by Barry Eisler
“Damn, son,” he said in his gravelly Mississippi Delta baritone. “You look like shit warmed over.”
Despite everything that had happened between them, and despite the humiliation of having his commander find him like this, Ben was so flooded with relief his legs went rubbery. He knew his situation was bad, but until this moment he hadn’t realized just how near he’d been to actual despair, how convinced he was beginning to feel that no one would ever find him.
He breathed in and out a few times, pulling himself together. When he trusted himself to speak, he said, “What are you doing here, Hort?”
Hort laughed, the sound deep and not at all unfriendly. As always, Ben was struck by the man’s complete ease and confidence, by his natural command presence. Colonel Scott Horton was a legend in the black ops community. He had personally designed and now commanded Ben’s secret unit, the absurdly blandly named Intelligence Support Activity, and his exploits in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were such that he was held in awe not just by his men, but even by the Joint Special Operations Command brass who were his nominal superiors.
The laugh slowly died away, a paternal grin lingering in its aftermath. “When I heard they had visiting hours in hell, I just couldn’t stay away.”
“I don’t need you to bail me out.”
This was so obviously untrue Ben immediately felt like a blustering child for saying it, and expected another baritone chuckle in response.
Instead, Hort said, “It’s not a question of what you need. I’m responsible for you.”
Ben knew he was being stupid, but anger was the only thing keeping him together and he was afraid to let it go. “Got a funny way of showing it.”
“Don’t ask me to apologize for putting the mission ahead of the man, son. I already told you, it was the toughest call I’ve ever had to make.”
Hort had been tasked with securing and erasing all knowledge of an encryption application called Obsidian. The op started with the liquidation of the inventor and the patent examiner, and would have taken out Ben’s younger brother, Alex, too, who was the inventor’s lawyer, along with Sarah Hosseini, an associate at Alex’s Silicon Valley firm. But Alex had realized he was in over his head and had called his big brother for help. Together, they’d managed to turn things around, though not before Hort, in the service of putting the mission before the man, had tried to erase all three of them.
“Yeah, well don’t ask me to apologize for not forgetting.”
Hort nodded, his expression grave. “That seems fair.”
Ben walked over to the chair opposite Hort, pulled it away from the table, and sat. He knew Hort would read it as a concession, but he didn’t care. He’d never felt so wrung out. His ribs ached, he’d only half slept since all this shit had started, and much as he hated to admit it, he was terrified Hort would leave as suddenly as he’d materialized. It was a ridiculous fear, but he couldn’t shake it no matter how much he blustered.
“How’d you find me?” he said quietly.
Hort nodded, as though expecting the question. “Pressure from the Australians. You’re lucky you killed one of theirs. If it had been a local, they’d have just dumped you here and no one would ever have heard from you again.”
Ben felt something sink in his chest. He realized he’d still been hoping the cops had lied to him. The hope suddenly felt stupid, and he knew he just hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself, admit what he’d done.
“The guy was a sailor?” he said.
“Royal Marine, yeah.”
He’d known as much already, but somehow having Hort confirm it eliminated Ben’s ability to deal with the guy as an abstraction. Having this little window opened on the guy’s humanity made part of Ben want to push it open further, but he knew better. Still, even the speculation was no picnic. Had he been married? He’d been pretty young, so maybe not. And Ben hadn’t seen a ring, though he supposed the guy might have removed one before a night of carousing on Burgos Street. Regardless, he would have had parents. Maybe brothers or sisters. He thought of Katie, his younger sister, who’d died in a car accident as a high school junior, and what her death had done to his family. The thought that he probably had caused something similar to someone else’s family because he was too sullen to just walk away from some woofing was suddenly making him feel sick. Not to mention the guy himself was never coming back, either.
“Anyway,” Hort said, “the Aussies made local law enforcement go to all the hotels in Makati, asking whether there was a guest who was supposed to check out but who’d ghosted off instead. It didn’t take them long to find the right hotel, the right guest, to have the room safe opened, to check the guest’s passport. When they found out you were American, they contacted the U.S. embassy. When the embassy realized who you were, they contacted JSOC. And here I am.”
It made sense. But it answered only how Hort had found him, not why. He knew he should ask, but he almost didn’t care. He had to fight the urge to blurt out, Please, just get me out of here …
He took a breath and said, “All right, you want something from me.”
Hort pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to mop the moisture off his face and scalp. “You’re a little more cynical than the last time I saw you.”
“I wonder why that would be.”
“You want me to just leave you here? I could, you know. The Australians want to extradite you. All I have to do is step aside and let it happen.”
Somehow, hearing the threat out loud eased Ben’s mind a little. If Hort were really going to leave, he would’ve just done it. And obviously, he hadn’t come all this way just to say hello.
“Maybe your brother could help you,” Hort said. “Good to have a lawyer in the family when you’ve been charged with murder. And the girl, Sarah Hosseini. Two smart lawyers. Strange to think of them protecting you instead of you protecting them, but there you have it.”
Hort had no way of knowing what had happened between Sarah and Ben—the way their distrust had alchemized to passion, maybe to even more. He was fishing on that one.
“Do they need protection?” Ben asked, his voice low, his tone casual.
There was a pause. Hort said, “No.”
Ben nodded, not exactly reassured. Alex and Sarah still knew a lot about Obsidian and about the failed op to disappear it. It wasn’t impossible someone on the National Security Council or wherever might get sufficiently uncomfortable about their knowledge to decide to revisit the issue. But at least Hort wasn’t threatening him with it. On the other hand, he’d learned from the Obsidian op that Hort could be a master bullshitter, at least when bullshitting was required by the mission. Maybe he just knew Ben well enough to know overt threats would be counterproductive. That didn’t mean the threat wasn’t there. It wasn’t in Hort’s character or his experience to display a weapon until he was ready to use it.
“All right,” Ben said. “So you’ve pulled all these strings, you’re running interference with the Australians and who knows who else, just because you care. I’m touched, Hort. Really.”
“You know you’re on YouTube now, right? Camera phones in the bar.”
Ben looked at him, his shame so enormous he couldn’t speak.
“Relax,” Hort said. “You got lucky. The spotlighting in the bar was pointed at the cameras. You can barely make out the action, let alone your face.”
Ben managed to nod, the whipsaw from horror to relief intensifying how sick he felt from what he did to the Aussie marine. He concentrated on his breathing, trying to get a grip on emotions that were slipping past his control.
Hort looked at him. Other than the useless rattle of the fan stirring the leaden air, the room was silent.
“So tell me, son,” he said. “What were you doing in that bar?”
Ben didn’t know why, but the question made him feel suddenly wary. “What do you mean, what was I doing? I was having a drink.”
“Why?”
“I had a lot to think about.
Some shit has happened to me recently, you might have noticed that. I just wanted to be alone and think. You never had something like that?”
“All the time. But if you wanted to be alone so you could think, you didn’t need a bar. Your hotel room would have been just fine. Or you could have taken a walk. Or gone to the library.”
“They don’t serve gin in the library.”
“No, they don’t. The gin was part of what you wanted, I can see that.”
Ben was getting increasingly uncomfortable. It wasn’t just what Hort was saying. It was also the quietly confident way the man was looking at him, as though he knew Ben better than Ben knew himself.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Hort looked at him. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. But maybe you need me to spell it out for you.”
Ben held Hort’s gaze. But why did he feel like flinching?
“What you wanted,” Hort said, “was to fuck someone up. And you couldn’t do that in your room, or taking a walk, or visiting a local branch of the Manila public library system. But a bar on P. Burgos Street was pretty much tailor-made. Now, maybe you didn’t mean to kill the man whose neck you crushed, maybe you just wanted to hurt him. It doesn’t matter. Either way, you lost control. And an operator can never do that.”
“I didn’t—”
“Yes, you did. Now listen. I rocked your world recently, I get that. I wish it hadn’t needed to be that way, but yeah, I turned you upside down. Your commander betrayed you, you can never trust these people again, everything you believed in is wrong. That was more or less it, right?”
Ben didn’t answer. He hadn’t thought of it in those terms exactly, but … Shit, was he really that transparent? He could feel his face burning.
“So you decided it was over with you and the unit, you were done. The problem is, you’re a man with a lot of energy inside you and you needed to divert it to something else. So you flew to Manila, where your ex-wife lives with your daughter. You thought you were going to be a better person, didn’t you, maybe reconcile with your ex, be a father to your little girl. Attach yourself to something new, like a man falling in love on the rebound. But it didn’t go well, did it?”
Ben felt his shame coalescing into anger. “Back off, Hort.”
“No, I will not back off. You went to see them, didn’t you? And your woman turned you away. Or you saw her with another man. Or both, or whatever. Well, that’s two rejections in a row, twice your world’s been rocked. Now, some men deal with rejection and humiliation and confusion by wallowing in self-pity. Some of your more self-actualized types can let it roll off their backs. How about you? How do you deal with it?”
Ben stared at Hort, his lips thinned, his nostrils flared. It was like being stripped, being stripped and laid bare. He wanted to blast the table out from between them and slam Hort into the wall, over and over until his eyes rolled up in his head and he learned to shut up, just shut the fuck up …
“For example,” Hort said, as though reading his mind, “how are you dealing with it right now?”
Ben ground his jaw shut and looked away. The breath was whistling in and out of his nostrils.
“Yeah, maybe now you’re starting to see it. You’ve got anger inside you, son. Maybe it’s all-natural, or maybe something happened along the way and made it worse. Either way, it’s in your nature to seek out enemies and destroy them. It’s what you do. It’s what you’re good at. Some people play the piano, some people race cars. You destroy enemies. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it. The country needs men like you and I wish we had more. But you need direction. You need that violence to be channeled. Because if somebody’s not authorizing enemies on your behalf, you’re going to go out and create some on your own, like an attack dog off its leash. You think what happened in Manila was a one-off? It wasn’t. It was the beginning of the rest of your life.”
Ben realized he was gripping the edge of the table, to steady himself or throw it aside he wasn’t even sure anymore. He opened his hands and flexed his fingers and concentrated again on slowing his breathing.
He knew Hort was right. If any of it had been bullshit, he’d have laughed it off. The way it was enraging him, though … why would that be?
Because the truth hurts.
“No one else talks to me like that,” he said after a moment. “No one.”
Hort nodded. “No one else cares enough to take the chance.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I want you to stop this foolishness. There’s a major shit storm heading our way right now and I need your help to stop it. So I need you to stop acting out like a wounded adolescent. I need you to be more self-aware and to show more self-control. Can I count on you for that?”
Ben wiped his lips with the back of a hand. He’d already spent so much time thinking, the hell with the unit, he was out, he could never trust Hort again … and here was the man himself, telling him not only that he was back in if he wanted, but acting like he’d never even left. Telling him he was needed.
It was confusing as hell. But also …
It felt good. So good.
A rivulet of sweat ran down into his eye. He blinked. “Give me that handkerchief, will you?”
Hort handed it to him. Ben unfolded it and wiped his face.
He gave the handkerchief back to Hort. “You said something about a shit storm?”
Hort nodded and stood. “I did. But first, let’s get you the hell out of here.”
4
An Extremely Unpleasant Death
Larison woke before dawn in another anonymous motel, this one along I-64 just outside Richmond, Virginia. He scrubbed a hand across the dark stubble on his face and considered trying to go back to sleep. Without the pills, though, the dreams were too much to face. He realized he should have weaned himself sooner, gotten used to sleeping unassisted before starting the op. But the pills would have dulled the edge he’d need if a bunch of guys in black fatigues and face masks blew his door with a shaped charge and came swarming into the room with chloroform, flex-cuffs, and a hood. Being unprepared for that possibility would be worse than the dreams. Though perhaps not by much.
The hell with it, he was too keyed up anyway. He swung his feet to the floor, picked up the Glock 18C machine pistol from the carpet next to him, and stood. He was fully clothed, all the way down to his boots and three spare 33-round magazines of armor-piercing ammunition in the pockets of his Blackhawk integrated tourniquet pants. They weren’t going to take him dazed and blinking in his skivvies the way they’d done Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They weren’t going to take him at all.
He walked through the dark to the bathroom and pissed, then came back and dragged the mattress from behind the couch and back onto the bed frame. He’d moved it to the floor the night before when he arrived. A small thing, but it could buy an extra second by creating the wrong focal point when a room was breached, and a second in a gunfight was like an hour any other time.
Truth is, it was a wonder he could sleep at all. He’d been planning this thing for years, and now it was finally happening. He’d just declared war on the U.S. government. And they were going to come at him with everything they had.
If he was lucky, the CIA would try to handle the whole thing in-house and the opposition would be limited and incompetent. More likely, given the sums involved, Christians in Action would have to bring in someone from the White House, and the White House would mobilize the NSA. The public didn’t really know what the NSA was capable of—didn’t want to know—but Larison had seen firsthand the results of operations like Pinwale, where the NSA got caught illegally reading vast quantities of American emails, along with some even more impressive ones that hadn’t leaked, and the thought of the puzzle palace training all that firepower exclusively on him was both exhilarating and terrifying.
And then there was Hort. Impossible to say whether JSOC would be brought into this. But even if they were kept out, it did
n’t mean Hort wouldn’t find his way in. Not everything Hort did had JSOC’s blessing, or even its knowledge. Larison had learned that the hard way and he wouldn’t forget it. Behind the avuncular exterior that was part of what made men worship him, Hort was one of the most ruthless and capable operators Larison had ever known.
He set the Glock down and started doing push-ups. He wanted to go out as little as possible, so these in-room workouts were all he could afford right now. And he needed something to burn off his anxiety.
The trick was to assume the worst and act accordingly. The NSA searched for patterns; Larison would give them none. His movements were random, he paid for everything in cash, and when he had to show ID, he could draw on a half dozen identities, all of them guaranteed sterile because he’d created them himself. It had been a long time since he’d trusted JSOC.
He finished two hundred and fifty push-ups, flipped over onto his back, and started a set of sit-ups. His breathing and heart rate were slightly elevated. He felt good. Working out always took the edge off when he was feeling paranoid.
Hort represented a different facet of the same problem. Hort would try to exploit what he knew about Larison to anticipate Larison’s next move and then plan an ambush accordingly. Larison had seen Hort get inside his enemies’ minds and predict what they would do next. The man knew people so well, at times he seemed almost psychic. So much so, in fact, that Larison had from time to time considered eliminating the threat Hort might now represent.
A surge of latent paranoia suddenly gripped him and he wondered if he’d made a mistake, if he should have taken out Hort after all. But Hort was no soft target, for one thing. For another, Larison wanted to avoid yet another doomed face tormenting his dreams. Not that Hort didn’t deserve it. But they all deserved it. Guilty or innocent, it didn’t make any difference.
