Requiem for an Assassin

didn’t work with Hilger. He said only, “What you can.”
    Which in his case, I gathered, was a lot.
    I waited, hoping he would add something I could use. After a moment, he said, “It’s too bad it has to be this way with us. I respect you. We ought to be able to work together. I work with a lot of guys like you.”
    “Like me how?”
    He shrugged. “Smart. Independent. With the insight to understand the way things really work.”
    I felt the manipulation, but didn’t know where he was trying to steer me. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Sure you do. You know democracy’s just a pretty picture. And that to ensure its survival and preserve its appearance, certain men have always done things that no one else can know.”
    “Assassinations.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Coups.”
    “Sure.”
    “Kidnapping?”
    He shrugged. “We call them ‘extraordinary renditions.’”
    “Abu Ghraib.”
    He shook his head. “I’m not talking about Abu Ghraib. AG was exactly the way not to go about it. People say what happened there is immoral. Shit, it’s worse than immoral. It’s incompetent. The whole thing was nothing but a fishing expedition. Widespread and sanctioned. And once it got out, predictably, we had to bend over backward in the other direction because of all the media scrutiny.”
    “I thought the VP said waterboarding was a ‘no-brainer.’ And that was after AG.”
    “Believe me, the right people had a lot more freedom before AG. Anyway, the VP doesn’t know what he’s talking about. None of them do. That’s the point. With guys like that in the limelight, more than ever you need the right things done in the dark.”
    Okay, so this was “you and I are the pros and everyone else is incompetent.” If he thought that would save him when this was done, he was wrong.
    I looked at him. “Yeah? How do you know when it’s right?”
    He returned the look. “When it’s necessary.”
    “And when is that?”
    “When you need something, and there’s no other way to get it.”
    “How did you know there was no other way here? You never asked me.”
    “Some things you just know.”
    “Why don’t you ask me now.”
    He shook his head. “Now I’m not asking. I’m telling you. That’s why I had to go through Dox. Because it has to get done.”
    A long silent moment passed. I tried not to think of Dox. It helped me keep the latent lust to kill Hilger momentarily on a leash.
    “All right,” I said. “Tell me what you want.”
    He glanced around, then leaned forward. “Three jobs, like I told you. When you’re done with the first, I’ll give you the second. When you’re done with the second, I’ll give you the third. When you’re done with the third, I’ll release Dox.”
    I looked at him. When I spoke, it was half directed at Hilger, half to appease the iceman.
    “If you do anything permanent to him,” I said, “you know I’ll find you. And you know what I’ll do to you.”
    He offered a faint, humorless smile. “You’re being generous. You’re going to try to find me the moment I let him go, if not before.”
    “There’s something you need to understand. I’ve been trying to get out of the life. If I have to revert to protect a friend, I will. But I don’t want to go any further than I have to. Yeah, right now I’m upset. I don’t like the way you got me to the negotiating table. But if you play it straight from here, we might all be able to walk away from this.”
    There was a lot of truth in there. Which made it the best kind of lie.
    Hilger nodded, but that was all. I didn’t know whether he’d bought it.
    “Let me talk to him again,” I said.
    He shook his head. “You’ve talked to him once. You can talk to him again after. After each one.”
    Something told me I wasn’t going to win on this point and I let it go. I rotated my head, cracking the neck joints. “All right,” I said, “the first one. Who, where, when, how.”
    “Who is Jan Jannick, Dutch national, male, forty-five years old. Where is the San Francisco Bay Area, where he’s temporarily resident. When is within five days from today. And how is something that absolutely looks natural.”
    The appearance of natural causes is my specialty, and the reason I’ve always been able to charge a premium. Except, of course, when I’m working under duress, when my fees tend to be…waived. I assumed it was the “naturalness” imperative that made Hilger need me, but there might have been more.
    “Why