Killing Rain

wished he had someone he could turn to in a like manner, but he didn’t, and he supposed this was part of the burden of leadership, to bear the doubts, and the hard memories, alone.
    Manny had said there had been another man, a big white guy. That wasn’t much to go on by itself, but Hilger had more. There had been a sniper at Kwai Chung. Maybe it had been Rain, but Hilger knew that Rain had no sniping background, and the gunman at Kwai Chung had been a pro. He’d taken the heads off those two Transdniester bagmen from far enough away so that no one had even heard the shots. That didn’t feel like Rain, who worked from close up. Hilger couldn’t be sure, but he suspected the shooter had been a CIA contractor called Dox. Hilger, through an intermediary, had tried to hire Dox to eliminate Rain and save Belghazi. Afterward, he wondered if the damn ex-Marine had decided to work with Rain instead of against him.
    He knew they had “served” together in Afghanistan, helping the Muj chase out the Red Army. He’d expected Dox’s mercenary instincts to be more powerful than any sense of comradeship the man might still feel from that shared conflict, but it seemed in that respect Hilger had misjudged.
    He had his own files on both these men, complete with photographs. The photo of Rain was out of date, but Hilger had used some Agency software to update it. He’d shown the photos to Manny before Manny returned to Manila, and Manny had given him a positive ID on both.
    So far, so good. But who had been behind the hit was proving more difficult to divine. The CIA had been his first guess, but he hadn’t been able to find out anything there. Of course, his inquiries had to be somewhat oblique, lest someone connect him through Manny to the men who had died in Manila, but he had his sources, and all of them had come up blank. The CIA might have wanted Manny dead, but it seemed they hadn’t tried to bring it about.
    Who, then? Manny hadn’t wanted to face it, but, as they’d discussed the day before, the list was anything but short. The problem was that Rain had no known connections with any of the primary suspects. He had a history with the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party and of course with the Agency, the latter dating all the way back to Vietnam, but he wasn’t known to work with anyone else. That didn’t mean there weren’t any other clients, of course; Rain was a freelancer, a mercenary. But expanding a client base in Rain’s line of work isn’t easy. You can’t just hang out a shingle, or take out a few ads. New clients come slowly, if at all.
    Well, there was a fairly straightforward way to get to the bottom of this. All he had to do was ask Rain or Dox. They might not want to tell him, true, but they’d be inclined to believe him when he said that he understood they were just contractors, that he had no personal beef with them nor any professional reason to want them removed. Hell, after he’d cleared this whole thing up, he’d be happy to have them on his team.
    What would make it sound appealing was that it was very nearly true. It would be true, in fact, except they’d killed Calver and Gibbons, which did indeed make things personal. And they had scared Manny’s boy, ruining any chance that Manny might want to just let bygones be bygones, as well.
    All he needed to do was get to them. A clean snatch, the back of an unmarked, unobtrusive van. A reasonable, man-to-man conversation, if possible. Electrified alligator clips attached to their scrota, if not. Either way, he would get the information he wanted.
    He took a deep breath. Yes, he needed someone who could snatch them, then interrogate them. And who knew the region well enough to be able to make it all happen quickly.
    There were several men he could have chosen, but one name stood out: Mitchell William Winters. The man was an expert. He had trained with the famed FBI Hostage Rescue Team and rendered more than his share of bad guys. And he had worked in Asia, doing security consulting for companies that needed such assistance in the region. Winters was into martial arts—Hilger remembered hearing about kali or something like that in the Philippines and Thai boxing in Bangkok. He didn’t particularly care about the karate stuff—Hilger’s choice of martial art was a SIG P229, concealed in a belly band carry, and he had yet to meet the Long Dong Do master who could block a bullet from it—but the experience in Asia would be critical.
    And