Requiem for an Assassin

go.”
    “You’re not done. There are two more.”
    Well, it was worth a try.
    “Give me the particulars, then,” I said.
    “Not yet. You’re a little ahead of schedule.”
    “We’re doing this on a schedule?”
    “The person’s not in position yet. As soon as he is, I’ll upload the information you need.”
    On the one hand, I liked the extra time. On the other hand, once again, I hated the idea that Hilger would be able to follow me by my efforts to track his target. I hoped Kanezaki would find something to help me short-circuit the whole thing.
    “How long are we talking about?” I asked.
    “Forty-eight hours. Check the bulletin board then.”
    He clicked off.
    I called Kanezaki from a pay phone. “You get it?” I asked.
    “I got it. He’s in Jakarta. Or at least he was during the time you had him on the phone.”
    I was gripping the phone hard. “Where in Jakarta?”
    “Pluit, it looks like. The marina.”
    “Can you be more precise than that?”
    “What do you want, an address? All I know is he was near a cell tower in Pluit. Without a formal request to the NSA, which will create a lot of questions and take a month to process anyway, I can’t triangulate. I can only give you a radius around a single tower. From what I can see, either he was in Pluit, or he was a little way out in the Java Sea.”
    I was quiet for a moment. He was right, I wasn’t being reasonable. But damn, to feel like I was that close to having him in my sights…
    “He’s got our friend on a boat,” I said. “They probably docked in Jakarta to make the call, maybe use an Internet café, whatever. But with the boat, they could move anywhere, and keep moving. There are ten million people in Jakarta alone. Leave Jakarta, and you’ve got seventeen thousand islands, only six thousand of them inhabited, and probably twenty thousand miles of coast. And that’s all assuming he stays somewhere in Indonesia and doesn’t move on. Shit, this isn’t much better than knowing he’s in Asia.”
    “It’s another piece,” Kanezaki said, after a moment. “Like you said.”
    I sighed. He was right again. “Is this anything you can use with what you’ve already got?” I said. “The visas, the previous known location, the government backing?”
    “I doubt it. I don’t have a way to search travel records by location, only by names. It doesn’t look like our friend was traveling as himself. So it’s slow going.”
    “All right,” I said, trying not to be frustrated. We had so many pieces…but they still added up to nothing. I fought the urge to just go to Jakarta, see what I could find there. Without more information it would be useless.
    “What about you?” he asked. “You learn anything on the call? Anything new we can work with?”
    “No. Well…maybe one of the people who’s holding Dox is or was a Marine. I think Dox was trying to indicate that, but I’m not sure.”
    “All right, I’ll see if that gets us anywhere.”
    Even as he said it, I knew it was unlikely. It was almost nothing.
    “Anyway, that’s all,” I said. “Hilger told me he’d upload details about the next assignment two days from now.”
    “Two days from now? You’re doing it again, aren’t you? Giving yourself time to…”
    “I’m not doing anything. He told me the person isn’t in position yet and wouldn’t be for forty-eight hours. I’ve got nothing to do but wait. If you could come up with something in that time, it sure would be handy.”
    “Otherwise…”
    “Yeah, that’s right. Otherwise we get to number two on the list.”
    “Jesus,” I heard him breathe.
    “Don’t ‘Jesus’ me,” I growled. “I’m not going to let something happen to my friend.”
    “Yeah, but…”
    “Bullshit. I don’t want to hear it. Not unless you’ve ever once gotten your own hands bloody. Have you? Ever? Or do you only send out other people for the nasty stuff so you can sleep like a fucking baby at night?”
    A long moment went by. Then he said, “I wasn’t judging you. I was just…a little awed. That’s all. I’m trying to help, okay?”
    I watched people strolling past me. A group of teenagers, laughing through orthodontic-perfect smiles, sauntering in distressed jeans that probably cost two hundred dollars a pair. Men whose faces bore the marks of nothing worse than overstretched mortgage worries beat back by too much Botox. Women with bare liposuctioned midriffs and Herculean plastic breasts. A river of well-fed