The Detachment

by Barry Eisler

  “If I can locate the operator, you drop him, too.”

  “That’s a big if. And, forgive me, I prefer not to loiter around ground targets that have been selected for double Hellfire missile strikes.”

  “I have a few ideas, and a few leads I’m chasing down. I don’t expect the operator will be far from the school. The less distance the Viper has to fly, the less chances for sightings. Likewise, they’ll want to launch the missiles close on to the target. Less opportunity for people to see two plumes of fire tracking in from miles away.”

  “But you said—”

  “Yes, in the end, it’s all explainable. But no sense having to explain more than necessary.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you have much to go on.”

  “I don’t, yet. But one more thing. If you’re the operator, given the parameters I just described, what else do you need?”

  I thought. “Someplace…quiet. Private, removed. So I can park, assemble the drone, and get it airborne without anyone seeing. And then operate it without interruption.”

  “Bingo. And how many places like that do you think there are in the vicinity of Lincoln?”

  “Probably a lot.”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem. But I’m looking into it. Plus there’s one more thing that could be a game-changer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I have a friend in one of the phone companies.”

  “A friend.”

  “Whatever you want to call him. He’s been monitoring Gillmor’s mobile phone for me.”

  I smiled. There was something satisfying about the tools of the national security state being turned against their owners.

  “You think Gillmor’s the operator?”

  “He’s had the training. He has the access. Plus, did you catch at the president’s announcement that Gillmor wasn’t named? For security reasons?”

  “Yeah, I wondered about that at the time.”

  “I don’t think they want that much publicly known about this guy before the attacks. They want him to have the freedom to move about as he needs depending on how many schools need to be hit. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that my read of the country’s mood is that they’re not going to need to hit too many. We’re close to a tipping point already.”

  “Yeah, I get that feeling, too.”

  “Also,” he said, “if you were committed enough to blow up a school, or multiple schools, how many people could you outsource it to? How many people could you count on to not lose their nerve at the last minute? Yeah, I think it’s going to be Gillmor. And if it is, we should be able to track his phone all the way to Nebraska.”

  I thought for a minute. On the one hand, I didn’t want to do this. It was too dangerous; there were too many possibilities for setups; there were too many unknowns and too many hidden agendas.

  But on the other hand…

  What I had told Horton that first morning was true: I’ve taken more lives than I’ll ever be able to remember. When I was younger, I had ways of shielding myself from thinking about all the mothers, fathers, wives, siblings, children. I ignored whatever elements in a target’s file might have caused me discomfort. I assured myself that if the target had enemies, he must be in the life. My subconscious mantra was that if I didn’t do it, someone else would. Rationalization was my narcotic. And, as with all drugs, over time, I habituated to mine. I needed more and more to accomplish less and less. Eventually, there was no dose at all that could confer the comfort I craved.

  Now, with too many yesterdays and fewer and fewer tomorrows, I find I’m increasingly troubled by knowledge I was once adroit in avoiding. The knowledge that following my brief encounters with every stranger I agreed to eliminate, I left nothing but tears and trauma, a wreckage of interwoven lives forever riven and malformed. The knowledge that there would never be a way to account for the amount of pain I have brought into the world. The knowledge that the world would have been marginally better off if I had never been born to begin with.

  There was no way to resurrect the lives I’d taken or rectify the damage I’d done. That side of the balance sheet was immutable. The only thing, maybe, was to offset it. To do something to save more lives than I’d cost, prevent more pain than I’d inflicted.

  It wasn’t much. But what else did I have to hope for?

  Hating the feeling of being manipulated, and of being a fool, I said, “We’ll need some hardware.”

  “Of course.”

  “And a private plane to get us to Lincoln. Even if we had time to drive, we’re all too strung out at this point. I think we’d kill each other before we got there.”

  “I’ll get you there.”

  “I need to talk to the others. I’ll call you back later today.”

  I hung up and checked my watch. Almost ten o’clock. Stores were opening soon.

  “Come on,” I said to Larison. “I’ll brief you on the way.”

  We walked to Harry Winston on Rodeo Drive, the store we’d agreed on after looking on the Internet that morning. We wanted someone reputable, and we figured Harry Winston was about as reputable as it got. Neither of us had been happy to leave our hardware at the motel, but we couldn’t very well walk into a jewelry store carrying, either. Larison’s danger vibe was enough of a problem. If an alert security guard then saw a bulge in our waistbands or around our ankles, we would have a little too much explaining to do.

  En route, I briefed him on Kanezaki’s intel. Unsurprisingly, he wanted no part of it. I wanted to bring up that weird moment from the night before, when Dox had employed, innocently, I was sure, a sodomy reference. But I didn’t know how to do it. Don’t worry, I don’t give a damn? Or, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone? What if I was wrong? And what good would it do anyway? But the thought that Larison had a secret, and might suspect that Dox and I had stumbled upon it, concerned me. This was a guy who was more than capable of killing to keep his private matters private.

  We got to the store at just after ten o’clock. A gemologist named Walt LaFeber helped us. He seated us in front of a glass table in the corner of the store while he went around to the other side. On the table were a microscope and a number of other instruments.

  I took out an envelope in which we had placed twenty stones of varying sizes, and emptied it carefully on the table. LaFeber picked up one of the larger stones and touched it with what looked like a current detector.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Believe it or not,” he said, “it’s just called a diamond tester. Diamonds are very good conductors of heat, and the instrument measures thermal conductivity. Yours looks good so far.”

  He examined the stone with various other devices, which, he explained as he worked, identified color, hardness, specific gravity, and various internal characteristics.

  After about ten minutes, he said, “Congratulations, this is quite a fine stone.”

  “It’s real?” Larison said. “A real diamond?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite.”

  “How much would you say it’s worth?” Larison asked.

  “Based on its size—nearly five carats—and its structure, shape, and color, I’d say you’re looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand dollars. Possibly more. A very fine stone.”

  “That’s a nice neighborhood,” I said, and even Larison smiled.

  LaFeber checked the rest of the stones. They weren’t all as impressive as the first one, but he estimated the least of them at over five thousand dollars. It looked like Horton had delivered.

  There was no charge for the service. It was strange. We’d shown him stones worth in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars, and didn’t even have to pay anything. I supposed it was one way the rich got richer.

  We thanked LaFeber and walked out into the sunlight of Rodeo Drive, oblivious consumers flowing past us. Shopping, it seemed, would be the last thing to go, even in the face of rolling terror attacks.

  We headed east on Wilshire Boule
vard. I considered that I was suddenly worth something like twenty-five million dollars. But the thought felt unreal. Not just because of the amount. But because I still had to live to spend it. And because, at the moment, I couldn’t say the prospects for that looked particularly promising.

  Larison and Rain boarded a bus on Wilshire and rode it toward Koreatown, where they would change to a Metro train. The wrong direction from the hotel in Santa Monica, but they were taking zero chances and weren’t going to follow a direct route to anywhere, especially now that they had the diamonds. Not today; maybe not ever again. Which was fine by Larison. He’d been living in a state of low-grade paranoia for years now. He accepted it. He was accustomed to it. He had no more problem with the necessity of watching his back to protect his life than he had with the necessity of brushing to preserve his teeth. It was just the way things were.

  Rain was good cover. Larison made people nervous, but when civilian eyes lighted on Rain’s Asian features, they were reassured and kept right on going. Larison could almost see the unconscious calculation appear for an instant in their expressions: not Muslim-looking. Peaceful Japanese. No problem.

  He almost couldn’t believe he had the diamonds. This is what he’d worked for, what he’d planned for, what he’d taken on the entire U.S. government for. True, Hort wasn’t dead—that punk Treven had fallen for yet another line of trademarked Hort bullshit—but Larison supposed he could accept that, at least for the moment. The original plan was to use Rain, Dox, and Treven to take out Hort, and then to close up shop by doing them, too. But Hort was a civilian now, he could be gotten to, so maybe it didn’t really matter if the order of operations had been reversed. In the scheme of combat plans being changed by a collision with battlefield reality, this was a pretty minor alteration. And, in the end, an irrelevant one.

  He’d act at his first opportunity, probably as soon as they got back to the motel and he was armed again. There were really only two considerations. First was the noise of the gunshots. But they still had the suppressed weapons they’d taken from the dead guys outside Kei’s apartment. If he could access one of those without alerting anyone to what he was up to, the noise part would be taken care of.

  Second was the reaction of whoever didn’t get shot first. Action always beat reaction, and he was fairly sure he could drop all three of them before the last to go had a meaningful chance to react. But fairly sure wasn’t entirely comforting under the circumstances, given the penalty he would incur for a miscalculation. Treven, Rain, and Dox were all formidable men, and Larison had to expect an exceptionally fast reaction when the shooting began. He decided he would drop Treven first, because Treven was the best combat shooter. Then Rain, because Rain had the sharpest instincts. And Dox last, because he was the biggest target and therefore the hardest to miss.

  Dox. He hadn’t much cared for the big sniper initially, but his respect for him had grown. That stunt at the Hilton in D.C. was one for the record books, and Larison had to acknowledge that without it, they almost certainly all would have shot each other a second later. And when they’d almost gotten into it the night before, he couldn’t help but be impressed by how easily Dox had shed his good ol’ boy persona and suddenly presented himself as lethally calm and quiet. It was a rare man who could maintain that kind of dangerous poise in Larison’s presence. He wondered if maybe he ought to revise the order of operations and take out Dox first.

  The problem was, some part of him didn’t want to take out any of them. Not even Treven, who had been dumb enough to let Hort walk away when he so easily could have left his body facedown in a remote canyon pass in the Hollywood Hills.

  They were competent. Reliable. And they worked well as a team. Yes, Treven was annoyingly earnest, and Dox was a ham, and Rain reminded Larison too much of himself for Larison ever to fully trust him. But…fuck, every time he ran through a scenario of dropping them, he found that unlike his usual dispassionate appraisal of angles and distances and odds, he felt something heavy and unpleasant and ominous, instead. As though some part of his mind was imagining what it was going to be like to live with the knowledge, and the images, that would dog him afterward, and was asking him, warning him, not to take on that weight. The cost, as Rain had put it. He was carrying too much already.

  He tried to shut that shit down, but he couldn’t. He reminded himself he had no choice, that it was a simple matter of operational security. He wasn’t persuaded. He told himself they would do the same to him. He didn’t believe it. He reasoned that it was better to make a mistake in one direction and live than to make one in the other direction and die. The words rang hollow.

  The worst part had been when Rain had pulled him aside and tried to talk to him. What had he said? I’m trying to be your friend. And the hell of it was, Larison thought it was true.

  But he’d also felt himself slip for an instant when that clown Dox had said the thing about ass-fucking. How many times had that sort of thing happened a million years ago in the barracks? Every time it had, some part of Larison’s mind started to panic that he’d been busted, that someone knew, or suspected, and was taunting him. But it was never the case. It was just how people talked. And he’d learned to suppress the reflex. So why had he slipped the night before? He thought Rain had spotted it, but he couldn’t be sure. The man didn’t show much.

  But what if he had? First Treven, then Hort, now Rain and Dox…the number of people who knew, knew what he was, was growing. It was getting out of control, and if he didn’t shut it down now, he would lose the ability outright.

  He understood on some level that it shouldn’t matter. Attitudes were changing, even DADT was dead…but the thought of people knowing, of looking at him differently, treating him differently…he hated it. It would be like revealing a terrible, exploitable weakness.

  And that wasn’t all, either. There were also the people who knew he was alive and relevant, rather than presumed dead and therefore forgotten. That number was growing, too. It was possible Hort would have told others besides Treven, Dox, and Rain, and if he had, then the genie was already out of the bottle. But Larison guessed Hort hadn’t. Hort liked to keep his cards close to the vest. And if he had told others, so what? Then the damage was done. Regardless, the thing to do now was to shut it all down while shutting it down was still as least theoretically possible.

  He looked out the window at the passing urban landscape, and felt more trapped than he ever had in his life. What the hell was wrong with him? His mind was telling him one thing. His gut wouldn’t go along for the ride.

  He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be outed. But he so wanted to be able to sleep again, to lie down on a bed without dreading what he would see when he closed his eyes and he was left alone and defenseless with his dreams.

  He was afraid of being weak. And he was afraid that failing to do the tactically sound thing here was the weakest move of all.

  The trick would be to not think about it. Get back to the motel, get the Glock, wait for the moment, see the opportunity, act to exploit it. Yes, like that. No thinking. Just pattern recognition, and reflex, and done.

  And not just Treven, Rain, and Dox. Kei, too. No one left who knew anything about him, or who could tie him to anything, or had any way to track him.

  Except Hort, of course. But Larison would clip that loose end in short order, too. And then he’d be done. Free of all these entanglements. Free.

  He didn’t have to like it. He just had to do it.

  Treven and Dox waited at the motel with Kei. Kei was sitting on one bed; Dox, on the other; Treven, increasingly antsy because Rain and Larison had been gone so long, pacing in what little space the room afforded.

  Treven hated waiting. When he was alone, he could wait patiently for days, even for weeks. But this was different. The whole operation was shot through with problems. Larison was acting increasingly unstable. There had been several near blow-ups among them, any one of which, had it gone critical, would ha
ve been fatal. And then there was Hort, suddenly scrambling all the pieces on the board with his stunt at the White House.

  He hoped he’d done the right thing in letting the man live. He told himself it was logical, but part of him wasn’t buying that, part of him knew it was emotional. Treven looked at Larison and Rain and Dox and didn’t want to be like them. He needed some line he wouldn’t cross, some sense of command authority and unit loyalty. Something that would represent the difference between a soldier with a conscience and a killer under contract. Wherever that thin line was, he knew he was dancing right along the edge of it now. Killing his commander would push him over forever.

  But his decision gnawed at him anyway. Hort was dangerous. He might have been tracking them right at that very moment through means none of them fully appreciated. Sure, the others assumed Hort had found them in Washington via satellites and surveillance cameras and all the rest because they didn’t know Treven had simply tipped the man off, but that didn’t mean the satellites and surveillance cameras didn’t exist. And sure, Hort had made his big speech and stepped down, and so presumably had lost his official access. But he still had friends in high places, and low ones, too. It was Hort himself who had schooled Treven in Sun Tsu: When strong, feign weakness. When weak, feign strength. Hort had certainly acted weak in the car last night, and the more Treven thought about it, the more nervous it made him.

  Dox was making him nervous now, too. The big sniper was sitting with his back against the headboard and his legs stretched out on the bed. His eyes were closed and he held his Wilson Combat in his lap, as serene as a sleeping toddler and the gun a favorite stuffed animal. The man had at least as much patience as Treven, it was obvious from the stillness with which he sat while they waited. It made sense—it would be a piss-poor sniper who couldn’t wait out a target—and, ordinarily, Treven would have admired and even been reassured by the trait. But now, it was making him feel like the source of Dox’s apparent serenity was some secret knowledge Treven himself lacked.