by Barry Eisler
“You’re talking about the Fort Hood shootings?”
“And the attempted Northwest Air bombing, the attempted Times Square bombing, the planned D.C. Metro bombing, the planned Portland bombing…all the work of American Muslims.”
I laughed. “You mean after a decade of two open wars, a dozen covert ones, predator strikes, torture, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, hysteria about mosques…American Muslims are getting susceptible to calls for revenge? It’s shocking.”
He took a sip of coffee, then set the cup down. “I wish I could share your levity. But the problem is getting worse.”
“What does this have to do with Shorrock?”
“His men are involved with several domestic cells. Theoretically, Shorrock is supposed to penetrate a cell just deeply enough to gather evidence sufficient for criminal prosecution. In fact, he is now running these cells for real. You follow?”
“Shorrock’s a secret radical?”
“Shorrock is planning a series of false flag attacks on America.”
I didn’t like where this was going. “Why?”
He looked at me. “To provide an emotional and political pretext for the suspension of the Constitution.”
“You’re talking about a coup,” I said, my tone doubtful. “In America.”
“A coup against the Constitution, yes. You don’t think it can happen here? Do yourself a favor. Even if you don’t want the job. Google COINTELPRO, or Operation Mockingbird, oh, and especially Operation Northwoods. You might also look into Operation Ajax, Operation Gladio, Operation Mongoose, and the so-called Strategy of Tension. And those are just the ones that have leaked. There are others. Unless you think the Reichstag Fire and the Gleiwitz incident and the Russian apartment bombings were unique to their respective times and places and could never happen elsewhere, least of all in America. But you don’t strike me as that naïve.”
“Was nine-eleven an inside job, too?”
“It wasn’t, though the way it’s been exploited, it might as well have been. But are you arguing that because not all cataclysms occur behind a false flag, that none of them do?”
The waiter brought over the omelet and Horton started in on it. I wondered how much of what he was telling me was true. And why, if it were true, I would even consider getting involved.
“You want some?” he said, chewing and gesturing to the omelet. “It’s delicious.”
“Why are you coming to me for this?”
He swallowed and nodded as though expecting the question. “The plotters are prominent individuals in politics, the military, corporations, and the media. They can’t just be killed or otherwise obviously removed, or the factions they represent would sense a threat and retaliate. I need their misfortunes to look natural for as long as possible, so we can do maximum damage to the plot before opposition can coalesce.”
I didn’t care for his premature use of we. But natural would explain why he was interested in me. “What else?”
“Some of the targets have significant security details, meaning you’ll need a team. That’s where your man Dox comes in, along with my men, Larison and Treven. This job could actually stand for a larger detachment, but size entails risks, too. I think the four of you can manage.”
“I don’t buy it. You don’t have the manpower in the ISA?”
“The manpower? Sure. The expertise? My friend, you’re being too modest. There are people who say you pushed a man in front of a moving Tokyo train in such a manner that a dozen bystanders didn’t see it, that even the security cameras didn’t pick it up.”
I didn’t see any advantage to correcting him, but the target in question had actually committed suicide with no assistance from me, and I was as surprised as everyone else standing on the platform when it happened. But my employer at the time believed it had been my doing and was awed. Funny, how legends get started.
“What do you have on Treven and Larison?”
“That’s between them and me.”
“Are they even part of the ISA?”
“They’re status is…”
“Deniable?”
“I suppose you could put it that way.”
“I hear ‘deniable’ and think, ‘hung out to dry if it comes to that.’”
He nodded. “Then don’t let it come to that.”
“And you want me to run this,” I said. “Not one of your guys.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got the most experience with this kind of thing. You know what you’re doing, and the other men will respect you. Plus they’re accustomed to following orders. You’re not. No disrespect.”
I looked at him, considering. He really thought I was going to do this. “Plus,” he said, “Larison, while a capable soldier, needs guidance.”
I sensed beneath the simple sentence a great deal of meaning. “What kind of guidance?”
“Discipline, for one. He’s like a gun—you want to make sure he’s always pointed in the right direction.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Let’s just say…he’s a man who has too much to keep hidden. A man in turmoil.”
First Larison, trying to show me there was distance between him and Horton. And now Horton, doing the same. I might have said something, but didn’t want to give away to one the possible maneuvering of the other.
“Why are you telling me so much?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t take the job if I didn’t.”
“I’m not taking the job either way.”
I expected him to say, Then why are you listening? But he didn’t. He’d know I’d be asking that question of myself, and answering it more convincingly than he could.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “What’s been relentlessly drilled into the heads of the American citizenry since nine-eleven, and following every attack and attempted attack since then?”
I glanced over at the restaurant entrance. “I don’t know. That they hate your freedoms, I guess.”
“Close. That we have to give up our freedoms. Every time there’s an attack or attempted attack, the government claims that to keep America safe, it needs more power and that the citizenry has to give up more freedom. Hell, by now, if the terrorists ever did hate us for our freedoms, they’d hate us a lot less. But they don’t. They hate us more. Meanwhile, Americans are being taught that if their country is attacked, it’s because they haven’t given up enough freedom, and all they have to do is give up a little more. Some determined individuals have recognized the situation is ripe for exploitation, and they’re on the verge of doing something about it.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes while he worked on his omelet. Dox kept a watchful eye on us, his left hand resting on the table, his right out of view.
When the plates had been cleared and we were down to just coffee, I said, “Here’s the problem. Let’s say everything you’ve told me is true. You still couldn’t pay me enough to take out the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.”
I wondered why I was still acting as though we were negotiating, rather than just telling him outright I had no interest under any circumstances. Was I really considering this? I wondered again whether Dox and Kanezaki were right about me, whether all my protestations about wanting out of the life were bullshit. But then why would I have pushed Delilah so hard to leave?
Horton was looking at me—a little critically, I thought. “You don’t care?” he said.
I shrugged. “It has nothing to do with me.”
“Nothing to do with you? What’s your country?”
“Are you talking about my passports?”
“I’m talking about your allegiances.”
“I don’t pledge allegiance to anyone who doesn’t pledge it back.”
“Let me ask you this, then. How many people have you killed?”
“More than I’ll ever remember.”
“Then what’s one more?”
I looked at him. “If he’s a th
reat? Nothing.”
He nodded. “I understand. It’s the same for me. I’ve taken a lot of lives, directly and indirectly, and some of them were under fairly questionable circumstances, I have to admit. One day, I believe I will have to face my maker and account for what I’ve done. Do you believe the same?”
I didn’t answer. Somewhere in my mind, an image slipped past the guards. A boy in Manila, clinging to his mother’s dress, crying for the father I’d taken from him. I remembered his voice, regressed, childlike. Mama, Mama. A voice I sometimes hear in my dreams.
“Occasionally I wonder,” Horton said, “when that day comes, if it could help my case to be able to say, ‘Yes, I’ve taken many lives. But look how many lives I’ve saved.’ You ever wonder anything like that? You ever wonder if there’s anything that could redeem men like us?”
Again, I said nothing. That single prison break from memory was emboldening others. Another boy, about my age at the time, supine on the steaming, pre-dawn river grass, whispering in a tongue I couldn’t understand, tears rolling from his eyes as his life ebbed through a chest wound into the sodden ground beneath him. A wound I had delivered.
Enough. Enough.
“Here’s the thing,” Horton said. “If we don’t stop this, in a few weeks’ time you’re going to turn on CNN and see video of the most horrific civilian carnage you can imagine. Rolling mass casualty attacks on the homeland calculated to cause maximum suffering and to achieve maximum media impact. You will watch those videos, and see the anguish of the survivors and listen to the bereavement of the families of the dead and you will know that it happened because you stood down. Because you could have done something about it but just didn’t care to. And on the day you stand before your maker, as one day you will, you’ll have to explain all that to him, explain to him and to the spirits of the slaughtered thousands how none of it was really your fault. You want that on your conscience? You want that on your soul?”
His delivery was strong, even impassioned, and I wondered what was feeding his fervor. His own sleepless nights, I decided. The wrong decisions he’d made, where he had pulled the trigger too quickly and shot an innocent, or held back too long and lost a friend. A mission he had missed. A wrong order he had issued. The deaths he had caused in trying to save lives.
A detached part of me was impressed at how effectively he’d made his case. He had at least three selling points he was prepared to use, and when each of the first two—loosely speaking, patriotism and “It’s just one more”—failed to elicit a response, he smoothly abandoned it and continued his reconnaissance by fire. My determined silence in response to his third line of inquiry would have told him all he needed to know. Not the specifics—the fallout of having been raised a Catholic, the increasing weight of the life I’ve lived and the lives I’ve taken, my nebulous hopes for some means of atonement, maybe even redemption—but the general, and accurate sense that he’d hit a nerve.
I sighed and glanced at the computer case. “What’s in there?”
“Particulars for Shorrock. Oh, and the fifty thousand we discussed. Yours, whatever you decide.”
Smart. I’ve rarely been shorted on a financial arrangement. No one wants to needlessly antagonize someone like me.
“What are you offering for this suicide mission?”
“There’s no reason it should involve suicide. Still, I’m offering one million dollars.”
I didn’t say anything. I had to admit, it was an attention-getting number. “Divide it with your team any way you see fit,” he said. “And don’t tell me it’s not enough. I know that game, and I respect you for playing it, but we both know that even if you decide to keep only a quarter for yourself, that’s more than you’ve ever been paid for a single job in your life. The next one will pay even better, too, but this one is one million, no more.”
I considered milking him for expenses, but decided there was no point. It was true, a quarter million for a hit was a huge premium, even factoring in the difficulty of the target.
“How are we supposed to get to someone like Shorrock?”
“I’d recommend this coming weekend, at the GovSec Expo in Las Vegas.”
“GovSec?”
“Government Security Expo and Conference. Every homeland security, defense, law enforcement, and intelligence contractor in America, all under the roof of the Wynn convention center, jostling for a more favorable position at the government teat.”
“What’s Shorrock doing there?”
“Nominally, he’s there to give the Saturday morning keynote. In fact, he’s there to be wooed by the boards of a half dozen contractors who are trying to lure him away from government service into a seven-figure advisory position. Access like Shorrock’s is worth more than a dozen lobbyists to these people. He’ll be getting the royal treatment all weekend.”
“You know how hard it would be to be to get close enough and alone enough to make something like this look natural, in a casino?”
“You’ll have some special tools. Go ahead, take a look in the case.”
I opened it. Inside were two Primatene asthma inhalers, held in place with Velcro straps.
“What are they?” I asked.
“The one with the red top is aerosolized hydrogen cyanide, three thousand parts per million.”
I whistled softly. Three thousand ppm is about what’s delivered in a gas chamber.
“That’s right. You spray it in a man’s mouth, or even just in his face, and he will be dead in under thirty seconds. But it dissipates extremely rapidly, and is—”
“Hard to detect, I know.”
“Especially if you’re not specifically looking for it. You’ll want to hold your breath when you administer it and I’d advise that you not linger in the vicinity, either.”
“Even so, three thousand ppm…”
“Yeah, it’s dangerous stuff, true. But you see the vial with the blue top? That’s the antidote, in case you accidentally inhale some yourself.”
“Hydroxocobalamin? Sodium thiosulfate?”
“You know your compounds. It’s both—they work best together. There are also hydroxocobalamin ampules in there, labeled adrenaline for bee stings in case anyone goes looking, and syringes. If you decide to go the cyanide route, and obviously it’s up to you, I recommend you all dose yourselves beforehand, just in case.”
“What else is in there?” I said, feeling myself getting sucked in, wondering why I wasn’t trying harder not to.
“Everything you could reasonably need. Encrypted phones, miniature wireless audio and video, everything. You work with me, you don’t need to spend time in a military surplus store. This is state of the art.”
Maybe so. It would still all need to be examined for tracking devices.
I looked around the dining room. Waiters moved briskly from table to table, carrying trays of pastries and fresh-squeezed juice and omelets to order. The tourists munched on forkfuls of eggs Benedict, excited at how soon the Rodeo Drive boutiques would be opening for them. The movie industry types smiled vacuously as they did their deals, bleached teeth radiant against salon tans. Dox sat watchfully, still as a statue of Buddha.
I’d need to test the spray before we went live. I might have tried it on Horton then and there and let him take his chances with the antidote, but it would have caused too much of a commotion. Well, I’d think of something. As for injecting myself with the contents of a syringe Horton or anyone else provided me, the chances of that were about zero. Anyway, I wouldn’t need to. There were commercial kits available.
I realized that, even with myself, I was raising only practical concerns. And neatly addressing them.
I asked myself what I was doing. I’d left Delilah because she wouldn’t get out of the life. But it seemed that, if anything, the problem wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in the life. The problem was, I wanted it too much. I was like a recovering alcoholic, and being with Delilah was making me want to drink.
So what was the first thing I
’d done after leaving her? It looked like I’d found myself a bar.
I looked over at Dox. Just a prearranged signal, and he’d put a bullet in Horton’s head, then follow me out through the side entrance.
The problem was, I didn’t know if that would be the end of trouble for me, or the beginning.
Or maybe that was a rationalization. I didn’t know. Maybe Dox and Kanezaki were right about me.
I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I’ve only ever had two clients I found out were lying to me,” I said. “You know what happened to them?”
“I can imagine,” he said dryly.
“When I do a deal, the client’s life is his collateral. You comfortable with that?”
“It’s what I expected.”
“No women or children. No non-principals. No B-teams.”
“Understood.”
“Have you told Treven and Larison how much you’re paying?”
“No, I have not.”
He probably thought I wanted to hold out on them. “Make sure you do,” I said. “We’re going to split this four ways even, and I don’t want any confusion about the size of the pie.”
He sipped his coffee. “I admire an honest man.”
“Where are they now?”
He smiled just slightly. “Waiting for you. In Las Vegas.”
I sat on one of the twin beds in a room at an off-strip Embassy Suites, Dox to my left, Larison and Treven facing us on the opposite bed. We would all check into the Wynn later that day, but once we were there, it would be better if we were seen together as little as possible. This would be our only chance to discuss Shorrock face-to-face.
It was strange to be in charge of the op. I prefer to be in charge of nothing larger than myself, and though I supposed that several years and multiple close calls of teaming with Dox and sometimes Delilah constituted a kind of practice, managing Larison and Treven was going to be a challenge. Neither struck me as a natural team player, and I imagined each was accustomed to long stretches alone in the field and to doing things his own way. Also, because I knew Horton had something on each of them, though I didn’t know what, it meant that in addition to whatever innate alpha male stubbornness I might encounter in taking charge of things, I also had to remember that their agendas might range considerably beyond the money the op represented.