“Damn, this is good,” Dox said, after the waitress had opened and decanted the bottle and we had taken our first sips. “I don’t know who Emilio is, but I’d sure like to shake his hand. How do you know so much about wine, man?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know that much.”

“Cut the modesty routine. I can tell you do.”

I shrugged again. “For what I do, I need to be able to blend in a lot of different strata of society. To do that, you need to know the little things, the tells. Could be wine, could be the right fork to use. Could be the right clothes to wear. Or the right words. I don’t know. I just watch and try to learn. I’m a good imitator.” I took a sip of the Emilio’s Terrace. “But also, I just like wine.”

“So you can just… put these things on, then take them off, like they’re a disguise?”

“I guess so. You do it, too, although a little differently. You’ve got a way of disappearing when you want to, I’ve seen that.”

“Yeah, that’s from sniper school. You just… draw in all your energy, like. It’s a Zen thing. Kind of hard to explain. A buddy of mine once told me it’s like what that creature did in Predator, or a Klingon warship with a cloaking device. I think that’s about right. I wouldn’t mind being able to move comfortably in all those different societies like you do, though. Still, it must be strange, to be able to move in them but not really belong in any of them, you know what I mean?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

The meal turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. The food and wine were first-rate, and the feeling of being in the heart of, and yet above and isolated from, the dense metropolis around us was invigorating, almost heady. The weather was Bangkok’s finest: cool and relatively dry, and a few stars were even visible through the polluted pall above. We talked a lot about Afghanistan, which was the conflict we had in common: the men we had known there; the crazy things we had done; the unintended consequences of an armed and well-trained cadre of Islamic fanatics that had followed in the wake of the departing Soviet army we had helped to drive out.

We talked, too, of Asia. I was surprised at his knowledge of and affection for the region, and his inquiries about Japanese culture, in particular, were intelligent and insightful. He told me about his love for Thailand, where he had been “sojourning,” as he liked to put it, for years, staying longer and longer with each visit, and how he hoped to retire here. How he no longer felt at ease in the States.

I understood his feelings. There’s something accepting about Thai culture, and there are species of farang, foreigners, who find themselves drawn to it. On the dark side of the phenomenon are pedophiles and other deviants who come to indulge their secret sicknesses. And there are the aging middle-management types, who anesthetize regrets about failed ambitions and the implacable, day-by-day approach of death by renting women with whom they are in any event too old and too far gone to function, and by reassuring themselves of their worth by living in a neocolonial style that the locals can’t afford. But there are many who stay for more benign reasons. Some, in a sense, are Easterners trapped in Western bodies, who find their truer natures liberated in Thailand’s “foreign” climes. Some are simply adventurers, addicts to the exotic. Some are refugees from a misguided affair, or divorce, or bankruptcy, or other such personal trauma. And some, like Dox and me, are soldiers who found themselves too altered by the things they did in war to return to the lands of their youth. For some, the distance between who you were and who you have become is unbridgeable, and the dissonance attempted repatriation creates is a constant reminder of the very changes that you want so badly to forget.

When we were finished with the meal, and lingering over enormous mugs of cappuccino, I told him, “I need your help with something.”

He looked at me. “Sure, man, anything, you know that. Just name it.”

“My Israeli contact. The one who brokered the meeting with Boaz and Gil. She just contacted me. She wants a meeting.”

“Maybe this is the break we’ve been waiting for, then. Some new info on Manny.”

I shook my head. “She didn’t say anything about Manny. She says she just wants to see me.”

He cocked his head and looked at me. “I don’t get it. Why would she want to see you, if it’s not about Manny?”

“Before she set things up with Boaz and Gil, I spent some time with her.” I gave him the Reader’s Digest version of how Delilah and I had met in Macau, of what had happened between us there and then in Rio after.

He listened quietly, his expression uncharacteristically grave. When I was done, he said, “You’re thinking about seeing her.”

I nodded.

“Are you going to do this because you think she might have some operational intel, or because you just want to?”

For a guy who liked to play the hick, Dox had a way of going straight to the heart of the matter. I could have equivocated, but I decided to play it straight with him. He deserved that.

“I just want to see her.”

He nodded for a moment, then said, “I’m glad you said so. I could tell it was that from how you just talked about her, and I would have been awfully concerned if you’d tried to bullshit me. I would have wondered if you were bullshitting yourself, too.”

“I don’t know if I’m bullshitting myself or not.”

“Partner, that in itself is a profound species of honesty.”

I sipped my cappuccino. “She might still have something operational for us. I doubt that the timing of the meeting is just a coincidence.”

“If it’s not a coincidence, and she told you she was calling just because she missed your charming personality, she wasn’t playing straight with you. There might be something nefarious at work.”

“ ‘Nefarious’?”

“Yeah, you know, it means ‘immoral’ or ‘wicked.’ ”

I frowned. “I know what it means.”

He smiled. “Well, if you know what it means, what do you think?”

“You might be right.”

“But you want to meet her anyway.”

“Yeah.”

He pursed his lips and exhaled forcefully. “Sounds like unsafe sex to me, partner. And I’m not sure I want to be the condom.”

I nodded. “When you put it that way, I’m not so sure, either.”

He gave me a medium-wattage grin. “Well, tell me what you want, anyway.”

“She’s coming to Bangkok. I told her I would meet her outside of customs. If she puts people there to anticipate me, you can spot them.”

“Okay…”

“We’ll take a taxi from the international terminal to the domestic. You’ll be tailing us, so you should have some opportunities to tell if we’re followed. If I’m clean, we’ll go through security on the domestic side. I’ll have two tickets for Phuket, which is where Delilah and I are going, and you’ll have a ticket for somewhere else. That way you’ll be able to get through security, too, and you’ll have another chance in the boarding area to confirm that we’re alone.”

“Phuket, huh? Hope you talked to your travel agent. There are still a few places that aren’t back on line after the tsunami.”

“I know.”

“Or you could go to Ko Chang, it’s in the Gulf of Thailand and they didn’t get hit at all. Plus it’s less built up and only about a four-hour drive from Bangkok.”

“I know. I want to fly. We’ll be harder to follow that way.”

“Ah, that’s a good point. Well, Phuket sure is nice, anyway. Where are you planning on staying?”

I balked for a second out of habit, then said, “Amanpuri.”

“Hoo-ah! Paradise on earth! Stayed there once and saw Mick Jagger. My kind of place, although I believe I do slightly prefer the beach at the Chedi next door. I won’t need one of the villas or anything like that. Just a pavilion ought to be fine. With an ocean view, of course. No sense being in paradise if you can’t see the water.”