Barry Eisler - The Detachment

Larison took a sip of coffee. “Why do you think Hort sent those assholes along with us?”

It was a little annoying that Larison hadn’t just answered the question. Treven paused, then said, “He doesn’t trust us, obviously.”

“That’s right. They’re working for him, not with us. Remember that.”

Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton was Treven’s commander in the ISA, and had once been Larison’s, too, before Larison had gone rogue, faked his own death, and tried to blackmail Uncle Sam for a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds in exchange for videos of American operatives torturing Muslim prisoners. He’d almost gotten away with it, too, but Hort had played him and kept the diamonds for himself. Treven wasn’t entirely sure why. On the one hand, Hort’s patriotism and integrity were unquestionable. A black man who might have been denied advancement in other areas but who was not only promoted, but held in awe by the army meritocracy, he loved the military and he loved the men who served under him. Yet none of that had prevented him from fucking Larison when he’d needed to, as he’d once tried to fuck Treven. He’d told Treven why: America was being run by a kind of oligarchy, which didn’t seem to trouble Hort much except that the oligarchy had become greedy and incompetent-grievous sins, apparently, in Hort’s strange moral universe. The country needed better management, he’d said. He was starting something big, and the diamonds were a part of it. So, he hoped, would be Treven and Larison, and this guy Rain they’d been sent to find, too, if he could be persuaded.

So of course Hort didn’t trust them. They weren’t under duress, exactly, but it wasn’t all a positive inducement, win-win dynamic, either. Larison had to be looking for payback, as well as a chance to recover the diamonds. And Treven had wised up enough to recognize the strings Hort had been using to manipulate him, and to know he needed to find a way to cut them, too. There was the little matter of some unfortunate security videos, for example, that could implicate Treven in the murder of a prominent former administration official. It didn’t matter that it had been a CIA op and that Treven had nothing to do with the man’s death. What mattered was that Hort and the CIA had the tapes, and might use them if Treven got out of line. So for the moment, the whole arrangement felt like an unstable alliance of convenience, all shifting allegiances and conflicting motives. Hort would never have sent them off without a means of monitoring them, and under the circumstances, Larison’s injunction that he remember who Beckley and Krichman were really working for felt gratuitous, even a little insulting. Maybe the man was just chafing at the fact that the contractors didn’t seem to give a shit about what Larison assumed was his own authority. Treven decided to let it go.

But what he wouldn’t let go was that Larison had ignored his question. “Same place, same time, same way out, two nights in a row?” he said. “That sound like our guy?”

Larison glanced at him, and Treven could have sworn the man was almost smiling.

“Depends,” Larison said.

“What do you mean?”

“Rain spotted them last night for sure, when they were there for longer. Very likely, he spotted them again tonight, too.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I would have spotted them. Because if this guy is who Hort says he is, he would have spotted them. Because if he’s not good enough to have spotted them, Hort wouldn’t even be bothering with him.”

Treven considered. “So what does that mean, if he spotted them but comes out the same way at the same time anyway?”

This time, Larison did smile. “It means I’m glad it’s not us walking point.”

When I left the Kodokan, I knew someone would be waiting for me. Most likely it would be the pair of giants I’d seen twice inside. Possibly they were just recon, and someone else would be set up outside, but if whoever it was had more manpower, the sensible thing would have been to rotate different members of the team to deny me the chance to get multiple IDs. Of course, it wasn’t impossible that I was supposed to see the two I’d already spotted-after all, their bulk was hard to miss-so that I’d keep searching for them when I went outside and consequently overlook the real threat. But if that had been the game, they would have stayed longer that evening, to be sure I had a chance to see them again. My gut told me it was just the two of them, handling both recon and action.

I kept to the left side of the exit corridor as I left the building, using the book and souvenir kiosk as concealment until the last moment to deny them additional seconds to prepare for my appearance. I doubted they had guns-firearms are tightly restricted in Japan, and anyone with the connections to acquire them would likely have fielded a larger and less conspicuous team. A sniper rifle would have been even harder to get than a pistol, and even if they’d managed to procure one, what were they going to do, rent an apartment overlooking the entrance of the Kodokan? Too much trouble, too much paper trail. There were better ways.

As I hit the glass doors, I kept my head steady but let my eyes sweep the sidewalk and street within my field of vision. Nothing yet. The night before, I’d gone left and taken the subway, and though I hadn’t seen them at the time, I now assumed they’d been lurking somewhere and had logged my movements. So if they were hoping to follow me tonight and introduce themselves on terrain they found more favorable, they’d set up to the right. If the plan was for me to walk into them, they’d be to the left. No way to be sure, but other things being equal, I prefer to see what’s coming. And why not let them see me repeating the pattern I’d established the night before? It would give them a little more data to rely on in underestimating me. I turned left onto the sidewalk, my eyes still moving, checking hot spots, my ears trained for footfalls behind me.

I spotted the first instantly, leaning against one of the pillars fronting the building. He was bigger even than I’d estimated from seeing him in the stands. His hands were visible and one of them held a cigarette. Not the best cover for action in Tokyo. The country is a little behind the times on the nonsmoking front, and with the exception of smokers visiting Starbucks and hospital intensive care units, no one goes outside for a tobacco break, especially in the wet summer heat.

I passed him and hit the stairs of Kasuga station, keeping my head down to conceal my face from the security camera staring down from the ceiling, my footsteps echoing along the concrete walls. Ordinarily, I found the cameras a hindrance if not an outright threat, but for the moment, their presence was cause for comfort. No one wants to do a hit in the Tokyo metropolitan subway system, where the number of closed circuit video cameras could make a Las Vegas casino blush. In the past, the cameras had never been a particular concern, but then again my specialty had always been the appearance of natural causes-one of the advantages of which is that no one examines security tapes afterward, trying to find out what happened. The Mossad team that did the Hamas official in Dubai, for example, had likely been planning on the appearance of a heart attack, and so wasn’t worried about the hotel and airport cameras that filmed them. But they’d blown the job, and what was obviously an assassination led to an investigation. I wondered at the time why they hadn’t called me. Maybe Delilah had told them I was out of the life. I smiled bitterly at the notion, and the memory, and kept moving down the stairs.