Redemption Games (John Rain #4)

by Barry Eisler

“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.”

The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat, an army instructor once told me, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson. If I ever die during an op, it won’t be because I was too lazy to properly prepare.

Her business was what the domestic media called sikul memukad, or “focused prevention,” a construction she preferred to the more straightforward “assassination.”

Sometimes she felt coldly angry at the men who harbored such thoughts; other times, she almost pitied them. Their problem was that they couldn’t get beyond the limits of their own inherently male experience. Men were simple: they were propelled by lust. And so they assumed women should be the same. That a woman might sleep with a man for her own, more calculating reasons, even reasons of state security, put them off balance. It made them wonder if they were as vulnerable as the woman’s victims, and this made them fidgety. If the woman was attractive, and they secretly desired her, the fidgeting became a squirm. Whore was their way of reassuring themselves they were the ones in control.

And then, with a burst of mixed pleasure and horror, I came upon an artifact: the Miami Hotel, which was still here at the top of Soi 13. Squalid and moldering from the moment it went up in the late sixties to house U.S. troops on R&R, the hotel now felt like an architectural middle finger extended to the rich, upscale Bangkok growing up around it.

“‘John Rain, killer and grammarian.’ You ought to put it on a business card.” “All right, I said.” “‘Use the subjunctive correctly or he’ll take your life.’”

“Sounds like unsafe sex to me, partner. And I’m not sure I want to be the condom.”

In Hilger’s experience, the wealthy were typically the cheapest, greediest people on the planet.

How someone could smell so good after chasing a terrorist a quarter mile, almost dying in his grasp, and then killing him, was a mystery I knew I would always savor.

“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?”

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.

the politicians were in thrall to Big Oil and Wall Street, or brain-dead, or both.

Politicians tended to be as resistant to that kind of opportunity as junkies were to a fix.

He was wearing a broad smile and it felt good to be with someone who was so happy to see me. Then I realized he was getting the same smile from me.

I was almost alarmed at how much I enjoyed his conversation. Dining with company was becoming addictive.

“Right. To get out of the killing business, all I need to do is kill a few more people.” “It does seem paradoxical when you put it that way. But yes, I believe you have accurately described the heart of the matter.”

“It’s a strange thing, having a child,” he said. “It completely alters your most fundamental priorities. When my eldest daughter was born, I realized I would do anything—anything—to protect her. If I had to set myself on fire to save her from something, I would do it with the utmost relief and gratitude. It’s quite a thing, quite a privilege, to care about someone so much that the measure of the worth of your own life is changed by it.”