The Chaos Kind

by Barry Eisler

  There was a pause. Larison said, “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  Maya nodded but didn’t otherwise respond.

  A second passed. Larison said, “One thing I think Frodo got wrong.”

  Maya looked at him. “What?”

  “When he said, ‘It is useless to meet revenge with revenge: it will heal nothing.’ In my experience? It heals plenty.”

  He patted her on the shoulder and moved off. A moment later, he was shaking hands with Manus, both of them smiling as though they were old comrades in arms, when in fact they had met only a few days earlier. Though in fairness, a lot had happened since then.

  Delilah looked over and saw John talking to Livia. They were laughing about something, and for a moment, Delilah envied his ease with her. Not in the minor-key jealous way she’d felt about the flirtation with Yuki. This was different—more akin to, what, a teacher and a capable student? John had told her about a conversation with Livia, when they’d all been in Paris, and his sense that the questions she had asked him, about his ability to adopt different personas to blend or disarm or get close, had been the product of much more than general curiosity. That this woman had an interest in killing, an intimacy with it, and not just in the line of duty. Of course, a normal person would have been put off by that. But then again, Livia wouldn’t have been interested in John if he were normal.

  It was strange. John had always approached Delilah as an equal. He was the better tactician, but he never talked down to her, and though he was always willing to answer her questions, sometimes in quite personal ways, he seemed to have no particular urge to teach her, either. She wondered whether Livia struck some different chord. Maybe John thought he had something to impart to Livia of which Delilah had no need. If so, she didn’t want to begrudge him that.

  Dox walked over with Diaz. “Alondra, meet Delilah. Delilah, Alondra Diaz. Alondra set sail only a few days ago now, but my God, she got her sea legs quick. She’s a good driver, a good interrogator, and for a city girl I think she’s got a way with horses, too.”

  Diaz laughed and she and Delilah shook hands. “I think I need you to introduce me more often, Dox. And Delilah, it’s good to meet you. He’s talked a lot about you.”

  Delilah smiled and glanced at Dox. “He does talk a lot.”

  Dox laughed. “Someone’s got to provide the entertainment around here. It’s not like John’s gonna do it.”

  They all spent a while getting acquainted and reacquainted, drinking coffee, taking advantage of the well-stocked refrigerator. At all times, someone kept watch on the parking lot.

  After a half hour, Kanezaki said, “We should get to it. The sun’s up, and if Rispel has somehow learned about Grimble, we don’t want to give her another chance to get ahead of us.”

  “I doubt the plan would be to ambush us straightaway,” John said. “Rispel doesn’t know what we learned from Schrader. It might be something she needs. So the smart play would be to hang back until we’ve made contact with Grimble. At that point, if all goes well, we’d have the entire puzzle. Rispel could swoop in and collect it all at once.”

  “Great,” Dox said. “Maybe she’ll capture and waterboard us, like she did Schrader.”

  “We already sketched out an approach,” Larison said to John. “It tracks with your point. But Tom, you’re going to have to bring us up to speed on the transport. I mean, you did order the horse, right? The bicycles? The screaming yellow Porsche?”

  “I did,” Kanezaki said. “I knew that by the time we were here, it would be too late to get ahold of anything I hadn’t thought of earlier. So I tried to be comprehensive—including fake license plates we’ll attach to the truck and the Porsche. But listen, Maya found a few interesting things about Grimble on the flight over. Maya, you want to tell them?”

  “He’s into figurines,” Maya said. “I’d heard something about this before, but didn’t realize the extent. I mean, big-time. Obsessively.”

  Once upon a time, Dox would have made a crack about that—about his own interest in figurines, or at least in figures, something like that. But he didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. Livia. He really was smitten. And even as the thought took shape, Delilah realized smitten was probably her own attempt to downplay the depth of his feeling, a reluctance that was an outgrowth of her distrust of Livia. She would have to be careful about that. If Dox was in love with this woman, Delilah would have to come to terms with it, lest she force Dox to make a choice that ultimately would be no choice at all.

  “What kind of figurines?” Delilah asked, knowing that if no one else raised the question, Larison would, and probably less delicately.

  “Japanese,” Maya said. “Samurai, feudal lords, that kind of thing. Something called the Battle of Sekigahara.”

  “How is that relevant?” Larison said, and Delilah had to suppress a smile.

  “He spends a ton of money on it,” Maya said. “And apparently a ton of time. Casts his own figurines, paints them, uses authentic materials like silk and leather to construct their outfits. He has a whole room dedicated to it. He’s given a couple interviews, but he won’t allow photos.”

  “The Battle of Sekigahara involved almost two hundred thousand soldiers,” Rain said. “If he’s serious about depicting even a portion of it, yes, he’d need some space.”

  Maya nodded. “The point is, we can’t be sure of where he’ll be on the property—only of where his phone will be. That’s not the same thing. People don’t ordinarily go out without their cellphones, but they do sometimes leave them on chargers while moving around their homes. And this guy’s home is on twenty-three acres with ten buildings. Knowing what he spends his time on could help us narrow things down.”

  The room was quiet for a moment while the group digested that. Livia said, “We have a lot to plan, and not much time. Schrader said the next release is scheduled for three o’clock this afternoon.”

  Delilah wasn’t surprised. They all had different concerns, and Livia’s were about the girls in the videos more than they were about the people in this room. And while those priorities weren’t indefensible, from Delilah’s perspective they didn’t make the woman trustworthy, either.

  “We all have different puzzle pieces,” Kanezaki said. “Maya knows Grimble. I’ve been arranging transport and other gear. You guys have the schematics for his compound. Now we need to turn it into a plan. So let’s put our heads together and get this done.”

  It wasn’t Henry V, Delilah thought, but she’d heard worse. And it was good to see how seasoned a player Kanezaki had become. It wasn’t so long ago that he would never have presumed to take charge of a team of such formidable operators—or that any of them would have taken him seriously if he had tried.

  And while on one level she was happy for him, somewhere deeper down she felt a tiny germ of concern. She considered Kanezaki one of the good guys, but of course in the intelligence business good was a relative term. Relative, and flexible. She’d never known Kanezaki to do anything that wasn’t calculated to increase his information portfolio, or that wasn’t a quid pro quo for something he himself wanted. It was possible his interest now was simply about obscuring the girls’ faces in those videos and then publicizing them, and thereby neutralizing the threat the videos had come to represent to everyone in the room. But it was also possible he was playing for something more. In her experience, people didn’t beat swords into plowshares, any more than governments did. No, when people came across a sword—especially one others were trying to acquire—they tended to conclude that the best possibility would be to find a way by which they themselves could wield it.

  chapter

  sixty-seven

  EVIE

  Evie rode Margarita along the side of Manzanita Way, Evie bouncing lightly in the saddle, Margarita’s hoofs clomping on the dirt trail. Evie had a lump on the back of her head from the tumble down the stairs, and despite heroic quantities of ibuprofen, her ankle was throbbing, too, but after what had happened the p
ain was almost glorious, a kind of proof of life. It was a beautiful day—the sky bright blue; the canopy of leaves above the cracked, gray-top road lit in various hues of yellow and orange and red; the midday air crisp and cool in the shadows and radiantly warm in the sun. If the houses hadn’t all been mansions at the ends of long, winding, cobblestoned driveways, and mostly shrouded by moss-covered stone walls and dense clumps of old-growth trees, she might have thought she was far off in the country somewhere, rather than thirty miles south of San Francisco in one of the most exclusive enclaves of Silicon Valley’s moneyed elite. Well, she could see why people would live here, if they could afford it, and why so many of them owned horses. She hadn’t ridden in years and promised to make more time for it once this craziness was done. And it would be done. She believed that. She had to.

  Her task was to identify anything that looked like surveillance. Rain had gone over a map with her, explaining where Rispel or another enemy could be expected to set up in preparation for an ambush. The man seemed to have a knack for getting in the head of an adversary, and Evie had been struck by how the others, who were themselves all veterans of one kind or another, had deferred to him. And she had been even more impressed by the way Marvin, who had outthought NSA Director Anders and his goon, Delgado, had periodically nodded in approval at Rain’s thinking.

  Good security could be thought of as concentric circles, Rain had explained, with the outer circles tending to be more cost-effective and intended, among other things, to buy more time. Think castles, he had said: moat, ramparts, walls, battlements, keep. Meaning you could gain a significant advantage by finding a way to bypass the outer circles and attacking the inner layers directly. Which is exactly what they hoped to do here, and exactly what Rispel or whoever else had been preempting them would be expecting.

  Depending on her resources, Rain said, Rispel would deploy surveillance, both mobile and static. A mobile unit would have at least four miles of ground to cover—the circumference of roads around Grimble’s and the adjacent properties—and would therefore be faced with too much risk of missing a small team attempting to gain entry. So there would also likely be a static unit or units, positioned at choke points. On the one hand, these teams would be impossible to avoid. On the other hand, they would be easier to spot—which is what Evie was trying to do now.

  They walked along, Margarita’s hoofs clop-clopping pleasingly in the stillness. As pretty a road as it was, it seemed not much favored by pedestrians—maybe because it was the middle of the week, maybe because the road didn’t really lead anywhere. A few of the houses she passed had gardening crews at work, and there were two construction sites. Beyond that and some birdsong in the trees overhead, everything was quiet.

  Close to the end of the road, thirty yards ahead, there was a small bridge that passed over a dry culvert. A man in a baseball cap and shades was sitting on it, eating a sandwich held in a brown paper bag. He looked up without evident interest as she passed and then went back to his sandwich.

  He could have been no one—a construction worker or a gardener taking a break, a birdwatcher, someone waiting on a friend for a planned bucolic stroll. But she didn’t think so. There were plenty of horses in the area—she had passed enough stables and droppings to know that—but still, his lack of interest as she went by struck her as more studied than real. The cap and shades felt like light disguise. And though outdoor work was a good way to stay in shape—Marvin was proof of that—even under the sweatshirt, this guy looked like he spent a lot of time pumping iron.

  She made a right on Sand Hill Road and continued until Sand Hill became Portola, then turned onto Old La Honda until she came to the parking area for the Thornewood Preserve, the terminus to another series of horse trails. Marvin, Dash, and Rain were waiting outside the truck, and she could see the relief on Marvin’s face as she came into view. She stopped and dismounted.

  Dash immediately signed, Did you see anyone?

  She nodded. “I think someone is there,” she said to Rain. She held out the reins to him so she could sign. “Here, can you hold these?”

  Rain started to say something, then stopped as though he couldn’t figure out what. He took the reins. Margarita looked at Evie, seemingly displeased at the handoff.

  “Thanks,” Evie said, and then started simultaneously signing for Marvin and Dash. “Yes, I think someone is there. Right at the entrance to Manzanita, where you thought they would be.”

  Rain glanced at the road behind her. “You’re confident you weren’t followed?”

  She smiled. “I didn’t even see a car on Old La Honda. The only way someone could have tailed me is on a horse of their own.”

  Rain looked up at the canopy of leaves above them, and she knew what he was thinking: Drones?

  “If they’re using drones,” she said, “they couldn’t be anything man-portable or I would have heard it. Or seen it. And regardless, I doubt someone out horseback-riding would be the kind of thing they’d be looking for.”

  Rain nodded. She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was impressed with her analysis or doubtful, so she added, “At NSA, among other things, I was in charge of tying together distributed video feeds and facial recognition. I wasn’t a field operative, but I’m not a stranger to surveillance.”

  Rain nodded again, though no less unreadably.

  The side door of the trailer opened and Kanezaki got out. “All good?” he said.

  She nodded. “Let’s get Margarita in the trailer, and I’ll brief you.”

  Kanezaki opened the back, took the reins from Rain, who seemed relieved to no longer be holding them, and helped lead Margarita inside. They all went in and closed the door behind them. Frodo, lying in a corner, watched, apparently too bemused by Margarita and all the strangers to react. Rain had wanted to leave the dog at the office park, but Maya had persuaded him by asking, “What if we can’t make it back? He’s chipped, he can be traced to me.”

  Rain had nodded reluctantly at that. And Evie had suppressed a smile. Maya wasn’t just computer smart. She knew how to persuade, too, primarily by understanding what mattered to the person she was persuading. Evie recognized the skill because Dash wore her down with it all the time.

  Evie told them what she had seen. Marvin looked at Rain and nodded as though to signal his concurrence that the sandwich man was not a civilian. Rain nodded back.

  “Let’s see how long he’s been there,” Kanezaki said. He worked the screen of a Stingray cellphone tracker for a minute. Dash watched, his mouth slightly open in the way he looked when he was utterly fascinated.

  Kanezaki said, “Entrance of Manzanita at Sand Hill?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Maybe fifty feet in, on the side of the road. You’re not seeing a phone there?”

  He played with the controls. “That’s right.”

  “Then he doesn’t have one,” she said. “Or it’s turned off.”

  No one had to say what that meant. It was unusual for someone not to be carrying a powered-up cellphone. Combined with the other factors—the location, the appearance—it made it more likely the man was indeed surveillance.

  She took off the riding helmet and field boots and pulled on her shoes. She’d change out of the jodhpurs later. She had to give Kanezaki credit—he’d wanted her to look the part, and she had.

  “So what do we do?” she said.

  Rain said, “Let’s have Maya make a pass on the bicycle. If the guy’s still there, that’ll settle it.”

  The fascination on Dash’s face changed to disappointment. He had badly wanted to be part of the bicycle countersurveillance. Intellectually, Evie doubted there was much if any danger—he would have just been biking in the area, as she had been riding Margarita. And of course Dash had made that case. But intellectually didn’t matter—Evie absolutely refused. Delilah had cushioned the blow, saying to Dash, “Hey, I thought we were going to go take the Porsche for a ride.” Dash had smiled in a way that made Evie wonder whether he had developed a
rapid-onset crush. She couldn’t blame him—the woman was certainly stunning. But it seemed that, compared to actually being involved in countersurveillance, Delilah and the Porsche were still a consolation prize. Or, more likely, Dash was wondering why he couldn’t just have both.

  Kanezaki unclipped one of the encrypted walkie-talkies, then hesitated. He turned to Rain so Dash couldn’t see what he was saying. “You’re okay taking that guy out, based just on a second sighting?”

  Rain looked at him. “It’s more than your outfit uses as the basis for a drone strike.”

  Kanezaki seemed not to have an answer for that.

  “Besides,” Rain said. “It’s not just a second sighting. That sandwich feels like cover for action. If he’s still eating it after a half hour, we’ll know. And yeah, if Maya sees a sandwich, it could be his second, or even his third. Maybe he’s a sandwich freak. Maybe he’s just a guy who likes to sit by the side of the road for an hour at a time. Probably not, though. And besides, on top of all the other evidence, the final check is me. Before anything else happens, I’ll see for myself. And I’ll know what I’m looking at.”

  Evie was surprised to realize she had no objections. She trusted Marvin, and Marvin trusted Rain.

  But beyond that, just a day earlier, someone had come for her and Dash. She wasn’t going to let that happen again. No matter what.

  chapter

  sixty-eight

  MAYA

  Maya was sitting in front of a place called the Village Bakery when she got the call from Tom. She took a last sip of coffee, closed the chin strap of her helmet, got on the bike, and took off.

  She’d felt silly when she first suited up—a brightly colored jersey and matching tights; padded, fingerless gloves; clip-in shoes; a pair of high-tech-looking shades. But Tom had assured her that she’d look right at home in Woodside, and he’d been right; there were a dozen riders in front of the bakery, and everything they were wearing was garishly over-the-top. The only mistake Tom had made was in getting a bike that was a little too fancy—a Trek Madone SLR 9 that had attracted some admiring commentary from the other riders. On the other hand, Tom had explained that excess was the point—as with the Porsche he’d scored for Delilah, it was important to go beyond what an op would require, or what a finance department would ever approve. Maya had noticed Rain smiling as Tom had explained, and Tom had smiled back. Maya realized there was a history there, and maybe something of a mentorship. She wondered whether Tom would tell her about it. And if things would ever be normal enough again for her to have a chance to ask.