Barry Eisler - The Detachment

He smiled. Ordinarily, he might have taken an opportunity like that to comment on the possible upside of her throwing her body over his. Instead, he said, “Well, now you’ve gone and burst my bubble.”

She laughed, just a little. “It could have been a lot worse for me. You made it better. I kept looking at that scary guy, Larison, and thinking, ‘Dox wouldn’t let him.’”

He wondered if she was playing him. “You really thought that?”

She nodded. “I did.”

He looked down at the ground. “If I did something to make this a little less worse of an ordeal for you, I’m glad. But it was still an ordeal, and I was still a part of it. Trust me, I know you’re bursting with relief and gratitude right now, but later? It’s all going to settle in. You’ll realize what you’ve been through. Being held like we held you is no joke.”

“You sound like you know.”

He wondered whether he should say more, and then did anyway. “Not so long ago, some men held me. I’m not going to tell you what they did, other than that it involved electric shocks, repeated drownings, and threats to Nessie. So yes, I’m not unacquainted with what you’re going to be dealing with in the coming days and weeks. I wish there were something I could do about it, but I can’t, other than to say again I’m sorry.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Nessie?”

He shook his head, knowing he shouldn’t have joked like that, determined not to follow up. “Never mind.”

He handed her the mailbag. She took it.

“What did my father do to you?” she said.

He shook his head again. “I don’t want to talk about it. It never should have had anything to do with you. I want you to tell me something else, instead.”

“What?”

He looked around at the cracked road, the barbed wire, everything baking under the unblinking Los Angeles sun.

“What are your plans? I mean, for the future. Film school…you want to make movies?”

She smiled. “That’s what I want. Pretty far afield from my dad, huh?”

“I’d say. But I’m glad. I like movies. When am I going to get to see yours?”

“I don’t know. I wrote a script I think is great. But financing is hard these days. We’ll see.”

“Financing, huh?”

She shook her head slightly as though not understanding what he was getting at.

“When you get home,” he said, “check the bottom of your mailbag. There are a bunch of little stones in there. They don’t look like much, but they’re diamonds. I don’t know what movies cost, and probably what I put in there wouldn’t be enough for Harry Potter, but I think they’ll get you started.”

She looked at him, then said, “Are you serious?”

He gave her a mock-stern look. “In the short time you’ve known me, have I ever not been?”

She looked at him for a moment longer, then stepped in wordlessly and hugged him. He hugged her back, but tentatively. He was ashamed to receive her gratitude, and he also didn’t like how good she felt in his arms. The Wilson Combat was in his front waistband, coming between them, and he supposed that worked as a metaphor.

After a moment, he broke the embrace. “All right, you.” he said. “Now git. I’ll follow you to make sure you reach the station all right. And I’ll keep an eye out for your movie.”

She hesitated. “Am I ever going to see you again?”

He shook his head. “That’s Stockholm Syndrome talking.”

“The hell it is.”

He smiled, and tried not to show how crappy he felt. “Well, I know your cell phone number. Who knows?”

“Will you call me someday? Not right away. Just…after this has started to seem unreal.”

He kept the smile in place. “I’d like that.” The way he’d phrased it, it wasn’t even a lie.

He followed her to the station as planned. When he was satisfied she was in a safe area, he pulled out alongside her. She turned and looked at him, and he thought she was going to come to the car. So he gritted his teeth and held up a hand in goodbye, and pulled out into traffic. He checked the rearview as he drove and the sight of her standing on the sidewalk, alone and watching him leave, made him feel sadder than he’d felt in a long time.

The next morning, the four of us stood on the tarmac at sleepy Santa Monica Airport. Kanezaki had flown commercial to LAX that morning, where he was changing to a chartered jet that would pick us up here. We could have met him at LAX, but security at major airports was extreme at the moment and we didn’t want to risk it-even if we’d been willing to leave the firearms behind, which we weren’t. So I’d dropped the others off at Santa Monica Airport and then driven the truck to a nearby U-Haul place, hoping Kanezaki would only be hit with a penalty for accidentally returning the truck on the wrong side of the country, rather than the cost of replacing a truck he’d failed to return entirely.

We’d spent the night at another downmarket L.A. motel. Kei was gone, and it was a relief-even, I thought, for Larison. Larison and Dox had spoken, but they’d been out of earshot and I couldn’t hear what was said. At the end of it, though, Dox had pulled the obviously stunned Larison in for one of his big hugs. Larison seemed as surprised and discomfited as I’d been when it had first happened to me. I wanted to tell him he’d get used to-Dox would say enjoy-it after a while, but I supposed he’d work that out on his own. In the meantime, it was good he was figuring out that while there might not be a worse enemy than Dox, there was also no better friend.

I hoped I’d done the right thing in tossing Larison that Glock. When I looked back on it, I felt like I wasn’t entirely sure of my own motivations. It was either the noblest, or the stupidest thing I’d ever done. And the problem was, it was still too early to tell.

I’d checked the secure site that morning. There was a single message from Horton:

Call me. This thing has got to be stopped.

And thank you. I won’t forget it.

The last part must have been about letting Kei go, and maybe specifically for saving her from Larison. Probably, in the overwhelming relief that must have washed over him after several nights of the worst fears he’d ever grappled with, he’d meant it. But I doubted his gratitude would last. I decided not to call. Larison had been right. Horton was an inveterate manipulator, and I didn’t want to give him another chance to lay out a line of bullshit.

There wasn’t much traffic at the tiny airport, and I had no trouble recognizing the plane Kanezaki had told me to watch for: an oddly bulbous private turboprop with a set of stubby wings under its nose and the main wings set way back. A Piaggio P180 Avanti. It came in from the northwest, taxied, turned, and stopped. The door opened and Kanezaki walked out onto the tarmac. He saw us and waved.

We all climbed on. I paused to shake Kanezaki’s hand; Dox, naturally, suffocated him with a hug. Kanezaki closed the door behind us, and five minutes later, we were airborne, the pilot on course for Lincoln.

“Damn,” Dox said, reclining in one of the plush, leather-clad seats. “I might have to get me one of these.”

The strange thing was, he could. But I didn’t think he really meant it. The money still didn’t feel real. We had too much heat on us, for one thing. And we were too focused on stopping this horror we’d inadvertently helped start, for another.

“I was right about Gillmor,” Kanezaki said. “He’s in Lincoln now.”

“Your friend is tracking his cell phone?” I asked.

He nodded. “Which means we need to divide the labor. We’re expecting four shooters on-site, and a ground team-presumably one man-operating the drone from somewhere else. You guys need to decide how to take it all down.”