Requiem for an Assassin

natural?”
    “You know why. I don’t want anyone asking questions.”
    “I’m asking why you don’t want the questions.”
    “That’s not something you need to know.”
    I thought for a moment. “Five days to get to San Francisco, track this guy, find him, identify a pattern, select an opportunity, plan for an escape…there’s no way. You know that.”
    “We already have a lot of the information you’ll need. Home and work addresses, things like that. It’ll save you time. I’ll upload it to the bulletin board.”
    “Even so…”
    “Jannick is a civilian. He has no surveillance consciousness at all, no security, no clue. He’s as soft a target as you’ve ever gone after. The only trick is making it look natural. That’s why I want you.”
    “If he’s that easy, anyone could have done it the way you want.”
    “He’s only one of three, remember. And you’re wrong about just anyone being able to do it. Making it look natural is harder than hell, except in the movies, and you know it. You’ve got a talent. It’s why we’re here.”
    There was a lot he wasn’t telling me, of course. So all I could do was continue to engage him, continue to try to gather the information that would get Dox out of this. After all, I understood profoundly that Hilger would kill Dox the moment I was done with whatever he wanted doing. Even if I were inclined to give Hilger a pass for his transgression, he couldn’t count on one from Dox. And if Dox and I came after him together, his prospects would be bleak indeed.
    Hilger, of course, could do this math as well as I could. And the ruthlessness I sensed in his poise would turn the situation into a simple equation for him, an equation for which the solution set would be obvious, and therefore imperative.
    He knew I knew all this. Which meant the third target might be fictitious. I would kill the first two to buy time, thinking I had one more to go before Hilger killed Dox, but in fact I’d have unwittingly finished the whole job at the second target, at which point Dox would die. The third job, then, would be a setup. They’d feed me coordinates on some easy-to-track civilian on terrain they knew well, and when I showed up to take out the red herring, I’d walk into an ambush. Meaning, in effect, that the third target would be me.
    Or maybe I’d be the second. Maybe Jannick was Hilger’s only objective, and when he was done, so was Dox. So was I. There were a lot of possibilities, none of them good.
    “Are you satisfied?” Hilger asked, as though reading my thoughts.
    “With what?”
    “With having looked in my eyes. Trusting me to let Dox go when this is done.”
    “No. I don’t trust you to do that. But I learned something else from your eyes.”
    “Yeah? What’s that?”
    From his tone, I knew he was concerned that I might have picked up some piece of information he didn’t want me to have. Why else would I have insisted on a meeting? Trusting someone because of what you see in his eyes is a load of shit, although the latest bozo in the White House claimed to have managed a view of Vladimir Putin’s soul that way. And it was clear after what happened in Góc Saigon that I wasn’t going to kill him. What else could I have been after, if not information?
    I thought of Mr. Blond. Maybe I’d lost him. Maybe not. Maybe there had been others I hadn’t spotted. I realized now that I’d been wrong in thinking Mr. Blond, and any others, were only backup for Hilger, or part of a setup. More likely, they were a plan B. If I refused to follow instructions, they would have tried to kill me here. Then they would do Dox immediately after.
    I took a deep breath, then let it go. “I learned I don’t have a choice.”
    He nodded. “You got that right.”
    I stood up and took out his knives. I wiped them off with a napkin—I don’t like leaving my fingerprints on weapons—and placed them on the table. He made no immediate move for them, which was smart. I put Dox’s phone on the table, too. There was no way Hilger would have been stupid enough to have used it for any sensitive calls, so there was nothing to gain by taking it. And I wanted a way to reach him quickly if necessary.
    “When will the information be on the bulletin board?” I asked.
    “It’s there now.”
    I looked at him. For the moment, the urge to kill him had faded into the background, like what happens when you get so hungry your appetite temporarily dissipates.
    “I’ll be in touch