Requiem for an Assassin

for playing, Mr. Hilger. Next contestant.
    It was natural enough, I supposed. Democracy is about checks and balances. But if the policymakers find they’re being checked and balanced a little too much, they look for what the software types call work-arounds. Can you blame them? You might as well blame water for trying to go around a rock. It’s not a question of blame and fault; it’s a question of nature and proclivities. If there were no demand for Hilger’s services, or for mine, for that matter, there wouldn’t be a supply.
    I wondered why Hilger would want to eliminate the CEO of a CIA-funded outfit offering neural net database technology. Was Jannick competition of some sort? Did his work interfere with something Hilger was trying to do, or threaten a market Hilger wanted to get into? No way to know, not yet.
    I considered how Hilger might try to trace me, making sure I hadn’t missed anything. He would expect me to Google Jannick right away. If he had access to the data, he could start with searches for Jan Jannick that occurred, say, one hour after our meeting at the Park Hyatt. Cross-reference the hits with servers in Vietnam, and you’d have the IP address of the computer I used. A long shot, maybe, but not impossible. But now, even if he had the access, he could confirm no more than that I’d checked out Jannick, as he would have suspected. My other Internet activity would remain sterile.
    I caught a cab back to my hotel, collected my gear, and headed directly to the airport. Hilger might have anticipated the move and put people at one of the choke points inside—check-in, maybe, or outside customs—but I doubted it. Too many cameras, too much security. Also, my gut told me he really wanted Jannick dead. If so, I’d be safe until it happened.
    Afterward was a different story.

12
    H ILGER DID a surveillance detection route, and, when he was satisfied neither Rain nor anyone else was following him, headed to the Sheraton, his rendezvous point with Demeere. He walked slowly, sweating in the tropical evening heat, only dimly aware of the humidity and the smell of diesel and spices he couldn’t name, ignoring the incessant horns, the shouted invitations from motorcycle cabs, the dizzying whine of two-stroke engines.
    That had been a close thing with Rain, a hell of a close thing. If the man had been bluffing at the Góc Saigon, it was the best bluff Hilger had ever seen. When Rain held that knife to his neck, and he saw what was in Rain’s eyes, he really thought he was done. He had thought, I miscalculated, he doesn’t care about Dox, the crazy bastard’s going to kill me right here.
    Hilger had been an inch from death twice before. The first time was in Baghdad, when a sudden sneeze from the omnipresent sand and dust had jerked his head a fraction, just far enough for a sniper round to crease his scalp instead of his skull. He’d called in artillery, and a minute later the sniper was vaporized. The second time, his rifle had jammed and he had to engage one of Saddam’s Fedayeen hand-to-hand. The man had tried to gut Hilger with a Bedouin knife that broke off on Hilger’s flak jacket, and Hilger knocked the man down with his rifle stock, then beat him to death with the butt, pulverizing his skull. Both times, the initial elation had given way to a feeling of wonderment at the miracle of still being alive, and then to a long period of reflection on the fragility of everything. He’d dodged two bullets, one of them literally, but those were only the two he knew about. How many went right by us, every day, without our even knowing?
    Well, he’d just survived his third, and now that he was out of Rain’s presence, now that the operational exigencies were behind him and he could acknowledge what had happened, that post-combat giddiness was kicking in. His legs felt rubbery and his hands were trembling. He’d known Rain by reputation, and by their one brief encounter in Hong Kong, but this was the first time he’d really seen him up close and personal. He recognized the type, although he’d known only a very few: Rain was a killer, a natural predator. The hesitation, the hand-wringing, even the paralysis that afflicts ordinary men, it was all absent from what he’d seen in Rain’s eyes.
    Hilger had done his share of killing, most recently that idiot Drano in Bali, but he didn’t consider himself to be in Rain’s class. He knew his own ability to kill, while formidable, was also something