Killing Rain

said.

    He laughed. “Okay. Remember, we can still hear you, so if you need anything, just speak up.”
    “Okay.”
    He cut out.
    I waited for nearly an hour in silence. Three times, someone came in to use the restroom. Each time, I checked to see if it was Manny or Hilger. It was possible that one or both of them might stop in on their way to the private dining room, in which case Delilah and Dox wouldn’t be able to warn me. But it was always someone else.
    The closet was fairly roomy, and I was able to move around a bit, do a few squats and stretches. There was a time when I could go to top speed without a warm-up, but that sort of thing was getting harder lately, and I wanted to stay limber.
    I was doing some isometric neck exercises when Dox came back on. “Okay, partner,” he said, “our guests have arrived. They’re being seated right now.”
    “How many?”
    “Two, it looks like. Hilger and Manny. Hang on, let me change frequencies and listen in for a minute.”
    A moment later, he came back on. “Yeah, it’s just the two of them. Hilger asked the hostess to escort ‘Mr. Eljub’ when he arrives. So it looks like it’s going to be just the three of them. You were right, Hilger didn’t change the plans.”
    “ ‘Eljub,’ ” Delilah said.
    I asked, “What of it?”
    “I’m . . . not sure. Just wondering who the mystery guest might be.”
    “I’m more concerned about where he’s sitting. And about whether he gets up.”
    “Of course.”
    I said, “Dox, can you switch the audio so that I can listen in, too?”
    “I can, but then you won’t be able to hear Delilah and me.”

    “That’s okay. You can cut back in anytime you think you need to.”
    “Gotcha. Okay, here you go.”
    There was a hiss, and then I was listening to Manny and Hilger. Hilger’s voice I remembered from listening to him through a parabolic microphone in front of Kwai Chung. He had a memorably slow, confident, reassuring way of speaking. Manny’s voice was higher; his tone, higher-strung. It sounded as though he was complaining to Hilger about security, specifically about having to leave his bodyguard outside.
    “He can do you more good monitoring the entrance than he could have in here,” Hilger told him.
    I wondered if he believed that—there were pros and cons, as I saw it—or if he was just trying to placate Manny, who struck me as a bit of a whiner.
    Manny said, “I don’t think so. Anyway, after what happened in Manila, I feel more comfortable with him close by.”
    “I’ve told you, I’m known at this club and I don’t have a bodyguard. If we post a man outside the door, it’s only going to make the staff curious about who I’m entertaining. Curiosity is the last thing we need tonight.”
    “He could have just eaten with us. The staff wouldn’t know his role.”
    “That’s true, but then we wouldn’t be able to speak freely. Look, I told you, Rain is in Bangkok. We almost had him there yesterday. He’s on the run now, and my men are pursuing him. You don’t have anything to worry about.”
    For a moment I wondered anew whether Hilger’s operation was in fact CIA. He certainly sounded like the government, describing an “almost had him” as a comforting sign of success. I sensed he would have been right at home spouting off about “catastrophic successes” and the other such doublespeak of the age.

    Manny said, “I want to know when you get him.”
    “Of course.”
    Well, Hilger’s going to have a little explaining to do to Manny later tonight, I thought. On the other hand, if things went as planned, Hilger wouldn’t be any more able to explain than Manny would be to listen.
    The audio cut out. There was a hiss, and Dox was back in my ear. “Saw Hilger pull some bug-detection gear from an attaché,” he said. “Glad we’re using video. I’m gonna go dark for ten minutes or they might pick up the signal.”
    “Good,” I said. The transmitters broadcast on radio frequency, which is present in the background in any urban location, and we were using low signal strength, boosted outside the room by the repeaters I’d put in place. So the concern wasn’t the transmitters’ ambient presence, only their susceptibility to a deliberate sweep, which might follow the signal they emitted like a trail of electronic bread crumbs. Once the sweep was completed, we could safely come back online.
    After ten minutes, I heard Dox again. “Okay, here we go. I’ll switch you