by Barry Eisler
“Let’s just say the new administration hasn’t changed JSOC’s mission. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that a lot of traditional Agency responsibilities have been taken from us and transferred to the military.”
“Why?”
“We’ve been in Afghanistan for over a decade now. Iraq for nearly that long. Plus other places that don’t make it into the news quite so much. A decade of global war means a lot of prominence for the military. They get what they want, and they want a lot.”
“What about a former ISA operator, last name Larison? And a current ISA guy, last name Treven?”
“The names don’t mean anything to me, but I can look. And I’ll keep my ear to the ground for anything on what Horton might want with you.”
Coming from Kanezaki, that might actually mean something. “I appreciate it.”
“Do the same for me. I’d like to know what he’s up to. You’re not easy to find, so he must be motivated.”
I sensed a hint of professional jealousy in the comment. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to share his assets. Or his former assets. And as a return favor, it wasn’t much. I told him I’d keep him posted and clicked off.
The third call was to Dox. “It’s me,” I said, when he’d picked up.
“‘Me’? Who’s ‘me’?” he said in his thick southern drawl.
We’d been through this before. “You know who ‘me’ is.”
He laughed, obviously pleased. “I know, I know, just trying to see—”
“If you can get me to say my name on the phone, I know. You’re going to have to try harder than that.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re getting older. I’ll get you sooner or later. How’ve you been, man? Goddamn if it’s not good to hear your voice, even with no name behind it.”
I briefed him on what was going on, and I could imagine him grinning on the other end.
“Sounds like someone’s going to get a mighty special going-away party,” he said.
“Yeah, and they want us to cater.”
“Well, I’m usually amenable to preparing some tasty victuals, if the per diem’s right. But what about you? I thought you were out of the catering business.”
“I’m just going to listen to a proposal.”
He laughed. “Whatever you say, partner.”
Dox was perfectly comfortable employing his deadly talents and could never understand my ambivalence. I said, “I’ll let you know what I learn.”
“Let me know? You’re fixing to go out there alone?”
“Look, there’s no sense—”
“I’ll tell you about sense. There’s no sense in leaving your dick flapping in the breeze while you walk into God knows what. I’ll meet you there and cover your back. And don’t tell me you don’t need it. You say that every time, and plenty of times you’ve been wrong.”
He was right, of course. He was as reliable a man as I’d ever known, and had once even walked away from a five-million-dollar payday to save my life. I just don’t like to have to rely on anyone.
But under the circumstances, the reflex felt like stupidity, like denial. “All right,” I said. “They’re paying me just for the face-to-face. I’ll split it with you.”
“Fair enough. What about your particulars? Secure site?”
Where possible, and especially with travel or other details that could be used to fix me in time or place, I prefer to communicate via an encrypted Internet site. Lately I’d begun carrying a Fire Vault and Tor equipped iPad—small, convenient, and a lot more secure than dedicated machines in Internet cafes, which are often compromised. “You know me,” I said.
“Yeah, I do, and I’ve learned to see some of the wisdom behind what lesser men would call your paranoia.”
I told him I’d post something within eighteen hours, then clicked off and strolled over to an Internet kiosk. There were plenty of seats available on all four daily JAL flights to Honolulu. Not the most direct route possible, but no sense in being obvious. I’d buy the ticket at Narita the next day, and likewise would take care of the L.A. leg once I landed. And I’d fly business, not first. Creating a larger data set for them to sift through wouldn’t indefinitely prevent them from zeroing in on the legend I’d be traveling under, but it would delay them, and under the circumstances a delay would be good enough.
Probably I was being overcautious. Parsimony suggested this was no more than what it looked like: JSOC wanting to contract out a particularly sensitive job, and probably one that involved natural causes. But as an organizing principle, parsimony has its limitations. Like most of what exists in nature, it can be manipulated by men.
Two days later, I sat alone at a corner table of the Beverly Wilshire’s The Blvd, enjoying a bowl of oatmeal and an Economic Energizer smoothie and slowly working my way through a pot of coffee, surrounded by a mixture of hotel guests in tourist garb and studio factotums preening about deal points over power breakfasts. I liked the hotel and would have spent the night there, but didn’t want to be a guest at the same place where, if things didn’t go well, I might have to leave Horton’s body behind. Instead, I’d stayed at the nearby Four Seasons, then strolled over to take advantage of the Beverly Wilshire’s low-key but pervasive security, which would make things more challenging for Horton’s forces if the meeting were a setup. Multiple entrances and exits on three separate streets would also complicate things for anyone planning something untoward. And on top of all the sound tactical reasons, it didn’t hurt that I liked their food.
Kanezaki had come through with information on Larison and Treven. Daniel Larison was indeed a former ISA operator, but was now deceased, blown up in the bombing attack on Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto in Karachi on October 18, 2007. Either the death was staged, or this guy was someone else who had stepped into the dead Larison’s shoes. And Treven was apparently Ben Treven, ISA, though this wasn’t a sure thing either because Kanezaki couldn’t get photographs that I might use to match against the men I’d met. But I supposed it didn’t matter all that much what their names were. What mattered was they were working for Horton.
I’d called Horton earlier that morning to let him know where he could find me, then headed straight over to ensure I could get a table with a view of the restaurant’s hotel and street entrances. Dox was a few tables away, facing me, concealed from the entrances by one of the giant, wood-paneled pillars.
We’d spent the previous evening catching up over dinner at XIV, a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. Over the chef’s tasting menu of heir-loom tomato & peach salad and Dungeness crab ravioli and other such delectables, Dox told me he’d grown bored with the little patch of paradise he’d built in Bali.
“It’s beautiful and all, you’ve been there,” he said, stroking his sandy-colored goatee. “I always thought it would be exactly what I wanted, my own place on the other side of the world. You know, far from the mad-ding crowd, and all that, but…I don’t know, maybe it’s not Bali, maybe it’s the life.”
“How so?”
“Well, shit. I can get work pretty much anytime I want it…there’s so much from the CIA and the Pentagon I’m not even taking anything from foreign clients anymore. I’m just tired of playing whack-a-mole with Achmed, I guess. I mean, what’s the point of being in the fire brigade, if the people you’re working for keep tossing matches on the underbrush? I should be glad, I realize—the big bad Global War on Terror means a nice annuity for people like you and me. What the hell, maybe it’s a midlife crisis. Maybe I should just buy a fancy car.” He took a healthy swallow of the Bombay Sapphire he was drinking, then said, “What about you and Delilah? How’s that going?”
I was drinking a 2007 Emilio’s Terrace from Napa Valley I’d discovered, strangely enough, in Bangkok. It was a cabernet and still young, but the fruit was delicious anyway. I felt vaguely sad for a moment to imagine how it might taste when it was really ready, in another decade or so. I looked at the dark liquid in the glass and said, “It’s not.”
&
nbsp; “What does that mean?”
“It means I left her in Paris. I’m back in Tokyo.”
“Back in Tokyo?” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I thought you loved Paris. Hell, I thought you loved Delilah.”
I sighed. “She wouldn’t leave the Mossad. I don’t know how many times I told her that one of us in the life and the other trying to leave it was making me insane. I finally just…I gave her an ultimatum.”
“I think I can tell by where you’re living these days how that worked out.”
I drummed my fingers on the table. “Probably for the best.”
“I don’t know. Thought you two had something special, tell you the truth.”
I nodded. The three of us had been through a lot together: first, as opposing players on hair triggers; then, when the Mossad had brought me in to take out a rogue Israeli bomb maker named Manheim Lavi, on the same team; and then, most improbably, watching each other’s backs for reasons that had nothing to do with national interests and everything to do with personal allegiances. What had bloomed between Delilah and me, I knew, was as improbable as it was precious.
“You think about her?” he asked.
I looked away. “What do you think?”
“Well, what was it about her being in the life you didn’t like, exactly? I’m in the life, and you seem to tolerate me.”
“I don’t live with you.”
“Is that really the critical difference?”
“Yeah, it is. I was trying to learn…how to relax over there. You know? New city, nobody knows me, nobody’s looking for me. I just want to take it down a notch, not always feel like I need to be looking over my shoulder. Well, how am I ever going to manage that when I’m around someone whose job could bring a shitstorm onto us at any minute, and once actually did?”
He frowned. “Someone made a run at y’all in Paris?”
I nodded, remembering. “Paris is a bitch.”
He dipped his head gravely and looked at me. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime. But partner, you, relaxing? That I’d like to see. Go ahead, do it for me, just for a minute. But let’s bet on it first. I could use the money.”
I didn’t answer. I hated when he pulled the psychoanalysis shit with me. I hated it more when there was substance to his observations.
“Anyway,” he went on, “here you are, back in the life but without Delilah. Even with me as a dinner companion, it doesn’t seem like such a great bargain, if you want my opinion. Which I know you don’t, but there it is.”
“I’m not ‘back in the life.’ Someone tracked me down. I’m trying to straighten it out. It’s not like I have much choice.”
I expected him to laugh at my protestations, which would have been classic Dox. That he didn’t irritated me even more.
“What?” I said.
He raised his eyebrows in mock innocence. “I didn’t say anything.”
“I know. It’s not like you. What are you thinking?”
He leaned back and scratched his belly. “Just that…maybe you were more bothered by what Delilah does in the life than you were by the life itself.”
I didn’t answer. Delilah did a lot of things for the Mossad. But chief among them were long-term honey trap operations with high-value targets. She was a gorgeous natural blonde, intelligent, confident, and sophisticated, and she knew how to work all of it. I doubted they’d ever had anyone on the payroll as effective as she was, not that they ever appreciated her for it. In fact, she’d told me the missions they sent her on—to literally sleep with the enemy—made her continually suspect, even stained in the eyes of management. Which was part of the reason I found it maddening she wouldn’t quit. What did she owe them? Why was she loyal? They didn’t deserve her.
“You going to tell me it never bothered you, her going off for a month at a time without being able to tell you where or who with? You going to tell me you never woke up alone in your big bed in the middle of the night, wondering if right then, at that very moment, she might be straining the gravy with—”
“‘Straining the gravy’?”
“Yeah, it means—”
“Forget it, I can imagine.”
“It’s all right, it means—”
“You made your point.”
He grinned. “I wasn’t being too oblique?”
“No, you weren’t being too oblique.”
The grin widened, for the most part his usual shit-eater but with some sympathy in it, too. I might have argued further, but what would have been the point? Like Kanezaki, he could think what he wanted. What mattered at the moment was, he was armed—a Wilson Combat Supergrade Compact. I’d asked him how he’d managed to procure it so soon after arriving from Bali, and he’d smiled and told me only, “The old underground redneck railroad.” It was comforting to know he had my back in the Beverly Wilshire now, amid the ambient music piped in from the high ceiling, the oblivious background chatter, the incongruous tinkling of quality silverware cutting fine food on high-end china.
Forty minutes after I’d been seated, I saw a black man come in through the restaurant entrance. Older than I remembered, of course, his head hairless now, the body thicker with age but obviously still powerful. He spoke briefly with a hostess, who gestured to where I was sitting and then led him over. I watched as they approached, noting that he was carrying what looked like a ballistic nylon computer case but that otherwise his hands were empty, and that the red, short-sleeved, collared shirt he wore, tucked into a pair of khaki trousers, would offer relatively poor opportunities for concealed carry. He was dressed to reassure me, but I’d still check his ankles and for any telltale irregularities in the fit of his clothes, and watch the entrances to see who came in behind him.
I stood as they came near and shook his hand when he offered it. When the hostess had moved off, he said, “John Rain. Goddamn, but I don’t think you’ve changed a bit. What’s your secret?”
“Avoiding trouble, mostly.”
He laughed. “You’re keeping busy, is what I hear.”
“Not recently, no.”
“Well, I hope we can change all that. Shame for a man like you to be idle.”
We sat down and he placed the computer case on the table between us. He glanced around the restaurant, his gaze settling momentarily on Dox. He might have pretended not to recognize him, but because I assumed he had access to military photos, that would have put me on edge. So it was smart of him instead to say, “I imagine he’s supposed to shoot me if things here go sideways.”
I was glad he acknowledged it. If he’d invited Dox over, I would have had to spell things out. “Something like that.”
“An understandable precaution. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. I left my men outside, and I myself am unarmed.” He slid his seat back from the table and eased up his pants legs. Nothing but socks, from ankle to bulging calf. “Okay? I’m just here to talk.”
It was bold of him to show up without protection, especially after losing two men in Tokyo. But I supposed he’d put himself in my position, and knew I wouldn’t take a chance on killing him before at least learning more.
I was carrying a full spectrum portable bug detector in my pocket—all transmitter frequencies and mobile phone frequencies within five feet. It had been vibrating silently since his arrival.
“I need you to turn off your phone,” I said. “And take out the battery.” He could have called someone before arriving, someone who could be recording our conversation now. Or he could have the phone itself set to a dictation function. And if it wasn’t a phone setting off the detector, it must have been a transmitter.
“Of course,” he said. Because he didn’t ask me to do the same, and because my phone was turned off, I assumed the detector he must have been carrying, which would have been set to ignore his own phone, was quiet. He took out his phone, powered it down, removed the battery, and placed the empty unit on the table. The vibrating in my pocket stopped.
He leaned forward
and put his elbows on the table, his fingers laced together. “Well, you’ll be unsurprised to learn it’s about a job. One requiring your unique set of skills.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do, but all right, I’ll spell it out. That’s why we’re here, after all.”
He ordered a full breakfast—a Blvd Omelet, with mushrooms and black truffles; orange juice; a pot of coffee. I wondered how much of it had to do with appetite, and how much to demonstrate how relaxed he was.
When the waiter had moved off, he said, “Does the name Tim Shorrock mean anything to you?”
The name was familiar, but for the moment, I couldn’t place it. “Should it?”
He shrugged. “It depends on how closely you follow these things. He’s not the most prominent player in the Beltway establishment, but he is the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center.”
The information clicked with the name’s familiarity, and I felt a small adrenaline surge as I realized what Horton wanted. Without even thinking, I shook my head and said, “No.”
There was a pause. He said, “No, you don’t want the job?”
“No one would want it. It’s too difficult and it’s too dangerous.”
A detached part of my mind registered that I was objecting on practical grounds, not on principle. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought my response wasn’t so much a refusal as it was a negotiating gambit.
“Look, we’ve both come all this way. If you’re not in too much of a hurry, why don’t you just hear me out?”
His point was completely reasonable. And yet I sensed danger within it. Why?
Because you’re interested. Admit it. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t even have come.
No. I came to find out what this is about. Because forewarned is forearmed. Sound tactics, that’s all.
The rejoinder felt weak. Kanezaki and Dox, always chuckling at me when I said I wanted out. Were they right? Did they know me better than I knew myself?
The waiter brought over Horton’s beverages and departed. Horton stirred some cream into his coffee and said, “The National Counterterrorism Center focuses primarily on analysis and coordination, but Shorrock has been developing an ops capability. You see, prior to nine-eleven, al Qaeda wasn’t able to recruit Muslim Americans, but that’s changed.”