“Exactly.”

“Coups.”

“Sure.”

“Kidnapping?”

He shrugged. “We call them ‘extraordinary renditions.’”

“Abu Ghraib.”

He shook his head. “I’m not talking about Abu Ghraib. AG was exactly the way not to go about it. People say what happened there is immoral. Shit, it’s worse than immoral. It’s incompetent. The whole thing was nothing but a fishing expedition. Widespread and sanctioned. And once it got out, predictably, we had to bend over backward in the other direction because of all the media scrutiny.”

“I thought the VP said waterboarding was a ‘no-brainer.’ And that was after AG.”

“Believe me, the right people had a lot more freedom before AG. Anyway, the VP doesn’t know what he’s talking about. None of them do. That’s the point. With guys like that in the limelight, more than ever you need the right things done in the dark.”

Okay, so this was “you and I are the pros and everyone else is incompetent.” If he thought that would save him when this was done, he was wrong.

I looked at him. “Yeah? How do you know when it’s right?”

He returned the look. “When it’s necessary.”

“And when is that?”

“When you need something, and there’s no other way to get it.”

“How did you know there was no other way here? You never asked me.”

“Some things you just know.”

“Why don’t you ask me now.”

He shook his head. “Now I’m not asking. I’m telling you. That’s why I had to go through Dox. Because it has to get done.”

A long silent moment passed. I tried not to think of Dox. It helped me keep the latent lust to kill Hilger momentarily on a leash.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me what you want.”

He glanced around, then leaned forward. “Three jobs, like I told you. When you’re done with the first, I’ll give you the second. When you’re done with the second, I’ll give you the third. When you’re done with the third, I’ll release Dox.”

I looked at him. When I spoke, it was half directed at Hilger, half to appease the iceman.

“If you do anything permanent to him,” I said, “you know I’ll find you. And you know what I’ll do to you.”

He offered a faint, humorless smile. “You’re being generous. You’re going to try to find me the moment I let him go, if not before.”

“There’s something you need to understand. I’ve been trying to get out of the life. If I have to revert to protect a friend, I will. But I don’t want to go any further than I have to. Yeah, right now I’m upset. I don’t like the way you got me to the negotiating table. But if you play it straight from here, we might all be able to walk away from this.”

There was a lot of truth in there. Which made it the best kind of lie.

Hilger nodded, but that was all. I didn’t know whether he’d bought it.

“Let me talk to him again,” I said.

He shook his head. “You’ve talked to him once. You can talk to him again after. After each one.”

Something told me I wasn’t going to win on this point and I let it go. I rotated my head, cracking the neck joints. “All right,” I said, “the first one. Who, where, when, how.”

“Who is Jan Jannick, Dutch national, male, forty-five years old. Where is the San Francisco Bay Area, where he’s temporarily resident. When is within five days from today. And how is something that absolutely looks natural.”

The appearance of natural causes is my specialty, and the reason I’ve always been able to charge a premium. Except, of course, when I’m working under duress, when my fees tend to be…waived. I assumed it was the “naturalness” imperative that made Hilger need me, but there might have been more.

“Why natural?”

“You know why. I don’t want anyone asking questions.”

“I’m asking why you don’t want the questions.”

“That’s not something you need to know.”

I thought for a moment. “Five days to get to San Francisco, track this guy, find him, identify a pattern, select an opportunity, plan for an escape…there’s no way. You know that.”

“We already have a lot of the information you’ll need. Home and work addresses, things like that. It’ll save you time. I’ll upload it to the bulletin board.”

“Even so…”

“Jannick is a civilian. He has no surveillance consciousness at all, no security, no clue. He’s as soft a target as you’ve ever gone after. The only trick is making it look natural. That’s why I want you.”

“If he’s that easy, anyone could have done it the way you want.”

“He’s only one of three, remember. And you’re wrong about just anyone being able to do it. Making it look natural is harder than hell, except in the movies, and you know it. You’ve got a talent. It’s why we’re here.”

There was a lot he wasn’t telling me, of course. So all I could do was continue to engage him, continue to try to gather the information that would get Dox out of this. After all, I understood profoundly that Hilger would kill Dox the moment I was done with whatever he wanted doing. Even if I were inclined to give Hilger a pass for his transgression, he couldn’t count on one from Dox. And if Dox and I came after him together, his prospects would be bleak indeed.

Hilger, of course, could do this math as well as I could. And the ruthlessness I sensed in his poise would turn the situation into a simple equation for him, an equation for which the solution set would be obvious, and therefore imperative.

He knew I knew all this. Which meant the third target might be fictitious. I would kill the first two to buy time, thinking I had one more to go before Hilger killed Dox, but in fact I’d have unwittingly finished the whole job at the second target, at which point Dox would die. The third job, then, would be a setup. They’d feed me coordinates on some easy-to-track civilian on terrain they knew well, and when I showed up to take out the red herring, I’d walk into an ambush. Meaning, in effect, that the third target would be me.

Or maybe I’d be the second. Maybe Jannick was Hilger’s only objective, and when he was done, so was Dox. So was I. There were a lot of possibilities, none of them good.

“Are you satisfied?” Hilger asked, as though reading my thoughts.

“With what?”

“With having looked in my eyes. Trusting me to let Dox go when this is done.”

“No. I don’t trust you to do that. But I learned something else from your eyes.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

From his tone, I knew he was concerned that I might have picked up some piece of information he didn’t want me to have. Why else would I have insisted on a meeting? Trusting someone because of what you see in his eyes is a load of shit, although the latest bozo in the White House claimed to have managed a view of Vladimir Putin’s soul that way. And it was clear after what happened in Góc Saigon that I wasn’t going to kill him. What else could I have been after, if not information?

I thought of Mr. Blond. Maybe I’d lost him. Maybe not. Maybe there had been others I hadn’t spotted. I realized now that I’d been wrong in thinking Mr. Blond, and any others, were only backup for Hilger, or part of a setup. More likely, they were a plan B. If I refused to follow instructions, they would have tried to kill me here. Then they would do Dox immediately after.

I took a deep breath, then let it go. “I learned I don’t have a choice.”

He nodded. “You got that right.”

I stood up and took out his knives. I wiped them off with a napkin-I don’t like leaving my fingerprints on weapons-and placed them on the table. He made no immediate move for them, which was smart. I put Dox’s phone on the table, too. There was no way Hilger would have been stupid enough to have used it for any sensitive calls, so there was nothing to gain by taking it. And I wanted a way to reach him quickly if necessary.

“When will the information be on the bulletin board?” I asked.

“It’s there now.”

I looked at him. For the moment, the urge to kill him had faded into the background, like what happens when you get so hungry your appetite temporarily dissipates.