RainStorm

would
    confer an important advantage in the job at hand.
    I heard the phone ring in Karate's room. The television went
    quiet.
    "Allo," I heard him say. A pause, then, "Bien. "
    French, then, as I had suspected from the nicotine permeating
    his room. And with a cultured Parisian accent. My French was
    mostly left over from high school, and the receiver reception was
    muffled and obscured by periodic static. This was going to be
    tough.
    "Oui, il est arrive ce soir."
    That I understood. Yes, he arrived tonight.
    Another pause. Then, "Pas ce soir." Not tonight.
    Pause. Then, "Oui, la reunion est ce soir. Ensuite cela." Yes, the
    meeting is tonight. Then after that.
    Pause. A thicket of words I couldn't pick apart, followed by, "Tout va bien." Everything is fine. Another impenetrable thicket.
    Then, "Je vousferai savoir quand ce sera fait." I'll let you know when
    it's done.
    Click. Back to CNN.
    A half hour later, the TV went off again. I heard his door open
    and close. He was going out.
    I grabbed a dark windbreaker and took the stairs to the ground
    floor. A professional could be expected to use the rear entrance,
    which would represent the less trafficked, less predictable alternative,
    and I ducked out through the back doors on the assumption that
    this was the route Karate would be using. There were three exits
    back here--one from the hotel, one from the beauty parlor, one from
    the restaurant--but all of them fed into the same courtyard, which
    in turn fed onto a single walkway, meaning a single choke point.
    There was an open-air parking garage next to the hotel. I
    walked into it and hugged the wall, obscured by bushes lining the
    wall's exterior.
    He appeared a minute after I'd gotten in position. The streetlights
    illuminated him and cast shadows into the garage where I
    stood silently by. I watched him stroll past me down the tree-lined
    walkway in the direction of the Avenida da Amizade, named, like
    most of Macau's thoroughfares, by the Portuguese centuries earlier.
    The soft drape of his navy sport jacket was too stylish for his
    surroundings--dress in Macau, I had learned, was almost slacker
    casual--but I supposed that as a white island in an Asian sea he was
    going to stand out regardless.
    Past the parking garage he turned right into an alley. I glanced
    back at the hotel exit--all quiet. So far he seemed to be alone, with
    no counter surveillance to his rear. I moved out to follow him. He
    reached the Avenida da Amizade and -waited for a break in the traffic
    before crossing. I hung back in the shadows and waited.
    On the other side of the street he turned left, looking back over
    his shoulder, as any pedestrian would, to check for oncoming traffic
    before crossing. I permitted myself the trace of a smile. His
    "traffic check" was an unobtrusive bit of counter surveillance It
    was nicely done, casual, and I saw from the quality of the move that
    I was probably going to have a hard time following him solo.
    He moved down the wide boulevard in the direction of the
    Hotel Lisboa, the territory's biggest casino and best-known trolling
    ground for prostitutes, and after a moment I crossed the street and
    trailed after him. The streetlights around us were widely spaced,
    with ample pools of darkness between them for concealment, and
    Karate couldn't have spotted me even had he looked backward to
    do so.
    A few hundred meters farther on, he cut down the steps of
    an underground passageway. The passageway was H-shaped, its
    lengths running parallel to the Amizade and its middle running
    perpendicular beneath it. I moved just a little more quickly to close
    the gap, and arrived at the entrance in time to see him disappearing
    into the middle of the tunnel and under the street.
    Now I faced a dilemma. If I followed him in and he glanced
    back, he -would make me. If I stayed put and he emerged on the
    opposite side of the street and hurried on to develop distance, I
    could easily lose him.
    I thought for a moment. Until now, his counter surveillance had
    been subtle, disguised as ordinary pedestrian behavior. But he was
    abandoning subtlety now: after all, a pedestrian out for a stroll
    doesn't typically cross a street one way and then, a short stretch
    later, cross back. He knew what he was doing. The question was,
    which way would he play it? Double back, to catch a follower? Or
    hurry out the other side, to lose him?
    If I had been working with a team, or even just a teammate,
    there wouldn't have been a