All the Devils

by Barry Eisler

  She did. A moment went by. Then he said, “Where the hell did you get that?”

  She felt a little adrenaline surge. He hadn’t even tried to conceal the astonishment in his tone.

  “You know what it is?”

  “Uh, yeah. Where did you get it?”

  “A man who I think was planning to use it against me somehow.”

  “What do you mean, ‘somehow’?”

  “I mean, I don’t know what it is. A drone?”

  “Yeah, it’s a drone. Called an Azrael. I hope you’ve been handling it carefully. There’s an explosive in the nose. Fragmentation charge.”

  “What?”

  “Who’s the man you took it from?”

  “I don’t know. He was following me. I doubled back on him, and he was preparing something inside an attaché case. When he saw me, he went for a gun.”

  Kanezaki didn’t respond, and for a bad moment, she wondered if she’d made a mistake in contacting him. For all she knew, the man she’d killed was one of Kanezaki’s colleagues. He’d helped her catch the park rapist, and Carl trusted him, but . . .

  She forced the thought aside. She’d consider those angles later. For now, she’d committed to a throw. Backing off halfway was a good way to get thrown yourself.

  “Here’s the thing,” Kanezaki said. “That drone is a prototype. There are three in existence. Very tightly controlled program. Even I’m not supposed to know, and I’m not going to tell you how I do.”

  Well, she didn’t need to know that. She assumed it was because Kanezaki made it a point to know everything. She wondered briefly if he’d ever been betrayed. If so, it had made a lasting impression.

  “You guys use these for . . . assassinations?” she said.

  “We don’t use them for anything yet. But yes, they’ll be the next thing in ‘dispositions,’ as we prefer to call them. Drones started off as surveillance platforms. Naturally, someone got the idea that maybe they could be missile platforms, too. And then 9/11 happened, and some S&T guys—CIA Science & Technology, the geek squad—literally bolted a couple of Hellfire missiles to the wings of an early model of Predator and blew up a truck full of high-value targets in Yemen. That was the first salvo in the drone wars, and the focus after that was loiter time, accuracy, and firepower. The Predator was succeeded by the Reaper.”

  She thought of how Carl would have made fun of all the scary names . . . Hellfire and Predator and Reaper. She could only imagine what alternatives he would propose. It made her miss him. And the way he could make her laugh. And how safe he made her feel.

  “But that was yesterday’s game,” Kanezaki went on. “Today, it’s all about miniaturization.”

  “I knew about the bird-sized ones,” she said. “It’s how Dillon tracked Carl—Dox—in Thailand. But this one . . . I mean, any smaller and it would be more like a dragonfly than a bird.”

  Kanezaki said nothing, and she realized insect-sized drones must already be in development.

  “How does it work?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you fly it close to the target, and blow it up?”

  “Pretty much. A Hellfire missile destroys the whole building. What we’re talking about . . . much smaller footprint. It’s ineffectively lethal from farther than five feet out, though maybe it could blind someone. But fly it up alongside the target closer than that, and . . . done.”

  “What about two people standing close together, talking?”

  “Sure, fly it right between them. Precise and discreet as a sniper rifle, and with a lot less required training and skill. Plus it’s more versatile, because it’s standoff. You don’t need line-of-sight. It can go anywhere—around corners, through windows, you name it.”

  “You said there are only three,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you tell me who would have access?”

  “Can you tell me what you’re involved in that would make someone with access want to use one against you?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Okay, tell me what you know.”

  She didn’t distrust him, exactly, but she didn’t like going first. On the other hand, she didn’t see an alternative. He’d dangled enough to make her realize that, and he’d done it well.

  She briefed him. When she was done, he said, “Whatever the involvement of the naval base, this drone wasn’t them. They don’t have access. They don’t even have knowledge.”

  She caught just a hint of professional pride in the assertion, and hoped it was a consequence of his confidence, rather than the cause.

  “Okay,” she said. “Then who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you find out?”

  There was a long pause. She thought he was going to tell her no. Or name some impossible price—kill someone, betray someone, she didn’t know what.

  But all he said was “Maybe. Will you give me the Azrael?”

  That wasn’t even hard. “It’s yours,” she said.

  “Okay. Keep it with you. Like the president keeps the nuclear football, okay? I don’t want that thing lost. Or to fall into the wrong hands.”

  “I get it.”

  “Call me back in thirty minutes.”

  She hesitated, then said, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he said, and clicked off.

  17

  Kanezaki took the stairs to the basement. From there, it would be a good quarter-mile walk to the tech lab. He was always looking for reasons to visit the various fiefdoms at Langley. If nothing else, it meant a little exercise. He needed it, too. These days he spent way too much time at his desk.

  The call from Lone had been the weirdest he’d received in longer than he could remember. And mixed up as he was with Rain, Dox, and the rest of his off-the-books assets, Kanezaki was no stranger to weird calls.

  He knew about the Azrael program. Give the geek squad their due, they came up with cool names, and associating the miniaturized drone project with a biblical angel of death was a great way to ensure continued funding.

  Which wasn’t to say that Azrael was just a marketing boondoggle. The geek squad had made astonishing progress with battery life, and what had started as tether powered, and then laser powered, had now reached almost an hour of entirely self-contained battery-operated flight time. The implications were enormous—not just for the war on terror, but also with regard to surveillance, both foreign and domestic—which was why the program had to be kept under such tight wraps.

  And yet, someone had made the call to let one of the Azrael birds out of its cage. Who? And why? From what Lone had told him, all she was up to was investigating a series of disappearances of teenaged girls. Which was of course a horrible thing, but it wasn’t geopolitics.

  Well, whatever it was, it must have threatened someone high up. Someone with Azrael clearances and then some. Okay, he could imagine that. What he couldn’t imagine was, why would someone want to use something so sophisticated, and with such a specific signature? At a minimum, it felt like overkill. And it also entailed what seemed unnecessary risk, because the remnants of the drone would almost certainly be discovered with the bodies of the Seattle cop and Homeland Security investigator the drone had been used to assassinate. That would point in directions a simple bullet or a regular bomb never would.

  He walked along the windowless corridor, the cinderblock walls painted an incongruous powder blue, the overhead fluorescent lights so harsh they almost called for sunglasses. Walking the various subcellars at Langley was always vaguely disorienting, akin to being in the belly of a Las Vegas casino. It could be high noon or the middle of the night or anything in between. No clocks, no windows, just the artificial brightness and the echoes of your own footfalls on the linoleum as you walked by the endless walls, and rounded undifferentiated corners, and passed locked door after identical locked door, nothing but the stenciled numbers beside them to give you even a clue about where you might be
.

  He wondered why he was helping her. Well, he wasn’t sure he was helping her yet. He might not be able to uncover anything useful. But still, he was trying.

  Some of it had to do with what he might learn from her. Misuse of an Azrael drone in a domestic assassination was the kind of thing he liked to know about. Lusted to know about, if he was being honest. Some of which had to do with the way his then-boss, Tokyo Station Chief Biddle, had tried to set him up for a fatal fall way back when Kanezaki had been a young, dumb CIA recruit. He would never forget that lesson, and he would never relax in his efforts to be forewarned and therefore forearmed. And never stop surrounding himself with people he knew he could rely on. Which was odd, because it was his colleagues he distrusted and his assets, people like Rain and Dox, who he knew had his back. Maybe it wasn’t just Biddle’s betrayal. Maybe it had to do with growing up sansei, spending time in America and Japan, and feeling like an outsider in both. He wasn’t sure.

  So why was he inclined to help Lone? Dox, he supposed. He knew there was a strong attachment between the big sniper and the Seattle cop. And because Dox was one of his most valuable assets, it made sense to do right by Lone as a way of keeping Dox in his debt.

  All that was true. And yet . . .

  The woman made him uncomfortable. She was too much of a zealot. Everything was black and white to her. It was bad enough that she herself was oblivious to shades of gray. Worse, he sensed she judged anyone with slightly more nuanced perception to be morally reprehensible.

  She lived in a simple world, he knew. Protect children. Protect women. Protect anyone who couldn’t protect themselves. Investigate rapists and child abusers, make a case, make an arrest, put a bad guy behind bars.

  It almost made him envious. She could accomplish good in the world without engaging in constant moral triage. But intelligence wasn’t like police work. In Kanezaki’s world, sometimes good ends meant very bad means. He didn’t like it. But he didn’t see a way to avoid it, either. All he could do was try to be as honest with himself as possible.

  Still. Lone herself was so clean, while he felt increasingly . . . tainted by the work he did. If he stayed too long at sea, would he lose sight of shore? Would he forget a shore even existed? He worried about that sometimes.

  Periodically, when he was called upon to do something . . . questionable, he would ask himself whether Tatsu would approve. Tatsu, Rain’s friend from the Keisatsuchō, the Japanese FBI, who had died from cancer years earlier. He had treated Kanezaki as a son—an honor under any circumstances, and particularly given that Tatsu’s own son had died in infancy. Kanezaki had never known anyone who swam in so much muck while himself somehow remaining fundamentally clean. Tatsu hadn’t been just a mentor. He had been a model, too, and Kanezaki was determined to be faithful to the memory of his example.

  Which, he supposed, might be the real reason he was willing to help Lone. He had children now, a little boy and girl. It was his job to make the world safe for them, whatever it took. But Lone protected them, or at least children like them, in her own way. Her own uncompromised way. And if he helped her, and she was good . . . maybe it would offset some of what he knew was bad about himself.

  He smiled ruefully. Maybe he should talk to an agency shrink. Open up about his doubts. But there were people he had crossed who might learn of it, and use it against him. And he wasn’t ready to turn over the asylum to the lunatics. Not yet, anyway. Better a white-knuckle drunk than to let anyone find out you were attending meetings.

  So okay. He would help her. And, in doing so, help himself. He was like someone whose job was driving a rig to haul away toxic waste. The job was critical, of course, but the rig caused a lot of pollution in its own right. But if he could find a way to purchase a carbon offset . . . well, that would be good, wouldn’t it? And then, if his kids ever had questions about the things he’d done and the life he’d led, maybe the offset would help them understand.

  He hoped so.

  He came to the entrance to the lab—an oversized double steel door. He picked up the phone intercom next to it and punched in a number. He heard a series of electronic chirps, and then a woman’s voice, doing a faux Russian accent: “This is KGB.”

  He smiled. “One day, that’s going to get you in trouble.”

  “Intelligence is risky business, comrade.”

  He laughed. “You got a few minutes for a walk?”

  “You bet,” she said, dropping the accent.

  A moment later, he heard the clack of an electronic lock, the whir of hydraulic cylinders retracting. Then the door opened, and a young woman with long auburn hair and startling green eyes came out, dressed as always in a white lab coat. Maya. Two years earlier, Kanezaki had pulled some strings to get her a position with the geek squad straight out of Caltech. And promoted her within the organization since. She was a good kid. It was strange to think of himself becoming for someone else what Tatsu had been for him, but life was a wheel and you had to roll with it.

  The door closed. “You look pale,” Kanezaki said. “Don’t they ever let you play outside?”

  She smiled. “Who wants to play outside, with the toys we have down here?”

  He inclined his head, and they started walking. “It’s actually one of those toys I wanted to ask you about,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. I wondered what you were doing down here.”

  His office was on the seventh floor now—the executive level. And seventh-floor people didn’t typically frequent the basement. He didn’t mind. Most of the assets he’d developed in the building worked on the lower floors. Some of them weren’t even officers—there were contractors, even admins. The people who made the organization run. Whose contributions and knowledge were typically overlooked. And who, for these and other reasons, were the easiest to recruit. He hoped no one would ever hold it against him. He was a spy. The way he saw it, recruiting was what spies were supposed to do.

  “I heard a rumor,” he said. “One of the Azrael birds flew off recently.”

  She looked at him, her expression a mixture of concern and surprise. He knew she wanted to ask. He also knew she wouldn’t.

  “I thought you guys were still testing them,” he added. “Who would even qualify for a borrow?”

  “I don’t know on whose authority,” she said, glancing around. “But I can tell you the guy who checked it out was a green-badger.”

  CIA employees were issued blue badges. Green denoted a contractor.

  “You guys checked out a prototype assassination drone to a contractor? Who? Why?”

  “All I can tell you is he was with OGE. Or Percivallian, or whatever they’re calling themselves now. Under a contract with ICE. You know we got the ICE drone program up and running. And still provide updates and technical assistance.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just surveillance drones.”

  She looked at him and said nothing.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Again, she said nothing.

  “Okay,” he said. “When was it checked out?”

  “Just yesterday.”

  He thought for a moment. The situation was crazy. It was irregular enough to have a prototype out in the wild. Given to a green-badger was another level. And as part of an ICE operation . . . even beyond the fact that the drone was apparently intended for the assassination of a local cop and a Homeland Security investigator, it made no sense at all.

  “I know you don’t know who authorized it,” he said. “But tell me who could have.”

  She sighed. “Tom, what are you getting me mixed up in?”

  “You’re not getting mixed up in anything.”

  “People know we’re friends. You helped get me the job.”

  “And you know what you tell me goes no further. I’m not even asking you for a name, Maya. I get you don’t know that. I just want to know parameters.”

  “You going to tell me why?”

  “Would you want to know even if I could?”

  She chuckled.
“Probably not.”

  “Then who?”

  “All I can tell you is this. You know those Azrael birds are closely watched and tightly controlled. If my boss let one go, the request would have had to come all the way from the top.”

  “The DCI?” That was the director of central intelligence, the head of the whole organization.

  She laughed. “Not even close. The boss has been running the lab since before 9/11. He dances circles around directors. Says they come and go, and he’s not wrong.”

  “Then who? DNI?” That was the director of national intelligence, who ran the entire intelligence community—CIA, NSA, everything.

  “Higher,” she said. “I’m talking SecDef. Vice president, maybe. Or POTUS. That’s it.”

  Kanezaki couldn’t see it. What interest would the secretary of defense, the vice president, or the president of the United States have in killing a Seattle cop and a Homeland Security investigator? And even if one of them did, why risk a trail that would lead back to ICE, or OGE, or CIA?

  “Anything else you can tell me?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Not even any theories?”

  “None at all. You know no one tells me anything. Not even you.”

  “But you see a lot. You could be a hell of a case officer, Maya, if you ever want to get out in the field.”

  She smiled. Probably she thought he was trying to flatter her, though in fact he’d meant it.

  “All right,” he said. “Thanks for the help. Keep me posted? If you learn anything else.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “Well, when I ask, anyway.”

  “Like I said.”

  He kept walking, past all the unmarked locked doors. It was good he’d developed ways to get behind some of them. But it seemed he was going to need to figure out how to get inside a few more.

  18

  It was past two in the morning, and Livia was in her loft, in front of her laptop. This time, it wasn’t just the usual insomnia. It was the man at Lake View, and the drone, and most of all what she’d learned from Kanezaki afterward. So although it felt distinctly surreal, she found herself researching the secretary of defense, vice president, and president.