Requiem for an Assassin Read Online Free PDF

loose. But she’d faced them down and forced her way back in, and now she was more determined than ever to stay.
    I was ambivalent about her work. On the one hand, it gave me space, which I liked. On the other hand, her continued presence in the life inhibited my own efforts to leave it. Part of it was the behavioral cues—the need for a ready cover story when I was with her in case she ran into someone she knew, and her routine perimeter checks and other tactics—which continued to remind me of who I’d always been. Part of it was ongoing operational necessity, because as long as she was in the life, she was at risk, and if you’re with someone at risk, you’d better believe you’re at risk, too. And part of it was notional: if I was this involved with someone still in the life, how far could I have left the life behind?
    I pushed her sometimes, but not too hard. I’d learned Delilah was a fighter, and if she felt she was being doubted, or second-guessed, or in any way talked down to, she had a tendency to come out swinging.
    “Why not retire?” I asked her once, over café-crèmes and croissants at Le Loir dans la Théière, a restaurant on the rue des Rosiers named after the dormouse in the teacup in Alice in Wonderland. Delilah had introduced me to the place, and I loved the mismatched chairs and small wooden tables, the eclectic wall art, the wonderful smell of years of fresh ground coffee. “We could buy an apartment on the beach in Barcelona. Make love to the sounds of the waves at night, walk on the beach in the morning. Nothing but the feel of the sun and the smell of coffee and cava and no bad memories.”
    She smiled and pushed back a strand of blond hair. Her blue eyes were lit by sunlight coming through the restaurant’s large front windows. “You make it sound enticing. Especially the making love part.”
    “That was my favorite, too.”
    She laughed. “I don’t know, John. I don’t know.”
    I took a sip of coffee and watched her. I liked it when she called me John. My Rolodex is slim, and the few people in it tend not to use my first name. Midori had called me Jun, short for Junichi, my Japanese given name, and at the time I had liked that very much, too. But that was before she had betrayed me to protect our infant son, and thereby denied me a part in his life. Among the bad memories I had just mentioned, Midori held a prominent position.
    “What would you do if you were doing something else?” I asked. “If you’d never gotten into the life. Do you ever think about that?”
    “Sometimes,” she allowed.
    “What would it be?”
    “I don’t know,” she said again. “Maybe fashion photography. That’s the cover I’ve been living in Paris, and I like it. I suppose I could have done it for real.”
    “Then do it now.”
    She took my hand. “You know I can’t. Iran is poised to go nuclear, we have Hamas in the territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Things are going to get worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all. I can’t just walk away to photograph anorexic girls on catwalks.”
    “Is that all you’d be walking away for?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    I tried again one evening as we stood pressed together on Pont Sully, taking in the glowing lights of the Ile Saint-Louis and the illuminated buttresses of Notre Dame. “Your organization is using you,” I told her. “You’ve said so yourself. Why don’t you just walk away?”
    I felt her stiffen, and she took a half-step back. “I’ve told you before,” she said, looking at me. “The ‘organization’ isn’t the point. This is about my country. My people.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t buy it. I think this is about you standing up to the men who blamed you for Gil getting killed in Hong Kong. Showing them you’re tougher than they are, that they can’t drive you out.”
    “Why does everything have to be so one dimensional with you? Yes, I have personal reasons for staying. My dignity is