“Assuming that I were interested, and I’m not, what would be in it for me?”

“You’re not interested? You’re going to a lot of trouble to meet me, for someone who’s not interested.”

A year ago my protestation would have flustered him. Now he was counterpunching. Good for him.

“It’s no trouble. I was here because of a woman. When I found out she was working for you, I had to break things off. So here I am, killing a few days before heading home.”

If he was surprised to learn that I knew about his connection with Naomi, he didn’t show it. He looked at me and said, “Some people think Rio is your home.”

I returned his stare, and something in my eyes made him drop his gaze. “If you want to play fishing games with me, Kanezaki,” I said, “you’re just wasting time. But if I think your I-took-a-course-at-Langley-on-verbal-manipulation-techniques bullshit contains an element of threat, I’ll take you out before you even have a chance to beg me not to.”

I felt fear flow off him in a cold ripple. I knew what he had just seen in his mind’s eye: the way I had broken his bodyguard’s neck, an act that would have looked as casual to Kanezaki as unzipping to take a leak. Which is exactly the way I had wanted him to see it. And remember it.

“The money could set you up well,” he said, after a moment.

“I’m already set,” I answered, which was a lie, unfortunately.

We were both quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Look, I’m not doing any verbal manipulation here. Or at least no more than you’d expect. And I’m definitely not threatening you. I’m just telling you that we could really use your help to accomplish something important, and that you could make a lot of money in the process.”

I suppressed a grin. It was nicely done.

“Tell me who and how much,” I said. “And we’ll see if there’s anything worth discussing after that.”

The target was Belghazi, of course. The first of many, Kanezaki told me, if I was interested. Two hundred thousand U.S. a pop, delivered any way I wanted, fifty thousand upfront, the rest upon successful completion. On expenses I’d be out of pocket, which minimized paperwork-and paper trails-for the bean-counting set, a rule we wound up having to change somewhat given the sums I needed to operate in the VIP rooms of the Lisboa. The only catch was that it absolutely had to look natural.

It was about what I would have guessed. Enough to create the incentive, but not so much that I wouldn’t be tempted to do it again later. Not a bad deal for them, really-about the cost of a Hellfire or two, and a lot less than a cruise missile. And more deniable than either.

“I’ll think about it,” I told him. “And while I’m thinking, pay Naomi what you owe her.”

“She didn’t hold up her end,” he said, shaking his head, not bothering to deny the connection. “So she’s out of luck.”

“What was ‘her end’?”

“She was supposed to contact us if you contacted her.”

I looked at him. “If she didn’t contact you, how…”

“Voice analysis. Like a lie detector. We used it every time I called her. Every time I asked whether you’d shown up, she said no. On the last time, the machine detected significant stress patterns.”

“So you knew she was lying.”

“Yeah. We sent people to watch her. You know the rest.”

I looked away and considered. So she had been telling me the truth-she really hadn’t given me up. Damn.

Or maybe she had, and Kanezaki was just protecting her. There was no way to know, and I supposed there never would be.

“Pay her anyway,” I said.

He started to protest, but I cut him off. “She still led you to me, even if it was inadvertent. Pay her the fucking finder’s fee.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, after a moment.

I wondered briefly whether this was bullshit, too, designed to make me feel that I’d won something. Again, no way to know.

“I’ll contact you,” I said. “If you’ve paid her, we’ll talk more. If you haven’t, we won’t.”

He nodded.

I thought about adding something about leaving her alone, some threat. But all an admonition would accomplish would be to reveal, more than I already had, that I cared, thereby making Naomi more interesting to them. Better to say nothing, and simply steer clear of her thereafter.

Maybe you could have trusted her after all. The thought was tantalizing.

And sad.

It didn’t matter. Even if there had been some possibility of trust, my reflexive assumptions, my accusations, had extinguished it.

I thought of an apology. But there are things that just aren’t subject to an “I’m sorry” or a “please forgive me” or a “really, I should have known better.”

Let it go, I thought. The twenty-five grand would have to do.

“Now tell me about Dox,” I said.

He shrugged. “I needed someone you knew, so you could see that the program, and the benefits of the program, were real. If it weren’t for that, then, other than your history, you would never have known about him.”

“Are there others?”

He looked at me over the top of his glasses. The look said, You know better than to ask something like that.

I looked back.

After a moment, he shrugged again and said, “I’ll just say that men like you and Dox are rare. And even he can’t operate in some of the places you can. Asia, for example. Also he tends to be a little less subtle in his methods, meaning not well suited for certain jobs. Okay?”

We left it at that. He gave me the URL for a secure bulletin board. I called him a few days later on his Japanese cell phone. He was back in Tokyo. He told me Naomi had gotten the money.

I used a pay phone to call her at Scenarium. The club was noisy in the background. She said, “I didn’t want the fucking money. I could have had it, but I didn’t want it.”

“Naomi…” I started to say. I didn’t know what I was going to add. But it didn’t really matter. She had already hung up.

I looked at the phone for a long time, as though the device had somehow betrayed me. Then I put it back in its cradle. Wiped it down automatically. Walked away.

I went to an Internet café and composed a message. The message was brief. The salient part was the number of an offshore account, to which they could transfer the fifty thousand down payment.

I heard laughter and looked up. Some kids at the terminal next to me, playing an online game.

I wondered for a moment how I had gotten here.

And I wondered if maybe this is what Tatsu had meant when he said I could never retire. That I would inevitably ruin every other possibility.

We shall not cease from exploration, some poet wrote. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.

How incredibly fucking depressing.

AFTER LEAVING BELGHAZI’S suite, I took a long, solitary walk along the waterfront. I wanted to think about what had just happened, about what I wanted to happen next.

Delilah. Who was she? How would her presence affect my operation? The same questions, of course, that she would be asking about me.

I knew from her deportment that she was trained. Therefore likely to be working with an organization, rather than on some sort of private mission. And that, despite public appearances, she was no friend of Belghazi’s. She was with him because she wanted something from him, something he kept, or that she thought he kept, on his laptop, but that she hadn’t yet managed to get.

I considered. By conspiring to get me out of the suite, she had sided, at least temporarily, with me. We shared a secret. That secret might become the basis for cooperation, if our interests were sufficiently aligned.

But she also had reason to view me as a threat. There was some hard evidence of her operation against Belghazi, in the form of her dual-purpose cell phone and the boot log on Belghazi’s computer, which the wrong people could find if they knew where to look. If someone like me were to steer them to it, for example.