RainStorm

head through the mall. I'll be right behind
    you. I'll tell you what to do next."
    "Don't you get tired of this stuff?" he asked, giving me a hangdog
    look.
    I watched the escalator behind him. "Go," I said. "Now."
    He did. I watched the escalator and the entrance for a moment
    longer. All clear. Then I caught up to him and fell in just behind
    and to the right of him. Harry's detector stayed quiet.
    We came to a maintenance corridor. "Here," I said. "Turn right."
    He did. We walked a few meters in. "Stop," I said. "Face the wall."
    He gave me a long-suffering sigh, but did as I asked. I patted
    him down. No weapons. I took his cell phone, turned it off, and
    pocketed it.
    "Will you give that back when school's over?" he asked.
    "Sure," I said. "If you're good. Now head out."
    I looked back the way we had come from. Nothing set off my
    radar. So far, so good.
    I took him through a provocative series of maneuvers that
    would have forced a pursuit team into the open. If I'd seen anything,
    I would have taken him past the knife and ended the bullshit
    then and there. But he was alone.
    I took him to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant deep in Pok Fu Lam,
    far enough from the island's tourist areas to draw only the most intrepid
    sightseers. The area was arguably a slum, but I liked it. In
    some ways, I found its crumbling four-story buildings, their paint
    faded and peeling from decades of subtropical moisture, their ornate
    balconies and carved balustrades by contrast strangely proud,
    even defiant, to be more pleasing than the trademark wealth and
    power of the districts east. Dox, enormous, bearded, and, most of
    all, Caucasian, looked decidedly out of place among the other diners,
    but he didn't seem to mind. The menu was entirely in Chinese,
    but I knew the characters and was able to point to what I wanted.
    "What is this?" Dox asked, after the soup had arrived and we
    had begun to eat. "It's tasty."
    "Good for you, too," I said. "A Chinese Olympic running
    coach used to feed it to his star athletes."
    "Yeah? What's in it?"
    "The usual stuff. Spring water. Mountain vegetables. Turtle blood
    and caterpillar fungus."
    He paused, the spoon halfway to his lips. "You serious?"
    "Well, that's what it said on the menu."
    He nodded as though considering. "Those Chinese runners are
    quick. If it's good enough for them, I guess I can have some, too."
    He slurped the rest down with a smile.
    I wasn't surprised. I'd seen Dox dine on equally unusual fare in
    the field in Afghanistan. Always with relish.
    When we were done with the soup, I asked him to tell me what
    was going on.
    "Well now," he said, leaning back in his chair. "You wouldn't
    believe the things they've trained me on. Forging ID, hacking computer
    networks, locks and picks, flaps and seals . . . And not just
    the training, they give me the toys! I've got a twenty-five thousand-dollar
    color laser copier, special paper, inks, hologram kits, magnetic
    stripe encoders, shoot, buddy, I can whip up fake ID that'd make
    your hair stand up! You want something, you just let me know."
    "You didn't come here just to make a sales pitch for fake ID, did
    you?" I asked.
    He seemed to brighten at that, and I wondered if Dox had
    come to the conclusion that my occasional barbed remarks were
    actually terms of endearment. That would be perverse.
    "I had a weird meeting with a guy the other day," he said, grinning.
    "Came all the way to see me in Bangkok, where I was relaxing
    and revivifying at the time. Told me his name was Johnson. But
    his real name is Crawley. Charles Crawley. The Third. Imagine, a
    family that would want to perpetuate a silly name like that when
    they could have named him something imaginative like Dox."
    "How'd you get his real name?"
    The grin widened. "Shit, I could smell lies all over that boy. So
    I pretended to get a call on my cell phone while we were talking. I
    used the phone to take his picture."
    He must have had one of the units with a built-in digital camera.
    In these matters it used to be that you only had to worry about
    the odd amateur who happened to be carrying a camcorder, like
    Zapruder or that guy -who caught the police working over Rodney
    King. Now it was anyone with a damn cell phone.
    I pulled out the unit I had confiscated from him. "This phone?"
    I asked.
    He nodded. "Go ahead, take a look."
    I hit the "on" button and waited for a moment while the phone
    powered up. Yeah, it was an Ericsson P900, new and slick, with a
    built-in camera