The Last Assassin

last year or so, and no longer felt comfortable without something sharp close at hand.
    Now properly outfitted, I started my customary systematic exploration of the city. I wouldn't feel at ease here until I had learned how best to blend, or how to escape, should my attempts at blending fail. So I went everywhere, that day and for the five days and nights after, at all times, by all means of transit. I absorbed the layout of the streets and alleys; the location of police stations and security cameras; the rhythms and rituals of pedestrians and tourists and shopkeepers.
    But there were so many distractions: the mingled smell of tapas and shawarma among the winding alleyways of El Raval; the sounds of music and laughter echoing in the public squares of Gràcia; the feel of the sea breeze on my face and in my hair on the peaks of Montjuic and Tibidabo. I liked that the locals took for granted morning mass in six-hundred-year-old cathedrals. I liked the contrasts: gothic and
modernista;
mountains and sea; historical weight and exuberant esprit.
    And the distractions weren't limited to the city itself. I was also suddenly aware of parents with infants. They were everywhere: walking their babies in strollers, holding them in their arms, gazing at their small faces with crippling devotion. Tatsu, my sometime nemesis and current friend in the Keisatsucho, the Japanese FBI, had warned me this would be the case, and, as in so many other matters, he had been right.
    What Tatsu hadn't prepared me for, what he couldn't, were the thousand other ways his news about Midori had left me ambivalent, confused, almost in shock. I had nearly canceled with Delilah, but then decided not to. I owed her an explanation, for one thing. I still wanted to see her, wanted it a lot, for another.
    I never could have predicted the affection I'd developed for Delilah, or that she seemed to have developed for me. Certainly our initial encounters were inauspicious. First there was Macau, where we learned we were working the same target. Then Bangkok and Hong Kong, where she was supposed to be working me. And yet the inherent mistrust born of working for competing intelligence organizations — Delilah, for the Mossad, and I, freelance at the time for the CIA — had paradoxically provided a stable foundation. Each of us recognized in the other a professional, an operator with an agenda, someone for whom business imperatives would always trump personal desire. All of that became the basis for respect, even mutual understanding, and ultimately provided the context for the indulgence of undeniable personal chemistry. The sex couldn't lead anywhere, we both knew it. So why not enjoy what we had, whatever it was, for as long as it lasted?
    But it did last, and it deepened. We spent a month together in Rio, after which Delilah had defied her paymasters when they ordered her to set me up. Defy, hell, she had very nearly betrayed them. She had warned me what was coming, and then worked with me to straighten things out. There must have been something between us, something worthwhile, if we had managed to avoid so many potentially lethal obstacles, and Barcelona was going to be the time and place to figure out what.
    On the day Delilah was due to arrive, I checked out of Le Meridien and did some shopping in preparation for my transition from anonymous salaryman to the more cosmopolitan persona I think of as the real me. I bought pants, shirts, and a navy cashmere blazer at Aramis in Eixample; underwear, socks, and a few accessories at Furest on the Plaça de Catalunya; shoes at Casas in La Ribera; and a leather carrying bag to put it all in at Loewe, on the ground floor of the magnificent Casa Lleó Morera building on the Passeig de Gràcia. I paid cash for everything. When I was done, I found a restroom and changed into some of the new clothes, then caught a cab to the Hotel La Florida, where Delilah had made a reservation.
    The ride from the city center took about twenty minutes, much of it up the winding road to the top of Mount Tibidabo. I had already reconnoitered the hotel and environs, of course, during my exploration of the city, but the approach was every bit as impressive the second time around. In the late afternoon sunlight, as the cab zigged and zagged its way up the steep mountain road, the city and all its possibilities appeared below me, then disappeared, then came tantalizingly back. And then vanished once again.
    When the cab reached the