But it’s been a long time since any of these emotional stratagems has been available to me. I typically operate alone, so there’s no group with whom to share responsibility. I don’t discuss my work, so euphemisms would be pointless. And what I do, I need to do from a very personal distance. By the time I’m that close, it’s too late to try to cover the target’s face or otherwise conceal his humanity.
All bad enough, even under the usual circumstances. But this time I was watching the target enjoy a Sunday outing in Manila with his obviously adoring Filipino family just before I killed him, and it was making things worse.
The target. See? Everyone does it. If I’m different than most, it’s only in that I try to be more honest. “More” honest. A matter of degree.
Manheim Lavi was his name, “Manny” to his business associates. Manny was an Israeli national, resident of South Africa, and citizen of the world, which he traveled much of the year sharing bomb-making expertise with a network of people who put the knowledge to increasingly grisly use. Vocations like Manny’s once offered a reasonable risk-to-reward ratio, but post-9/11, if you sold your expertise to the wrong people, you could lose your rewards pretty fast. That was Manny’s story, as I was given to understand it, a tragic fall from a certain government’s grace.
Manny had arrived in Manila from Johannesburg that evening. A black Mercedes from the small Peninsula fleet had picked him up at Ninoy Aquino Airport and whisked him straight to the hotel. Dox and I were already staying there, outfitted with first-rate ersatz identities and the latest communication and other gear, all courtesy of Israeli intelligence, my client of the moment. Dox, an ex-Marine sniper and former comrade in arms of mine, had recently walked away from a five-million-dollar payday to save my life in Hong Kong. Bringing him in on this job was in part my way of trying to repay him for that.