by Barry Eisler
He leaned forward. “Anything?”
She turned her head toward the aisle, away from the people to her left and in front of her, and rested her left cheek against her folded hands. “Taped to the bottom of my seat. Lean forward whenever you like and it’s yours.”
“Summarize it for me.”
“The man, Manus, is a ghost, like you said. All his records purged. Not many people could have done that, so yeah, the idea that he reported to then-NSA director Anders makes sense. Whether Manus killed Anders, I couldn’t say.”
“But they’re tracking him now. They say he’s in Seattle.”
“Again, not something I could confirm. But if it’s true, I’m pretty sure I know why he’s there. Remember what we talked about with Guardian Angel?”
Guardian Angel was a massive system of government surveillance. It monitored emails, phone calls, cellphone movements, credit card payments, Internet searches . . . everything. It was one of the few programs Snowden hadn’t known about, in part because it was so compartmentalized. The architects knew individual pieces. Only a very few had the complete picture.
“Of course,” he said.
“Well, someone was using the system to monitor someone named Alondra Diaz. She’s an assistant US Attorney, who just—”
“Announced a case in connection with the arrest of Andrew Schrader, yes.”
Maya glanced back at him. “You know?”
If he hadn’t been so troubled by what Maya had found, he might have been amused. She was the most capable Science & Technology whiz kid he’d ever come across, and cultivating her had been a coup. Most of the seventh-floor people tried to develop lateral assets—other chiefs, deputy chiefs, assistant deputies. But those were political sources, when what Kanezaki wanted was information. So he wasted little time in Headquarters’s more rarefied realms, preferring to troll the facility’s basements and subbasements instead. In his experience, the maid often knew more than the lord of the manor. Certainly Maya did. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have blind spots.
He gave her a gentle smile. “Don’t let yourself get so distracted by what’s stamped secret that you forget to read the news.”
She chuckled. “Good point.”
Not for the first time, he was bewildered to find himself someone’s mentor. It seemed like not that long before, the helplessly green recruit had been him. He wished Tatsu could have seen the transition. He wished the wily Keisatsuchō cop, who as part of Japan’s national police force should have been an adversary but who instead had treated Kanezaki as a son, could have known before he succumbed to cancer that the naive kid he had taken under his wing now navigated his own fraught moral waters, with Tatsu’s example as his compass.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I think that’s the connection. There’s more in the file. But . . . I mean, an assistant US Attorney, do you really think . . .”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll read the file. But that was a great idea you had, a backdoored hidden log file to monitor which Guardian Angel searches were being deleted.”
“What goes into the shredder is what’s most revealing.”
“Exactly.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, exactly. You’re the one who told me that.”
Had he? Maybe, though not in those words. “Well, it’s true.”
“What I’m saying is, the back door was your idea.”
He wasn’t sure where she was going. “I was just thinking out loud. You’re the one who told me it could be done. And who found a way to do it. Credit where it’s due, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, if you give me too much credit, I might think you’re trying to snow me. And you don’t need to, Tom. I believe in you.”
He nodded, thinking touché. Here he’d been teasing her about the importance of paying attention to the news and not just to matters stamped secret. While himself forgetting something more important—not to underestimate people.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I believe in you, too.”
She smiled. “Obviously. Now, are you taking off? One of us should, and I was hoping to watch the movie.”
chapter
eight
DOX
Dox stood under a gray drizzle at the apex of Freeway Park, observing the weird concrete labyrinth below. It was hard to know what to make of it. He’d been to most of the great city parks of the world—Lumpini in Bangkok, Güell in Barcelona, Beihai in Beijing. Not to mention your more local candidates like Central in New York and Golden Gate in San Francisco. But this one . . . Well, it was sui generis, as the lawyers liked to say, you’d have to give it that. He wondered what was behind the design—a crazy architect, thinking what the world needed most was a Brutalist version of Angkor Wat or the stepwells of India? Maybe. The problem was, two great tastes didn’t always taste great together. He liked sriracha plenty and he loved durian, too, but he wouldn’t pour the one on the other.
But he’d told Kanezaki that, based on the intel, he had a feeling the park would be the place to look for this hombre Manus, and so here he was.
It was a strange job for a sniper. Hell, it was a strange job for any respectable killer for hire. More a humanitarian mission than the kind of reach-out-and-touch-someone engagement Kanezaki ordinarily had in mind.
Of course, that didn’t mean the job was free of Kanezaki’s signature manipulations. The man just couldn’t help himself. Though somehow, the fact that Dox knew what he was up to, and that Kanezaki knew Dox knew, tended to make the habit tolerable.
The way Kanezaki had initially pitched it, for example, when he’d reached Dox on the satellite phone in Bali two days earlier. He’d said, “I have something that needs looking into in Seattle. Livia would be right for it, but I thought you’d want to know first.”
Thought you’d want to know. True enough, of course, but it obscured the larger story, which was that there was no way Dox would allow Labee to face danger if he could face it himself. Labee, Livia’s real name, which she’d told him when he told her his was Carl. He loved the sound of it. Loved saying it, even to himself. And he loved that only he got to call her that.
“That’s very courteous of you,” Dox had told him, half-annoyed, half-grateful.
“In fairness,” Kanezaki said, “I was instructed to retain you for the job.”
“Instructed? By who?”
“DCI Rispel.”
That threw him. When the hell had he become a plaything for people as high up as Rispel? And why would Kanezaki even consider Labee for something like this?
“Should I be honored?”
Kanezaki chuckled. “I doubt it. It’s clear to me Rispel’s primary concern, with effectiveness as a given, is disposability.”
“At least my effectiveness is a given. For a minute there, you had me worried.”
“She pitched the job as retaliation. But that’s bullshit. Someone brought in a contractor to make a run at a government official. They want to use you to cut the thread.”
“Assassinate the assassin?”
“That’s how it looks to me.”
“Classic. But I wouldn’t even consider it.”
“I’ve always admired your ethics.”
“It’s not ethics, son. It’s professional courtesy. With maybe a little concern for karma thrown in. Who’s this official, anyway?”
“An assistant US Attorney named Alondra Diaz.”
“Pretty name.”
“Livia knows her.”
The thought of Kanezaki monitoring Labee put him on edge. “What? How? And how do you know?”
“Just incidental collection. Diaz’s cellphone history shows a periodic nexus with Livia. I didn’t look into it more deeply, but I think Livia trains her. Martial arts or women’s self-defense or whatever.”
He sensed the didn’t look into it more deeply was an attempt to mollify him, but he was still irritated. “Son, if you want to call it ‘incidental’ for public consumption, I can’t stop you. But please, don’t p
iss down my back and tell me it’s raining.”
“I don’t track Livia, Dox. Out of respect for her, and for you. And for myself. I’ve seen too many people in this gig get addicted to the voyeurism.”
“Sure, loveint and all that.”
“Loveint is the least of it. People lose sight of the purpose. I’m not going to let that happen to me.”
The truth was, Dox didn’t find the declaration reassuring. It felt to him like protesting too much. But he had bigger concerns for the moment than Kanezaki’s self-awareness about the allure of power. “Is Livia in danger?” he said.
“I don’t have any reason to think so, no.”
“You’re sure?”
“Based on everything I can tell, I think Rispel believes Diaz is the problem, and that eliminating her will solve it. She’s probably right, too. Assuming they can make it look natural.”
“Natural? Wonder why they didn’t reach out to John? Or maybe they did. But he’s retired, and besides, he won’t take a job if it involves a woman.”
John Rain, half-American and half-Japanese, was once so adept at “natural causes” that he had been the go-to man for elements of the Japanese government and for the CIA. But age, conscience, and maybe the love of an ex-Mossad agent named Delilah had conspired to impel him to find a way out of all that. Still, pound for pound, even now Rain was the most formidable urban operator and tactician Dox had ever known.
“I don’t know if they tried Rain,” Kanezaki said. “My guess is they didn’t. The guy they’re bringing in is more deniable. A ghost named Marvin Manus. Whose only known connection is to former NSA director Theodore Anders.”
“Didn’t Anders drown a few years ago?”
“That’s the official story. The truth is, he was crushed to death. Back broken. Rispel says Manus did it, but who knows?”
“And Rispel says she wants me to, what, drop this guy for killing Anders?”
“Correct. But I think what she really wants is for you to drop Manus after he kills Diaz.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want you to stop him.”
“You mean preempt him?”
“No, not like that. Not kill him. Just . . . stop him.”
“By what, sweet-talking him?”
“Look, I’m not going to micromanage you. I don’t want Diaz dead, and I don’t want Manus dead, either. He’s more valuable to me alive.”
Dox didn’t even have to ask why. With Kanezaki, it was always about the information.
It wasn’t his kind of job. And he didn’t need the money. He realized that’s why Kanezaki had mentioned Labee. Go ahead and turn me down, I’ll just call in that marker your girlfriend owes me. Yeah, of course that was it. It had worked, hadn’t it?
Not that Labee was his girlfriend exactly. He didn’t know what label to put on it, and wasn’t inclined to try. Whatever it was, it was about as unlikely a thing as he could have imagined, which is probably why the gods or fate or the universe or whatever had decided to have a laugh by making it happen. Dox had been in Cambodia, hunting for a guy named Sorm as part of a contract. And Labee had been in Thailand, where she had tracked down the men who had trafficked her and her sister, Nason, when they’d been girls. They’d run into each other, somehow gotten past their initial suspicions, and realized they had the same objectives, albeit for different reasons. Then they’d killed a bunch of people who had it coming and then some. She’d told him things about her past, things she’d never told anyone but that he needed to know to understand the forces they were up against. Maybe it was the way she’d trusted him. Or how brave she was. Or beautiful. But the truth was, when it came to love, you could come up with all the articulable reasons in the world and in the end it wouldn’t mean a thing. But he did love her, he knew that. He’d never said it for fear of scaring her off, but he did.
When it came to Kanezaki, though, none of that mattered. What mattered was what might be negotiated on Labee’s behalf.
“If I take this thing,” Dox said, “it squares Livia’s debt with you?”
“I wouldn’t say squares, but—”
“Squares, son. That’s the deal. I save Ms. Diaz via less-than-lethal means, and Livia owes you nothing, not even a cup of coffee if you happen to be in town. You want it or not?”
There was a pause. Kanezaki, with his theatrical pauses. If things didn’t work out at CIA, he could always teach a course on negotiation.
“All right,” Kanezaki said. “Do this, and Livia and I are square.”
Dox spotted the loophole. “Not just square to date. Square forever. Even if she asks for your help again, with Guardian Angel or whatever.”
He was aware he was revealing too much, that Kanezaki would use it as leverage next time. But the damn rascal was already using how much he cared about Labee. And besides, the point wasn’t to protect himself. It was to protect her.
“Come on, Dox. I don’t know what she might ask of me in the future.”
“Neither do I, and I don’t care. Those are my terms.”
“Okay. But then next time she asks me to go out on a limb for her, what’s my incentive?”
Damn, he hadn’t thought of that. “All right. But whatever she might ask of you going forward, when it’s time to collect you come to me first, you son of a bitch.” Which of course Kanezaki was going to do anyway. After all, he’d just done it now.
“Deal,” Kanezaki said, probably with a suppressed smile. “Are you going to bring in Rain?”
Dox was glad they were done haggling. The truth was, he had certainly considered asking for John’s help. And it was funny, when they’d first met in Afghanistan, a lifetime earlier, they hadn’t gotten along well, at least not personally. Dox talked too much for John’s taste, though from Dox’s perspective, the problem was that John talked too damn little. But then they’d met again in Rio, where some government dumbasses thought they could get Dox to betray an old comrade in arms for money. They turned out to be wrong, in the dead-wrong sense of the word, and afterward, realizing he could trust someone had just about melted old John’s brain. But they’d had each other’s backs ever since, stumbled into a few adventures—sometimes with Kanezaki’s help, other times at his instigation—did a good deed or two, and somehow even managed to make a little money along the way by outsmarting a few bad guys.
“Nah,” Dox said after a moment. “He and Delilah deserve some peace. He’s always going on about how he’s retired. It’s high time someone acted like he means it.”
“Does he?”
“He thinks he does.”
“Then who?”
“My God, the calumny. Maybe I’ll just handle it all by my capable self, you ever consider that?”
“Come on, we both know less-than-lethal is likely to be more complicated. Who?”
“Sources and methods, son.”
Kanezaki laughed. “That’s my line. Let me guess. Daniel Larison.”
Larison had fallen in with them a few years back in connection with a series of false-flag terror attacks initiated by some of America’s most esteemed political personages. It hadn’t been a great fit initially, and in fact they’d all nearly killed each other before finding a way to work together. And now Larison was on the very short list of people Dox trusted to have his back. More amazing still, he knew, was that Larison felt the same way.
Dox smiled. “Not much I can hide from you, is there?”
“Not if I’m looking. You don’t think Larison might be . . . too much?”
“I’d rather use a soldier as a diplomat than a diplomat as a soldier. But I’ll tell the old angel of death to dial it down this time.”
“Remember, we don’t want death here. We want Manus motivated to tell us what he knows.”
“Oh, it’s we and us now, is it?”
“For all the things that matter? Yes. It is.”
Dox couldn’t deny that. Kanezaki was an ace bullshitter, but that didn’t mean he never told the truth.
An
d now here he was, just two days later. Not an ideal amount of time to prepare, but he and Larison knew each other’s moves and they were managing.
His cellphone buzzed in his back pocket. He pulled out the unit and glanced at the screen. Caller blocked. Well, of course. The phone was an encrypted burner, and only Kanezaki had the number. He pressed Answer and raised the phone to his ear.
“Hello.”
“She just left her apartment,” Kanezaki said. “As soon as it was clear she was heading toward the park, they called me with instructions to have you in position near Pike Place Market.”
“Why there?”
“They say Manus spent the night at a hostel in the neighborhood and they expect him to be there again later this morning. I’m betting that means he’s at the park now. They don’t want you to have those coordinates because they want you to remain ignorant of what he does to Diaz. A federal prosecutor falls and cracks her head or gets mugged or whatever in the park, you drop a guy near Pike Place Market, no one ever makes the connection. Congratulations, I think you called all of it.”
He had called it, hadn’t he? Well, a killer just knows a killer. Kanezaki’s people had assembled Diaz’s cellphone history. She didn’t have a lot of reliable patterns beyond home and office, neither of which would present an attractive option for something intended to look natural because of too many witnesses and too much known connection with the target. But it turned out she had a habit of using Freeway Park on some of her morning jogs. Dox and Larison had agreed that if they were looking to take her out, and especially if it had to look at least seminatural, this was the spot they would use to make it happen. And if they were thinking that way, it was reasonable to expect Manus would be, too.
“What’s your intel on the man based on?” Dox said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are we talking national technical means? Or are there other operators in the vicinity?”
“He’s carrying a burner they dialed into. I gather foot surveillance against this guy would be difficult. Especially this early in the morning, without many people around.”