If Rain had seen Winters coming, he must be damn near psychic. That, or the Thais had slipped somehow. You couldn’t expect them to own up to something like that. They were just local muscle, after all. Contractors. With Calver and Gibbons dead from that goat-rope in Manila, Hilger hadn’t been able to field a full, professional team.

“How did Winters die?” Hilger asked.

“Rain had a knife.”

Hilger frowned. All that kali stuff… Winters was supposed to be an expert with blades. “He beat Winters, with a knife?” he asked, thinking that something was wrong with the story.

“Dox threw a chair at him, it seems. It knocked him down.”

Well, that would do it. “And then?”

“The Thais said Rain and Dox jumped on him and started stabbing him. There was nothing they could do and they ran away.”

Hilger believed they ran away, all right. He just wondered exactly when in the sequence it had actually happened.

“Were you able to confirm any of this?” he asked.

“Yeah. I’ve got a contact in the embassy who was able to check with the Thai police. Winters had broken ribs and was killed by a knife wound in the chest. He had defensive wounds on his arms.”

Even in the midst of his anger and sorrow over Winters, Hilger felt a sense of relief that the man had died on his feet. Winters knew a lot, and it would have been a problem if Rain and Dox had managed to interrogate him. Not that Winters had been any sort of pushover-it would have taken a lot to separate him from any information he was intent on keeping-but this way, Hilger didn’t have to deal with any doubts at all.

“What do the police make of it?” he asked.

“They think it was a bad drug deal. Winters was traveling sterile. No problem there.”

Damn, Winters had been a good man. Thorough. Losing him was a blow.

Hilger realized he was going to have to call Winters’s sister, Elizabeth Shannon. Winters hadn’t been married; his sister was his next of kin. Hilger had dated her after the war. She was married now, with a family, but they had stayed friendly. Goddamnit, he was dreading that call. He hated Rain for forcing him to make it.

“What’s next?” Demeere asked.

Hilger thought for a moment about telling the man to come to Hong Kong for the meeting with VBM, but then decided not to. It would have been useful to have him there to take Winters’s place, but he judged it more important to keep someone on Rain and Dox. He wanted them dead.

“Try to reacquire Rain and Dox,” Hilger told him. “And use your discretion, but I would advise against trying to render them again. We’ve lost too many people already, and I don’t see how we could do it anyway without a full team in place. If you can find them and the opportunity is there, just take them the fuck out.”

“Roger that,” Demeere said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Hilger hung up. Christ, the op was coming apart. But he had to find a way to fix it. It had taken him two years to set up this meeting with VBM. And it wasn’t just the time he’d invested. It was the things he’d been forced to do to make it possible. Those things were going to haunt him forever, and if there was a God out there, Hilger knew one day there was going to be some explaining to do.

He put his elbows on his desk, closed his eyes, and rested his forehead against his fingertips. Yeah, he’d made some hard calls along the way, calls that no one should have to make. Having to take out that guy in Amman, an American, with a family, hadn’t been easy. And having to sit on information that he knew would have saved lives in Bali, in Jakarta, and elsewhere… well he was going to have to live with all of that, too.

But a lot of good was coming from it, and that was the thing to focus on. You had to look at the big picture. Were the Brits wrong not to evacuate Coventry when they discovered the Nazis were going to bomb it? If the city had been evacuated, the Nazis would have known their Enigma code had been compromised, and the whole Allied war effort would have been jeopardized. The people of Coventry had to be sacrificed so that others might live. It wasn’t pretty when you said it out loud, but that’s what had happened. The difference was, today the politicians didn’t have the balls to make those decisions. So the hard work had devolved to men like himself.

It was funny, he thought, that democracy couldn’t survive if it tried to adhere top to bottom to its own ideals. He knew that it was men like himself, working behind the scenes, on their own, doing what no one else could face, who made democracy function, who saved it from the knowledge of its own inherent hypocrisy, who kept it sleeping untroubled at night.

The irony was, Rain was a man who might understand all this. Didn’t the Japanese even have a name for it? Honne and tatemae-real truth, and societal façade? English could use a couple of words like that. Their absence from America’s lexicon was revealing: not only couldn’t we appreciate the necessity, we couldn’t even acknowledge the concept.

Rain. He imagined how good it was going to feel when he received confirmation that the man was dead. He was surprised at the intensity of the feeling. Ordinarily, these things weren’t personal for him. But three good men were down, and now he had to make that call to Elizabeth Shannon… not to mention the pressure all this was putting on his entire operation.

Yeah, he wanted him dead, all right. And Dox, too. He wondered if maybe he would have a chance to do it himself.

THE FLIGHT TO HONG KONG the next morning was uneventful. After the restless night I’d just had, I was glad to sleep through most of it. I arrived at Hong Kong International feeling relaxed and refreshed and caught a cab to the Shangri-La.

I checked in, then called Dox on the prepaid unit he was carrying. He was in a cab, on his way to Kowloon.

“Stop at the bug-out point first, take care of that,” I said. “No sense in both of us being there at the same time. Then check in and get the clothes you need.”

“Will do.”

The bug-out point was a coffee shop near the Man Mo temple on Hollywood Road. When you go operational, or otherwise commit an act that the authorities are apt to frown upon if you’re caught, it’s wise to choose a backup meeting place to use if it becomes inconvenient to return to your hotel, and to preposition certain necessary items there: cash, for one thing; and a spare passport, for another, if you’re lucky or connected enough to know how to come by such things. You typically want a place that’s accessible at all hours and that offers many appropriate hiding spots: the underside of a counter or a bookshelf, the back of a bathroom cabinet, that sort of thing. Whether the op goes well or poorly, your things need to be in place for only a few hours. If the op goes really poorly, you’ve got bigger problems than someone stumbling across the stash you’ve taped to, say, the underside of a toilet in an all-night diner.

“When you’re done with that,” I said, “let’s meet on the mezzanine level of the Grand Hyatt at sixteen hundred. It’s away from the main lobby so it’s private, and you’ll look right at home there in your new threads.”

“Sounds good. You’ve got the gear?”

“And everything else.”

“All right, partner, see you soon.”

I turned off the phone and headed over to the hotel shopping arcade, where I got a haircut and a shave. I had them put a bunch of gel in my hair and slick it back-not my usual look, and not a dramatic alteration to my appearance, but lots of small changes would begin to add up. Next, a visit to an optometrist for a pair of rectangular wire-frame glasses that did a nice job of reworking the angles of my face. At the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall, one stop at Dunhill got me the rest of what I needed: single-breasted, double-vented navy gabardine suit, fitted with inch-and-a-half cuffs in fifteen minutes flat; white Sea Island cotton shirt and flat gold cuff links; brown split-toe lace-ups and navy socks; brown alligator belt and British-tan attaché case. It wasn’t terribly cold in Hong Kong, but perhaps just chilly enough to justify the purchase of a pair of brown deerskin gloves, which went into the attaché. I checked myself in the mirror before heading out of the store and liked what I saw: a well-off Japanese businessman, with international experience and taste, in the discreet employ of powerful industrial interests seeking a foothold in Hong Kong through one of its famous business institutions, the China Club. Hopefully I’d even get to keep the clothes when this was done. Hopefully they wouldn’t have any bullet holes in them.