Barry Eisler - The Detachment

“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 Washington, 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.”