Barry Eisler - The Detachment

I am beginning to think the only way the national government can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military. -James Fallows

The environment most hospitable to coups d’etat is one is which political apathy prevails as the dominant style. -Andrew Janos

Vienna seemed an unlikely locale for killing the president’s counterterrorism advisor.

When Horton had briefed Dox and me in Los Angeles, I’d initially pictured Washington, where Finch worked, or maybe some beachside place, where he might enjoy a summer vacation with his family. But as it turned out, Finch wasn’t in Washington just then, and nor did he have a family. What he did have was a single sibling-a sister, who taught at the Universitat fur Angewandte Kunst Wien, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and whom Finch tended to visit whenever he was in Europe on official business. At the moment, as it happened, he was in London, tasked, no doubt, with reassuring the British that the Special Relationship was still special, along with the other important activities presidential counterterrorism advisors are expected to carry out. The problem with London was that the people he was meeting would have their own security details, meaning getting close to him would involve penetrating veritable Venn diagrams of overlapping protection. But Vienna was neither an announced part of Finch’s itinerary, nor an official one. Unless art professors in the former seat of the Hapsburg Empire had their own bodyguards, Finch’s security would be all we had to worry about, and with luck, even that would be light, perhaps even nonexistent.

I had called Kanezaki from a payphone after going through security at LAX. My fellow passengers and I went through the new security machines with our arms raised over our heads as though we were criminals. A few chose to get patted down instead, like prisoners. No one seemed to mind the new normal.

Kanezaki hadn’t learned anything about Horton, but he did mention that a certain Tim Shorrock, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, had died of an apparent heart attack in Las Vegas. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” he asked.

“Why would I know anything about it?”

“Just seems like a lot of coincidences. Horton is obviously a key member of the counterterrorism community-”

“It’s nice you guys have a community now, with members. It makes it sound so friendly.”

“-and a heart attack for Shorrock, at the same time Horton is reaching out to you, makes me wonder. Especially because apparently Shorrock was some kind of fitness fanatic.”

“You ever hear of an earthquake causing a church to collapse on its parishioners?” I asked. “It happens. Same as a fitness fanatic with a faulty valve or whatever. I tend to think of it as God indulging his sense of irony. Or maybe his sense of humor.”

“Maybe. Did you ever meet with Horton?”

“Maybe.”

“You were going to keep me posted, remember?”

I might have reminded him that keeping him posted was in exchange for his finding out about what Horton was planning, which he hadn’t done. But if I told him that, he would just respond that he had tried but hadn’t managed, and anyway that he had come through with information about Treven and Larison. It would be a circle jerk at best; more likely, it would erode some of the trust and goodwill Kanezaki and I had spent years building.

Still, I hesitated to tell him, even in broad strokes, what Horton was up to. Need-to-know and other aspects of operational security are a long-honed reflex in me. But if Larison was right, it was in my interest to learn everything I could about Horton, who might be as much opposition as he was client. Offering some information of mine in exchange for data that might give me a clearer view of the movement of pieces on the board, and of the players behind them, would be a smart trade.

“It’ll sound a little crazy,” I said.

He chuckled. “It’s a crazy business. My own COS tried to have me taken out, remember?”

Back when he’d been a green CIA recruit in Tokyo, Kanezaki had run dangerously afoul of his chief of station, a certain James Biddle, who tried to hire me to kill him. I warned Kanezaki, instead, and that warning had fostered a relationship that had since become highly useful to me.

“All right. Horton says there’s a coup afoot in America.” When I was done giving him the 30,000-foot view of the landscape, I asked, “You think that’s possible?”

There was a long pause, then he said, “I think the public’s been…prepped for this, yes. Even before nine-eleven, but especially since then. There’s a ratchet effect, and nothing, not even killing bin Laden, seems to change it. I can see where some people could realize they could take advantage, whether out of greed or rationalized patriotism or whatever. What does Horton want you to do?”

“I think you can imagine.”

“The plotters?”

I didn’t answer.

“Shorrock?”

Again, I didn’t answer.

“It might be true,” he said, after a moment. “In which case, you’re doing something pretty heroic. But…if the people behind this thing get wind of your involvement, I think you’re going face opposition like you’ve never seen.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, remembering, again, Larison’s admonitions about Horton.

“You trust Horton?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why are you doing this? The money?”

There was a time when Kanezaki’s inquiries were obvious and callow. He’d come a long way.

“Not just the money. I wouldn’t call it heroic, the way you did, but…look, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for me to do something good for a change.”

“If it is good. You only have Horton’s word to go on, is that right?”

“That’s why I called you. I was hoping for some kind of corroborating evidence, one way or the other.”

“I wish I’d been able to find something. So far not.”

“Let me ask you something. Horton…does he have any vulnerabilities?” I was thinking of what Larison had said about hostages to fortune. I wondered whether Horton had one of his own.

“My friend, that’s a line I can’t cross. I’m not going to help you take out an American army colonel.”

“I’m not asking you to. But…if this thing turns out to be other than what it’s been billed as, heroism might require a different course. Just keep it in mind.”

“The two operators you asked me to follow up on-Larison and Treven. Are they involved?”

But I’d said enough. I told him let’s just stay in touch-after all, he wanted to know if Horton was right and what was being done about it, and I wanted an early warning system in case I was being set up. He told me he’d keep trying to find out more, and I headed off to Vienna.

Horton’s intel had been spotty. He had Finch’s roundtrip Washington to London flights, and he knew his schedule of meetings in London. The meetings ended two days before the return flight, and Horton claimed to be ninety percent sure Finch would spend those two days in Vienna, taking a roundtrip flight from London on his own dime before heading back to Washington on his government-sanctioned ticket. What we didn’t know, though, was on what flight Finch would arrive, or where he would be staying. We might have called various airlines and Viennese hotels to “confirm” the reservation of a Mr. Jack Finch, but doing so would have created too many possibilities of an airline or hotel employee learning from the evening news about the selfsame Jack Finch’s demise, finding the previous call to be too weird under the circumstances to be merely a coincidence, and contacting the authorities, who might then want to check on whether other airlines and hotels had received similar calls. If Finch had been conducting his business like a good, oblivious civilian, Horton would have been able to nail down his travel details easily enough. The fact that he couldn’t indicated some security consciousness on the part of Finch, and suggested too that Horton felt circumscribed in his ability to look, lest his inquiries tip Finch off. Regardless, the upshot was that the locus of our attention had to be the sister. If we could get a fix on her, we would also be fixing Finch. After that, we would have to improvise.