For most couples, a quiet dinner for two at Auberge de la Reine Blanche on the Île Saint-Louis would be just the thing to smooth out the complications in a romance. But for gorgeous Mossad operative Delilah and trying-to-retire contract killer John Rain, nothing is ever easy, and when Rain sees a crew of hard-looking men setting up outside the restaurant, he realizes someone has been bringing her work home with her. Is it a hit — or something even worse? When it comes to killing, business and pleasure are the most dangerous mix of all.

Paris Is A Bitch

Excerpt: THE DETACHMENT

Excerpt: Chapter 1

Excerpt: Chapter 2

Excerpt: Chapter 3

Excerpt: FLEE: A Thriller, by J. A. Konrath and Ann Voss Peterson

Excerpt: RUN, by Blake Crouch

Personal Safety Tips from Assassin John Rain

About the Author

Books by Barry Eisler

Contact Barry

Delilah and I were enjoying a late dinner at Auberge de la Reine Blanche on the Île Saint-Louis. Softly lit, intimate, and unpretentious, it was one of her favorite restaurants, and though I typically shun any behavior that might be used to fix me in time and place, an occasional last-minute reservation was something I was learning to live with. Delilah was grateful for the concession, and expressed her thanks not in words, but in kind, ceding me the seat with the view of the entrance and, through the large front windows, open now to the fine spring air, the antique street and sidewalk without. She never suggested that she might watch my back, as she was willing to let me watch hers. I wondered if she was afraid of my response, and how it might reveal the limits of my trust, limits which she sensed but wasn’t yet ready to face head-on.

I had arrived earlier that evening, a longtime habit for which Delilah typically affected neither approval nor reproach. An astute tactician, she understood the importance of examining terrain through a potential enemy’s eyes before occupying it oneself. And though her own routines were less rigorous—she would say less paranoid—than mine, she was patient with these vestiges of the life I was determined to leave behind. She believed in me, she’d told me, believed I was more than the iceman, the killer inside me who’d been running my life and was constantly, insidiously trying to regain his position in the driver’s seat of my psyche. She told me she understood that I wanted to be done with all that, out of the life, free of the past, the iceman departed, deliquesced, deceased.

It was never going to be easy. I’ve known men returned from war who had trouble sleeping without their boots on and a rifle close at hand, and I’ve understood their difficulty. It’s hard for the most primal, powerful regions of the mind to abandon habits that were once crucial to the organism’s survival, even when the higher mind recognizes those habits are no longer warranted. What can the habits hurt? the survival mind wants to know. And, sadly, things like a chance for peace and hope of redemption aren’t responses it finds much persuasive.

But even worse than the tenacity of my psyche was the stubbornness of my circumstances. Because how was I going to get out of the life while Delilah was still in it, while her own behavior was constantly, insidiously cuing and inciting my own? And why should I even want to, when she was always implicitly telling me her work with Mossad was more a devotion than her relationship with me, when she was always refusing the commitment to me that I was trying to make to her?

We fought a lot, and the fights were getting worse. Sometimes she would belittle my professed desire to get out of the life, pointing out my ongoing need for tactical behavior, which I in turn would blame on her. We took turns with patience and frustration. But no matter the argument, no matter whoever or whatever was at fault, it was true I couldn’t relax when I saw her without first performing what, to a civilian who didn’t know better, would probably be diagnosed as a weird species of obsessive-compulsive disorder. So in the hours before our scheduled dinner, I strolled the narrow lanes of the island, reminding myself of its routes and rhythms, reacquainting myself with its lines of entry and points of escape. It was a beautiful evening, the sky pastel blue, the trees budding with tentative green, and the banks of the Seine were thronged with pleasure seekers, talking and laughing and drinking wine. Just past Rue Boutarel on the Quai d’Orléans, I paused and joined them, admiring the sunset silhouetting Notre Dame Cathedral on the Île de la Cité, a short walk away across the Pont Saint-Louis. I watched the sky glowing pink, deepening to red, and finally surrendering to violet and indigo, and wondered what it all must have looked like a few thousand years earlier, before this small spit of rock in a river had been subject to the minds and hands of men, and what it would look like a few thousand years hence, when war or climate change or some deep immune response from the earth itself had cleansed the area of the humans who claimed it now, and nature made it once again her own.

And now, satisfied that I had a way out if I needed one, I sat in the back of the restaurant on one of the old wooden chairs, enjoying the sounds of French and German and English, all pleasantly scrambled by the close walls and the dark, beamed ceiling; enveloped by the smells of bœuf à la bourguignonne and soupe à l’oignon and petites bouchées d’escargots sauce roquefort; and savoring the sight of the beautiful, deceptively elegant blonde across from me, who, if we could find a way past our professional tensions and make common cause of something better, I thought might actually be the best thing that had ever happened to me.

Delilah smiled and asked me in French, “What are you thinking?”

She was wearing a simple, cream-colored silk wrap dress with tasteful but still tantalizing décolletage, and the candle on the table between us was casting distracting shadows. I let my I eyes linger where they wanted to linger, then smiled lasciviously and said, “About what I might want for dessert.”

She smiled back. “Well, for that, you have to see the menu.”

“I’ll have to take my time with that. If it all looks good enough, I might even order more than one.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You think you can handle that much?”

I looked into her blue eyes. “I don’t know. I’ll have to taste it and see.”

She gave me a challenging look, the kind that would make weak men wilt and strong men wild. “Then come back to my apartment. We’ll see if your eyes are bigger than your stomach. But…”

“Yes?”

“You can’t stay tonight. I have to leave early tomorrow.”

“Where are you going?” I said, immediately irritated at myself for asking a question to which I already knew the answer. Or rather, the response.

“John. Why do you ask me that? You know I can’t tell you.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“And I can’t tell you that, either. As you know.”

I felt a stupid petulance taking hold of me and tried, without much success, to shrug it off. I shouldn’t have pressed, but I said, “A day? A month? How long this time?”

She sighed. “Longer than a day, less than a month. I think.”

I looked away, nodding. “You think.”

An American in an expensive blazer and with perfectly groomed three-day facial stubble was blathering into his mobile phone at the table next to us. I hadn’t noticed until just then, having been focused more on whether Delilah and I were speaking quietly enough not to be overheard than with whether anyone else was talking too loudly. I looked over, and his girlfriend touched his arm to let him know his phone monologue was annoying someone. He glanced at me but didn’t change his volume. My irritation with Delilah was looking for an outlet, and I considered snatching the phone out of his hand, breaking it in two, shoving one half down his throat and the other up his ass, and putting the whole thing back together inside his chest. But that would get me noticed, and then some, and with my mostly Asian features, I was already a bit more noticeable in Paris than I liked.

Delilah said, “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t respond. Stubble Boy was yammering on, something about structural asset-backed securities and tranches. I tried to tune him out.

Delilah said, “I know it’s difficult for you. I can imagine what it’s like. And I’m sorry.”

I looked at her. “Yeah? What do you imagine?”

There was a pause. She said, “You wonder what the new assignment is, and whether that means I have to go to bed with someone.”

High-value-target honey trap operations were Delilah’s métier, and if she hadn’t been so effective in the role, the Mossad would have cut her loose ages earlier because she wouldn’t take any of the shit their bureaucracy tried to serve her.

“That’s not what makes it difficult,” I said, although the sentiment was less than solid.

“What, then?”

“You know what. It’s not what you do in the life—I know that, and I get it. It’s you in the life, period. It’s making me feel like I have one foot in and one foot out, and I can’t find my balance.”

Stubble Boy said, “Fuck that! You tell him if he wants the higher coupon payments, he takes the higher risk. That’s—”

“Excuse me,” Delilah said, switching to Parisian-accented English, her voice suddenly projecting. “It might just be the acoustics in here, but your phone conversation seems awfully loud. Why don’t you take it outside? Or, better yet, for the sake of your date, wait until you’re alone?”

Stubble Boy looked briefly incredulous, and I half-expected him to stammer something born of baseless entitlement such as, Do you have any idea who I am? Instead, he held the phone away from his head and said dismissively, “Look, there’s plenty of noise in here. I don’t know what the problem is.”

He turned as though to resume his conversation. I knew Delilah wasn’t going to let it go, so I leaned across to his table and took hold of his free wrist. He looked at me, shocked, and tried to yank free. Eccentric hand and forearm strength is one of the consequences of a lifetime of near daily judo, and I do additional exercises to augment my grip—enough so that I can crush an apple in one hand if I want to. This time, fortunately for Stubble Boy, I didn’t want to. But I let him know I could.

“Put the phone away,” I said quietly. “And lower your voice.”

He looked like he was going to protest, but a little more effortless pressure on his wrist and the flat look in my eyes made him think better of it. “Jesus, you don’t have to get so huffy,” he said. I looked at him for a moment longer, then released his wrist and turned back to Delilah. I heard him say into the phone, extra loudly to try to restore some of his damaged pride, “Hey Bob, I’ll call you back. Couple of rude Parisians here.”

Delilah smiled and said to me in French, “Well, that was diverting.”

I shrugged, having already largely forgotten the idiot. “Anyway. This whole situation would be a lot more tolerable for me if there were at least an endpoint to look forward to. Six months, six years, if I just knew there was a time when…”

I let the thought trail off. On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, a swarthy young man of what looked like Arabic, maybe Algerian, descent was scrutinizing the menu in the window. He had a narrow, ferret-like face, and his eyes darted around in a way that suggested he felt jumpy. Nothing alarming in itself, necessarily, but this was the second time I’d seen him in the last ten minutes. Both times he had examined the menu, but had also spent a fair amount of time scoping the inside of the restaurant. Again, in itself nothing out of the ordinary. People read menus and look inside restaurants, sometimes repeatedly, while they try to decide where to eat. But the behavior is more common in a pair or a group than it is in a singleton. Also, there was something purposeful, rather than inquiring, in the way he was looking around inside.

“What?” Delilah said.

“There’s a guy outside. Second time I’ve seen him and I don’t like his vibe.”

“Shall I look?”

“No. If it’s anything, I don’t want him to know he’s made. Wait, he’s coming inside.”

I slid my chair back so if necessary I could clear the table instantly, then picked up the glass of house Bordeaux I was drinking. Most people have trouble recovering from a glass of wine in the eyes, especially if it’s followed by an immediate barrage of much worse. Delilah’s hand dipped discreetly below the table, no doubt accessing the FS Hideaway knife—basically a steel talon on a double finger ring—she typically wore on her inner thigh.

“Hands are empty,” I said quietly, looking at Delilah and keeping the guy in my peripheral vision. He strode to the end of the restaurant, just past where I could see him. My scalp prickled with the discomfort of letting him get behind me, but Delilah was watching him now and I knew her expression would tell me instantly whether action was required. I heard him ask the waitress what time they closed, and then he was heading back out. I watched him go, and again something in my gut told me he was trouble.

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Could be just what it looked like. He’s trying to decide where to eat, maybe because he’s meeting friends later.”

“Come on. Did that guy feel like Île Saint-Louis to you? He didn’t even feel like the Quartier Latin. More like la Goutte.” La Goutte d’Or was a rough part of the city in the 18th arrondissement, populated largely by Arabs and Africans, and known for its drugs, crime, and presence of illegals from the Maghreb.

“Are you trying to make a point?”

The question irritated me. What kind of point would I be trying to make?

Stubble Boy and his girlfriend stood to go. “Have a great night,” he said, his tone sarcastic and his voice overly loud. Delilah rolled her eyes but other than that didn’t engage him.

When they were gone, I said, “Did he look at you when he turned to leave the restaurant?”

She shrugged. “Men always look at me.” She said it without self-pleasure, just as a simple statement of fact.

“But how did he look at you? Did it feel sexual? Appreciative? Or like something else?”

“Why are you pushing this?”

“Why are you resisting?”

“Because I think you’re trying to make a point. Trying to show me how my being in the life is putting you on edge, keeping you off-balance, something like that.”

I tamped down my irritation. “Delilah. You know me. Have I ever played games with this shit? Tried to make a point by pretending there was a problem when I didn’t really think there was one?”

There was a pause. She said, “No.”

“That’s right, no. So let me tell you what I think just happened. Ferret Boy scoped the restaurant from the outside ten minutes ago and saw the back of your blonde head. He reported back to whoever that you were in here. Whoever, who’s more senior and seasoned than Ferret Boy, asked him how he’d determined that. When Ferret Boy admitted he’d only seen you from behind, Whoever told him to get his ass inside the restaurant on some pretext and get a positive ID of your face. Which he just did.”

“How do you know he wasn’t scoping for you?”

“You know the answer to that. With where I’m sitting, he could see my face from outside the restaurant. Besides, my enemies aren’t from that part of the world. Yours are.”

“Isn’t that profiling?”

“It is if you’re doing it right.”

“Or it could be about someone else in the restaurant. Or it could be just a coincidence.”

She was smarter than that and her resistance was really beginning to agitate me. “Look, maybe I’m wrong, I’ve been wrong plenty of times before. But only on the side of caution. You really want to bet your life on ‘maybe it’s a coincidence’? You want to bet your life to prove a point in a stupid argument with me?”

She looked at me for a long moment, then nodded, her expression suddenly sober. “What are you thinking? A hit?”

I was glad to see she was finally taking this seriously. “Maybe, but I’d guess no. If it were a hit, they could have waited to make the positive ID outside. If it wasn’t you, they just walk away. Hell, they wouldn’t even need to wait outside. The hitter could just walk into the restaurant in light disguise, march up to the table, get the ID, bam, two shots in the head, then back outside beating feet before witnesses even have a chance to process what just happened.”

“You know why I’m so attached to you?”

“No.”

“Because most people wouldn’t consider something like that fit dinner conversation.”

I smiled tightly, liking that even though she was taking the situation seriously now, she was still cool under pressure. “But if it’s something other than a hit, and they need to set up carefully, they’d want to know it was you before committing. The only thing is, that guy didn’t feel like a pro to me. And anyone who really knows you wouldn’t send an amateur to do the job.”

“Well, it could be someone who doesn’t really know me.”

“Why would anyone who doesn’t really know you want to kill you?”

She smiled, a little sadly. “Remember the kind of work I do. The target wouldn’t have to know of my professional affiliations to develop a grudge. What he thought was personal would be enough.”

That was a good point. I said, “Well, whatever it is or isn’t, I’d rather not find out. But there’s no rear entrance to this restaurant. They take deliveries straight through the front door.”

She didn’t have to ask. She knew I never went into a room I didn’t know every way out of.

“How do you want to handle it?” she said.

I considered. “Ask the waitress if you can bum a cigarette. Woman-to-woman, she’ll be more likely to want to help out.”

“You’re going to have a smoke?”

“Just outside the door. Like any well-mannered Parisian.” Paris had gone no-smoking, thank God, forcing smokers to head outdoors to indulge.

“I don’t like it. You don’t know what’s out there.”

“That’s why I want to have a look. They’re not after me, remember? Anyway, if I see something I really don’t like, I’ll head back in and we’ll reconsider.”

Delilah told the waitress that Zut!, she really needed a smoke but had forgotten her cigarettes; could she hit the waitress up and thank her in the tip? The waitress smiled understandingly and produced a Gauloise Blonde. Delilah requested a lighter, and that was forthcoming, too. I put four twenty-Euro notes on the table, which would cover the meal if we had to bug out, nodded to Delilah, and went to see whether there was anything to my suspicions.

I kept as far left as possible as I headed out of the restaurant, maximizing my view of the street to the right, then cut the other way just before I got to the door, widening my view left. I saw nothing, but any reasonably competent surveillance would have accounted for a maneuver like mine before taking a position.

At the threshold of the door, I could see there were no immediate problems to my left, so I immediately swept right. Twenty meters down the street, on the opposite side, I saw Ferret Boy, leaning with his back against the dark stone façade of the École de Garçons, bathed in shadows.

Houston, we have a problem.

This was the quiet end of Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, far from the gravitational force of Notre Dame. There were few stores down here, just some galleries, all of them closed and almost all of them dark, and the opposite side of the street was occupied entirely by the lightless monolith of the École. The only illumination came from a few widely spaced yellowish streetlights affixed to the façades of the old buildings on one side of the narrow street and the École on the other. The nearest cross street was Rue Poulletier, sixty meters to the left. When we departed, we wouldn’t just be walking out into the dark. We might as well be entering a tunnel.

Well, that’s the thing about the dark and tunnels. They work both ways.

I noticed another guy walking toward Ferret Boy. They did nothing to acknowledge each other, but they both looked the same to me: young, Arabic, somehow jumpy. I fired up the cigarette and gave no sign that I had particularly noticed them or particularly cared.

To my left, ten meters down on the opposite side of the street, was a panel truck. Could have been a coincidence, but I didn’t like it. I couldn’t see on the other side of it, but I had a feeling someone else was leaning against a stone wall in the dark there.

I tracked a few degrees further left. All the way down at the corner of Rue Poulletier was another guy. I didn’t think it was a hit before, but now I was nearly sure it wasn’t. No one needed this kind of manpower for a hit. And with that panel van parked where it was, I was starting to think it might be a snatch. Overall, compared to a hit, I rated a snatch as a positive. More people to deal with, true, but they would be constrained in their actions.

Also, as I’d told Delilah about Ferret Boy initially, these guys didn’t feel like pros to me. In which case, Delilah must have been right. Whoever had hired them didn’t know who she really was, or what she was capable of. They’d be assuming they were here to grab a helpless woman, maybe after knocking down her feeble dinner date.

Dinner for two at Auberge de la Reine Blanche? Eighty Euros. Being underestimated by the punks outside? Priceless.

I puffed on the cigarette for a few minutes without inhaling. I hadn’t smoked since I was a teenager, and a coughing fit would have been bad for my cover. When I judged I’d been there long enough, I pinched off the filter, which had my DNA on it, and shredded the rest of it on the sidewalk with the sole of my shoe. Then I went nonchalantly back inside. I handed the waitress her lighter. If she was annoyed that I had smoked the cigarette Delilah had asked for, she gave no sign of it.

I sat down and said to Delilah, “It’s not a hit. I’m guessing a snatch.” I told her about the panel truck and the disposition of forces.

She listened quietly. When I was done, she said, “It doesn’t make sense. How could they have found me? No one followed me here. I’m certain of that.”

I glanced at the python shoulder bag slung over her chair back. “Your cell phone?”

“But you said they look like amateurs. How could they have tracked my cell phone?”

“Maybe they’re working for someone a little more sophisticated than they are. Someone who provided your whereabouts and turned the risky part over to them. What I don’t get is, why would someone want to snatch you? I mean, if they want to take you, it’s because they know who you are. If they know who you are, they don’t outsource it to a handful of punks from La Goutte. They bring in professionals.”

A moment passed, then she said, “I think I know what this is.”

“What?”

“I can’t tell you.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. “Delilah. I’m about to walk out that door with you into I don’t know what. I don’t care what. Now you don’t have to thank me for that. But Goddamn it, you do have to tell me what you know so I can be as prepared as possible for whatever it is I’m about to deal with.”

Another long moment passed. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just—”

“Forget it. Who are they?”

“For the last year, I’ve had to spend time with a wealthy man. A Saudi. A financier. You can imagine what he finances.”

“Okay.”

“He’s very well connected. Which is why I was assigned to him. When my organization had learned what it needed to learn through me and had acted on the intelligence, I broke the connection with him.”

“He never knew you were using him?”

“No. He thought it was just an affair. The problem was, he became obsessed with me. To get him to stop contacting me, I told him I was in love with someone else. He still wouldn’t stop. So I told him if he didn’t leave me alone, I would tell his wife of the affair. He’s a very pious man, or pretends to be, and his piety is critical to his influence. So it was a serious threat.”

“How did he take it?”

“He was enraged.”

“Enraged enough to want to do something in response?”

“He’s a selfish man,” she said. “And cruel. The kind of man who, if he couldn’t have something for himself, would try to keep it from anyone else.”

I exhaled long and hard, trying not to imagine the psychic price she must have paid for repeatedly offering her body, and even a simulacrum of her mind, to someone who obviously repulsed her.

“You know,” I said, “it wouldn’t have hurt for you to tell me that before we were trapped in a restaurant with an ambush waiting outside.”

She said nothing, and I wondered if she could sense what I’d really been thinking. Probably she could.

“All right,” I said. “Never mind. This guy… is he connected enough to track you to Paris?”

“He knows I live in Paris. I didn’t try to hide that.”

“Does he know your particulars?”

“Of course not.”

“Is he connected enough to find out? To track a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Then what do you think these guys are here for? Kidnap you? Take you back to Saudi Arabia, put you in a harem?”

She looked at me, her face expressionless. “I think they’re here to hurt me.”

“Hurt you how?”

She cocked her head as though in wonder at how thick I was, then said, “If you and two or three other thugs had a woman alone in a panel van and wanted to hurt her in the worst way possible, wanted to ruin her for anyone else, what would you do?”

I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.

“Well,” she said. “I imagine that’s how they’re planning to hurt me.”

I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, “When this is done, I want you to tell me who the Saudi is.”

“No. I don’t want you involved.”

“I’m already involved. I’m not going to let you walk out there alone.”

“My organization will take care of it. Let’s just focus on tonight.”

I wanted to press the point, but she was right. About the tonight part, anyway. The rest we could figure out later.

“All right,” I said. “I only saw one on the right, but there was another guy mobile so there could be two. Could you handle two on your own?”

“Yes.”

“Then here’s how we’ll play it. If I go with you, and the ones on the left see me help you drop the opposition on the right, I lose the element of surprise if they come after us. If I hang back, and anyone pursues you, they’ll have to get through me, and they won’t even understand I’m a real obstacle until it’s too late. Okay?”

She nodded. “It’s a good plan.”

“So we walk out together and kiss goodnight at the door. You go right, I hang back. If you need help, I’m close enough to back you up. If you don’t, I’ll mop up the others.”

Suddenly she looked alarmed. “You can’t kill them. Not unless you absolutely have to.”

I tamped down my frustration. I wasn’t used to having to consult on this kind of thing. I said, “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, okay? We’re up against four. Maybe more. We don’t know if they have weapons, we don’t even know for sure what this is about. When I hit these guys, I don’t want them getting back up. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.”

“Think, John. We can’t leave four bodies, or more, outside a restaurant where we just had dinner, where we’ve eaten, what, eight, ten times before? The police will get a description. An attractive blonde and a Japanese guy, you want to be worried about the police looking for something like that every time we share a kiss on the Pont de Sully?”

Goddamn it, she was right. I was letting those images of what they would do to her in the truck affect my judgment.

I blew out a long breath. “You’re right.”

“I mean it,” she said, knowing me, realizing how I was feeling.

“I get it. I’m not going to kill anyone.”

But I’ll make them wish I had.

“If the plan is to get you into the truck,” I said, “that’s the center of gravity of this thing. So when you’re done taking care of business, you keep going in the same direction you started. Away from the truck. I’ll handle my end, you just get out of Dodge. You understand?”

“Yes,” she said. There was no need to affect protest. She was good, but she knew I was better. Sending the target back into the center of the op would have just been stupid.

“Good. And don’t go back to your apartment when it’s done. We don’t know how they tracked you. If it’s your mobile, they could have logged your movements to your apartment, we don’t know. So when we’re done—”

“Yes, I’ll turn it off and remove the battery. Where do you want to meet?”

“There’s a park, by Sully Morland Metro.”

“The Square Henri-Galli.”

“Yes. The playground inside it, the monkey bars—I’ll meet you there and we’ll figure out what to do next. But like you say, first this.”

“Okay.”

I rotated my neck, cracking the joints, and popped my knuckles. I felt a surge of hot adrenaline spread out from my gut and it felt like coming home.

“All right,” I said. “You ready?”

She nodded and we stood. She pulled on the cream suede jacket that earlier she’d hung on the back of her chair, slipped one arm and her head through the strap of her shoulder bag, and eased the Hideaway onto the first two fingers of her right hand, concealing it alongside the shoulder bag. I drained the last two inches of wine remaining in my glass, but didn’t swallow it, instead holding it in my mouth. Delilah bid the waitress au revoir, merci, and we walked to the door, each of us eyeing the area outside. Just beyond the threshold, we paused, facing each other, and kissed in the French style, one cheek, then the other, giving each of us two opportunities to see what was waiting a little way down the street.

I squeezed her arm and she moved off, her footfalls echoing quietly on the stone sidewalk in the dark, and there was something about the sound as it faded away that almost could have panicked me. I hadn’t expected it to be so hard to let her walk alone into whatever she was facing. I suddenly wondered if I’d made a mistake, if the odds weren’t better with us sticking together. But too late to go back now.

I took out my mobile as though to make a call, using it as an excuse to linger in front of the restaurant a moment longer. I kept my head down but my eyes up and saw the two on my end of the street start moving in our direction. They weren’t even looking at me. They were completely focused on Delilah. Bad enough that they’d underestimated her. But thinking I was a civilian, too… this just wasn’t going to be their night.

I glanced right. Someone had stepped out of the gloom in front of Delilah. I heard him say, “Désolé.” Someone else had peeled himself off the dark wall of the École and was moving to flank her. Delilah’s arm moved in a blur and the first guy stumbled back, clutching his face, crying out, “Ah! Putain de merde!” She’d slashed him with the Hideaway. I hoped across an eye.

The second guy, obviously not understanding what had just happened or not having time to process it, reached her and grabbed her wrist, pulling on it as though trying to haul her in the direction of the truck. Delilah pulled the other way and the guy braced with his forward leg, straightening his knee. I saw it coming a second beforehand: she chambered her forward leg and blasted a stomp kick into his outer knee, blowing it outside in. As the guy shrieked and crumbled to the ground, something an old instructor had once said popped up crazily in my mind—Actually, the knee bends both ways, it’s just that one of them requires surgery afterward—and then Delilah was running, and I heard footfalls to my left.

I turned, slipping my phone back into my pocket. There were two of them, hauling ass to catch Delilah or to help their buddies or both. The one in the lead barely glanced at me as I stepped into the street on an intercept course. As he came abreast of me, sprinting, I rotated my hips and launched my right arm into his path at neck level, catching him full in the throat with the forward edge of my hand. I felt something break in his cricoid cartilage and another crazy thought—that had to hurt!—flared and disappeared somewhere in my consciousness. Then his feet were sailing past me and I dropped my weight, guiding the back of his skull into the stone street where it connected with a satisfying crack.

The second guy pulled up short just a few feet away, his eyes bulging, his circuits obviously jammed with the effort of trying to work through how a simple plan had just gone so incredibly wrong. His right hand went to his front jeans pocket, and before he could access whatever weapon he had there, I spewed a mouthful of wine directly into his face and eyes. He cried out in pain and disgust and stumbled back, his hand still groping at his pocket. I swept in, simultaneously securing his right wrist with my left hand and catching the collar of his leather jacket with my right, spun counterclockwise, and blew his legs out from under him with harai-goshi, a classic and powerful judo throw. I used the collar grip to bring his head toward the ground faster than his body, and the back of his cranium crashed into the street like his partner’s with a satisfying and doubtless disabling crack. I released him, stood, and stomped his right hand, turning his metacarpals to mush and thereby rendering his weapon hand useless, maybe permanently so.

I glanced behind me. The two men Delilah had dropped were still down. I glanced the other way. The truck was quiet. Either it was empty, or whoever was inside didn’t realize what had just happened to his buddies. I strode over to the back door and gave it two brisk raps with my knuckles. “Open up,” I said in French. “There’s been a problem.”

I heard movement inside, then the door started to swing out. I grabbed the handle and flung the door wide, and the guy who’d been opening it spilled out onto the street with a startled cry. As he came to his knees, I grabbed his hair with both hands and shot a knee into his face, then a second time, and again. By the third shot, his arms had dropped away and I was supporting dead weight. I let go and he slumped to the street, his head smacking the fender of the truck with a theatrical clang along the way.

As I used the hem of my jacket to wipe down the handle I’d grabbed, the driver’s door blew open. I immediately moved counterclockwise around the truck, buying myself time and distance in case whoever it was had a weapon. But then I heard the sound of feet and saw the guy’s back as he turned left on Rue Poulletier, and I realized he was running away. He would have been better off driving, but maybe he’d thought I was the police, or maybe he’d just panicked.

I went after him. It wasn’t carefully planned, just an impulse, born of cold rage at what would have been happening in that truck if things had gone the way they’d planned. And it wasn’t as though I wanted to stick around the crime scene anyway.

He headed west on the Quai d’Anjou. I thought he would break right over the Pont Marie, but he didn’t, he just kept going, I suppose thinking he could outlast me. He wasn’t much of a runner, though, and it wasn’t long before his pace was slackening. By the time we had reached Rue Le Regrattier, he was going not much faster than a man who was running late for an appointment, which, other than his loud panting, he might in fact have been. I could have overtaken him there, but wanted a quieter place, somewhere we might have a moment alone.

On the short riser of stone stairs that led to the Pont Louis-Philippe, he stumbled and collapsed. I circled around him as I approached, watching his hands, making sure they were empty. There were a few people around but not so near as to present a problem.

“Okay, okay,” he said in French, coming to his feet. He was panting, doubled over, his hands on his knees. “Please. Okay.”

I looked around again to ensure we were alone, then smacked him in the side of the head—a blow to establish dominance, not inflict damage. “You know who you fucked with tonight?” I said. “GIGN.”

He blanched at that. The Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale was the French Gendarmerie’s elite counterterrorism unit. GIGN operators had a reputation for toughness, and were especially feared in the Parisian slums. If you were an illegal, and I was betting this guy was, a GIGN operator was just about the last person in the world you wanted taking a personal interest in you.

“I didn’t… I didn’t…” he stammered between gasps. “But your face—”

I smacked him again. “Idiot, you think I’m supposed to look like GIGN? What about the woman, did she look GIGN to you? You think we should wear signs, maybe, so punks like you can identify us?”

An oh, fuck expression stole across his face, and I knew he believed completely. And why not? How else could he understand how a defenseless woman and her innocuous date had mowed down his entire crew?

He panted and shook his head. “I didn’t know.”

“You’re part of a cell? This was a terrorist hit, yes? You know what we do with terrorists who attack GIGN?”

His eyes were bulging in exhaustion and panic, but I knew a part of his brain was still reasoning, thinking, we’re talking, if we’re talking, I can talk my way out. I wanted to encourage that sensibility.

“No!” he said. “Not a terrorist. I swear, I didn’t know.”

“Who are you working for?” I said. “Al Qaeda? Yes, this is a big night for me, to break up an al Qaeda cell. Come on, we’re going to Satory, GIGN headquarters. I have two partners, we all lost friends in Afghanistan. They’ll want to interrogate you themselves.”

“I don’t know any al Qaeda!” he said. His breathing was becoming a little less labored. “Please, this was a mistake. I’m not a terrorist.”

“No? You’re not a terrorist? Then you’re what? What was tonight?”

“A mistake. I’m sorry.”

“You were trying to kidnap my partner. Why?”

“I was hired.”

“By whom?”

“One in my crew knows a Saudi. But not al Qaeda! One of the royals, he said. The Saudi hired us to kidnap the woman. That’s all I know.”

It probably was all he knew. I doubted anyone who hired a bunch of street toughs would have shared more than that. But it couldn’t hurt to try for a little more. So I smacked him again. At this point, the smacks would be almost comforting, maintaining my dominance, which he now accepted, and implying that if he played his cards right, this was the worst he might receive. “That’s all you know? A Saudi? Listen, you want to avoid disappearing in Satory, you better stop insulting me with this bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit. My boss told us the Saudi wanted the woman to be hurt. He gave us five thousand Euros, with five thousand more on completion.”

“You believe that? Your boss took probably twice that. He played you for a chump. And what were you supposed to do?”

“Just… look, I’m giving you cooperation, all right? I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t know she was GIGN. That she was your partner.”

“What were you supposed to do?”

“We were supposed to rape her. All of us, every way possible. And then slash her. Slash her face. Make her ugly. I’m sorry.”

I maintained my expression of stern professional skepticism. But inside, something was uncoiling, something I would need to keep in check if I was going to keep my promise to Delilah. I was distantly aware of the hypocrisy of my reaction to what he had been hired for. After all, I’ve killed people for money. It’s what I used to do. I never had a problem with it, or much of a problem, anyway.

But still.

“Who was the Saudi?” I said. “What is his name?”

“I don’t know. Vincent didn’t tell us that.”

“Vincent?”

“My boss. The one you pulled from the back of the truck.”

Whether he was bullshitting me or was legitimately ignorant, I wasn’t going to learn anything more from him. It was time to go.

“You have contraband?” I asked him.

“Contraband?”

“Drugs. Weapons. You’re carrying?”

“No, man, I’m clean.”

I gestured with my head to the stone wall along the entrance to the bridge. “Put your hands on the wall. I’m going to pat you down. If you’re telling me the truth, you can walk. If you’re lying, I take you to Satory.”

He gave me a sly look, probably thinking what I really wanted was to take his contraband, not arrest him for it.

Sad, how cynical people can be.

He turned and put his palms on the wall.

“Feet farther back,” I said. “Weight on your palms. And spread your legs.”

He complied.

I watched him for just a moment, savoring what I was about to do. Then I reached one hand between his legs and took hold of his badly exposed balls, which I then proceeded to pretend were one of those apples I sometimes use to test my grip.

An apple would have done better.

When I was done, I left his unconscious body in a heap and walked away without looking back. I crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe, made a right on Voie Georges Pompidou, and five minutes later I was at the park. Delilah was waiting by the monkey bars as promised, the playground a small triangle of stillness and dark against the sounds and headlights of the streets surrounding it.

“It was what you thought,” I said. I told her what happened, and what I’d learned from the guy I’d left by the Pont Louis-Philippe.

When I was done, she touched my face, an intimate gesture I had always welcomed from her but that just then irritated me. “Thank you,” she said.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I told you, my organization—”

“Mossad. I know who you work for. Why can’t you say the name?”

“You know the name. Why do I have to say it?”

I didn’t answer. I knew I was being petty.

“Anyway,” she said, “my organization will move me to a new apartment. They’ll watch me. I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be fine? Your organization wasn’t even competent enough to protect you tonight, now you’re going to be okay because they’ll watch you? Do you even believe that?”

She didn’t answer. It was maddening.

“What about the Saudi?” I said. “You think he’s going to just quit?”

“They’ll take care of him, too.” She paused, then said, “Are you interested?”

I looked at her, incredulous. “In the job? You can’t be serious.”

“Why not? A half hour ago, I had to beg you not to.”

“For you. I would have done it for you. I’m not going to be hired by your organization. Don’t you understand? I can’t modulate this shit, Delilah. Maybe you can, but I can’t. You know how hard it is to fight that part of myself, to keep him in check? Because he’s always looking for a way back in. Tonight he found a personal one, because of you. And now you’re offering a professional opportunity on top of it. What’s wrong with you? How many times do I have to tell you, I just want—”

“Out of the life, I know.”

“Then why are you trying to drag me back in? So you won’t have to leave? When are you going to be happy, when your work gets us both killed?”

“They were just punks.”

“This time. Next time, it’ll be fucking Delta Force. One of us has to make a decision here, Delilah. I’m tired of you refusing to make it.”

“What are you saying?”

I knew I was being pigheaded and reckless. But I was still jacked on adrenaline, and I was pissed.

“I’m saying I want to know when. Right now. Tell me when you’re out. Because if you can’t tell me that, I’ll know the answer is never. And I’ll know to stop wasting my time.”

A long beat went by. I heard the sounds of traffic, and distant voices laughing, and the branches of elm trees swaying in the dark above us.

Finally, she said, “I can’t tell you that. Because the truth is, I don’t know.”

In the dim, diffuse light, I couldn’t read her face. I supposed it didn’t matter.

“You shouldn’t go back to your apartment,” I said. “Not that it makes any difference to me.”

I turned and walked away.

I wanted her to say something. John, wait. Anything.

But she didn’t.

I walked across the Pont de Sully back to the Île Saint-Louis, confused, seething. It was completely un-tactical, but I wanted to hurt someone. I didn’t think I’d killed Vincent or anyone else in his crew—though the throat shot and two cranial slams had been hard enough so that I couldn’t be sure—and maybe I would find some straggler still skulking around near the restaurant.

They were all gone. No police, either. All told, probably for the best, but I was left with all my helpless rage and no where to direct it. Why couldn’t she have just given me an answer? How many times had I stood by her, backed her up, let her disappear for a month at a time without asking where she’d been or what she’d been doing? And for what? So that right after I helped save her from about the worst thing possible, she could just let me walk away without even a word of protest, or doubt, or regret?

And the worst of it was, part of me still wanted to go to her. She could be headstrong, and maybe she would disregard my admonition about her apartment. Maybe she was angry enough to ignore my advice just to make a point. She might need my help.

No. If she needed me, all she had to do was ask, but she didn’t. She could have, but she didn’t.

I looked around, and this city I’d become so comfortable with felt suddenly alien to me, a pretty oasis built for someone else, inhabited by strangers, my own presence that of a ghost. Paris made no sense for me without Delilah, and the loneliness and alienation I felt right then settled into my gut with an almost physical weight.

I paused and considered. She would take me back if I wanted. We wouldn’t even have to discuss what had just happened. Everything would be the way it had been.

I shook my head and walked on. On the Pont de la Tournelle, heading toward the Quartier Latin, I was surprised to see Stubble Boy coming toward me, still glued to his cell phone, walking with his girlfriend. He saw me and his face twisted into an unpleasant smile.

“Hey,” he said, pulling the phone momentarily away from his face. “If it isn’t the Parisian politeness police. Struck out with your date?”

And suddenly, everything was clear.

I spent only a few moments with him, testing the conventional wisdom that you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole, the peg in this case being his cell phone, the hole being his mouth.

It turns out the conventional wisdom is off by a little. In fact, the whole thing depends on how hard you jam the peg.

When I left him, crumbled and gagging and spitting out teeth, his broken phone tossed in the river and his girlfriend shrieking over him, I knew what would happen next. The downed man, and the shrieking woman, would soon attract attention, including police attention. A tourist assaulted right on one of the famous bridges of the Île Saint-Louis would be bad for business, especially if the culprit weren’t caught. Luckily, this particular tourist was acquainted with his assailant, and would tell the police all about him so they would know who to look for: an unassuming but dangerous Asian man who enjoyed dinner at Auberge de la Reine Blanche, and who was known to be accompanied by a stunning blonde.

But I didn’t care. Because they’d be looking for that man in Paris. And after tonight, he’d never be there again.

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I hadn’t killed anyone in almost four years. But all good things come to an end, eventually.

It was good to be living in Tokyo again. The face of the city had changed, as it continuously does, but in its eternal, essential energy, Tokyo is immutable. Yes, during my sojourn in safer climes there had occurred an unfortunate profusion of Starbucks and Dean & Delucas, along with their innumerable imitators, but the havens that mattered remained impervious to this latest infestation. There was still jazz at Body & Soul in Minami Aoyama, where no seat is too far from the stage for a quiet word of thanks to the band members at the end of the evening; coffee at Café de l’Ambre in Ginza, where even as he nears his hundredth birthday, proprietor Sekiguchi-sensei arrives daily to roast his own beans, as he has for the last six decades; a tipple at Campbelltoun Loch in Yurakucho, where, if you can secure one of the eight seats in his hidden basement establishment, owner and bartender Nakamura-san will recommend one of his rare bottlings to help melt away, however briefly, the world you came to him to forget.

I told myself no one was looking for me anymore. But I knew if they were, they’d start with a place I’d been known to frequent. Unless you had unlimited manpower, you couldn’t use the bars or coffee houses or jazz clubs I liked. There were too many of them in Tokyo, for one thing, and my visits would be too hard to predict. You might wait for months, maybe forever, and though there are harder surveillance duty stations than the oases haunted by Tokyo’s roving night denizens, eventually you’d start to stand out, especially if you were a foreigner. Meanwhile, whoever was paying you would be getting impatient for results.

Which made the Kodokan a unique vulnerability. I’d trained there for nearly twenty-five years before powerful enemies forced me to flee the city, enemies I had, by one means or another, managed to outlast. Judo at the Kodokan had been my only indulgence of anything like a routine, a pattern that could be used to fix me in time and place. Going back to it might have been my way of reassuring myself that my enemies really were all dead. Or it could have been a way of saying come out, come out, wherever you are.

Randori, or free training, was held in the daidojo, a modern, two-storied space of four connected competition zones open to bleachers ringing the area a floor above. On any given night, as many as two hundred judoka wearing the traditional white judogi, male and female, Japanese and foreign, buzz-cut college stars and grizzled veterans, take to the training hall, and the vast space is filled with cries of commitment and grunts of defense; earnest discussions of tactics and techniques in mutually incomprehensible tongues; the drum beat of bodies colliding with the tatami and the cymbal slaps of palms offsetting the impact with ukemi landings. I’ve always loved the cacophony of the daidojo. I’ve stood in it when it’s empty, too, and its solemn daytime stillness, its enormous sense of patience and potential, has its own magic, but it’s the sound of evening training that imbues the space with purpose, that brings the dormant hall to life.

On training nights the bleachers are usually empty, though nor is it unusual to see a few people sitting here and there and watching the judoka practicing below: a student, waiting for a friend; a parent, wondering whether to enroll a child; a martial arts enthusiast, making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of modern judo. So I wasn’t unduly concerned one summer night at the sight of two extra large Caucasians sitting together in the stands, thickly muscled arms crossed over the railing, leaning forward like carrion birds on a telephone line. I logged them the way I reflexively log anything out of place in my environment, giving no sign that I had particularly noticed them or particularly cared, and continued randori with the partner I happened to be training with, a stocky kid with a visiting college team who I hadn’t yet let score against me.

My play had reached a level at which for the most part I was able to anticipate an opponent’s attack in the instant before he launched it, subtly adjust my position accordingly, and frustrate his plan without his knowing exactly why he’d been unable to execute. After a while of this invisible interference, often an opponent would try to force an opening, or muscle a throw, or would otherwise over-commit himself, at which point, depending on my mood, I might throw him. Other times, I was content merely to flow from counter to counter, preventing battles rather than fighting them. A different approach than what had characterized my younger days at the Kodokan, when my style had more to do with aggression and bravado than it did with elegance and efficiency. As the offspring of a Japanese father and Caucasian American mother, I once wore a heavy chip on my shoulder. My appearance was always Japanese enough, but appearances have almost nothing to do with prejudice in Japan. In fact, the society’s worst animus is reserved for ethnic Koreans, and burakumin—descendents of leather workers—and those others guilty of hiding their impurities behind seemingly Japanese faces. Of course, my formative years are long behind me now. These days, with my dark hair increasingly shot through with gray, I no longer pine for a country that might welcome me as its own. It took time, but I’ve learned not to engage in those conflicts I’ve always lost before.

From their size, close-cropped hair, and Oakley wrap-around shades, favored these days by Special Forces and their private sector counterparts, I made the visitors as military, maybe serving, maybe ex. That in itself was unremarkable: the Kodokan is hardly unknown among the American soldiers, Marines, and airmen stationed in Japan. Plenty of them come to visit, and even to train. Still, I prefer to assume the worst, especially when the assumption costs me little. I let the college kid throw me with tai-otoshi, the throw he’d been trying for all night and obviously his money move. In my former line of work, being underestimated was something to cultivate. I might have been out of the life, but I wasn’t out of the habit.

I was careful when I left that night, my alertness at a higher than usual pitch. I checked the places I would set up if I’d been trying to get to me: behind the concrete pillars flanking the building’s entrance on Hakusan-dori; the parked cars along the busy, eight-lane street; the entrance to the Mita-sen subway line to my left. I saw only oblivious sarariman commuters, their interchangeable dark suits limp and rumpled from the diesel-laced humidity, their brows beaded with sweat but their expressions relieved at the prospect of a few undemanding hours at home before the next day’s corporate exertions. Several riders on motor scooters went by, the two-stroke engines of their machines whining in and then fading out as they passed, but they weren’t wearing the full-face helmets favored by motorcycle drive-by gunners and they never even slowed or looked at me. A woman rode a bicycle past me on the sidewalk, a chubby-cheeked toddler secured in a basket attached to the handlebars, his arms outstretched and his tiny hands balled into fists at what I didn’t know. No one felt out of place, and I saw no sign of the soldiers. If they didn’t show up again, I’d classify their one-night presence as a nonevent.

But they did show up again, the following night. And this time, they stayed only briefly, probably just long enough to scan through the scores of judoka and confirm the presence of their target. If I hadn’t been doing my own frequent, unobtrusive scans of the spectator seats, I would have missed their appearance entirely.

I continued training until eight and then showered after as usual, not wanting to do anything out of the ordinary, anything that might suggest I’d spotted something and was preparing for it. But I was preparing, and as a plan unspooled in my mind and adrenaline snaked out through my trunk and limbs, and as the presence of danger and the certainty of how I would deal with it settled into place with an awful, familiar clarity, I had to acknowledge to myself that I’d been preparing my whole life, and that whatever intervals of quiet I had ever briefly indulged were as meaningful and relevant as dreams. Only the preparation was real—the preparation, and the purpose it always enabled.

Ben Treven and Daniel Larison sat on stools at the window counter of a Douter coffee shop fifty yards south of the Kodokan on Hakusan-dori, sipping black coffee and waiting for the two Blackwater contractors to return. Treven had wanted to join them, to get a firsthand look at the man whom up until the week before he’d thought to be a myth, but Larison had insisted there was no upside to sending in more than two of them, and Treven knew he was right. It bothered him how easily and naturally Larison had established himself as the alpha of the team, but he also had to admit that Larison, in his mid-forties ten years Treven’s senior, had seen more of the shit even than Treven had, and had survived heavier opposition. He told himself if he kept his mouth shut he might learn something, and he supposed it was true. But after ten years in the Intelligence Support Activity, the deliberately blandly named covert arm of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, he wasn’t used to running into people who acted like his tactical superiors, and even fewer he thought might be right about it.

Treven was facing the window in the direction of the Kodokan, and saw the Blackwater guys, who he knew only as Beckley and Krichmond, approaching before Larison did. He nodded his head slightly. “Here they come.”

Larison had instructed all of them to use their mobile phones as little as possible and to keep them shut off, with the batteries removed, except at previously agreed-upon intervals. The units were all rented, of course, and all under false identities, but good security involved multiple layers. The CIA’s careless use of cell phones in the Abu Omar rendition from Milan had led to the issuance of arrest warrants from an Italian judge for a bunch of CIA officials, including the Milan station chief, and Treven figured Larison was applying the lessons of that op to this one. Still, the current precautions struck him as excessive—they weren’t here to kill or kidnap Rain, after all, only to contact him. On the other hand, just as for sending only the two Blackwater guys into the Kodokan for the initial recon, he supposed there was no real downside to the extra care.

The Blackwater guys came in and stood so they were facing Treven and Larison and had a view of the street. Treven had seen plenty of foreigners in this section of the city, but even so he knew they were all conspicuous. Treven’s blond hair and green eyes had always been somewhat of a surveillance liability, of course, but he figured that to the average Japanese, such features wouldn’t much distinguish him from Larison, with his dark hair and olive skin, or from any other Caucasian foreigner, for that matter. What the natives would notice, and remember, was the collective size of the four of them. Treven, a heavyweight wrestler in high school and linebacker for Stanford before dropping out, was actually the smallest of the group. Larison was obviously into weights, and, if Hort could be believed, maybe steroids, too. And the Blackwater guys could almost have been pro wrestlers. Treven wondered if Hort had selected them in the hope their size might intimidate Rain when they made contact. He doubted it would make a difference. Size only mattered in a fair fight, and from what he’d heard of Rain, the man wasn’t stupid enough ever to allow a fight to be fair.

“He’s there,” the man called Beckley said. “Training, just like last night.”

Larison nodded. “Maybe we should switch off now,” he said in his low, raspy voice. “Two nights in a row, he’s probably spotted you. Treven and I can take the point.”

“He didn’t spot us,” Krichmond said. “We were in the stands, he barely even glanced our way.”

Beckley grunted in agreement. “Look, if the guy were that surveillance conscious, he wouldn’t be showing up at the same location at the same time every night in the first place. He didn’t see us.”

Larison took a sip of coffee. “He any good? The judo, I mean.”

Krichmond shrugged. “I don’t know. Seemed like he had his hands full with the kid he was training with.”

Larison took another sip of coffee and paused as though thinking. “You know, it probably doesn’t really matter that much whether he saw you or not. We know he’s here, we can just brace him on his way out.”

“Yeah, we could,” Krichmond said, his tone indicating the man found the idea hopelessly unambitious. “But what kind of leverage do we have then? We found him at the Kodokan. Tomorrow he could just go and train somewhere else. Or give up training, period. We want him to feel pressured, isn’t that what Hort said? So let’s show him we know where he lives. Brace him there, make him feel we’re into his life in a big way. That’s how you get people to play ball—by getting them by the balls.”

Treven couldn’t disagree with the man’s assessment overall. He was surprised Larison didn’t see it that way, too. But Larison must have realized his oversight, because he said, “That makes sense. But come on, he must have seen you. Treven and I should take the point.”

“Look,” Beckley said, his tone indicating the tail-end of patience, “he didn’t see us. Krichmond and I will take the point.” He gestured to one of the buttons on his damp navy shirt. “You’ll see everything we see, through this. If he spots us, and I doubt he will, we’ll switch off like we planned. Okay?”

The button was actually the lens of a high definition pocket video camera that shot color in daylight and infrared-enhanced black and white at night. Each of them was similarly outfitted, and each unit transmitted wirelessly to the others on the network. A separate unit, about the size of a pack of playing cards, could be held in the hand to display what the other units were transmitting. It was nothing fancy, just a stripped-down and slightly modified version of the Eagle Eyes monitoring system that was increasingly popular with various government agencies, but it enabled a small surveillance team to spread out beyond what traditional line of sight would allow, and also enabled each team member to know the position of all the others without excessive reliance on cell phones or other verbal communication.

Larison raised his hands in a you win gesture. “All right. You two cover the entrance of the Kodokan. Treven and I will wait here and fan out behind you when you start following him.”

Beckley smiled—a little snidely, Treven thought. And it did seem like Larison, maybe in a weak attempt to save face, was pretending to issue orders that had in fact just been issued to him.

Beckley and Krichmond went out. Larison turned and watched through the window as they walked away.

Treven said, “You think he’s going to come out again at the same time? Hort said he was so surveillance conscious.”

Larison took a sip of coffee. “Why do you think Hort sent those Blackwater bozos along with us?”

It was a little annoying that Larison hadn’t just answered the question. Treven paused, then said, “He doesn’t trust us, obviously.”

“That’s right. They’re working for him, not with us. Remember that.”

Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton was Treven’s commander in the ISA, and had once been Larison’s, too, before Larison had gone rogue and tried to blackmail Uncle Sam for a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds in exchange for videos of American operatives torturing Muslim prisoners. He’d almost gotten away with it, too, but Hort had played him and kept the diamonds for himself. Treven wasn’t entirely sure why. On the one hand, Hort’s patriotism and integrity were unquestionable. A black man who might have been denied advancement in other areas but who was not only promoted, but held in awe by the army meritocracy, he loved the military and he loved the men who served under him. Yet none of that had prevented him from screwing Larison when he’d needed to, as he’d once tried to screw Treven. He’d told Treven why: America was being run by a kind of oligarchy, which didn’t seem to trouble Hort much except that the oligarchy had become greedy and incompetent—grievous sins, apparently, in Hort’s strange moral universe. The country needed better management, he’d said. He was starting something big, and the diamonds were a part of it. So, he hoped, would be Treven and Larison, and this guy Rain they’d been sent to find, too, if he could be persuaded.

So of course Hort didn’t trust them. They weren’t over here under duress, exactly, but it wasn’t all a positive inducement, win-win dynamic, either. Larison had to be looking for payback, as well as a chance to recover the diamonds. And Treven had wised up enough to recognize the strings Hort had been using to manipulate him, and to know he needed to find a way to cut them, too. There was the little matter of some unfortunate security videos, for example, that could implicate Treven in the murder of a prominent former administration official. It didn’t matter that it had been a CIA op and that Treven had nothing to do with the man’s death. What mattered was that Hort and the CIA had the tapes, and might use them if Treven got out of line. So for the moment, the whole arrangement felt like an unstable alliance of convenience, all shifting allegiances and conflicting motives. Hort would never have sent them off without a means of monitoring them, and under the circumstances, Larison’s injunction that he remember who Beckley and Krichmond were really working for felt gratuitous, even a little insulting. Maybe the man was just chafing at the fact that the Blackwater guys didn’t seem to give a shit about what Larison assumed was his own authority. Treven decided to let it go.

But what he wouldn’t let go was that Larison had ignored his question. “Same place, same time, same way out, two nights in a row?” he said. “That sound like our guy?”

Larison glanced at him, and Treven could have sworn the man was almost smiling.

“Depends,” Larison said.

“What do you mean?”

“Rain spotted them last night for sure, when they were there for longer. Very likely, he spotted them again tonight, too.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I would have spotted them. Because if this guy is who Hort says he is, he would have spotted them. Because if he’s not good enough to have spotted them, Hort wouldn’t even be bothering with him.”

Treven considered. “So what does that mean, if he spotted them but comes out the same way at the same time anyway?”

This time, Larison did smile. “It means I’m glad it’s not us walking point.”

When I left the Kodokan, I knew someone would be waiting for me. Most likely it would be the pair of giants I’d seen twice inside. Possibly they were just recon, and someone else would be set up outside, but if whoever it was had more manpower, the sensible thing would have been to rotate different members of the team to deny me the chance to get multiple IDs. Of course, it wasn’t impossible that I was supposed to see the two I’d already spotted—after all, their bulk was hard to miss—so that I’d keep searching for them when I went outside and consequently overlook the real threat. But if that had been the game, they would have stayed longer earlier that evening, to be sure I had a chance to see them again. My gut told me it was just the two of them, handling both recon and action.

I kept to the left side of the exit corridor as I left the building, using the book and souvenir kiosk as concealment until the last moment to deny them additional seconds to prepare for my appearance. I doubted they had guns—firearms are tightly restricted in Japan, and anyone with the connections to acquire them would likely have fielded a larger and less conspicuous team. A sniper rifle would have been even harder to get than a pistol, and even if they’d managed to procure one, what were they going to do, rent an apartment overlooking the entrance of the Kodokan? Too much trouble, too much paper trail. There were better ways.

As I hit the glass doors, I kept my head steady but let my eyes sweep the sidewalk and street within my field of vision. Nothing yet. The night before, I’d gone left and taken the subway, and though I hadn’t seen them at the time, I now assumed they’d been lurking somewhere and had logged my movements. So if they were hoping to follow me tonight and introduce themselves on terrain they found more favorable, they’d set up to the right. If the plan was for me to walk into them, they’d be to the left. No way to be sure, but other things being equal, I prefer to see what’s coming. And why not let them see me repeating the pattern I’d established the night before? It would give them a little more data to rely on in underestimating me. I turned left onto the sidewalk, my eyes still moving, checking hot spots, my ears trained for footfalls behind me.

I spotted the first instantly, leaning against one of the pillars fronting the building. He was bigger even than I’d estimated from seeing him in the stands. His hands were visible and one of them held a cigarette. Not the best cover for action in Tokyo. The country is a little behind the times on the nonsmoking front, and with the exception of smokers visiting Starbucks and hospital intensive care units, no one goes outside for a tobacco break, especially in the wet summer heat.

I passed him and hit the stairs of Kasuga station, keeping my head down to conceal my face from the security camera staring down from the ceiling, my footsteps echoing along the concrete walls. Ordinarily, I found the cameras a hindrance if not an outright threat, but for the moment, their presence was cause for comfort. No one wants to do a hit in the Tokyo metropolitan subway system, where the number of closed circuit video cameras could make a Las Vegas casino blush. In the past, the cameras had never been a particular concern, but then again my specialty had always been the appearance of natural causes—one of the advantages of which is that no one examines security tapes afterward, trying to find out what happened. The Mossad team that did the Hamas official in Dubai, for example, had likely been planning on the appearance of a heart attack, and so wasn’t worried about the hotel and airport cameras that filmed them. But they’d blown the job, and what was obviously an assassination led to an investigation. I wondered at the time why they hadn’t called me. Maybe Delilah had told them I was out of the life. I smiled bitterly at the notion, and the memory, and kept moving down the stairs.

I turned the corner into the station proper and there was the second guy, standing under the florescent lights in front of the ticket vending machines, looking at the wall map above like an extra-large, extra-confused tourist. Kasuga isn’t a main thoroughfare, and the area was mostly deserted—just a glassy-eyed ticket puncher in a booth, looking about as sentient as a potted plant, and a couple of high school kids who were testing their English trying to help my new friend find whatever he was looking for. I heard him grumble that he was fine as I moved past and could almost have sympathized—having a civilian address you when you’re trying to be invisible is always a bitch. I slid a prepaid pass into the ticket machine and went through to the platform.

I strolled slowly along, the grimy tracks below me and to my right, the white tiled wall gleaming to my left. I passed a few Tokyoites standing here and there—a girl with tea-colored hair and garish makeup texting on a mobile, a sarariman absently practicing his golf swing, a couple people I recognized from the Kodokan—but no one who tickled my radar. About two thirds of the way to the end I stopped and stood with my back close to the wall. But for the hum of an air conditioning unit, the platform was silent. From somewhere inside the tunnel to my left, I could just hear dripping water.

I could have glanced back, but doing so would only confirm what I already knew: they had fallen in behind me. They’d keep well down the platform, and when a train arrived they’d get on it, two or three cars away. At each stop, they’d check through the sliding doors to see if I was getting off, and follow me when I did. When they’d tailed me to a venue they found sufficiently dark, or isolated, or otherwise suitable for the business at hand, they’d do what they came for and depart.

But that’s the problem with dark, isolated, and otherwise suitable venues. Like tracer rounds, they work in both directions.

I felt a rumble approaching from far down in the tunnel to my right, and a voice over a public address system announced the arrival of a Meguro-bound train. The rumble grew louder. I glanced to my right and glimpsed the two giants, pressed against the wall about halfway down the platform—the spot I’d most likely overlook if I glanced in the direction of an approaching train. Not too close to alarm me; not so far that they’d get picked up in the natural angle of my vision. I didn’t know who I was dealing with, but the positioning showed some experience.

It wouldn’t have been hard to lose them. I doubted they knew the city well at all and they couldn’t possibly have known it the way I do. But I didn’t see the point. A long time ago, in another context, a man I considered dangerous told me the next time he saw me, he would kill me. I took him at his word, and prevented him from carrying out his promise. It was the same now. If these guys wanted to meet me, we’d get the meeting over with tonight. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder, wondering when they’d show up next. And I wasn’t going to look for an opportunity to politely ask them about the nature of their business, either. When you’ve spent a lifetime in my former line of work, and when two guys this big show up at your only possible known locale and start following you, it’s time to assume the worst, and to act accordingly.

The train hurtled out of the tunnel and began to slow, its brakes hissing, its wheels screeching against the metal tracks. It shuddered to a stop and the doors slid open. A few passengers stepped out. I walked into a mostly empty compartment and stood facing the doors, just in case. No one else got on. After a moment, a loudspeaker voice warned passengers the train was leaving, and then the doors hissed closed and the train jerked into motion.

I thought I’d take them to Jinbocho, two stops away on the Mita line and best known for its numerous antiquarian book shops. I liked the area, too, for a coffee shop, not far from the station, appropriately enough called Saboru, the Japanese word for lounging, loafing, playing hooky, or otherwise taking a timeout from the world. Though I would only take the giants past the coffee shop, not inside. And the timeout I had in mind for them was going to be longer than what saboru ordinarily implied.

When the train stopped at Jinbocho station, I got unhurriedly off and headed for the A7 exit. I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t need to. They might have been sufficiently familiar with Tokyo to know how quickly you can lose the subject of surveillance in the shifting nighttime crowds, the unmarked, narrow alleys, of a section of the city as old and labyrinthine as Jinbocho. Or they might not have been even that familiar, in which case they’d lack the confidence to let anything more than a short gap open up between us. Either way, they would stay close now until their first opportunity.

When I was a kid, I had to learn to deal with bullies. First in Japan, where small half-breeds like me attracted the righteous attentions of larger children for whom cruelty and joy were indistinguishable; later, after my father died, in small town America, where I was an exotic half-Asian kid with limited English and a funny accent. During my first week at the American public school in which my newly-widowed mother had enrolled me, I’d noticed a much larger kid eyeing me, a meaty, crew-cut blond boy the other kids called the Bear. The Bear had acquired his nickname, apparently, because his favorite thing to do was to grab his victims in a frontal bear hug, squeeze them senseless, then throw them to the ground, where he could hurt and humiliate them at will. I saw one hapless kid get the treatment—the Bear sucked him in; the kid tried to push away but then his arms crumbled; the Bear threw him down and beat the crap out of him. I figured everyone he’d ever grabbed must have reacted the same way: if someone is trying to draw you in to squeeze you to death, you’d naturally resist. So it stood to reason that the Bear might not be prepared for someone who failed to resist his embrace. Who instead embraced him back.

It didn’t take long for my turn to come. Though I lacked the frame of reference at the time, I recognized the behaviors—the looks, the comments, the accidental-on-purpose hallway shoulder slams—that for bullies on both sides of the Pacific constituted a kind of foreplay. And I instinctively understood that the little signs were all a tactical weakness, too, because they informed the intended victim of what was coming, and when. I resolved never to display such warnings myself, and I never have.

It was on a grass berm behind the school’s weedy baseball field that the Bear decided to consummate our incipient relationship. I’d studied him enough, and was experienced enough, to recognize even before he did that this would be the place and time. So when he nudged his friends and pointed at me, it was almost comforting, like watching an actor dutifully playing his part in a drama the conclusion of which I already knew. He swaggered over to where I was standing and demanded, what are you looking at? It was so much what I’d expected, I think I might have smiled a little, because although I didn’t respond, for an instant I thought I saw doubt pass across his features like the shadow of a fast-moving cloud. But then it was gone, and he was again accusing me of looking at him, the one line of inquiry apparently having exhausted his creative capacity, and he threw out his arms and lunged at me, just as I’d hoped he would.

As his arms circled my back and he started to pull me in, I shot my hands forward and dug my fingers into the back of his neck, my elbows braced against his chest. I felt him jerk in surprise but he only knew the one move and it had always worked before, so he didn’t stop—he locked his hands and started to squeeze, but now I was squeezing, too, my biceps tightening with the effort, my forearms corded, bringing his head alongside mine, and as our left cheeks connected I dug my face in, bit into his earlobe, and ripped it free with a jerk of my head. He screamed and suddenly he was trying to push me away, but I was clamped onto him like pliers and I bit him again, this time on the back of the ear. Cartilage crunched and tore loose and my mouth was filled with hot, coppery blood, and a primal frenzy swept through me as I realized how I’d made him bleed. He screamed again, lost his balance, and fell onto his back. I spat out what I’d chewed off, reared up, and started raining punches down onto his face. He covered up blindly, in a panic. Someone tried to grab me but I slipped free and darted in for another go at his ear. This time I couldn’t find it—there was too much blood, and not enough ear—but just the feeling of the renewed attack made the Bear shriek in terror and scramble from beneath me as the other kids pulled me loose.

We both stood, the Bear crying now, his eyes wide in disbelief, his left hand groping shakily at the mutilated stump on the side of his head. The two kids who were holding my arms let me go and stepped warily to the sides, as though realizing they’d been standing too close to a wild animal. I looked at the Bear, my fists balled, my nostrils flaring, and felt a bloody smile spread across my face. I took a step toward him, and with a hitching, anguished squeak, the Bear turned and fled for the safety of the school.

The Bear’s parents made a fuss, threatening a lawsuit and excoriating my mother for raising such a wanton, savage child. The school held disciplinary proceedings, and for a while it looked like I might be expelled. But the hearings turned to a discussion of previous incidents in which the Bear had been involved, and of how he was so much bigger than I was, and I sensed in the official expressions of disapproval something pro forma, something of a whitewash. Eventually, I realized that some cabal of frustrated teachers and outraged parents had been secretly pleased at the Bear’s comeuppance, and had used the hearings as the means by which they could achieve an outcome that had already been decided. It was the first time I’d seen such a thing, but later, I came to understand the dynamic is common, occurring, for example, every time the government appoints a blue ribbon commission to investigate the latest scandal. In the end, my encounter with the Bear blew over. Surgeons were able to save what was left of his ear. He grew his hair long to cover his deformity, and he never came near me again.

I learned two things from my encounter with the Bear. First, the importance of surprise. It didn’t matter what size, skills, or other advantages your enemy had if you didn’t give him a chance to deploy any of it.

Second, that there’s always an aftermath. Following the fight, I’d been lucky not to have gotten in more trouble with the authorities. Meaning it was better to take care of such matters in a way that couldn’t be attributed to you. Winning the fight wouldn’t mean much if you got pummeled afterward, legally or otherwise.

At the top of the stairs, I turned left onto the nameless narrow street fronting Saboru, with its eccentric mountain hut façade and profusion of potted plants around the door and under the windows. The light hadn’t yet entirely leached from the sky, but the area was already thick with shadows. A few knots of pedestrians passed me, probably heading home from work, or perhaps for a beer and yakitori in nearby Kanda. I knew my pursuers were close behind me, but they wouldn’t be comfortable yet—the pedestrian density wasn’t quite right. They’d be waiting for an especially congested area, where there would be so many people and so much tumult that no one would notice what had happened until several seconds after the fact. Or for an especially empty area, where there would be no witnesses at all.

I had a knife, a Benchmade folder, clipped inside my front pants pocket. But I would use it only for contingencies. Knives make a lot of mess, all of it laced with DNA. Guns, too, create an evidence trail. For sheer walk-awayedness, there’s really nothing like bare hands.

Past Saboru, the neighborhood grew more residential; the yellow streetlights, fewer and farther between. Within a block, the sparse clusters of pedestrians had evaporated entirely. Over the incessant background screech of cicadas I could just hear a set of footfalls from ten meters back. Coming, no doubt, from whichever of them was keeping me in visual contact. The secondary guy would be about the same distance behind the first, needing only to maintain visual contact with him. If they narrowed the gap between them, it would mean action was at hand. I wasn’t going to give them that chance.

There was a small parking lot on the left side of the intersection ahead. I had noted it on one of my periodic tactical explorations of the city’s terrain, and liked it because among a cluster of dim vending machines to its rear was the entrance to a series of alleys, more like crevices, really, leading back to the street we were walking on now. In fact, I’d just passed a locked gate that led from one of the alleys, though I doubted my pursuers would notice it, or, even if they did, would understand its current significance. From the sound of the lead guy’s distance behind me, I estimated that I could make it through the alley to the inside of the gate at about the same time the first guy would be pausing at the parking lot’s corner, trying to figure out where I’d gone, and the second guy would be passing the gate.

I made a left into the parking lot, and then, the instant I’d turned the corner, accelerated and turned left into the entrance to the alleys. Another left, past a row of garbage cans, and I was at the inside of the gate I’d just passed. I paused, my back to the wall, covered in darkness, and watched as the secondary guy passed my position. I waited several seconds before gripping the metal rail at the top of the gate and moving it slightly to confirm solidity and soundlessness. Then I hopped up, eased my belly over, put a hand on each side, and rotated my legs around, landing catlike on the street side. There was the second guy, just a few meters ahead, approaching the edge of the parking lot. He was moving so slowly it seemed he was aware his partner would have stopped just around the corner to look for me and was trying to give him time. I wondered for an instant how he could have known his partner had paused—maybe just a sensible precaution when turning a corner?—but it didn’t matter. What mattered is that I was closing in on him, and that for the moment I had his back.

I traded stealth for speed, knowing I had only an instant before he might check behind him, and in fact as I reached him, he was just beginning to turn. But too late. I leaped into him, planting my left foot in the small of his back as though trying to climb a steep riser of stairs. His body bowed violently forward and his head and arms flew back, and a startled grunt, loud enough, I was aware, for his partner to hear around the corner, forced itself from his lungs. As he plunged to his knees, I wrapped my left arm around his neck, trapping his upturned face against my abdomen, secured my left wrist with my right hand, and arched savagely up and back. His neck snapped as easily as if it had been made of kindling, and with a similar sound. I let him go and he crumbled to the ground.

His partner appeared instantly from around the corner. He cried out, “Oh, fuck!”, the vernacular, and the accent, I was distantly aware, both American, and lunged at me. I had no time to get out of the way, but nor the inclination. Instead, I held my position, extending my torso away from him so he was forced to reach for me, and twisted slightly counterclockwise as we came to grips. I extended my left leg, planted the sole of my foot against his right knee, grabbed both his biceps, and used his momentum to spin him counterclockwise in hiza-guruma. He was overbalanced and couldn’t get his legs out to correct because of the way I was blocking his knee. There was an instant of resistance, and then he was sailing past me, perpendicular to the ground, trying to twist away from me and turn his body toward the coming impact. But he was moving too fast for that now, and I was assisting his rapid descent, applying pressure to his shoulders to make them fall faster than his feet, wanting his cranium to bear the brunt.

He hit the pavement with a thud I could feel as well as hear, his shoulders connecting first, then the back of his skull as his head snapped back. I dropped to my knees next to him but he wasn’t out, and even shocked and dazed as he must have been, he managed to turn into me and go for my eyes with his left hand. I grabbed his wrist with my left hand, slamming my elbow into his face on the way, snaked my right arm under his shoulder, secured my own left wrist, extended my body across his chest, and broke his elbow with ude-garami. He shrieked and tried to buck me loose. I scrambled back, reared up, and blasted a palm heel into his nose. The back of his head bounced into the pavement and I hit him again the same way. He rolled away from me, trying to get up, and I launched myself onto his back, throwing my left arm around his neck, catching my right bicep, planting my right hand against the back of his head, and strangling him with classic hadaka-jime. He struggled and thrashed and I kept an eye on his remaining good arm, in case he tried to access a concealed weapon. The choke was deep, though, and his brain was getting no oxygen. In a few seconds he was still and, a few more after that, gone.

I released my grip and came shakily to my feet, my heart hammering. I wiped sweat from my eyes with my sleeve and looked around. No one. Not likely either of them was carrying identification, but I felt I could afford a moment to check.

I knelt and pulled the guy I’d strangled onto his back. He rolled over with liquid ease, his broken arm flopping unnaturally to the pavement next to him. I patted his front pants pockets. A folding knife in the right. Something hard and rectangular in the left—a cell phone? I pulled it out and saw that it was a phone, as I’d hoped. But wait, there was something else in the pocket. I reached back in and felt something metallic. I pulled whatever it was out and stared at it. It took me a moment to realize what I was holding: a small video camera.

Oh, shit.

A wire extended from the unit, disappearing beneath his clothes. I slipped my fingers between the buttons of his shirt and tore it open. The wire ran to one of the buttons. I leaned in—it wasn’t easy to see in the dim light—and looked more closely. Shit, it was no button at all, but a lens. And I was staring right into it.

I tore the wire free and stuffed the camera and phone into my pockets, then scrambled over to where the other guy lay. He was similarly equipped. I pocketed the second phone and camera, too, and walked off, keeping to the quiet streets paralleling Yasukuni-dori. I would take the batteries out of the phones to make sure they were untraceable and examine the cameras as soon as I was safely away from the bodies. If the two giants had been using the equipment only to monitor each other, I would be okay.

But I had a feeling they weren’t just monitoring each other. And if I was right, I was in for another visit, and soon.

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Blake Crouch

THE tattered windsock hangs limp against its pole. Weeds erupt through fissures in the ancient pavement of the runway where she stands, and in the distance, support beams rise from heaps of twisted metal—three hangars, long since toppled upon a half dozen single- and twin-engine airplanes. She watches the Beechcraft that brought her here lift off the ground, props screaming, and climb to clear the pines a quarter mile past the end of the runway. She walks into the field. The midmorning sun blazing down on her bare shoulders. The grass that grazes her sandaled feet still cold with dew. Someone jogs toward her, and beyond them she can see the team already at work, imagines they started the moment the light became worth a damn.

The young man who has come to greet her smiles and tries to take her duffle bag, but she says, “No, I’ve got it, thanks,” and keeps walking, her eyes catching on the colony of white canvas tents standing several football fields away near the northern edge of the forest. Still probably an insufficient distance to avoid the stink when the wind blows out of the south.

“Good flight in?” he asks.

“Little bumpy.”

“It’s so cool to finally meet you. I’ve read all about your work. I’m even using two of your books in my thesis.”

“That’s great. Good luck with it.”

“You know, there’s a few decent bars in town. Maybe we could get together and talk sometime?”

She lifts the strap of her heavy bag, swings it onto the other shoulder, and ducks under the yellow crime scene tape that circumnavigates the pit.

They arrive at the edge.

The young man says, “I’m doing my thesis on—”

“I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“Matt.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, Matt, but could you give me a minute alone here?”

“Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.”

Matt heads off toward the tents, and she lets her bag slide off her shoulder into the grass, estimating the dimensions of the pit at thirty-five meters by twenty meters, and presently attended to by nine people, seemingly oblivious to the flies and the stench, each in their respective worlds, doing what they walk this earth to do. She sits down and watches them work. Nearby, a man with shoulder-length graying hair buries a pickax into a wall of dirt. A young woman—probably another intern—flits from station to station, filling a bucket with backdirt to be added to the mound of grave fill near the southern edge of the pit. Everywhere that human remains have been exposed, red flags stand thrust into the earth. She stops counting them after thirty. The nearest anthropologist appears on the verge of pedestaling a skeletonized body, down to the detail work now—poking chopsticks between ribs to clear out the dirt. Other skeletons lie partially exposed in the upper layers. The remnants of human beings with whom she will become closely acquainted in the weeks to come. Deeper, the dead are more than likely mummified, possibly even fleshed depending on the water content of the grave. Beside the autopsy tent on the other side, tables have been erected in the grass, and at one of them, a woman she recognizes from a previous UN mission is at work reassembling a small skeleton on a black velvet cloth to be photographed.

She realizes she’s crying. Tears are fine, even healthy in this line of work, just never on the clock, never in the grave. If you lose control down there, you might never get it back.

Approaching footsteps snap her out of her reverie. She wipes her face and looks up, sees Sam coming toward her, the bald and scrawny Australian team leader who always wears a tie, especially in the field, his rubber boots swishing through the grass. He plops down beside her, reeking of decomp. Rips off the pair of filthy, elbow-length gloves and tosses them in the grass.

“How many have you taken out so far?” she asks.

“Twenty-nine. Mapping system shows a hundred fifty, hundred seventy-five still down in there.”

“What’s the demographic?”

“Men. Women. Children.”

“High-velocity GSWs?”

“Yeah, we’ve collected a ton of .223 Remington casings. But this is another weird one. Same thing we saw in that mass grave in Denver. Maybe you heard about it.”

“I haven’t.”

“Dismemberment.”

“Have you determined what was used?”

“In most instances, it’s not a clean break, like a machete or ax strike. These bones are splintered.”

“A chainsaw would do that.”

“Clever girl.”

“Jesus.”

“So I’m thinking they cut everyone down with AR-15s, and then went through with chainsaws. Making sure no one crawled out.”

The blond hairs on the back of her neck stand erect, a rod of ice descending her spine. The sun burns down out of the bright June sky, more intense for the elevation. Brushstrokes of snow linger above timberline on the distant peaks.

“You okay?” Sam asks.

“Yeah. Just that this is my first mission out west. I’d been working New York City up until now.”

“Look, take the day if you want. Get yourself acclimated. You’ll need your head right for this one.”

“No.” She stands, hoisting the duffle bag out of the grass and engaging that compartment in her brain that functions solely as a cold, indifferent scientist. “Let’s go to work.”

THE president had just finished addressing the nation, and the anchors and pundits were back on the airwaves, scrambling, as they had been for the last three days, to sort out the chaos.

Dee Colclough lay watching it all on a flatscreen from a ninth-floor hotel room ten minutes from home, a sheet twisted between her legs, the air-conditioning cool against the film of sweat on her skin.

She looked over at Kiernan, said, “Even the anchors look scared.”

Kiernan stubbed out his cigarette and blew a river of smoke at the television.

“I got called up,” he said.

“Your Guard unit?”

“I have to report tomorrow morning.” He lit another one. “What I hear, we’ll just be patrolling neighborhoods.”

“Keeping the peace until it all blows over?”

He glanced at her, head cocked with that boyish smirk she’d fallen for six months ago when he’d deposed her as an adverse expert witness in a medical malpractice case. “Does anything about this make you feel like it’s going to blow over?”

A new banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen—45 dead in a mass shooting at a Southern Baptist church in Columbia, South Carolina.

“Jesus Christ,” Dee said.

Kiernan dragged heavily on his cigarette. “Something’s happening,” he said.

“Obviously. The whole country—”

“That’s not what I mean, love.”

“What are you talking about?”

He didn’t answer right away, just sat there for a while, smoking.

“It’s been coming on now, little by little, for days,” he said finally.

“I don’t understand.”

“I barely do myself.”

Through the cracked window of their hotel room—distant gunshots and sirens.

“This was supposed to be our week,” she said. “You were going to tell Myra. I was—”

“You should go home, be with your family.”

“You’re my family.”

“Your kids at least.”

“What is this, Kiernan?” She could feel an angry knot bulging in her throat. “Are we not in this together? Are you having second thoughts about everything or what?”

“It’s not that.”

“Do you have any concept of what I’ve already sacrificed for you?”

She couldn’t see all of his face in the mirror on the opposite wall, but she could see his eyes. Gaping into nothing. A thousand-yard stare. Somewhere other than this room. He’d gone deep, and she’d sensed it even before this moment, in the way he’d made love to her. Something held back. Something missing.

She climbed out of bed and walked over to her dress where she’d thrown it against the wall two hours ago.

“You don’t feel it?” he asked. “Not at all?”

“I don’t understand what—”

“Forget it.”

“Kiernan—”

“Fucking forget it.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

Dee pulled the straps over her shoulders as Kiernan glared at her through the cloud of smoke around his head. He was forty-one years old, with short black hair, and a two-day shadow that reminded her so much of her father.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“You and I are not the same anymore, Dee.”

“Did I do something or—”

“I’m not talking about our relationship. It’s deeper. It’s…so much more profound than that.”

“You’re not making sense.”

She was standing by the window. The air coming in was cool and it smelled of the city and the desert that surrounded it. A pair of gunshots drew her attention, and when she looked through the glass she saw grids of darkness overspreading the city.

Dee glanced back at Kiernan, and she’d just opened her mouth to say something when the lights and the television in their room cut out.

She froze.

Her heart accelerating.

Couldn’t see anything but the flare and fade of Kiernan’s tobacco ember.

Heard him exhale in the dark, and then his voice, all the more terrifying for its evenness.

“You need to get away from me right now,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s this part of me, Dee, getting stronger every time I breathe in, that wants to hurt you.”

“Why?”

She heard the covers rip back. The sound of Kiernan rushing across the carpet.

He stopped inches from her.

She smelled the tobacco on his breath, and when she palmed his chest, felt his body shaking.

“What’s happening to you?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t stop it, Dee. Please remember that I love you.”

He put his hands on her bare shoulders, and she thought he was going to kiss her, but then she was flying through darkness across the room.

She crashed into the entertainment center, stunned, her shoulder throbbing from the impact.

Kiernan shouted, “Now get the fuck out while you still can.”

To continue reading RUN by Blake Crouch, visit your library or favorite ebook retailer and pick up a copy today.

A Thriller

J. A. Konrath and Ann Voss Peterson

NOT TOO LONG AGO…

“Whenever possible, avoid engaging the enemy,” The Instructor said. “If engaged, run. Fighting should be your last resort. Patriotism has its place, but it costs millions of dollars to train people like you. You’re more valuable than the mission. If things go sour, flee.”

This is fun I typed. Then I hit enter and waited for the reply. It popped up on my computer screen a moment later.

No pressure, but are we ever going to meet IRL?

I took the last sip from my bottled water and tried to ignore the jitter under my rib cage. In real life. He assumes I have one.

I tossed the empty over my shoulder without looking. The sound it made confirmed I’d hit the garbage can.

How do I know you’re not some lunatic stalker? Or even worse, weigh eighty pounds more than your jpg?

I’d been chatting with Victor9904 almost daily for the past two weeks. I liked him, and he was the first guy I had ever hooked up with online that I wanted to meet in person. That alone made me a little nervous. Dating, for me, was complicated. Except for stretches of time when I was abroad, I kept to a tight routine. Cruising bars looking for men wasn’t part of that routine.

Do you have a webcam? he typed.

Another jitter, this time tougher to ignore. Chatting online was one thing. Letting him see me was riskier.

Yes. But I haven’t showered yet this morning.

<grin> Neither have I. You chicken?

I smiled. I don’t scare easily.

OK. I’ll set up a private webcam chat room and send you the URL. Give me a minute…

Sounds good.

I didn’t rush to the bathroom to check myself in the mirror, but I may have moved a little quicker than normal. My dark hair was shorter than I would have preferred, but it never got in my face and was easy to manage and conceal. I finger combed it, deemed it fine, and wiped a toast crumb from the corner of my mouth. I was wearing what I’d slept in, an old tee and some baggy sweat pants. Since I’d already told him I hadn’t showered, changing into nice clothes and putting on make-up would be disingenuous.

Besides, if a guy couldn’t accept the way a woman looked when she woke up, he wasn’t worth waking up next to.

Not that I was planning any sleepovers.

Sex, on the other hand… it had been too long.

I wandered back to my computer, sat down, and noted my pulse was a tiny bit faster than normal. My webcam was built into the monitor. I switched on the application, and a few seconds later Victor IMed me the address. I typed in the URL, and then there he was, filling my computer screen, smiling boyishly.

He was actually cuter than his jpg. Blond hair. Strong chin, covered in stubble. Broad shoulders. Around my age, early thirties, and his blue eyes were several shades lighter than mine.

He said something, which I lip-read to be, Good morning, Carmen. Nice to finally see you. Are you wearing a Cubs t-shirt?

I unmuted the picture and adjusted the volume.

“Yes, I am.” I smiled. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Victor stood up, revealing the White Sox logo on his jersey. Behind him I could make out a sofa, but the room details were blurry beyond that. With the sound level up, I heard his cat, a calico named Mozart, meow in the background.

“I’m a season ticket holder.” His voice was deep, rich, pure Chicago south-side. He sat down, grinning. “But I’m willing to work through this if you are.”

I shook my head, feigning disapproval. “I dunno. Season tickets? I’m not sure I could get over something like that.”

“Are you asking me to give up the Sox when we haven’t even had a first date yet?”

“If I did ask, what would you say?”

He rubbed his chin. “On one hand, I don’t want you to think I’m a pushover. On the other hand, if this is what you look like before a shower, giving up the Sox doesn’t seem like that big a sacrifice.”

I granted him a smile for that one. “You should see me juggle.”

We stared at each other for a few seconds.

“This is the first time I’ve ever used a webcam for something other than business.” He leaned forward, like we were talking over a coffee table. “It’s weird. Intimate, but distant at the same time.”

“I agree.” I took a breath and a plunge. “Dinner would be better, I think.”

“Are you free tonight?”

I pretended to consider it. “Yes.”

“I could pick you up. Have we reached a level of trust where you’re willing to tell me where you live?”

“Let’s meet someplace.” Only one person in the world actually knew where I lived, and I wanted to keep it that way.

“You like German food, right?”

I nodded, remembering I’d mentioned that during our very first text chat.

“How about Mirabel’s on Addison?” he said. “Six o’clock?”

“Looking forward to it.”

“Me, too. But now it’s almost nine, and I’m on call. Gotta get ready for work.”

“Off to save some lives?”

“I’m hoping for a slow day. Maybe I’ll get lucky and no one in Chi-town will dial 911 during my shift. But if I do have to heroically spring into action,” he winked at me, “I’ll be ready.”

“See you later, Victor.”

“See you, Carmen.”

He switched off the camera. I initiated my tracking software, locating his IP address. It was the same one he always used. Previously, I’d hacked his ISP and gotten his billing information, and from there it had been easy to run a background check. Victor Cormack, as far as I could research using both public and private records, had been telling me the truth about his job, his education, his past. On the surface, he was a normal, average person.

But anyone checking out my identity would assume the same about me.

I erased my Internet footsteps, deleting cookies, clearing the cache, and reformatting the C drive. A pain in the ass to do every time I went online, but a necessary one. Then I wiped the keyboard clean with a spritz of Windex and began my morning work-out.

Halfway into it, my encrypted cell phone rang. I finished my two-hundred thirty-ninth push-up, slid the sweaty bangs off my eyebrows with my forearm, and padded over to the breakfast bar to answer it. Only one person—the same person who knew my address—had this number. A call meant work. And work couldn’t be refused. The phone was even waterproof so I could take it into the shower.

I hit the connect button on the touch screen and waited, habit making me tune in to my surroundings. I could smell traces of the green pepper omelet and wheat toast I’d had for breakfast, along with a slightly sour odor coming from the sink telling me dishes needed to be done. The ambient sounds were unremarkable; the thermostat kicking on, the hum of the fridge, the ticking of a wall clock hanging over my computer, pigeons warbling outside.

To continue reading FLEE by J. A. Konrath and Ann Voss Peterson, visit your library or favorite ebook retailer and pick up a copy today.

Part of the appeal of my series about the half-American, half-Japanese assassin John Rain seems to be Rain’s realistic tactics. It’s true that Rain, like his author, has a black belt in judo and is a veteran of certain government firearms and other defensive tactics courses, but these have relatively little to do with Rain’s continued longevity. Rather, Rain’s ultimate expertise, and the key to his survival, lies in his ability to think like the opposition.

Okay, get out your notepad, because:

All effective personal protection, all effective security, all true self-defense, is based on the ability and willingness to think like the opposition.

I’m writing this article on my laptop in a crowded coffee shop I like. There are a number of other people around me similarly engaged. I think to myself, If I wanted to steal a laptop, this would be a pretty good place to do it. You come in, order coffee and a muffin, sit, and wait. Eventually, one of these computer users is going to get up and make a quick trip to the bathroom. He’ll be thinking, “Hey, I’ll only be gone for a minute.” He doesn’t know that a minute is all I need to get up and walk out with his $3000 PowerBook. (Note how criminals are adept at thinking like their victims. You need to treat them with the same respect.)

Okay. I’ve determined where the opposition is planning on carrying out his crime (this coffee shop), and I know how he’s going to do it (snatch and dash). I now have options:

1. avoid the coffee shop entirely (avoid where the crime will occur);

2. secure my laptop to a chair with a twenty dollar Kensington security cable (avoid how the crime will occur — it’s hard to employ bolt cutters unobtrusively in a coffee shop, or to carry away a laptop that has a chair hanging off it); and

3. hope to catch the thief in the act, chase him down, engage him with violence.

Of these three options, #2 makes the most sense for me. The first is too costly — I like this coffee shop and get a lot of work done here. The third is also too costly, and too uncertain. Why fight when you can avoid the fight in the first place? This is self-defense we’re talking about, remember, self-protection. Not fighting, not melodrama. As for the second, yes, it’s true these measures won’t render the crime impossible. But what measures ever do? The point is to make the crime difficult enough to carry out that the criminal chooses to pursue his aims elsewhere. Yes, if twenty-seven ninjas have dedicated their lives to stealing your laptop and have managed to track you to the coffee shop, they’ll probably manage to get your laptop while you’re in the bathroom even if you’ve secured it to a chair. But more likely, your opposition will be someone who is as happy stealing your laptop as someone else’s. By making yours the marginally more difficult target, you will encourage him to steal someone else’s.

Which brings us to an unpleasant, but vitally true, parable:

If you and your friend are jogging in the woods, and you get chased by a bear, you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun your friend.

Except at the level of very high-value executive protection (presidents, high-profile businesspeople, ambassadors and other dignitaries), you are not trying to outrun the bear. You are trying only to outrun your friend.

Let’s combine these two concepts — thinking like the opposition, outrunning your friend — with an example from the realm of home security. And let’s add an additional critical element: that all good security is layered.

If you wanted to burglarize a house, what would you look for? And what would you avoid?

Generally speaking, your principal objectives are to get cash and property, and to get away (home invasion is a separate subject, but is addressed, like all self-protection, by reference to the same principles). You’d start by looking at lots of houses. Remember, you’re not trying to rob a certain address; you just want to rob a house. Which ones are dark? Which are set back from the road and neighbors? Are there any cars in the driveway? Lights and noise in the house? Signs of an alarm system? A barking dog?

Thinking like a burglar, you are now ready to implement the outer layer of your home security. By some combination of installing motion-sensor lights, keeping bushes trimmed to avoid concealment opportunities, putting up signs advertising an alarm system, having a dog around, keeping a car or cars in the driveway, leaving on appropriate lights and the television, and making sure there are no newspapers in the driveway or mail left on the porch when you’re away, you help the burglar to decide immediately during his casing or surveillance phase that he should rob someone else’s house.

If the burglar isn’t immediately dissuaded by the outer layer, he receives further discouragement at the next layer in. He takes a closer look, and sees that you have deadbolt locks on all the doors, and that your advertisement was not a bluff — the windows are in fact alarmed. If he takes a crack at the doorjamb, he discovers that it’s reinforced. If he tries breaking a window, he realizes the glass is shatter-resistant. Whoops — time to go somewhere else, somewhere easier.

Okay, the guy is stupid. He keeps trying anyway. Now the second layer of security described above, which failed to deter him, works to delay him. It’s taking him a long time to get in. He’s making noise. At some point, the time and noise might combine to persuade him to abort (back to deterrence). But if he insists on plunging ahead, the noise has alerted you, and you have bought yourself time to implement further inner layers of security: accessing a firearm; calling the police; retreating to a safe room; most of all, preparing yourself mentally and emotionally for danger and possible violence.

Now another example, relating to personal protection from an overseas kidnapping attempt. Like everything else, this form of protection starts with you thinking like the bad guy. Your objective is to kidnap a foreigner. Not a particular foreigner (high-value targets are a separate problem, although again subject to the same principles), just any old foreigner. So what do you need to do to carry out your plan?

First, you need to pick a target. This part is easy — any foreigner will do. Next, you need to assess the foreigner’s vulnerability. Where will you be able to grab him, and when? To answer these questions, you need to follow the target around. If he’s punctual, a creature of habit, if he likes to travel the same routes to and from work at the same times every day, you will start to feel encouraged.

But what if instead, during the assessment stage, you see the target go out to his car and carefully check it for improvised explosive devices. Your immediate thought will be: Hard target. Security-conscious. Too difficult — kidnap someone else.

If you’re the potential target, do you see how your display of security consciousness becomes the outermost layer of your security?

But suppose the would-be kidnapper wants to assess a bit further. Now he learns that you never travel the same route to and from work. You never come and go at the same times. He can’t get a fix on your where and when. How is he going to plan a kidnapping now?

Note that, by putting yourself in the opposition’s shoes, you have identified a behavior pattern in which he must engage before carrying out his crime: surveillance. Before you are kidnapped, you will be assessed. Assessment entails surveillance. Now you know what pre-incident behavior to look for. If you were trying to follow you, how would you go about it? That’s what to look for.

Perhaps the would-be kidnapper will discover choke points — a certain bridge, for example — that you have to cross every day on your way to the office. This would be a good place for him to lay an ambush. But because you know this too, you will be unusually alert as you approach potential choke points. As he watches your choke point behavior, he realizes again that you are security-conscious, and thus a poor choice for a target. Again, deterrence. If he is rash and acts at this point anyway, the inner layers of your security — locked and armored vehicle; defensive driving tactics; presence of a bodyguard; access to a firearm; again, most of all, preparing yourself mentally and emotionally for danger and possible violence — all have time to come into play.

Other examples: if you needed fast cash, where would you look to rob someone? Maybe on the potential victim’s way from an ATM? If so, what kind of ATM would you pick? Where would you wait? What if you wanted to steal a car? Assuming you’re not a pro who can pick locks and hot-wire ignitions, where would you go? Maybe outside a video store, or a dry cleaner’s, a place where people leave the keys in the ignition because they’ll “only be gone for a minute”? Now, armed with a better understanding of the criminal’s goals and tactics, how should you behave to better protect yourself?

One common element you might see in all of this is the vital need for alertness, for situational awareness. Understanding where threats are likely to come from and how they are likely to materialize will help you properly tune your alertness. If you are not properly alert to a threat, you almost certainly will be unable to defend yourself against it when it materializes.

Notice that so far the discussion has included no mention of martial arts. This is because martial arts, self-defense, fighting, and combat, while related subjects, are not identical. The relationship and differences among these areas is outside the scope of this article; for more information, check the suggestions for further reading below, especially www.nononsenseselfdefense.com. For now, suffice it to say that martial arts can be thought of as an inner layer of self-defense. If you have to use your martial arts moves, then almost certainly some outer layer of your security has been breached and you are in a worse position than you would have been had the outer layers held fast.

To put it another way:

Thinking like the opposition; taking threats seriously and not being in denial about their existence; and maintaining proper situational awareness, are infinitely more cost effective for self-defense than is training in martial arts.

Note that I have been doing martial arts of one kind or another since I was a teenager. I love the martial arts for many reasons. I do not dispute and am not discussing their value, but rather am emphasizing their cost-effectiveness in achieving a given objective — here, effective personal protection. No matter what her martial arts skills, the person who recognizes in advance and can therefore steer clear of an ambush has a much better chance of surviving it than does the person who wanders into the ambush and then has to fight her way out.

So practice thinking like the opposition, and you’ll have a better chance of lasting as long as John Rain.

I am indebted for much of what appears in this article particularly to the wisdom and experience of Marc MacYoung and www.nononsenseselfdefense.com. There is much more to this subject; this article is only a start. To learn more, I suggest:

Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear, www.gdbinc.com/home.cfm

Marc MacYoung, Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons www.nononsenseselfdefense.org

Peyton Quinn, A Bouncer’s Guide to Barroom Brawling

If you’re interested in going deeper into the mechanics and psychology of violence, then:

Tony Blauer’s tapes and courses, www.tonyblauer.com

Alain Burrese, Hard-Won Wisdom from the School of Hard Knocks, www.burrese.com

Loren Christensen’s books and videos, www.lwcbooks.com

Marc MacYoung’s books and videos, www.nononsenseselfdefense.com

Peyton Quinn, Real Fighting, www.rmcat.com

If you want to go beyond self-defense and into the realm of combat and killing, then:

Dave Grossman, On Killing and On Combat www.killology.com

Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan International Judo Center along the way. Eisler’s bestselling thrillers have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year, have been included in numerous “Best Of” lists, and have been translated into nearly twenty languages. Eisler lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and, when not writing novels, he blogs about torture, civil liberties, and the rule of law at www.BarryEisler.com.

Fiction

Hard Rain

Rain Storm

Killing Rain

The Last Assassin

Requiem For An Assassin

Fault Line

Inside Out

The Lost Coast

Paris Is A Bitch

The Detachment (Coming soon)

Non-fiction

The Ass Is A Poor Receptacle For The Head: Why Democrats Suck At Communication, And How They Could Improve

Ebooks and Self-Publishing: A Conversation Between Authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath

For updates, free copies, contests, and everything else you want on The Detachment (available soon), featuring Larison, Rain, Dox, Treven, and the other characters you love, sign up for Barry’s newsletter.  It’s a private list and your email address will never be shared with anyone else.  The newsletter is also a great way to be the first to learn about movie news, appearances, and Barry’s other books and stories.  You can also find Barry on his website, his blog Heart of the Matter, Facebook, and Twitter.

Copyright © 2011 by Barry Eisler. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

Edition: April 2011