by Barry Eisler
He glanced at the blond guy, who shrugged. Their demeanors intrigued me. The blond guy seemed on edge, as he ought to have been, as indeed I was. The dark guy, on the other hand, was incongruously relaxed, and seemed almost to be enjoying himself.
I ordered three coffees and three waters and the waitress moved off. I nodded at the dark guy. “What do I call you?”
“Larison.”
I turned my head to the other guy, who said, “Treven.”
“All right, Larison and Treven. What do you want?” The more on-point question, of course, would have been, Who do you want me to kill? But it didn’t matter which route we took. We’d arrive at the same destination.
“We were sent just to find you,” Larison said. “The one who wants something from you is Colonel Horton. Scott Horton.”
The name was familiar, but for a moment, I couldn’t place it. Then I remembered something from Reagan-era Afghanistan, a time that felt to me now, when I considered it at all, so remote it could have been someone else’s life. The CIA had recruited former soldiers like me to train and equip the Mujahadeen who were fighting the Soviets, and though deniability had been imperative, there were a few active-duty military in theater, too, to liaise with the irregulars. There had been a young Special Forces noncom everyone called Hort, whom we’d teased because, despite his obvious capability and courage, he was black, and so an absurd choice for a covert role in Afghanistan. He assured us, though, that this was the point: if he was captured, Uncle Sam wanted to be able to say to the Russians, You think we’d be stupid enough to send a black soldier to blend in Afghanistan? Must have been a freelancer, a black Muslim answering the call of jihad. See how your wars are radicalizing people? What a shame.
I said, “This guy cut his teeth in Afghanistan?”
Larison nodded. “Training the Muj, yeah.”
“White guy?”
“No. Black.”
“Does he go by a nickname?”
“Hort.”
Sounded like a match. He must have received a commission somewhere along the way and then never left the military. I estimated that today he’d be about fifty. “And he’s a colonel now,” I said, more musing than asking a question.
“Head of the ISA,” Treven said.
I nodded, impressed. It was a long way from deniable cannon fodder to the head of the Intelligence Support Activity, the U.S. military’s most formidable unit of covert killers.
“And you?” I asked, looking at Larison, then Treven. “ISA?”
Treven nodded. He didn’t seem entirely happy about the fact, or maybe he was just uncomfortable acknowledging an affiliation he would ordinarily reflexively deny.
Larison said, “Once upon a time. These days, I just consult.”
“Pay’s better?”
Larison smiled. “You tell me.”
“The pay’s okay,” I said. “Healthcare’s not so great.”
Treven glanced at Larison—a little impatiently, I thought. Maybe the kind of guy who liked to get right down to business. He didn’t understand this was business. Larison and I were trying to feel each other out.
“And the other two?” I said.
“Contractors,” Larison said. “One of the Blackwater-type successors. I can’t keep track.”
I glanced at Treven, then back to Larison. “So, ISA, a consultant, contractors…That’s a fairly eclectic gang you’ve got there.”
“We didn’t ask for the contractors,” Larison said, turning his palms up slightly from the table in a what can you do gesture. “That was Hort. I guess you could say he…overstaffed this thing.”
“And you downsized it.”
He dipped his head slightly as though in respect or appreciation. “You and I both.”
He seemed determined to let me know there were no hard feelings about the two dead giants—indeed, to acknowledge he’d deliberately sacrificed them. And now he was implying some distance between himself and Horton, too, and implying some commonality between himself and me. I wasn’t sure why.
“What’s Horton’s interest?” I asked.
“We don’t know the particulars,” Treven said. “All he told us was, he’s rebuilding, and he wants to make you an offer.”
“Rebuilding what?”
“I don’t know. Something about an operation you took down, run by a guy named Jim Hilger.”
Hilger. I didn’t show it, but I was surprised to hear the name. In all the times we’d crossed paths, first in Hong Kong, where he was brokering the sale of radiologically-tipped missiles and nuclear materiel, and then in Holland, where he’d been running an op to blow up the port in Rotterdam and drive up the price of oil, his affiliations had never been entirely clear to me. The last time I’d run into him was in Amsterdam, which was the last time he ran into anyone. If Horton had been involved with the late Jim Hilger, whatever he wanted was apt to be hazardous.
“What do you know about Hilger?” I asked.
Treven shook his head. “No more than I just told you.”
Larison said, “I’ve heard of him.”
“Who did he work for? Was he government? Corporate?”
Larison laughed. “You really think there’s a difference?”
Treven frowned just the tiniest amount, and I sensed Larison’s comment made him uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure why. Well, neither was going to tell me more. And, given Hilger’s current condition, I supposed it didn’t matter anyway.
“Anything else?” I said.
Treven said, “Yeah. This thing Hort’s trying to rebuild is going to include a former Marine sniper named Dox, who you’re supposed to know.”
I didn’t respond. I hadn’t seen Dox in a while, but we were in touch and I knew he was still living in Bali. He didn’t need work, but this would probably interest him anyway. It wasn’t a question of money with Dox. He just liked to be in the thick of it.
A part of my mind whispered, And you? I ignored it.
Larison said, “You might want to contact Dox yourself. If you don’t, we have to, and what’s the point of getting more contractors killed?”
Again, I was intrigued by his hint that he didn’t mind what happened to the contractor elements of his team.
The waitress returned with our order and left. Larison took a sip of coffee and nodded appreciatively. Treven didn’t touch his.
I drained my water glass and looked at them. “What does Horton have on you two?”
Neither of them responded. Well, he had something. And now they had something on me.
But then Larison surprised me. He said, “The video recorder is in my pocket. Mind if I reach for it?”
The question was appropriate. In a situation like this one, with someone like me, you want to keep your hands visible. Especially once you’ve established that you’re too smart to reach for something suddenly. The only reasonable inference would be that you’re going for a weapon, and the inference would lead to an unfriendly response.
I gestured that he should feel free. He stood and slowly extracted from his front pocket a unit like the two I’d taken from the giants. He placed it in the center of the table and sat back down. Then he glanced at Treven, who repeated the move, producing an identical unit.
I made no move to pick up the recorders. I’d expected the intent of the initial offer was only to get me to meet them, but now they seemed actually to be following through on it. Give up leverage for free? If they’d been clumsy civilians, maybe I could have read it as a naïve attempt to beget goodwill with goodwill. But neither of these guys was naïve. On the contrary, both of them had the quiet, weighty aura of men who’ve repeatedly killed and survived, an experience that tends to extinguish belief in the power of goodwill, along with most other such happy indulgences.
“There are no copies,” Larison said. “We don’t have anything on you. You want us to get lost, we’ll walk out of here right now. But the next team Hort sends, they won’t give you the video. They’ll use it.”
Probably he
was lying about the copies, but I would never know for sure until someone tried to use them against me, and that would happen only if friendlier tactics proved useless. So Larison could be expected to try something relatively subtle to begin with. And so far he’d handled it deftly, I had to admit. You never want to present extortion as a threat: doing so just needlessly engages the subject’s ego and creates unhelpful resistance. Instead, you want to present the threat as though it has nothing to do with you, as though in fact you’re on the subject’s side. Maybe that explained the hints about a gap between Horton and them. It would have been a good way to help me persuade myself that my problem wasn’t with these two, but with someone else. If he was ruthless enough, and I sensed he was, he might even have sacrificed the two giants for the same end.
“Look,” Larison said, “no one can just disappear anymore. Everyone is findable. It’s a condition of modern life. You want total security? You have to disconnect. Live off the grid, remotely, no contact with the outside world. But if you like cities, and judo, and jazz, and coffee houses, and culture, all of which is part of your file, you don’t have a chance if someone like Hort is determined to find you. The only way is to make it so the people who are looking for you, stop looking for you.”
“How do you do that?” I asked, my tone casual.
He took another sip of coffee. “You wait for the right opportunity.”
“Or you make one,” I suggested.
He nodded. “Or you make one. And I’ll tell you one other thing. If you decide to accept Hort’s offer, whatever it is? Charge him for it. Charge him a lot. He can afford it.”
He sounded unhappy as he said the words, even acrimonious, and if I hadn’t picked up earlier on some kind of rift, I couldn’t miss it now. Whatever Horton was up to, I decided it must be important to him, if it was generating animosity in someone as seemingly formidable as Larison.
No one said anything after that. Larison obviously knew when it was time to shut up and let the prospect close the deal with himself, and Treven was smart enough to follow the older man’s lead.
We sipped our coffee in silence. Either this was an impressive piece of theater that included two dead extras, or what they were telling me, and what they were hinting at, was largely true. Horton wanted to make Dox and me an offer, most likely one we couldn’t refuse. He’d made similar offers already to Treven and Larison, who were unhappy about it and looking for an alliance or some other way out, but were also smart enough to keep those particular cards concealed for now. As for copies of the evening’s home video, for now there was no way to know. And for the moment, it didn’t really matter.
For the third time that night, I saw no advantage in waiting. I finished my coffee and took the video units from the table.
“How do I contact Horton?” I said.
Later that night, in the endless, twisting depths of the Shinjuku subway complex, where the multiple levels and concentrated crowds make tracking and locating someone from a signal nearly impossible, I checked the video on the cameras. The footage was grainy and helter-skelter, but properly enhanced it might provide damaging evidence for the prosecution, if it ever came to that. I destroyed the drives on all the units and disposed of them. The phones were useless—the only numbers dialed were to each other. I disposed of them, too. Then I found an Internet café and Googled Larison, Treven, and Horton. Larison and Treven drew precisely nothing. Horton was mentioned in passing in a few news articles, and had a Wikipedia entry consisting only of a brief outline of a distinguished military career and a note that he was divorced and had no children. Finally, I made three calls, all from separate pay-phones.
First, the number Larison had given me. A deep, Mississippi Delta baritone I remembered from Afghanistan, but with more age behind it, more gravity, answered, “Is this who I hope it is?”
I said, “I don’t know. Is there someone else you were hoping to hear from?”
He laughed. “There are people I hope to hear from, and people I hope to never hear from again. Glad to say you’re in the first camp. How’ve you been?”
“I’ve been fine. I heard you want to propose something.”
“You heard right.”
“I’m listening.”
“With all the water under the bridge here, it’d be better if we did this face to face.”
“All right, come out here. Your guys can tell you where to find me.”
“They already did. Thing is, I’m too tied up right now for overseas travel. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll meet you halfway. How about Los Angeles? Anywhere in the city you’d like.”
Los Angeles was easy enough to get to from Tokyo, and a destination with so many indirect routes I didn’t think I’d have trouble concealing my movements. Reflexively, I started considering how I would approach the situation if I were trying to get to me, and was surprised, and a little unsettled, at how familiar and natural it felt to slip back into the mindset. Almost as though I’d missed it.
“If you want me to come to you,” I said, testing what Larison had told me, “you’ll need to cover my travel expenses. And I travel first class.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less. Tell you what. However our conversation turns out, you’ll get twenty-five thousand dollars just for showing up. That ought to cover your travel expenses, and then some.”
“Fifty,” I said. “You’ve already created problems just by the way you contacted me.”
There was a pause, and I wondered if I’d asked for too much, if only because my boldness might suggest someone had encouraged me to press. But so what? If there was some kind of ill will with Larison, Horton would have to be a fool not to know it already. And the man I remembered from Afghanistan wasn’t a fool.
“I understand you’ve created some problems yourself,” he said, and I realized Larison and Treven had likely already checked in and briefed him about the dead contractors. I wondered again about copies of the video. “But okay, we’ll make it fifty. If you can be there tomorrow.”
I wondered what this was about. If he was willing to pay fifty thousand U.S. just to get me to show up, it was something special. Meaning, almost certainly, something dangerous.
“Tomorrow’s impossible,” I said. “The day after I can do. For the fifty.” The truth was, it didn’t matter that much to me one way or the other. I just don’t like to be rushed. Time pressure is what you do to someone when you’re trying to get him to react without pausing to think.
“All right,” he said, “the day after. You can reach me at this number. I’ll be in the center of the city, but we can meet anywhere you want.”
I paused before responding. Why did I want to do this? The money? The advantages of dealing with whatever it was head-on rather than waiting? Some dark, subversive part of me, sick of my civilian pretensions, grabbing on to a way back in—the killer inside me, the Iceman, demanding his due?
“I’ll call you,” I said, and clicked off.
No doubt his emphasis on flexibility was intended to mollify my security concerns. He’d already chosen the city and had tried to choose the day; if his demands got much more specific than that, he knew it would make me jumpy.
The next call was to Tomohisa “Tom” Kanezaki, an ethnic Japanese American I’d first encountered when he was a green case officer with the CIA’s Tokyo Station. I didn’t trust him, exactly, but we’d traded enough favors for me not to view him as an active threat, and to know he could be counted on to do what he said he would. We’d lost touch about a year earlier, when I was living in Paris with Delilah, thinking I was happy. The last time we’d spoken, he was on a rotation at Langley and hating it.
He picked up with a characteristically noncommittal Yes. In Japan it had usually been Hai. Either way, it felt oddly good to hear his voice.
“Still living the good life at company headquarters?” I said.
There was a pause, and I could picture him smiling. I wondered if he was still wearing the wire-rimmed spectacles. Probably. They
made him look bookish, as he once genuinely had been. These days, they’d conceal the street smarts he’d developed, and he was astute enough to know the value in that. No aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu, as the Japanese saying goes. The hawk with talent hides its talons.
“I wouldn’t call it particularly good,” he said. “What are you…is everything okay?”
“I have a small favor to ask—very small.”
Kanezaki could always be counted on to ask for a favor in return. Some of his return favors were pretty damn big, so it paid to establish that what I was asking for was trivial.
“You want to do this with Skype?” he said. “If you don’t think my mobile is secure enough.”
This was both a concession to my security paranoia and a way to build the favor up with some indices of importance. “No,” I said. “It’s not that kind of thing. I just want the skinny on a JSOC colonel named Scott Horton. People call him Hort. You know of him?”
There was a pause, and I wondered if Kanezaki was considering whether I was going to kill Horton. It was the way he was used to thinking of me. But he’d know if that were the case I wouldn’t have asked him.
“Yeah, I know of him. But his position is—”
“Classified, I know. I know what his position is. I want to know about the man. Any reason he wouldn’t have my best interests at heart?”
“That’s hard to say. The kind of thing you do tends to create enemies.”
“Used to do.”
He laughed. “And yet, here you are.”
I ignored it. “He wants to meet me.”
“You think it’s a setup?”
“I always think it’s a setup. Sometimes it even is.”
“Well, all I can tell you is, he’s got a lot of weight behind him. In the last administration, JSOC was reporting directly to the vice president and doing some extremely off-the-books stuff. Seymour Hersh called it a hit squad.”
“Any truth to that?”
He laughed. “You’re not really asking me to verify a Sy Hersh story, are you?”
It was true, then. “What else?”