I nodded in capitulation. “All right.”

The grin got wider. “You made the right decision, Mr. Rain, and I promise you won’t regret it. You checked into the hotel yet?”

We were staying at the Sukhothai, which offered the right combination of high class and low visibility. Something like the Oriental had plenty of the first but none of the second; innumerable Bangkok hotels would have offered the opposite combination. But the Sukhothai had been built for both beauty and discretion. The property, with its acres of flower gardens and lotus ponds; its long, symmetrical lines and soft lighting; and its traditional accents of Thai architecture and art was certainly a triumph of form. But from my perspective, the hotel was also highly functional: its small, intimate lobby was utterly unlike the grand, bustling thoroughfares that greeted visitors at, say, the local Four Seasons, which was well designed for people who wanted to see and be seen, but uncomfortable for those who favored invisibility instead.

“I got an early check-in this morning,” I told him. “You?”

“The same. Nice place, too. I like those big bathtubs. You can get three people in one of them, did you know that? With all those mirrors, you can have a lot of fun. This one time…”

“Why don’t we meet in the lobby, then?” I said.

He grinned at the interruption. “All right. Twenty-hundred?

“You need to rest up first?”

“No, son, I need to go out and buy you that double dose of Viagra.”

Trying to get the better of Dox was a losing proposition. I signaled the waiter for the check and said, “Eight o’clock, then.”

JIM HILGER never got upset. It wasn’t that he didn’t show agitation; he simply didn’t experience it. The crazier things became around him, the calmer he felt at his center. The quality had made him one of the best combat shooters in the Third Special Forces during the first Gulf War. When someone was firing at him, it felt almost as though his personality had floated out of his body, leaving a machine to handle things in its place. He knew that, had he lived in the age of dueling, he would have been fucked with by nobody.

He knew, too, that his imperturbability was a useful leadership skill. In combat, when his men saw how calm and deadly he was, they became calm and deadly, too. And now, in his new role, he had found that his flatlined demeanor gave him power over the people he managed. The more upset they became in a crisis, the more his temperature dropped, cooling the people around him in the process. It was as though people assumed he must know something they didn’t; otherwise, he would be coming unglued, too. In fact, he doubted that he really knew more than others. It was just that he had come to rely on his own coolness, to believe that his coolness was the one thing he could count on to get him through, as it always had before. He didn’t believe in anything more than that.

When Manny had called him the day before, nearly hysterical with rage, Hilger’s calmness had been put to the test. “Just tell me what happened,” Hilger had repeated while Manny had fulminated and threatened. It took a little while, but eventually he had brought Manny around. And Jesus, a little hysteria almost seemed to be in order. Someone had tried to hit Manny in Manila, and Calver and Gibbons, two of Hilger’s best men, men from his Gulf War unit, had been killed in the process. A critical first meeting with an asset, which Hilger had been trying to set up with Manny’s help for over two years, and which Calver and Gibbons had gone to Manila to take care of, had been aborted. The whole thing was a mess.

As Manny had hyperventilated the news to him, Hilger automatically shifted into problem-solving mode.

“Where is VBM?” he asked, using the cryptonym they had established for the new asset.

“I don’t know,” Manny told him. “I don’t have an immediate way of contacting him. He probably went to the meeting site, and when we didn’t show up, he left.”

Shit. Not quite the first impression Hilger had been hoping for.

“Can you reestablish contact?” he asked. “Set up another meeting?”

That produced a minor explosion. “Another meeting? Someone just tried to kill me! In front of my family!”

Hilger realized he wasn’t demonstrating the proper priorities. All right, one thing at a time.

“Look, there’s not much we can do over the phone,” he told Manny. “We need to meet. You’ll give me every detail. And then we’ll figure out what to do.”

“But how do I know I can trust you,” Manny had whined. “How do I know you weren’t behind this?”

“Those were my people who were killed,” Hilger told him. “I can’t give you better proof than that.”

Manny wasn’t being rational. He said, “Maybe it was a trick, maybe it was a trick.”

Hilger sighed. He said,“Let’s work together and we can solve this problem the way it needs to be solved.”

There was a long pause. Hilger’s heart rate was slow and steady.

Manny said, “All right, all right.”

“Good. Where do you want to meet?” Giving Manny the choice would help ease his ridiculous suspicions.

“Not in Manila. I can come to…” He paused, and Hilger knew he had been about to say Hong Kong and then had thought better of it. Hong Kong was Hilger’s home base, where he lived his financial-adviser cover. Manny didn’t want to offer him any advantages just now, and, probably because he felt spiteful, was glad to deny him any convenience, as well.

“Jakarta,” Manny said. “I can come to Jakarta.”

Hilger didn’t want to fly to Jakarta. Manny was being a pain in the ass.

“Sure. But I’ve got a few things here I need to wrap up first-it’ll probably take a few days. Are you sure you can’t make it to Hong Kong?”

There was a long silence. Hilger said, “Look, we can meet anywhere you want, but Hong Kong will be faster, and I’d like to get started on this right away. Anywhere in Hong Kong, fair enough?”

That closed it. The next day, they were sitting in a coffee shop off Nathan Road in Kowloon, just a fifteen-minute cab ride from Hilger’s office through the Cross-Harbor Tunnel. There weren’t quite as many white faces in Kowloon as there were in Central, where Hilger worked, but there were enough so that neither of them would stick out, and there was a lower chance that Hilger might run into someone he knew. Not that anyone would recognize Manny-it wasn’t as though the man’s face appeared on post office walls, although probably it should-but it was better to be safe. Hilger had taken the usual precautions to ensure that he hadn’t been followed, and hoped that Manny had been equally thorough. He had indulged Manny his mandatory hysteria. When he felt he had been nodding sympathetically for long enough, he began his debriefing.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Hilger commanded, and he knew that his calm would now be reassuring. “Not just that day, but every day, from the moment you arrived in Manila.”

Manny complied. When he was finished, Hilger began to drill into the details.

“You say there were two of them.”

“I think so, yes. Someone came in after the bodyguard.”

“But you didn’t see his face.”

“Not well. He was big. I think Caucasian. I’m not sure.”

Hilger considered. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you hadn’t seen him, I could have told you he was there. The first guy, the Asian, you say he was already in the bathroom, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“He’d been following you for a while before he decided to anticipate you in the bathroom. But he wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t have backup continuing to watch you. Otherwise, if he’d been wrong about you coming to the bathroom, he would have lost you.”

Manny nodded and said, “Yes, that makes sense.”

“You think you could recognize the Asian?”

Manny nodded. “If I saw him again, yes. I got a good look at his face. Can you find him? And the other one?”