Barry Eisler: The Detachment

“How do I contact Horton?” I said.

Later that night, in the endless, twisting depths of the Shinjuku subway complex, where the multiple levels and concentrated crowds make tracking and locating someone from a signal nearly impossible, I checked the video on the cameras. The footage was grainy and helter-skelter, but properly enhanced it might provide damaging evidence for the prosecution, if it ever came to that. I destroyed the drives on all the units and disposed of them. The phones were useless-the only numbers dialed were to each other. I disposed of them, too. Then I found an Internet cafe and Googled Larison, Treven, and Horton. Larison and Treven drew precisely nothing. Horton was mentioned in passing in a few news articles, and had a Wikipedia entry consisting only of a brief outline of a distinguished military career and a note that he was divorced and had no children. Finally, I made three calls, all from separate pay-phones.

First, the number Larison had given me. A deep, Mississippi Delta baritone I remembered from Afghanistan, but with more age behind it, more gravity, answered, “Is this who I hope it is?”

I said, “I don’t know. Is there someone else you were hoping to hear from?”

He laughed. “There are people I hope to hear from, and people I hope to never hear from again. Glad to say you’re in the first camp. How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been fine. I heard you want to propose something.”

“You heard right.”

“I’m listening.”

“With all the water under the bridge here, it’d be better if we did this face to face.”

“All right, come out here. Your guys can tell you where to find me.”

“They already did. Thing is, I’m too tied up right now for overseas travel. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll meet you halfway. How about Los Angeles? Anywhere in the city you’d like.”

Los Angeles was easy enough to get to from Tokyo, and a destination with so many indirect routes I didn’t think I’d have trouble concealing my movements. Reflexively, I started considering how I would approach the situation if I were trying to get to me, and was surprised, and a little unsettled, at how familiar and natural it felt to slip back into the mindset. Almost as though I’d missed it.

“If you want me to come to you,” I said, testing what Larison had told me, “you’ll need to cover my travel expenses. And I travel first class.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less. Tell you what. However our conversation turns out, you’ll get twenty-five thousand dollars just for showing up. That ought to cover your travel expenses, and then some.”

“Fifty,” I said. “You’ve already created problems just by the way you contacted me.”

There was a pause, and I wondered if I’d asked for too much, if only because my boldness might suggest someone had encouraged me to press. But so what? If there was some kind of ill will with Larison, Horton would have to be a fool not to know it already. And the man I remembered from Afghanistan wasn’t a fool.

“I understand you’ve created some problems yourself,” he said, and I realized Larison and Treven had likely already checked in and briefed him about the dead contractors. I wondered again about copies of the video. “But okay, we’ll make it fifty. If you can be there tomorrow.”

I wondered what this was about. If he was willing to pay fifty thousand U.S. just to get me to show up, it was something special. Meaning, almost certainly, something dangerous.

“Tomorrow’s impossible,” I said. “The day after I can do. For the fifty.” The truth was, it didn’t matter that much to me one way or the other. I just don’t like to be rushed. Time pressure is what you do to someone when you’re trying to get him to react without pausing to think.

“All right,” he said, “the day after. You can reach me at this number. I’ll be in the center of the city, but we can meet anywhere you want.”

I paused before responding. Why did I want to do this? The money? The advantages of dealing with whatever it was head-on rather than waiting? Some dark, subversive part of me, sick of my civilian pretensions, grabbing on to a way back in-the killer inside me, the Iceman, demanding his due?

“I’ll call you,” I said, and clicked off.

No doubt his emphasis on flexibility was intended to mollify my security concerns. He’d already chosen the city and had tried to choose the day; if his demands got much more specific than that, he knew it would make me jumpy.

The next call was to Tomohisa “Tom” Kanezaki, an ethnic Japanese American I’d first encountered when he was a green case officer with the CIA’s Tokyo Station. I didn’t trust him, exactly, but we’d traded enough favors for me not to view him as an active threat, and to know he could be counted on to do what he said he would. We’d lost touch about a year earlier, when I was living in Paris with Delilah, thinking I was happy. The last time we’d spoken, he was on a rotation at Langley and hating it.

He picked up with a characteristically noncommittal Yes. In Japan it had usually been Hai. Either way, it felt oddly good to hear his voice.

“Still living the good life at company headquarters?” I said.

There was a pause, and I could picture him smiling. I wondered if he was still wearing the wire-rimmed spectacles. Probably. They made him look bookish, as he once genuinely had been. These days, they’d conceal the street smarts he’d developed, and he was astute enough to know the value in that. No aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu, as the Japanese saying goes. The hawk with talent hides its talons.

“I wouldn’t call it particularly good,” he said. “What are you…is everything okay?”

“I have a small favor to ask-very small.”

Kanezaki could always be counted on to ask for a favor in return. Some of his return favors were pretty damn big, so it paid to establish that what I was asking for was trivial.

“You want to do this with Skype?” he said. “If you don’t think my mobile is secure enough.”

This was both a concession to my security paranoia and a way to build the favor up with some indices of importance. “No,” I said. “It’s not that kind of thing. I just want the skinny on a JSOC colonel named Scott Horton. People call him Hort. You know of him?”

There was a pause, and I wondered if Kanezaki was considering whether I was going to kill Horton. It was the way he was used to thinking of me. But he’d know if that were the case I wouldn’t have asked him.

“Yeah, I know of him. But his position is-”

“Classified, I know. I know what his position is. I want to know about the man. Any reason he wouldn’t have my best interests at heart?”

“That’s hard to say. The kind of thing you do tends to create enemies.”

“Used to do.”

He laughed. “And yet, here you are.”

I ignored it. “He wants to meet me.”

“You think it’s a setup?”

“I always think it’s a setup. Sometimes it even is.”

“Well, all I can tell you is, he’s got a lot of weight behind him. In the last administration, JSOC was reporting directly to the vice president and doing some extremely off-the-books stuff. Seymour Hersh called it a hit squad.”

“Any truth to that?”

He laughed. “You’re not really asking me to verify a Sy Hersh story, are you?”

It was true, then. “What else?”

“Let’s just say the new administration hasn’t changed JSOC’s mission. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that a lot of traditional Agency responsibilities have been taken from us and transferred to the military.”