Barry Eisler - The Detachment

“You can all do what you want,” Treven said. “I’ve already made up my mind. I’m not going to stand by and let this thing happen. I’ve done a lot of fucked-up things in my life, but I’m not going to do that.”

“Fine,” Larison said. “We’ll have the diamonds confirmed tomorrow. If they check out, we split them a quarter apiece and go our separate ways.”

There was no disputing his logic, but still I didn’t like his point. What would he do if he thought we knew his secret? Would we be at risk? But Treven knew, and Larison seemed to tolerate that. But what about the diamonds? Was he really going to walk away from three-quarters of what had originally been his own?

Dox looked at me. “I’m not going to stand by and let this happen, either. Even if the diamonds check out, how could we enjoy the money if it came at the cost of the lives of a bunch of schoolchildren?”

“What the hell does one have to do with the other?” Larison said.

Dox ignored him. “Can you contact your Asiatic friend and see what he can do? Either to head it off himself, or, if he can’t, to help us out with a little intel and the necessary hardware.”

I nodded. But inside, I was struggling. I wondered whether among the four of us, Larison was the only one without a conscience. Or whether he was the only one with a brain.

My mind flashed to that breakfast meeting with Horton, and the conviction I’d heard in his little speech about having to meet your maker. He hadn’t been thinking about what he’d done. He’d been thinking about what he was about to do. And I was an idiot to have missed it.

“I’ll see what he can do,” I said. “And tomorrow, Larison and I will take a sampling of the diamonds to a jeweler. If they check out, we’re all free agents again.”

No one pushed back about the division of labor. Everyone understood that no one was going to be left alone with the diamonds, and no one was going to be the sole conduit for an expert’s certification.

Things had gotten hellishly fraught. Being part of this detachment reminded me about the old maxim for war: Easy to get into. Hard to get out of.

“One thing you might not be considering,” I said to Larison.

He looked at me. “What’s that?”

“My contact. He told me if we could get him proof, he could get us a pass. Get us off the president’s hit list or whatever it is we’ve landed on.”

Larison shook his head disgustedly. “You don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hort says he wants the same thing? Proof that these attacks have been false flag?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Hort has an uncanny ability to frame whatever he wants so that it sounds like exactly what you want.”

“But we want the proof either way.”

“Then go get it. I told you, I’m done.”

There was nothing more to say. We bunked down in shifts again, but I barely slept at all. I was putting myself in Larison’s shoes, seeing us the way I imagined he did. And the image was keeping me wide awake.

Early the next morning, Larison and I went out with our share of the diamonds to have them tested. It was a little awkward to be walking around with a fanny pack that, if the diamonds were real, contained something in the neighborhood of twenty-five million dollars, but the safest thing to do at this point was for each of us to be responsible for his own share. Certainly Larison wasn’t going to take his eyes off his portion-he’d been screwed by a switch before, and he wasn’t going to let it happen again.

We did a thorough surveillance detection run, finishing up at the Beverly Wilshire, where Horton and I had shared breakfast an impossibly long time before. The previous night, I’d uploaded to the secure site a thorough briefing on the contents of Treven’s conversation with Horton. I used a lobby payphone to call Kanezaki now.

“You find anything?” I said, when he’d picked up.

“Yes. And it tracks with what Horton told you.”

“How so?”

“Two things. First, during one of his revolving-door stints outside of government, Gillmor headed up a DARPA-funded company called Novel Air Capability. Usually called NAC.”

“Okay.”

“What I’m telling you is top secret SCI-”

“Give me a break.”

“Sorry. I guess it’s a habit. Anyway, NAC has created a prototype drone. They call it the Viper.”

“That’s a scary name.”

“Well, they needed to come up with something good to match the Predator and the Reaper. Anyway, this is an extremely versatile aircraft. Component parts, thirty minutes assembly time. It’s small-with the wings folded, it’ll go in a truck about the size of the one I got you. Vertical takeoff and landing; stealth configuration; twenty-four hours loiter time; capable of carrying and firing two Hellfire missiles.”

“Shit.”

“It gets worse. The ground control system is radically simplified and mobile. They call it the Viper Eye.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“You ever see someone flying a radio-controlled plane?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s pretty much what we’re talking about. The only real difference is that this one is operated by video rather than line-of-sight. That’s because of the distances the Viper can travel, and so that the operator gets a bird’s-eye view of whatever he’s targeting. But the control system itself just looks like a ruggedized laptop with a couple of joysticks attached. You don’t need the kind of training a traditional Predator or Reaper ground station operator gets. You really only need a few runs to acquire fundamental competence with the system. They’re marketing it to domestic law enforcement.”

“Without the Hellfires, I hope.”

“Yeah, as a domestic spy drone. But the point is, it’s designed for ease of transport, ease of training, ease of use.”

“Let me guess. One of them has gone missing.”

“That’s right.”

“You think that’s what they’re going to use on this school.”

“This school, and if that doesn’t do the trick, on others.”

I didn’t answer. I was remembering my conversation with Treven in the truck, when I’d told him I thought schools were going to be the next thing. I realized I hadn’t fully believed it at the time. Hadn’t accepted, deep down, that anybody would go that far. But of course, that was naive. The triumph of hope over experience.

“You there?” he said.

“I’m here.”

“Anyway, I think the plan is for Gillmor’s unwitting false flag team to get into the school auditorium and shoot it up with automatic pistols. If Horton is right, and it’s only a four-man team, some people will get out. Four’s not enough to lock down the whole school, just enough to do major damage once the team is inside. So there will be some witnesses. And while the team is in the building, Gillmor’s going to level the place with two Hellfire missile strikes. The survivors will talk about a bunch of crazed Islamic terrorists screaming Allahu Akbar, and the working assumption will be they used pre-positioned high explosives to go out like martyrs.”

I considered. “Are you sure of your information?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because if that’s the plan, there are a lot of problems. First, you’re going to have witnesses describing a strange airplane. Maybe with rockets flying off the wings.”

“You think that’s a problem? It’s barely relevant. First of all, Iran has publicly announced the development of its own drones. So even if there’s a sighting, a senior White House official calls up a pet reporter and ‘leaks’ that the government thinks it was Iran. The public is already prepped to hate Iran like some kind of nation state version of Emmanuel Goldstein, so when the pet reporter reports the anonymous government ‘leak,’ it slots perfectly into an existing narrative, and the public swallows it as fact.”