by Barry Eisler
“Oh, a little racist patter to go with the sexist. You trying to bore me to death now? You think I haven’t heard it all before, mostly from people a lot more clever than you?”
Goddamn it, she was right. She’d won the round. Now he was just being an asshole.
“Well,” he said, “you were right. That’s twice I didn’t see you coming.”
She smiled, and despite her evident amusement there was something gentle and even forgiving in her eyes. “I told you. Now listen. I like your dimples but I don’t have time to flirt with you. I’m not here to play games.”
“Yeah? What do you have in mind instead?”
“A little word association exercise to start with, to establish our bona fides. You ready?”
“Sure,” he said, not knowing where she was going.
“Detainees.”
Ah. Now he understood.
“Interrogations,” he said.
She nodded. “Now we’re making progress. Videotapes.”
“Missing.”
“Diamonds.”
“A hundred million U.S.”
“Bingo.”
They were quiet for a moment. “All right,” he said. “We’re both looking for the same thing.”
“Exactly. And the brick wall your people are throwing up is going to make it impossible for either side to find it.”
“Then tell me what you need,” Ben said, hoping to learn more from the questions than he was willing to provide with answers.
“I need Larison.”
“Larison’s dead.”
“He’s supposed to be dead, yes.”
“What makes you think he’s not?”
“Look, the only thing we could get from CIA were some records, probably incomplete, on who had access to what we’re looking for. I was up for two nights straight cross-referencing the data. A black ops guy named Larison, deceased, had the access. I asked the Agency and they stonewalled me. That told me I was on to something. I told my superiors we needed to look into it. How sure are we this guy is dead? And even if he is, maybe he had an accomplice who got the tapes before Larison died. They all blew me off. They’re all looking for an analyst, trying to adapt their serial killer profiling tools to predict the kind of personality that would do something like this. And let me tell you, once an orthodoxy takes hold at the Bureau? It’s like religion, nothing’s going to shake it. So they told me fine, you want to stake out a dead guy’s widow’s house? Go right ahead. They gave me Bob and Drew, who you might have noticed aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and shooed me away. They were just glad to get me out of their hair.”
Well, Hort had been wrong about another agency not getting curious about Larison. He’d read the Bureau right, it seemed, he just hadn’t known about this tenacious woman.
“Why didn’t you interview her yourself, then?” he said.
“I was going to. But first I wanted to watch her. See if someone like you happened to show up.”
“Might have cost you time. Pretty big gamble.”
“Not so big, really. Because here you are. So what did she tell you?”
“Not much.”
“You’re lying.”
Well, it felt like he was lying, but technically he was afraid he might be telling the truth. “She might have told me one thing that was useful. I’m going to check it out now. Leave me alone for a while and I’ll let you know what I turn up.”
“That’s your idea of interagency cooperation? I knew you were CIA.”
“Look, I’m under a lot of pressure. It’s the best I can do right now.”
“Fine. You can explain while I’m booking you in the Orlando field office.”
“You want to know something, Paula? I like you. You’re smart and you’ve got balls. But if you make a move to arrest me, you’re going to wind up like your buddies Bob and Drew. The only difference might be that with you, I could feel bad about it after.”
She watched him for a moment, amused or seething he couldn’t tell.
“You’re right,” she said, with that sweet, soothing tone that to him was beginning to sound like a rattlesnake’s tail. “You’re a hard man. Even if I arrested you, I bet I couldn’t get you to cooperate. Guess I’ll just have to interview Wheeler myself. When she mentions someone has already been to see her, I’ll say, ‘Really? That’s awful. Who was he? Did he tell you he was FBI?’ ’Cause I know you didn’t just waltz into her house and tell her you were CIA. ‘He did? No, ma’am, he wasn’t FBI. I don’t know who he was, we’ve never heard of him. But impersonating an FBI agent is a crime punishable by no less than ten years in a federal penitentiary. I’d like to assist you in registering a complaint with the Bureau so we can conduct a formal investigation into who this man could be. We’ll need to release a description to the media, too.’ That kind of thing.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Then call.”
He watched her. She didn’t blink.
He asked himself why she wouldn’t do it. And couldn’t think of a single good reason.
“All right,” he said, “we need to visit a private investigator in Orlando. But your pals Bob and Drew stay behind, got that? They need medical attention, for one thing. For another, I don’t want to have to worry about one of them stewing over what happened, and doing something stupid to get his mojo back. They don’t strike me as the bygones-be-bygones type.”
“No, they’re not. So, yes, we’ll make it just the two of us. But give me their guns first.”
Ben looked around. “Hand me your purse.”
She did. He held it under the table and slipped Drew’s and Bob’s weapons inside it, then put it on the table. She went to take it back, but he didn’t let it go.
“I’m still armed, Paula,” he said, looking into her eyes. “And I’d hate to have to shoot you just as we’re getting to know each other. I really would feel bad about it.”
She smiled and patted his hand. “I’ll bet you would, sugar. I’ll bet you would.”
9
Some Kind of Military Spook
Harry McGlade’s office was located in Orlando’s Parramore district, home of the Amway Arena, a U.S. federal courthouse, police headquarters, and a number of other state buildings. The area was awake and bustling when Ben and Paula arrived. At nightfall, Ben knew, the daytime population would roll away like drops of mercury, revealing a sad substratum of winos, whores, and madmen beneath.
Paula had called McGlade from the road and told him she had a case, that he was highly recommended though she couldn’t say by whom, that she needed to see him right away. McGlade was amenable.
The building was a ramshackle second-floor walk-up with a stairway that smelled like someone had been using it for a toilet. Paula went in first. McGlade was just beginning to stand from behind an enormous metal desk when Ben followed her in. Crestfallen would be too strong a word for the look on his face, Ben thought, but not by much. His age was hard to guess—ballpark, sixty—and he was overweight in a way that looked more liquid than fat, with Gollum-pale skin that suggested this squalid room was as much a cave to him as it was an office.
“Didn’t realize there were two of you,” he said, in a nasal voice.
“I’m sorry,” Paula said. “I didn’t want to say too much over the phone.”
Ben looked around. The place was like an experiment in entropy. Papers so scattered that but for the settled-in stink of sweat and tobacco you’d think a wind had blown through. Two overflowing ashtrays. An algae-covered aquarium with no fish that Ben could see. It was hot, too, and Ben realized the guy must be too cheap or too destitute to use the air conditioner.
There was a pair of metal folding chairs in front of the desk. McGlade came around, swept up the piles of paper on each, and made a show of stacking them neatly on the floor. “Here,” he said. “Have a seat. Coffee?”
Ben and Paula both said, “No,” simultaneously and equally emphatically.
McGlade circled back to an incongruousl
y fancy leather office chair Ben suspected he’d stolen. “All right,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
“It’s not what you can do for me,” Paula said, reaching into her purse and taking out her credentials. “It’s what you can do for the FBI.”
McGlade examined her ID, his expression suddenly sewn up tight. “All right. What can I do for the FBI?”
“You can tell us about a case you were working on a little over three years ago,” Ben said. “Guy named Daniel Larison. His wife thought he was having an affair.”
McGlade’s face lost a drop of color. “I’m sorry, but all my client matters are entirely confidential.”
Paula smiled at him. “Mr. McGlade,” she said, her tone exceptionally sweet, “we’re very busy, so I’ll get straight to the point. Tell us something useful, and you’ll have a contact and friend inside the Bureau for life. Fuck with me, and I’ll crawl up your ass and chew my way out.”
Ben thought, What? He had to clamp his jaw shut to keep from laughing. At the same time, he was beginning to realize McGlade would have to be a fool to think she was bullshitting him.
There was a long silence while McGlade assessed the probabilities. Then he said, “All right. Three years ago, a woman in Kissimmee contacted me, told me she thought her husband was having an affair.”
“Marcy Wheeler?” Paula asked.
“Yeah. Wheeler. Happens all the time. Usually it’s a wife who calls me, but sometimes a husband. Ninety percent of what I do is domestic. Anyway, I get what I need from her—photograph of the husband, car registration, that kind of thing—and I go to tail the guy, see where he’s going. SOP. Except, it turns out the guy is almost impossible to tail.”
“Watching his back?” Ben said.
“You could say that. Now I see a little of this kind of thing all the time. People who are up to no good can be jumpy, sometimes they pay more attention than your average honest citizen. I’m used to it and it’s not a problem for me. This guy was way beyond that. His wife told me he was some kind of military spook, but when I saw how surveillance conscious he was, I knew he was something really special. Counterterrorism, Delta, something like that. I told Wheeler this one could take awhile, he was too watchful and I couldn’t get close. I quoted her a long-term rate and she was okay with it.”
“A little annuity for you, huh?” Ben said, and he realized he felt weirdly protective of Marcy. “She the first client you fed that story to?”
“As a matter of fact, smart guy, she was. I don’t charge by the hour. My business is about results.”
“Okay,” Paula said. “So you backed off. But you stayed on him.”
“That’s right. His wife would tell me when he was traveling. Now here’s the interesting thing. Most times, even though I couldn’t stay on him long, I could confirm he was going to Patrick Air Force Base. Figured from there, he was getting a military flight to wherever he was going. But other times, I confirmed he was going to Orlando International. When I’d get the word from the wife, I’d set up at the airport in Orlando, wait for him there. Didn’t matter that he was watching his back if I could get set up in front of him, right?”
Ben popped a knuckle. “You figured the civilian flights were the illicit ones.”
“Exactly. So twice in Orlando, I watched him board a flight to Miami. Next time the wife told me he was traveling, I went to Miami, started staking out the arrivals gates for flights from Orlando.”
Wheeler leaned forward in her chair. “And?”
“And twice I saw him boarding a flight to Costa Rica. San Jose, the capital. I told Wheeler it looked like he was up to something in Costa Rica. As it happens, I have a contact there, someone who could pick Larison up when he arrived. She said do it. So I did.”
Wheeler said, “Who?”
“Guy who goes by the name Taibbi. I know him from the service. He’s a surfer, or was when I knew him, anyway. Now he owns a bar in Jacó, near Playa Hermosa, a big surfing beach. Freelances in this and that, if you know what I mean.”
“No,” Ben said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Look, Jacó’s got three draws: surfing, drugs, and whores. You get it now? I asked Taibbi if he wanted to be my local liaison on this case. Follow a guy, confirm whether he’s got a mistress, I get a finder’s fee, he gets the balance. I warned him the guy was military, surveillance conscious. Taibbi says don’t worry, I’ve got a crew.”
Paula glanced at Ben, then back to McGlade. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, exactly. All Taibbi told me was that Larison did one of his crew. Cut his throat.”
“My God,” Paula said.
“Yeah. Whatever happened, it spooked Taibbi bad, and Taibbi, let me tell you, has seen his share of shit.”
“That’s not what Wheeler told us,” Ben said. “She said your guy in Costa Rica disappeared.”
“Yeah, that’s what I told her. I just wanted to keep it vague, you know? The fewer questions the better. Anyway, Taibbi told me he was done, called me a few choice words for not adequately warning him of what Larison was all about—like I knew, for fuck’s sake—and told me he was out. I started thinking about what I’d gotten myself into, what it would be like if Larison ever learned some PI had been following him. Well, the hell with that. So yeah, I told Wheeler my Costa Rica guy had disappeared and I gave her back her money. And that’s the last I heard of any of this, until now.”
Paula said, “And Taibbi didn’t go to the police?”
“Taibbi lives the kind of life that doesn’t mix well with law enforcement. And if your next question is why I didn’t go to the cops either, what was I supposed to do? Tell the Costa Rican police I heard there was a murder that the guy who might have seen it will never testify about? Please.”
“So you saw Larison traveling from Miami to Costa Rica,” Ben said. “What were the dates?”
“Are you shitting me? It was three years ago.”
“You don’t have records?”
“Oh, yeah, I have records,” McGlade said, looking around the office. “I’m sure they’re here somewhere. I’ll just get some excavation equipment and we’ll turn them up in no time.”
Ben tried not to let his impatience show. “What was the season?”
“First time was … shit, I can’t remember. But wait. Second time … I remember the Magic had just made the play-offs. It was a big deal, their first time since 2003. So that would have been … April. Yeah, April 2007. Yeah, they beat the Celtics the night before, I remember that. So … hold on.”
McGlade leaned forward and worked his computer for a moment. “April 16, 2007. That was the day Larison flew from Miami to San Jose the second time. So the first time would have been … maybe three months before that. Four at the most.”
“Remember the airline?” Ben said.
“Lacsa. Costa Rican carrier, United affiliate, I think.”
Ben nodded. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a pretty good start. Hort could check the passenger manifest on the day Larison traveled. Ben doubted the man would have been traveling under his own name, but now they had a good shot at uncovering an alias. Or one of them, anyway.
McGlade said, “All right? That’s everything I know. You don’t have to crawl up my ass now. Unless you’re into that kind of thing.”
“One more question,” Paula said, smiling. “The name of your friend’s bar.”
10
Someone Else’s Dreams
Larison stepped off the bus at the Greyhound station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The ticket he’d bought was for Scranton. One was as good as the other, he just didn’t like going where the ticket said he would. He knew no one was watching—paying cash and moving by bus was the most secure and anonymous means of travel left in America—but there was no downside to layering in another level of security, either.
He slung his bag over his shoulder and started walking, his boots crunching quietly on the cement sidewalk. The sun was setting behind the tired-looking buildings to
his right, but the air was still suffused with a stagnant heat. He didn’t care. A little sweat, a little body odor would make it less likely that anyone would take an interest in him or recall his passage after he was gone.
He headed south along Market Street, knowing he’d find a hotel soon enough. In his worn jeans and faded flannel shirt, his unshaven face obscured by a Cat Diesel hat, he knew he looked like a tradesman of some sort who’d lost his job in the hollowed-out economy and was looking to find another. Nobody important, but not a criminal, either, just a down-on-his-luck guy moving away from something sad and toward something maybe a little better, interesting to nobody, not even to himself.
More than anything, he wished he could have spent these days with Nico in San Jose. Or better yet, on the beach in Manuel Antonio, where they’d first met. Costa Rica had become a kind of symbol in his mind, a shorthand for forgetting everything about his past and living the way he wanted to, with the person he wanted to. But he couldn’t afford to go there now. He was too tense, for one thing. Nico, who could read his moods like no one who’d ever known him before, would intuit something was wrong. Also, for now, Larison preferred not to cross international borders. He wanted his remaining few contacts with the government to come from a variety of entirely random eastern seaboard locations, including the last contact, when he would instruct them on how to deliver the diamonds. After that, he would vanish like smoke.
For a moment, the thought of vanishing made him feel almost giddy. Because it would seem like vanishing only from his enemies’ perspective. From his own standpoint, it would be more like … more like being reborn, like his real self finally stirring to wakefulness. And once that part of him, the real him, the self he’d denied and obscured and hidden for so long, was awake, the dreams would stop, wouldn’t they? Yes, that would be one of the best parts about waking up, that the dreams would finally end. They’d belong to someone else then. They couldn’t touch him in Costa Rica.
He’d gone there for the first time five years earlier, while on temporary duty training the Honduran government’s praetorian guard in intelligence gathering and interrogation. He’d heard of Manuel Antonio, supposedly a gay paradise on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. It was a short flight to San Jose, and from there, a short drive to Manuel Antonio. Of course he hadn’t told anyone where he was going, he was just taking a few days to himself. He was married, and people naturally assumed he was being tight-lipped because he was chasing whores and wanted to be discreet. No one cared about that sort of thing. Getting a little strange tail was considered one of the perks of temporary duty and was ironically protected by its own informal “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. He was happy to have people think it of him. It wasn’t so terribly far from the truth and was therefore perfect cover.
