Barry Eisler - The Detachment

When Dox was engaged-on what he was watching through his sniper scope, for example-his focus was supernatural. But when he wasn’t all the way on, he tended to be all the way off. “What do you think?” I said again, drawing on the patience our partnership required.

Dox let the drapes fall closed and sat back down on the bed. “Shoot, partner, you know I do my best work outdoors. I defer to you on this kind of situation. Main thing, it seems to me, is that we get him alone and away from all the cameras for a minute. Could be that means something with the gym. Or maybe a lavatory. Figure he’ll be drinking a lot of coffee, or green tea if he’s a health nut, he’ll have to hit the head at some point. Follow him in, spray him in the face, head back to L.A. for a beer.”

“We’ll need to test the cyanide first,” Larison said. “And assuming it works as advertised, pick up a commercial antagonist. No telling what Hort has in that ‘antidote.’”

At some point, when the moment was right, I’d press him on what was up between Horton and him. But not now. “How do you see it?” I said, looking at him. “The keynote, or the gym?”

Larison smiled, and I wondered if he knew what I was doing. “I think we can exploit the gym,” he said.

“I’m not saying we can’t,” Treven said quickly. “But it’ll take some luck. The file says he’s into CrossFit. Well, I do some CrossFit WODs myself, and you’d have a hard time predicting on any given day whether you’ll find me in the gym or out on the road. So for all we know, Shorrock could decide the hell with the gym, I’ll go for a run and see the sights.”

“Wads?” I asked, not revealing that I was pleased by his objections.

“Workout Of the Day,” Dox and Larison answered simultaneously.

I mentally corrected to WOD. “Am I the only guy who’s not doing this CrossFit stuff?”

“You do it already,” Dox said. “You just don’t know the name.”

“Well,” I said, “whatever Shorrock does, let’s take the potential obstacles one-by-one and see if the workout intel could be useful. First, how likely is it he’ll go for a run?”

Dox tugged on his goatee. “Hundred degree heat, hordes of tourists to dodge? Plus I guarantee the gym at the Wynn is fancy, and there’ll be ladies in spandex. Who’d want to miss that? So I’d bet against a run.”

As was often the case, I wouldn’t have put it the way Dox did, but I couldn’t disagree with his logic.

“All right,” Treven said, holding up a hand in a maybe so, but… gesture. “Let’s assume he’ll be at the gym at some point. It’s still a huge window. A real CrossFit guy would get up extra early if necessary to squeeze in a WOD before a full day of meetings. Or he might skip lunch to get one in, or maybe right before bedtime.”

The dog barked again. Dox said, “Christ almighty. That is the worst bark I’ve ever had to endure. Sounds like someone’s giving the damn thing an electrified enema.”

I tried not to picture it. Which of course just made it worse.

“You’re right,” I said, looking at Treven. “Still, if there were a way we could catch him at the gym, it could really put us in business. It’s not on his schedule, so not a hot spot from the perspective of his security detail. In fact, if one of us could be in there when he arrived, we’d likely be overlooked. He’s supposed to have two Secret Service bodyguards, right? That’s not a full detail. If it were the president, they’d have a full team to clear every room ahead of time, whether he was announced or not. But with just two, they’ll be focused more on anyone trying to follow Shorrock than they will be on people who are already in a place he randomly decides to visit.”

There was quiet for a moment. Treven said, “Well, we could try rotating through the gym. We’re all in shape, so to anyone else in the gym, the staff or whoever, a ninety-minute workout wouldn’t seem unusual, and probably each of us could kill a good amount of time showering or using the sauna or whatever in the locker room before and after. If we rotate through one at a time, two hours each, that’s an eight-hour window we’d have covered. Still fifty-fifty in a sixteen-hour day, but not bad, either.”

I nodded, pleased. I had the same idea, of course, but by expressing it as a vague wish, I’d let Treven turn it into a plan he could now feel was his own.

“It’s an interesting suggestion,” I said. “And now that you mention it, I think we might do even better. We don’t need wall-to-wall coverage, do we? Figure Shorrock will work out for at least an hour. If he’s not there when the first of us is ready to leave, the next person could show up, say, thirty minutes later and still easily overlap with Shorrock. That means we’re up to almost ten hours of coverage. And I’m betting he’s more likely to show up early than late. The part of his day that’ll be easiest to manage is the part before the meetings. Plus, the main reason he’s out here is to be wined and dined. That would all happen at night. So if we play it right, we’re actually doing significantly better than fifty-fifty.”

Dox drummed his hands on his belly. “Not bad odds, for Vegas. And there’s one other possibility, though I’d call it a long shot given the Sin City venue and all that. The file says he’s a church-going man. Every Sunday.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Well, he’s scheduled to leave on Sunday. Maybe a pious man would stop at a local house of worship on his way out of town. By the time his flight gets to the East Coast, with the three-hour time difference, he’d be too late for anything back home.”

I nodded. “Agreed, a long shot, and hard to know where he’d be going ahead of time, assuming he goes at all.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Though how many churches could there be in Las Vegas?”

“Hundreds,” I said. “If you want to make money in hospitals, you build where people are sick.”

Larison said, “I like the gym. We can rotate like Treven said, with thirty-minute intervals in between to extend our coverage. Whichever one of us sees him in there can alert the others. They have extensive spa facilities, and if he uses any of it-toilet, shower, steam room, hot tub, sauna-we’ll only need him alone for a second. Sauna or toilet would be perfect, in fact. Easily explained as a heart attack with the first, embolism with the second.”

I nodded thoughtfully, again trying to convey that these were persuasive points I hadn’t fully considered myself.

“Doing a man in the steam room,” Dox said. “When you say it like that, it sounds dirty.”

I didn’t bother pointing out that no one else had said it like that.

Treven said, “The gym makes sense.”

The dog barked again. Dox winced and said, “Car alarms, people who yell on cell phones in public, and people who don’t bring their yapping dogs inside. And people who put their seats all the way back in coach, while we’re on the subject. I swear, there’s no more civility in the world. Listen, I’m gonna grab a soda from the machine. Anyone want anything?”

The others shook their heads. Dox stepped out.

We talked more about how to approach Shorrock, what we’d do if he showed up in the gym, what we’d do if he didn’t. I noted Dox had been gone a little longer than a trip to the vending machine would have warranted, and wondered if maybe he’d felt an uncharacteristic need for some privacy and had actually gone out to use a restroom in the lobby.

“What about reconnaissance?” Treven asked. “We need to walk the resort to get the layout and nail down details. We can’t do it together, obviously, but we’ll be conspicuous as singletons wandering the casino. It’s strange behavior, and staff monitoring the cameras might pick up on it.”