RainStorm

Rainstorm
    by Barry Eisler
    ONE
    the agency had hired me to "retire" Belghazi, not to protect
    him. So if this didn't go well, their next candidate for a
    retirement package would probably be me.
    But the way I saw it, saving Belghazi from the guy I now
    thought of as Karate would be doing Uncle Sam a favor. After all,
    Karate could fail to make it look natural, or get caught, or do some
    other sloppy thing, and then there would be misunderstandings,
    and suspicions, and accusations--exactly the kinds of problems the
    Agency had hired me to avoid.
    Of course, there was also the matter of my getting paid. If
    Karate got to Belghazi first and I couldn't claim credit, I might be
    out of a check, and that wouldn't be very fair, would it?
    I thought of this guy as Karate because my suspicions about him
    had first jelled when I saw him doing karate kata, or forms, in the
    gym of the Macau Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where we were both
    staying and where Belghazi was soon to arrive. Avoiding the facility's
    tangle of Lifecycles and Cybex machines, he had focused instead
    on a series of punches, blocks, and kicks to the air that, to the
    uninitiated, might have looked like some kind of martial dance
    routine. Actually, his moves were good--smooth, practiced, and
    powerful. They would have been impressive in any twenty-year-old,
    but this guy looked at least twice that.
    I do some similar solo exercises myself, from time to time,
    although nothing so formal and stylized. And when I do work
    out this way, I don't do it in public. It draws too much attention,
    especially from someone who knows what to look for. Someone
    like me.
    In my line of work, drawing attention is a serious violation of
    the laws of common sense, and therefore of survival. Because if
    someone notices you for one thing, he'll be inclined to look more
    closely, at which point he might notice something else. A pattern,
    which would have remained quietly hidden, might then begin to
    emerge, after which your cloak of anonymity will be methodically
    pulled apart, probably to be rewoven into something more closely
    resembling a shroud.
    Karate also stood out because he was Caucasian--European was
    my guess, although I couldn't pinpoint the country. He had close-cropped
    black hair, pale skin, and, when he wasn't busy with Horse
    Stance to Spinning Back Kick Number Two in the Mandarin Oriental
    gym, favored exquisitely thin-soled loafers and sport jackets
    with hand-rolled lapels. Macau's population of about a half million
    is ninety-five percent Chinese, with only a small Portuguese contingent
    remaining to remind anyone who cares that the territory, now
    a Chinese Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong, was not
    so long ago a Portuguese colony, and even the millions of annual
    gambling tourists are almost all from nearby Hong Kong, Taiwan,
    and mainland China, so non-Asians don't exactly blend.
    Which is part of the reason the Agency had been so eager for
    me to take on the Belghazi assignment to begin with. It wasn't just
    that Belghazi had become a primary supplier to various Southeast
    Asian fundamentalist groups whom, post-9/11, Uncle Sam had
    come to view as a serious threat. Nor was it simply my demonstrated
    knack for the appearance of "natural causes," which in this
    case would be necessary because it seemed that Belghazi had protectors
    among certain "allied" governments whom Uncle Sam preferred
    not to offend. It was also because the likely venue for the job
    would require invisibility against an Asian background. And, although
    my mother had been American, my face is dominated by
    my father's Japanese features--the consequence of genetic chance,
    augmented years ago by some judicious plastic surgery, which I had
    undergone to better blend in Japan.
    So between the conspicuous ethnicity and the kata moves,
    Karate had managed to put himself on my radar screen, and it was
    then that I began to notice more. For one thing, he had a way of
    hanging around the hotel: the gym, the cafe, the terrace, the lobby.
    Wherever this guy was from, he'd come a long way to reach
    Macau. His failure to get out and see the sights, therefore, didn't
    make a lot of sense--unless he was waiting for someone.
    Of course, I might have suffered from a similar form of conspicuousness.
    But I had a companion--a young Japanese woman-- which made the "hanging around" behavior a little more explainable.
    Her name was Keiko, or at least that was how she billed herself
    with the