Requiem for an Assassin

Fitzgerald’s mansion was still there, I discovered, on Hoff-stots Lane, and was currently for sale for $28 million. It seemed Accinelli had done well with GPI. He certainly wasn’t living in Sands Point on his military pension.
    Manhattan made me think of Midori, living in Greenwich Village with our son, Koichiro. He would be…about two and a half now. I’d seen him only once, a year earlier, and after Midori’s betrayal I knew there was no way I could have either of them in my life. A permanent gulf was best for all of us, even, much as it saddened me to admit it, for Koichiro. I thought of him, of course, late at night, when sleep wouldn’t come, and the way he looked and felt the one time I had held him in my arms. Sometimes I would open up a small vein of hope about the far-off future, and imagine going to him, explaining who I was, building a relationship, however uncertain, being part of his life. Those tenuous hopes and fragile aspirations seemed ridiculous now, weak and naive in equal measure, and I could have laughed at myself for ever having indulged them.
    Sands Point had its own website, which boasted that the community was entirely residential: just eight hundred fifty families; a few houses of worship; a primary and a secondary school; and unsurprisingly, a country club with an eighteen-hole golf course. The country club was called the Village Club, and I had a strong suspicion that Accinelli, an ethnic kid who had grown up on the other side of the tracks in nearby Oyster Bay and then gone on to make something of himself, would be a member. I checked the club’s website. There was no directory of members, but there was a collection of photos from a recent New Year’s Eve party, Accinelli prominent in several of them. An attractive woman of about his age, whom I assumed was his wife, was on his arm in all the photos. The people around them were well dressed, looked well fed, and must certainly have been blessed by fortune. I made them as low-tax Republicans and limousine liberals. Probably there was more to them than that, but the shorthand would get me started as I determined how to invisibly infiltrate their society.
    I thought about posting the information to Kanezaki. The sooner he had the name of the second target, the sooner he could apply the new data to the nexus we were trying to build with Hilger, and, by extension, Dox. There wasn’t an obvious connection to the CIA, as there had been with Jannick, but…I hated the thought of tipping off a government agency to an impending hit, even if the tip-off was to someone with a good track record, like Kanezaki. It was just too dangerous. I decided to play it by ear again. Worst case, I’d tell him immediately afterward, and find a way to placate him, as I had before.
    Because I had accessed the bulletin board and then researched Accinelli from computers in L.A., I had to assume Hilger might now be able to place me here. I imagined how he would try to anticipate me, if that’s what he wanted to do: He’s coming from L.A. The most obvious airport would be LAX, but of course there’s Orange County, too, and Burbank. On the other end, JFK, La Guardia, and Newark are all pretty much equally possible. I haven’t given him much time, so assume he goes straight to the airport after accessing the bulletin board…
    No. With a minimum of three airports on either side, the whole thing was too unpredictable. He couldn’t narrow it down enough to make it operational, not unless he had a small army of people to rotate through all three possible destination airports for surveillance of multiple incoming arrivals. Even so, as always, I would assume the presence of a welcoming party, and use extra caution leaving whatever airport I flew into.
    I purged the nav system for a last time, input LAX as my next destination, and returned the car at the airport. I caught a bus to the terminal, where I discovered that United offered three red-eyes: two to JFK and another to Newark. First class was sold out on the JFK-bound flights, but there was one first-class seat left on the 10:30 to Newark. I bought a ticket, spent two hours reading the latest Economist in the departure lounge, and slept for a few hours before arriving in Newark at six-thirty the following morning.
    I waited in the arrivals area with my carry-on after getting off the plane, until the passengers from my flight had cleared out. Among the people who remained, all presumably waiting for other