“Lot of nasty people in the world, man, that’s all,” he said, giving me the grin. “I mean a sheep is one thing, but an alligator? I’m surprised you’d think so little of me.”

I didn’t know how Dox was able to maintain his constant good cheer even as he prepared to go operational. When I’m gearing up, I get serious, even dour. Harry, my martyred hacker friend, had always been nervous helping me with ops, and had often provoked an unfamiliar clownishness in me. But Dox and I seemed to polarize the opposite way.

But he’d done well so far. I wasn’t yet confident in his social engineering skills. He was too consistently brash, too direct, and, I had to admit to myself, his style was just too different from mine. Getting Manny’s room number had been a test. I’d resisted the urge to tell him how to go about it, and he had come up with something close to what I’d thought of myself. More important, something that worked. It wouldn’t come easily to me, but I’d have to try to give him more slack as we went along, as he continued to prove himself.

“Let’s see,” I said, closing my eyes. “He’s in nine-fourteen. That’s around the corner from the elevators. Unless the bodyguard is positioned at the elevators while Manny is in his room, I ought to be able to get some video in place.”

“Yeah, nice having a way to know when he’s leaving. I hate hanging around in the open, waiting for someone to go out.”

In the dark, though, I knew Dox could wait for days. He had the kills to prove it.

I opened my laptop bag and took out a camera, a wireless unit about twenty millimeters square and weighing less than an ounce. I clicked it on, then worked the laptop’s keyboard for a minute, watching as the screen filled with input from the unit. “It’s transmitting all right from here,” I said, “but at nine hundred megahertz it’s only rated to about a thousand feet. I might have to install a couple of repeaters along the way. You wait here and monitor the screen. Tell me if you’re getting reception and the right view of the elevators once I’ve got it in place.”

“Roger that.”

We took earpieces from the laptop bag and slipped them in place. I walked over to the door and checked through the peephole. The hallway was empty.

I walked out, hearing a loud clack as the door closed behind me. “You there?” I asked quietly.

“Roger that,” I heard back. Okay, the commo gear was still working.

I took the elevator down to the lobby level, not wanting to go to Manny’s floor directly from mine. To satisfy anyone who might be watching through the dome security camera peeking down from the elevator ceiling, I got out and bought a pack of gum at the gift shop, then came back and headed up to the ninth floor. There were no stops along the way, and a minute later the doors opened on nine. I walked out and looked around. The hallway was empty.

There was a wooden credenza against the wall opposite the elevators with a mirror behind it. I walked over, supported myself against the credenza with my left hand, and ran the fingers of my right through my hair. There was another dome camera mounted on the ceiling in front of the elevators, and if anyone was watching right then, all they would see was a man concerned with his appearance. In fact, I had slipped the adhesive-backed unit underneath the left edge of the credenza, where it would have a wide-angle view of the approach to the elevators.

“How’s the image?” I asked quietly.

“No go. Too grainy. Signal’s falling off before it reaches the receiver. I think we need the repeater to boost it.”

“Okay. Hang on.”

I walked down the hallway for a few paces, then returned to the elevator, just another hotel guest who’d absentmindedly gotten off on the wrong floor. This time, I stopped on six. As I got off, I checked my room key and looked around in slightly theatrical confusion, thinking, Gosh, these floors all look the same, where was I staying again? just in case someone was watching. Then I placed a repeater in front of the elevators the same way I had put the camera in on Manny’s floor.

The moment I clicked it on, I heard Dox’s voice: “Okay, there we go. Now that’s a beautiful view.”

I moved out of the way. “The approach to the elevators?”

“Yeah, and it beats the wide-angle shot of your crotch I was getting a minute ago. Someone should call America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

I thought about a retort, but then this was exactly what he wanted. I let it go and walked back to the room.

THE TWO MEN who’d offered me the Manny job a week before had never explicitly acknowledged their affiliations. They might have been Mossad; they might have been attached to one of the elite Israeli military units, like the Sayeret Matkal. All I knew was that they were compatriots of Delilah, who had vouched for them. Her involvement had been enough to convince me to meet them.

Delilah and I had first crossed paths in Macau, where we discovered we were both focused on Achille Belghazi, an arms merchant I had been hired to kill but whom Delilah’s people needed alive for the extraction of critical intelligence. We’d managed to create an uneasy truce, though, and things had worked out well in the end. Very well, if you included the month Delilah and I had spent together in Rio afterward, before she had to return to her world and I to mine.

But despite our personal chemistry, I didn’t trust Delilah completely: she was an operator, after all, with her own professional agenda. So I had insisted that her people travel to Nagoya, a large Japanese city two hundred miles west of Tokyo. For me, Nagoya would be native terrain, but for a couple of visiting Israelis, and any uninvited guests they might decide to bring, it would be unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and they would be reassuringly conspicuous there. Tokyo might have served my purposes instead, but I preferred to travel there infrequently. It had been two years since I’d faced off with Yamaoto, the puppet-master behind much of Japan’s endemic corruption, but I knew the man had a long and bitter memory and would be looking for me in Tokyo. Nagoya was better.

My prospective clients followed my instructions, and on the appointed day and time we met at Torisei, a small yakitoriya in Naka-ku. Yakitori is down-home Japanese fare, primarily chicken, other meats, and vegetables grilled over an open charcoal barbecue and served on wood skewers. It’s usually supplemented by chazuke, a soupy mixture of tea and rice, and always washed down with copious portions of beer or hot sake. Yakitoriya tend to be small, cozy, and unpretentious, and are often located near subway stations to make it easier for their sarariman and student patrons to duck in for a quick meal at a corner table or the easy camaraderie of the counter.

I was sitting in a tea shop across the street, wearing an unobtrusive sarariman-style navy suit and reading the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese-language daily paper, when they arrived. I saw them approach from the north, pause to glance at Torisei’s sign, and go inside. Although they were out of their element in Nagoya, they didn’t refer to directions or other written instructions to confirm that they’d found the place, and I sensed from this that they were accustomed to operating sterile, something that in professionals becomes a habit.

I waited and watched the street. After ten minutes, I got up and followed them in. As I parted the establishment’s blue noren curtains, I was thinking in Japanese and maintaining a Japanese persona. In my peripheral vision, I saw that they had taken one of the small tables. They both looked up when I arrived, but I ignored them. I expected Delilah would have given them a description, but I doubted that would be enough for them to pick me out if I wanted to stay anonymous. I took a seat at the counter, facing them and with the entrance door to my right. I ordered yaki-onigiri-grilled rice balls-and an Asahi Super Dry, opened my paper, and started to read. After a few minutes, when I felt they would have concluded I wasn’t of interest, I glanced around.