Killing Rain

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.”
    “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