by Barry Eisler
Horton had delivered the bad news to Treven’s brother, a Silicon Valley lawyer named Alex, who had taken it stoically. Horton’s understanding was that the brothers hadn’t been close, and that they were even estranged. But Horton had seen something in Alex’s eyes at the mention of Katie—their sister, Horton explained, who’d died in a car accident when they were all teenagers. Maybe there was some element of closure for Alex in his brother’s posthumous message. But there was no way to know.
Dox had called, too. He was going to visit Livia—in Portland, he said. Her caseload wouldn’t permit a real vacation, and she wasn’t yet ready to spend time together where she lived, or where he did. But I could tell he was giddy at the prospect of seeing her, and despite my concerns, I was happy for him.
For a while, Delilah and I watched the snow falling on the rock garden, our shoulders pressed together in comfortable silence.
“Will you show me what you were scribbling?” she said.
“Just a silly poem.”
“Ah.”
I knew she wouldn’t press further. Which was what made it possible. I handed her the paper, and she read the English aloud:
Snow covering rocks
A moment of concealment
Shapes last forever.
We sat silently again, listening to the soft crackling of the irori embers. She said, “Do you think that’s the way the world works?”
I waited a moment, considering.
“Probably,” I said. “But that’s not really what the poem is about.”
“What, then?”
I looked at her. “Maybe it’s about us.”
She raised her eyebrows. “The shapes?”
“Yes. Because, you know, the snow melts. The garden emerges again. I just couldn’t express all that in a haiku. I’m a dabbler, not Bashō.”
She drew in close, close enough for me to feel her breath on my lips. “We’ll find another way to express it,” she said, and kissed me.
I didn’t know if she was right. But I wanted to keep trying. I was glad I was finally retired. And this time, I was going to make it last.
At least for as long as I could.
But those were thoughts for another occasion. I put my arm around her, quietly overwhelmed at her presence, the unexpected conversion of my fortress of solitude into a nation of two.
Notes
chapter one
A beautiful video requiem about the rebirth of a minka—a traditional Japanese farmhouse like Rain’s—and the love behind it:
https://vimeo.com/20658635
chapter two
Two articles on the real-world operation that’s the basis for Livia’s sting:
“The Takeover: How Police Ended Up Running a Paedophile Site,” https://gu.com/p/4m3dp/sbl
“Australian Police Sting Brings Down Paedophile Forum on Dark Web,” http://bit.ly/2y2LCxC
Pentagon $7600 coffee pots, $640 toilet seats, etc.:
“Only the Pentagon Could Spend $640 on a Toilet Seat,” http://bit.ly/2l4ihiN
For more on the power of mirroring:
Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062407805
More on cognitive dissonance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
chapter five
Rain’s reference to who, where, and how much is courtesy of Max von Sydow’s Joubert, from Three Days of the Condor. “I don’t interest myself in why. I think more often in terms of when. Sometimes where. Always how much.”
https://youtu.be/voPmfT09jlg
chapter six
The “hurtcore” subculture Livia describes is real.
“‘Sadistic’ Paedophile Matthew Falder Jailed for 32 Years,” http://bit.ly/2HsX6Pl
chapter eight
Additional information about the multiple Secret Service scandals Lieutenant Strangeland mentions to Livia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secret_Service#Misconduct
chapter nine
The adrenal stress training Livia puts her students through, including verbal intimidation and escalation, is modeled after Peyton Quinn’s Rocky Mountain Combat Applications course. I highly recommend it.
http://www.peytonquinn.com
If you want to be safer in the world, reading Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence is an exceptionally cost-effective measure.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316235024
chapter ten
The article Livia recalls, about how undersea mountains and trenches exert a gravitational effect on the water thousands of feet above them, detectable at the surface:
“Ocean Technology,” http://econ.st/2FuOoCL
chapter eleven
While I was casting about for a good name for the front-runner presidential candidate, I happened to listen to this wonderful Intercepted podcast episode—“Evening at the Talk House.” One of the characters was named Walter Barkley, and it felt perfect, so I borrowed it.
https://interc.pt/2HscEpp
chapter fifteen
A video of the tunnel El Chapo Guzmán used to escape from a Mexican maximum-security prison:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/07/19/el-chapo-escape-tunnel-cost-blackwell-intv.cnn
George Carlin on the slightly nonintuitive concept of the “near-miss”:
https://youtu.be/zDKdvTecYAM
chapter forty-four
The radio frequency vehicle stopper is real.
“The Pentagon Wants to Stop Marauding Vehicles with High-Powered Microwave Beams,” https://bit.ly/2FI6I6K
chapter fifty-one
If you were thinking I made up the idea of a mercenary corporation pitching the government to privatize a war . . . I didn’t.
“Erik Prince’s Plan to Privatize the War in Afghanistan,” https://theatln.tc/2xbfF4q
“Trump White House Weighing Plans for Private Spies to Counter ‘Deep State’ Enemies,” https://interc.pt/2kkwOHL
More instances of the Pentagon using off-the-book contractors to track and kill enemies:
“Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants,” http://nyti.ms/2HHoUPf
“CIA Sought Blackwater’s Help to Kill Jihadists,” http://nyti.ms/2zOjth0
NSA collects Tor and VPN traffic on hundreds of thousands of Americans each day:
“The Senate Intelligence Committee 702 Bill Is a Domestic Spying Bill,” http://bit.ly/2zL8L84
FBI efforts to hack Tor:
“The Tor Teardown, Brought to You by Goats, Giraffes, and Thor’s Hammer,” http://bit.ly/2CivVmC
chapter fifty-three
Some background on “parallel construction”:
“Parallel Construction Revealed: How the DEA Is Trained to Launder Classified Surveillance Info,” https://bit.ly/1bYzJpi
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection—an organization that does work Livia would be proud of, and that deserves your support. https://ldicp.org.
Thanks to Michael Devine, Seattle Police Department, who opened the door for me with SPD interviews and ride-alongs, and who continues to patiently answer all my cop-related questions.
Thanks to Lori Kupfer, who knows Delilah and her moves better than I do.
Thanks to Micah F. Lee of The Intercept for giving me a primer on encryption and anonymization apps. Anything I managed to get wrong anyway is despite Micah’s efforts.
Thanks to “FOIA Terrorist” Jason Leopold, who got me thinking in the right direction about the Secret Service and the Justice Department.
Thanks to Wim Demeere for helping me get the unarmed-combat sequences right. Of course, this means when I get anything wrong, it’s Wim’s fault.
To the extent I get violence right in my fiction, I have many great instructors to thank, including Massad Ayoob, Tony Blauer, Alain Burrese, Loren Christensen, Wim Demeere, Dave Grossman, Tim Larkin, Ma
rc MacYoung, Rory Miller, Clint Overland, Peyton Quinn, and Terry Trahan. I highly recommend their superb books and courses for anyone who wants to be safer in the world, or just to create more realistic violence on the page:
http://www.massadayoobgroup.com
https://blauerspear.com
http://yourwarriorsedge.com/about-alain-burrese
http://www.lorenchristensen.com
http://www.wimsblog.com
http://www.killology.com
http://www.targetfocustraining.com
https://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com
http://www.chirontraining.com
http://moderncombatandsurvival.com/author/peyton-quinn
https://conflictresearchgroupintl.com/terry-trahan
https://mastersofmayhem.info
Thanks as always to the extraordinarily eclectic group of “foodies with a violence problem” who hang out at Marc “Animal” MacYoung and Dianna Gordon MacYoung’s No Nonsense Self-Defense, for good humor, good fellowship, and a ton of insights, particularly regarding the real costs of violence.
Thanks to Naomi Andrews, Jacque Ben-Zekry, Phyllis DeBlanche, Grace Doyle, Alan Eisler, Emma Eisler, Bart Gellman, Brad Handler, Meredith Jacobson, Dan Levin, Genevieve Nine, Valerie Paquin, Matt Powers, Laura Rennert, and Paige Terlip for helpful comments on the manuscript. Special thanks once again to Mike Killman for never letting me get lazy about creating action scenes that are both dramatic and tactically correct, and for his fascinating, discursive editorial comments generally.
Most of all, thanks to my wife and literary agent, Laura Rennert, for being such an amazing daily collaborator and otherwise doing so much to make these books better in every way. For anyone else grateful for the increased pace of my writing, Laura’s the one we owe it to. Thanks, babe, for everything.
Bibliography
Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to Oku (translated by Donald Keene and illustrated by Miyata Masayuki).
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1568365845
Robert Young Pelton’s Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400097827
John Roderick’s Minka: My Farmhouse in Japan.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1616894512
Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097CYTYA.
Yoshihiro Takishita’s Japanese Country Style: Putting New Life Into Old Houses.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/4770027613
About the Author
Photo © Naomi Brookner
Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and start-up executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan Judo Institute along the way. Eisler’s award-winning thrillers have been included in numerous “Best Of” lists, have been translated into nearly twenty languages, and include the #1 bestsellers The Detachment and Livia Lone. Eisler lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and, when he’s not writing novels, blogs about torture, civil liberties, and the rule of law. www.barryeisler.com.