The Detachment (6 page)

Probably he was lying about the copies, but I would never know for sure until someone tried to use them against me, and that would happen only if friendlier tactics proved useless. So Larison could be expected to try something relatively subtle to begin with. And so far he’d handled it deftly, I had to admit. You never want to present extortion as a threat: doing so just needlessly engages the subject’s ego and creates unhelpful resistance. Instead, you want to present the threat as though it has nothing to do with you, as though in fact you’re on the subject’s side. Maybe that explained the hints about a gap between Horton and them. It would have been a good way to help me persuade myself that my problem wasn’t with these two, but with someone else. If he was ruthless enough, and I sensed he was, he might even have sacrificed the two giants for the same end.

“Look,” Larison said, “no one can just disappear anymore. Everyone is findable. It’s a condition of modern life. You want total security? You have to disconnect. Live off the grid, remotely, no contact with the outside world. But if you like cities, and judo, and jazz, and coffee houses, and culture, all of which is part of your file, you don’t have a chance if someone like Hort is determined to find you. The only way is to make it so the people who are looking for you, stop looking for you.”

“How do you do that?” I asked, my tone casual.

He took another sip of coffee. “You wait for the right opportunity.”

“Or you make one,” I suggested.

He nodded. “Or you make one. And I’ll tell you one other thing. If you decide to accept Hort’s offer, whatever it is? Charge him for it. Charge him a lot. He can afford it.”

He sounded unhappy as he said the words, even acrimonious, and if I hadn’t picked up earlier on some kind of rift, I couldn’t miss it now. Whatever Horton was up to, I decided it must be important to him, if it was generating animosity in someone as seemingly formidable as Larison.

No one said anything after that. Larison obviously knew when it was time to shut up and let the prospect close the deal with himself, and Treven was smart enough to follow the older man’s lead.

We sipped our coffee in silence. Either this was an impressive piece of theater that included two dead extras, or what they were telling me, and what they were hinting at, was largely true. Horton wanted to make Dox and me an offer, most likely one we couldn’t refuse. He’d made similar offers already to Treven and Larison, who were unhappy about it and looking for an alliance or some other way out, but were also smart enough to keep those particular cards concealed for now. As for copies of the evening’s home video, for now there was no way to know. And for the moment, it didn’t really matter.

For the third time that night, I saw no advantage in waiting. I finished my coffee and took the video units from the table.

“How do I contact Horton?” I said.

L
ater that night, in the endless, twisting depths of the Shinjuku subway complex, where the multiple levels and concentrated crowds make tracking and locating someone from a signal nearly impossible, I checked the video on the cameras. The footage was grainy and helter-skelter, but properly enhanced it might provide damaging evidence for the prosecution, if it ever came to that. I destroyed the drives on all the units and disposed of them. The phones were useless—the only numbers dialed were to each other. I disposed of them, too. Then I found an Internet café and Googled Larison, Treven, and Horton. Larison and Treven drew precisely nothing. Horton was mentioned in passing in a few news articles, and had a Wikipedia entry consisting only of a brief outline of a distinguished military career and a note that he was divorced and had no children. Finally, I made three calls, all from separate pay-phones.

First, the number Larison had given me. A deep, Mississippi Delta baritone I remembered from Afghanistan, but with more age behind it, more gravity, answered, “Is this who I hope it is?”

I said, “I don’t know. Is there someone else you were hoping to hear from?”

He laughed. “There are people I hope to hear from, and people I hope to never hear from again. Glad to say you’re in the first camp. How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been fine. I heard you want to propose something.”

“You heard right.”

“I’m listening.”

“With all the water under the bridge here, it’d be better if we did this face to face.”

“All right, come out here. Your guys can tell you where to find me.”

“They already did. Thing is, I’m too tied up right now for overseas travel. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll meet you halfway. How about Los Angeles? Anywhere in the city you’d like.”

Los Angeles was easy enough to get to from Tokyo, and a destination with so many indirect routes I didn’t think I’d have trouble concealing my movements. Reflexively, I started considering how I would approach the situation if I were trying to get to me, and was surprised, and a little unsettled, at how familiar and natural it felt to slip back into the mindset. Almost as though I’d missed it.

“If you want me to come to you,” I said, testing what Larison had told me, “you’ll need to cover my travel expenses. And I travel first class.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less. Tell you what. However our conversation turns out, you’ll get twenty-five thousand dollars just for showing up. That ought to cover your travel expenses, and then some.”

“Fifty,” I said. “You’ve already created problems just by the way you contacted me.”

There was a pause, and I wondered if I’d asked for too much, if only because my boldness might suggest someone had encouraged me to press. But so what? If there was some kind of ill will with Larison, Horton would have to be a fool not to know it already. And the man I remembered from Afghanistan wasn’t a fool.

“I understand you’ve created some problems yourself,” he said, and I realized Larison and Treven had likely already checked in and briefed him about the dead contractors. I wondered again about copies of the video. “But okay, we’ll make it fifty. If you can be there tomorrow.”

I wondered what this was about. If he was willing to pay fifty thousand U.S. just to get me to show up, it was something special. Meaning, almost certainly, something dangerous.

“Tomorrow’s impossible,” I said. “The day after I can do. For the fifty.” The truth was, it didn’t matter that much to me one way or the other. I just don’t like to be rushed. Time pressure is what you do to someone when you’re trying to get him to react without pausing to think.

“All right,” he said, “the day after. You can reach me at this number. I’ll be in the center of the city, but we can meet anywhere you want.”

I paused before responding. Why did I want to do this? The money? The advantages of dealing with whatever it was head-on rather than waiting? Some dark, subversive part of me, sick of my civilian pretensions, grabbing on to a way back in—the killer inside me, the Iceman, demanding his due?

“I’ll call you,” I said, and clicked off.

No doubt his emphasis on flexibility was intended to mollify my security concerns. He’d already chosen the city and had tried to choose the day; if his demands got much more specific than that, he knew it would make me jumpy.

The next call was to Tomohisa “Tom” Kanezaki, an ethnic Japanese American I’d first encountered when he was a green case officer with the CIA’s Tokyo Station. I didn’t trust him, exactly, but we’d traded enough favors for me not to view him as an active threat, and to know he could be counted on to do what he said he would. We’d lost touch about a year earlier, when I was living in Paris with Delilah, thinking I was happy. The last time we’d spoken, he was on a rotation at Langley and hating it.

He picked up with a characteristically noncommittal
Yes.
In Japan it had usually been
Hai.
Either way, it felt oddly good to hear his voice.

“Still living the good life at company headquarters?” I said.

There was a pause, and I could picture him smiling. I wondered if he was still wearing the wire-rimmed spectacles. Probably. They made him look bookish, as he once genuinely had been. These days, they’d conceal the street smarts he’d developed, and he was astute enough to know the value in that.
No aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu,
as the Japanese saying goes. The hawk with talent hides its talons.

“I wouldn’t call it particularly good,” he said. “What are you…is everything okay?”

“I have a small favor to ask—very small.”

Kanezaki could always be counted on to ask for a favor in return. Some of his return favors were pretty damn big, so it paid to establish that what I was asking for was trivial.

“You want to do this with Skype?” he said. “If you don’t think my mobile is secure enough.”

This was both a concession to my security paranoia and a way to build the favor up with some indices of importance. “No,” I said. “It’s not that kind of thing. I just want the skinny on a JSOC colonel named Scott Horton. People call him Hort. You know of him?”

There was a pause, and I wondered if Kanezaki was considering whether I was going to kill Horton. It was the way he was used to thinking of me. But he’d know if that were the case I wouldn’t have asked him.

“Yeah, I know of him. But his position is—”

“Classified, I know. I know what his position is. I want to know about the man. Any reason he wouldn’t have my best interests at heart?”

“That’s hard to say. The kind of thing you do tends to create enemies.”

“Used to do.”

He laughed. “And yet, here you are.”

I ignored it. “He wants to meet me.”

“You think it’s a setup?”

“I always think it’s a setup. Sometimes it even is.”

“Well, all I can tell you is, he’s got a lot of weight behind him. In the last administration, JSOC was reporting directly to the vice president and doing some extremely off-the-books stuff. Seymour Hersh called it a hit squad.”

“Any truth to that?”

He laughed. “You’re not really asking me to verify a Sy Hersh story, are you?”

It was true, then. “What else?”

“Let’s just say the new administration hasn’t changed JSOC’s mission. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that a lot of traditional Agency responsibilities have been taken from us and transferred to the military.”

“Why?”

“We’ve been in Afghanistan for over a decade now. Iraq for nearly that long. Plus other places that don’t make it into the news quite so much. A decade of global war means a lot of prominence for the military. They get what they want, and they want a lot.”

“What about a former ISA operator, last name Larison? And a current ISA guy, last name Treven?”

“The names don’t mean anything to me, but I can look. And I’ll keep my ear to the ground for anything on what Horton might want with you.”

Coming from Kanezaki, that might actually mean something. “I appreciate it.”

“Do the same for me. I’d like to know what he’s up to. You’re not easy to find, so he must be motivated.”

I sensed a hint of professional jealousy in the comment. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to share his assets. Or his former assets. And as a return favor, it wasn’t much. I told him I’d keep him posted and clicked off.

The third call was to Dox. “It’s me,” I said, when he’d picked up.

“‘Me’? Who’s ‘me’?” he said in his thick southern drawl.

We’d been through this before. “You know who ‘me’ is.”

He laughed, obviously pleased. “I know, I know, just trying to see—”

“If you can get me to say my name on the phone, I know. You’re going to have to try harder than that.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You’re getting older. I’ll get you sooner or later. How’ve you been, man? Goddamn if it’s not good to hear your voice, even with no name behind it.”

I briefed him on what was going on, and I could imagine him grinning on the other end.

“Sounds like someone’s going to get a mighty special going-away party,” he said.

“Yeah, and they want us to cater.”

“Well, I’m usually amenable to preparing some tasty victuals, if the per diem’s right. But what about you? I thought you were out of the catering business.”

“I’m just going to listen to a proposal.”

He laughed. “Whatever you say, partner.”

Dox was perfectly comfortable employing his deadly talents and could never understand my ambivalence. I said, “I’ll let you know what I learn.”

“Let me know? You’re fixing to go out there alone?”

“Look, there’s no sense—”

“I’ll tell you about sense. There’s no sense in leaving your dick flapping in the breeze while you walk into God knows what. I’ll meet you there and cover your back. And don’t tell me you don’t need it. You say that every time, and plenty of times you’ve been wrong.”

He was right, of course. He was as reliable a man as I’d ever known, and had once even walked away from a five-million-dollar payday to save my life. I just don’t like to have to rely on anyone.

But under the circumstances, the reflex felt like stupidity, like denial. “All right,” I said. “They’re paying me just for the face-to-face. I’ll split it with you.”

“Fair enough. What about your particulars? Secure site?”