Barry Eisler - The Detachment

“If I didn’t know better,” I said, suppressing a smile despite everything else, “I’d think you had your own roster of pet reporters.”

“Hey, in this town, it’s more important than an entourage. Anyway, forget about Iran. The bottom line is, anytime there’s a major event, you get a certain number of witnesses describing strange pre-and post-incident occurrences. The corporate media’s been trained to ignore it unless they’re told otherwise.”

“What if someone shoots video with a cell phone?”

“People have shot video of UFOs. Of the Loch Ness Monster. It’s always explainable.”

“Are you telling me the Loch Ness Monster is real?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

“What about the debris? The FBI will pick through the place. Forensics teams will be able to tell what caused the explosion.”

“Look what the FBI did on the anthrax investigation. They’ll be instructed to tell the public what the public needs to hear, and to close the case. And outside of a few blogs the establishment media will be instructed to marginalize, that’ll be the end of it.”

“But we’re talking about physical evidence. On the scene.”

“John, listen. You don’t get it. The country is traumatized. People want to believe in their leaders, so they will. They won’t be able to believe the truth. Look, it doesn’t matter whether the CIA killed Kennedy. It doesn’t matter whether nine-eleven was an inside job. Even if you could prove such things, the proof would be ignored, because as a matter of almost religious faith, the country can’t accept such notions. Especially at a time like this.”

“But Horton’s whole plan is to expose this thing for what it was. More or less.”

“That’s different. Or at least, I hope it is. Horton isn’t a nobody with a cell phone camera and a conspiracy theory. He’s an insider, with a reputation he’s carefully stage-managed. That reputation he’s created-his brand-is essentially a counternarrative. He’s undermining ‘I can’t believe Americans would do such things’ with ‘I’m an American, and a hero, too, and you know I’m honest.’ Horton is one communications-savvy bastard, I’m telling you.”

I couldn’t help smiling a little. “I guess it takes one to know one.”

“You’re right, it does.”

“Okay. Let’s assume your information is good. Can you stop this thing?”

“Maybe. With your help.”

“How did I know you were going to say that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Why can’t you just call the Lincoln police?”

“And tell them what? I heard someone’s going to bomb a school?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Assuming they would even take me seriously, and assuming I didn’t get disappeared to a black site for doing it, the plotters would just divert to a secondary target. Remember, this is just four guys with machine pistols and a monstrously portable drone. There’s no pre-positioning and there’s almost no planning. The whole thing is nothing but a fire-and-forget exercise-if they want, they can just choose another school. And, absent the shooters-who they won’t need after the first one because the Allahu Akbar witnesses will already have been created and will already have insured the proper narrative structure-they can repeat as necessary. We have to stop them in the act.”

“Well, then send some people in.”

“Who? I don’t have that kind of juice with the paramilitary branch. Besides, who’s going to gear up and parachute into Lincoln, Nebraska, on my say-so?

“Goddamn it, stop manipulating me.”

“I may be manipulating you, but I’m telling you the truth.”

Christ, he sounded just like his mentor, my late friend Tatsu. For a moment, it made me sad. Tatsu would have been proud of his protege.

“What’s your plan,” I said, hating that I was conceding.

“Some element of you and your guys can drop the shooters before they get inside. They’re not well trained, they’re not expecting any opposition. A school is about as much as they can handle.”

“What about the Viper?”

“If I can locate the operator, you drop him, too.”

“That’s a big if. And, forgive me, I prefer not to loiter around ground targets that have been selected for double Hellfire missile strikes.”

“I have a few ideas, and a few leads I’m chasing down. I don’t expect the operator will be far from the school. The less distance the Viper has to fly, the less chances for sightings. Likewise, they’ll want to launch the missiles close on to the target. Less opportunity for people to see two plumes of fire tracking in from miles away.”

“But you said-”

“Yes, in the end, it’s all explainable. But no sense having to explain more than necessary.”

“It doesn’t sound like you have much to go on.”

“I don’t, yet. But one more thing. If you’re the operator, given the parameters I just described, what else do you need?”

I thought. “Someplace…quiet. Private, removed. So I can park, assemble the drone, and get it airborne without anyone seeing. And then operate it without interruption.”

“Bingo. And how many places like that do you think there are in the vicinity of Lincoln?”

“Probably a lot.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem. But I’m looking into it. Plus there’s one more thing that could be a game-changer.”

“What’s that?”

“I have a friend in one of the phone companies.”

“A friend.”

“Whatever you want to call him. He’s been monitoring Gillmor’s mobile phone for me.”

I smiled. There was something satisfying about the tools of the national security state being turned against their owners.

“You think Gillmor’s the operator?”

“He’s had the training. He has the access. Plus, did you catch at the president’s announcement that Gillmor wasn’t named? For security reasons?”

“Yeah, I wondered about that at the time.”

“I don’t think they want that much publicly known about this guy before the attacks. They want him to have the freedom to move about as he needs depending on how many schools need to be hit. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that my read of the country’s mood is that they’re not going to need to hit too many. We’re close to a tipping point already.”

“Yeah, I get that feeling, too.”

“Also,” he said, “if you were committed enough to blow up a school, or multiple schools, how many people could you outsource it to? How many people could you count on to not lose their nerve at the last minute? Yeah, I think it’s going to be Gillmor. And if it is, we should be able to track his phone all the way to Nebraska.”

I thought for a minute. On the one hand, I didn’t want to do this. It was too dangerous; there were too many possibilities for setups; there were too many unknowns and too many hidden agendas.

But on the other hand…

What I had told Horton that first morning was true: I’ve taken more lives than I’ll ever be able to remember. When I was younger, I had ways of shielding myself from thinking about all the mothers, fathers, wives, siblings, children. I ignored whatever elements in a target’s file might have caused me discomfort. I assured myself that if the target had enemies, he must be in the life. My subconscious mantra was that if I didn’t do it, someone else would. Rationalization was my narcotic. And, as with all drugs, over time, I habituated to mine. I needed more and more to accomplish less and less. Eventually, there was no dose at all that could confer the comfort I craved.

Now, with too many yesterdays and fewer and fewer tomorrows, I find I’m increasingly troubled by knowledge I was once adroit in avoiding. The knowledge that following my brief encounters with every stranger I agreed to eliminate, I left nothing but tears and trauma, a wreckage of interwoven lives forever riven and malformed. The knowledge that there would never be a way to account for the amount of pain I have brought into the world. The knowledge that the world would have been marginally better off if I had never been born to begin with.