by Barry Eisler
Larison pulled up to the window. The guy’s ears must have had just enough time to send an urgent corrective message to his brain—threat on right, not on left—because his head started to turn in the instant before Larison put an armor-piercing round into the back of it.
The driver was amazingly quick. In the moment during which Larison was focused on his partner, he managed to open the door and jump out onto the street. Larison stepped back, judged the angle, and fired twice through the van. He heard a cry from the other side and circled carefully around the front. The guy was splayed out on his back in a growing pool of blood, a gun on the ground beside him, his legs kicking feebly as though to propel him from the scene of his own destruction. Larison checked his flanks—clear—stepped out from behind the cover of the van’s engine block, and approached him, the HK up.
“Please,” the guy whispered. “Please.”
Larison smiled and shot him in the face.
He went back to the bike, reloaded, and roared off.
Seven down, he thought. Five to go.
He wished there were more.
28
Shaken Up
The whole thing happened so fast that Ben didn’t have time to figure out what to do. In the space of a half minute, he watched Larison appear, drop five men, and disappear again. Ben could have gotten out of the van after the first three and engaged Larison from behind, but his orders were strictly to observe, and besides, the point, if anything, was to snatch Larison, not to kill him. Still, it was appalling to have to be a spectator to so much killing, to be helpless to do anything about it.
Paula was stunned by the mayhem. She watched it all with one hand over her mouth, the other around the butt of the Glock in her lap, muttering, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”
When Larison mounted up and roared off toward the other end of the street, Ben knew the two men waiting there were already dead. A moment later, the same .45 caliber gunshots he’d already heard confirmed it.
Ben started to pull out his phone to call Hort. And then he realized.
Larison wasn’t done. He was heading toward Nico’s office. Hoping to find more prey.
Someone had to warn those guys. He could call Hort—
Who would have to call the national security adviser, who would have to call the CIA, who would have to call the field director, who would have to call the snatch team in front of Nico’s office, whose bodies, by then, would already be cooling.
Fuck it.
He opened the back door. “Drive to Nico’s office,” he said. “Right now. I’ll get there faster on foot.”
“What the hell—”
“He’s going to take out the second team. I’ve got to warn them.”
He sprinted down the street, the Glock out, his eyes scanning the hot spots. He passed another van, a bloody body splayed out in the street beside it. People were looking out windows and coming to doorsteps. He pulled the baseball cap lower and ran.
He cut across corners and between parked cars and it took him less than two minutes to cover the distance to Nico’s office cul-de-sac. Fifty yards out, he heard two more .45 caliber shots.
He burst onto the street just in time to see Larison pumping another white van full of bullets. Larison was standing on the passenger side, just behind the door, the angle obviously calculated to make shooting maximally difficult for the people inside. Two shots, a third. Then he calmly walked to the back of the van and emptied a half dozen more rounds into it in a pattern that no one hiding inside could have avoided.
Ben sprinted down behind a parked car. He hoped it would provide cover. He had a feeling Larison was using AP rounds.
Larison looked left and right. He took a fresh magazine from a fanny pack or belly band and swapped it into his gun. Ben had the shot. All his instincts, all his experience, told him to take it.
He ground his teeth together and fought warring impulses. He could end this thing right now. Right here. But wouldn’t that mean the tapes, set to a dead-man trigger, would be released? Wasn’t that exactly what he was supposed to prevent?
Larison picked up his bike and mounted it. He rode past Ben. And looked directly at him.
Somehow, even through the visor obscuring Larison’s face, Ben thought he felt a kind of … recognition pass between them. He still had the shot. Larison must have known it. But he didn’t react. He just looked at Ben, and then rode away.
A second later, Paula came barreling down the street, going right past Larison. She must have missed Ben crouching between the cars because she went by him. Shit. He ran out after her.
She turned around in the cul-de-sac. Her window was down. “Here,” Ben called. She nodded and stopped. Ben went around the back of the van and saw her pushing the passenger door open as he came up the side. He would have preferred to drive, but if they encountered opposition, for the moment it would be better for Paula to drive and for Ben to shoot.
There was a squeal of tires from the opening of the street. Ben gripped the side of the door and watched a brown sedan rapidly approaching. Cops? he thought. It would have been a pretty fast arrival. And that kind of bad luck twice in a row, first Manila, now here … he didn’t believe it.
“Keep your head down,” he said. He could see a passenger and a driver, both Caucasian, both wearing shades. No one in back.
The car stopped ten feet in front of them. The driver and passenger, both in poplin suits, stepped out. Their hands were empty. Ben scanned the area. He saw faces in gated windows and people coming to their doors. But no other immediate threats.
“Paula Lanier?” the passenger asked, moving toward the driver side of the van.
Paula looked at him. “Who are you?”
Ben didn’t like the whole thing from the beginning, and he was liking it less by the second. The way the car was blocking them. The fact that whoever these guys were, they wanted to have a conversation of some sort at the scene of a recent multiple homicide. The way the passenger had called out Paula’s name, which felt like an attempt to lull her by establishing false familiarity. And now they were engaging in a flanking maneuver. Five more feet, and the passenger would disappear from Ben’s view. Meanwhile, the driver was continuing to advance on Ben.
He didn’t think these things consciously, but rather realized them in a kind of instanteous mental shorthand. Nor did he consciously weigh a decision. Rather, he simply understood what needed to be done. And did it.
He moved up from the side of the van, tacking right so he could keep the driver and passenger in a single line of vision. “Stop moving,” he called out, loudly and in a flat tone that would have made an attack dog pause. He put the Glock’s sights on the driver’s face. “Now.”
But the passenger didn’t stop. And the driver said, “Relax, fella, we’re here to help. Diplomatic Security. Here, let me show you ID.”
The guy started to reach inside his jacket. Under more relaxed circumstances, Ben might have asked, What part of “stop moving” don’t you understand? As it was, he shot the guy instead. A neat hole magically appeared in the guy’s forehead. His body twitched once and slid to the ground.
The other guy lurched toward the driver side of the van. Ben sprinted forward to prevent him from getting to cover, the Glock at chin level in a two-handed grip. As he angled around the front of the van, he saw the guy had gotten his gun out. Too late. Ben nailed him with another head shot. Blood and brain matter sprayed the side of the van and the guy tipped over to the ground.
Ben ran up to the door and yanked it open. Paula’s mouth was hanging open in shock. Her face was flecked with red and gray. He knew she wasn’t going to be able to drive. Not now.
“Move,” Ben said. “Passenger seat. Go.”
She complied. He stepped over the dead guy, jumped into the seat, engaged the transmission, and swerved around the sedan. The sedan’s front bumper clipped the open door and slammed it shut as they squealed around it.
“What … what the fuck … ,” Paula spluttered.
/>
Ben drove. They could figure out what the fuck later.
“What did you just do? They said … they said they were—”
“What they said was bullshit.”
“How can you be so sure? You killed them.”
“You’re goddamned right I killed them. You think Diplomatic Security doesn’t know enough to stop moving when a guy pointing a gun point-blank at their faces tells them to? You think DS is so inept that not only don’t they stop, they reach for something unseen? There’s not a cop or a DS in the world that stupid.”
“That’s it? You decided to kill them … based on that?”
Ben shot onto the highway and headed west. He slowed his speed to normal.
“Actually, no, there were a dozen things. The way they stopped. The way they approached. The way they used your name. And why wouldn’t anyone have had the sense to tell us they were coming? You don’t send in a B-team like that without a heads-up to the A. It’s guaranteed to cause friendly fire.”
“They knew me!”
He glanced at her. “Did you know them?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Then they didn’t know you. They knew your name. I’m sure they had a photograph. The rest was artifice to help them get close.”
“But how could you really know—”
“Look, I don’t tell you how to dust for fingerprints, okay? So don’t tell me how a couple operators get close to their targets before drilling them with head shots. If you’d waited a second longer for the proof you want, you’d be dead now.”
“Then who were they?”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m starting to think they could be anyone. That’s the problem with those damned tapes.”
He thought. Could Hort have set him up? He still didn’t trust him, not after Obsidian. But why would he? Hort was getting overruled back in Washington, and Ben was his only set of eyes and ears on the ground. What possible gain would there be for Hort?
Besides, if it had been Hort, why would that guy have used Paula’s name and not Ben’s? It was Ben they needed to lull more than Paula. He was the greater tactical threat. If Hort had sent them, he would have told them as much.
And it was more than that. So soon after the emotional whipsaw of Obsidian and Manila, Ben didn’t want to believe it could have been Hort. Some things, he decided, just had to be determined by your gut. And his gut told him it wasn’t Hort.
Which didn’t answer the question of who it had been. Backup for the snatch teams? What would have been the point? And why would they have asked for Paula? CIA? FBI? He just didn’t know.
About the only thing going well for them at the moment—beyond the welcome fact that they were still alive—was that it was getting dark and starting to rain. The cars on the highway were becoming indistinct, their headlights on, their wipers pumping. Still, a van was far from impossible to spot. Fourteen people shot to death in a quiet San Jose suburb, probably a dozen witnesses describing the vehicle leaving the scene, possibly noting that a white man and black woman had been inside it. An unusual combination, one the staff at the InterContinental might remember, even if they couldn’t describe the faces of the man or woman in question. He knew he’d been careful about keeping his head down in the lobby and elevator of the hotel, where the cameras were. He hoped Paula had been, too.
He pulled off the highway into a strip mall full of cantinas and bodegas. “Where are we going?” Paula said.
“We need a vehicle change. Police will be looking for this van. I don’t want to be driving it when they find it.”
“I am the police,” Paula said, shaking her head as though in disbelief.
“Not here, you’re not. Not now.”
He drove down the parking lot until he saw what he was looking for—an early nineties Ford Taurus. He pulled up next to it and stopped.
“Take the wheel,” he said. “I’m going to hot-wire that Taurus, and you need to follow me when I’ve got it going. We don’t want to leave the van right here for the police to find when they get a stolen-vehicle report. We’ll leave it a couple miles away and then drive the Taurus.”
Paula nodded meekly, and he wondered whether she was going into shock.
“You okay?”
She nodded again.
“You going to be sick? That’s normal. It’s okay.” She shook her head. “I’m okay. I’m just … I’ve just never …”
“I know. We’re going to get you someplace quiet. You can clean up. And we’ll talk. Okay?”
She nodded again.
“Just follow me now. It won’t be long.”
He got out and was happy to find the car unlocked. Not exactly a model chop shops were salivating over. He could have broken a window easily enough, but someone driving with a window down in the rain is sufficiently abnormal to draw law enforcement attention. Unbroken was better.
He got in the car, closed the door behind him, slid the seat back as far as it went, and took out his tools: the SureFire mini-light; a key ring from which a number of handy items dangled, including two screwdriver bits, flat point and Phillips head; a Benchmade 9051SBK folding knife; a short strip of duct tape from around the mini-light. An old drill sergeant had once told him a soldier with thousand-mile-an-hour tape and a few other small items was a wonder to behold, and Ben had since found it to be true.
He got down under the steering wheel, holding the duct-tape-wrapped SureFire between his teeth, and used the Phillips head screwdriver to remove the steering wheel access cover. He found the primary power supply wire and the electrical circuit wire, used the Benchmade to strip about an inch of insulation off each, and twisted them together. He stripped a half inch of insulation off the ignition wire and touched it to the wires he’d connected a moment before. The engine kicked over. He pumped the gas pedal with his hand and the engine caught. He wrapped the duct tape around the connected primary power and electrical circuit wires, put his tools back in his pockets, sat up, and nodded to Paula. He turned on the headlights and pulled out, watching Paula follow in the rearview mirror.
This time he drove southeast, in case anyone had reported a green van fleeing west on the highway from the crime scene. Ten minutes later, he spotted another shopping mall from the road and pulled off the highway. Paula pulled in next to him. He left the engine running, got out, and opened the driver side of the van.
“We need to wipe it down,” he said. “We might not get everything, but it’s better than nothing.”
There was a canister of bleach wipes in back intended for this very purpose. They spent a few minutes going over everything they’d touched. When they were done, they got out. They left everything unlocked, the driver-side door open, and the keys in the ignition. With luck, someone would steal it, contaminate it, and drive it far away.
“It’s okay,” Paula said, walking around to the driver side of the Taurus. “I can drive.”
“I know you can. But you wouldn’t be human if you weren’t shaken up by what just happened, okay? And it’s also human not to realize it until later.”
“You’re not shaken up?”
“I’ve seen this kind of thing before. You haven’t. Come on, I’m not trying to give you a hard time. You can drive tomorrow if you want. Let me take over for now.”
She looked at him as though trying to gauge his intent, then nodded and went around to the other side. They pulled away and Ben took out his phone.
Hort picked up on the first ring. “What happened?”
“Larison killed them. Showed up on a motorcycle and dropped all seven in front of the condo. They put a tranquilizer round in his neck, it didn’t do shit. What is the guy, a vampire?”
“A tranquilizer … goddamn, he must have dosed himself with an antagonist. Damn.”
“Plus five more in front of the office.”
“I told them. I told them.”
Ben heard only anger in Hort’s voice. Nothing that indicated he’d known about the two guys in the brown s
edan.
“I had the shot,” Ben said. “I could have taken him out. Not in time to save anyone, but still.”
“Your orders were only to observe. Technically, you weren’t even supposed to be there.”
“I did. I’m just … saying.”
“I understand how you feel. But if you’d dropped him, the dead-man trigger would probably have published the tapes already. You did the right thing.”
“I tried to get to the second team. I couldn’t reach them in time.”
“I’m sorry, son.”
“There’s something else. As we were pulling away from the office, a car pulled up. Brown sedan, I didn’t get the make, not that it would matter. Two guys got out. Caucasian. American, from the accents. They knew Lanier’s name. It was a hit.”
There was a pause. “A hit? You sure they weren’t Ground Branch, part of the snatch team?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re okay?”
“I’m fine. They’re not. I didn’t have time to check for ID, and I doubt they would have been carrying any. But you need to find out who those guys were and who’s coming after Paula and me.”
“Roger that. How’s Lanier?”
Ben glanced over. “She’s okay.”
“Do you need anything?”
“No, we’re good. Unloaded the van, we’re going to find somewhere to bunk down for the night.”
“Good. Get some rest. Stay safe. I’m going to find out what I can and get back to you.”
“What’s our next move? Larison’s still out there.”
“I know. And maybe now, these idiots will listen to me when I tell them how this needs to be handled. Before we lose any more people.”
29
Doubt
Larison rode hard to the southeast, rain splattering against his visor and soaking his shirt. He’d dosed himself with Benzedrine to counter the post-combat parasympathetic backlash and felt like he could ride forever. With light evening traffic and breaks at a minimum, he would reach the Panamanian border in about five hours. The weather was slowing him down for the moment, but the wind was blowing north and he could see breaks in the clouds ahead of him. With luck, he’d be riding out of it soon.