Black Rain

The response was deliberate, with gravity in her voice that he recognized from his past. “We’re interested in maintaining a low profile, a vision local hires don’t always seem to embrace. We’re looking for someone who won’t ask questions and won’t answer them if they come his way.” She shrugged. “As for the phone call. Well, we needed to make sure that you were in fact you.”

The call had included a lot of questions, questions he’d chosen not to answer. That had probably been enough.

Calls like that, or inquiries by other means, had been common over the past ten years, especially during his exile in Africa, after his separation from the CIA. They came from rebel elements, foreign governments and from corporations and proxies of the same Western interests he’d supposedly been excommunicated from. When a man is listed as a threat by his own country, he is presumed to be open to offers from all sides.

Depending on who was asking, the questions took different forms. The dictators, generals and warlords were refreshingly, if disturbingly, direct. The agents of the various Western governments were far less clear, their words always couched in the hypothetical. If this individual were to disappear, then the killing in this region might stop. If this man were to fall into our hands … if this party were to receive these weapons … then funds might be placed into this numbered account. For years he’d listened to these proposals, picking and choosing from a litany of offers up and down the West African coast and into parts of Asia.

He told himself that he’d rejected all those that might be patently evil, but in places that reeked of madness it was often hard to tell the difference. Guns begat guns; one dead warlord was replaced by two with a blood feud between them; an oil terminal that gave money to a mad dictator also gave jobs and food to people who worked on and around it—was it moral or immoral to blow such a thing up? Finally, he couldn’t tell anymore. He’d left Africa and arrived in Brazil, ready to vanish forever. It seemed for a while that he had, but the call had come anyway. Apparently some people were not allowed to disappear.

Hawker stared at the woman across from him, realizing, at least, that her offer had not been phrased in the hypothetical. “You have security issues.”

“Anonymous threats and a break-in at our hotel. Items were taken, others destroyed. Things of little value, but the message was clear: someone doesn’t want us going out there.”

“Any candidates?”

“Plenty of them,” she said. “From radical environmentalists who think we’re out to destroy the rainforest, to mining and logging concerns who think we’re trying to stop them from destroying the rainforest.” She paused. “But we have reason to believe it goes deeper than that.”

He understood what she was saying: there was more at stake than she could or would tell him. But she needed him to know it in general. It made him wonder how much she knew. She seemed a little young to be in such a position and making such a request. No, he decided, “young” wasn’t the right word. More like “keen” or “zealous.” Perhaps that’s what people looked like when they still believed in what they did. He couldn’t remember.

“No questions asked?” he guessed.

“Not many that I can answer.”

He’d try another tack, one she’d be able to confirm, at least to some extent. “And what do you know about me?”

“Enough,” she said.

“Enough?”

“Enough to wonder what someone with your reputation is doing in the middle of nowhere.”

“People who trusted me died,” he said, thinking that if she didn’t know that, she didn’t know enough. “You still want to hire me?”

She appeared unfazed. “The people I work for do. You were the only name on a short list. Chosen personally, it seems.”

“By whom?”

She took another sip of the coffee, maneuvering the glass carefully and examining the chips in the rim as she placed it down. For a second he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then her eyes flashed at him again. Apparently she’d made him wait long enough. “Stuart Gibbs,” she said. “The NRI’s director of operations.”

The name rattled around in his head. Hawker didn’t know the man, but he’d heard of him. Gibbs had been fairly high up in the Agency when Hawker had left, a rising star with a reputation for arrogance and ruthlessness. And now he ran the NRI, or part of it anyway. Such a nice little organization.