I knew he would crack, and I couldn"t help smiling a little. I said, "Because I just came from there."
He looked at me and said, "Holy s.h.i.t."
"So? This time you go first."
He sighed. "All right. Hilger was running a private op."
"What do you mean, "private"?"
"Let me amend that. I should have said "semiprivate." Like the post office: private, but government-subsidized."
He took a sip from his demita.s.se. "What is intelligence, to the policymakers? It"s just a product. h.e.l.l, in the community we even call it a product. We call the policymakers "consumers." And what do all consumers want?"
"Low prices?" I offered.
He chuckled. "If the consumer is rich enough so that price doesn"t matter."
"Then choice," I said.
He nodded. "Exactly. And if you don"t like what one store is trying to sell you, you"ll spend your money somewhere else. Look at what the White House did in the run-up to Iraq. They didn"t like what the CIA was telling them, so they set up a Pentagon unit and did their shopping there, instead."
"So Hilger . . ."
"Look, think of it this way: the basis exists for a compet.i.tive, free market for intelligence. Regardless of the structure that exists by law, policymakers will always look to different factions to satisfy policymaking requirements, and develop those factions if they don"t already exist."
I took a sip of espresso. "Hilger"s one of the factions?"
He nodded. "For almost a decade, he"s been building his own network. In a sense, he"s created a privatized intelligence service, and his product is good. A lot of policymakers have come to rely on it."
"What happened, did the CIA get jealous?"
"That"s not the point. Sure, he was able to do things that the Agency can"t-he"s got no oversight, for one thing. But that"s exactly the problem. He"s his own extra-governmental inst.i.tution."
"And what are you doing here with me?"
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Hilger was corrupt. And I"m not just talking about the two million dollars he made off with from Kwai Chung last year. I"m talking about much worse than that. Remember the U.S. diplomat who was a.s.sa.s.sinated in Amman a few years ago?"
I nodded.
"That was Hilger, making his bones."
That tracked with the conversation I had overheard in the China Club. I nodded.
"Look," he said, "why do you think it"s so hard for us to penetrate terrorist cells? Because there"s a simple admission test: kill a high-profile American, or carry out some other atrocity. If you can do that, you"re in. Well, the CIA can"t do that."
"But apparently, Hilger can."
"Can and did. Hilger created access to terrorists by being a terrorist. The thing in Jordan, deals with that guy Belghazi you took out last year, black market arms, money laundering . . . I"ve got evidence that he knew about the Bali bombing before the fact. Two hundred people died there. The two bombings in Jakarta, too. After all that, you think he even remembered who he was or what he was trying to do?"
"I don"t know."
"It"s like Nixon"s "madman" theory. You want people to think you"re a madman, you have to start doing mad things. In which case, you might as well be mad. What"s the difference?"
"Tell me why you were leaking to the Post."
He shrugged. "I had to put pressure on Hilger"s network. Publicity equals pressure."
"The first story said the men in Manila were spooks, not ex-spooks."
"They were ex-spooks, like I told you. But if the story was that they were current, Langley would face more questions, and Hilger would feel more heat."
"So those "well-placed sources" the stories mentioned . . ."
"Yeah, you"re talking to him."
I nodded in appreciation. "What about "Gird Enterprises"?"
"One of Hilger"s front companies, I think. We"ll know soon enough. The media is all over it now."
"Now that you leaked it."
"Of course," he said, sounding and for a moment even looking very much like Tatsu.
"Are you sure that taking down Hilger was the right thing to do?" I asked. "He"d gotten pretty close to this guy Al-Jib . . ."
"Ali Al-Jib?" he asked, his eyes wide.
"You know any others?"
"How do you know this?"
"Because they were meeting at the China Club in Hong Kong last night."
"They were meeting . . . holy s.h.i.t, where is Al-Jib now?"
"I expect he"s being fished out of Victoria Harbor. Unless he was able to swim for sh.o.r.e with five bullets in him."
He shook his head as though incredulous. "That was you, at the China Club?"
I shrugged.
He shook his head again. "Someone ought to give you a medal."
"I"d settle for just getting paid. Anyway, how do you know Hilger wasn"t trying to develop Al-Jib, run him somehow? Maybe Al-Jib would have led to other sources."
He took a breath and let it out. "Who knows what Hilger was up to with Al-Jib? The man was dirty."
I took a sip from the demita.s.se. "So what happens to him now?"
He shrugged. "I don"t think he has much of a chance, but I don"t have all the information yet. What happened at the China Club?"
I told him, leaving out Dox"s and Delilah"s involvement.
He sat silently while I briefed him, shaking his head as though incredulous. When I was done, he said, "You did Manny, too. Unbelievable. You really should get a medal."
"I wish I"d thought to come to you a week ago and ask what it would be worth to you for me to take these guys out. I probably could have retired on it."
"That would be a tragic loss. Guess I can"t ask you who you were working for this time?"
"Guess you"re right."
"It"s okay. I can imagine."
"You can imagine all you want."
"Well, from what you"ve told me, I don"t think Hilger can survive this. His supporters are all going to be running for cover."
"I don"t know," I said. "I get the feeling this guy is a survivor. Look at the way he turned things around at Kwai Chung last year, and made off with two million U.S. in the process. I wouldn"t underestimate him."
"I"m not," he said.
I finished my espresso and set down the demita.s.se. "Are you still in touch with Tatsu?" I asked.
"A bit," he said, his tone guarded, and I knew they were in touch a lot.
I nodded. "Spend time with him. He"s walked the narrow path you seem to be on for a long time, and somehow he hasn"t managed to fall off. That"s rare. You should try to learn his secret."
"What path are you talking about?"
"The one where the end justifies the means."
He nodded.
"Well," I said, getting up, "seeing as I"ve just eliminated two of the entries on Uncle Sam"s nonexistent terrorism hit list, I guess I can count on you to pay for the coffee?"
He stood and smiled. "My pleasure."
I looked at him. "Is this on you, though? Or the government?"
"It"s on me."
I nodded. "That"s what I thought."
I held out my hand and we shook. "Ki o tsukero yo," I said. Be careful.
"So shimasu," he told me. I will.
TWENTY-THREE.
HILGER SAT in the Dragonair departures area at Hong Kong International, waiting for his flight to Shanghai. The sun was up and he was exhausted.
It had been a long night. Deleting the files hadn"t required much time. They were all electronic, after all. And collecting his essential gear hadn"t been a problem, either, as much of it was kept in a bag that served as the civilian equivalent of the bug-out kits they had been taught to use in the military. It had been the phone calls that had taken a while. There were the people in his network, who needed to be warned. There were the family members, who needed to be prepared. And there were the politicians, who needed to be importuned. Each set of calls had been more difficult than the one that preceded it.
He wasn"t worried about himself. He"d been ready for a day like this, and his backup systems had worked well. Even if they hadn"t, and he"d been forced to take a fall or even worse, he could have handled it. What was hard to come to grips with was the total unraveling of his op. He"d been so close to achieving so much. America was in mortal danger, and wasn"t doing enough to safeguard against it. With his operation crippled, he thought the worst was now inevitable.
He"d read an article once, about the wildfires they have every few years in Southern California. Some expert was explaining that, because of the encroachment of suburban development on woodlands, the small fires nature employed to clear out the underbrush were no longer permissible. As a result, year after year, the underbrush got thicker and drier and more ready to combust. Sooner or later, the expert said, something will always set that underbrush off. It"s almost mathematically certain.
He looked at a WMD attack on America in much the same terms. There was so much post-Soviet materiel out there, and so many fanatics who wanted to use it, that it was just a matter of time. But no one wanted to accept this fact, any more than the Los Angeles suburban homeowners wanted to accept that a little annual soot on their wood siding might be a small price to pay to avoid a f.u.c.king holocaust. It was just how people"s minds worked. There wasn"t much you could do about it.
He shook his head, disgusted. It all made him think of the way munic.i.p.alities install traffic lights. After a certain number of auto fatalities at a given intersection, the politicians say, "Hmm, we ought to put in a light there." They were going to do the same thing when New York had disappeared under a mushroom cloud.
Or maybe he was giving the idiots too much credit. h.e.l.l, losing New York . . . maybe they would just pause for a minute, then go back to renaming French fries and prohibiting gay marriage and the other priorities of the day.
Yeah, the politicians were in thrall to Big Oil, or brain-dead, or both. If anyone was going to prevent a cataclysm, it would be Hilger, and the team he had built.
He sighed. Al-Jib was one of his linchpins. If Hilger just could have learned a little more about the man"s contacts, where his knowledge had been disseminated, they might actually have been able to stuff some of the f.u.c.king genie back in the bottle. But not now. Al-Jib probably wouldn"t touch Hilger after this. That is, a.s.suming the man was still alive. The blonde in the China Club, whoever she was, had taken off after him like a hungry lioness hot on a gazelle.
Well, there were little silver linings in the cloud. When his p.i.s.sant National Security Council contact had started back-pedaling about whether the White House could support Hilger in the face of another mess, Hilger had just told the man what a shame it would be when Hilger"s client list came to light, with the contact"s name and those of several other prominent political personages on it. The helpless silence that had followed that warning was one of the most satisfying sounds Hilger had ever heard. The contact"s plan of simply saying "I have no recollection of that event, Senator," and "I don"t recall that meeting, Senator," and "I can"t imagine I would have done that, Senator, because that would be wrong," suddenly just wasn"t going to be adequate, and the piece of s.h.i.t knew it.
Hilger had gone on to explain that he was no Edwin Wilson. If he went down, lots of people would be coming with him, first among them Mr. NSC contact. Do I need to explain further? Hilger had asked. No, the contact had told him in a tight, emasculated voice. He had made himself perfectly clear.
Wilson had been an operative the Agency allegedly fired back in 1971, but who had gone on acting like a spook afterward, carrying out a.s.sa.s.sinations, laundering money, and selling plastic explosives to countries like Libya, until he was jailed in 1983. Wilson claimed that he"d never left the Agency and that the whole thing had been a sanctioned op; the government, predictably, claimed he was fabricating. Hilger didn"t know the truth-that information would be very closely held, just as it was for him-but he suspected the whole thing had been an op. After all, how do you get close to a man like Kaddafi? By selling him what he wants. There were people who understood this principle then, just as there were people, like Hilger, who understood it today.
Wilson"s error, though, had been his failure to collect evidence implicating his paymasters. Hilger had been much better prepared. The people who had been greedy enough to invest their money with him had been stupid, too. NSC staffers just couldn"t explain being on the same client list as unsavorables like Manny. They would have to back Hilger, or go down with him.
As for the Agency, he knew the last thing they would want would be another Wilson scandal. Even if they denied Hilger, the press would go into a frenzy over a repeat. All those resultant congressional committees, and questions under oath, examination of finances, new layers of oversight . . . no one wanted any of that, there was so much more important work to be done. Plus, Hilger"s contacts were putting out the word that Hilger had been behind Manny"s death. And if Al-Jib turned up not breathing, that would be attributed to Hilger, too. All, of course, with the understanding that the new director could take whatever credit for the op he wanted. Politicians tended to be as resistant to that kind of opportunity as junkies were to a fix. The Hong Kong police and Hong Kong liaison could be bought off the same way. With the right mix of sense and incentives, the whole thing could be put to sleep pretty quietly.
Of course, the Jim Hilger cover was permanently blown, and at a minimum Hong Kong"s Chinese overlords would declare him persona non grata and boot him out. Hilger had decided to save them the trouble. He already had an established ident.i.ty, and a presence he had been careful to cultivate, in Shanghai. When the authorities showed up at his Hong Kong apartment, or at his office, as perhaps they already had, he wasn"t going to be there to greet them.
He was going to miss that view from Two IFC, though. Well, it wasn"t like there were no skysc.r.a.pers in Shanghai. The city was growing so fast, and had so many foreigners, that he"d have no trouble fitting in there and gearing up again.
He thought of Rain for a moment, and could actually feel his face contorting with rage as he did so. He was surprised at his own reaction. After all, Rain hadn"t acted with knowledge. He"d been hired for a job and he"d done it. Hilger used people like him all the time; it wasn"t personal. So why was Hilger taking it so personally now? It was stupid. Yes, the man had screwed up everything. And in the process, cost Hilger years of effort and unknowingly endangered millions of innocents. But he hadn"t meant it, he hadn"t known. Hilger should just let it go.
Or he should just find the b.a.s.t.a.r.d and shoot him in the head. It wasn"t justified, it wasn"t even mature, but it would probably help him sleep better.
And that f.u.c.king Dox, too. Someone had nailed him with a chair as he"d hauled a.s.s down the China Club stairs, and he had a pretty good idea of who it was. He had a welt on his back the size and color of an eggplant.
One thing at a time, though. First, Shanghai. Then, probably, more damage control. Then salvaging what he could of his operation.
Then it would be time for Rain and Dox. And G.o.d help them then.