The Last Assassin

couch in her Paris apartment. She tried to concentrate on the book she was reading, but couldn't turn off her conflicted thoughts. She'd come back from Barcelona a week ago — a week! — and still hadn't heard from Rain. Things had always been open-ended before, true, but this time he had told her right at the airport that he would call. And especially after the things they'd said to each other, or nearly said, in Barcelona, what did it mean that he hadn't gotten in touch? Only one thing, she knew: he'd fixed things with his ex and lacked either the courage or the courtesy to tell Delilah. What was she supposed to do, call him, instead? What would she say? 'Hi, John, did you reconnect with your past love and your new family? Is there still any place in your life for me?' Please. She'd said too much already.
    No, it hadn't been a great week, coming as it did in the middle of what was turning out to be an interminable administrative review. Her colleague Boaz had called her to see how she was doing, and when she pressed him he admitted he'd heard the news wasn't good. It seemed they were trying to decide between a formal reprimand, which would be merely humiliating, and yanking her from the field permanently, which she didn't know if she could bear at all. Boaz was a friend and he'd tried to leaven his honesty by telling her how many supporters she had, but what difference did that make? If they decided to hang her, she was going to hang.
    Her mind's eye wasn't being kind to her. For work, she pictured conference rooms staffed by bald, paunchy men stroking their chins and clucking their tongues. For Rain, she envisioned a joyous reunion with Midori in the afternoon; tearful explanations and apologies in the evening; tender, intimate lovemaking all night, with a baby asleep in a crib nearby. Logically, she knew better, but this was a tough time for her and she couldn't control her imagination, only negotiate with it.
    She had fed Boaz the pieces of information she had acquired from Rain. Boaz knew that under the circumstances the request couldn't be operational, but he helped her anyway. The computers returned a single name: Midori Kawamura, thirty-eight, Japanese national, residing in New York City, mother of Koichiro Kawamura, born in New York fifteen months earlier. Jazz pianist. Delilah had looked up the woman's website and the moment she saw the bio photo, she knew it was her. She didn't need an intel report for that.
    The woman was beautiful, Delilah had to admit. She had that thick, shiny, perfectly straight Asian hair, and porcelain skin most women would kill for. And she was obviously talented. But she was a civilian. It didn't make sense.
    Well, attractions could be strong enough to survive long separations. They could even survive much worse, as her own relationship with Rain demonstrated. It hurt to admit it, but maybe it was no more complicated than that. Rain was in love with the woman and wanted to be with her, that was all.
    Or maybe he'd been telling the truth, maybe this was about the baby, not Midori. But the woman had never told him, he'd only found out from some thirdhand surveillance photos. Rain had said he'd screwed things up with her, but what did that mean? Screwed things up so badly that afterward the woman had tried to hide from him the existence of their child?
    Among the collateral information Boaz had supplied was a report that the woman's father had died of a heart attack less than a month before Midori left for America. By itself, nothing more than happenstance. But Delilah knew Rain's specialty was 'natural causes,' that he'd even been planning on causing a heart attack for his target on Macau when he and Delilah had first run into each other.
    Delilah had asked Boaz to check a little further, and had learned that the father, Yasuhiro Kawamura, had been a career bureaucrat with the Construction Ministry, which meant he would have been neck deep in all the corruption over there. A player, not a civilian.
    She moved these pieces around in her mind, and a possible pattern started to form. Rain and Midori's father… It was a little hard to believe, but somehow she felt it was right. But did the woman know?
    If her suspicions were correct, she might have an important tool. But a dangerous one. She'd have to think about how she could use it, or whether she should use it at all.
    Her mobile phone rang. She looked at it. No number appeared on the caller ID display.
    She closed the book,