Requiem for an Assassin

“Where?”
    “Someplace else. You might have called someone and told him where we are.”
    “I’m alone.”
    I wasn’t going to tip my hand by asking about Mr. Blond. “That’s good to hear,” I said. “Indulge me anyway.”
    I’m not getting any younger, but I have still two advantages. First, I’ve always been unusually quick—partly the result of genetics, partly of obsessive training. Second, I can go from stonelike stillness to explosive violence without any of the usual precursors. The signs people know to look for—obvious ones, like shouting, gesticulating, and other posturing, and less obvious ones, like the face going white and the pupils dilating—I don’t exhibit, or have learned to mask. I can hurt you, or worse, and the only sign you’ll have of what’s coming is that I was close enough to do it.
    Hilger didn’t know that. I was close, sure, but the sum total of his experience would be telling him that there’d be some warning, some noticeable transition, and that therefore he would have the necessary moment to react. So it really wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t ready for what happened next.
    “You need to…” he started to say.
    I closed the distance with one long step, my lead hand feinting for his face. His eyes popped open in surprise and his arms flinched upward—away from my trailing knee, which arced up and slightly around on the way to its abrupt run-in with his balls. He made a sound you might describe as vomitus interruptus and doubled over into me. I shoved him into the wall and had the folder open against his neck in an instant. The edge might not have offered longevity, but it was plenty sharp at the moment, and I pressed it against his carotid, the pressure just short of breaking the skin, my fist in his Adam’s apple, my left hand securing his right wrist and keeping it away from anything he might have in his pocket.
    “Hands up, shitbag,” I breathed. “Against the wall, alongside your head. Move for a weapon and I’ll open you down to your spine.”
    Beyond my substantive need to check him for weapons, it was important that I give him an option other than resistance or death. If he were convinced I was going to kill him, I couldn’t expect cooperation. As it was, he decided to comply. He grimaced and slowly got his arms up against the wall. His head was pressed back, his chin tucked in against my fist, his nostrils flaring with his breathing. His eyes were narrowed to slits, coldly observing me.
    I stared back at him, and realized with a start how close I was to doing it. Grab his hair, shove his head to the left, rip right, sidestep to avoid the spray. Walk outside, fillet Mr. Blond before he had a chance to react. Go Keyser Söze on them, let the remnants of Hilger’s team understand who they were fucking with and what was coming for them next.
    “I don’t check in, my men do Dox,” he said, as though reading my thoughts. “It’s automatic.”
    Maybe, I thought. Or maybe your men let Dox go at that point, to mollify me. What good is he to them, anyway, if you’re dead? Yeah, let him go. A quitclaim, a peace offering.
    Jesus. I wanted to kill him so badly I was actually panting a little. And rationalizing everything else, even Dox’s life, to give myself permission.
    Do it. Just fucking do it. End it now and you can walk away.
    I imagined Dox, helpless somewhere, cut off, in pain, and somehow the thought stayed my hand. My whole body trembling with ambivalence, I turned Hilger around and patted him down. He was carrying two knives, a folder and a belt unit. I pocketed both. Next, Dox’s mobile phone. I turned it off and pocketed it, too. Other than a roll of dong and greenbacks, he was carrying nothing else, not even a wallet.
    I backed away from him, closing the knife as I moved. I put it back in my pants, noting that Harry’s bug detector had stopped vibrating the moment I had turned off Dox’s phone. Hilger was clean.
    I watched him, dumbfounded, on some level, that he was still alive, that I’d managed to hold back. He swallowed and his right hand drifted to his throat, rubbing it, caressing the undamaged skin. He was breathing hard.
    The hostess turned the corner and pulled up short. She hadn’t seen what had happened a second earlier, but she could feel the aftermath. I glanced at her and said, “Give us a minute.” She nodded and backed away.
    I looked at Hilger. “Let’s go.”
    He shook his head. “Out of the question,” he