Elleri Kuin - Guess Who’s Coming to Kill You

Wilkinsons most valuable asset was that he looked like a tired businessman pushing fifty. He was in fact tired and pushing fifty, but he was not a tired businessman pushing fifty. He was a tired spy pushing fifty.

He had seen it all before and he had been through it all before. That was the trouble, as he was to find out shortly. There is a deadly hypnosis about repeated experience that lowers the guard; or, if the guard-up is automatic, like a reflex, the muscle response is not. He was to find that out shortly, too.

Wilkinson leaned against the wall in the alley behind The Golden Obi watching tradesmen and porters going and coming through the rear door. He was well in the shadows. He was thinking: what am I doing here?

That was bad; a bad sign. Holloway would have been distressed, if a spider can be credited with emotion. Worse, or perhaps better, he would have seen to it that Wilkinson was cashiered on the spot. But Holloway was in his web in Washington, D.C., an ocean and a continent away, and that was Fred Wilkinsons misfortune.

The wail of soul music came from somewhere inside the square building. On the street side the building was all neon flash; in the alley it was a dump. Times Square-like nightclubs and soul bands had been enthusiastically ingested by the Japanese along with other condiments of the American cuisine. It produced in Wilkinson the stomach revolt felt by the fastidious everywhere. That was another of Wilkinsons weaknesses; he was fastidious, or rather he had grown fastidious with the multiplication of his assignments; another bad, very bad, sign.

The dirt offended him, the flash offended him, the smells offended him, and it was all very like home, which he sometimes thought offended him more than anywhere. Home to Wilkinson was Washington, and Washington meant the Holloways, and the Holloways meant FACE and CIA; which brought Wilkinson full circle.

At times on assignments like these he had to remind himself that he was in a foreign country. Tokyo was a let-down. It was not openly dangerous like Saigon; not seething with cockroach spies like Berlin; not a gateway to Mediterranean hocuspocus like Lisbon, or a boiling pot like Buenos Aires. Things had settled down in Tokyo; which was why, Wilkinson suspected, Holloway had put his okay on the CIA mission. Even a Wilkinson, Holloways eyes had seemed to say, could pull this one off.

Sometimes he yearned increasingly these days for a book-type adventure. He did not know a Chteau Lafite Rothschild 1918 from a Bordeaux Rouge 64 he knew of no one in the trade with James Bonds oenological and other expertise; but it would be nice, it would be nice. Like inhabiting a fairy tale, where bullets missed or left laughable flesh wounds, and the hero enjoyed professional beatings from which he blithely strolled away. Being young again would be especially nice, with its tireless sexuality. Bond kept tumbling in and out of bed with breasty beauties as if his body had never heard of gonad fatigue. (There was even supposed to be a counterpart in reality, a school near Moscow where the KGB trained selected spies to perform prodigies of intercourse; the British intelligence agents Wilkinson had met insisted on its existence with a fervor, Wilkinson suspected, that had led Ian Fleming astray.) Being young again... being anything but what he was.

Wilkinson took a drag and sighed smoke. Two policemen sauntered past the alley entrance, glancing in. They did not see him. Not that it would have mattered if they had. He had his cover story ready his legend, as the fancy boys called it in case he was questioned. A hostess in The Golden Obi had promised to meet him in the alley and he, poor sucker, was waiting. The club hostesses in Tokyo often rid themselves of importunate foreigners that way; the story was plausible enough. To lay the groundwork for it Wilkinson had had two drinks in the club with a hostess before slipping into the alley. He was ready for the meet if Krylov was serious.

He glanced at his wristwatch in the glow of his cigarette a natural action if it should be overseen; male foreigners hot for Japanese girls were notoriously impatient. He felt a stir of pride at the fact that he still made the right moves automatically. He had a lot of good missions left in him, Wilkinson knew runs, as they called them nowadays even though he couldnt seem to convince anyone in Washington. For anyone read Holloway. They all added up to Holloway. Damn Holloway.

At the home office the Holloway boys had hinted that he was skid-bound. They hadnt come right out with it, but they might as well have. His crown was balding, his waist was blowing up, he was walking on the flats of his feet. All right for a Class II or a contract agent who had to do only transmission, cutout, or courier work, but not for a Class I man who was expected to be everything from an Olympic athlete to a psych major.

Wilkinson drew deeply on his cigarette and shifted his stance. At that moment he saw curtains part in a second-floor window in the rear wall of the building and froze to attention. He caught one glimpse of the sheared silhouette of a tall, bulky man, but in that glimpse Wilkinson made out the crop of dark hair and the square face with its professional camouflage of boyish charm and recognized Krylov. Krylov was of course allowing himself to be seen from the alley to let Wilkinson know he was still waiting for a chance to come down unseen. He must be desperate, Wilkinson thought; what Wilkinson could see others might see, too.

He kept watching, refusing to reveal himself. After a moment Krylovs silhouette moved away from the window and the curtains dropped back.

Wilkinson ground his cigarette out. Okay so far. They could yatter all they wanted about his going to seed, but it took a man of long experience to set up a proper meet and carry it through. They had even had the gall to ask for his plan in advance instead of letting him work out the details in his own way a demand they would never have made in the old days. In revenge Wilkinson had worked out two plans, giving them their choice. The first had set the Seibu department store for the meet, either in the basement, which looked like a hero-sized American supermarket, usually crowded with people shopping for meats and delicatessens and delicacies from all over the world; or on the top floor, with its dozens of restaurants and coffee shops, always jammed, where a shopper could dine on soba and seaweed for eighty yen or a kobe beefsteak dinner for a thousand; the Seibu was a favorite haunt of foreigners. A cultural attach like Krylov, tired of the relative austerities of GUM, could be expected to browse or dine there, and an American tourist was one of the Seibus commonest sights. Wilkinsons alternative plan had been The Golden Obi alley.

He had passed the plans along through channels the usual two cutouts and a communicator and they had made him wait almost two days for the nod for the second plan. It rankled. Not their choice of the second plan, but the wait. It was a good plan, based on the existing situation, as good plans should be. Aleksei Krylov was known to frequent The Golden Obi; he had gone soft on a hostess there named Kimiko. It would be easy for Krylov to excuse himself ostensibly to visit the mens room and instead slip out the rear door to make the meet. Even if they were observed it would appear a casual encounter. And in the open alley such normal hazards as bugs or eavesdropping would be minimized. The kids they used for Class I agents these days were dead shots and expert karate fighters and they maimed and killed without hesitation, but could they think things out ahead of time? Wilkinson thought not. The organization lost a lot of Class I agents because of it, he was convinced.