ve taped to, say, the underside of a toilet in an all-night diner.
    “When you’re done with that,” I said, “let’s meet on the mezzanine level of the Grand Hyatt at sixteen hundred. It’s away from the main lobby so it’s private, and you’ll look right at home there in your new threads.”
    “Sounds good. You’ve got the gear?”
    “And everything else.”
    “All right, partner, see you soon.”
    I turned off the phone and headed over to the hotel shopping arcade, where I got a haircut and a shave. I had them put a bunch of gel in my hair and slick it back—not my usual look, and not a dramatic alteration to my appearance, but lots of small changes would begin to add up. Next, a visit to an optometrist for a pair of rectangular wire-frame glasses that did a nice job of reworking the angles of my face. At the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall, one stop at Dunhill got me the rest of what I needed: single-breasted, double-vented navy gabardine suit, fitted with inch-and-a-half cuffs in fifteen minutes flat; white Sea Island cotton shirt and flat gold cuff links; brown split-toe lace-ups and navy socks; brown alligator belt and British-tan attachécase. It wasn’t terribly cold in Hong Kong, but perhaps just chilly enough to justify the purchase of a pair of brown deerskin gloves, which went into the attaché.