The Killer Collective

by Barry Eisler

  Larison and Rain were proned out under the leaves on a ridge in Lake Anna State Park, looking down on the overflow lot. Larison was glad to be working just with Rain again. He trusted Rain’s intentions, and he trusted his abilities—which wasn’t something he could say about anyone else he knew. Dox came close, he supposed. But as much as he’d reluctantly grown to like the big sniper, Dox was always going to be too brash and ebullient for Larison to ever really be comfortable with. Rain’s quiet confidence and meticulous planning were more Larison’s speed. And beyond that, he could tell that, like himself, Rain felt like an outsider, detached and alienated from the world but still seeking some kind of connection. Well, he’d made one with Larison, and Larison wouldn’t forget it.

  The other three were a half mile up the trailhead, waiting for Livia’s contact, a Homeland Security Investigations agent named B. D. Little. Livia had described him as black, midforties, maybe six-two and 220, built like a former football player, probably wearing glasses and a suit, and looking like the federal law enforcement he was. The question was whether anyone would be with him or, more worrying, behind.

  Even though Little was expecting the meeting to be at the winery, Rain wanted to get in position at the park early. That suited Larison fine. It was always good to get a feel for the rhythms of a place. It made spotting incongruities easier.

  They’d been silently watching for close to twenty minutes when Rain said, “How are . . . things with you and Nico?”

  Larison tensed. He knew Rain and the others knew, though he also preferred them to pretend they didn’t. But . . . in any other context, it would have been a normal question, right? It might even have seemed rude not to ask. Maybe that was all Rain was doing. Just being . . . normal.

  Still, he wasn’t sure how to respond. After a long pause, he said, “Good.”

  They were both quiet again, watching the parking lot. A minute went by. Rain said, “You’re lucky.”

  This was a lot of talk coming from Rain. And on an uncomfortable subject. Larison tried to puzzle it out. He couldn’t. Finally he said, “You don’t . . . have someone?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “Long story.”

  Larison glanced at his watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”

  Rain sighed. “We had a dumb fight. But that wasn’t the cause, it was a symptom. She was in the life and wouldn’t leave it.”

  Larison tried to think of how to respond. Before he could come up with anything, Rain added, “How do you make it work with Nico? With a civilian?”

  Larison considered. “That’s what makes it work. This fucking life . . . Nico’s so innocent, he almost makes me feel innocent again.”

  Jesus, had he really just said that? He hadn’t thought about it, it just came out. But it was too late to take it back.

  “I wish I could feel like that,” Rain said. “But I can’t. Not with her.”

  Larison had to laugh a little at that. “I’m not saying it lasts. You and I are never going to feel innocent. Not really. You should settle for her making you feel good. And you doing the same for her.”

  They were quiet again. After a minute, Rain said, “It’s probably too late anyway.”

  “Well, why don’t you go see her? Where is she?”

  Rain glanced at him, his expression rueful. “Paris.”

  It took Larison a second to connect the dots. “Wait a minute, is that why Dox gave you that look when Kanezaki and Hort were talking about blondes?”

  Rain nodded.

  “You said she’s in the life. Could she help?”

  “I . . . shit, I don’t want to talk about this.”

  Larison laughed. “Look, nobody’s ever going to confuse me with Dr. Ruth, but hell yes you want to talk about this, you brought it up.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t . . .”

  Rain stopped talking and gestured with a finger to the lot.

  A dark sedan had just pulled in. It stopped. A man got out, fitting Livia’s description perfectly.

  “Little,” Larison said.

  Rain nodded.

  “All right. We’ll talk about the other thing later.”

  “We really don’t have to.”

  “Up to you. I’m probably not the best guy to give advice to the lovelorn. And I know you’re afraid Dox will give you shit about it. But my opinion, for what it’s worth? Talk to someone. There’s too much room for regret if you get it wrong.”

  They watched as Little read the sign at the trailhead, then disappeared into the woods.

  Rain glanced at Larison. “I think you might be better in the advice department than you think.”

  Larison laughed again. “I’ll keep my day job. Just in case.”

  A minute later, another dark sedan pulled into the lot. It stopped on the side opposite from Little’s car. Two large men in gray suits got out. No ties. They started walking briskly toward the trailhead.

  Rain was smiling. “One of my favorite surveillance tells,” he said.

  Larison nodded. “The in-between garb.”

  “Exactly. These guys are tailing Little. But they don’t know where they might wind up. Maybe in a business district. Maybe in a diner. Maybe a shopping mall. So they dress at the low end of formal for some environments, and the high end of casual for others.”

  “But a walk in the woods was something they just weren’t ready for.”

  Rain glanced over. “So you make them as tailing Little, not as working with him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  Larison considered. It was hard to articulate, but he knew he and Rain were seeing the same thing. “The way Little was walking, he seemed not to have a clue. A cop, not an operator. No sense of what might be behind him, whether opposition or his own people. And if they were with him, they wouldn’t have been following so closely. He would have told them where he’d be, and they could have drifted way back before moving in. Those guys . . . they lost visual contact for a moment, and they didn’t like it. So they moved in a little quickly.”

  Rain nodded. “Agreed.”

  Larison understood what that “agreed” entailed. Nothing else needed to be said.

  A few minutes later, Little came around a bend in the trail and passed their position. Larison couldn’t imagine walking an actual marked trail in the woods as instructed by someone else. Unless he was suicidal and just wanted to end it all. He reminded himself Little was law enforcement. A good investigator, Livia had said. But not even a street cop.

  As soon as Little was past, the two of them took up positions behind trees on either side of the trail.

  The two men following Little came around the bend. Neither was holding a gun.

  Okay.

  Larison and Rain stepped simultaneously from behind cover, their guns up. “Not even a twitch,” Larison said. “Or you’re done right there.”

  Both men froze, their eyes wide, their arms out slightly and shaking with tension from the conflicting freeze and go for the gun signals shooting through their brains.

  “Easy,” Rain said. “All we want is to ask you some questions. Answer them and you can walk out of here. Anything else is an instant bullet in the brain. Fair enough?”

  “What the hell is this?” one of the men said, maybe thinking he could bluff his way out. But their body language was all wrong. They were scared and they were pissed, but they were definitely not experiencing the kind of tilt reaction a civilian gets when confronted by two men insisting on having questions answered at gunpoint.

  “That’ll be your last question,” Rain said. “The rest come from us. Do you understand?”

  The men nodded. Larison was 90 percent sure Rain was just giving them something to hope for. You couldn’t very well expect men to cooperate if they were convinced they were going to die no matter what. But even if Larison was wrong, it didn’t matter. Part of the reason he’d lasted so long was his insistence on killing everyone who ever tried to come
after him. Treven was the one exception. And he was pretty sure it was the exception that proved the rule.

  “Follow my commands now,” Rain said. “Hands over your heads. Higher. All the way. Splay your fingers. Good. Now turn and face the other way. Good. Now keep your arms up, and slowly—and I mean fucking slowly—get down on your knees. Good. Now bring your arms down straight out in front of you, and lower yourselves onto your faces. If your hands get anywhere remotely near your bodies, you won’t get a warning, you’ll get a bullet in the back of the head. Do you understand?”

  The men nodded and carefully lowered themselves onto their faces. Larison wondered if Rain was serious about talking to them, or if he just wanted to give Little time to move far enough along the trail to possibly be out of earshot. It was hard to tell with Rain. Larison had seen him talking to men one second and killing them the next, without noticeable variation in affect along the way.

  “Good,” Rain said. “Now, arms all the way straight out to your sides. Palms facing the sky and lifted off the ground. Now spread your legs. Toes out. Now both of you turn your heads right. Left cheeks to the ground. Good. Now each of you slowly—slowly—put your left hand against the small of your back, palm facing the sky.”

  The men complied. Rain approached the one on the left. He planted his left foot on the ground next to the left side of the man’s head, then got his right knee under the man’s wrist and swept it up higher along the man’s back in a kind of chicken-wing hold. The man yelped. With his free hand, Rain pressed the man’s head firmly into the dirt, immobilizing him. Larison, more accustomed to killing people than restraining them, stepped to the front so he could shoot both men in the head unimpeded.

  Rain pressed the muzzle of the gun against the back of the man’s neck. “Why are you following that man?”

  Neither of them answered.

  Rain looked at Larison and nodded.

  “We’re going to play a game I like,” Larison said. “It’s called ‘The one who doesn’t answer the question first dies.’”

  Rain looked at Larison’s gun and shook his head, then glanced at Larison’s boot and nodded. Larison nodded back.

  “Why are you following that man?” Rain said again.

  Neither of them answered.

  Larison stepped in, raised his foot, and stomped his heel into the near man’s neck as though trying to break a log. The man’s arms flew up. Cartilage and vertebrae shattered. The man’s body spasmed and Larison stomped again to be sure. And again. After the third blow, the man’s fingers were still twitching, but otherwise he was still.

  “Damn,” Larison said, “that was actually a tie. So you have to play again.”

  The man Rain was restraining started breathing hard. “Fuck,” he said. “Oh, fuck.”

  “Take it easy,” Larison said. “You’re the only player now. You have a better chance of winning.”

  “I don’t know why we were following him,” the man said quickly. “We were told to.”

  Rain gave Larison a Hold on, we’re making progress look. “By whom?”

  “OGE.”

  “We know about OGE,” Rain said. “What does Graham want with that man?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. We were just supposed to follow him. Observe who he might be meeting with. Jesus Christ, who are you guys? Why are you doing this? This is some kind of mistake. We were just following him, that’s all.”

  “How were you following him?” Rain asked, overlooking the fact that the guy had violated Rain’s Only we get to ask the questions policy. Not that it really mattered.

  “Someone at headquarters is dialed in to his cellphone,” the guy said. “They were giving us step-by-step instructions.”

  “Who at headquarters?”

  “I don’t know everyone at headquarters, okay? It’s a big operation. There are people there who just do that stuff. Or who know people who do that stuff. Or whatever. And who get the data to field people like me. Look, I’m really trying to cooperate here. I think this is just a mistake, okay?”

  Rain looked at Larison, his eyebrows raised questioningly. Larison shook his head—nothing more to be learned here.

  Without another word, Rain raised the pistol and smashed the butt down into the guy’s neck over the carotid artery. The guy went limp. Rain slid his gun hand onto the guy’s right shoulder, pinning it to the ground, reached under the guy’s chin with his free hand, and ripped the guy’s head back at a diagonal as though yanking the starter rope on a lawnmower. There was an enormous crack! as the guy’s neck broke. Rain stood and stepped back, the pistol at the ready, but there was no need, the guy was already dead.

  They searched the bodies and recovered cellphones, wallets, and a pair of SIG Sauer P229s and spare magazines. Rain wasn’t interested in the guns, having been provisioned by Kanezaki, but Larison was always looking to improve his various stash sites, and so took both. They moved the bodies off the trail and covered them with leaves. They’d be found before long, but before long would be time enough.

  chapter

  thirty-one

  RAIN

  An hour later, the five of us plus Little were sitting in the rental van behind a supermarket on the outskirts of Spotsylvania. At the park, Larison had called Dox using the satellite phones and told him what had happened. Little needed to ditch his cellphone immediately. And they all needed to get back to the lot and the hell out of Dodge.

  To his credit, Little kept cool when we confronted him. He insisted he hadn’t known there was a tail. I found myself believing him. There had been his observable demeanor along the trail, of course, and that of his pursuers. But beyond that, if OGE had known he was on his way to meet the rest of us, they would have sent a lot more than just two guys—who hadn’t even had their guns out when Larison and I intercepted them.

  “Where are they now?” Little wanted to know.

  “They’re no longer a threat,” Larison said.

  Coming from a man with Larison’s bearing, there was pretty much only one way to interpret that. Little said, “My God, you killed them?”

  “They’re no longer a threat,” I said. “Which is good, because in the last few days, Livia had four people come at her, the rest of us had two, plus a helicopter gunship, and just now there were two more on you. You think those men were following you to make sure you’d be safe in the woods? Have they given any indication they look at law enforcement as untouchable?”

  Little didn’t respond.

  “So how about if you just say thank you,” Larison said, “and be glad we believe your story that you didn’t know they were behind you.”

  Livia said, “Enough. Little. We need to put our heads together about why they were following you. Was it because you and I talked on the phone, and they connected us that way?”

  Little was quiet for a moment, his jaw set. He was collecting himself, I knew. Whatever experience he had, it didn’t involve people making the sorts of decisions Larison and I had made at the park and acting on them. This was a guy who thought he was comfortable swimming in the open water, the turbulent, dark water, and was only now learning just what kinds of creatures lurked in those depths.

  Finally, he blew out a long breath. “It could be that,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s something else. I think the problem is coming from the Bureau. What I don’t yet know is why.”

  Livia extended a hand in a please continue gesture.

  “Here’s how I approached it,” Little said. “After the first time you and I talked, I asked myself, ‘How do you wind up with six predatory pedophiles in the Secret Service? in the Secret Service?’ And not just your garden variety, either, but the worst, the hurtcore specialists. I mean, statistically speaking, that’s a lot for a relatively small organization.”

  No one said anything, and he went on. “And then I thought, ‘Okay, let’s say there are that many. Unlikely, yes, but I suppose not impossible, because statistics don’t get evenly distributed. Flip a coin a thousand times
and it doesn’t go heads, tails, heads, tails, all the way down the line. You get improbable runs—five heads in a row, maybe even ten. So okay, let’s accept that, as unlikely as it seems, the Secret Service is home to six predatory pedophiles.’”

  He paused and, seeing there were no questions, continued. “Well, if so, there must have been a prior indication of a problem. At some point, someone got caught using a work computer to access child pornography, or a victim came forward, or a past violation came to light. Something. Something. Not just a blank canvas with six predatory pedophiles pederasts and their ongoing vileness on the other side of it. No. That would be borderline impossible.

  “Now, when there’s a serious federal crime committed by a federal employee, SOP is to report the matter to the Justice Department. So I made it a point to stop by. Talked to a fellow in records there, made sure to inquire about a variety of matters to obscure the nature of my actual interest. And when I mentioned, ‘Oh, one other thing . . . any reports filed about child-pornography charges against a Secret Service agent in the last five years or so?’ You know what he said?”

  We were all silent.

  “‘That’s funny,’ he said, ‘you’re the second one to ask about that. Is something going on?’ I asked him who was the first, at which point he got nervous, maybe thinking he had already said too much. He told me he wasn’t authorized to say more, and that regardless, the records had now been sealed. Meaning that to access them, I would have to go through hell’s own interagency process, and maybe even get a court order. And even after all that, I might find that the records had somehow been accidentally misplaced or destroyed.”

  “Who was asking before you?” Livia said. “And what did they find?”

  Little looked at her. “Ever heard of J. J. Arrington?”

  “Yes,” Livia said. “The head of CID. My chief has a call in to him because Agent Smith was head of VCAC, and she reported to him.”

  Dox said, “CID? VCAC?”

  Livia nodded. “The FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. And the Violent Crimes Against Children program, which is part of CID.” She looked at Little. “What about Arrington?”