The Detachment

by Barry Eisler

  But Horton was right—I needed four at least, and even so it wasn’t going to be easy. We knew Shorrock would be staying at the Wynn, but that was about all. We didn’t know what room he’d be in, and, outside the keynote, we had no details about his schedule. Given the size of the resort, without more it would take a lot of luck to find and fix him, let alone make him expire of “natural causes.” Nonetheless, I had an idea for how we might close to him, and I might have proposed it directly. But I decided it would be better to solicit opinions. I had no command authority over these people, and I sensed things would go more smoothly if I helped them reach their own conclusions, rather than presenting them with mine. So I asked Treven and Larison what they thought.

  “The keynote,” Treven said immediately. “Cover the exits, follow him when he’s done, rotate the point, wait for the opportunity.”

  It was the response I was expecting from Treven, who struck me as a little more eager and a little less devious than Larison, and I didn’t like it. “The keynote’s tempting because it’s our only real fixed point,” I said. “But that’s also the problem. Most likely he’ll be surrounded by hangers-on before and after. And worse, because it’s on his public schedule and therefore an obvious vulnerability, his security detail will be alert and keeping very close. It couldn’t hurt to try, especially if we find we can’t pick him up any other way, but I don’t think it’s our first choice.”

  “Then what?” Treven said.

  I rubbed my chin as though thinking. “The file says he’s a fitness fanatic,” I said. “I wonder if there’s something we could do with that.”

  “You think the gym?” Treven said.

  I nodded slowly as though favorably considering his idea. “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.” I turned to Dox. “What do you think?”

  A dog was barking outside, the sound high-pitched and screechy, probably a small breed and apparently an exceptionally neurotic one. It had been going off intermittently since we’d checked in and its fingers-on-a-blackboard pitch made it hard to tune out. Dox got up, opened the drapes a crack, and looked down. “Wish that mutt would simmer down,” he said. “Looks like somebody tied it up by the pool. Nobody’s even there, what the hell’s it yapping at? Lucky for it I don’t have my rifle.”

  When Dox was engaged—on what he was watching through his sniper scope, for example—his focus was supernatural. But when he wasn’t all the way on, he tended to be all the way off. “What do you think?” I said again, drawing on the patience our partnership required.

  Dox let the drapes fall closed and sat back down on the bed. “Shoot, partner, you know I do my best work outdoors. I defer to you on this kind of situation. Main thing, it seems to me, is that we get him alone and away from all the cameras for a minute. Could be that means something with the gym. Or maybe a lavatory. Figure he’ll be drinking a lot of coffee, or green tea if he’s a health nut, he’ll have to hit the head at some point. Follow him in, spray him in the face, head back to L.A. for a beer.”

  “We’ll need to test the cyanide first,” Larison said. “And assuming it works as advertised, pick up a commercial antagonist. No telling what Hort has in that ‘antidote.’”

  At some point, when the moment was right, I’d press him on what was up between Horton and him. But not now. “How do you see it?” I said, looking at him. “The keynote, or the gym?”

  Larison smiled, and I wondered if he knew what I was doing. “I think we can exploit the gym,” he said.

  “I’m not saying we can’t,” Treven said quickly. “But it’ll take some luck. The file says he’s into CrossFit. Well, I do some CrossFit WODs myself, and you’d have a hard time predicting on any given day whether you’ll find me in the gym or out on the road. So for all we know, Shorrock could decide the hell with the gym, I’ll go for a run and see the sights.”

  “Wads?” I asked, not revealing that I was pleased by his objections.

  “Workout Of the Day,” Dox and Larison answered simultaneously.

  I mentally corrected to WOD. “Am I the only guy who’s not doing this CrossFit stuff?”

  “You do it already,” Dox said. “You just don’t know the name.”

  “Well,” I said, “whatever Shorrock does, let’s take the potential obstacles one-by-one and see if the workout intel could be useful. First, how likely is it he’ll go for a run?”

  Dox tugged on his goatee. “Hundred degree heat, hordes of tourists to dodge? Plus I guarantee the gym at the Wynn is fancy, and there’ll be ladies in spandex. Who’d want to miss that? So I’d bet against a run.”

  As was often the case, I wouldn’t have put it the way Dox did, but I couldn’t disagree with his logic.

  “All right,” Treven said, holding up a hand in a maybe so, but… gesture. “Let’s assume he’ll be at the gym at some point. It’s still a huge window. A real CrossFit guy would get up extra early if necessary to squeeze in a WOD before a full day of meetings. Or he might skip lunch to get one in, or maybe right before bedtime.”

  The dog barked again. Dox said, “Christ almighty. That is the worst bark I’ve ever had to endure. Sounds like someone’s giving the damn thing an electrified enema.”

  I tried not to picture it. Which of course just made it worse.

  “You’re right,” I said, looking at Treven. “Still, if there were a way we could catch him at the gym, it could really put us in business. It’s not on his schedule, so not a hot spot from the perspective of his security detail. In fact, if one of us could be in there when he arrived, we’d likely be overlooked. He’s supposed to have two Secret Service bodyguards, right? That’s not a full detail. If it were the president, they’d have a full team to clear every room ahead of time, whether he was announced or not. But with just two, they’ll be focused more on anyone trying to follow Shorrock than they will be on people who are already in a place he randomly decides to visit.”

  There was quiet for a moment. Treven said, “Well, we could try rotating through the gym. We’re all in shape, so to anyone else in the gym, the staff or whoever, a ninety-minute workout wouldn’t seem unusual, and probably each of us could kill a good amount of time showering or using the sauna or whatever in the locker room before and after. If we rotate through one at a time, two hours each, that’s an eight-hour window we’d have covered. Still fifty-fifty in a sixteen-hour day, but not bad, either.”

  I nodded, pleased. I had the same idea, of course, but by expressing it as a vague wish, I’d let Treven turn it into a plan he could now feel was his own.

  “It’s an interesting suggestion,” I said. “And now that you mention it, I think we might do even better. We don’t need wall-to-wall coverage, do we? Figure Shorrock will work out for at least an hour. If he’s not there when the first of us is ready to leave, the next person could show up, say, thirty minutes later and still easily overlap with Shorrock. That means we’re up to almost ten hours of coverage. And I’m betting he’s more likely to show up early than late. The part of his day that’ll be easiest to manage is the part before the meetings. Plus, the main reason he’s out here is to be wined and dined. That would all happen at night. So if we play it right, we’re actually doing significantly better than fifty-fifty.”

  Dox drummed his hands on his belly. “Not bad odds, for Vegas. And there’s one other possibility, though I’d call it a long shot given the Sin City venue and all that. The file says he’s a church-going man. Every Sunday.”

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Well, he’s scheduled to leave on Sunday. Maybe a pious man would stop at a local house of worship on his way out of town. By the time his flight gets to the East Coast, with the three-hour time difference, he’d be too late for anything back home.”

  I nodded. “Agreed, a long shot, and hard to know where he’d be going ahead of time, assuming he goes at all.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. Though how many churches could there be in Las Vegas?”

  “Hundreds,” I said. “If
you want to make money in hospitals, you build where people are sick.”

  Larison said, “I like the gym. We can rotate like Treven said, with thirty-minute intervals in between to extend our coverage. Whichever one of us sees him in there can alert the others. They have extensive spa facilities, and if he uses any of it—toilet, shower, steam room, hot tub, sauna—we’ll only need him alone for a second. Sauna or toilet would be perfect, in fact. Easily explained as a heart attack with the first, embolism with the second.”

  I nodded thoughtfully, again trying to convey that these were persuasive points I hadn’t fully considered myself.

  “Doing a man in the steam room,” Dox said. “When you say it like that, it sounds dirty.”

  I didn’t bother pointing out that no one else had said it like that.

  Treven said, “The gym makes sense.”

  The dog barked again. Dox winced and said, “Car alarms, people who yell on cell phones in public, and people who don’t bring their yapping dogs inside. And people who put their seats all the way back in coach, while we’re on the subject. I swear, there’s no more civility in the world. Listen, I’m gonna grab a soda from the machine. Anyone want anything?”

  The others shook their heads. Dox stepped out.

  We talked more about how to approach Shorrock, what we’d do if he showed up in the gym, what we’d do if he didn’t. I noted Dox had been gone a little longer than a trip to the vending machine would have warranted, and wondered if maybe he’d felt an uncharacteristic need for some privacy and had actually gone out to use a restroom in the lobby.

  “What about reconnaissance?” Treven asked. “We need to walk the resort to get the layout and nail down details. We can’t do it together, obviously, but we’ll be conspicuous as singletons wandering the casino. It’s strange behavior, and staff monitoring the cameras might pick up on it.”

  No one responded right away, and in the silence, I realized the dog had finally stopped yapping. It was a relief.

  “That’s a good point,” I said. “What I usually do in a situation like this is get an escort. They don’t care what you do or what you talk about as long as they’re being paid, and if they notice you watching your back or doing anything tactical, they usually attribute it to the fact that you’re married and afraid of being seen.”

  “Works for me,” Treven said. “I’ve done it myself.”

  Larison nodded. “It’s a good idea.”

  There was the sound of a keycard sliding into the door lock, and a moment later Dox walked in. He was grinning.

  “Well, the cyanide works,” he said, holding up the canister.

  For an instant, I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then it hit me. I said, “You didn’t.”

  Dox nodded. “I did. If I had to listen to that thing for one more minute, I was going postal, I swear. This way, it was two birds with one stone. The cyanide works, and we get to enjoy the sounds of silence.”

  I shook my head and sighed, thinking I should have seen it coming.

  “Oh, come on,” Dox said. “Tell me you didn’t think of it yourself.”

  Treven said, “I wish I had.”

  We all laughed at that, and maybe the laughter was good. Nothing brought a team together better than shared laughter—well, shared fighting, maybe, but bar fights were a younger man’s game, and anyway we couldn’t afford the attention. But the momentary sense of camaraderie struck me as likely to be just that: momentary. Nothing more than a lull, a veneer temporarily obscuring differences that might soon impel each of us to very different sides of a board, the contours of which I sensed but couldn’t yet discern.

  Treven benchpressed a hundred eighty pounds at a dead weight station in the spacious Wynn fitness center, taking his time, going easy. He could have put another hundred on the bar, but that kind of weight would have been conspicuous, and besides, he was only here in case Shorrock showed up, not for a real workout. Shorrock was scheduled to check in that day, with the keynote tomorrow, and though check-in was at three, it wasn’t inconceivable he’d arrive earlier. So Treven had started in at the gym at noon, doing nothing other than the length of his workout to distinguish himself from the other guests who’d been coming and going. It had been nearly two hours already, and no sign of Shorrock. It was about time for him to move on and let Dox, who was on deck, take over. It was silly, but he’d been hoping he’d be the one to make the initial contact. He wasn’t used to feeling like the junior member of a team, and although it embarrassed him to admit it, he wanted a chance to prove himself.

  They’d been here for three days now, and knew the public layout of the hotel well enough to be employees. They’d been over every inch of the property—every bar, every restaurant, every club, every store, every men’s room. The parking garages, the pools, the perimeter. Everything. They were as ready as they could be on short notice and given the other constraints they were operating under. All they needed now was a little break, something they could leverage into something bigger.

  He set the bar back on the rack and walked over to the mats to stretch. He hoped he was doing the right thing, taking out Shorrock. He’d always been fine knowing the military would disown him if he ever blew an op, but at least he’d always been able to comfortably assume his actions had been sanctioned by the proper chain of command. This one was different. The president had an assassination list, true—in fact, its existence had recently leaked, along with the fact that among its targets were American citizens. None of which was news to anyone in the ISA, but it wasn’t like the president had called him personally. Treven didn’t know where Hort’s orders had come from, or whether there had been orders at all. But what was he supposed to do? The kind of shit the military used him for was so deniable he hadn’t received written orders in longer than he could remember. If he’d asked Hort for something in writing now, Hort probably would have referred him for a psych evaluation.

  He rotated his neck, cracking the joints, and started doing some yoga stretches. It was a tricky situation. On the one hand, Hort had repeatedly proven himself manipulative and worse. On the other hand, if what he claimed about Shorrock was true, that he was planning domestic mass casualty attacks, taking the man out could save thousands of American lives.

  But was that really the reason he was here? He’d never been so confused about his own motivations…hell, he’d never been confused at all. The deal had always been simple: a photograph; a file; intelligence on who, what, and where. How was always up to him. Why was never even a consideration. Now, everything was different. Maybe it was all a natural transition. Maybe before he’d been nothing but a tool, albeit a sharp one, and now he was waking up to the way real hitters played the game. Yeah, maybe. That’s what Hort had told him, anyway—that he was beginning to understand the way the world really worked, that he was on his way to being a player in his own right.

  He was afraid of those security tapes, he had to admit. The way Hort had presented it, it was the CIA that had the tapes—the deputy director, a guy named Stephen Clements, specifically—and Hort was leaning on Clements to keep the tapes under wraps. But Treven wondered. Isn’t that exactly how an operator like Hort would position this kind of leverage? Someone else is trying to extort you, and I’m your best friend who’s stopping him. How could he ever really know? If he stepped out of line, he could easily find himself arrested and charged with murder. Regardless of the truth of it all, Hort would just tell him he was sorry, he’d done all he could to prevent it from happening.

  He knew he couldn’t live this way forever. At some point, he would have to go after Clements, and probably Hort, too. That, or just tell them all to fuck off and take his chances. He wondered if the real reason he’d accepted Hort’s orders this time was just to defer that day of reckoning.

  Or was it something else? Having learned through multiple near-death experiences just how much of the noble-sounding king and country rhetoric was bullshit designed to fool the impressionable and empower the co
rrupt, was it possible he still craved being on the inside so much he was pretending not to know better? When he put it that way, it felt pathetic, but the notion of abandoning the military—abandoning the ISA—was horrible. Just imagining it made him feel anxious to the point of panic. What would he do? Who would he be?

  He blew out a long breath and popped up on his palms in upward facing dog, his pelvis on the floor, his back arched. He liked the yoga. He found he didn’t bounce back quite as quickly as he had in his football and wrestling days, and that the esoteric stretches seemed to help.

  One of the attendants walked over, an attractive brunette wearing a spa uniform with a nametag reading Alisa. Treven had noticed her watching him earlier and wondered if she was interested. Apparently that would be a yes.

  “I didn’t figure you for a yoga aficionado,” she said.

  “I don’t know about aficionado,” Treven said, coming to his feet. “But I like the stretches.”

  “It’s smart. A lot of guys who are into weights don’t stretch enough.”

  “Do you teach this stuff?”

  “Personal trainer. I don’t think you need it, though. I was watching you, you know what you’re doing.”

  She was certainly easy on the eyes, and any other time, he would have been happy to follow wherever this led. But not today.

  “Well, I better wrap it up,” he said. “You can only do so much yoga in a day.”

  She smiled, just a hint of Oh, well in the way her eyes lingered on his. “Can I bring you anything? A towel, water…?”

  “No, I’m good. Thanks for asking.”