RainStorm

Japanese escort agency through which I had hired her. She
    was in her mid-twenties, too young for me to take seriously, but
    she was pretty and surprisingly bright and I was enjoying her company.
    More important, her presence made me look less like some
    kind of intelligence operative or lone-wolf killer assessing the area,
    and more like a forty-or
    fifty-something Japanese who had taken
    his mistress to Macau, maybe for a little gambling, maybe for a lot
    of time alone at a hotel.
    One morning, Keiko and I went down to the hotel's Cafe Girassol
    to enjoy the breakfast buffet. As the hostess led us to a table,
    I scanned the area for signs of danger, as I do by habit whenever
    entering a room. Hot spots first. Back Corner One: table of four
    young Caucasians, two male, two female, dressed for a hike. Accents
    Australian. Threat probability low. Back Corner Two: Karate. Hmm. Threat probability medium.
    Keep the eyes moving. Complete the sweep. Wall tables: empty.
    Window seats: elderly Chinese couple. Next table: three girls, fashionable
    clothes, confident postures, probably Hong Kong Chinese,
    young professionals on a quick holiday. Next table: pair of Indian
    men in business attire, sunny Punjabi accents. Nothing that rubbed
    me the wrong way.
    Back to Karate's vicinity with an oblique glance. He had his
    back to the wall and an unobstructed view of the restaurant's entrance.
    His seating position was what I would have expected from
    a pro; his focus on the room offered further evidence. I noticed that
    he had a newspaper open in front of him, although he wasn't bothering
    to read it. He would have been better off without the reading
    material: then he could have scoped the room as though he was
    bored and had nothing better to do than people-watch.
    Or he should have brought a friend, as I had. I could feel him
    looking at us at one point, and was glad to have Keiko there, smiling
    into my eyes like a satisfied lover. The smile was convincing,
    too. She was good at her job.
    Who was he waiting for, though? I might have assumed the answer
    \vas me--"only the paranoid survive," I think some Silicon
    Valley type once said--but I was pretty sure I wasn't it. Too many
    chance sightings followed by ... nothing. No attempts to follow
    me, no attempt to recognize my face, no hard-eyed, that's him kind
    of feeling. After over a quarter century in the business and a lot of
    incidental training before that, I'm sensitive to these things. My gut
    told me he was after someone else. True, it wasn't impossible that
    he was only told where and when, with information on who to be
    provided subsequently, but I deemed that scenario unlikely. Not
    many operators would agree to take this kind of job without first
    knowing who they were going up against. It would be hard to
    know how to price things otherwise.
    If the matter had been local--say, a Triad dispute--it was unlikely
    that a white guy would have been brought in for the job. The
    Triads, Chinese "secret societies" with deep roots in Macau and
    the mainland, tend to settle their affairs themselves. Adding up the
    available data, therefore, and taking myself off the short list of possible
    targets, I was left with Belghazi as the most likely recipient of
    Karate's attentions.
    But who had hired him? If it had been the Agency, it would
    have been a violation of one of my three rules: no women or children,
    no acts against non-principals, no B-teams. Maybe my old
    friends from the government thought that, because they had managed
    to track me down in Rio, I was vulnerable, and that they
    could therefore treat my rules as mere guidelines. If this was indeed
    their assumption, they were mistaken. I had enforced my rules before,
    and would do so again.
    That afternoon, I made a point of strolling past the gym with
    Keiko, and, sure enough, there was my friend, earnestly kicking the
    air at the same time as the day before. Some people just need a routine,
    and refuse to accept the consequences of predictability. In my
    experience, these people tend to get culled, often sooner, sometimes
    later. It's a Darwinian world out there.
    Seeing an opportunity, I checked the sign-in sheet. His name
    was illegible, but he had written his room number clearly enough:
    812. Hmmm, a smoking floor. Unhealthy.
    I asked Keiko if she wouldn't mind shopping by herself for a little
    while. She smiled and told me she'd be delighted, which was
    probably the truth. She might have thought I was going off