Requiem for an Assassin

between. Blending wasn’t the problem here. The problem was access, and control.
    I thought about using light disguise to enter Jannick’s building. There might be opportunities inside—a restroom, a fitness facility, a closet. Somewhere Jannick’s guard would be down and I could hold him long enough to do things the way they needed to be done. But I hated to create a connection between myself and the place where he worked, especially if that’s where he was going to die.
    I walked back to the Mercedes, cutting once again through the parking lot on the way. Jannick’s car still wasn’t there. It was dark now, but there was a lot of light from streetlamps. I was going to have to find a better place.
    I drove back to Jannick’s house. Still no car. Then back and forth again. I used slightly different routes each time, and after five such trips, I started to feel I had a reasonably good feel for the layout of the streets, the patterns of traffic. Within that layout and those patterns, there would be possibilities. There always were. Sometimes I recognized them immediately; sometimes I had to sleep on it first, and let my subconscious work the problem.
    Sleep. I needed to get up early tomorrow to make sure I could catch Jannick before he left for work. And the time zone shifts were getting to me. It was time to call it a day.
    I stopped at a phone booth in a gas station and checked the Yellow Pages, where I found a hotel called the Stanford Park. Menlo Park, the next town over. I called and was glad to hear they had a vacancy, a king room with a fireplace. No smoking, the clerk said apologetically, perhaps in response to the Japanese accent I was using. No problem, I assured him. No smoking was fine. It was only available for two nights? That would be fine, too. I didn’t plan to be in town any longer than that.
    I purged the car nav system before checking into the hotel, then had an excellent dinner at a place called Café Borrone, about a mile down the road: salad, lasagna, and a wonderful Napa Valley Cabernet called Emilio’s Terrace, which, as globalization would have it, I had discovered a year earlier in Bangkok. The restaurant itself was a lively place, a bigger, smoke-free, California version of some of the Left Bank cafés I liked. There was a huge independent bookstore next to it, Kepler’s, and after dinner I strolled among its offerings for a while, watching the people, absorbing details. Everyone looked so prosperous and satisfied and well intentioned. I felt like some secret foreign matter among them, a virus in the system, a germ in an operating room.
    I asked one of the employees, a pretty woman named Cynthia, about Internet access. She directed me to the public library, less than a quarter mile away. I strolled over and checked the bulletin boards. Nothing.
    The last thing I did before falling into an exhausted sleep was fire up my old cell phone and check its voice-mail account. There was a message from Delilah. “Don’t push me away like this,” she said. “Call me, please.”
    I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had to stay focused. I had to be who I always was.

15
    I GOT UP at five o’clock the next morning, showered, shaved, fueled up on eggs and coffee in the hotel’s restaurant, and went out. Unlikely that Jannick, or anyone else, would get to work this early, but still I drove past his parking lot to start with. It was deserted. Next, I stopped at a Starbucks in the shopping center at the other end of East Bayshore. I ordered a Venti Latte, wondering why they couldn’t just call the damn thing a large, and dumped the contents in a drain a little ways from the store. It was the cup I needed: first, because I’d noticed that just about everyone in Palo Alto walked around attached to a Starbucks coffee, and carrying one of my own would make me look natural. Second, and more important, I didn’t know how long I might have to wait for Jannick, and although no one was likely to pay attention to a quietly parked Mercedes, they might be discomfited by the sight of a man repeatedly stepping out of it to urinate on the curb.
    I drove by Jannick’s house. There was still no car in front, but my guess was that it was in the garage. The sun was just coming up, and the house was dark. I drove down to OPM and parked in my spot. I couldn’t see his house from here, but I’d catch him when he pulled onto Page Mill.
    While I waited, listening to a woman named Alisa Clancy on a radio show called