Killing Rain

morality is determined by the use to which it is put. There is katsujinken, the sword that gives life, or weapon of justice; and setsuninto, the sword that takes life, or weapon of oppression. In the dream, some nameless thing had almost caught me because of my inability to decide. I couldn’t afford to keep making that mistake in my life.
    Could I become katsujinken ? Was that the answer? Killing Belghazi in Hong Kong a year earlier had prevented the transfer of radiologically tipped missiles to groups that wanted to detonate them in metropolitan areas. Didn’t my act there save countless lives? And couldn’t something like that . . . offset the other things I’ve done?
    The notion was both appealing and frightening: appealing, because it hinted at the possibility of redemption; frightening, because it also acknowledged the certainty that, one way or the other, eventually I would be judged.
    I chuckled ruefully.
    Katsujinken and redemption . . . I was going to continue trying to reconcile East and West until the attempt finally killed me.
    I thought about Manny. He was like Belghazi, wasn’t he? A lot of good would come from his death.
    And his little boy will be marooned in grief for years to follow.
    I thought of the delicate way Dox had asked me if I was afraid I might freeze again, and of the simple confidence with which he took me at my word when I told him he needn’t worry.
    And suddenly the feeling of being frozen, stuck in some nameless purgatory between competing worldviews, began to seem like the worst possibility of all. This was the wrong time to be a philosopher, to be afflicted with doubts. I didn’t care what the price was. I didn’t care whether it was right or wrong. I was going to finish what I started.
    I felt the familiar mental bulkheads sliding shut, sealing off my emotions, focusing me only on the essentials of what needed to be done and how I would do it. Some bloodless, disconnected part of myself, turning the knobs and dials and making sure that things happened as they needed to. Whatever it was, this feeling, it has served me well countless times in my life. I don’t know if other people have it, but it’s part of my core, part of what makes me who and what I am. But this time, as those partitions moved into place, the part of me being closed off behind them wondered whether this wasn’t some further transgression, some further sin. To have been so close to what felt like a difficult epiphany, and to deliberately turn away from it . . .
    I sat back in the chair and let my gaze unfocus. I started thinking about how we could do it the way it needed to be done.
    I’d been to the China Club once, and knew the general layout. It was on the top three floors of the old Bank of China building in Central. The elevators stopped at thirteen; the next two floors were accessible only by internal staircases.
    I’d need to arrive early, use a pretext for getting in. Maybe I’d be doing advance work for some Japanese corporate titan, checking the place out to see if the boss wanted to shell out all those yen for a membership. The ploy was good. I’d used it before, and it usually brought out the host’s deepest desires to show his place off and answer all my innocent questions.
    The problem was that Manny knew my face now. I could ameliorate some of that with light disguise, which I assumed I’d have to use anyway because of the high likelihood of security cameras at the building’s perimeter and possibly inside. I’m also good at just fading into the background when I need to. But Hilger, who I sensed was a significantly harder target than Manny, would also know my face, as well as Dox’s. The CIA had photos of us both, as I’d learned during the Belghazi op a year earlier, and Hilger would have studied them closely, the same way I would have. Getting into the building wouldn’t be too difficult. But once we were inside, our ability to move might be curtailed.
    I sat and thought more. I could get there early, and probably find a place to hide. A bathroom, a closet, whatever. Dox would arrive later. We might be able to use cameras, as we had at the Peninsula in Manila, and Dox could monitor them and signal me with the commo gear when it was time to move. But where could we position him so he wouldn’t be noticed? I pictured him, sitting alone at the China Club’s renowned Long March
    Bar. The Long March Bar was for entertaining and impressing clients. Anyone sitting by himself for