by Barry Eisler
I didn’t know if I wanted this. But what did I want?
“Where are you now?” I said, improvising.
“In the city.”
“Close to where we met before?”
“I could be there in twenty minutes.”
“Go to the same hotel. I’ll call in less than an hour.”
“Good.”
I clicked off.
“He’s got some more work for us?” Dox said.
“Two more. And a big completion bonus, apparently. How’s that sound to you?”
He smiled. “Sounds like money, partner.”
“Maybe. How do you feel about a face-to-face?”
“You worried he’s gonna be Jack Ruby to our Lee Harvey Oswald?”
“Something like that.”
He reached under the seat and produced the Wilson Combat. “Old Oswald should have carried one of these.”
I thought about it for a moment, and decided there was a way. “Head to West Hollywood,” I said.
When we were off the highway and had driven a couple of miles west on Santa Monica Boulevard, I called Horton again. At this point, anyone listening in wouldn’t have time to scramble a team after us, so the momentary breach of communication security I was about to commit would be harmless. “Urth Caffé,” I told him. I knew the place from previous visits to L.A., and though I liked their coffee, we wouldn’t be enjoying it today. “Corner of Melrose Avenue and Westmount Drive.”
“I’ll be there in under ten minutes.”
I clicked off. Horton was a precise man, and it occurred to me that he must know the city reasonably well to be able to instantly offer such an estimate. I wasn’t sure what that meant, if it meant anything, but I filed the information away for subsequent consideration.
We parked on Westmount, just south of Melrose, and got out. The air felt cool compared to the blast furnace heat of Las Vegas, and the late morning sky above the mixed palm and deciduous trees was a clear, hard blue. We both headed to the restroom in Urth, squeezing past tables of chattering, oblivious Angelenos clustered around metal tables under the shadows of green umbrellas on the sidewalk and patio. The coffee smelled like heaven, but we didn’t have time and I was already amped for the meeting with Horton. Maybe later.
We went back to the car, Dox in the backseat this time while I took the wheel. I drove around the block, right turn following right turn, single family bungalows, walk-up apartment houses, low slung commercial establishments like Bodhi Tree Bookstore and Peace Gallery, repeat. Knots of pedestrian shoppers shifted and glided along the sun-drenched sidewalks, but no sign of Horton. And no sign of anything untoward, either—black Chevy Suburbans with darked-out windows; sedans with hard-looking men inside idling at the curb; a formation in sunglasses and unseasonable jackets taking up positions around the perimeter of the restaurant and beginning to move in.
My phone buzzed—Horton. I clicked on and said, “Yeah.”
“I’m here, but I don’t see you.”
“Walk out of the restaurant left on Melrose and immediately turn left onto Westmount. We’ll be there in a minute.”
“Still being cautious, I see.”
“I’m sure it’s unnecessary.”
He chuckled. “I fully understand.”
I clicked off and handed my phone back to Dox. “Phones off,” I said. “And take out the batteries.” Horton knew the number, and someone could triangulate on it while we drove. Probably unnecessary, as Horton put it, along with my other precautions, but if you’re serious about having something life-saving in place the one percent of the time you really need it, you’ll have to have it in place the other ninety-nine percent, too.
Dox laughed. “This about automobile cell phone use being illegal in the great state of California?”
“No,” I said, glancing in the rearview and trying to hide my exasperation. Dox’s cell phone habits had once nearly gotten us killed in Bangkok. “It’s about—”
He laughed. “I know, I know, we don’t want anyone triangulating on us. Just pulling your leg, partner. Though I don’t know why I bother, it’s so easy.”
I sighed. Probably I would never get used to it. I always go quiet in the moments before a mission, but Dox needed to crack jokes, most of them at my expense.
I turned on the bug detector and circled the block again, right on Westbourne, right on Sherwood, right on Westmount. I spotted Horton halfway up the street, on the sidewalk to our right, heading toward us. He was dressed the way he had been the other day—short-sleeved shirt, tucked in, nowhere good to conceal a gun except in an ankle holster. Or maybe, for the moment, in the back of his waistband, which we couldn’t see from our current position, but Dox had the window down now, the Wilson Combat just below it, and if Horton’s hands went anywhere we couldn’t see them, he’d have to be able to draw faster than Dox could shoot, which was another way of saying he’d be dead right there.
We pulled up next to him and I indicated he should get in the front passenger seat. He nodded, but first courteously hiked up his pants to expose his ankles, then turned around so we could confirm he wasn’t carrying in the small of his back, either. He got in and I did a quick K-turn that would be the first of the maneuvers I would make to ensure we weren’t being followed. The bug detector was still.
“I appreciate the two of you taking the time,” Horton said. “And let me say, nice work in Las Vegas. We’ll never know how many lives you saved and how many grievous injuries you prevented, but from what Shorrock was planning, probably it was thousands.”
“Don’t thank me,” Dox said. “I’m just here to shoot you if something goes wrong.”
Horton was smart enough not to mistake Dox’s genial tone for a lack of serious purpose. He said, “Well, then, let’s make sure nothing goes wrong.”
I headed south on La Cienega, then kept us on neighborhood streets to weed out traffic. I judged it unlikely Horton would risk having us followed—he would have known that as our passenger he would literally have a gun to his head. Still, I stopped several times to make sure no one was behind us and did a few strategic U-turns, too. With Horton’s reach, of course, I couldn’t rule out satellite surveillance in addition to the more common vehicular variety, but that wasn’t an immediate threat and Dox and I could deal with the possibility later. I knew Horton might have seen and memorized the plates as we approached to pick him up, too, but I’d rented the car under an identity that wouldn’t lead back to me. As long as we were careful, we’d be all right.
When I was satisfied no one was trying to tail us, I said, “If we’ve already saved all these lives, why do you need the other two plotters taken out, too?”
Horton nodded as though expecting the question. “Shorrock was the tip of the spear, so he was the most important immediate target. But while the spear still exists, its tip can be relatively easily replaced. There are two more key players, the loss of whom will completely end anybody’s hopes of using false flag attacks as the basis for a power grab.”
“Who?”
“Are you interested?”
“I can’t answer that if I don’t know who.”
He paused, then said, “Have you heard of Jack Finch?”
“No.”
“He keeps a low profile for a man in a powerful position.”
“Which is?”
“The president’s counterterrorism advisor.”
Dox laughed. “You sure do pick some hard targets. I’m afraid to ask who the third one might be.”
Horton said, “Let’s just keep talking about them one at a time for now.”
“What’s Finch’s role in the plot?” I asked.
“Finch,” Horton said, “is what you might think of as an information broker.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he is the modern incarnation of the illustrious J. Edgar Hoover, who as you might know maintained his position as head of the FBI for nearly half a century by amassing incriminating files on all the important players in Wash
ington, including every president he served under.”
Dox laughed again. “Sounds like old Murdoch and Fox News.”
“In a sense,” Horton said, “it is. But more focused. And more extensive.”
“What does any of that have to do with the coup?” I said.
“The first step is the provocation, which was Shorrock’s department. After the provocation, though, the plotters need to ensure that certain key players in the government—the president, highly placed military and law enforcement personnel, and the judiciary, if there’s a challenge—support the president’s assumption of emergency powers in response to the crisis. You can see why this is critical. America is a big, fractious place. There are a number of people who want things to be run more efficiently, as they might put it. But not enough of them to guarantee success in the face of opposition.”
“He’s got dirt on the president?” Dox said.
Horton chuckled. “He has dirt on everybody. I told you, like Hoover. But Hoover didn’t have much more than phone taps and surveillance photos. Finch has intercepted email, Internet browsing histories, copies of security video feeds, records of hacked offshore bank accounts—everything you can imagine in an interconnected digital age. We’re talking about dossiers documenting financial corruption and sexual depravity, in such detail they’d make Hoover weep with envy.”
“I’m not buying it,” I said. “I don’t care how many people Finch controls. The president can’t just suspend the Constitution and get away with it.”
“Ah,” Horton said, “but he won’t call it a suspension. He’ll simply ask for certain emergency powers to deal with the crisis, and he’ll ask Congress for these powers for only ninety days, the powers to expire unless Congress agrees to renew them. Very serious and sober people will talk about the unprecedented nature of the threat, and how the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact, and other such things, and they’ll show how independent and level-headed they are by telling the president he can have only thirty days, renewable, they’ll be damned if they agree to ninety.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say it could be done. Still, what’s the point?”
“What do you mean?”
“The point of all of it. These people…don’t they already have enough? Power, money…they’re already running things. Why upset the apple cart if they’ve got all the apples?”
“The people behind this don’t care about apples. They’re doing this because, in their misguided way, they care about their country.”
“They’re going to destroy it to save it?”
“They don’t think of it as destruction. In their minds, America’s democracy is suffering from a fatal disease. Legislative gridlock, capture of the government by special interests, a war machine that’s become like an out-of-control parasite on the economy.”
“Are they wrong?”
“They’re not wrong, but their means of redress are. Their plan is to take the reins of power, set things right, and then return power to the people.”
Dox laughed. “Yeah, that always works out well.”
“They don’t think the chances are good. They just think they’re better than the chances of the current course, which they judge to be nil. Like an emergency procedure for a patient who, if heroic measures aren’t undertaken, is going to die regardless.”
“Sounds pretty insane,” I said.
“It is insane. In no small part because they’re not factoring in the cost of the thousands of people who will have to be terrorized, burned, maimed, crippled, traumatized, and killed in order to create the groundwork for their plan. And this is why we need to stop it.”
I told myself I should just walk away. We’d done Shorrock. That was enough.
But then I thought of something. Something I should have spotted sooner.
“How do you know so much about this?” I said.
There was a pause, then he said, “Because I’m part of it.”
I glanced over at him, then back to the road. “Part of it how?”
“Never mind how. I was brought in, I played along, I want to stop it.”
“Without leaving a return address.”
“By the time the third and final critical player succumbs to ‘natural causes,’ they might catch on to me, in which case I’m prepared to face the music, which I expect will be a funeral dirge. But yes, in the meantime, I have a chance to destroy this thing root and branch. For that, I need an untraceable outside detachment, and speed, and no signs of foul play.”
We drove in silence for a few moments. Horton turned to Dox.
“Can you take that gun off my back long enough to tell me what you think about all this?”
I glanced in the rearview and saw Dox grin. He said, “I’ve just been waiting to hear about the per diem.”
Treven listened to Rain’s briefing over the sounds of the speeding L.A. Metro subway car, both impressed and concerned. Impressed that Rain had spotted a weakness in Shorrock’s defenses, had immediately improvised to exploit it, and had finished Shorrock with the cyanide as planned. Concerned that Rain and Dox had since met Hort and now seemed to be controlling the flow of information in both directions. He wasn’t used to having a buffer between himself and Hort, and even aside from what he recognized was an unworthy, petulant reaction to being placed on the periphery, he also understood that having to rely on Rain and Dox as intermediaries put him at an operational disadvantage.
The late morning train was mostly empty, a few bored-looking passengers dispersed among the seats. The four of them stood facing each other in the center of the car, swaying slightly as it hurtled along, Rain’s voice just audible although their faces were only inches apart. Rain had called them with instructions for the meeting, and Treven assumed he’d chosen the subway to frustrate any satellite surveillance Hort might be employing to track him. There were video cameras in the stations, of course, but even if Hort had access to a local feed, he’d have to know where to look and there would be layers of local bureaucracy to wade through. By the time anyone had a fix on their position, they’d all be long gone.
Larison said, “You think this Finch thing is for real?”
Rain took a moment before answering. “I didn’t know if Shorrock was for real, either. But the money’s been deposited.”
“He’s offering three hundred apiece for Finch,” Dox said. “And he says it’ll be five hundred apiece for the third one, whoever that turns out to be. That’s over a million for each of us when this is all done. I don’t know about you, but where I come from that’s a lot of green.”
“Where do you think Hort’s getting all this money to throw around?” Larison said, and Treven wondered where he was going with this, how much he was going to tell them.
“I don’t know,” Rain said. “Do you?”
Larison glanced casually around the swaying train car, then said, “What if I told you that instead of exposing ourselves for one million, we could protect ourselves, and walk away with twenty-five million?”
“Twenty-five million…dollars?” Dox said.
Larison nodded. “Apiece.”
Dox laughed. “You’re bullshitting us. Protect ourselves how, kill the president?”
Larison shook his head. “Kill Hort.”
Dox laughed again, but Treven could tell from his expression the number had gotten his attention.
Rain said, “What does he have on you?”
Larison smiled coldly. “That’s not what matters. What matters is, Hort is holding one hundred million in uncut diamonds. Well, make that ninety-nine million, after paying us. Portable, convertible, completely untraceable.”
Rain said nothing. Treven wondered whether he believed it.
“It’s a lot of upside,” Larison said. “But you want to know something? The diamonds are really just a bonus. They’re not even the point.”
“You know,” Dox said, “I’ve always wanted to be involved in a conversation where someone would say,
‘the hundred million dollars isn’t even the point.’ Between that and the twins in the bathtub at the Suko-thai in Bangkok, I can now retire a contented man.”
Larison flashed his cold smile again. “What I mean is, focusing on the money makes it sound like we have a choice. We don’t.”
“What do you mean?” Rain said.
“I mean, you don’t understand Hort. So let me explain a few things about him. One, he always protects himself from blowback. Therefore two, when he’s done using us for whatever Shorrock and the rest of this is really about, he’ll move to silence us. Therefore three, one of these hits, maybe the next one, maybe the third, will be nothing but a setup to fix us in time and place.”
“But he just paid us a million even,” Dox said.
Larison nodded. “To establish his bona fides. And to make us believe the rest of what he’s promising is real. You see why he’s structuring it this way? To get our greed to override our judgment.”
Dox glanced at Rain. Treven read the glance as I’m deferring to you on this, partner.
Rain said nothing. The man’s expression and tone never seemed to vary. It made him hard to read. That was bad enough, but after seeing what Rain had done to the contractors, and knowing that he’d efficiently taken Shorrock off the board, too, Treven was starting to find Rain’s mildly flat-lined demeanor outright unnerving.
“Do you get it now?” Larison said. “After what we just did in Las Vegas, as long as Hort is alive, he’s a threat to all of us.”
“You knew this going in,” Rain said.
“I wanted us all to be in the same boat, facing the same set of options, if that’s what you mean. But I didn’t con you. I didn’t mislead you. You made your own decision for your own reasons. Anyway, even if I’d told you what I thought, you wouldn’t have listened. I’m not sure you’re listening even now.”
No one said anything.
“All right,” Larison said. “Go ahead and let him jerk your strings. Chase after his promises, if you want. Eventually, you’ll die trying. Or, you can recognize what’s going on here, preempt the threat, and walk away clean with twenty-five million apiece in the process.”