Requiem for an Assassin

often, but I liked the routine. I’d done something similar for a long time with Midori before our rupture, at which point I’d shut that board down. I realized afterward that I missed the possibility of a message, that I had grown used to living with the pleasure of a small quotidian hope.
    I almost hated to admit it, because Dox’s boisterousness, wise-cracking, and willingness to wing it on tradecraft drove me crazy, but he was now as close a friend as I’d ever had. I hadn’t much cared for him when we’d first met, in Afghanistan. He was damn capable in the field, but his constant antics and outsized personality grated on me. Then, a few years ago, some elements in the CIA had tried to draw on the Afghan connection in sending Dox after me in Rio. Instead, the two of us wound up working together. The partnership was of necessity at first, and I distrusted him. But at Kwai Chung harbor in Hong Kong, he’d walked away from a bag with five million dollars in it to save my life. With that one remarkable act, he’d blasted through my defenses and altered my whole worldview. I still struggled with the aftermath. Would I have done the same for him? Today I wouldn’t hesitate, but at the time…no, I had to admit, at the time I wouldn’t have. I didn’t trust anyone back then, didn’t think anyone was worthy of trust. I believed in preemptive betrayal. There was a line I heard in a movie once: “Hell, I’ll kill a man in a fair fight…or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight.” That was me. There was nothing wrong with betrayal, just with letting the other guy beat you to it. But Dox had changed my view. The only person I could think of who had affected me as profoundly was Delilah.
    One day, on one of these forays to an Internet café, I saw there was a message waiting from the big sniper. I smiled and opened it, expecting nothing more than a report on the weather in Bali and maybe a hint of some fresh sexual conquest. The usual, from Dox.
    I couldn’t have been more wrong. The message said, We got to your friend near his villa on Bali. He’s with us, and for now he’s okay. But if we haven’t heard from you within twenty-four hours from posting this message, we can’t guarantee his continued comfort.
    I felt the blood draining from my face, an adrenaline dump in my gut. There was no way it was a joke. Dox liked to give me a hard time, but this would be crossing a line. I looked up from the terminal and glanced around, instinctively, uselessly, then looked back at the message. There was a phone number—Dox’s mobile. That was all.
    The message had been left at 2:00 A.M . Greenwich Mean Time. That was 3:00 A.M . in Paris. So…shit, over twelve hours ago. Less than twelve to go.
    I purged and closed the browser, then walked outside. Cars shot along the boulevard de Magenta, dead leaves skittering in their backwash. Pedestrians dodged me, intent on their destinations, heads down against the chill winter breeze, shoulders hunched. A multitude of urgent questions and frightened thoughts were crowding me, trying to get inside, and for a few minutes I concentrated only on my breathing, letting the cold air work to clear my mind.
    What do you know, I thought. Not what you suspect; what you know. Start with that.
    What it boiled down to wasn’t very much. Someone had gotten to Dox. Whoever it was, they were good. They’d forced him to give up the bulletin board, which meant they were ruthless. Now they wanted something from me.
    What else? The board was compromised. If they were good enough to take out Dox, they’d be good enough to hack the site and determine the location of the terminal from which I’d just accessed it. In fact, I had to assume they’d just gotten a ping confirming for them that I was currently in Paris.
    Shit, I thought. Shit.
    If I called from Paris, it would give them a second means of determining my current position. But if they’d already hacked the bulletin board, what they’d get from a phone call would be redundant.
    I thought about using the remaining time to go somewhere else, another city in France, maybe, or a quick train trip to Brussels, or Frankfurt. But I immediately rejected the notion. If they logged the time and location of the bulletin board access and then the call came hours later from elsewhere, it would look like I was trying to obscure my current location, which would mean Paris was in some way significant to me. Better to act as though my presence