The Detachment

by Barry Eisler

  He couldn’t disagree with Larison’s analysis of the current state of play—after all, he knew firsthand how manipulative and ruthless Hort could be. And the points Larison had made about the security video placing Treven at a murder scene were persuasive, too. If Larison was right, the choice was pretty straightforward: kill or be killed.

  Still, the thought of taking out Hort made him anxious, almost dizzy. Could he really do this? To his own commander? He tried to think of it as a fragging, like what enlisted men had sometimes done to incompetent lieutenants in Vietnam. But when he imagined himself putting a round into Hort’s forehead, the neat hole, the momentary pressure bulge of the eyes from cavitation in the cranium, the instantaneous loss of expression from the face and rigidity from the body…something inside him rebelled.

  What would he do afterward? Hort would be replaced, naturally, but it was hard to imagine things ever going back to the way they were. He was afraid he would have committed a kind of patricide, that he’d be tormented by conscience, that his fellow elite soldiers would sense he’d committed some primordial sin, maybe even suspect precisely what it was. He’d bear the mark of Cain, always suspect, forever an outsider.

  No. He wasn’t like Larison and Rain, and he didn’t want to be. He’d done his share of killing, most of it at close quarters, but except when it had been self-defense, it had always been under orders. He was part of something, why would he fuck that up? And who was Larison, anyway? A skilled operator, no doubt, but still, a loose cannon, a rogue. And Rain was beginning to strike him as a borderline sociopath. Dox was a buffoon, too dumb to know better. They did what they did for money, which meant they could always be bought. Had he really been considering turning on Hort, turning on the unit, to throw in his lot forever with this group of burnouts?

  And then suddenly, he saw a way through this. A way to protect himself, stay on the inside, and get clear of Rain, Larison, and Dox. All at the same time.

  “You might be right,” Rain said, over the sounds of the train. “But still, I want to finish Finch. That’s what I was hired to do, and I’m not in the habit of turning on a client just for a better payday, even a much better one. If you and Treven want in, we’ll split the fee three hundred apiece. Otherwise Dox and I can handle it alone, and we walk away with no hard feelings.”

  Larison said, “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Do you want in on Finch?” Rain said.

  Larison looked away for a moment as though considering. Then he said, “What would you do if you found out Hort is lying to us about Shorrock and Finch? About what all this is about?”

  Rain said nothing.

  “Yeah,” Larison said. “I thought so. All right, I’m in on Finch. Because soon enough, you’ll be in on Hort.”

  Later, after they’d split up, Treven did a long surveillance detection run. When he was sure he was alone, he used a payphone at a gas station to call Hort. Hort picked up with a typically noncommittal, “Yes?”

  “It’s me,” Treven said.

  There was a pause, then, “It’s good to hear your voice, son. Nice work in Las Vegas.”

  “That wasn’t me so much.”

  “Could you have done it with fewer players?”

  “Probably not, no.”

  “Then it couldn’t have been done without you. Which is why I wanted you to be a part of it in the first place.”

  Treven didn’t answer. He felt like he’d arrived at a fork in the road. Whichever way he went, there’d be no turning back. Ever.

  “What’s on your mind, son?” Hort said.

  Treven took a deep breath. “There’s something you need to know,” he said.

  Faced with intractable national problems on one hand, and an energetic and capable military on the other, it can be all too seductive to start viewing the military as a cost-effective solution.

  —The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012, Charles J. Dunlap

  I am beginning to think the only way the national government can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military.

  —James Fallows

  The environment most hospitable to coups d’etat is one is which political apathy prevails as the dominant style.

  —Andrew Janos

  Vienna seemed an unlikely locale for killing the president’s counterterrorism advisor.

  When Horton had briefed Dox and me in Los Angeles, I’d initially pictured Washington, where Finch worked, or maybe some beachside place, where he might enjoy a summer vacation with his family. But as it turned out, Finch wasn’t in Washington just then, and nor did he have a family. What he did have was a single sibling—a sister, who taught at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and whom Finch tended to visit whenever he was in Europe on official business. At the moment, as it happened, he was in London, tasked, no doubt, with reassuring the British that the Special Relationship was still special, along with the other important activities presidential counterterrorism advisors are expected to carry out. The problem with London was that the people he was meeting would have their own security details, meaning getting close to him would involve penetrating veritable Venn diagrams of overlapping protection. But Vienna was neither an announced part of Finch’s itinerary, nor an official one. Unless art professors in the former seat of the Hapsburg Empire had their own bodyguards, Finch’s security would be all we had to worry about, and with luck, even that would be light, perhaps even nonexistent.

  I had called Kanezaki from a payphone after going through security at LAX. My fellow passengers and I went through the new security machines with our arms raised over our heads as though we were criminals. A few chose to get patted down instead, like prisoners. No one seemed to mind the new normal.

  Kanezaki hadn’t learned anything about Horton, but he did mention that a certain Tim Shorrock, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, had died of an apparent heart attack in Las Vegas. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” he asked.

  “Why would I know anything about it?”

  “Just seems like a lot of coincidences. Horton is obviously a key member of the counterterrorism community—”

  “It’s nice you guys have a community now, with members. It makes it sound so friendly.”

  “—and a heart attack for Shorrock, at the same time Horton is reaching out to you, makes me wonder. Especially because apparently Shorrock was some kind of fitness fanatic.”

  “You ever hear of an earthquake causing a church to collapse on its parishioners?” I asked. “It happens. Same as a fitness fanatic with a faulty valve or whatever. I tend to think of it as God indulging his sense of irony. Or maybe his sense of humor.”

  “Maybe. Did you ever meet with Horton?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You were going to keep me posted, remember?”

  I might have reminded him that keeping him posted was in exchange for his finding out about what Horton was planning, which he hadn’t done. But if I told him that, he would just respond that he had tried but hadn’t managed, and anyway that he had come through with information about Treven and Larison. It would be a circle jerk at best; more likely, it would erode some of the trust and goodwill Kanezaki and I had spent years building.

  Still, I hesitated to tell him, even in broad strokes, what Horton was up to. Need-to-know and other aspects of operational security are a long-honed reflex in me. But if Larison was right, it was in my interest to learn everything I could about Horton, who might be as much opposition as he was client. Offering some information of mine in exchange for data that might give me a clearer view of the movement of pieces on the board, and of the players behind them, would be a smart trade.

  “It’ll sound a little crazy,” I said.

  He chuckled. “It’s a crazy business. My own COS tried to have me taken out, remember?”

  Back when he’d been a green CIA recruit in Tokyo, Kanezaki had run dan
gerously afoul of his chief of station, a certain James Biddle, who tried to hire me to kill him. I warned Kanezaki, instead, and that warning had fostered a relationship that had since become highly useful to me.

  “All right. Horton says there’s a coup afoot in America.” When I was done giving him the 30,000-foot view of the landscape, I asked, “You think that’s possible?”

  There was a long pause, then he said, “I think the public’s been…prepped for this, yes. Even before nine-eleven, but especially since then. There’s a ratchet effect, and nothing, not even killing bin Laden, seems to change it. I can see where some people could realize they could take advantage, whether out of greed or rationalized patriotism or whatever. What does Horton want you to do?”

  “I think you can imagine.”

  “The plotters?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Shorrock?”

  Again, I didn’t answer.

  “It might be true,” he said, after a moment. “In which case, you’re doing something pretty heroic. But…if the people behind this thing get wind of your involvement, I think you’re going face opposition like you’ve never seen.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, remembering, again, Larison’s admonitions about Horton.

  “You trust Horton?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why are you doing this? The money?”

  There was a time when Kanezaki’s inquiries were obvious and callow. He’d come a long way.

  “Not just the money. I wouldn’t call it heroic, the way you did, but…look, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for me to do something good for a change.”

  “If it is good. You only have Horton’s word to go on, is that right?”

  “That’s why I called you. I was hoping for some kind of corroborating evidence, one way or the other.”

  “I wish I’d been able to find something. So far not.”

  “Let me ask you something. Horton…does he have any vulnerabilities?” I was thinking of what Larison had said about hostages to fortune. I wondered whether Horton had one of his own.

  “My friend, that’s a line I can’t cross. I’m not going to help you take out an American army colonel.”

  “I’m not asking you to. But…if this thing turns out to be other than what it’s been billed as, heroism might require a different course. Just keep it in mind.”

  “The two operators you asked me to follow up on—Larison and Treven. Are they involved?”

  But I’d said enough. I told him let’s just stay in touch—after all, he wanted to know if Horton was right and what was being done about it, and I wanted an early warning system in case I was being set up. He told me he’d keep trying to find out more, and I headed off to Vienna.

  Horton’s intel had been spotty. He had Finch’s roundtrip Washington to London flights, and he knew his schedule of meetings in London. The meetings ended two days before the return flight, and Horton claimed to be ninety percent sure Finch would spend those two days in Vienna, taking a roundtrip flight from London on his own dime before heading back to Washington on his government-sanctioned ticket. What we didn’t know, though, was on what flight Finch would arrive, or where he would be staying. We might have called various airlines and Viennese hotels to “confirm” the reservation of a Mr. Jack Finch, but doing so would have created too many possibilities of an airline or hotel employee learning from the evening news about the selfsame Jack Finch’s demise, finding the previous call to be too weird under the circumstances to be merely a coincidence, and contacting the authorities, who might then want to check on whether other airlines and hotels had received similar calls. If Finch had been conducting his business like a good, oblivious civilian, Horton would have been able to nail down his travel details easily enough. The fact that he couldn’t indicated some security consciousness on the part of Finch, and suggested too that Horton felt circumscribed in his ability to look, lest his inquiries tip Finch off. Regardless, the upshot was that the locus of our attention had to be the sister. If we could get a fix on her, we would also be fixing Finch. After that, we would have to improvise.

  On the one hand, Emma Capps, widowed but retaining her married name, was fairly easy to track. For starters, we had both her home and work addresses, courtesy of standard IRS paperwork. We also had plenty of photographs, scraped from the university’s website, from Capps’s Facebook page, and from Capps’s own website, where she blogged about trends in the art world and advertised her paintings—impressive oil works that were at once recognizably realistic but also bathed in an otherworldly, melting luminescence. On the other hand, none of us was particularly familiar with Vienna, we knew nothing of Capps’s daily habits, and we had only four days before Finch was expected to arrive in the city.

  Still, an experienced four-man team, operating within urban concealment, can typically nail down the details of a civilian’s routine within a matter of days, and so it was for us with Capps. The fourth-floor flat in the déclassé 15th District, near Westbanhof, the main train station; morning yoga at Bikram Yoga College, a few blocks away; breakfast at Café Westend, also in her neighborhood; the university in the afternoon, where, given the paucity of students because of the summer break, we assumed she was painting rather than teaching. She was an attractive woman of about fifty with wavy brown hair, an erect posture, and a purposeful stride—easy to watch in both senses of the phrase. She seemed to live alone, and I wondered what had happened to her deceased husband, and how old she’d been when she’d lost him, and whether there had been any children beforehand. If there had been, presumably they were now grown and living on their own. Horton hadn’t included such details in her file, either because he didn’t have them, or, more likely, because he understood that no one other than a sociopath wants to become overly familiar with the humanity of someone targeted, even peripherally, in an op. And, indeed, as we watched Capps and learned her routines, I felt an inchoate hope that there were children somewhere, or a lover, or someone else in her life besides the brother we were about to take away.

  On the fourth day we were watching her, the day we expected Finch to arrive, she stayed at the university later than usual. The four of us had shadowed her from her neighborhood that morning and were now taking turns circling the university, and at first I was concerned when she failed to emerge around five as she had previously. I would have expected her to meet Finch at the airport, or at least at Westbanhof Station. Could he have been coming in on a late flight? Had he canceled, or had Horton been wrong about him coming in the first place? But then I realized there was another possibility—simply that Finch, who had been visiting his sister here for many years, would know his way around and require no escort. So maybe the deviation in routine was a good sign.

  Turned out it was. Capps left the university at close to six. There were plenty of pedestrians about, all enjoying the late summer daylight, and there were also lots of bicyclists and motor scooters and cars, so following Capps without being observed was easy. I stayed on her from a discreet distance, then watched her enter Café Prückel, a classic Viennese coffee shop in one of the glorious nineteenth-century buildings that characterized the area—where, with the kind of serendipity that occasionally smiles down upon an op, Dox was presently taking a load off while Treven, Larison and I worked the street. I called him on the mobile he was carrying.

  “Our girl is coming to see you,” I said when he picked up. “Did you—”

  “Saw her already, amigo. I’m at one of the sidewalk tables, enjoying a tasty espresso and apple strudel mit Schlag.”

  “‘Mit Schlag’?”

  “Means with whipped cream.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Oh. Well, when in Rome and all that, you know, I just like to blend.”

  For a moment, I pictured enormous, goateed Dox amidst the effete students and artistes of the area. What I pictured couldn’t fairly be characterized as blending.

  “That’s…admirable,” I
said.

  “Danke, buddy, I appreciate it. Anyway, what’s the plan?”

  “Stay put for now. One of us will get a table on the other side of the building or inside so we have a view of both entrances. She might be meeting her friend there.”

  The oblique references were probably unnecessary—the phones Horton had supplied were encrypted, and at this distance we were connected by their radio function rather than through a cell tower. But no sense taking chances.

  “Roger that. Tell you what, get here soon so I can get up and drain the dragon. I’ve got three espressos inside me at this point and I think at least two are trying to get out.”

  “Hold it in for five more minutes. I’ll buzz you as soon as we have someone else inside.”

  “Can we make it four? I swear, I am currently engaged in mortal bladiatorial combat, and—”

  “Look, I’ll try,” I said, exasperated. I clicked off and called Larison and Treven. Larison headed into the café; Treven, who was on a rented motor scooter, stayed outside.

  Once Larison had confirmed he was inside and could see Capps, I told Dox to pull out. If Capps was indeed meeting Finch here, I didn’t want to give him the chance to log more of us than was strictly necessary.

  I waited on a bench under the shade of some trees in the nearby Stadtpark, just a harmless-looking Japanese tourist taking in the sights and sounds and smells, savoring the sense of loneliness and freedom that comes only from solitary sojourns in strange lands, where all the everyday things seem subtly wondrous and different and new, where there’s no one to please or disappoint or explain to, where the traveler finds himself suspended between the beguilement of the comforts he left behind, and the allure of an imaginary future he senses but knows he can never really have.

  I passed nearly an hour that way, the day’s heat slowly loosening, the trees’ shadows lengthening, pensioners and lovers and dog walkers drifting past me, occasionally enjoying an adjacent park bench. Maybe Horton’s intel had been faulty. Maybe Finch wouldn’t show. Maybe I’d get credit in the next life, or the afterlife, for trying, for a good faith effort that had ultimately failed to produce results.