The Killer Collective

by Barry Eisler

  Graham looked up at him, his face already swollen and purple from the blows he’d received. “What do you want?” he said.

  “That’s really up to you,” John said. “Right now, we want you dead. But maybe you can change our minds.”

  chapter

  fifty-one

  LIVIA

  An hour later, they were all in the van, parked at the bug-out point—a lightless cul-de-sac between a sprawling train terminus and a place called the Pavilions of Bercy, which looked like some sort of fairground art museum. Behind them was a graffiti-covered stone wall; all around were dumpsters, earth-moving equipment, and a profusion of construction detritus and weeds. Rain, who in addition to his expertise with local bars and jazz clubs seemed also to be a specialist in what might be called “lonely, abandoned, nocturnal Paris,” had suggested the spot, and Livia had to agree, it was a good one. They ought to have all the time they needed with Graham here.

  Still, in case they were disturbed, Delilah was behind the wheel, keeping watch through the windshield and via the mirrors, and the men all had their guns out. Graham was propped against one of the wheel wells, some of the moving blankets folded under him into an impromptu cushion, and Livia was kneeling next to him, holding an ice pack against his swollen face.

  “What is this,” he said, “good cop, bad cop?”

  “Believe me,” Livia said, setting the ice pack on the floor, “if I’m the good cop, you don’t want to meet the bad one.”

  Graham looked around the van. “Am I missing something? I thought I already had.”

  “That depends on you,” Livia said.

  “It’s actually pretty simple,” Rain said. “Arrington’s done. You can show us you’re with us on that, or you can go down with him.”

  Livia gave Rain a look. She respected him, but she didn’t know him or his moves nearly well enough to have him tag teaming her subject. Well, the man was a bit of a control freak, as Carl had said. She’d find a way to manage him.

  If Graham was surprised they knew about Arrington, he didn’t reveal it. “How can I show you something like that?” he said.

  “I can suggest a few ways,” Livia said. “But under the circumstances, I think you might want to get creative yourself.”

  Larison added, “Because if you don’t, tomorrow they’ll find your body in a dumpster.”

  Livia gave him the same look she’d given Rain. She realized she should have been more explicit about how this interrogation would be conducted. Initially, she’d been relieved when everyone agreed she would lead it, that there had been no need for an argument. But she hadn’t counted on all of them wanting to chime in.

  At least so far, no one had said anything stupid. The trick now was to make Graham understand they knew a lot, and to make him believe they knew even more than that. A healthy appreciation of how things would go for him if they found him uncooperative wouldn’t hurt, and in fairness, Larison’s comment, along with the man’s overall deadly vibe, was useful in that regard.

  “Arrington pulled records,” Livia said. “And then had them sealed. The names of Secret Service agents who had been referred to Justice for using their devices to access child pornography.”

  The referrals she was sure of. The precise reason for the referrals, she wasn’t. But she’d dealt with enough instances of predators getting busted for using their work computers to access illicit materials that she felt confident in the bluff.

  Graham looked down. He seemed to be struggling with something—possibly the realization that he’d been outplayed and had run out of options. This was the point where suspects started to think about what they could offer in exchange for some kind of deal.

  After a moment, he looked up. “If you think about it,” he said, “this whole thing was nothing but a cluster-fuck. Just a giant misunderstanding.”

  Neither Larison nor Rain spoke. Thank God. There was a time to press, and a time to back off.

  “Anyway,” Graham went on, “I’m . . . sorry it all happened. I really am.”

  Larison said, “It’s a little l—”

  Livia silenced him with a furious stare. She kept staring until he’d nodded. Then she looked back to Graham.

  “Talk is cheap,” she said.

  He nodded. “I think I know what you want. But I’ll need certain assurances.”

  Even before becoming a cop, Livia had known that you had to ease off slightly as your opponent went to his back—trading pressure, which you no longer needed, for more control, which you did. People fighting from their backs were desperate, liable to do almost anything to get free, and needed to be managed carefully. So she stayed cool. She’d been at this exact moment, and in fact had heard Graham’s exact words, countless times in police interrogation rooms. A potential deal was on the table now, yes, but it wasn’t yet closed. And closing was an art unto itself.

  Again, Larison and Rain kept their mouths shut. Slow, but not ineducable. She said to Graham, “I’m listening.”

  He looked at her, then at the rest of them. “I know Arrington is finished. But I don’t want him prosecuted. Do you understand?”

  Livia said again, “I’m listening.”

  “I want immunity,” he said. “And the only kind of immunity I want is the kind that doesn’t get to implicate me or anyone else—not in a confession, not in testimony, not in leaks to the press. Not at all. I’ll show you my bona fides, as long as we agree that once I do, either you or I will take out Arrington.”

  “We’re supposed to just let you walk out of here on your say-so?” Horton said.

  Livia gave him the look she’d given Larison. What was it about men that always made them feel they had to add something, and wouldn’t let them just watch? Delilah was up front, ready to drive if there were a problem, but even if she’d been in back, Livia sensed the woman wouldn’t have interfered the way the men did.

  Horton nodded and shut up.

  “What I can give you,” Graham said, “would be more than enough to prosecute Arrington. Blow up the Secret Service ring . . . everything. So the person who should be having trust issues right now is me, not you. What’s to stop you from killing me right after I’ve told you what you want?”

  “Maybe you can’t trust us not to kill you if you tell us,” Rain said. “But I guarantee, you can trust us to kill you if you don’t.”

  This time, Livia didn’t bother to stare him down. Part of her wanted to, on principle, but in fact it was more or less what she had been planning to say herself, and a pretty succinct summary of where things stood for Graham. Still, she hoped it wouldn’t encourage the others to keep chiming in. It occurred to her that Carl, who was ordinarily the most loquacious of the group and then some, was the only one keeping quiet now.

  “I get that,” Graham said. “So let me just say this. All of this was business. And none of it was necessary. Rain, I was prepared to respect your no. But then you and Larison went to see Hort, and it felt like a security breach. Maybe I overreacted, but still.”

  “What about me?” Livia said. “That was just business, too?”

  Graham nodded. “That was the beginning of the business. You know what happened. You uncovered a child-pornography ring at the Secret Service. The contractor you were working with told his supervisor. His supervisor told Arrington. At which point, Arrington decided the toothpaste needed to go back in the tube.”

  Livia almost asked why. It was the one thing they had never been able to understand—why was Arrington so intent on protecting the Secret Service?

  And then all at once it hit her, one of those cop insights that could remain so frustratingly out of reach in the dark, and then reveal itself in a spontaneous burst of clarity. Probably what had triggered it was just that simple word—protect—which for whatever reason she’d been looking at the wrong way up until this very moment.

  She’d always thought of rings like Child’s Play as a disease. One that, like all diseases, had vectors. A patient zero, who then infected others,
who in turn infected others.

  She’d been so focused on Secret Service agents infecting each other. After all, the encryption app Trahan had uncovered on Child’s Play was the one he had designed for the Secret Service.

  But who else did Secret Service agents come into contact with? Who else could they infect?

  Not just each other. Also . . . their protectees.

  She let nothing show in her expression. The excitement. The satisfaction. The exultation. Nothing.

  “Stop pretending this is about the Secret Service,” she said, leaning close and getting in his face. “How fucking stupid do you think we are?”

  She could feel the others looking at her. I swear to God, if one of you interferes with my play now, I will kill you.

  But none of them did. She let the silence work on Graham, then said, “Arrington found it in the Justice records, didn’t he? We had six instances of Trahan’s encryption app being used on Child’s Play. But not six previous referrals to Justice. And Arrington had a hunch: the agents who’d been referred to Justice had shared Trahan’s encryption app with someone else. Someone outside the Secret Service.”

  Graham blinked, and she knew she was right. He’d been hoping to bullshit them. To hold something back. Now he realized he couldn’t, and was trying to recover.

  “So Arrington braced the agents in those Justice files,” she went on. “‘There’s no statute of limitation on these crimes,’ he told them. ‘The FBI is going to prosecute. We’re going to expose you. Send you to prison. Ruin your life.’ And they all shit their pants, and begged him, and offered to cooperate any way he wanted. And he said, ‘Tell me who you shared this encryption app with. Give me names, and I won’t prosecute you. I’ll protect you.’”

  Graham was impassive. But his pupils were dilated, and a bead of sweat rolled down his swollen face.

  The men were all silent. Well, it was never too late to learn not to interfere with someone else’s interrogation.

  Livia sensed she had another bluff, and decided to play it. “I want your copy of those Justice Department files,” she said.

  Graham blinked. “Why do you think I have a copy?”

  He sounded like a guy trying to conceal that he was sucking wind after being gut-punched, and she felt a surge of excitement.

  “Because if anyone else ever got hold of those files,” she said, “they’d learn the same things Arrington had. And if what he’d learned ever became public, he wouldn’t be able to use it to blackmail the people those Secret Service agents had shared the app with. So he didn’t just have those files sealed. He destroyed them. But he still needed his own copy to hold over the heads of the people he was threatening.”

  “I suppose that’s possible,” Graham said, and she knew, she fucking knew, he was at the end of his bluff, “but why would you think Arrington would share any of that with me?”

  “Because you guys go way back,” she said, her voice rising. “SEAL Team 8. Haiti. Kosovo. Because you weren’t going to kill a cop and an FBI agent, you weren’t going to bring down a fucking plane, without seeing the proof yourself. Without having access to it. So you better get smart right fucking now, and prove to us which side you’re on, or Larison is going to jam the muzzle of a gun in your ear and pull the trigger and we’re going to leave what’s left of you out on the sidewalk. And prosecute Arrington anyway, because—you know what?—I already have enough. In fact, fuck it. I’m sick of this. Larison. Kill him.”

  Larison raised his eyebrows in surprise—and evident pleasure. He looked at Rain. And Rain, finally deferring to her on this the way he should have from the beginning, nodded.

  Larison took one of the moving blankets and spooled it around his gun hand—an expedient way of muffling the sound of a shot. Then he grabbed Graham by the collar of his jacket. “Outside,” he said. “I don’t want to have to ride around in this thing with your brains all over the walls.”

  “Hold on,” Graham said. “Hold on. Okay, my bad.”

  Larison hauled him up. “Too late, asshole.”

  Livia held up a hand to Larison and said to Graham, “Last chance. Get it right, or we’re done.”

  “I have the files,” Graham said. “They’re on an encrypted site. I can give you the log-in credentials. You can see for yourself.”

  Carl pulled Livia’s laptop out of a bag, handed it to Rain, and fired up his sat phone to use as a Wi-Fi hotspot.

  Larison shoved Graham back down, but kept the grip on his collar. Graham intoned the credentials. Rain punched them in, then handed the laptop to Livia. She suppressed a flush of triumph. It was exactly what she needed—Secret Service referrals to the Justice Department. Three agents. Accessing child pornography from work computers, just as she’d suspected. She moved a copy to another site, forwarded it to Little and Strangeland, then handed the laptop back to Rain.

  “Three referrals,” she said. “But six Child’s Play members were using Trahan’s app. Now, maybe some of the remaining six had just never been caught accessing child porn from their work devices. But at least some of them were protectees. And I can go after them now, I can uncover them, exactly the way Arrington did, because now I have the Justice Department records and I know the initial vectors. So all you’d be doing by telling me the rest is saving me a little time and effort. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty good deal for saving your own life. So tell me. Who were the other three Child’s Play members who were using the Secret Service encryption app? The ones who aren’t named in those Justice Department records.”

  A long moment passed. No one interrupted the silence.

  Finally, Graham said, “You’re not going to believe me.”

  She looked at him. “Try me.”

  He sighed. “All right. Walter Barkley, for one.”

  Only years of professional discipline kept Livia from showing her astonishment at the mention of a senator—and presidential front-runner on top of it. To conceal her reaction and keep him talking, she downshifted to something secondary. “Which of the agents shared the app with him?”

  “It wasn’t an agent who shared it with Barkley. It was another senator.”

  Livia realized that, in her excitement, she’d made an unnecessary—and mistaken—assumption. She should have asked a wider-aperture version: Who shared the app with Barkley? She hated that kind of misstep. But okay, no harm, no foul.

  “One of the agents shared the app with a senator he was protecting?” she said.

  Graham nodded, his shoulders deflated. She’d seen the posture before, on suspects who realized as they bargained that their position was getting steadily weaker, while the cops’ position hadn’t been affected at all. But once the dynamic started, it was difficult to stop.

  “Which senator?” she said.

  “Fenwick.”

  It was beginning to feel surreal. But she pushed the feeling aside and reminded herself to stay matter-of-fact. The suspect needed to feel like the revelations were routine, nothing the cop didn’t already know, and therefore neither much of a betrayal nor particularly valuable, either.

  “Garrison Fenwick?” Horton said, his tone incredulous. “The Senate majority leader?”

  Oh my God, what is wrong with these people, I swear I should have duct-taped their mouths shut

  This time, Livia didn’t give Horton the Shut the fuck up look. She gave him a disgusted one. He held up his hands in a Sorry, my bad gesture.

  She turned back to Graham. “Why would the Senate majority leader get Secret Service protection? I thought that was mostly presidents and vice presidents and their families.”

  “They also do special assignments,” Graham said. “Case by case, depending on security concerns. And a few years ago, Fenwick was dealing with threats in the face of some contentious legislation, and someone made the call that the usual Capitol Police detail wasn’t enough. An Agent Crocker—one of the three in those Justice files—started shadowing him, spending nights in the senator’s Potomac home, while the senator�
�s wife and children were traveling. They got to know each other, the hints got increasingly brazen, they realized their mutual interest . . . and they started sharing material. Crocker wanted to curry favor, so he told the senator, ‘Don’t use Tor, you know the Bureau and NSA are doing everything they can to crack it—here, check out this super-secure app the Secret Service itself developed.’”

  “All right,” Livia said. “So Fenwick shared the app with Barkley.”

  Graham nodded. “One senator to another. Your tax dollars at work.”

  “Who else?” Livia said. “Remember, I’m going to find out anyway. Don’t make me think you have conflicted loyalties here.”

  “One other. Fenwick shared the app with Charlie Hamm, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Three senators, all in Arrington’s pocket. That would be quite a thing no matter what. But on top of it, Barkley is poised to become the next president of the United States. Can you understand why this was a big deal?”

  “I can understand why it’s a big deal,” Livia said. “What I can’t understand is why the head of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division didn’t prosecute.”

  “Look,” Graham said, “it’s not just that Arrington is power mad. Not exactly. He also figured that if he could have learned about this child-porn ring in the Senate, the Russians could have learned of it, too. And can you imagine what the Russians would be able to do if they had this kind of kompromat on the president? Not to mention the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and the Senate majority leader.”

  That tracked with what Kanezaki had told them—that Arrington was obsessed with the notion of Kremlin plots. Okay, it seemed Graham was being forthcoming.

  “If he was really worried about blackmail,” Livia said, “he should have sought indictments. If it’s out in the open, no one can use it.”

  Graham smiled. “Well, that’s where it starts to get a little complicated. I mean, first, can you imagine what it would be like to try to prosecute men like Barkley? Between those three senators alone, you’ve got a fortune of probably two hundred million dollars. And then there’s the Secret Service. They’d fight like hell. The Agency would try to disassociate itself from Arrington. They’d leak his psych file. There would be a coordinated campaign by some of the most powerful members of the government and the deep state to destroy him. Why fight that battle—and probably lose it—when you can do something easier and more effective?”