by Barry Eisler
Taibbi leaned back in his chair and crossed his ankles on the desk again. “Like you guys have any jurisdiction here in Jacó anyway. Please.”
Paula smiled, and Ben wondered if Taibbi, who seemed to have good instincts, would recognize just how dangerous her smile could be. “Oh, Mr. Taibbi,” she said, in her most honeyed voice, “I hope a smart man like you would know better than that. There’s jurisdiction, and then there’s jurisdiction. It’s the second kind that can really bite you on the ass. Especially if you give someone a reason.”
Taibbi looked at her for a long moment. Ben could tell the man was tough. But he could also tell he was smart. He knew what Taibbi would do.
“Well,” Taibbi said, with a grudging smile, “I don’t see any reason we can’t have a conversation. Just about some hypotheticals. Nothing that really happened. And off the record, of course.”
Paula returned his smile. “That’s all we’re asking.”
Taibbi scrunched up his face, worked his chew around from inside his cheek, and spat it into his cup. He got up and sauntered over to a bureau. “What’s your poison?”
Ben thought it extremely unlikely the man would try to drop two FBI agents in his own bar. Still, he watched him closely, ready to draw and use the desk for cover if Taibbi did anything the least bit froggy.
“We’re on duty,” Paula said. “But thank you.”
“Suit yourself,” Taibbi said. He pulled the stopper out of a decanter and poured a large measure of what looked like whiskey into a glass. “How about you, tough guy?” he said, looking over his shoulder. “You look like a whiskey guy to me.”
“Nah, milk’s more my speed.”
Taibbi chuckled. He picked up his glass, took a swallow, and let out a long breath. He turned his back to the bureau and leaned against it, looking Ben up and down. “The FBI must have been short on decent wiseasses when they hired you.”
“Yes, sir,” Paula said, shooting eye daggers at Ben. “That’s about right. Now, those hypotheticals you were going to tell us about?”
Taibbi took another swallow. “What’s the worst thing that happens if you get made on surveillance?”
Ben looked at him. “Depends on the target.”
Taibbi’s eyes narrowed. “‘Target,’ huh? Not ‘subject’?”
Ben thought, shit. Paula said, “My associate here did some other things before joining the Bureau. You might have noticed that.”
My associate, Ben thought. She didn’t know what name Taibbi had seen on the ID, so she didn’t use one. She was good. At the moment, he had to admit, better than he was.
“Did he now?” Taibbi said.
“Well?” Ben said. “What’s the worst thing?”
Taibbi rolled the glass between his palms. “In my experience? You’re embarrassed. Maybe you blow the case.”
Ben waited.
“So you understand, that’s all we were expecting. That was the limit of our downside. McGlade told us this guy was surveillance conscious, sure, but that’s like saying someone with the fucking Ebola virus is feeling a little under the weather. It doesn’t exactly prepare you for what you’re about to face.”
He took another swallow of whiskey, and Ben was fascinated to see the way real tension was creeping into his expression and posture. The man didn’t like what he was remembering.
“We followed Larison from the airport. He took the bus and we used a four-person tag team. All we needed to do was track him to his mistress’s place, if there was a mistress, get a photo, email it to McGlade, back at the bar by midnight. Easy money for an evening’s work. Well, let me tell you about our easy money. We’d been rotating the point to keep Larison from getting a fix on anyone. My guy Carlos went first, and rotated out when Larison changed buses in San Jose. By the time we’d tracked Larison to Barrio Dent, a suburb on the east side of downtown, Carlos was on point for the third time. We’d been careful as hell, but Larison must have made Carlos anyway. I had visual contact with Carlos, he had the eye on Larison. All of a sudden, Carlos stops under a streetlight, looks confused. Looks left, looks right. I’m thinking, fuck, Larison slipped him. We blew it.”
He took a swallow of whiskey and let out a long breath.
“And just as I’m thinking that, Larison appears out of the dark like a fucking apparition. I know how that sounds, and I don’t care. I’m telling you, the man was gone, and then he was there. He did something, it looked like, just touched Carlos lightly from behind, and then he was gone again, like fucking vapor. Carlos starts staggering around, clutching his neck, there was this slurping sound. I ran over. Fucking blood like I’ve never seen—and I promise you, I’ve seen blood—blood is geysering out of Carlos’s neck, just shooting out all around his hands and between his fingers. Larison must have used a punch knife or something, you got that? Something sharp as a razor. Opened Carlos up like a fucking beer can, he knew exactly where to put the cut. Jesus, I’m telling you, I never saw anything like it. Carlos went down and bled out in ten seconds. I had blood inside my shoes, my socks were soaked from standing in it.”
He took another swallow of whiskey and shuddered. “Hypothetically, that is.”
Ben had no doubt Taibbi was telling the truth. First, because unless he had natural Oscar potential as an actor, he couldn’t have feigned what Ben had just seen. Second, because Ben understood Larison. He knew the training. The reflexes. The mind-set.
Ben said, “Why didn’t you go after him?”
“What, that night? I told you, we might as well have been chasing the humidity under that streetlight.”
“No, another time. You’d traced him to Barrio Dent. And you’re local. You could have found him.”
Taibbi’s expression was grim. “Maybe one of us did.”
Ben and Paula said nothing. Taibbi finished what was in his glass and refilled it.
“Yeah, Carlos had a brother, they were both part of my crew. The brother’s name was Juan. Juan was a tough little bastard, and he worshipped his big brother. He was out of his mind from what Larison did. It was all, ‘Let’s get that motherfucker’ this, and ‘Let’s get him’ that. I told him we needed to keep cool heads and cut our losses. That this guy was out of our league and we’d gotten off lightly, see? I’ve been around long enough I can make that kind of call. But Juan was young and stupid.”
“And it was his brother,” Ben said, thinking of Alex.
“Yeah, it was his brother. Hard to let that go. Well, he stormed off, telling us how we were pussies and cowards and could all go to hell. Which I’m sure we all will, eventually, it’s just Juan found a way to get himself there first.”
“What happened?” Ben asked.
“Don’t know what happened. My guess is, Juan went back to Barrio Dent looking for Larison. Somehow, he found him. Maybe he got lucky, if you can call it that. They found his body in a sewer in Los Yoses, another little suburb adjacent to Barrio Dent. Skull crushed from behind. Larison must have come up behind him, just like he did Carlos. Only difference was, Juan’s wallet was missing, so the police wrote it off as a robbery. Juan wasn’t exactly an honest citizen, by the way, so it’s not like the police knocked themselves out trying to figure out what happened to him.”
“His wallet was gone?” Ben said, imagining Larison.
“Yeah. I figured it was Larison’s way of making it look like a robbery instead of an execution. Less interesting that way to the gendarmerie.”
“You say the brothers were named Carlos and Juan?” Paula said.
“That’s right. Carlos and Juan Cole.”
“The deaths occurred in Barrio Dent and Los Yoses?”
“Yeah, like I said.”
“Close to each other?”
“Maybe two kilometers apart.”
“Can you tell us where precisely?”
“He did Carlos across the street from a restaurant called La Trattoria in Barrio Dent. Just north of the Citibank on the central avenue leading from San Jose to the suburbs. You can’t miss it, the
re’s only a single streetlight, the rest of the street is dark. That’s why Larison chose it.”
Ben knew that’s why Larison chose it. He’d spotted the tail and then led them into an ambush.
“And Juan?” Paula said.
“Around the corner from a restaurant called Spoon in Los Yoses. One block southeast from the restaurant. The corner with the sewer.”
“Any other contact with Larison after that?” she asked.
“Are you kidding me? Let me tell you something. I think you can surmise that I don’t have a whole lot of rules in my life. But I’ve got one: you don’t fuck with the angel of death.”
“Angel of death?” Ben said.
Taibbi looked at him, squinting slightly as though trying to decide something. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about, amigo. I can tell you do.”
He took a swallow of whiskey, then looked into the glass. “I served in Vietnam, and I’ve known some pretty tough customers along the way. But I’ve known only three men who I’d call death personified. One was a guy named Jake, and he’s long dead. Another, went by the name of Jasper, is supposed to be in business for himself now, and believe me, you don’t want to be the subject of that business. The last was a part-Japanese guy named Rain, and no one knows what happened to him. Larison is in that league. He killed Carlos about as casually as I spit tobacco. And Juan, too. Snuffed them out and then evaporated like some evil fucking mist. Like I told Juan before he went and threw his life away, we were lucky. With a guy like Larison, it could have been worse.”
Paula said, “So you never saw him again.”
“No. And I sure as hell haven’t been looking.”
She said, “You don’t know what he was doing here?”
“I don’t know if he was on holiday, or he had a mistress, or if he wanted to go hiking in the fucking rain forest. I don’t know how long he was here or whether he’s ever been back. I don’t know anything more than what I just told you. And I don’t really want to, either.”
They were all quiet for a moment. Ben said, “I want to know something.”
“What?”
“Why’d you tell us all this?”
Taibbi glanced at Paula. “Because your partner asked so nicely, remember?”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Taibbi took a swallow of whiskey. “I told you, I don’t want to cross paths with Larison again. But that doesn’t mean I want him to live happily ever after, either. So whatever you’re planning to do with him, I figure now it’s your risk, and maybe my reward. That’s a division of labor I can live with.”
Paula frowned. “What do you mean, ‘whatever we’re planning to do with him’?”
Taibbi laughed. “What I mean is, if you’re FBI, I’m Doris Day.” He nodded at Paula. “You, maybe.” Then he looked at Ben. “But you? No way.”
“Yeah?” Ben said. “What am I?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But I’ll tell you what you look like. You look like him.”
16
Not a Comforting Thought
In the van on the way to San Jose, Paula was fuming in the passenger seat. “I told you I was going to take the lead. Why can’t you listen?”
“We got what we wanted, didn’t we?”
“Despite you, not because. Every time you open your damned mouth, you antagonize people.”
“Yeah, and then you got to do your sweet southern girl routine. Isn’t that what you guys call ‘good cop, bad cop’?”
“That’s right, ‘you guys.’ That was an FBI ID you showed Taibbi, wasn’t it?”
“What difference does it make?”
“I want to know who the hell you’re with.”
“That doesn’t make any difference, either.”
“Then why won’t you tell me?”
“Because it doesn’t make any difference.”
“It’s all personal for you, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You say it’s the job, but it’s not. You’d already gotten past that bouncer, but no, you had to make fun of him afterward, also. And Drew—you’d already disarmed and disabled him, why’d you have to sass him, too? Does the sass help you get the job done?”
He frowned. It was like Hort again, asking him why he went to that Burgos bar.
“Look, a Zen monk can’t do what I do, okay? Not that you would know.”
“Oh, those are the only two possibilities? Zen monk, and you?”
He didn’t answer. He’d never longed to be working alone as much as he did right then.
They drove for a while in silence. Ben said, “Did you catch what Taibbi said about the wallet?”
“Of course I caught it.”
“I mean, what did you make of it?”
“Just what Taibbi said. Larison was trying to make the second killing look like a robbery.”
“Wrong. Larison didn’t give a shit what the second killing looked like. He’d already vanished like a ghost and no one was going to connect him to the body whether the guy died of blunt trauma or a heart attack or was abducted by aliens.”
“Why, then?”
“Because once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”
“Will you please stop talking in riddles?”
“Put yourself in Larison’s shoes. You arrive at the airport. You’re good—you’re the best, in fact—so you remember faces, especially ones that belong to anyone who puts out any kind of operational vibe, no matter how slight. At the airport, you log dozens of faces, knowing most of them, probably all, will turn out to be false positives. The ones you see now are happenstance. Then, a half hour, a bus change, and five miles later, one of those faces pops up again behind you. The guy definitely has the vibe. Okay, that’s twice—coincidence, maybe. Now you get to Barrio Dent—long way from the airport, small part of the city—and you see the guy again. That’s enemy action.”
“Tell me again how you’ve never been in the military.”
“So now Larison knows for sure he’s been followed. But he’s got no reason to think there’s any way he could have been followed from the States. In other words, he’s not being followed because he’s Larison. He’s being followed because he’s something generic.”
“You mean, like a tourist.”
“Exactly. He figures that he drew the attention of a gang whose MO is to follow a tourist from the airport, hit him over the head when he’s alone or somewhere dark, and make off with his bag, his wallet, his passport, his watch. It happens. And the pattern fits what Larison realizes is in his wake. So he decides to disrupt the pattern.”
“All right, that’s Carlos. Then what?”
“Then what, I think, could be our break.”
“How?”
“Larison was in town for a few days, maybe longer. Say he was shacking up with his mistress. They’re going out a lot, enjoying the local nightlife, the restaurants and bars. Carlos’s brother Juan knows Larison had business in Barrio Dent or nearby because that’s where they tracked him to. He knows it’s a long shot, but he’s obsessed and he’s got nothing else to go on anyway. So one night, he cases every watering hole in Barrio Dent, Los Yoses, and San Pedro. They’re all right next to each other and none is particularly big. I read it in the guidebook. Systematically, one by one, starting in Barrio Dent, go back to the beginning, repeat. If he doesn’t get bingo the first night, he does it again the next.”
“Okay, one night, like Taibbi said, he gets lucky.”
“Yeah, although again, lucky might not be quite the right word. He spots Larison and his lady, say, having dinner. Now, he thinks he’s being a cool customer and that no way Larison’s going to make him. Even after what happened to his brother, he doesn’t get what he’s up against. Like Taibbi said, he’s young and hotheaded.”
“And Larison made him.”
“Right. And I’ll give you good odds, too, that Juan was liquored up when he found Larison the
second time, so he’d be sloppy and radiating all his inner badassedness. So Larison spots the problem and says to his girlfriend, excuse me, I need to step outside—a smoke, a little air, whatever. Wait here, babe, I’ll be right back. He walks outside, and dumb young Juan follows him. Larison leads him along a little, then doubles back on him, just like he did to Carlos. He doesn’t have time or the opportunity to interrogate him, but he wants to know who are these guys who’ve been following him. So he does him, takes his wallet, puts him in the nearest sewer so he won’t be found until later, and is back inside without even breaking a sweat.”
“Taibbi said Juan’s skull was caved in. How did Larison do that? With some table linen he borrowed from the restaurant?”
Ben reached into his pocket and pulled out the SureFire flashlight. He handed it to Paula. “Feel the bezel, around the glass. That’s Mil-Spec hard-anodized aluminum. Now hold it in your hand like a hammer, with the bezel protruding at the bottom of your fist. Now imagine smashing it into the back of someone’s head with an overhand blow. What do you weigh, a hundred twenty, a hundred twenty-five pounds? You could put a hole in someone’s skull that way. A guy like Larison could do an entire lobotomy.”
She handed the SureFire back to him. “Larison would carry something like this?”
“Like this, or an ASP tactical baton. Or he picked up a rock. It doesn’t matter.”
“How would you know what a guy like Larison carries?”
Ben ignored the probe. “The point is, he does it, takes the wallet, and sees the guy he just killed is named Juan Cole. He would have checked the papers after he did Carlos, so now he knows he’s dealing with brothers. Taibbi suggested these guys were petty criminals, they probably have records, and the papers would have said as much. So Larison’s working hypothesis becomes, two brothers, or maybe a gang of which two brothers were a part, followed him from the airport hoping to mug him. He killed one brother, the other decided he wanted revenge, Larison killed him, too.”