by Barry Eisler
“Thanks for the information,” I said, preparing to click off. “I’ll call you when I’m somewhere safe.”
“Wait,” he said. “Hold on. Just got something on my screen. It’s…oh, fuck.”
“What?”
“Terror alert. Goes out to everyone in the intelligence and law enforcement communities. CIA, FBI, local and state police, everyone. It says…hang on, okay, Shorrock and Finch didn’t die, they were murdered. According to toxicology tests, with cyanide. And that you were involved. You, the two ISA operators you asked me about, and Dox. And that you’re all armed, special-ops trained, and believed to be in the Washington metro area right now, planning another terror attack.”
It had to be Horton. No one else knew about the cyanide. And Horton didn’t know that I hadn’t even used it.
“You can’t get out of there now,” Kanezaki said. “Every airport, every train station, every bus station, they’ll be crawling with personnel. Every surveillance camera in the city will be looking for you.”
“Do they have photographs?”
“Grainy in the alert. Like blow-ups from surveillance cameras.”
Las Vegas, I guessed. Our best bet would be cabs, at least to start with. The farther we got from the city center, the less concentrated the opposition would be. But we had to move fast.
“All right, at least they’re grainy,” I said. “I doubt the average cop—”
“You don’t get it. You’re not going to be arrested. The president has an assassination list, don’t you know that? There’s a NOFORN addendum to this alert that says you’re on it. All four of you. They’ll shoot you on sight. And if you do wind up captured, there’s Guantanamo, Bagram, Camp No, the Salt Pit…and those are just the ones that have been disclosed. There are others they can put you in the Red Cross has never heard of, let alone visited, you understand? You’ll have a number, that’s it. No one will know your name. John, some of these places, you might as well be on another planet, or in another dimension. You get there, you’re just—”
“I need to go. I’ll call you.”
“Wait. Let me help you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because you’re the only ones who can stop this thing now.”
“Bullshit. Spill it to the media. Don’t you have contacts at the New York Times?”
He laughed. “You think the Times would do anything with this, even if I had proof? They sat on Bush’s illegal domestic surveillance program until after he was safely reelected. Their editor-in-chief asks the White House for permission to publish, for God’s sake, and is proud of it, too.”
“Then one of the networks. ABC, CNN, whatever.”
He laughed again. “Did you catch Jeremy Scahill’s report about the Agency’s secret prison in Somalia? The seventh floor had apoplexy, it was so dead-on accurate. They used Barbara Starr and Luis Martinez to discredit it. ABC and CNN, the watchdog media.”
“Then call Scahill.”
“The people we’re up against will just instruct the networks to ignore or discredit him. The networks work for us, John. Which I admit is mostly useful and I’ve taken advantage of it many times myself. But it’s working against us right now.”
“Wikileaks, then.”
“Now you’re making sense. But I don’t have any proof. Get me some.”
“No. I don’t want to get further into this. I want to get out.”
“You’re telling me you’re not going to make Horton pay for setting you up?”
I didn’t answer.
“You think he’s going to stop coming after you? You know as well as I do that he’ll be more motivated now than ever.”
Again I said nothing.
“Damn it, John, let me help you.”
I was in a box and I couldn’t see a way out of it. “Goddamn it. How?”
“I’ll come to you. Put you in the trunk of my car and drive you out of the city.”
“The trunk? There are four of us. What kind of car do you have?”
“Honda.”
“What model?”
There was a pause. “Civic.”
I looked over at the collective mass of Larison, Treven, and Dox. “No way,” I said.
“You’d be amazed what you can fit into a tight space with a little Crisco,” Dox offered, apparently having intuited what we were talking about.
“You have a better idea?” Kanezaki said.
“We’re talking about eight hundred, maybe nine hundred pounds. You couldn’t get us all in there with a chainsaw and a blender. And even if you could, the back of the car would be riding suspiciously low.”
“I’ll borrow my sister’s minivan. You can all hunker down. As long as no one stops me, no one will see you. It’s built to hold seven, the shocks won’t even be noticeably compressed.”
That sounded more promising. “When can you be here?”
“Where are you?”
If it had been anyone but Kanezaki, I would have been suspicious of a setup. But I trusted him as much as I did anyone other than Dox. Plus, I had no choice.
“Capital Hilton,” I said.
“She lives in Chevy Chase. It’s not that far, but we’re getting into rush hour now.”
“Can you have her meet you someplace in between and swap cars there?”
“That’s a good idea. I’ll be there in an hour. Maybe less. If there’s a problem, I can’t reach her or she’s out with her kids somewhere, or whatever, I’ll call you.”
“Leave a message on the secure site. My phone will be out of commission.”
“Right, okay.”
“We’ll meet you in the lowest level of the parking garage. Away from the elevators.”
“Got it. See you soon.”
I clicked off and disabled and pocketed the phone. Larison, Treven, and Dox had moved out from between the beds and away from each other. Everyone’s arms were loose and their hands open. They looked liked gunslingers in a western a half-second away from drawing.
“What the fuck is going on?” Treven said.
I didn’t like the accusatory tone I heard in the question, and reminded myself to be extra calm in my response. Four armed, dangerous, and suddenly distrustful men in a small room…if things got out of hand, it was going to be very bad.
“You were right,” I said, looking at Larison. “Horton set us up. Shorrock has been replaced by one of Horton’s guys, and Finch is about to be replaced by Horton himself. The government just issued some kind of all-points terror alert saying the four of us killed both of them with cyanide. We were just put on the presidents’ kill list. And they know we’re in D.C.”
“Horton and that damn cyanide,” Dox said. “So that was just supposed to incriminate us and sound scary to the public, too?”
I nodded. “Yeah. And the hell of it is, I never even used it. And no one else…”
I stopped, realizing I’d missed something obvious. Dangerously obvious.
Treven’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
I didn’t answer. I realized there were three people who thought I’d used cyanide on Shorrock: not just Horton, but also Larison and Treven. Either one of them, or both, could have mistakenly told Horton that I’d used the cyanide. That would have given him additional confidence to order the faked toxicology reports. He would have believed there really would be evidence of cyanide if anyone examined the corpses more thoroughly.
“Then how did you do Shorrock?” Larison said. “The way you did Finch?”
I was struck that despite the tension in the room, he could remain so detached and professionally curious.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. But if Larison and Treven were working for Horton, they wouldn’t be on that terror alert, right? Unless the idea were to make it look like we were all in the same boat, when in fact…
Treven tensed. In my peripheral vision, I saw Dox spot it, too.
There was a blur of movement, and an instant later all four of us had our guns out. Treven and I were poin
ting at each other. Dox was aiming at Treven. Larison had the muzzle of his angled toward the floor, but his head and eyes tracked from Treven to Dox to me and back again.
“You think I had something to do with this?” Treven said. “I’m as fucked as you are.”
I saw his hands were as steady as mine. “Put your gun down if you want to get unfucked,” I said.
Treven said nothing.
Larison’s head kept tracking. He looked like a rattlesnake trying to make up his mind about in which direction to strike.
I thought we had maybe two more seconds before the tension boiled over. I couldn’t figure out a way to stop it.
Suddenly, Dox brought the muzzle of his Wilson Combat up to his own neck. “Hold it,” he said. “The next man makes a move, the nigger gets it.”
I blinked and thought, What the fuck?
“Drop it,” he said. “Or I swear, I’ll blow this nigger’s head all over this town!”
He looked from one of us to the other, his eyes wide in faux lunacy.
Larison started to grin, then guffawed. “All right,” he said. “You win. You win.” He eased his pistol into the back of his waistband and held up his hands.
Treven glanced at Larison, then his eyes went back to Dox. His pistol stayed on me. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.
“Good Lordy-Lord,” Dox said, his voice a falsetto now. “He’s desperate. Do what he say! Do what he say!”
“You’re crazy,” Treven said, but he lowered his gun a few inches. I did the same.
“What,” Dox said, “y’all never saw Blazing Saddles? Cleavon Little? I always wondered if it’d work for real.”
Treven’s gun dropped a little more. “You’re crazy,” he said again.
Dox kept his own gun in position at his neck. “Well, it’s a film, you see. A very fine film, in which—”
“I know the movie,” Treven said.
Dox took the gun from his neck and slid it into the back of his waistband. “Well, maybe the part you’re missing, and this could be due to the subtlety of my delivery, is that two seconds ago we were on the verge of committing a big old group suicide here. Besides hoping to get y’all to come to your senses, that’s what I was trying to demonstrate. You see, placing my weapon to my own neck was a metaphor—”
“We get it,” I said, slowly lowering my gun. Treven did the same.
“I’m waiting for someone to thank me for not doing the campfire scene,” Dox said.
Larison was still grinning, and I imagined this was the first time he appreciated just how cool Dox could be when the shit was hitting the fan. And how much method there was to his hillbilly madness. “Oh baby, you are so talented,” he said, and it was incongruous enough to make me realize it must have been another line from the movie.
“And they are so dumb,” Dox said, confirming my suspicion. They both laughed, and I thought maybe they would be okay now. He wasn’t a man you’d want to fuck with, but laugh at Dox’s jokes and chances were good you’d have a friend for life.
Treven, though, was still an open question. I slid the gun back into my waistband. Treven hesitated, but then followed suit.
“Let’s try to stay chilly,” I said. “We have enough people trying to kill us just now without doing the job for them.” Dox and Larison were still laughing, so the message was mostly for Treven. And, I supposed, for myself.
I briefed them on my conversation with Kanezaki. We all agreed that, overall, our safest move was to stay put until we met him in the garage.
“I should have known these targets and this thing were too big for them to leave us alone afterward,” Dox said. “I let the damn money cloud my reason.”
No one spoke. Dox looked at Larison. “I believe you’ve earned the right to say ‘I told you so.’”
Larison shook his head. “The question is, what do we do now?”
“Exactly,” Treven said. “Wherever your guy takes us, all right, we’re out of the crosshairs, at least for the moment, but what do we do then?”
I turned to Larison. “You said you had a way of getting to Horton.”
He nodded. “If you’re really ready to hear it.”
I looked at him. “I am.”
“Okay, then. We’re going to need your friend’s car. Not just to get out of the area. To get back to Los Angeles.”
Larison briefed us on the vulnerability he had discovered. It was Horton’s daughter.
“She’s a film school grad student at UCLA,” he explained. “Name is Mimi Kei. Parents are divorced and she uses her mother’s maiden name. The mother’s Japanese.”
“But I checked him out on Wikipedia,” I said. “When you first mentioned his name, in Tokyo. There wasn’t much outside a few highlights of his military career, but it said he’s divorced with no children.”
“He doesn’t want people to know about her,” Larison said. “He has a lot of enemies. That’s probably why she uses her mother’s name. Makes it that much harder for anyone to make the connection.”
“Well, how did you make it?” Dox asked.
Larison smiled. “I always knew if I ever got exposed and someone came after me, it would be Hort, and I wanted an insurance policy against that possibility. So after I pulled my little disappearing act, but before I made my move with the torture tapes, I tracked him. Caught a lucky break, observed him having lunch one day with a pretty young woman in downtown D.C. Followed her back to Georgetown University. Spent some time on Facebook and found her. Her page was privacy protected, but it was easy enough to use the name to confirm she was an undergrad at Georgetown, to track the name Kei to Hort’s failed marriage, and then to do some judicious social engineering to get her to accept a friend request from a Facebook profile I created. I can tell you from her photo page that she’s close with both her parents. And more importantly, that Hort dotes on her. You should see his face in the photos of them together. I guarantee you, take her as collateral, and Hort will do anything we tell him.”
I realized that an hour earlier, I had reacted with anger and disgust that the plotters were threatening someone’s family. And yet here I was, contemplating the same. I had two routes of rationalization available: first, that unlike Schmalz, Horton had brought this on himself. Second, that unlike those of the plotters, our threats against Mimi Kei would be bluffs.
I looked at Larison’s expression, and realized we weren’t going to see eye to eye on that last point. I would have to watch him. Closely.
“And she’s at UCLA now?” I asked.
Larison nodded. “Second-year this fall. Taking summer classes even as we speak. I’ve been keeping tabs.”
“That’s why he knows L.A. so well,” I said. “I wondered about that the two times I met him there. In fact, he suggested L.A. to me. I first thought he was just proposing it as a convenient point between Washington and Tokyo, but no. He was looking for an excuse to visit his daughter.”
Larison smiled again. “His little girl.”
“All right,” Treven said, “but what’s the play? We don’t know where she lives, we don’t know her habits, I don’t think we know much about UCLA. Where do we grab her? Where do we hold her? Without the right tools, I don’t see how we’re going to ensure she’s quiet and cooperative without being brutal. And look, we’ll do what we have to do, but if we fuck her up too much, it’s hard to say which way it’ll cut with Hort. We want to threaten her, absolutely, but if we have to start actually doing it, we lose leverage.”
“I don’t know about that,” Larison said. “I’d even argue that hurting her, with the promise of much worse, would be the ideal way to ensure Hort is as compliant and cooperative as possible. But I’m confident he’ll do what we want either way.”
“Okay,” Treven said. “Assume we grab her. Hold her somewhere, threaten to hurt her if Hort doesn’t cooperate. But cooperate how? Even if he calls off the dogs, the second his daughter is safe, they’ll be on us again. You planning on holding her forever?”
/> “Not forever,” Larison said. “Just long enough to recover the diamonds.”
“You’re still thinking about the diamonds?” Dox said. “Shit, I’m just looking for a way to get the president to take my ass off his personal assassination list, and not put me in one of his secret prisons for the rest of my life.”
“It’s the same thing,” Larison said. “You ever thought about how much security you can buy with twenty-five million dollars?”
“I know you want those diamonds back,” I said. “But I don’t think the diamonds alone are going to solve the problems we have now. We need to be clear about our new situation, and how we address it.”
Larison rubbed his hands together. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know exactly. But I agree it’s going to involve the daughter one way or the other. Find something that’ll act as…well, if not a guarantee of our safety, then at least an inhibition on Horton’s ability to direct forces against us. Anyway, we don’t have to figure it all out now. We’ll have plenty of time while we’re driving.”
Dox said, “Road trip!”
I checked the secure site. Kanezaki, confirming the pickup was on schedule.
“My contact should be here in just a few minutes,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”
We wiped down the surfaces we might have touched and policed up all sandwich wrappers and other visible evidence that anyone had been in here. Not that anyone would be looking, and there would likely be some hair and other DNA evidence regardless of our other efforts, but better to leave less of a trail to follow than more.
We moved to the door. I looked through the peephole—all clear. I was about to turn the handle when I remembered the two bodyguards I’d seen at the other end of the hallway. I hesitated.
Larison said, “What is it?”
I turned to them. “When you all arrived, was there a security detail at the other end of the hallway on this floor?”
They all shook their heads.
Well, that was odd. These weren’t the kind of men who would overlook something like that.
“Why are you asking?” Larison said.
“Because there was one when I got here. Two bodyguards, who must have taken up their position after you all arrived but before I did.”
