Don’t blame Naomi, I thought. Anyone would have given you up.

Not Midori, was the reply. And then I thought, No, you’re just trying to turn her into something too good to be true, something impossible.

But maybe she really was that good, and now I was just trying to dampen it, debase it, cheapen the consequence of what I’d lost.

I guess you can never really know, I thought. But then how do you decide?

Doesn’t matter how it gets decided. Just that you do the deciding.

I shook my head in wonder. Midori was still throwing me off, all these months later and half a world away. Making me doubt myself, my judgments.

What does that tell you?

That one I didn’t answer. I already knew.

I sat and thought for a long time. About my life in Rio. About how Naomi had come into it, and how she was then suddenly gone. About what I ought to do now.

A breeze kicked up along the sand. I felt empty. The breeze might have been blowing straight through me.

I supposed I could just leave it all behind me. Bolt for the exit again, go somewhere new, invent another Yamada.

I shook my head, knowing I wasn’t ready for that, not so soon after the last time. The thought of doing it all again felt like nothing but dread.

Which made the conclusion that followed suspect, a possible rationalization. The conclusion went like this: It would be better to know what they want, anyway. To take the initiative, rather than passively waiting for whatever they have in mind.

All right then. I left the beach, and called Kanezaki from a pay phone. There was a decent chance they would track the call to Rio, but they obviously already knew I was here.

The phone rang twice. “Yeah,” I heard him say. He sounded groggy.

It was early afternoon in Rio, and Tokyo was twelve hours ahead. “Hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, recognizing my voice. “I had to get up to answer the phone, anyway.”

I was surprised to hear myself chuckle. “Tell me what you want.”

“Can we meet?”

“I’m in Rio for a few more days,” I told him. “After that I won’t be reachable.”

“All right, I’ll meet you in Rio.”

“Glad I was able to provide you with the excuse.”

There was a pause. “Where and when?”

“Have you got a GSM phone, something you use when you travel?” Unlike Japanese cell phones, a GSM unit would work in Brazil and most of the rest of the world.

“I do.”

“All right. Give me the number.”

He did. I wrote it down, then said, “I’ll call you on this number the day after tomorrow, when you’re in town.”

“All right.”

I hung up.

Two days later, I called him. He was staying at the Arpoador Inn on the Rua Francisco Otaviano in Ipanema, an inexpensive hotel located right on Ipanema’s famous beach.

“How are we going to do this?” he asked.

“Have a cab take you to Cristo Redentor, Christ the Redeemer,” I told him. “From there, head southwest on foot along the road through the Parque Nacional da Tijuca, the national park. I’ll find you in there. Start out from the statue in one hour.”

“All right.”

An hour later I had made myself comfortable on a trail overlooking the road through the national park, about a kilometer from the statue. Kanezaki appeared on time. I watched him pass my position, waited to ensure that he was alone, then cut down to the road and caught up with him from behind.

“Kanezaki,” I said.

He spun, startled to hear my voice so close. “Shit,” he said, perhaps a little embarrassed.

I smiled. He looked a little older than he had the last time I had seen him, leaner, more seasoned. The wire-rimmed glasses no longer made him look bookish. Instead, they gave his face… focus, somehow. Precision.

The bug detector was silent. I patted him down, took his cell phone for safekeeping, and nodded my head toward the trail from which I had just descended. “This way,” I said.

I led him back to a secondary road in the park, where we walked until we found a cab. A few deft countersurveillance maneuvers later, we were comfortably ensconced in the Confeitaria Colombo, a coffee shop founded in 1894 that, but for the tropical atmosphere and the surrounding sounds of animated Portuguese, can convey the illusion of an afternoon in Vienna. I used English to order a basic espresso, not wanting Kanezaki to see any more of my familiarity with the local terrain, and he followed suit.

“We want your help again,” he told me, as soon as the espressos had arrived and the waitress had moved off. Right to the point. Like Tatsu. I knew there was a relationship there, each believing the other to be a source, with Tatsu’s view being the more accurate. I wondered if Kanezaki was emulating the older, more experienced man.

“Like you wanted it last time?” I asked, my eyebrows arched slightly in mild disdain.

He shrugged. “You know I was in the dark about all that as much as you were. This time it’s straightforward. And sanctioned.”

“Sanctioned by whom?”

He looked at me. “By the proper authorities.”

“All right,” I said, taking a sip from the porcelain demitasse. “Tell me.”

He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “After Nine-Eleven, Congress took the shackles off the Agency. There’s a new spirit in the place. We’re pushing the envelope again, going after the bad guys-”

“The few, the proud…” I interjected.

He frowned. “Look, we’re really making a difference now-”

“Be All You Can Be…” I started to sing.

His jaw clenched. “Do you just enjoy pissing me off?” he asked.

“A little bit, yes.”

“It’s petty.”

I took another sip of espresso. “What’s your point?”

“I wish you’d just listen.”

“So far I’ve listened to five clichés, including something about shackled envelopes. I’m waiting for you to actually say something.”

He flushed, but then nodded and even managed a chuckle. I smiled at his composure. He had matured since I had last seen him.

“Okay,” he said. “Remember that Predator drone that took out Abu Ali and five other Qaeda members with a Hellfire missile in Yemen in November 2002? That was one of ours.”

“That’s what was in the papers,” I said.

“Well, what’s not in the papers is the full extent of this kind of clandestine activity. The Agency has won a tug-of-war with the Pentagon over who’s responsible for these things. The Pentagon tried, but they can’t move fast enough to act on the intelligence we produce. So we’ve been tasked with the action ourselves. And we’re doing it.”

I waited for him to go on.

“So now we have a new mandate: no more Nine-Elevens. No more sneak attacks. We’ve been charged with doing whatever it takes-and I mean whatever-to disrupt the international terrorist infrastructure: the financiers, the arms brokers, the go-betweens.”

I nodded. “You want me for the ‘whatever’ part.”

“Of course,” he said, almost impatiently, and this time I was sure he’d gotten the habit from Tatsu, who had a way of uttering those two syllables as though barely managing to avoid instead saying, Are you always this obtuse?

He took a sip from his cup. “Look, some of the individuals in question enjoy a lot of political protection. Some of them, in fact, are technically U.S. citizens.”

“ ‘Technically’?”

He shrugged. “They could be classified as enemy combatants.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

“What?” he asked.

I smiled. “Just thinking about the way the end justifies the means.”

“Sometimes it does.”

“Their end, or only yours?”

“Let’s save the philosophical discussion,” he said. “The point is, even post-Nine-Eleven, even in the current, security-minded climate, it wouldn’t do to just take some of these people out. Certainly not with a Hellfire missile. Better if their demise were to look… you know, natural.”