I waited two minutes, then heard the twang again. “Well, it’s good news and bad news. Our friend is here under the name Mr. Hartman. But all the clerk said to him is, ‘Mr. Hartman, your room number is written here.’ ”

I’d received the same treatment when I checked in and wasn’t surprised. The hotel staff was well trained.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Sure, there’s something else,” I heard him say, and I could imagine his trademark grin. “He took the elevator on the Ayala Tower side.”

The hotel had two separate wings-the Ayala and the Makati. Now we knew which set of elevators to focus on. We were beginning to triangulate.

“You get on with him?” I asked.

“I tried to. But the bodyguard was awfully polite and insisted that I just head on up by my lonesome.”

All right, his bodyguard had some tactical sense. Not a surprise. “Did he get a good look at you?”

“Good enough. I think we can expect him to recognize the best-looking fella in Manila next time he sees me.”

I nodded. Letting Dox run ahead was a calculated risk. Soon enough we would be double-teaming Manny, and it would be hard for his bodyguard to avoid getting distracted by sightings of Caucasian Dox, with his linebacker’s physique and good ol’ boy’s grin. Distracted enough to completely overlook the smaller, unassuming Asian guy Dox was working with.

There were about two hundred and sixty rooms on the Ayala side, and I thought about calling each of them from the house phone, offering, “May we have someone draw you a bath, Mr. Hartman?” until I hit the right room. But if Manny knew the hotel’s routines, as presumably he did, or even if he was just reasonably paranoid, a call like that could make him suspicious. He might phone the front desk to confirm. Or he might just accept the offer, which would create its own set of problems. Enormous, goateed Dox showing up to draw you a bath isn’t everyone’s idea of proper hygiene.

So I’d hold off on Plan Bath, and use it only if our more subtle attempts came to nothing. “Think you can get anything else?” I asked.

“You know I’m working on it. Give me five minutes.”

The next part of the plan was for Dox to make his way to the gift shop, where he would buy a book or something and charge it to his room. The clerk would check Dox’s name and room number against a list to ensure that the transaction was legitimate. Dox would be holding a high-resolution camera designed to look like an ordinary cell phone. Dox would position himself so that he could use the camera to capture what was on the list, including the name Hartman and an accompanying room number. We’d tested the system earlier, and it had worked perfectly. Now that we had the right name, it was time to see whether it would work when it counted.

Five minutes later there was a knock on my door. I padded quietly over and flipped up the small piece of cardboard I had taped over the peephole-no sense blocking the light from behind with my approach and alerting a visitor to my presence-and looked through. It was Dox. I opened the door. He came inside wearing his indefatigable grin.

“You’re smiling like that, you better have good news,” I said, closing the door behind him.

The grin broadened and he nodded. “That, and I’m just happy to see you, partner, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

I gave him a nod in return, knowing that anything more would encourage him. I couldn’t pretend to fully understand Dox. In many ways he was a contradiction, a conundrum. He was a talker, for one thing-not a breed I’ve ever been particularly comfortable around-and a loud one at that. And yet every other sniper I’ve known, and I’ve known more than a few, has been reserved, even taciturn. Every environment has a certain flow to it, a rhythm, a connectivity, and snipers instinctively and habitually enter into that flow without disturbing it. But Dox liked to stir things up-in fact, his nom de guerre was short for “unorthodox,” an accolade awarded by consensus in Afghanistan, where the Reagan-era CIA had sent men like us to arm and train the Mujahedeen against the invading Soviets. His constant boisterous clowning there had put me off at first, and I’d initially figured him for nothing but a braggart. But when I’d seen his effectiveness and coolness under fire, I knew I’d been wrong. When he settled behind the scope of his rifle, there was an eerie transformation, and the good ol’ boy persona would fade away, leaving in its shadow one of the most focused, deadly men I’ve ever met. I didn’t understand the opposing forces that combined to create his character, and I knew I would never have trusted him but for what he’d done at Kwai Chung. Of course, that single act couldn’t eradicate my lifelong tendency to doubt, but it seemed in a way to have eclipsed it, or at least to have created an uncomfortable exception.

We walked into the room. I sat down at the small desk and flipped open the Mac PowerBook I’d brought along for the festivities. It came out of sleep mode and I typed in the password. Dox handed me the camera.

“You sure you got a shot of the page with Manny’s name on it?” I asked.

He gave me a theatrical sigh. “There you go, hurting my feelings again.”

“Does that mean you got it?”

He sighed again. “Didn’t I tell you I’d get it?”

I attached the camera to the laptop. I hit the “sync” key, then glanced at him and said, “Let’s see if I have to apologize for my outrageous lack of faith in your infallibility.”

“Don’t worry, partner, I’ll be gracious about it. I hate to see a grown man grovel.”

It took just a few seconds for the images to download. The first of them was an alphabetical listing of hotel guests, A through F. I closed the image and opened the next one. G through M. Including one Randolph Hartman, Room 914. Bingo.

“How’d you get the clerk to give you a shot of G through M?” I asked. “You’re checked in under Smith, right?”

“Yeah, Mr. Smith first told the clerk that he couldn’t remember his room number, but that she could charge the Snickers bar he was buying to Mr. Herat.”

Cute. Herat is one of the northern cities of Afghanistan.

“And then?”

“Well, the nice young lady-pretty little thing, by the way, and I think she liked me-she flipped to the page with the H names on it and told me there was no Mr. Herat registered at the hotel. I told her, ‘That’s odd… Oh, wait a minute, that’s right, the room is under my name, not my partner’s.’ Should be under Smith, I told her, and okay, now I’m remembering, it’s room 1107, Ayala Tower. Which is indeed where Mr. Smith is staying.”

I looked at him. “Did she seem suspicious?”

He rolled his eyes. “Shoot, partner, I was trying to buy a damn candy bar, not cash a check. She couldn’t have cared less. Besides, it was pretty obvious she was distracted by her blossoming feelings for me. I think I might stop by again later, see what time she leaves work.”

“Hey,” I said, looking at him, “if you need to get off, Burgos Street is a two-minute cab ride from here. I don’t want you trying to make it with the hotel staff. That kind of shit gets noticed.” Even as I said it, though, I realized it would be pointless. Dox was genetically wired to be conspicuous. In some ways, I supposed, the tendency could be an asset. In an environment like this one, Dox came across more like an ugly American tourist than an undercover operator. He was hiding in plain sight.

He shrugged. “All right, don’t get your panties in a wad. It’s just that I hate to disappoint the pretty ones, is all.”

“ ‘The pretty ones’?” I said, still annoyed. “Dox, you’d fuck an alligator if it would hold still for you.”

“That is not true, partner, Marines do not engage in congress with reptiles. We prefer whenever possible that our partners be mammalian.”

I gave up. “Oh, okay. I don’t know how these rumors get started.”