RainStorm

didn't need to sleep with Belghazi
    to tell me where I could find him."
    Reasonable enough, but I could feel that he sensed I was arguing
    with him, and was suspicious about why. I needed to rein that
    shit in.
    Kanezaki picked up his coffee and looked at it for a moment,
    then said, "There's more. Both bad guys died of a single twenty-two
    caliber gunshot to the eye. Even from close up, and the victims
    were hit close up, that's a hell of a shot. Whoever pulled the trigger
    is confident enough to use something with low penetration power
    because he knows he can place one shot where it needs to go to get
    the job done."
    He. Interesting.
    "The woman's not the shooter?" I asked.
    "I don't think so. I think she's the spotter. She's like a very specialized
    mole. She gets vetted by the target, passes the test, gets inside.
    The target is still taking other precautions, of course, and thinks
    he's safe. But there's a flaw in his security, and he's sleeping with it.
    Then, when the woman judges that the moment is right, she
    makes a phone call. That night, the guy she's with runs into a bullet.
    She's not there when it happens, and she vanishes afterward. No
    one knows she was involved."
    He took a sip of coffee. "You know, I once read an article about
    unexplained car accidents. It seems a significant percentage of au-
    tomotive fatalities gets filed under 'unknown causes.' Broad daylight,
    bright sunshine, a guy flips his car and dies. A lot of times when
    this happens, it turns out the windows were rolled down. So one
    theory is, the guy is driving along, listening to the radio, enjoying
    the beautiful day, and a bee flies into the car. The guy freaks, tries
    slapping at the bee, gets distracted, boom. The bee flies away. 'Unknown
    causes.' I think that's what we're dealing with here."
    "Who's she working for, then?"
    "Don't know. A lot of possibilities, because these guys have lots
    of enemies. Could be a business competitor, someone moving in
    on the weapons contracts or the cash transactions to get better access
    to the skim. Could be the French--they've got their fingers in
    everything and you never really know what the hell they're doing
    or why. But my guess is, it's an Israeli operation."
    I nodded, both impressed by and not particularly liking his insights.
    It was one thing for me to have an idea of who Delilah was,
    who she was with. I could use the information any way I liked, I
    could control the situation. It was another thing to have the CIA
    taking an interest. "Why?" I asked.
    He shrugged. "Because the Israelis have the most constant and
    immediate motive to disrupt the infrastructure and they're always
    trying to do so, any way they can. Because Israeli assassination
    teams like to work with twenty-twos--they're small and concealable
    and relatively quiet. The teams that killed the Septemberists
    who did Munich were using twenty-twos. And because the shooter
    is so good. And likewise for the woman. The guys she's setting up
    and knocking down aren't lightweights, so if she's doing what I
    think she's doing, she must be damn good at it. Mossad quality."
    "You think she's Mossad?"
    He nodded. "I think she's part of the Collections branch. Collections
    does the target assessment and evaluation, after a committee
    has decided on the hit. Specialists, called Kidon, or Bayonets,
    part of the special Metsada unit, are the actual triggermen. So the
    division of labor here, it has an Israeli feel to me. Have you seen her
    again?"
    "No," I said, reflexively.
    He paused for a moment, then said, "I was almost hoping you
    had. It's not impossible that she could have been behind whoever
    attacked you in Hong Kong."
    Oddly enough, the notion seemed less likely when proposed by
    Kanezaki than it did when I was grappling with it myself.
    "They were Arabs," I said.
    "Mossad uses Arab factions all the time. False flag ops. But anyway,
    I don't know for sure that she's Israeli. I told you, she could
    also be working for a faction. Or she could be a freelancer." He
    smiled. "You know those freelancers, they'll work for anyone."
    "Even the CIA," I said, not returning the smile.
    "That's true. But she's not one of ours. I would know about it."
    "I wouldn't overestimate how much you know about what your
    organization is up to. Your motto could be, 'Don't worry, our right
    hand doesn't have a clue about the left.'"
    He chuckled. "That can be true at times."
    We were quiet for a moment.
    I didn't want him to think I was