Requiem for an Assassin

to Delilah, but a danger, too. It wasn’t fair to her.
    Not two days earlier, I’d decided I should just break things off with her, I’d accepted that it had to be done. Then, stupidly, I’d let her come see me, and it had been so good that I’d temporarily forgotten my resolve. But already, as I drove east into West Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard, the sun flaring behind me as it sank in the sky, my evening with Delilah was beginning to feel meaningless, even foolish. She was an attractive woman, yes, more attractive than any I’d ever known. And she had a lot of good qualities, along with a few maddening ones. But what did any of that have to do with me, really, and the life I had to lead? Drunk on liquor at the time, and intoxicated by her nearness, I’d nearly been beguiled by her talk of choices. But I saw clearly now all that was foolish. Some things go beyond choice. Some deeds have such power and resonance that they become your own nature, and eclipse everything else you do. Delilah didn’t understand that. Because part of me cared about her, and always would, I was glad she could indulge such illusions, and took some quiet pride in maintaining them for her. What I couldn’t, and wouldn’t do, was share them.
    I stopped at an Internet café with no great hope and checked the Kanezaki bulletin board. Still nothing. I stared at the empty text box for a few moments, unsurprised. I would just have to go on to the next target. It felt natural. It felt like fate.
    At another café, I checked on Hilger. There was a message waiting, as I had expected. I smiled to myself, ruefully. You see? I thought, as though I was talking to Delilah. You see?
    A name, Michael Accinelli. A timetable: five days again. Shit. I wondered what the short fuses meant. For now, no way to know. I supposed I should count myself lucky that Hilger hadn’t made the deadline even sooner, after learning how quickly I’d managed to do Jannick.
    There was a business address in Mineola, New York; a home address in Sands Point, New York. I didn’t recognize the name of either town. Phone numbers. The make and model of the cars he drove—a 2007 Mercedes S600 and a 2007 Range Rover HSE—along with license plate numbers. Several photos of a fit-looking guy in his late fifties, with a full head of steel-gray hair and dark, piercing eyes. In one of the shots, Accinelli was wearing an expensive-looking charcoal chalk-striped suit; a white, spread collared shirt; a navy tie; and a white linen handkerchief. He was sitting, both hands folded on a knee, leaning forward slightly, smiling confidently. Very chairman of the board, and in fact the photo looked like something lifted from a corporate brochure or website. In the other photos, he was behind a lectern in similar business attire, probably at an investors’ conference or some industry event.
    I Googled him. The first hit was for a company called Global Pyrochemical Industries, and sure enough, there was the shot of Accinelli in the charcoal suit, right on the home page. He was indeed the chairman of the board, and the CEO, too. I clicked on his bio: born and raised in Oyster Bay, Long Island, 1950; graduated with honors from West Point, 1972; served in Grenada, Panama, and the first Gulf War, winning a Silver Star in the second of the three conflicts; retired from the Army a bird colonel after twenty years of service. Founded GPI in 1993, took it public in 2001.
    I wondered about Iraq. That was Hilger’s war, too. Could be a coincidence; could be a connection. A long shot, but I tried searching for Hilger/Accinelli. Nothing. Likewise Jannick/Accinelli and Jannick/Hilger. Well, maybe Kanezaki could do better.
    GPI described itself as a specialty chemical supplier to companies all over the world. They had four product lines: intermediates for pharmaceuticals; automotive airbags; industrial cellulosic polymers; and pyrotechnic and military. I didn’t know much about any of it. The only applications I recognized were car airbags, and the various military uses: rocket propellant, explosives, white phosphorus grenades.
    I checked on the business and home addresses. Mineola was on Long Island, about twenty-five miles east of Manhattan. Sands Point was ten miles north of Mineola, on the north shore of Long Island at the tip of the Port Washington peninsula. Mineola sounded solidly middle class; Sands Point, on the other hand, apparently was the model for the town of East Egg in The Great Gatsby.