The Detachment (18 page)

I stepped inside the entranceway, ready to provide a story in Japanese-accented broken English about needing a restroom, and was surprised to see that I wasn’t yet in the hotel. The front entrance was shared, it seemed, with an apartment complex. To my right was another dark wooden door, marked with the hotel’s signature orange; ahead of me was a long flight of wide stone stairs leading to a landing and then continuing on around and above it. Between the hotel and the apartment complex, how much foot traffic could be expected here at night? Not a great deal, I suspected, and the later Finch stayed out for dinner, the greater the likelihood that when he arrived at the hotel, we would have the moment alone I needed.

On the mosaic tiled floor alongside the staircase, I noticed some painting equipment—a tarp, several cans, a ladder, coveralls—and indeed, the corridor smelled of freshly applied oil paint. Nothing worth stealing, so the workmen probably just left it when they quit for the day. I walked over for a closer look, and saw a roll of translucent plastic sheeting the workers must have been using to keep splatter off the tiled floor. I pulled on the deerskin gloves I was carrying, knelt, and unrolled about a foot worth of plastic. It was strong and heavy—about ten mils, I guessed, maybe more—but still flexible. I gripped a corner and tried, unsuccessfully, to drive my thumb through it. I drummed my fingers along the roll and looked around, an idea forming in my mind.

There was a box cutter on the tarp next to the paint cans. I used it to cut off about a three-foot length of the plastic sheeting, which I laid out on the floor alongside the equipment, and then replaced the roll and the box cutter as I’d found them. I stepped outside, called Larison, and told him what I wanted him to do. Then I called Dox, who confirmed that he and Treven were close by the restaurant and that Finch and Capps were inside.

“Good,” I told him. “I want you to give them plenty of space. All I need to know is when they leave, whether they’re heading toward the hotel together or whether they say goodnight before, and when our friend is a minute away from the hotel.”

“You sure he’s going back to the hotel? It’s a nice city and the weather’s good, he might want to go to a club or something.”

I thought of Finch, whose file photos had revealed a balding, colorless bureaucrat of about fifty—not so different in appearance, in fact, from J. Edgar Hoover, to whom Horton had compared him. “You think our guy is going clubbing?” I asked.

There was a pause. “Well, not clubbing, maybe. But there are areas of the city where a gentleman who’s so inclined can find women of a certain professional disposition. If we get done in time tonight, I’m fixing to visit one of those areas myself.”

“I think you might be confusing your own proclivities with those of our friend.”

“I’m not sure ‘proclivities’ is the word I’d use, but okay, I suppose I see your point.”

“Look, if he stays out for whatever reason, you just keep watching him. The later he gets back to the hotel, in fact, the better. I just need that one-minute heads-up regardless.”

I clicked off, then called Treven and told him to coordinate with Dox to watch the restaurant and the route to the hotel. I hoped we could finish this thing tonight. If we couldn’t, our next chance would be in the morning, which would mean watching the hotel entrance all night and trying to do the job in daylight. And every minute you spend in that kind of proximity to a target, you have to remember someone might be targeting you.

A
n hour later, Larison and I were strolling the cramped streets of a neighborhood near the hotel, each of us having separately examined the area as thoroughly as we could in the short time available. We compared notes on points of ingress and egress; noted the locations of ATMs, which would be equipped with cameras; and agreed on the overall approach we would employ. All we had to do now was wait.

“Why go to Washington?” he said at one point. “Forget it. Go after Hort before he comes after you.”

Horton had told me the third job would be in D.C. The plan was for the four of us to meet up there after Vienna and receive instructions after we’d arrived.

“How?” I said. “A JSOC colonel? Who knows you’d like nothing more than to take him down and get those diamonds back? What’s your plan?”

He looked at me. “I know how to get to him. How to get to him where he lives.”

“How?” I said, intrigued.

He shook his head. “Not now. When you’re ready. When you look me in the eye and tell me you understand there’s no other way.”

“Then we’ll have to wait.”

I watched him. I could see he was frustrated and trying to suppress it.

“What does your friend Dox think?” he said, after a moment.

I saw no advantage to confirming a personal attachment. “I don’t know that I’d call him my friend.”

“Don’t bullshit me. He acts like he doesn’t care about anything other than getting paid and laid, but I can see that’s an act. You know how he looks when we’re all together?”

“How?”

“Like a Rottweiler watching out for his master. I wish I had someone like that guarding my back.”

“I’m not his master.”

“You know what I mean. Behind the good ol’ boy façade, he just looks loyal. Fiercely loyal. And you don’t show much, but I have a feeling you must have done something to earn that. I can tell you’ve been through the shit together. I just don’t know what kind of shit.”

I wound up telling him about Hong Kong, and Hilger, and how Dox had walked away from a five-million-dollar payday to save my life, and how I’d killed two innocent people just to buy time to save Dox’s life. I wondered if I was being stupid. But something made me want to tell him. I wasn’t sure what, but I’ve learned to trust my gut.

When I was done, he said, “So they used Dox to get to you.”

The question made me uneasy. I wondered if I’d told him too much. But something still told me it would be useful for him to know. I didn’t know why.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Is there anyone else like that? Someone you care about? But who couldn’t protect themselves? Who would be…what’s the expression? A hostage to fortune?”

My mind instantly flashed on my small son, Koichiro, whom I’d seen only twice, as an infant in New York, whose mother would have told him by now his father was dead. Whose mother, indeed, had tried to make it so.

I didn’t answer. I’d told him enough already. Maybe too much.

He nodded and said, “Well, whoever that person is, he or she is now a hostage to Hort.”

I stopped and looked at him, trying to read his expression in the dim light. “Is that what he has on you?”

He answered the same way I had, by saying nothing.

It was hard to imagine this stone killer being that attached to anyone else. But I supposed people might say the same about me.

“Who?” I asked.

His mouth twisted into something midway between a smile and a grimace. “The particulars don’t really matter, do they?”

I thought of Koichiro again, then said, “Probably not.”

We might have moved on at that point, but instead we lingered, caught in that frustrating space between the desire for understanding and the futility of words for achieving it.

“How do you even know Horton has these diamonds?” I said. I knew he would read the small expression of interest as a weakening, and that it might therefore draw him out.

It did. He said, “Because he took them from me.”

He went on to tell me an astonishing story about CIA videos of terror suspects being gruesomely tortured by American interrogators, how the videos were made, who was in them, who stood to be sacrificed as fall guys if the videos ever got out.

“I read about this a few years ago,” I said. “I wondered why the Agency was admitting to making those tapes, and to destroying them.”

“Well, now you know. They were missing, not destroyed.”

“Missing because you took them.”

He nodded. “The diamonds were a ransom for the tapes’ return. But Hort stole them from me.”

I almost asked why he hadn’t retaliated by releasing the tapes, but then realized: the hostage. Horton, it seemed, had collected the necessary cards, and then called Larison’s bluff.

“When I checked up on you?” I said. “My source told me you were dead.”

He smiled coldly. “Greatly exaggerated.”

“You staged that?”

A young couple was heading toward us, walking hand-in-hand, the hard consonants of their German echoing off the close-set buildings and the stone sidewalk. Larison paused. They might not have understood English, but at a minimum they would have recognized it, and why give them a recollection of having passed two American men near where a body would soon be found?

When they were safely beyond us, Larison said, “As a way of throwing off the animosity I knew I was going to stir up. Hort saw through it.”

“Still, that’s a hell of a feat that you managed to stay ahead of them at all. You must have had the whole U.S. government hunting for you.”

“It was…interesting. I had to keep moving. A lot of buses, some hitchhiking. Rarely more than one night in the same town.”

“Yeah, I’ve done some of that myself. You see any good parts of the country?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer. His eyes drifted away, and his mouth loosened slightly as though in mild wonderment, or even reverence.

“I liked The Lost Coast,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get back, someday.”

Something had happened there, though I doubted he’d tell me what. Knowing Larison, it was probably something dark. I decided not to press.

“The tapes,” I said. “Are you in them?”

We started walking again, in silence. Finally he said, “I’m not proud of everything I’ve done. Are you?”

I found myself considering the question. Considering it carefully.

“There are…things,” I said. “Things that weigh on me. What a friend of mine calls ‘the cost of it.’ You know what I’m talking about?”

He nodded. “Of course.”

“I don’t know about you, but when I look back, and I’m being honest with myself, which mostly I try to do, it occurs to me that I’ve done more bad in the world than I’ve ever done good.”

I wondered why I’d said that to him. I’d never thought it before. At least not in those words. Was it what Horton had said to me over breakfast that morning?

I thought he was going to blow it off. Instead, he said, “I have…dreams. Really bad ones. Related to some of the shit I’ve done, the shit that’s on those tapes. I couldn’t tell you the last time I lay down at night without dreading what I would face in my sleep. Or the last time I slept through the night without waking up covered in sweat and going for the weapon on the bedstand next to me. The truth is…”

In the dark, I saw his teeth gleam in a smile that faltered into a grimace.

“The truth is,” he went on, “I’m pretty fucked up. But what can you do? A shark has to keep swimming, or it dies.”

I thought of Midori, the mother of my son. “You know, I once said the same thing to a woman I was trying to explain myself to.”

“Yeah? Did she understand?”

I remembered the last time I’d seen her, in New York, and what she’d tried to do just beforehand.

“That would be a no,” I said, and we both laughed.

My phone buzzed. Dox. I picked up and said, “What’s the status?”

“Our diners have just left the restaurant. A nice familial hug goodnight, and our guy is currently on his way to your position alone and on foot, ETA ten minutes. Guess you were right about the clubbing.”

“Good. Have—”

“Already done. Our friend on the scooter is zigzagging the street near you. He’ll see the diner when he’s one minute out. When you get a buzz from scooter man, it’s a one-minute ETA. And I’ll move in close but not too close in case you need me. Good luck.”

“Okay, good.” I clicked off and said to Larison, “Less than ten minutes. Let’s get in position.”

We headed toward the hotel. As we neared the end of Sonnenfels-gasse, just two blocks away, a uniformed cop turned the corner, heading toward us. I wasn’t unduly alarmed—there was no reason for him to pay any particular attention to us, and Larison and I had already established that “inebriated drinking companions” would be our cover for action in case we were stopped. I retracted into my harmless Japanese persona and prepared to just walk on by in the shadows.

But a few meters away, he called out,
“Hey.”
Larison, I realized, and that damn danger aura he put out. The cop must have keyed on it, consciously or unconsciously.

I gave him a small, unsteady wave and moved to go around, but he stopped and put up his hand to indicate we should do the same.
Shit.

The cop said,
“Wo gehen Sie so Spät noch hin?”
I shook my head. Even if I’d understood his words, and I didn’t, I would have pretended not to. The less basis we had for engagement, the more likely he would be to give up in frustration, or otherwise to lose interest and move on.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
he said, and this I did understand. Do you speak German?

Larison answered in slurred Spanish:
“Solamente espanol, y un poco de ingles.”
Only Spanish, and a little English—close enough to the Portuguese I spoke from my time in Brazil to be easily comprehensible.