The Chaos Kind

by Barry Eisler

  Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid. That was another thing her father had liked to say.

  Well, she’d been bold, all right. But it wasn’t triumph she felt. Because her mother had a preferred expression, too. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

  She was suddenly afraid it was her mother’s wisdom she should have heeded.

  chapter

  twenty-eight

  SCHRADER

  Schrader knew something was wrong as soon as the agents began driving south on I-5. “I thought you said we were going to the FBI field office,” he said. “Isn’t that in Seattle?”

  The wipers made a soft thump thump. The one called Robinson glanced at him in the rearview mirror, then back to the road. “We have different field offices. We’re taking you to Tacoma.”

  But a few minutes later, they exited the interstate and started heading southeast on surface roads. Schrader looked around, not understanding. The windows of the car were dirty, and with the rain it was hard to see. “Where are we going?” Schrader said.

  “You’ll know when we get there,” the one called McBride said, not even glancing back. “Now do us all a favor and shut the fuck up. Our job is to drive you, not to make small talk.”

  They hit a pothole and the handcuffs bit into Schrader’s wrists. “I want to talk to my lawyer,” he said, trying to control his growing unease. “Sharon Hamilton. You can call her for me. I’ll give you her number, she’s right here in Seattle. Could you do that? Please.”

  McBride turned back and looked at him. “Tell you what, buddy. If one more word comes out of your mouth, we’re going to pull over and I’m going to gag you.”

  “But it’s not fair! I don’t know where you’re taking me and I want to talk to my lawyer!”

  Without a word, Robinson pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. McBride got out. He was holding some kind of long white cloth—a bathrobe belt? Schrader was suddenly terrified.

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry! I won’t say anything else! I’ll stop!”

  McBride said nothing. He opened the rear passenger-side door, leaned in, and pulled the cloth across Schrader’s mouth. Schrader wanted to twist away, but he was afraid of what they might do if he tried to resist. “Wait, wait, wuhwuhwuh . . . ,” he said as McBride secured the belt behind his head. He tried to ask them why they were doing this, why they wouldn’t just call Sharon, but all that came out was the wuhwuhwuh sound. The cloth was rough against his tongue and the only way he could avoid gagging was to bite down to keep it from invading deeper into his mouth.

  McBride took him by the chin and looked in his eyes. “No more noise from you,” he said, his tone weirdly gentle. “Do you understand? Unless you want to get hooded, too. Do you want that?”

  Something in the kindness of the tone undid Schrader. He shook his head and started to cry.

  McBride patted his leg. “That’s good. We’ll be there soon. You’re going to be fine.”

  They started up again. Other than the thump thump, thump thump, the car was silent now. The handcuffs hurt and the cloth belt was worse. Schrader had to concentrate to keep from gagging. He felt something running down his chin and realized it was drool.

  Robinson turned on the radio, some country-and-western station. McBride said, “I hate this shit. I choose on the way back.” Robinson laughed.

  The farther they drove, the more Schrader knew something was badly wrong. The areas they passed through were increasingly remote. There were barely any houses, let alone FBI field offices. He realized he had to pee, and he couldn’t even ask. Not that they would have listened. He breathed through his nose and tried not to gag.

  The pine trees grew taller and thicker. They passed a big body of water. Schrader thought it might be Lake Tapps, but he’d lost track of where they were heading.

  They turned onto a twisting gravel road and stopped at a gate. McBride got out and unlocked and opened it. Robinson drove through, then waited while McBride relocked the gate and got back in the car.

  Robinson turned off the music. Schrader hadn’t liked it, but the silence that replaced it was much worse. Thump thump, thump thump.

  They came to a two-story green house. It had a pair of white garage doors in front. One of the doors opened. But no one in the car had pressed a button. Someone inside must have been waiting. Watching.

  They pulled inside. The wipers stopped. The garage door closed behind them with a loud mechanical rumble and a thud. For a moment, they sat there in the dark and the quiet. Schrader didn’t know where they were. Or what was happening. All he knew was that it was very bad. He tried to hold in his pee, and all at once he couldn’t.

  A man came out. He flipped on a light. He was wearing jeans and a fleece jacket. He didn’t look like an FBI agent.

  The man opened the rear passenger-side door and pulled Schrader out. “Jesus,” he said, looking at Schrader’s wet prison jumpsuit. “You guys couldn’t pull over and let him take a leak?”

  McBride came out and looked. “Oh, come on.” He looked at Robinson. “I am not cleaning that up.”

  Robinson came around and looked, too. “Oh, hell. Whatever. We’ll throw some towels over it. Keep the smell down.”

  Schrader stood there, ashamed and humiliated. He realized he was still peeing. There was nothing he could do. He started crying again.

  “Why’d you gag him?” the new man said. “He could have choked.” It didn’t sound like he cared about Schrader. It sounded like he cared about . . . something else.

  “Hey,” McBride said. “You want to take the gag off, go for it. Good luck finding another way to shut him up.”

  The new man chuckled and patted Schrader on the back. “Well, we don’t want to shut him up, do we?” He looked Schrader up and down, as though measuring him for something. “We want to hear everything he has to say.”

  chapter

  twenty-nine

  KANEZAKI

  When Kanezaki’s admin told him the DCI wanted to see him immediately, he wondered if it was connected to DNI Pierce Devereaux’s presence in the building. The word was, Devereaux had come to see Rispel, and her admin had heard shouting from behind Rispel’s closed office door. When it came to gossip, at least, in an intelligence agency there were no secrets.

  He was actually glad Rispel had summoned him. From what he’d seen on the news, Seattle was boiling over, and Dox, Larison, and Manus were flying blind without him. A meeting with Rispel would be a chance at more intel, or at least more insight. Beyond which, the anxiety of wondering how she was going to play it with him had been an unpleasant distraction. Best to get past it.

  No cozy seat in the corner this time. Rispel didn’t even get up from behind her desk when the admin let him in. Or say anything after the admin had left and closed the door. Kanezaki sat, suppressing the urge to speak. You go first, he thought. You’re the one who wanted the meeting.

  “I’ve just received some quite disturbing news from DNI Devereaux,” Rispel said after a moment. “About Seattle.”

  Well, he’d been right. It was about both Devereaux and Seattle. “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid that, through no fault of my own, I’ve put you in a bad position.”

  That, he hadn’t been expecting. “Yes?”

  “This . . . Manus matter. I was given to understand it was a payback operation, as I told you. It seems in fact it was related to Andrew Schrader, who as I’m sure you’ve seen on the news has been waltzed out of his prison cell by mysterious forces.”

  Kanezaki had already planned on playing dumb, and despite Rispel’s unforeseen gambit he saw no reason to change the plan now. “I was wondering why I never heard from you this morning.”

  “I had operators in the area tracking Manus. Six of them. They were massacred in a park.”

  “I saw it on the news. Those were your people?”

  She nodded. “Are you certain your man Dox had nothing to do with this?”

  Your man. He recognized the trap she was laying
out—an easy opportunity to claim that Dox had never been anywhere near the park. But Dox had told him there had been a scout, a woman posing as a jogger, and he couldn’t be sure of how much Rispel might know. So all he said was “I can’t imagine why he would have been involved.”

  “Have you been in touch with him?”

  Another potential trap. “Of course. He wanted to know what happened to the target. Why he was ‘all dressed up but didn’t have a prom date,’ is I think how he put it.” At any rate it sounded like something Dox would say.

  Rispel nodded. He could tell she wasn’t convinced.

  “Well,” she said after a moment. “It seems I’ve been used. Not for the first time. But that’s another story. For now, suffice to say that it seems this Manus thing wasn’t about payback for Anders, as I was given to understand, but rather about securing, or silencing, Schrader.”

  He remembered something one of his instructors had told him: The best way to conceal a lie is to wrap it in truth. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either. Did Dox say anything else?”

  He saw risks in the truth and risks in the lie. He chose the lie. “Just that he had the same concerns you do about current events. Told me the job wasn’t worth the per diem.”

  “He’s in the wind, then?”

  “Are you asking if I can contact him?”

  “Or track him down, yes.”

  “I can try. But when he doesn’t feel like answering, he doesn’t. And if I try to contact him another way, I doubt he’ll feel it’s friendly.”

  She sighed. “It’s strange. The team I had monitoring Manus. Before they were all annihilated, the leader checked in with me. She said she saw two men in the park bracing Manus. Could that have been Dox? If it was, then he and Manus must have been cooperating. There’s no other possible explanation for how Manus could have prevailed against a team of six trained operators.”

  Another thing he hadn’t seen coming. “Manus was in the park? You had me position Dox near Pike Place. The fish market.”

  “Yes, Manus had spent the night in a hostel nearby. Dox didn’t mention any of this to you?”

  “No. He told me he waited all morning near the market, heard the news about the shooting and then the prison break, and pulled the plug.” He realized he was being too reactive, giving her too much leeway to shape the conversation. “But if you had six operators . . . why did you even need Dox?”

  She frowned. “Compartmentalization, for one thing. Deniability, for another.”

  “Who were the operators?”

  “Honestly, Tom, what difference does it make?”

  “You have a lot of questions about Dox, but none about the operators?”

  She pursed her lips. “Your man Dox is alive. The operators are dead. I’d say they’ve proven their bona fides. Dox, on the other hand, is an open question.”

  She looked away for a moment, drumming her fingers on her desk. “The DNI has informed me that Schrader is likely in possession of some extremely compromising material regarding some extremely highly placed people. I don’t know the details. But the DNI is afraid this . . . prison break was engineered by Russian forces. Or possibly Chinese.”

  He’d tried hard to game out all the possibilities, but that one he hadn’t seen coming. “Wait a minute . . . You mean the DNI told you to take out Manus as a payback operation, and now he says he thinks, what, the FSB or MSS broke Schrader out of prison because of blackmail videos? Did he explain any connection between the two? Or try to resolve the discrepancy?”

  “I asked him about exactly those subjects. He’s keeping me in the dark. Telling me just enough to make me frustrated, but not enough to make me useful.”

  “I can imagine,” Kanezaki said. He couldn’t resist, but he immediately regretted it.

  Rispel chuckled. “Fair enough. As I learn more, so will you. In the meantime, see if you can get in touch with Dox. Try to find out what he knows. If there’s a storm coming, we want to batten down the hatches.”

  chapter

  thirty

  RISPEL

  After Kanezaki had left, Rispel considered.

  He’d been lying, of course. The team leader had described the men in the park, and one of them fit the photographs Rispel had of Dox from when he’d been a Marine. The leader also described him as having a Texas accent.

  Of course, in theory it was possible Dox was lying to Kanezaki rather than Kanezaki lying to her. But there was no way a contractor like Dox could have independently developed the intel to track Manus. It had to have come from Kanezaki.

  But how could Kanezaki have acquired it?

  By tracking Manus’s phone? But the man wasn’t carrying his own phone. Only a CIA-provided burner. And Manus’s exceptional surveillance consciousness was the very reason Rispel had wanted such a large team on the ground to monitor him.

  Through Diaz, then?

  Diaz was easy to track. If Kanezaki had keyed on her, he would have considered the park a likely nexus, just as Rispel had.

  Why, though? What was Kanezaki’s interest?

  She couldn’t answer that. Couldn’t imagine what advantage he would see in thwarting her.

  All right. Forget why. How?

  She couldn’t answer that, either. Diaz wasn’t difficult to track, but how would Kanezaki even have known to do it? Unless . . .

  Guardian Angel.

  No. She’d deleted all the searches related to Diaz. Deletion was unlawful, of course, but Rispel had people, trusted people, she could rely on to circumvent the safeguards.

  But given that there were ways to get around the no-deletion protocols . . . could there also be a way to log the deletions themselves?

  My God.

  She reminded herself that she was only speculating. There was no reason to panic. She didn’t really know.

  But nothing else made sense.

  Who, though? Kanezaki couldn’t have done it himself. He didn’t have the technical chops, any more than Rispel herself did.

  She had her people. Who would be Kanezaki’s equivalent?

  She didn’t know. What she did know was that no one could get in and out of Guardian Angel without leaving footprints. And her people were excellent trackers.

  chapter

  thirty-one

  DOX

  The rain had stopped, and while they waited for Diaz to come out, Dox wiped off the sideview so he could better watch for tails. The other hand he kept on the butt of the Wilson. He didn’t expect any problems and didn’t see any, but he wasn’t taking chances, either.

  Diaz came out, and Dox held the door for her as she jumped in back. He got in, and Labee was pulling away from the curb even before he had the door closed. She made an immediate right, checking the rearview as she drove.

  “You,” Diaz said. “You’re the one I saw outside the park.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Dox said. “I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to properly introduce myself. It’s been a hectic morning. You can call me Dox.”

  “Did you kill those people?”

  Dox glanced at Labee. She made a left, again checking the rearview, and said nothing.

  “I’m just glad you’re safe,” Dox said. “And I hope you’ll believe me when I say, I’d like to keep it that way.”

  Labee made another left, then a right into something that was more alley than street, squeezing past a delivery truck on the way. As soon as they were past the truck, she gunned it, throwing Dox back against the seat and making him wonder whether he’d exercised good judgment in leaving his seatbelt unbuckled in case they ran into opposition. She turned the wrong way onto a one-way street, gunned it again, and cut back onto a main thoroughfare. Dox checked the sideview. As far as he could tell, they were clean.

  Twenty minutes later, they were sitting on the mats in one of the martial arts academies where Labee taught her women’s self-defense classes. Classes were at night, and for the moment, the place was empty.

  “What did
Schrader tell you?” Labee said to Diaz. “About the videos.”

  Diaz looked at Dox as though uncertain of what to say. That was fine. He felt uncertain about her, too. He wasn’t in the habit of chatting with federal prosecutors right after gunning down a bunch of bad guys in a public park.

  “You can trust him,” Labee said. “And not just because you have to.”

  There was a long pause. Diaz said, “I tried to scare him. I mean, I did scare him, obviously. I told him that people had tried to kill me, and failed, and that now I was going to be untouchable. Which meant the next move by whoever sent the people in the park would be to silence him. I told him one word from me, and the BOP—” She glanced at Dox. “The Bureau of Prisons would remove all the protection he was getting. No more cameras, no extra guards. He said no one would hurt him, because he has videos of various powerful men having sex with underage girls.”

  “Children,” Labee said. “Alondra, I don’t care how they get referred to in statutes, underage girls are children.”

  Diaz grimaced. “Bad habit. I don’t say child prostitutes anymore, either. Prostituted children.”

  Labee nodded. “What men?”

  “He wouldn’t give me that. I got him to say a lot—more than he meant to, I’m sure, because he was scared and trying to please me—but he wouldn’t name names. But I could tell he was worried. I kept pressing him, saying how would they know, and why should they believe him. And he said his lawyer told Hobbs.”

  “Uriah Hobbs?” Dox said.

  Diaz nodded. “That Hobbs.”

  “Well,” Dox said, “that’s not great. I mean, it was bad enough when it was just Rispel and the CIA. But the attorney general runs Justice, and Justice runs the FBI. This is turning into a lot of opposition for our little band of brothers.”

  “There’s more,” Diaz said. “Schrader says the videos will be released unless he resets an automated system.”

  “Dead-man switch,” Dox said. “Like Larison suspected. Not just the angel of death—smart, too. Did Schrader offer any details? How the system gets reset, or where, or by whom?”