Barry Eisler: The Detachment

“You’re thinking about his daughter?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I think we made her suffer enough. I really hate the idea of taking her daddy away from her. But also…I don’t know. I just feel like, what’s the point? We got a good outcome. Plus, what if he really is trying to set things right in the corridors of power and such?”

“That’s exactly what he wants us to wonder.”

“What if it’s true?”

I was still ambivalent. “Larison might have ideas of his own, you know.”

“I’ll let Larison worry about Larison. I only worry about you. Besides, I think he’s going to leave old Horton alone.”

I wondered about that. “Why?”

“Just a feeling. He got his diamonds back, didn’t he? I don’t think revenge is going to be a huge priority for him, even if he’d never admit that, even to himself.”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“I guess we will. You did a nice job, Mister Rain, as head of our little band of brothers. I wasn’t sure you had it in you.”

I laughed. “I don’t know about that. How many times did we almost blow each other’s brains out? Which we would have at least once, if it hadn’t been for you.”

“Well, I won’t deny doing a hell of a Cleavon Little impersonation just when it was called for. But think of it this way. With someone else in charge of this crew, we wouldn’t have almost blown each other’s brains out. We would have done it.”

I thought he was giving me too much credit, but I didn’t say anything one way or the other.

“Okay, Mister Modest,” he said, “time to go. Try not to miss me too much, okay?”

“I’ll try.”

“Hell, come on out to Bali. Now that you’re single again, you can enjoy my island properly. I know all the best spots and the prettiest ladies. Unless you think you’re going to crawl back to Delilah.”

I laughed to cover my confusion and told him I’d see him in Bali. That much, at least, I was sure of.

It was a little awkward with Treven. He was still active-duty military, and he didn’t say where he was going. I had the feeling the life wasn’t for him, but that neither was retirement, not even with a tax-free twenty-five million. I thought maybe he was just someone who needed a structure, and a direction, like a train needs a set of tracks.

I still wondered for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate whether he might have been working both sides of the op at one point. Maybe it was that he didn’t kill Horton when he could have. At the time, I couldn’t fault his reasoning, but I also suspected reason wasn’t the real basis for his reluctance. I sensed the presence of some kind of attachment there, something between him and Horton. Or maybe what I sensed was just Treven trying to cling to that structure I thought he needed, a structure that had always given him purpose but that events were peeling away from him. Maybe the fear of losing that structure had caused him to reach out to Horton at some point, to try to play both sides against the middle. But I supposed it didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but a part of me was glad I would probably never know. I didn’t want to have to do something about it. It was easier to let it go.

Larison was also sketchy about his next moves, and I assumed he was going to his lover. I hoped it would work out for him. My own attempt at romance with a civilian had resulted in the civilian in question trying to have me killed. And she was the mother of my child. Of course, I said nothing to him, neither about his personal life nor about Horton.

He thanked me when we said goodbye, and I wasn’t sure for what-for keeping his secret; for keeping him from walking away from us in a way he would have regretted; for taking the chance I had taken in trusting him.

“Don’t mention it,” I said. “It was all just self-preservation.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “I owe you.”

“Owe me what? You brought me in on an op that made me twenty-five million.”

He didn’t answer right away, and I realized he was thinking his original plan hadn’t involved my keeping the diamonds. And that his recollection of whatever he’d originally planned must have been producing uncharacteristic stirrings of conscience. I thought I’d been lucky things had worked out as they had. It could easily have gone another way.

“I don’t know where I’ll be, exactly,” he said. “But if you need me, I’ll have your back.”

Coming from Larison, an offer like that would be as rare as it was meaningful. I appreciated it, and I told him so. I had a feeling I’d see him again, and I told him that, too.

And so our detachment dissolved. For a time, anyway.

I went back to Tokyo, of course, as I always seem to, like a salmon swimming upriver to the spot where it was born. I settled in, and enjoyed the feeling of a lull in my life. The city continued to recover steadily from the trauma of the earthquake and tsunami, and I gave an impossibly large and appropriately anonymous amount to relief efforts in the north. Revelations about the corruption that led to the Fukushima reactor meltdown were astonishing, even for a cynic like me. Still, nothing seemed to come of it. Japan, it seemed, at least in terms of apathy, was not so different from America.

Because there, too, the news was astonishing. Revelations, indictments, charges of treason. Most of it true, as Horton had foretold, the lies woven so carefully into the fabric that no one who didn’t understand the entire tapestry would ever spot them. Horton, again as he foretold, developed an enormous following. There were calls for him to run for president. To his credit, I supposed, he demurred, and I imagined that what people believed was his noble resistance to the allure of power would one day burnish his legend.

But despite all the revelations and arrests and the outrage, I didn’t really see all that much change. The wars kept grinding along. There were no populist revolts, no peasants with pitchforks storming the Capitol or burning the barons of Wall Street, even in effigy. There was talk of a third party-a second party would have been the more accurate way to put it, I thought-but nothing meaningful came of it. Though Wikileaks was the conduit for everything that was coming out, the New York Times and all the others were getting the credit, as though they would have touched any of it if Wikileaks hadn’t forced them, exactly as Kanezaki had said. Overall, people seemed to want to understand perfidy as a problem with personalities rather than as something insidious in their institutions.

Horton kept at it, working the levers of his popularity and power, but I had the sense the commission, far from being a vehicle he could steer as he wanted, was more a vessel that was gradually coming to control and contain his ambitions. I wondered how disappointed he was, and whether, in the dark, quiet hours of the very early morning, he ever lay in the sleepless grip of something like despair, the souls of all the lives he’d cut short pressing in close upon him.

I wasn’t worried about his coming after any of us. I thought he’d been telling the truth when he’d said he didn’t think we could do him much damage. And killing one of us without killing us all would have been dangerous. If any of us decided he was a threat again, Horton would have a real problem to contend with. And then there was his daughter, of course. Maybe she’d told him Dox was a softie. But Horton wouldn’t know about the rest of us. Would he really risk reprisals? I doubted it.

Watching his faraway machinations from my haven in Tokyo, as remote as the Marvel Comics Watcher on the moon, I wondered whether Horton had misread his own country. Maybe democracies, maybe all cultures, had life cycles, the same as the humans who comprised them. And maybe there were things cultures could do to extend their lives-the equivalent of exercise and eating right, or, to analogize to what Horton had done, the equivalent of radical surgery-but those things would, in the end, matter only at the margins. Maybe, regardless of the efforts of the exceptional few, the genes hidden and inherent in a culture’s own DNA would dictate a length of years, and make inevitable the onset of sclerosis, and senility, and death, as ineluctably as the Fates cutting the thread of an individual life.