Barry Eisler - The Detachment

“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.”

Treven had the sick sense that he had been turned into a bystander on all of this. Kill Finch? Turn on Hort? No one was asking him what he thought. And the truth was, he wasn’t sure himself.

He couldn’t disagree with Larison’s analysis of the current state of play-after all, he knew firsthand how manipulative and ruthless Hort could be. And the points Larison had made about the security video placing Treven at a murder scene were persuasive, too. If Larison was right, the choice was pretty straightforward: kill or be killed.

Still, the thought of taking out Hort made him anxious, almost dizzy. Could he really do this? To his own commander? He tried to think of it as a fragging, like what enlisted men had sometimes done to incompetent lieutenants in Vietnam. But when he imagined himself putting a round into Hort’s forehead, the neat hole, the momentary pressure bulge of the eyes from cavitation in the cranium, the instantaneous loss of expression from the face and rigidity from the body…something inside him rebelled.

What would he do afterward? Hort would be replaced, naturally, but it was hard to imagine things ever going back to the way they were. He was afraid he would have committed a kind of patricide, that he’d be tormented by conscience, that his fellow elite soldiers would sense he’d committed some primordial sin, maybe even suspect precisely what it was. He’d bear the mark of Cain, always suspect, forever an outsider.

No. He wasn’t like Larison and Rain, and he didn’t want to be. He’d done his share of killing, most of it at close quarters, but except when it had been self-defense, it had always been under orders. He was part of something, why would he fuck that up? And who was Larison, anyway? A skilled operator, no doubt, but still, a loose cannon, a rogue. And Rain was beginning to strike him as a borderline sociopath. Dox was a buffoon, too dumb to know better. They did what they did for money, which meant they could always be bought. Had he really been considering turning on Hort, turning on the unit, to throw in his lot forever with this group of burnouts?

And then suddenly, he saw a way through this. A way to protect himself, stay on the inside, and get clear of Rain, Larison, and Dox. All at the same time.

“You might be right,” Rain said, over the sounds of the train. “But still, I want to finish Finch. That’s what I was hired to do, and I’m not in the habit of turning on a client just for a better payday, even a much better one. If you and Treven want in, we’ll split the fee three hundred apiece. Otherwise Dox and I can handle it alone, and we walk away with no hard feelings.”

Larison said, “You’re making a mistake.”

“Do you want in on Finch?” Rain said.

Larison looked away for a moment as though considering. Then he said, “What would you do if you found out Hort is lying to us about Shorrock and Finch? About what all this is about?”

Rain said nothing.

“Yeah,” Larison said. “I thought so. All right, I’m in on Finch. Because soon enough, you’ll be in on Hort.”

Later, after they’d split up, Treven did a long surveillance detection run. When he was sure he was alone, he used a payphone at a gas station to call Hort. Hort picked up with a typically noncommittal, “Yes?”

“It’s me,” Treven said.

There was a pause, then, “It’s good to hear your voice, son. Nice work in Las Vegas.”

“That wasn’t me so much.”

“Could you have done it with fewer players?”

“Probably not, no.”

“Then it couldn’t have been done without you. Which is why I wanted you to be a part of it in the first place.”

Treven didn’t answer. He felt like he’d arrived at a fork in the road. Whichever way he went, there’d be no turning back. Ever.

“What’s on your mind, son?” Hort said.

Treven took a deep breath. “There’s something you need to know,” he said.

Faced with intractable national problems on one hand, and an energetic and capable military on the other, it can be all too seductive to start viewing the military as a cost-effective solution. -The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012, Charles J. Dunlap