The third book in the John Rain series, 2004

THE AGENCY HAD hired me to “retire” Belghazi, not to protect him. So if this didn’t go well, their next candidate for a retirement package would probably be me.

But the way I saw it, saving Belghazi from the guy I now thought of as Karate would be doing Uncle Sam a favor. After all, Karate could fail to make it look natural, or get caught, or do some other sloppy thing, and then there would be misunderstandings, and suspicions, and accusations-exactly the kinds of problems the Agency had hired me to avoid.

Of course, there was also the matter of my getting paid. If Karate got to Belghazi first and I couldn’t claim credit, I might be out of a check, and that wouldn’t be very fair, would it?

I thought of this guy as Karate because my suspicions about him had first jelled when I saw him doing karate kata, or forms, in the gym of the Macau Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where we were both staying and where Belghazi was soon to arrive. Avoiding the facility’s tangle of Lifecycles and Cybex machines, he had focused instead on a series of punches, blocks, and kicks to the air that, to the uninitiated, might have looked like some kind of martial dance routine. Actually, his moves were good-smooth, practiced, and powerful. They would have been impressive in any twenty-year-old, but this guy looked at least twice that.

I do some similar solo exercises myself, from time to time, although nothing so formal and stylized. And when I do work out this way, I don’t do it in public. It draws too much attention, especially from someone who knows what to look for. Someone like me.

In my line of work, drawing attention is a serious violation of the laws of common sense, and therefore of survival. Because if someone notices you for one thing, he’ll be inclined to look more closely, at which point he might notice something else. A pattern, which would have remained quietly hidden, might then begin to emerge, after which your cloak of anonymity will be methodically pulled apart, probably to be rewoven into something more closely resembling a shroud.

Karate also stood out because he was Caucasian-European was my guess, although I couldn’t pinpoint the country. He had close-cropped black hair, pale skin, and, when he wasn’t busy with Horse Stance to Spinning Back Kick Number Two in the Mandarin Oriental gym, favored exquisitely thin-soled loafers and sport jackets with hand-rolled lapels. Macau’s population of about a half million is ninety-five percent Chinese, with only a small Portuguese contingent remaining to remind anyone who cares that the territory, now a Chinese Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong, was not so long ago a Portuguese colony, and even the millions of annual gambling tourists are almost all from nearby Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China, so non-Asians don’t exactly blend.

Which is part of the reason the Agency had been so eager for me to take on the Belghazi assignment to begin with. It wasn’t just that Belghazi had become a primary supplier to various Southeast Asian fundamentalist groups whom, post-9/11, Uncle Sam had come to view as a serious threat. Nor was it simply my demonstrated knack for the appearance of “natural causes,” which in this case would be necessary because it seemed that Belghazi had protectors among certain “allied” governments whom Uncle Sam preferred not to offend. It was also because the likely venue for the job would require invisibility against an Asian background. And, although my mother had been American, my face is dominated by my father’s Japanese features-the consequence of genetic chance, augmented years ago by some judicious plastic surgery, which I had undergone to better blend in in Japan.

So between the conspicuous ethnicity and the kata moves, Karate had managed to put himself on my radar screen, and it was then that I began to notice more. For one thing, he had a way of hanging around the hotel: the gym, the café, the terrace, the lobby. Wherever this guy was from, he’d come a long way to reach Macau. His failure to get out and see the sights, therefore, didn’t make a lot of sense-unless he was waiting for someone.

Of course, I might have suffered from a similar form of conspicuousness. But I had a companion-a young Japanese woman-which made the “hanging around” behavior a little more explainable. Her name was Keiko, or at least that was how she billed herself with the Japanese escort agency through which I had hired her. She was in her mid-twenties, too young for me to take seriously, but she was pretty and surprisingly bright and I was enjoying her company. More important, her presence made me look less like some kind of intelligence operative or lone-wolf killer assessing the area, and more like a forty- or fifty-something Japanese who had taken his mistress to Macau, maybe for a little gambling, maybe for a lot of time alone at a hotel.

One morning, Keiko and I went down to the hotel’s Café Girassol to enjoy the breakfast buffet. As the hostess led us to a table, I scanned the area for signs of danger, as I do by habit whenever entering a room. Hot spots first. Back Corner One: table of four young Caucasians, two male, two female, dressed for a hike. Accents Australian. Threat probability low. Back Corner Two: Karate. Hmm. Threat probability medium.

Keep the eyes moving. Complete the sweep. Wall tables: empty. Window seats: elderly Chinese couple. Next table: three girls, fashionable clothes, confident postures, probably Hong Kong Chinese, young professionals on a quick holiday. Next table: pair of Indian men in business attire, sunny Punjabi accents. Nothing that rubbed me the wrong way.

Back to Karate’s vicinity with an oblique glance. He had his back to the wall and an unobstructed view of the restaurant’s entrance. His seating position was what I would have expected from a pro; his focus on the room offered further evidence. I noticed that he had a newspaper open in front of him, although he wasn’t bothering to read it. He would have been better off without the reading material: then he could have scoped the room as though he was bored and had nothing better to do than people-watch.

Or he should have brought a friend, as I had. I could feel him looking at us at one point, and was glad to have Keiko there, smiling into my eyes like a satisfied lover. The smile was convincing, too. She was good at her job.

Who was he waiting for, though? I might have assumed the answer was me-“only the paranoid survive,” I think some Silicon Valley type once said-but I was pretty sure I wasn’t it. Too many chance sightings followed by… nothing. No attempts to follow me, no attempt to recognize my face, no hard-eyed, that’s him kind of feeling. After over a quarter century in the business and a lot of incidental training before that, I’m sensitive to these things. My gut told me he was after someone else. True, it wasn’t impossible that he was only told where and when, with information on who to be provided subsequently, but I deemed that scenario unlikely. Not many operators would agree to take this kind of job without first knowing who they were going up against. It would be hard to know how to price things otherwise.