by Barry Eisler
At nearly one in the morning, there was a soft knock at the door. All of us stood, save Kei, who still had one wrist flex-tied to a bedpost. All the guns came out again. Larison was looking at Kei; Dox was looking at Larison. I checked the peephole. It was Treven.
“Easy,” I said to Larison and Dox. “It’s him.”
I opened the door and Treven came in. He was holding a gym bag. That was encouraging. I locked the door behind him.
“You get the diamonds?” Larison said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t brief us yet.” I gestured to Kei. “Dox, could you put the headphones on her?”
We’d picked up a pair of over-the-ear headphones and a radio so we could talk in her presence without being overheard. Dox put the headphones on himself, adjusted the radio volume to his satisfaction, and then slipped the headphones onto Kei’s head and over her ears. She bore it well, her expression neutral but not blank; her posture, resigned but not beaten.
“Right here,” Treven said, holding up the bag.
Larison nodded. I didn’t like how eager he looked. “Did you do him?” he said.
There was a pause. Treven said, “No.”
Larison’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Treven said. “I could have. But based on what he told me, I think it would have been a mistake to do it right now.”
“Goddamn it,” Larison said, “Hort always has a line of shit. Always. When the hell are you going to figure that out?”
Treven looked at him. “You know,” he said, “I’m getting a little tired of you.”
I thought, Christ, here we go again.
“Listen,” I said, in my best command voice. “We’re all a little strung out. You’re professionals, you know the signs and you know the causes. We’ve been going balls-out for a week now, Las Vegas to Vienna, back to the East Coast, gun fights, three days non-stop driving in a portable sauna all the way to California, worrying about satellites and drones and however the hell Horton tracked us in D.C….no privacy, no breaks, and barely any sleep. It’s amazing we haven’t killed each other yet. But let’s not kill each other now, okay? We need to dial it down. Or we’re all going to die.”
No one spoke. Either the moment had passed, or Dox was going to have to do another movie impression. Or we were all going to shoot each other. One of the three, anyway.
Finally, Larison said, “What did he say?”
Treven looked at me and said, “You were right about the schools.”
We all listened quietly while he briefed us. When he was done, Larison said, “You can’t really believe him. Don’t you see what he’s doing?”
I looked at Treven. “He told you where and when the school attack is supposed to go down?”
Treven nodded. “Lincoln, Nebraska. Smack in the middle of the country. Three days from now, on the first day back from summer vacation. Some kind of back-to-school assembly that morning in the auditorium, apparently. This guy Gillmor is running a team of four guys. Hort says they’re going to show up with machine pistols and just hose the room down. Nothing fancy, not a lot of logistics, just pure horror and destruction tailor-made for cable news.”
“Exactly,” Larison said. “It’s another setup. We’re supposed to show up with our hair on fire exactly when and where Hort tells us to. This time, he’ll have snipers positioned in vehicles all around the school. He fixes us, finishes us, goes home and has a beer.”
“There’s one more thing,” Treven said. “They’re going to hit the building with drone-fired Hellfire missiles while the shooters are inside.”
“What’s the point?” Dox said. “Kill the shooters?”
“Yes,” Treven said. “Just like Hort was trying to kill us after we did Shorrock and Finch. And also increase the destruction. But don’t you see? If we try to stop this, we won’t all be fixable in the same place at the same time. Some of us would have to take out the shooters. Someone else would have to take out the drone, or find the ground team operating it.”
“So Hort fixes us in two places instead of one,” Larison said. “It’s the same bullshit, and you’re falling for it. Again.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Dox said to Larison. “What if Horton’s telling the truth? A bunch of children are going to be slaughtered, and we’ll be part of it.”
Larison looked incredulous. “Part of it how?”
“We took out Shorrock and Finch,” Dox said. “We helped set this in motion.”
“Not our fault,” Larison said. “We thought we were stopping it, remember?”
“You didn’t care if we stopped it, started it, or fucked it in the ass,” Dox said. “You just wanted your damn diamonds.”
For just an instant, Larison’s expression twisted. I read it as, What did you mean by that? I sensed him fight to not glance at Treven, who shook his head the tiniest fraction, as if to say, I didn’t tell them.
Hort’s words flashed in my mind:
He’s a man who has too much to keep hidden. A man in turmoil.
I wasn’t sure how I knew. It was all preconscious, nothing I could articulate. But I knew. Larison was gay. Treven knew, and Larison knew Treven knew, his secret.
It was over in an instant. I didn’t think Dox had spotted it, and I suspected Treven and Larison would have been confident neither Dox nor I had noticed anything, either. I didn’t even know what it meant, exactly. Was this what was stressing Larison out? Why would Dox or I even care?
But Larison cared. That was clear. It was a secret, and he wanted to keep it that way.
“It doesn’t matter what I wanted,” Larison said, fully in control again. “What matters is that whatever these people might or might not be planning at a school or anywhere else, it has nothing to do with us. Even beyond the fact that you can bet it’s an ambush. And even if we survived it, you want to do something that would help put Hort back in power? We’re lucky he’s defanged for the moment. You want him coming after us again? Because he would. His motives haven’t changed, only his means.”
“You can all do what you want,” Treven said. “I’ve already made up my mind. I’m not going to stand by and let this thing happen. I’ve done a lot of fucked-up things in my life, but I’m not going to do that.”
“Fine,” Larison said. “We’ll have the diamonds confirmed tomorrow. If they check out, we split them a quarter apiece and go our separate ways.”
There was no disputing his logic, but still I didn’t like his point. What would he do if he thought we knew his secret? Would we be at risk? But Treven knew, and Larison seemed to tolerate that. But what about the diamonds? Was he really going to walk away from three-quarters of what had originally been his own?
Dox looked at me. “I’m not going to stand by and let this happen, either. Even if the diamonds check out, how could we enjoy the money if it came at the cost of the lives of a bunch of schoolchildren?”
“What the hell does one have to do with the other?” Larison said.
Dox ignored him. “Can you contact your Asiatic friend and see what he can do? Either to head it off himself, or, if he can’t, to help us out with a little intel and the necessary hardware.”
I nodded. But inside, I was struggling. I wondered whether among the four of us, Larison was the only one without a conscience. Or whether he was the only one with a brain.
My mind flashed to that breakfast meeting with Horton, and the conviction I’d heard in his little speech about having to meet your maker. He hadn’t been thinking about what he’d done. He’d been thinking about what he was about to do. And I was an idiot to have missed it.
“I’ll see what he can do,” I said. “And tomorrow, Larison and I will take a sampling of the diamonds to a jeweler. If they check out, we’re all free agents again.”
No one pushed back about the division of labor. Everyone understood that no one was going to be left alone with the diamonds, and no one was going to be the sole conduit for an expert’s certificati
on.
Things had gotten hellishly fraught. Being part of this detachment reminded me about the old maxim for war: Easy to get into. Hard to get out of.
“One thing you might not be considering,” I said to Larison.
He looked at me. “What’s that?”
“My contact. He told me if we could get him proof, he could get us a pass. Get us off the president’s hit list or whatever it is we’ve landed on.”
Larison shook his head disgustedly. “You don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hort says he wants the same thing? Proof that these attacks have been false flag?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Hort has an uncanny ability to frame whatever he wants so that it sounds like exactly what you want.”
“But we want the proof either way.”
“Then go get it. I told you, I’m done.”
There was nothing more to say. We bunked down in shifts again, but I barely slept at all. I was putting myself in Larison’s shoes, seeing us the way I imagined he did. And the image was keeping me wide awake.
Early the next morning, Larison and I went out with our share of the diamonds to have them tested. It was a little awkward to be walking around with a fanny pack that, if the diamonds were real, contained something in the neighborhood of twenty-five million dollars, but the safest thing to do at this point was for each of us to be responsible for his own share. Certainly Larison wasn’t going to take his eyes off his portion—he’d been screwed by a switch before, and he wasn’t going to let it happen again.
We did a thorough surveillance detection run, finishing up at the Beverly Wilshire, where Horton and I had shared breakfast an impossibly long time before. The previous night, I’d uploaded to the secure site a thorough briefing on the contents of Treven’s conversation with Horton. I used a lobby payphone to call Kanezaki now.
“You find anything?” I said, when he’d picked up.
“Yes. And it tracks with what Horton told you.”
“How so?”
“Two things. First, during one of his revolving-door stints outside of government, Gillmor headed up a DARPA-funded company called Novel Air Capability. Usually called NAC.”
“Okay.”
“What I’m telling you is top secret SCI—”
“Give me a break.”
“Sorry. I guess it’s a habit. Anyway, NAC has created a prototype drone. They call it the Viper.”
“That’s a scary name.”
“Well, they needed to come up with something good to match the Predator and the Reaper. Anyway, this is an extremely versatile aircraft. Component parts, thirty minutes assembly time. It’s small—with the wings folded, it’ll go in a truck about the size of the one I got you. Vertical takeoff and landing; stealth configuration; twenty-four hours loiter time; capable of carrying and firing two Hellfire missiles.”
“Shit.”
“It gets worse. The ground control system is radically simplified and mobile. They call it the Viper Eye.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“You ever see someone flying a radio-controlled plane?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s pretty much what we’re talking about. The only real difference is that this one is operated by video rather than line-of-sight. That’s because of the distances the Viper can travel, and so that the operator gets a bird’s-eye view of whatever he’s targeting. But the control system itself just looks like a ruggedized laptop with a couple of joysticks attached. You don’t need the kind of training a traditional Predator or Reaper ground station operator gets. You really only need a few runs to acquire fundamental competence with the system. They’re marketing it to domestic law enforcement.”
“Without the Hellfires, I hope.”
“Yeah, as a domestic spy drone. But the point is, it’s designed for ease of transport, ease of training, ease of use.”
“Let me guess. One of them has gone missing.”
“That’s right.”
“You think that’s what they’re going to use on this school.”
“This school, and if that doesn’t do the trick, on others.”
I didn’t answer. I was remembering my conversation with Treven in the truck, when I’d told him I thought schools were going to be the next thing. I realized I hadn’t fully believed it at the time. Hadn’t accepted, deep down, that anybody would go that far. But of course, that was naïve. The triumph of hope over experience.
“You there?” he said.
“I’m here.”
“Anyway, I think the plan is for Gillmor’s unwitting false flag team to get into the school auditorium and shoot it up with automatic pistols. If Horton is right, and it’s only a four-man team, some people will get out. Four’s not enough to lock down the whole school, just enough to do major damage once the team is inside. So there will be some witnesses. And while the team is in the building, Gillmor’s going to level the place with two Hellfire missile strikes. The survivors will talk about a bunch of crazed Islamic terrorists screaming Allahu Akbar, and the working assumption will be they used pre-positioned high explosives to go out like martyrs.”
I considered. “Are you sure of your information?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because if that’s the plan, there are a lot of problems. First, you’re going to have witnesses describing a strange airplane. Maybe with rockets flying off the wings.”
“You think that’s a problem? It’s barely relevant. First of all, Iran has publicly announced the development of its own drones. So even if there’s a sighting, a senior White House official calls up a pet reporter and ‘leaks’ that the government thinks it was Iran. The public is already prepped to hate Iran like some kind of nation state version of Emmanuel Goldstein, so when the pet reporter reports the anonymous government ‘leak,’ it slots perfectly into an existing narrative, and the public swallows it as fact.”
“If I didn’t know better,” I said, suppressing a smile despite everything else, “I’d think you had your own roster of pet reporters.”
“Hey, in this town, it’s more important than an entourage. Anyway, forget about Iran. The bottom line is, anytime there’s a major event, you get a certain number of witnesses describing strange pre-and post-incident occurrences. The corporate media’s been trained to ignore it unless they’re told otherwise.”
“What if someone shoots video with a cell phone?”
“People have shot video of UFOs. Of the Loch Ness Monster. It’s always explainable.”
“Are you telling me the Loch Ness Monster is real?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny.”
“What about the debris? The FBI will pick through the place. Forensics teams will be able to tell what caused the explosion.”
“Look what the FBI did on the anthrax investigation. They’ll be instructed to tell the public what the public needs to hear, and to close the case. And outside of a few blogs the establishment media will be instructed to marginalize, that’ll be the end of it.”
“But we’re talking about physical evidence. On the scene.”
“John, listen. You don’t get it. The country is traumatized. People want to believe in their leaders, so they will. They won’t be able to believe the truth. Look, it doesn’t matter whether the CIA killed Kennedy. It doesn’t matter whether nine-eleven was an inside job. Even if you could prove such things, the proof would be ignored, because as a matter of almost religious faith, the country can’t accept such notions. Especially at a time like this.”
“But Horton’s whole plan is to expose this thing for what it was. More or less.”
“That’s different. Or at least, I hope it is. Horton isn’t a nobody with a cell phone camera and a conspiracy theory. He’s an insider, with a reputation he’s carefully stage-managed. That reputation he’s created—his brand—is essentially a counternarrative. He’s undermining ‘I can’t believe Americans would do such things’ with ‘I’m an American, and a hero, too, and you
know I’m honest.’ Horton is one communications-savvy bastard, I’m telling you.”
I couldn’t help smiling a little. “I guess it takes one to know one.”
“You’re right, it does.”
“Okay. Let’s assume your information is good. Can you stop this thing?”
“Maybe. With your help.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?”
“Because it’s true.”
“Why can’t you just call the Lincoln police?”
“And tell them what? I heard someone’s going to bomb a school?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Assuming they would even take me seriously, and assuming I didn’t get disappeared to a black site for doing it, the plotters would just divert to a secondary target. Remember, this is just four guys with machine pistols and a monstrously portable drone. There’s no pre-positioning and there’s almost no planning. The whole thing is nothing but a fire-and-forget exercise—if they want, they can just choose another school. And, absent the shooters—who they won’t need after the first one because the Allahu Akbar witnesses will already have been created and will already have insured the proper narrative structure—they can repeat as necessary. We have to stop them in the act.”
“Well, then send some people in.”
“Who? I don’t have that kind of juice with the paramilitary branch. Besides, who’s going to gear up and parachute into Lincoln, Nebraska, on my say-so?
“Goddamn it, stop manipulating me.”
“I may be manipulating you, but I’m telling you the truth.”
Christ, he sounded just like his mentor, my late friend Tatsu. For a moment, it made me sad. Tatsu would have been proud of his protégé.
“What’s your plan,” I said, hating that I was conceding.
“Some element of you and your guys can drop the shooters before they get inside. They’re not well trained, they’re not expecting any opposition. A school is about as much as they can handle.”
“What about the Viper?”