Inside Out

The New York Times, March 2, 2009

U.S. SAYS CIA DESTROYED 92 TAPES OF INTERROGATIONS

The government on Monday revealed for the first time the extent of the destruction of videotapes in 2005 by the Central Intelligence Agency, saying that agency officers destroyed 92 videotapes documenting the harsh interrogations of two Qaeda suspects in CIA detention including the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding.

1. About a Hundred Percent

Ben Treven could feel the Australians looking at him again, sizing him up for whether he’d make a good victim tonight. He brushed his blond hair out of his face and kept his gaze on nothing in particular, nodding his head slightly as though he was enjoying the pulsing house music. He knew the smart thing was to ignore them, but part of him couldn’t help hoping they’d take their wordless interview just a little further. It had been a hell of a day and he could feel that old, crazy urge to unload on someone. If these guys wanted to give him a reason, it was up to them.

The three of them were in civilian clothes, but he’d heard the accents and seen the swagger and took them for sailors on shore leave. Manila’s Burgos Street, an eternally crumbling matrix of neon and girly bars and massage parlors, had ingested them as it had ingested generations of sailors and marines and sex tourists before them. It would appropriate their money, alleviate their lust, and expel them afterward like pale effluent into the dank Manila night.

The burliest of the three missed his shot at the spotlit pool table, and as he stepped away to make room for his buddy, he squinted and waved a hand up and down in Ben’s line of sight, palm forward, as though wiping a window. The gesture read, Hello? Anybody there?

Ben kept his expression blank. Oh yeah, pal, somebody’s here. And believe me, you don’t want to meet him.

A petite Filipina waitress in heels and a microscopic skirt sauntered over to the pool table, balancing a tray of San Miguels one-handed. Ben hadn’t seen her earlier-she must have just started her shift. She took the Australians’ pesos, distributed their beers, and studiously failed to respond to their leering smiles. Then she turned and headed in Ben’s direction, the Australians’ eyes following her ass.

“You need another drink, sweetie?” she asked Ben, smiling, her eyes dark, her teeth white against the smooth brown skin of her face.

He was standing with his back to the bar and she would have known he could have just ordered from the bartender. He didn’t know whether her interest was personal or professional. He wondered whether it would irritate the Australians.

He shook his head and offered only a polite smile. “Thanks, I’m good.”

She leaned a little closer. “Are your eyes… green?”

“That’s what people tell me.”

She smiled again. “It’s my favorite color. If you need anything, just tell me, okay?”

“I will. Thanks.”

He told himself that as long as he didn’t do anything to provoke them, it wasn’t his fault. But he also recognized that he was ignoring them almost ostentatiously now, that a more effective way to avoid a problem would have been to raise his Bombay Sapphire and give them a cold smile: I’m aware of you, I’m not afraid of you, I’m being friendly so you can now look for trouble elsewhere without having to acknowledge you’ve backed down to the guy you were initially assessing.

He took a swallow of the gin and set the glass down on the bar. Yeah, that would have been the better way. But that afternoon his ex-wife had told him she never wanted to see him again, that their daughter, Ami, believed the man now raising her was her real father, that he shouldn’t have tracked them down in the first place, and what could he have been thinking after they hadn’t heard from him in nearly three years? She hadn’t even seemed angry when he’d approached her in the rain in front of Ami’s suburban Manila school, just uncomfortable, as though he was no more than an old acquaintance she would have preferred not to run into. She’d countered his protests, ignored his entreaties, and dismissed him with obvious relief. And instead of doing the minimally dignified thing and just leaving, he had lurked around the corner, getting wetter and angrier, until he heard the school bell, and then he had watched pathetically from behind a tree as his ex-wife collected their small daughter, kissing her and taking her by the hand and leading her away before Ben even had time to get a good look at her face. And now he was on his third double Bombay Sapphire, and these chumps were giving him the stink eye, and the bar was too noisy and the spotlights too glaring and Manila was too fucking polluted and humid and he was sick of it, he was sick of all of it, and someone was going to pay.

The burly Australian waved again. Ben maintained his thousand-yard stare. The Australian cocked his head and said something to his buddies; over the music and the noise of conversation at the bar, Ben couldn’t hear what. The three of them started walking over. Ben noted they hadn’t put down their pool cues. His heart kicked a little harder and he felt his mouth wanting to twist into a smile.

The Australians took their time, watching him, continuing to gauge him as they approached. None of the bar’s patrons, generally young, mostly western, universally stupid, seemed to notice. Ben remained motionless. The Australians weren’t sure what he was, and Ben knew they would bark before they got up the courage to bite. Amateurs.

They stopped an arm’s distance in front of him, three abreast, the burly one in the middle, the pool cue in his left hand, his right arm draped across his buddy’s shoulder. He said, “Looking out of it there, mate. Too much to drink, eh?”

Ben kept his gaze unfocused, noting the placement of their hips and hands, smiling now as though at some private joke. The burly one was clearly the leader. Drop him suddenly and violently and the other two would be useless for anything other than hauling his carcass home. There were so many ways to do it, too, it was almost sad to have to choose. The guy’s weight was on his right foot, exposing the instep to a stomp. His knees were open, too, and so were his balls. Or start with the throat, move to the head, then work your way down in whatever time you had before the guy collapsed.

The guy leaned in, his eyes trained on Ben’s face. “You hear me, mate? I’m talking to you.”

Still Ben didn’t look at them. “I know. It’s making it harder for me to ignore you.”

The guy furrowed his brow. “You’re trying to ignore us, is that it?”

In a different mood, Ben might have felt sorry for the guy. He might have just met the guy’s eyes and let him know with a look what was a second away from happening. Then maybe give them a face-saving way out, maybe tell them he was just here to chill, sorry if he’d done anything to offend them, fair enough?

Yeah, in a different mood.

The guy glanced left and right at his buddies as though sharing his amusement, but in fact seeking reassurance. “You believe this guy?” he said. Then he turned back to Ben. “Hey. Look at me when I talk to you.”

Ben felt it coming. He wasn’t even trying to stop it anymore.

The guy raised his right hand and went to jab his outstretched finger into Ben’s chest. “I said-”

Ben shot his left hand out and wrapped the guy’s finger in his fist. He stepped in and bent the finger savagely back. There was a sound like snapping tinder. The guy shrieked and plummeted to his knees. The sounds of conversation and laughter ceased and Ben could sense people reorienting, trying to figure out what had caused that bloodcurdling sound. Ben bent what was left of the finger farther back and twisted it. The guy shrieked again, his face contorted in pain.

The guy to the left choked up on his pool cue and started to bring it around, and Ben instantly realized he’d been wrong about them turning tail. A klaxon went off in his mind and some deep-seated setting instantly ratcheted from bar fight to combat. He snatched his glass off the bar and flung gin into the guy’s face. The guy recoiled and started to turn away. Ben grabbed a bar stool and swung it in a tight arc, going for center mass, getting his hips and full hundred and ninety behind it. The guy made the mistake of trying to duck, and the stool caught him in the head instead of the shoulder and blasted him sideways.

Somebody shouted. People started scrambling away. The third guy was backpedaling, his left arm out, his right hand reaching for the back of his belt, obviously going for a weapon, trying to gain an additional half second to deploy it. Ben bellowed a war cry and lunged forward, swatting away the guy’s outstretched arm, grabbing and securing his right wrist, attacking his eyes with his free hand. The guy screamed and tried to shake free and something clattered to the floor. Ben shot a knee into his balls. The guy doubled over and Ben let him go. He saw the first guy was coming shakily to his feet. He stepped in, wrapped his fingers in the first guy’s hair, yanked him forward, and clubbed him in the back of the neck. The guy’s arms spasmed and Ben felt something crack under his fist.

He spun to face the other two. They were twisting and groaning. The first guy was splayed on the floor, motionless.

A thought flashed through his mind, sobering in its clarity: did I kill him?

He looked toward the exit. The patrons had scattered to the periphery and the center of the bar was clear, but ten feet away, between Ben and the door, four wiry Filipinos were pointing pistols at him. Off-duty cops? Another thought flashed through his mind:

Shit, what are the chances?

Two of them were starting to fan out to his flanks now, the two in the center moving forward, pistols still forward, one guy producing a pair of handcuffs from the back of his belt.

Right now? Chances look about a hundred percent.

Even if he’d been armed, and he wasn’t, dropping all four without getting shot in return would have required a hell of a lot of luck. He briefly considered raising his arms to show he was no threat and just walking past them to the exit. But their quick reaction to the disturbance, and the tactical way they were approaching him now, told Ben these guys were experienced, that they’d be happy to shoot him before suffering the humiliation of letting him just walk on by.

Ben looked around and saw people holding up cellphones. They were taking his picture. Or video.

He glanced at the Australians again. Two were still twisting. The other was still inert. The red haze was suddenly gone and a chill rippled through him. He raised his hands, palms forward, and thought, Oh, shit.

2. Falling

Ulrich looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows and watched the K Street traffic twelve stories below, his feet perched on his mahogany desk, a wireless headset snug against his ear. “Thanks, Jim,” he said. “Really appreciated your time last week. And my client is just delighted the senator understands how counterproductive any additional regulation would be on top of what the industry is already burdened with. If you have any other questions, I know it would be their pleasure to arrange another golf outing. And of course you can count on their complete support. You bet. Thanks again.”

He clicked off and thought, Done and done. Lobbying wasn’t so different from governing, really. He was making ten times his public-sector salary, which was nice, and his office furniture was a hell of a lot better than what he’d had in room 268 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, too, but other than that? Well, his work was no longer stamped secret, true, but nor would it have done for the public to have too close a peek at the way lobbyists made laws. The main thing was, the priorities were the same, and so were the methods. It was all about who you knew, and how you could get who you knew what they wanted.

His other phone buzzed-the secure line that went straight to his desk and not through his secretary. He put his feet down and picked up the corded handset. “Ulrich.”

“It’s Clements. Are you alone?”

Clements was still the number two guy at CIA, having been passed over for the number one slot by the new administration in favor of an outsider. He was a good contact-one of many Ulrich used to maintain his influence among the city’s elite.

“Yeah, I’m alone. What is it?”

“We have a problem.”

Ulrich’s chest tightened and he immediately thought, the tapes.

“Go on.”

“You know how in the end we all assumed the tapes had been destroyed by a patriot?”

God, he hated being right all the time. “Yes.”

“The director got a call this morning telling him to go to a website. He did. The tapes are all online.”

“What the-”

“Wait. They’re not public. The website is encrypted. The caller wants a hundred million dollars in uncut diamonds, or he decrypts the files and uploads them to YouTube and every media outlet in the United States and abroad.”

Ulrich felt clammy sweat spring out under his arms and along his back. He was momentarily at a loss. If this had happened when he had the full authority of the vice president’s office behind him, he would have instantly taken control, and taking control would have calmed him. As it was, he felt trapped, in sudden thrall to this dimwit to whom he ought to be issuing orders. He felt horribly, uncharacteristically helpless.

Which raised a question. “Why are you calling me?” he said.

There was a pause. “The director just contacted the Justice Department. They’re bringing in the FBI.”

“The FBI… no. Impossible. No one could be that stupid.”

“It’s not stupid. He’s new. No previous connection to the Agency. He’s covering his ass by following procedure.”

The room was suddenly stifling and Ulrich felt like he was falling. So much time had gone by. He hadn’t even thought about the tapes in… he couldn’t remember. He really had come to believe they were gone-launch all the investigations you want, it doesn’t matter because the tapes no longer exist.

He’d never been so wrong.

“You used to work with Bilton, right?” he heard Clements say. “The president’s counterterrorism adviser?”

“I know him. Why?”

“Call him. He’s got the ear of the national security adviser. We’re going to stonewall the Bureau, and the Bureau will go to the national security adviser to mediate. When they do, we want a sympathetic ear. All we need to do is keep the Bureau on a leash for a few days while we go after whoever is behind this.”

“This is what we did last time. We didn’t find anything, remember?”

“That was last time. This time, something new-something major-is in play. This guy, or this organization, whoever it is, they’re calling us. Creating websites. Issuing instructions. At some point, they’ll have to tell us how to deliver the diamonds. All that adds up to a whole series of opportunities we didn’t have before. The director’s made me point man on this and I’ve already assembled a team-same kind of discreet team we used last time. So we can handle it quietly-but not if the Bureau gets involved and starts treating it as a criminal case.”

Ulrich exhaled a deep breath. Clements was right, he had to admit. Embarrassing to have him point out something Ulrich had missed, but he was right.

“Yeah, I can get in touch with Bilton. He’ll understand. What’s our window?”

“The caller agreed to give us five days to put together the diamonds.”

“What? You’ve only got five days to find this guy and air him out?”

“It’s more complicated than just airing him out. He says he’s got the video rigged to an electronic dead-man switch. If he fails to disarm the switch at a preset interval, the video gets uploaded.”

Hot bile surged into Ulrich’s throat. He pulled a bottle of Maalox Maximum Strength from a desk drawer, unscrewed the cap, and took a huge mouthful. He grimaced, his eyes watering, and swallowed.

“Anything else?” he managed to ask.

“Yeah. If this thing goes south, we’ll want to have our stories straight.”

“If this thing goes south,” Ulrich said, his mouth pasty with the taste of the Maalox, “it won’t matter what our stories are.”

He realized when Clements didn’t respond that he’d been hoping he would. Nothing could have confirmed Ulrich’s point more emphatically than the silence on the other end of the phone.

“I’ll get in touch with Bilton right away,” Ulrich said. “Let’s keep each other posted.”

He hung up, put his glasses on the table, and sat for a moment with his face in his hands.

There was nothing he could do. The Agency was in charge, Ulrich’s involvement was reduced to that of a messenger boy… They were done, they were all done. Ever since the tapes were first discovered missing, he’d been living on borrowed time. No, since before then, even. Since he’d first figured out what to do with the Caspers. That’s what had killed him. He just hadn’t realized it until now.

It wasn’t fair. For so many years, he’d tried so hard to protect the nation, and he just… he just couldn’t anymore. And without him, who would?

And then some deep part of himself cut through the thickening mists of despair. He wasn’t helpless. He didn’t need to defer to the idiots at the CIA who had caused this catastrophe in the first place. He didn’t have the power he’d once wielded, true, but he still had the contacts. In the end, the contacts might matter more. All he had to do was use them. Use them well.

He put his glasses back on, took another swallow of Maalox, and picked up the secure phone.

3. Lungs of a Dragon

On his second day in the Manila city jail, Ben was still telling himself it could have been worse. But it wasn’t easy to figure out how.

Out of habit, he’d been traveling sterile. His passport, his wallet, anything that could identify him-it was all inside the safe in his room at the Manila Mandarin Oriental. Even the magnetic room key was under a loose cobblestone on Paseo de Roxas, where he’d left it when he first set out that evening. The Philippines didn’t fingerprint visitors at immigration, at least not yet, so at the moment of his arrest, the only clue to his identity was the five thousand pesos and change in his jeans pocket. Which was no clue at all, thank God.

His mind had been a shambles of conflicting emotions: exultation at having fought and prevailed; worry that he’d accidentally killed someone; fury at having been so stupid and incompetent; fear about what was going to happen to him. On top of everything else, humiliation. Being arrested by the local third world gendarmerie was about the biggest embarrassment a black ops soldier could suffer. He’d laughed at stories of guys it had happened to, thought they were fuckups and incompetents. But look at him now. He was one of them.

He was determined to keep his options open, to say nothing that might unwittingly preclude subsequent possibilities. He didn’t respond when the cops told him one of the men he’d fought was dead, his neck broken. Maybe they were lying, though his gut told him, sickeningly, it was true. He was silent when they pretended they were his friends, he was silent when they knocked him down and beat the shit out of him. Part of him was aware that his silence was probably making things worse. But having lost control of everything else, he found himself clinging to whatever pathetic sense of dignity and power he could derive from the simple ability to deny his interrogators his voice.

Eventually they told him they didn’t care, the guy he killed wasn’t Filipino and he wasn’t Filipino so why were they wasting their time? They’d dumped him in the Manila city jail, which Ben quickly learned from some of its English-speaking inhabitants had been built for a thousand inmates and currently housed more than five times that number. There were people of all ages, mostly Filipino but a few foreigners, too, convicted murderers serving life sentences alongside ordinary people who couldn’t afford bail and were just waiting for their day in court. It was so hot the concrete walls caused second-degree burns, so crowded the prisoners had to sleep side by side on the ground in shifts, and stank so badly from the accreted decades of concentrated piss and nonstop sweat and endemic diarrhea that you could feel the miasma on your skin like something moving and alive, something trying to worm its way into your pores so it could dissolve you from the inside out.

There was an open-air pavilion where the prisoners were served food. Twice a day, the same watery, yellowish gray porridge smelling like rotting fish. On his first morning, Ben choked it down, knowing he had to eat to stay strong, then barely made it to the corner of the pavilion before throwing it all up. A bony but tough-looking Thai guy with brown skin as drawn and dried as jerky laughed and said, “No worry! Everyone do first time, sometime second time, third time. Soon-soon, okay, yum-yum.”

“Yum, huh?” Ben said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Not yum-yum, you die,” the Thai guy said. “So you make yum-yum.”

No one messed with him-his size and demeanor took care of that-but so what? Dummying up, he began to realize, was just a multiplication of his initial stupidity. Had the cops even filled out any paperwork? He couldn’t remember seeing any. Looking around at the shifting ranks of scrawny, gap-toothed prisoners, all of them filthy and haggard and sweating bare-chested in the heat, he could easily imagine himself being forgotten here.

On the third day, with the magnitude of his fuckup gnawing at his mind and fear settling like some dark obstruction deep in his chest, he approached the guy who looked like the head guard and asked to call the U.S. consulate. The guy didn’t even look at him, he just laughed to himself and tapped his truncheon. Ben told him he was an American citizen, there’d been a mistake, he needed to talk to the consulate, okay? The guy’s laugh drifted away and his gaze shifted to Ben. His eyes were flat and his fingers curled around the hilt of his truncheon. Ben felt a surge of anger and pictured himself snatching the puke’s truncheon off his belt and braining him with it. But he managed to shove the anger back, knowing it was what had landed him here in the first place, knowing that as bad as things were, uncorking on a guard would make them infinitely, permanently worse.

As he lay down that night on the radiant, piss-stained concrete floor of the small cell he shared with a dozen other prisoners, he remembered a moment from his jungle training. They’d dropped him in a part of the Everglades so dense that even at noon the sun was just a dim green glow at the top of the tree canopy. He had three days to reach his objective, alone, and a day in he started wondering, if he didn’t make it out, how would anyone even find him? He remembered the feeling of being lost and alone, monumentally insignificant in an indifferent, alien world. And now he was fighting that feeling again, that creeping, childlike dread at having been abandoned somewhere, orphaned, marooned.

He crossed his arms and rubbed his shoulders as though trying to prove he was even still there. Nobody knew what had happened to him. Eventually, when he didn’t report in, the military would go looking, but where? He’d been inhaled like a dust mote into the lungs of a dragon. And every breath the dragon took carried him deeper into its body and farther from the light. He was in so deep already, how was he ever going to get out? In his few nightmarish days within the beast, he’d already run into guys who’d been here for years-years-without being sentenced, without even a hearing. He imagined that once you passed a certain point in a system like this one, the overseers wouldn’t let you up for air even if by some amazing coincidence they became aware of your case. At that point, after all, your story would be an embarrassment to them. And the worse your treatment, the more sympathetic your circumstances, the more egregious the entire story, the more culpable they would all be. After a certain amount of time without a hearing, being innocent would probably be the worst thing that could happen to someone in a place like this. What were they going to do, admit that for three, five, seven years, they’d caged up a guy who-oops-hadn’t even done anything, and never even gave him a hearing? Yeah, fat chance of that. Better to just leave you where you are. You’d been there that long already, and it wasn’t like anyone was asking about you. Let sleeping dogs lie, baby. Wait long enough, and eventually they’d be sleeping for good.

The next morning, as he dozed on the concrete, he was awakened by a hard poke in his ribs, which were still bruised from some well-placed kicks delivered by Manila’s finest. He shot to his feet, his back to the wall, adrenaline rocketing through him. Three guards regarded him, their truncheons out. He looked from one to the other. Reasonably good odds, maybe, but what was he going to do-cut through these three and then levitate over the wall?

One of the guards motioned with his truncheon. Ben nodded and started walking.

They took him to a small room with faded green cinder-block walls and a single rattling fan that in its uselessness seemed only to worsen the clinging wet heat. A black man in jeans, sneakers, and a red polo shirt, obviously fit and somewhere in his fifties, was sitting at a peeling linoleum table in the center of the room, his shaved head beaded in perspiration. He shook his head in mild disapproval as Ben entered.

“Damn, son,” he said in his gravelly Mississippi Delta baritone. “You look like shit warmed over.”

Despite everything that had happened between them, and despite the humiliation of having his commander find him like this, Ben was so flooded with relief his legs went rubbery. He knew his situation was bad, but until this moment he hadn’t realized just how near he’d been to actual despair, how convinced he was beginning to feel that no one would ever find him.

He breathed in and out a few times, pulling himself together. When he trusted himself to speak, he said, “What are you doing here, Hort?”

Hort laughed, the sound deep and not at all unfriendly. As always, Ben was struck by the man’s complete ease and confidence, by his natural command presence. Colonel Scott Horton was a legend in the black ops community. He had personally designed and now commanded Ben’s secret unit, the absurdly blandly named Intelligence Support Activity, and his exploits in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were such that he was held in awe not just by his men, but even by the Joint Special Operations Command brass who were his nominal superiors.

The laugh slowly died away, a paternal grin lingering in its aftermath. “When I heard they had visiting hours in hell, I just couldn’t stay away.”

“I don’t need you to bail me out.”

This was so obviously untrue Ben immediately felt like a blustering child for saying it, and expected another baritone chuckle in response.

Instead, Hort said, “It’s not a question of what you need. I’m responsible for you.”

Ben knew he was being stupid, but anger was the only thing keeping him together and he was afraid to let it go. “Got a funny way of showing it.”

“Don’t ask me to apologize for putting the mission ahead of the man, son. I already told you, it was the toughest call I’ve ever had to make.”

Hort had been tasked with securing and erasing all knowledge of an encryption application called Obsidian. The op started with the liquidation of the inventor and the patent examiner, and would have taken out Ben’s younger brother, Alex, too, who was the inventor’s lawyer, along with Sarah Hosseini, an associate at Alex’s Silicon Valley firm. But Alex had realized he was in over his head and had called his big brother for help. Together, they’d managed to turn things around, though not before Hort, in the service of putting the mission before the man, had tried to erase all three of them.

“Yeah, well don’t ask me to apologize for not forgetting.”

Hort nodded, his expression grave. “That seems fair.”

Ben walked over to the chair opposite Hort, pulled it away from the table, and sat. He knew Hort would read it as a concession, but he didn’t care. He’d never felt so wrung out. His ribs ached, he’d only half slept since all this shit had started, and much as he hated to admit it, he was terrified Hort would leave as suddenly as he’d materialized. It was a ridiculous fear, but he couldn’t shake it no matter how much he blustered.

“How’d you find me?” he said quietly.

Hort nodded, as though expecting the question. “Pressure from the Australians. You’re lucky you killed one of theirs. If it had been a local, they’d have just dumped you here and no one would ever have heard from you again.”

Ben felt something sink in his chest. He realized he’d still been hoping the cops had lied to him. The hope suddenly felt stupid, and he knew he just hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself, admit what he’d done.

“The guy was a sailor?” he said.

“Royal Marine, yeah.”

He’d known as much already, but somehow having Hort confirm it eliminated Ben’s ability to deal with the guy as an abstraction. Having this little window opened on the guy’s humanity made part of Ben want to push it open further, but he knew better. Still, even the speculation was no picnic. Had he been married? He’d been pretty young, so maybe not. And Ben hadn’t seen a ring, though he supposed the guy might have removed one before a night of carousing on Burgos Street. Regardless, he would have had parents. Maybe brothers or sisters. He thought of Katie, his younger sister, who’d died in a car accident as a high school junior, and what her death had done to his family. The thought that he probably had caused something similar to someone else’s family because he was too sullen to just walk away from some woofing was suddenly making him feel sick. Not to mention the guy himself was never coming back, either.

“Anyway,” Hort said, “the Aussies made local law enforcement go to all the hotels in Makati, asking whether there was a guest who was supposed to check out but who’d ghosted off instead. It didn’t take them long to find the right hotel, the right guest, to have the room safe opened, to check the guest’s passport. When they found out you were American, they contacted the U.S. embassy. When the embassy realized who you were, they contacted JSOC. And here I am.”

It made sense. But it answered only how Hort had found him, not why. He knew he should ask, but he almost didn’t care. He had to fight the urge to blurt out, Please, just get me out of here…

He took a breath and said, “All right, you want something from me.”

Hort pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to mop the moisture off his face and scalp. “You’re a little more cynical than the last time I saw you.”

“I wonder why that would be.”

“You want me to just leave you here? I could, you know. The Australians want to extradite you. All I have to do is step aside and let it happen.”

Somehow, hearing the threat out loud eased Ben’s mind a little. If Hort were really going to leave, he would’ve just done it. And obviously, he hadn’t come all this way just to say hello.

“Maybe your brother could help you,” Hort said. “Good to have a lawyer in the family when you’ve been charged with murder. And the girl, Sarah Hosseini. Two smart lawyers. Strange to think of them protecting you instead of you protecting them, but there you have it.”

Hort had no way of knowing what had happened between Sarah and Ben-the way their distrust had alchemized to passion, maybe to even more. He was fishing on that one.

“Do they need protection?” Ben asked, his voice low, his tone casual.

There was a pause. Hort said, “No.”

Ben nodded, not exactly reassured. Alex and Sarah still knew a lot about Obsidian and about the failed op to disappear it. It wasn’t impossible someone on the National Security Council or wherever might get sufficiently uncomfortable about their knowledge to decide to revisit the issue. But at least Hort wasn’t threatening him with it. On the other hand, he’d learned from the Obsidian op that Hort could be a master bullshitter, at least when bullshitting was required by the mission. Maybe he just knew Ben well enough to know overt threats would be counterproductive. That didn’t mean the threat wasn’t there. It wasn’t in Hort’s character or his experience to display a weapon until he was ready to use it.

“All right,” Ben said. “So you’ve pulled all these strings, you’re running interference with the Australians and who knows who else, just because you care. I’m touched, Hort. Really.”

“You know you’re on YouTube now, right? Camera phones in the bar.”

Ben looked at him, his shame so enormous he couldn’t speak.

“Relax,” Hort said. “You got lucky. The spotlighting in the bar was pointed at the cameras. You can barely make out the action, let alone your face.”

Ben managed to nod, the whipsaw from horror to relief intensifying how sick he felt from what he did to the Aussie marine. He concentrated on his breathing, trying to get a grip on emotions that were slipping past his control.

Hort looked at him. Other than the useless rattle of the fan stirring the leaden air, the room was silent.

“So tell me, son,” he said. “What were you doing in that bar?”

Ben didn’t know why, but the question made him feel suddenly wary. “What do you mean, what was I doing? I was having a drink.”

“Why?”

“I had a lot to think about. Some shit has happened to me recently, you might have noticed that. I just wanted to be alone and think. You never had something like that?”

“All the time. But if you wanted to be alone so you could think, you didn’t need a bar. Your hotel room would have been just fine. Or you could have taken a walk. Or gone to the library.”

“They don’t serve gin in the library.”

“No, they don’t. The gin was part of what you wanted, I can see that.”

Ben was getting increasingly uncomfortable. It wasn’t just what Hort was saying. It was also the quietly confident way the man was looking at him, as though he knew Ben better than Ben knew himself.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Hort looked at him. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. But maybe you need me to spell it out for you.”

Ben held Hort’s gaze. But why did he feel like flinching?

“What you wanted,” Hort said, “was to fuck someone up. And you couldn’t do that in your room, or taking a walk, or visiting a local branch of the Manila public library system. But a bar on P. Burgos Street was pretty much tailor-made. Now, maybe you didn’t mean to kill the man whose neck you crushed, maybe you just wanted to hurt him. It doesn’t matter. Either way, you lost control. And an operator can never do that.”

“I didn’t-”

“Yes, you did. Now listen. I rocked your world recently, I get that. I wish it hadn’t needed to be that way, but yeah, I turned you upside down. Your commander betrayed you, you can never trust these people again, everything you believed in is wrong. That was more or less it, right?”

Ben didn’t answer. He hadn’t thought of it in those terms exactly, but… Shit, was he really that transparent? He could feel his face burning.

“So you decided it was over with you and the unit, you were done. The problem is, you’re a man with a lot of energy inside you and you needed to divert it to something else. So you flew to Manila, where your ex-wife lives with your daughter. You thought you were going to be a better person, didn’t you, maybe reconcile with your ex, be a father to your little girl. Attach yourself to something new, like a man falling in love on the rebound. But it didn’t go well, did it?”

Ben felt his shame coalescing into anger. “Back off, Hort.”

“No, I will not back off. You went to see them, didn’t you? And your woman turned you away. Or you saw her with another man. Or both, or whatever. Well, that’s two rejections in a row, twice your world’s been rocked. Now, some men deal with rejection and humiliation and confusion by wallowing in self-pity. Some of your more self-actualized types can let it roll off their backs. How about you? How do you deal with it?”

Ben stared at Hort, his lips thinned, his nostrils flared. It was like being stripped, being stripped and laid bare. He wanted to blast the table out from between them and slam Hort into the wall, over and over until his eyes rolled up in his head and he learned to shut up, just shut the fuck up…

“For example,” Hort said, as though reading his mind, “how are you dealing with it right now?”

Ben ground his jaw shut and looked away. The breath was whistling in and out of his nostrils.

“Yeah, maybe now you’re starting to see it. You’ve got anger inside you, son. Maybe it’s all-natural, or maybe something happened along the way and made it worse. Either way, it’s in your nature to seek out enemies and destroy them. It’s what you do. It’s what you’re good at. Some people play the piano, some people race cars. You destroy enemies. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it. The country needs men like you and I wish we had more. But you need direction. You need that violence to be channeled. Because if somebody’s not authorizing enemies on your behalf, you’re going to go out and create some on your own, like an attack dog off its leash. You think what happened in Manila was a one-off? It wasn’t. It was the beginning of the rest of your life.”

Ben realized he was gripping the edge of the table, to steady himself or throw it aside he wasn’t even sure anymore. He opened his hands and flexed his fingers and concentrated again on slowing his breathing.

He knew Hort was right. If any of it had been bullshit, he’d have laughed it off. The way it was enraging him, though… why would that be?

Because the truth hurts.

“No one else talks to me like that,” he said after a moment. “No one.”

Hort nodded. “No one else cares enough to take the chance.”

“What do you want, then?”

“I want you to stop this foolishness. There’s a major shit storm heading our way right now and I need your help to stop it. So I need you to stop acting out like a wounded adolescent. I need you to be more self-aware and to show more self-control. Can I count on you for that?”

Ben wiped his lips with the back of a hand. He’d already spent so much time thinking, the hell with the unit, he was out, he could never trust Hort again… and here was the man himself, telling him not only that he was back in if he wanted, but acting like he’d never even left. Telling him he was needed.

It was confusing as hell. But also…

It felt good. So good.

A rivulet of sweat ran down into his eye. He blinked. “Give me that handkerchief, will you?”

Hort handed it to him. Ben unfolded it and wiped his face.

He gave the handkerchief back to Hort. “You said something about a shit storm?”

Hort nodded and stood. “I did. But first, let’s get you the hell out of here.”

4. An Extremely Unpleasant Death

Larison woke before dawn in another anonymous motel, this one along I-64 just outside Richmond, Virginia. He scrubbed a hand across the dark stubble on his face and considered trying to go back to sleep. Without the pills, though, the dreams were too much to face. He realized he should have weaned himself sooner, gotten used to sleeping unassisted before starting the op. But the pills would have dulled the edge he’d need if a bunch of guys in black fatigues and face masks blew his door with a shaped charge and came swarming into the room with chloroform, flex-cuffs, and a hood. Being unprepared for that possibility would be worse than the dreams. Though perhaps not by much.

The hell with it, he was too keyed up anyway. He swung his feet to the floor, picked up the Glock 18C machine pistol from the carpet next to him, and stood. He was fully clothed, all the way down to his boots and three spare 33-round magazines of armor-piercing ammunition in the pockets of his Blackhawk integrated tourniquet pants. They weren’t going to take him dazed and blinking in his skivvies the way they’d done Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They weren’t going to take him at all.

He walked through the dark to the bathroom and pissed, then came back and dragged the mattress from behind the couch and back onto the bed frame. He’d moved it to the floor the night before when he arrived. A small thing, but it could buy an extra second by creating the wrong focal point when a room was breached, and a second in a gunfight was like an hour any other time.

Truth is, it was a wonder he could sleep at all. He’d been planning this thing for years, and now it was finally happening. He’d just declared war on the U.S. government. And they were going to come at him with everything they had.

If he was lucky, the CIA would try to handle the whole thing in-house and the opposition would be limited and incompetent. More likely, given the sums involved, Christians in Action would have to bring in someone from the White House, and the White House would mobilize the NSA. The public didn’t really know what the NSA was capable of-didn’t want to know-but Larison had seen firsthand the results of operations like Pinwale, where the NSA got caught illegally reading vast quantities of American emails, along with some even more impressive ones that hadn’t leaked, and the thought of the puzzle palace training all that firepower exclusively on him was both exhilarating and terrifying.

And then there was Hort. Impossible to say whether JSOC would be brought into this. But even if they were kept out, it didn’t mean Hort wouldn’t find his way in. Not everything Hort did had JSOC’s blessing, or even its knowledge. Larison had learned that the hard way and he wouldn’t forget it. Behind the avuncular exterior that was part of what made men worship him, Hort was one of the most ruthless and capable operators Larison had ever known.

He set the Glock down and started doing push-ups. He wanted to go out as little as possible, so these in-room workouts were all he could afford right now. And he needed something to burn off his anxiety.

The trick was to assume the worst and act accordingly. The NSA searched for patterns; Larison would give them none. His movements were random, he paid for everything in cash, and when he had to show ID, he could draw on a half dozen identities, all of them guaranteed sterile because he’d created them himself. It had been a long time since he’d trusted JSOC.

He finished two hundred and fifty push-ups, flipped over onto his back, and started a set of sit-ups. His breathing and heart rate were slightly elevated. He felt good. Working out always took the edge off when he was feeling paranoid.

Hort represented a different facet of the same problem. Hort would try to exploit what he knew about Larison to anticipate Larison’s next move and then plan an ambush accordingly. Larison had seen Hort get inside his enemies’ minds and predict what they would do next. The man knew people so well, at times he seemed almost psychic. So much so, in fact, that Larison had from time to time considered eliminating the threat Hort might now represent.

A surge of latent paranoia suddenly gripped him and he wondered if he’d made a mistake, if he should have taken out Hort after all. But Hort was no soft target, for one thing. For another, Larison wanted to avoid yet another doomed face tormenting his dreams. Not that Hort didn’t deserve it. But they all deserved it. Guilty or innocent, it didn’t make any difference.

He amped up the speed of his sit-ups, bludgeoning back the paranoia. He cranked out two hundred and fifty and rolled to his feet. He was still breathing through his nose. He started doing squats.

He wondered whether he should have taken a chance and staked out his ex-wife. She was still in Kissimmee, the town near Orlando where they’d lived in the years before Larison had ostensibly died-she’d grown up there and her folks were still local, and with Larison traveling so much, it had been comfortable for her, especially with the baby. For anyone who managed to connect what was going on with Larison, it would be a logical spot to begin, and Larison would have liked the opportunity to run reconnaissance to get a sense of who and what he was up against. But in the end, he’d judged the risks not worth the rewards. His primary weapons were stealth, movement, and surprise. Outnumbered as he surely was, anything that put him in contact with the enemy was an enormous risk.

Squat, stand. Squat, stand. On every other rep, he leaped into the air and landed on his toes. Sweat trickled down his sides.

Anyway, Marcy didn’t know anything about him. She never had. Their whole marriage had been a pathetic farce. He couldn’t even blame her for the baby. Really, he should have thanked her. It made everything he had to do afterward easier. The main thing was, operationally, she was a dead end. He was fine.

Then why was he pushing the workout so hard?

Because you’re keyed up, that’s all. Who wouldn’t be?

He finished the squats and went straight into lunges. Two fifty, five hundred, it didn’t really matter. He could go practically forever, it was just a question of time.

It was all so strange. He was officially dead, he’d been hiding for years, he’d severed all contact with anyone who’d known him as Larison. And yet it was only now that he felt everything was about to irrevocably change. He had the overwhelming sense of being perched on the edge of a dark precipice. He had no choice but to leap, not seeing what was on the other side, knowing only that it would be everything he always wanted, on the one hand.

Or an extremely unpleasant death, on the other.

He wondered for a moment whether he really had a preference. Did it matter?

He decided it didn’t. After the sobbing, the begging, after the awful… sound they all made, the men he’d interrogated had all eventually reached that point of surrender, of not caring how they were released, wanting only for it to be over. It was strange that he should feel a kinship with them now.

And then he thought of Nico. If this didn’t go well, Nico would never know what had happened. He’d probably assume Larison had abandoned him and gone back to his wife. The thought of Nico left that way, forever wondering, doubting, was like a vise around his heart.

No. It wouldn’t end that way. He had all the cards. And he was playing them well. He’d gotten this far, hadn’t he?

He wondered again whether Hort would be involved. And if so, what dumb young fool Hort would set against him. Whoever he was, Larison might have felt sorry for him. But he didn’t. They’d burned the pity out of him. The only pity he had left he would save for himself.

5. Someone Else Would Worry About Why

Less than an hour after his arrival, Hort walked Ben out of the Manila city jail. A sedan with a driver who looked like Diplomatic Security drove the two of them back to the Mandarin Oriental, where Ben showered, vacuumed down two plates of pasta and a beer, and passed out. Hort woke him at eight. The car took them to the airport, where they checked into adjacent first-class seats on a Philippine Air flight to Los Angeles. The luxury was anything but standard, and Ben took it to mean that whatever Hort wanted, it needed to be done ASAP. This would likely be Ben’s last chance to sleep for a while.

The moment they were in the air, Hort took out an ordinary iPhone and selected an application that would pump out random subsonic signals to scramble any listening devices. The military called the application the Susser, meaning subsonic signals scrambler, but like so much other military hardware, such as the GBU-43/B massive ordnance air blast-more widely known as the Mother of all Bombs-this one, too, had its own nickname: the Cone of Silence. Everyone knew the national carriers allowed their nations’ spy services to bug the first-class seats for industrial espionage.

Hort set the phone down on the armrest between them and put a Bluetooth earpiece next to it. “These are for you,” he said. “There’s more information on the phone, but we’ll get to that.”

“Okay.”

“Two days ago, someone contacted the new director of central intelligence,” Hort said, his voice so low it was almost inaudible over the background roar of the engines. “This someone has gotten hold of some extremely sensitive materials and wants to be paid for their safe return.”

Ben pinched his nostrils and cleared his ears. “How sensitive are we talking about?”

“A hundred million dollars sensitive. That’s what our blackmailer is asking for. Payment in uncut diamonds, none larger than three carats. Small, anonymous, easy to move.”

“What do they have, photos of the president in flagrante?”

“I wish that’s what this were about. No, what they have is interrogation videos.”

Ben thought for a moment. “I read somewhere the CIA had destroyed a bunch of waterboarding videos. First there were just a couple, then they admitted closer to a hundred, something like that?”

Hort nodded. “That’s the story they told the papers. Truth is, they never destroyed anything. The destruction story was just disinformation they put out when they discovered the tapes were missing.”

“Yeah, but this story broke… I forget, but it’s been years.”

“December 2007. That’s when they discovered the tapes were missing, that’s when they started trying to cover it up.”

“And then…”

“And then in March 2009, they changed the story. Ninety-two tapes, not just a few.”

“Why?”

“A throw-down to the new administration. The word was, the newbies were going to investigate the tapes’ destruction more seriously than the previous one was inclined to. So the message was, ‘This is much worse than you think. Investigate and you’ll never get anything done on the economy, or health care, or global warming, or jack shit. An investigation will go in a hundred directions you don’t want. It’ll eat you alive.’”

“I don’t get it. In the end, what did they think was going to happen? Were they hoping the tapes really were destroyed?”

“That’s exactly what they were hoping. And it wasn’t a bad working theory, if you think about it. Someone should have destroyed those tapes-can you imagine what would happen if they got out?”

“Why the hell make tapes in the first place? Are they crazy over there?”

Hort shrugged. “The signal-to-noise ratio wasn’t great on the information they were getting from the program. Truth is, most of the people we were picking up, we weren’t even sure who they were. Informants were accusing people we’d never heard of, dirt-poor Pakistani farmers turning in some Arab just because they didn’t like him or didn’t want to pay him the money they owed. Settle a grudge by accusing your enemy of terrorism and collect a bounty at the same time-who could resist that? And with the methods the CIA was using, fabrication was a problem. So they tried to develop a mosaic, cross-referencing everything they extracted in the interrogations. Fabrication is random; the overlaps have more credibility, that was the theory. So every new bit of intel extracted meant they could look at previous intel in a new light. For that, they needed records, something they could go back to.”

“Yeah, records. Transcripts. Not video. Not if you don’t want to get crucified on CNN.”

“Transcripts miss things. They needed to be able to examine the totality of circumstances: when did the subject say what he said, what was being done to him at the time, what were his facial expressions at that moment, his body language, were there other indices of fabrication? They were trying to mine every bit of value from the information they managed to extract. That was the whole point of the program. The tapes were a key part of it. And there was supposed to be an element of intimidation, too. You know, ‘What are your tough-guy terrorist friends going to think when they see this video of you crying and begging like a baby?’”

Ben had heard corridor talk about the program. Most of it sounded pretty stupid to him, but that was true for a lot of Agency initiatives and it wasn’t his problem. Until now, anyway.

He cleared his ears again. “These tapes… were there copies?”

“No. One set of originals, and that’s what the blackmailer has.”

“Even so, do we know that whoever took them and whoever is using them are the same? If they’ve been brokered, every middleman in the chain would have made copies.”

“My gut tells me they haven’t been passed around. First, because in all these years, no one’s heard a peep about these tapes being circulated. Second, if you’re smart enough to steal the tapes, you’re smart enough not to broker them. The risks are similar, but the real payoff only comes when you hit up Uncle Sam. Who else is going to come up with a hundred million dollars in diamonds?”

Ben couldn’t find any fault in Hort’s reasoning. “All right. What do we have to go on about the blackmailer?”

“So far, nothing. Initial call placed from a cloned sat phone. Communication through an anonymous private email account established at the caller’s instruction after that. We traced the points of access, of course. They’re all over the eastern United States. We’ve tried to triangulate. No luck. No tie-in with surveillance cameras outside an Internet café, nothing like that. The people we’re dealing with are good, no question.”

“So working backward from the blackmail doesn’t get us anything. What about from the initial theft? Assuming we’re dealing with the same person or group.”

Hort nodded slowly. “There, I think I might have a lead or two.”

Something in Hort’s tone, and in his use of “I” instead of “we,” contained a world of subterranean meaning. Ben paused, knowing Hort wanted him to figure it out.

“You haven’t told the CIA.”

Hort looked at Ben and nodded again, obviously pleased. “Go on.”

“You don’t trust them?”

Hort snorted. “You could say that. Right now they’re running around like a bunch of hyperactive retards. They’re going to fuck this up if we let them. So we’re not going to let them.”

Ben thought for a moment, sensing he was missing something, not sure of what it was. “Is it just the CIA? Who else knows about this?”

Hort smiled. “The DCI contacted the Justice Department. Federal blackmail case, standard operating procedure.”

“And if the FBI recovers those tapes…”

“Exactly. Their goal will be prosecution. They’ll preserve the tapes as criminal evidence. Eventually, they’ll leak. And you’ve got Abu Ghraib all over again, multiplied by about a thousand. You put those tapes on Al Jazeera, forget about just guaranteeing al Qaeda’s monthly recruitment numbers-it’ll ignite the whole Muslim world.”

“Oh, man.”

“So now we have three overlapping investigations. The CIA, which caused this monumental goat-fuck to start with. The Justice Department, which if they recover the tapes will, with all their good intentions and by-the-book behavior, wind up doing the same damage the blackmailer is threatening.”

“And me.”

“I’d call that us. But yes.”

Ben nodded. He couldn’t deny, he liked the sound of the plural better. “Us, then.”

He thought for a minute. The whole thing had been so smoothly delivered. But there was something missing at the center of it. Something obvious.

“Why?” he said.

“I told you, I can’t trust the others.”

“No, I’m asking you why not one of the other guys in the unit. Why’d you come to me?”

“Well, for starters, I had to get you out of a hellhole in Manila.”

“The real reason.”

Hort sighed. “I’m dealing with manpower issues right now, that’s why. Most of the ISA is tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Among the ones who aren’t, two are recovering from injuries you inflicted when you met up with them in California. And another operator you might remember, Atrios, isn’t reporting in again, ever.”

Ben was glad Hort hadn’t tried to bullshit him about how special he was. The truth was, there wasn’t a man in the unit who wasn’t in some way the best.

He thought again. There was something nagging at him… and then he realized.

“This whole time, we’ve been talking about ‘the blackmailer.’ Singular. You used it. And you didn’t correct me when I did.”

Hort smiled. “Is that right?”

“You know who it is.”

Hort’s smile broadened. “Just don’t forget who trained you, son, all right?”

Ben felt an absurd flush of pride and tried to ignore it. “Who?”

“A good man with a lot of demons, demons that finally got the better of him. His name is Daniel Larison. You never knew him, but he was part of the unit. One of the originals, in fact. He was one of the few people who had access to the tapes.”

“So why isn’t everyone looking for him now?”

“Because he died in the bombing attack on Prime Minister Bhutto in Karachi on October 18, 2007.”

There was a long pause. “He faked his death?”

“I believe he did. He had contacts in Pakistan’s ISI and he could have had foreknowledge of the attack.”

“And not warned anyone?”

“I told you, the man has demons.”

“Damn. How many people died in that attack?”

“About a hundred and forty, and three times that burned and maimed. Larison was in Karachi on temporary duty. Shortly before the attack, he reported he was going to meet a contact at Bhutto’s rally. But that might have been deception, and he could have left the country under a false passport after. The bomb was big enough to make it impossible to identify all the remains, one of which was assumed to be Larison’s based on knowledge of his movements and on other factors. Anyway, we couldn’t inquire too closely without getting into a pissing match with the ISI about placing operators unauthorized on their soil.”

“Yeah, but they know we-”

“They know, and they don’t want us to remove their ability to deny that they know. Anyway, if anyone could have pulled this off, it was Larison.”

“What’s his motive?”

“Well, there’s a hundred million dollars in play. That’s a lot of motive right there.”

“Would you do what he’s doing for a hundred million?”

“It doesn’t matter what I would do. It’s what Larison would do. Like I said, the man had demons. He saw some shit in the course of his work that mandated time with a shrink, but he would never see one.”

Hort paused, and a ripple of sadness seemed to pass across his face.

“Yeah, he shouldered an unfair burden, and the weight was causing cracks. He was a serial steroid abuser, for one thing. He had anger management issues, for another. Too many times, he stepped over the line in the field. I won’t lie to you, either-a lot of this is my responsibility. I saw the signs, I knew he’d been in the field for going on way too long. He needed a reprieve, he needed help. But with two active war theaters and shadow operations like we’ve never seen before, we’ve been stretched. Hell, we’ve got National Guard deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, grunts on their fifth tour of duty, politicians asking more and more and giving us less and less to do it with. Put enough pressure on the system, you’re going to start seeing cracks. Cracks in the system, cracks in the soldiers.”

Interesting. Hort had read the anger in Larison as he’d read it in Ben. Well, it wasn’t like the unit attracted a lot of Zen Buddhists.

“Why are you so sure it was him?”

“I’m not sure. But there’s no one else that makes any sense.”

“Then couldn’t the other players-the Agency, the Bureau-figure out Larison, too? That he had the access, faked his death-”

“They could, but they won’t. They don’t know him the way I do. Larison was the best. He’s what you’ll be in ten years if you keep developing the way you need to. Right now, you’ve got the confidence and the instincts. What you need is judgment. And control.”

That was a rebuke for Manila. Ben couldn’t deny the justice of it.

“If it’s just the Agency and the Bureau on this, how did you find out? What’s your connection?”

Hort smiled as though pleased that Ben was considering all the angles, asking the right questions. But he said only, “I’ve been around for a while, son. I know people.”

Yeah, a guy like Hort had contacts everywhere: Pentagon, State, all the spook services… probably even the White House. Couldn’t really expect him to reveal his sources and methods.

“So, what’s our time frame?”

“Five days. And he says he has an electronic dead-man trigger. Even if we find him, we can’t just take him out.”

“A bluff?”

Hort shook his head. “It’s exactly what he would do. Or you or I would do, for that matter.”

“What do I do when I find him?”

That ripple of sadness passed across Hort’s face again. “You don’t do anything. Your job is just to find him and fix him. Not to finish him. Not yet, anyway. For the time being, we’re going to have to play this one by ear.”

Ben wasn’t sure what playing it by ear would be about. Up until now, “find, fix, and finish” had always constituted a half-redundant description of what Ben did, with “finish” being the real point. He wanted to ask what Hort had in mind, and why he thought they might be able to end this without ending Larison in the process. But he’d asked the important questions already, and that kind of “why” wasn’t in his job description anyway. His orders were to find and fix Larison, and he would carry them out. Presumably, at that point, he’d get some new orders. In the meantime, someone else would worry about why.

6. Don’t Want to Wind Up Like Him

The next morning, Ben was slowly circling Belthorn Drive in Kissimmee, Florida, a half-hour drive southwest of the airport in Orlando. According to Hort, this was the current residence of Larison’s “widow,” now going by her maiden name, Marcy Wheeler. For the moment, Wheeler was pretty much the only actionable thing they had to go on.

He drove, his head sweeping back and forth, absorbing information, looking for the detail that didn’t fit: a parked car with a couple of hard-looking men inside, a van with darked-out windows, a man in shades strolling along and somehow not from the neighborhood. Nothing tickled his radar. Belthorn was a sleepy collection of modest ranch houses being inexorably replaced by more imposing McMansions. But for the heat and the occasional palm tree, it could have been a suburban street in just about any lower-middle-class American neighborhood transitioning from older families and long-standing homes to younger, more aggressive colonists, newcomers with more of a need to make a statement and more appetite for the housing debt such statements required.

Wheeler lived in one of the older, smaller homes, a one-level yellow rectangle that looked like it contained one or at most two bedrooms and that badly needed a fresh coat of paint. Ben parked at the end of the street, far enough to keep Wheeler from seeing the license plate on his rented car, near enough to watch the house. Hort had told him Wheeler had a son, and it was almost time for school.

He watched and waited, hoping he was doing the right thing. He knew he couldn’t trust Hort the way he once had, not after what had happened with Alex and Sarah. But at the same time, when the op was blown, Hort had immediately stood down. He could have killed all three of them-should have, in fact, from a strictly operational perspective-but instead, he had let them walk away. Why leave all those loose ends? Ben could only surmise that it had been personal, that Hort had almost been looking for a reason to not follow his orders. But was that enough reason to trust the man now?

On the other hand, what were the alternatives? Leave the unit and join a private outfit? He could, he supposed. With the government stretched so thin, men with his credentials were making a mint as contractors. Even elite groups were having to offer retention bonuses, bonuses that more often than not didn’t work.

Yeah, he should do it. Three years as a contractor in someplace like Somalia and he could practically retire.

Ah, bullshit. The truth was, he liked being in the unit. Partly it was the training. He shot with Delta, jumped with the Smokejumpers, and learned his tradecraft from grizzled CIA survivors of Denied Area operations. He enjoyed the pride, the quiet swagger that came with being ISA. There were maybe three hundred men, not just in America, but in the world, who could legitimately claim to be his peers. That was saying something.

But it was more than that. He liked being on the inside. He liked knowing the secrets, the way things really worked, the real world beneath the surface everyone else inhabited. Contractors had the salary, and maybe they still had the swagger, but they didn’t have the inside position. And he didn’t want to give that up.

And why should he? What else did he have? A daughter who thought he was dead, an ex-wife who wished it were so… crap, it hurt, but when he was alone with his thoughts like this, he had to admit his life was a mess. He was glad he and Alex had managed to mend some badly broken fences recently, that was something. But what had it really changed? They weren’t attached by much more than blood before, and it wouldn’t be all that different now.

And Sarah? Their chemistry was pretty unbelievable, it was true. They couldn’t have been more different and at first he thought she hated him. Which maybe on some level she did, but then they’d wound up in bed anyway. He’d initially tried to pass it off as the effects of shared danger and a combat hard-on, but the truth was, it felt like more than that.

Even so, the only reason she’d let herself get close was because she didn’t really understand what he did. How could she understand? They were from totally different worlds. And let’s face it, she was the kind of person who was more comfortable pretending his world didn’t even exist. Which was ironic, because as far as he was concerned, it was her world-a world where violence never solved anything and where no one was evil, just misunderstood, and all people were fundamentally rational and could be reasoned with-that was the illusion, the pretty veneer. He knew the truth. He knew what things looked like from the inside. And he liked the view.

He thought about how he’d handle Wheeler. He knew subtlety wasn’t his forte-never had been, never would be. He was better at kicking in doors than at persuading people to open them, and this was a persuasion job, no doubt. But he’d had the elicitation training at the Farm, and over the course of various ops, he’d managed to put that training to good use. It was like Hort said, he just needed to exercise a little more control. He’d be okay.

At just past eight o’clock, Wheeler’s front door opened. A small boy, eight years old if Hort’s information was correct, stepped outside, Wheeler just behind him, blond hair tied back, gray shorts and a navy tank top. She helped the boy struggle into a backpack, kissed him, and waved him off, then watched while he waited at the curb with a few other kids similarly outfitted. A few minutes later, a yellow school bus pulled up. There was a hiss of hydraulic brakes, a red stop sign sprouted from its side, and then it was gone, the children along with it. Wheeler watched it go, looking somehow deflated in its wake. Ben thought of Ami in Manila, another child of a dead father.

Come on, forget it. It’s better like this. Put it away.

He got out of the car and started walking toward Wheeler’s house, his head sweeping left and right, keying on the hot spots. He detected no problems. He was wearing an olive poplin suit, white shirt, wine-colored tie, and black wing tips, all courtesy of a Brooks Brothers in Orlando, all practically government-issue. A standard Bureau Glock 23, spare magazines, pocket litter, and FBI ID and passport in the name of special agent Daniel Froomkin had been waiting for him in a dead drop near Orlando. Hort had explained that there actually was a Froomkin on the payroll in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., that the legend was fully backstopped. They couldn’t expect Wheeler to cooperate with someone who had no colorable legal authority.

The air was humid and smelled of cut grass. A thin, Mexican-looking guy was pushing a buzzing mower across one of the lawns on the other side of the street. Ben paused and watched him for a moment. The guy’s T-shirt was soaked with sweat and he was wearing earplugs against the noise. His arms were weathered and brown from too much sun. A beat-up pickup loaded with gardening equipment sat at the curb. The guy felt legit.

He headed up a short riser of cement steps, the Glock creating a reassuring weight and pressure under his left armpit, reminding himself one last time that he was Dan Froomkin, FBI, investigating a crime. Even a civilian could sometimes spot the incongruity in the vibe between an operator and an investigator. One of the things they’d taught him at the Farm was that to make a cover work, you had to submerge your true self inside it. The key was to believe your cover, to feel it like it was the truth.

He knocked on the door, an authoritative knock, confident, but not so loud as to be intimidating or aggressive. And he kept a respectful distance from the threshold. The trick would be to make her want to cooperate in part by making her afraid of what might happen if she didn’t. But she couldn’t be consciously aware of the fear. It had to be in the background, obscured by a demeanor just friendly enough to enable her to believe she was volunteering and ignore that she was being subtly coerced.

A moment later, Wheeler opened the door. Either Kissimmee enjoyed a low crime rate, or she was trusting. Or maybe her mind was still on her son.

“Can I help you?” she asked, her expression uncertain. Up close he could see she was a pretty woman, mid-forties, hair highlighted, teeth artificially white. The shorts and tank top revealed a toned body. Ben noted in mental shorthand that despite the modest house, despite being a single mother, she still spent on the hair, the teeth, maybe on a personal trainer or yoga or Pilates courses. Her appearance was important to her. He was aware this might be useful, but he didn’t yet see how.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ben said, producing the FBI ID. “I’m Dan Froomkin, special agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’d like to ask you a few questions about your late husband, Daniel Larison. It should only take a few minutes, if you don’t mind.”

Her pupils dilated slightly, the result, no doubt, of an adrenal surge. But she seemed more surprised than afraid. “My late husband… what? Why?”

“We’re investigating a crime, ma’am. Your husband wasn’t involved, but his behavior in the time before his death might prove helpful.”

Ben waited while she absorbed that potentially ominous we. After a moment, she said, “All right, but I don’t really think I’ll be able to help, Mr. Froomkin.”

Ben gave her a friendly smile, a lower-wattage version of the one that had always made it easy for him to hook up in high school and in various port cities after. “Well, it can’t hurt to try and find out. And please, you can call me Dan if you like. Sometimes I hate having to be so official with people.”

“All right, Dan,” she said, returning the smile with a slightly nervous-looking one of her own. “Come in, I guess. Would you like a cup of coffee? I just put some on.”

Ben nodded. “I’d love one. Thanks.”

He followed her through a small foyer to an equally small kitchen. The furniture was sparse and eclectic and looked like it had been handed down. The way she took care of herself suggested Wheeler wasn’t exceptionally frugal, so from the furnishings Ben surmised Larison hadn’t carried an impressive life insurance policy and hadn’t left behind much of anything else. Again, he wasn’t sure what this might mean, but filed it away as something potentially useful.

The kitchen smelled like waffles or pancakes. Clearing a pair of plates and glasses from the table, she said, “Sorry about the mess. Here, have a seat.”

Ben noted that she made breakfast and ate it with her son. Watched him at the bus stop until he was gone. A devoted parent. He thought of Ami again, and was irritated at himself for letting the thought intrude. Ami had nothing to do with this.

He sat and considered. She was nervous, that was clear. But who wouldn’t be, when the government shows up at the door flashing ID and asking about dead relatives? The nervousness felt normal. She was wary, not scared. And regardless, she’d taken him to the kitchen. That was good. People did business in the kitchen, it was where they opened up. The living room was a façade, the place for putting people off.

She brought him coffee in a plain white mug that looked like it came from Pottery Barn or the like. “Milk? Sugar?”

“No, black is good.” He took a sip. “This is great. Thanks.”

She smiled again, warmed up her own cup, and sat across from him.

He took another sip of the coffee. It really was good-nothing fancy, just strong and dark, the way he liked it. “Sorry to intrude like this,” he said. “Probably not your idea of an ideal morning. I’ll try to make it quick.”

She shook her head. “That’s okay. I just don’t know what I could tell you. My husband died a long time ago.”

The phrase “a long time ago” intrigued him. Not a date, not a number of years… just something vague, a reference to the indeterminate, irrelevant past. He had the sense that she had severed her memories of Larison from her life, that she now held them at a distance. Why?

“I apologize if my presence here is stirring up any sad memories. I understand your husband died in the course of service to the nation.”

She smiled a tight, uncomfortable smile. “Well, he always lived for that service. Not a huge surprise he would die for it.”

Ben hadn’t expected her to know anything about the blackmail, if indeed Larison was the guy behind the blackmail. If he was even alive at all. And nothing about her demeanor suggested otherwise. Just the normal amount of discomfort.

He gave her a sad smile that wasn’t exactly a forgery. Just being in this homey kitchen was like some silent condemnation of his own role as a father. “Well, I know a little about that. Hard not to let the job… overwhelm you.”

She glanced at his left hand. “Are you married?”

He shook his head. “Divorced.”

He realized this was a single mom in her mid-forties, devoted to bringing up her son. What were her dating prospects in a small Florida suburb? When was the last time she’d been with a man?

He hadn’t anticipated this angle before, but sensed now it might present an opening. Maybe make her more cooperative, more talkative than would otherwise have been the case. The thought helped him push back his awareness of Ami and refocus.

“Anyway,” he said, smiling and shaking his head as though the conversational detour had flustered him, which in fact it had, “there’s a chance your husband was in contact with some people we need to interview. Would you happen to still have his passport? Travel receipts? Correspondence? Anything about his contacts or his movements would be helpful.”

She took a sip of coffee and watched him. She seemed to be evaluating him and he couldn’t tell what she might be thinking.

“No,” she said, after a moment. “I’m not the sentimental type, and even if I were, I wouldn’t have saved any mementos from him.”

Him, this time. Before, husband.

He looked at her, pleased she was willing to talk, disappointed at his sense that she wasn’t going to have anything useful to tell him.

“I’m sorry, would you mind if I asked why not?”

She shrugged. “We didn’t have a happy marriage. Is that going to go in your report?”

He shook his head, wondering where this was coming from, and feeling a little bad, too. Part of him was aware of the strangeness of it: that maybe he was more comfortable shooting people than he was manipulating them.

“I don’t see why it would need to,” he said.

There was a pause. She said, “If I tell you what I know about his whereabouts before he died, will you tell me what you find out?”

Ben was taken aback. “Ma’am, this is a confidential investigation-”

“Marcy. After all, I’m calling you Dan, right?”

Ben was suddenly struggling to stay ahead of her, and wondering whether he’d been ahead to begin with.

“Yes, you’re right. Marcy. If there’s something I can tell you at some point, I’ll tell you. But I can’t promise you anything. You know that.”

That sounded right. Like what a real FBI guy would say in similar circumstances.

She looked at him for a long time, that evaluating look again, and he thought he’d been a fool to believe she was being friendly because she was interested in him. She was interested in something, all right. But not in what he’d thought.

“If my husband was involved in some kind of crime, I guess you won’t be able to tell me. But I don’t care about that anyway. It’s his… personal life that still bothers me. It shouldn’t-he’s been dead a long time and mostly I’ve moved on. But it would help me to know. Closure and all that.”

“I… understand,” Ben said, as noncommittally as he could.

She smiled at him, an odd smile Ben judged as about equal parts sympathy and condescension, and again he was struck by how badly he’d misjudged her intelligence.

“Do you?” she asked.

He set his coffee mug on the table. “Why don’t you tell me and we’ll see.”

There was a long pause. She said, “My husband would go away for weeks, sometimes months at a time, and wouldn’t tell me where or why. What was I supposed to think?”

“Well, you know his assignments were secret-”

“Please. Other than the honeymoon and a short time after, we were barely having sex. Even when he would come back from one of these long ‘assignments,’ he wasn’t interested. When we did it at all, it felt perfunctory. Like maybe he was thinking of someone else. What would you have made of that?”

“I suppose under the circumstances I’d suspect my husband was having an affair.”

“Of course that’s what you would suspect. So I hired a private investigator and had him followed.”

Ben stared at her for a moment while he tried to digest that. “You… had your husband followed?”

She frowned slightly, and Ben realized she had misunderstood the reason for his surprise. “I mean,” he said, “from what I’ve heard about your husband, hiring a PI to follow him would be like sending a twelve-year-old to beat up Mike Tyson.”

The frown eased and she chuckled. “Yes, the investigator told me he was ‘surveillance conscious,’ I think that’s the phrase he used. At first, the best he could do was learn that my husband had flown to Miami. Twice. But the next time, when I told him my husband was about to travel again, the investigator waited at the airport in Miami. This time, he saw he was flying to Costa Rica.”

Holy shit, Ben thought. This could be something. “Costa Rica.”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“The investigator hired someone local, in San Jose. Next time my husband went to Costa Rica, the local guy was supposed to follow him. Instead, he disappeared.”

“Your husband disappeared?”

She shook her head. “Not my husband. The local guy. My investigator got scared, told me he didn’t want to work on the case anymore, and gave me back my money. And my husband died after that, before I could hire someone else.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. My husband could be a scary man.”

“Scary how?”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “He had rage inside him. I don’t know what about. Maybe it was work, things he saw or things he had to do.”

“He had a temper?”

“No. He never lost his temper. At least not with me. With me he was mostly just cold.”

“Then-”

“I can’t explain it to you. You wouldn’t understand, you didn’t live with him. There was something inside him he was struggling to keep from exploding. Maybe it finally did. I don’t know. I look back now, and I realize… he was very controlled. He only let people see what he wanted them to see. Even his wife. So I don’t have anything else I can tell you.”

They were quiet for a moment. Ben said, “Do you still have the contact information for the local investigator?”

“Sure. Harry McGlade. He operates out of Orlando. Or at least he did-we haven’t been in touch since he dropped the case.”

Ben couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was in some kind of collusion with Larison. But if so, they’d have to be in collusion with the PI, too, or at least they would have had to manipulate the hell out of him years in advance. All of which he judged highly unlikely. His gut told him she was telling the truth.

“What else?” he asked, reminding himself to use the kind of open-ended questions they’d taught him at the Farm were best for general elicitation.

She laughed. “What else were you expecting? That’s got to be more than you were hoping for right there.”

He was half impressed, half irritated by her spunk. He wondered what she’d been like as Larison’s wife. A handful, that much was clear.

He looked at her. “If you think of anything else, will you call me?”

She smiled, a faint, sad movement at the corners of her mouth. “If you learn anything else, will you do the same?”

Why not, he thought. She’s still in pain over this. You can call her, tell her anything you want, and make her feel better.

“If I learn something that would be personally helpful to you,” he said, “then yes, I’ll try to find a way to let you know. Off the record.” It felt good to say it. It wasn’t even a lie exactly.

“I just want to know about Costa Rica. You understand?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Was he seeing someone there.”

“Got it.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I doubt it. That’s a very hard thing not to know about the man you were married to. If you’re decent, you won’t even put what you find in your report.”

“I don’t… I’ll try not to.”

She looked at him and nodded gravely, as though grateful for his gesture and doubtful of its worth. “Well, if you happen to come back here and want to fill me in in person, that would be fine.”

He nodded, wondering whether he’d been wrong after all about her initial interest. “I can’t promise anything,” he said. “But… I think that would be nice.” Again, he wasn’t exactly lying.

She walked him to the door. He opened it and took a quick glance through the crack-first right, then sweeping left as he opened it wider. Everything looked all right. The gardener and his truck were gone. Other than that, nothing had changed since he’d arrived.

“My husband used to do that,” she said from behind him, her voice cold.

He stepped out onto the stoop and glanced back at her. “Well, I don’t want to wind up like him.”

Even before the words were out, he realized it sounded harsher than he’d intended. As he tried to think of a way to soften it, she said, “Don’t, then,” and closed the door between them.

7. The Easy Way

Ben walked down the steps, scanning the street. The information about Costa Rica sounded promising. He would check with Horton ops in South America, and if they could eliminate business, he would assume Larison had been traveling for personal reasons instead. A lover? The wife certainly seemed to think so.

And he’d follow up with McGlade, the investigator. Guy had to have been mildly brain damaged to try to tail someone like Larison, but he’d at least had the sense to figure out at some point the job wasn’t worth the per diem.

Marcy. He had to admit, even beyond operational necessity, he was intrigued. She was a strange combination of savvy and honesty, openness and mystery. He wanted to do right by her, if he could. Not because he was interested in her. Or at least, not only because of that. It was something about the way she’d watched her son. That… sadness he’d seen in her face when the bus had pulled away. Initially it had made him think uncomfortably about Ami, but now it was summoning images of his own childhood, the breakfasts his mother would serve her three kids and her slightly absentminded engineer husband. Happy breakfasts, mostly, even though Ben had little patience for little brother Alex. Or at least they’d been happy until Katie’s accident. Happiness had fled the Treven household after that, with Ben close on its heels.

Forty yards from his car, he noticed another one parked behind it, a brown Taurus that hadn’t been there before. His heart rate kicked up a notch and his alertness level moved from orange into red. He slowed, watching the car, aware of the weight of the Glock.

Thirty yards out, the passenger-side door opened. A big white guy with close-cropped hair in a suit a lot like his started to get out. The driver-side door opened, too, and a black guy emerged, as big as his partner and also in a dark, forgettable suit. Ben slowed more, his readiness now completely at condition red, his heart pounding, his limbs suddenly suffused with adrenaline. They started walking toward him, their hands empty. He sensed, without having to consciously articulate it, that this wasn’t a hit. If it had been, they wouldn’t have moved on him while he was this far away.

Ben’s head tracked left to right and he scanned his flanks to confirm the primary threat wasn’t just a setup-a trained response burned by combat into reflex. A petite young black woman with a short afro, shapely and well-dressed in navy slacks and a matching sleeveless blouse, was walking along the sidewalk toward them. Her vibe was civilian and he sensed no connection to the two men. He judged her not part of the threat.

Ten yards. Ben watched their hands and shoulders, not their eyes. If anyone’s arm even twitched, he would have the Glock out and they’d have to skip the pleasantries.

Five yards. “Excuse me, sir,” the black guy said. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

Ben checked his flanks again. The black woman was watching them, but with no more than normal curiosity. When she saw Ben looking, she glanced away, just another civilian recognizing possible trouble and not wanting it to recognize her back.

Three yards. “Who’s ‘we’?” Ben asked.

“FBI,” the white guy said. “You need to come with us.”

They stopped, close enough to try to grab him now, if they were that stupid.

“Nah, I don’t feel like going anywhere right now,” Ben said. “Better just ask me here.”

“Look,” the black guy said, his hand easing his jacket back, thumb first. “We can do this the easy way-”

Ben didn’t give him a chance to finish the move, or even the sentence. He shot an open-hand jab into the guy’s throat, catching his trachea in the web between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the cartilage shift unnaturally behind the blow. The guy’s teeth slammed shut and his head snapped forward.

The other guy started to shuffle back to create distance, his hand going for something under his jacket. But he was on the wrong end of the action-reaction equation. Ben caught him by the lapels and smashed his forehead into his face. He felt the guy’s nose break. He took a half step back and shot a knee into the guy’s balls.

He turned back to the black guy, who was clutching his throat with his left hand and groping under his jacket with his right, his eyes bulging. Ben closed the distance, caught the guy’s right sleeve, and yanked him past in the kind of arm drag he’d once favored as a high school wrestler. He hoisted him from behind, rotated him over an upraised knee, and slammed him facedown into the sidewalk.

The white guy was on his knees, his face a bloody mask. He snaked a jerky arm inside his jacket. Ben took a long step over and kicked him in the face. The force of the kick lifted the guy’s supporting arm clean off the sidewalk and he dropped the gun he’d been fumbling for. Ben swept it up-a Glock 23, just like his. He checked the load. Good to go.

He tracked back to the black guy, aiming the Glock with a two-handed grip. No movement. Track back to the white guy. Same.

He stepped over to the black guy and bent to take his gun and check for ID.

A voice came from behind him, feminine, sweetly southern-accented but with steel underneath. “Put the weapon down, sir. Now. Or you’re dead right there.”

He looked up. Son of a bitch, the black woman. She’d taken cover behind a parked car and was pointing a pistol at his face.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, slowly lowering the Glock. “You’re with these guys. I didn’t spot that.”

“Drop. The weapon. Now.”

Ben didn’t know who they were. They felt like law enforcement. From the way they were armed and what the black guy had said, they could have been FBI. And Hort had said the Bureau was investigating.

But he’d be damned if anyone was going to take him into custody again. Not today. Not ever.

He eased the Glock into his waistband. “Yeah, I heard you the first time.”

“Sir, I will shoot you.”

He looked at her. “Then shoot me.”

The black guy groaned and started to get up. Ben kicked him in the face and he went down again.

“Stop that!” the woman yelled.

“You want to ask me your questions, ask,” Ben said. “Otherwise, I’ve got places to go.”

There was a long pause. The woman continued to watch him through her gun sights and for a tense moment Ben wondered whether he’d miscalculated, whether she might actually shoot him.

She watched him for a moment longer, and he could see the tension in her face. Incongruously, he found himself noticing her skin. Smooth, light brown, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks. There was a hint of Asian in the shape of her eyes.

She lowered the pistol and muttered, “Goddamn it.”

She came out from behind the car and approached him, the gun in a two-handed grip but pointed at the ground. Ben noted that she was watching his torso, not his face. She was well-trained.

She walked over to the fallen white guy and knelt next to him. “Bob,” she said, “are you okay? Bob.”

Bob groaned. He got a hand on the street and started pushing himself up. The woman helped him. While she did, Ben reached inside the black guy’s jacket.

“Hey!” the woman called.

Ben extracted a Glock from a shoulder holster. “Too late,” he said. “Doesn’t look like you’re going to shoot me, but I don’t know about this guy.”

The woman walked over. “Drew,” she said. “Goddamn it, Drew, talk to me.” She looked at Ben. “If you killed him, I swear to God you’re going down.”

Drew wheezed, then broke into a coughing fit. He rolled to his side, his hands on his throat.

“Well, he’s breathing,” Ben said. “What were you saying there, chief? Something about, what, doing this the easy way? Well, you were right, it was easy.”

“Shut up,” the woman said. “Drew. Look at me. Can you drive?”

Drew sat up and massaged his throat. Ben didn’t think the guy looked good to drive. He looked good to puke.

But Drew managed a nod.

“Then go.”

Drew wheezed. “That’s not-”

“Just go. I’ll interview this guy and fill you in later.”

She stood up and holstered her gun. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Where are we going?”

“Wherever you like. A coffee shop. A park. Somewhere we can talk.”

“I don’t think-”

“Just shut up and drive your car, okay? Before I get sorry I didn’t shoot you.”

8. No One Ever Sees Me Coming

They found a Starbucks in the direction of Orlando. At the counter, Ben told the girl at the register, “Just a black coffee. Tall.” Then he walked off and found a table that put his back to the wall.

A minute later the black woman set a couple of coffees on the table and joined him. She looked miffed, whether at having to buy and bring him his coffee or being stuck with her back to the door or both, he didn’t know. It was satisfying either way.

“Who are you?” the woman said.

He picked up the coffee and took a sip. “It’s not going to work that way.”

“What way is that?”

“The way where you ask the questions.”

“Look, if I wanted to-”

“But you don’t want to. Otherwise you would have already.”

She drummed her fingers along the table. He couldn’t help noticing how attractive she was. That great skin; close-cropped, natural black hair; full lips; perfect teeth. Maybe that’s why he’d instantly written her off as a potential threat when he’d first spotted her. Stupid.

She opened her purse and took out an ID. The ID read, Special Agent Paula Lanier, Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with a photo.

Ben looked up from the ID. “Well, Paula, it’s good to meet you.”

“Sorry I can’t say the same. And now it’s your turn.”

Ben didn’t want to get into specifics. The Froomkin identity was backstopped, but someone within the FBI itself could debunk it easily enough.

“Why don’t you just call me Ben,” he said.

“All right, Ben, who are you with?”

“With?”

“Stop messing around with me, okay? I want to know who you are and what you were doing at Marcy Wheeler’s house. And I want to know whatever she told you.”

He took another sip of coffee. “That’s a lot to ask, on short acquaintance.”

“It’s not, really. Not when you consider that you can tell me here, or I can arrest you right now and we can conduct the interview at the Orlando field office instead.”

“Is this the hard way or the easy way again? It didn’t work out well for Bob and Drew back there. You sure you want to go down that road, too?”

“I’m the one who had the drop on you, remember?”

“Then why haven’t you just arrested me?”

“Because I’d rather do this off the record for now.”

“Why?”

“Look, I know who you are. Or what, anyway. You’ve got spook written all over you.”

Ben couldn’t help smiling. “I could say the same about you, you know.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Funny. I know you’re CIA. Could have been DIA, maybe, but I know they’re not involved in this thing.”

Interesting that she would assume that. Well, Hort told him the CIA would be conducting its own off-the-books investigation, trying to beat the FBI to the tapes. Looked like the Bureau was aware of the problem, too.

He felt a momentary unease. These missing tapes were big. Maybe the biggest thing he’d ever worked on. A lot of players were after them, maybe for a lot of different reasons. A part of him wondered why all these agencies were circling one another the way they were, and the thought was as unfamiliar as it was uncomfortable. He was accustomed to thinking in terms of who. And when. And where. And how. But why? For the second time in as many days, he reminded himself that why was someone else’s problem.

“What are you, Ground Branch?” she said. “You’re former military. I can tell by the way you move.”

“Yeah? Well, I took a look at you and couldn’t tell anything. Until you were pointing a gun at me.”

She smiled. “That’s right. No one ever sees me coming.”

An unprofessional double entendre popped into Ben’s mind and some vestigial sense of judgment saved him from giving it voice.

“I’ll bet they don’t,” he said, keeping it neutral.

“So don’t blame yourself too much.”

“I’ll get over it.”

They sat in silence for a moment, watching each other, and Ben knew she was evaluating him the way he was her.

“All right,” he said, “so why off the record?”

She smiled just the tiniest bit, and he realized she’d been using the silence to draw him out. Damn, he had to stop underestimating women.

“Because I’ve never seen interagency cooperation worse than what we have on this case. Not even compared to what I’ve heard it was like before 9/11. And look what all that distrust and rivalry caused back then. When we don’t work together, Americans die. It’s that simple, but you people never seem to wake up to it.”

“‘You people’? What about your side?” Weird to suddenly find himself pretending to be an FBI guy pretending to be a CIA guy, but he went with it.

“Oh, there’s plenty of blame to go around, I’m sure. But we’re getting next to zero from the Agency on this one. We had to threaten a subpoena just to get a few records. And your presence at Wheeler’s house confirms you’ve been holding back. If you know something about her, if she’s relevant, why haven’t you told us?”

“Well, it’s not like you told us, either.”

“The only reason my team was staking out Wheeler’s house in the first place is because the Bureau thinks she’s a dead end. If they thought she was important, someone else would have been assigned.”

“You mean you, Bob, and Drew aren’t the A-team?”

She cocked an eyebrow again. “You keep up the sarcasm,” she said, her voice sweet, “you might get smacked.”

“I don’t know. That might be nice.”

She went to take a sip of coffee. Halfway to her mouth, she snapped the cup toward him. Hot coffee hit him in the face. He shot to his feet, spluttering and wiping his eyes.

“What the fuck?” he said.

He looked around. A few patrons were staring, but quickly glanced away.

“Oh, what, did I not smack you the way you were hoping?” she said.

He wiped his face and flung coffee droplets from his palms. “You’ve got nerve, sweetie, I’ll give you that.”

“Sit your ass down and recover your pride. Unless you want me to school you again.”

He sat down, his ego smarting much worse than his face. “I like when you get all ghetto-talk on me. Really, it’s sexy.”

“Oh, a little racist patter to go with the sexist. You trying to bore me to death now? You think I haven’t heard it all before, mostly from people a lot more clever than you?”

Goddamn it, she was right. She’d won the round. Now he was just being an asshole.

“Well,” he said, “you were right. That’s twice I didn’t see you coming.”

She smiled, and despite her evident amusement there was something gentle and even forgiving in her eyes. “I told you. Now listen. I like your dimples but I don’t have time to flirt with you. I’m not here to play games.”

“Yeah? What do you have in mind instead?”

“A little word association exercise to start with, to establish our bona fides. You ready?”

“Sure,” he said, not knowing where she was going.

“Detainees.”

Ah. Now he understood.

“Interrogations,” he said.

She nodded. “Now we’re making progress. Videotapes.”

“Missing.”

“Diamonds.”

“A hundred million U.S. ”

“Bingo.”

They were quiet for a moment. “All right,” he said. “We’re both looking for the same thing.”

“Exactly. And the brick wall your people are throwing up is going to make it impossible for either side to find it.”

“Then tell me what you need,” Ben said, hoping to learn more from the questions than he was willing to provide with answers.

“I need Larison.”

“Larison’s dead.”

“He’s supposed to be dead, yes.”

“What makes you think he’s not?”

“Look, the only thing we could get from CIA were some records, probably incomplete, on who had access to what we’re looking for. I was up for two nights straight cross-referencing the data. A black ops guy named Larison, deceased, had the access. I asked the Agency and they stonewalled me. That told me I was on to something. I told my superiors we needed to look into it. How sure are we this guy is dead? And even if he is, maybe he had an accomplice who got the tapes before Larison died. They all blew me off. They’re all looking for an analyst, trying to adapt their serial killer profiling tools to predict the kind of personality that would do something like this. And let me tell you, once an orthodoxy takes hold at the Bureau? It’s like religion, nothing’s going to shake it. So they told me fine, you want to stake out a dead guy’s widow’s house? Go right ahead. They gave me Bob and Drew, who you might have noticed aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and shooed me away. They were just glad to get me out of their hair.”

Well, Hort had been wrong about another agency not getting curious about Larison. He’d read the Bureau right, it seemed, he just hadn’t known about this tenacious woman.

“Why didn’t you interview her yourself, then?” he said.

“I was going to. But first I wanted to watch her. See if someone like you happened to show up.”

“Might have cost you time. Pretty big gamble.”

“Not so big, really. Because here you are. So what did she tell you?”

“Not much.”

“You’re lying.”

Well, it felt like he was lying, but technically he was afraid he might be telling the truth. “She might have told me one thing that was useful. I’m going to check it out now. Leave me alone for a while and I’ll let you know what I turn up.”

“That’s your idea of interagency cooperation? I knew you were CIA.”

“Look, I’m under a lot of pressure. It’s the best I can do right now.”

“Fine. You can explain while I’m booking you in the Orlando field office.”

“You want to know something, Paula? I like you. You’re smart and you’ve got balls. But if you make a move to arrest me, you’re going to wind up like your buddies Bob and Drew. The only difference might be that with you, I could feel bad about it after.”

She watched him for a moment, amused or seething he couldn’t tell.

“You’re right,” she said, with that sweet, soothing tone that to him was beginning to sound like a rattlesnake’s tail. “You’re a hard man. Even if I arrested you, I bet I couldn’t get you to cooperate. Guess I’ll just have to interview Wheeler myself. When she mentions someone has already been to see her, I’ll say, ‘Really? That’s awful. Who was he? Did he tell you he was FBI?’ ’Cause I know you didn’t just waltz into her house and tell her you were CIA. ‘He did? No, ma’am, he wasn’t FBI. I don’t know who he was, we’ve never heard of him. But impersonating an FBI agent is a crime punishable by no less than ten years in a federal penitentiary. I’d like to assist you in registering a complaint with the Bureau so we can conduct a formal investigation into who this man could be. We’ll need to release a description to the media, too.’ That kind of thing.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Then call.”

He watched her. She didn’t blink.

He asked himself why she wouldn’t do it. And couldn’t think of a single good reason.

“All right,” he said, “we need to visit a private investigator in Orlando. But your pals Bob and Drew stay behind, got that? They need medical attention, for one thing. For another, I don’t want to have to worry about one of them stewing over what happened, and doing something stupid to get his mojo back. They don’t strike me as the bygones-be-bygones type.”

“No, they’re not. So, yes, we’ll make it just the two of us. But give me their guns first.”

Ben looked around. “Hand me your purse.”

She did. He held it under the table and slipped Drew’s and Bob’s weapons inside it, then put it on the table. She went to take it back, but he didn’t let it go.

“I’m still armed, Paula,” he said, looking into her eyes. “And I’d hate to have to shoot you just as we’re getting to know each other. I really would feel bad about it.”

She smiled and patted his hand. “I’ll bet you would, sugar. I’ll bet you would.”

9. Some Kind of Military Spook

Harry McGlade’s office was located in Orlando ’s Parramore district, home of the Amway Arena, a U.S. federal courthouse, police headquarters, and a number of other state buildings. The area was awake and bustling when Ben and Paula arrived. At nightfall, Ben knew, the daytime population would roll away like drops of mercury, revealing a sad substratum of winos, whores, and madmen beneath.

Paula had called McGlade from the road and told him she had a case, that he was highly recommended though she couldn’t say by whom, that she needed to see him right away. McGlade was amenable.

The building was a ramshackle second-floor walk-up with a stairway that smelled like someone had been using it for a toilet. Paula went in first. McGlade was just beginning to stand from behind an enormous metal desk when Ben followed her in. Crestfallen would be too strong a word for the look on his face, Ben thought, but not by much. His age was hard to guess-ballpark, sixty-and he was overweight in a way that looked more liquid than fat, with Gollum-pale skin that suggested this squalid room was as much a cave to him as it was an office.

“Didn’t realize there were two of you,” he said, in a nasal voice.

“I’m sorry,” Paula said. “I didn’t want to say too much over the phone.”

Ben looked around. The place was like an experiment in entropy. Papers so scattered that but for the settled-in stink of sweat and tobacco you’d think a wind had blown through. Two overflowing ashtrays. An algae-covered aquarium with no fish that Ben could see. It was hot, too, and Ben realized the guy must be too cheap or too destitute to use the air conditioner.

There was a pair of metal folding chairs in front of the desk. McGlade came around, swept up the piles of paper on each, and made a show of stacking them neatly on the floor. “Here,” he said. “Have a seat. Coffee?”

Ben and Paula both said, “No,” simultaneously and equally emphatically.

McGlade circled back to an incongruously fancy leather office chair Ben suspected he’d stolen. “All right,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

“It’s not what you can do for me,” Paula said, reaching into her purse and taking out her credentials. “It’s what you can do for the FBI.”

McGlade examined her ID, his expression suddenly sewn up tight. “All right. What can I do for the FBI?”

“You can tell us about a case you were working on a little over three years ago,” Ben said. “Guy named Daniel Larison. His wife thought he was having an affair.”

McGlade’s face lost a drop of color. “I’m sorry, but all my client matters are entirely confidential.”

Paula smiled at him. “Mr. McGlade,” she said, her tone exceptionally sweet, “we’re very busy, so I’ll get straight to the point. Tell us something useful, and you’ll have a contact and friend inside the Bureau for life. Fuck with me, and I’ll crawl up your ass and chew my way out.”

Ben thought, What? He had to clamp his jaw shut to keep from laughing. At the same time, he was beginning to realize McGlade would have to be a fool to think she was bullshitting him.

There was a long silence while McGlade assessed the probabilities. Then he said, “All right. Three years ago, a woman in Kissimmee contacted me, told me she thought her husband was having an affair.”

“Marcy Wheeler?” Paula asked.

“Yeah. Wheeler. Happens all the time. Usually it’s a wife who calls me, but sometimes a husband. Ninety percent of what I do is domestic. Anyway, I get what I need from her-photograph of the husband, car registration, that kind of thing-and I go to tail the guy, see where he’s going. SOP. Except, it turns out the guy is almost impossible to tail.”

“Watching his back?” Ben said.

“You could say that. Now I see a little of this kind of thing all the time. People who are up to no good can be jumpy, sometimes they pay more attention than your average honest citizen. I’m used to it and it’s not a problem for me. This guy was way beyond that. His wife told me he was some kind of military spook, but when I saw how surveillance conscious he was, I knew he was something really special. Counterterrorism, Delta, something like that. I told Wheeler this one could take awhile, he was too watchful and I couldn’t get close. I quoted her a long-term rate and she was okay with it.”

“A little annuity for you, huh?” Ben said, and he realized he felt weirdly protective of Marcy. “She the first client you fed that story to?”

“As a matter of fact, smart guy, she was. I don’t charge by the hour. My business is about results.”

“Okay,” Paula said. “So you backed off. But you stayed on him.”

“That’s right. His wife would tell me when he was traveling. Now here’s the interesting thing. Most times, even though I couldn’t stay on him long, I could confirm he was going to Patrick Air Force Base. Figured from there, he was getting a military flight to wherever he was going. But other times, I confirmed he was going to Orlando International. When I’d get the word from the wife, I’d set up at the airport in Orlando, wait for him there. Didn’t matter that he was watching his back if I could get set up in front of him, right?”

Ben popped a knuckle. “You figured the civilian flights were the illicit ones.”

“Exactly. So twice in Orlando, I watched him board a flight to Miami. Next time the wife told me he was traveling, I went to Miami, started staking out the arrivals gates for flights from Orlando.”

Wheeler leaned forward in her chair. “And?”

“And twice I saw him boarding a flight to Costa Rica. San Jose, the capital. I told Wheeler it looked like he was up to something in Costa Rica. As it happens, I have a contact there, someone who could pick Larison up when he arrived. She said do it. So I did.”

Wheeler said, “Who?”

“Guy who goes by the name Taibbi. I know him from the service. He’s a surfer, or was when I knew him, anyway. Now he owns a bar in Jacó, near Playa Hermosa, a big surfing beach. Freelances in this and that, if you know what I mean.”

“No,” Ben said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Look, Jacó’s got three draws: surfing, drugs, and whores. You get it now? I asked Taibbi if he wanted to be my local liaison on this case. Follow a guy, confirm whether he’s got a mistress, I get a finder’s fee, he gets the balance. I warned him the guy was military, surveillance conscious. Taibbi says don’t worry, I’ve got a crew.”

Paula glanced at Ben, then back to McGlade. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, exactly. All Taibbi told me was that Larison did one of his crew. Cut his throat.”

“My God,” Paula said.

“Yeah. Whatever happened, it spooked Taibbi bad, and Taibbi, let me tell you, has seen his share of shit.”

“That’s not what Wheeler told us,” Ben said. “She said your guy in Costa Rica disappeared.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told her. I just wanted to keep it vague, you know? The fewer questions the better. Anyway, Taibbi told me he was done, called me a few choice words for not adequately warning him of what Larison was all about-like I knew, for fuck’s sake-and told me he was out. I started thinking about what I’d gotten myself into, what it would be like if Larison ever learned some PI had been following him. Well, the hell with that. So yeah, I told Wheeler my Costa Rica guy had disappeared and I gave her back her money. And that’s the last I heard of any of this, until now.”

Paula said, “And Taibbi didn’t go to the police?”

“Taibbi lives the kind of life that doesn’t mix well with law enforcement. And if your next question is why I didn’t go to the cops either, what was I supposed to do? Tell the Costa Rican police I heard there was a murder that the guy who might have seen it will never testify about? Please.”

“So you saw Larison traveling from Miami to Costa Rica,” Ben said. “What were the dates?”

“Are you shitting me? It was three years ago.”

“You don’t have records?”

“Oh, yeah, I have records,” McGlade said, looking around the office. “I’m sure they’re here somewhere. I’ll just get some excavation equipment and we’ll turn them up in no time.”

Ben tried not to let his impatience show. “What was the season?”

“First time was… shit, I can’t remember. But wait. Second time… I remember the Magic had just made the play-offs. It was a big deal, their first time since 2003. So that would have been… April. Yeah, April 2007. Yeah, they beat the Celtics the night before, I remember that. So… hold on.”

McGlade leaned forward and worked his computer for a moment. “April 16, 2007. That was the day Larison flew from Miami to San Jose the second time. So the first time would have been… maybe three months before that. Four at the most.”

“Remember the airline?” Ben said.

“Lacsa. Costa Rican carrier, United affiliate, I think.”

Ben nodded. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a pretty good start. Hort could check the passenger manifest on the day Larison traveled. Ben doubted the man would have been traveling under his own name, but now they had a good shot at uncovering an alias. Or one of them, anyway.

McGlade said, “All right? That’s everything I know. You don’t have to crawl up my ass now. Unless you’re into that kind of thing.”

“One more question,” Paula said, smiling. “The name of your friend’s bar.”

10. Someone Else’s Dreams

Larison stepped off the bus at the Greyhound station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The ticket he’d bought was for Scranton. One was as good as the other, he just didn’t like going where the ticket said he would. He knew no one was watching-paying cash and moving by bus was the most secure and anonymous means of travel left in America -but there was no downside to layering in another level of security, either.

He slung his bag over his shoulder and started walking, his boots crunching quietly on the cement sidewalk. The sun was setting behind the tired-looking buildings to his right, but the air was still suffused with a stagnant heat. He didn’t care. A little sweat, a little body odor would make it less likely that anyone would take an interest in him or recall his passage after he was gone.

He headed south along Market Street, knowing he’d find a hotel soon enough. In his worn jeans and faded flannel shirt, his unshaven face obscured by a Cat Diesel hat, he knew he looked like a tradesman of some sort who’d lost his job in the hollowed-out economy and was looking to find another. Nobody important, but not a criminal, either, just a down-on-his-luck guy moving away from something sad and toward something maybe a little better, interesting to nobody, not even to himself.

More than anything, he wished he could have spent these days with Nico in San Jose. Or better yet, on the beach in Manuel Antonio, where they’d first met. Costa Rica had become a kind of symbol in his mind, a shorthand for forgetting everything about his past and living the way he wanted to, with the person he wanted to. But he couldn’t afford to go there now. He was too tense, for one thing. Nico, who could read his moods like no one who’d ever known him before, would intuit something was wrong. Also, for now, Larison preferred not to cross international borders. He wanted his remaining few contacts with the government to come from a variety of entirely random eastern seaboard locations, including the last contact, when he would instruct them on how to deliver the diamonds. After that, he would vanish like smoke.

For a moment, the thought of vanishing made him feel almost giddy. Because it would seem like vanishing only from his enemies’ perspective. From his own standpoint, it would be more like… more like being reborn, like his real self finally stirring to wakefulness. And once that part of him, the real him, the self he’d denied and obscured and hidden for so long, was awake, the dreams would stop, wouldn’t they? Yes, that would be one of the best parts about waking up, that the dreams would finally end. They’d belong to someone else then. They couldn’t touch him in Costa Rica.

He’d gone there for the first time five years earlier, while on temporary duty training the Honduran government’s praetorian guard in intelligence gathering and interrogation. He’d heard of Manuel Antonio, supposedly a gay paradise on Costa Rica ’s Pacific coast. It was a short flight to San Jose, and from there, a short drive to Manuel Antonio. Of course he hadn’t told anyone where he was going, he was just taking a few days to himself. He was married, and people naturally assumed he was being tight-lipped because he was chasing whores and wanted to be discreet. No one cared about that sort of thing. Getting a little strange tail was considered one of the perks of temporary duty and was ironically protected by its own informal “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. He was happy to have people think it of him. It wasn’t so terribly far from the truth and was therefore perfect cover.

Manuel Antonio lived up to its billing: white sand beaches framed by swaying palm trees to one side and blue surf to the other; dozens of lively bars and clubs and restaurants; nothing but young, toned men, all relaxed, fearless, looking to hook up. He remembered thinking the moment he arrived he would have to find a way to get back, it was that good.

He’d met Nico on Playita, one of the surfing beaches. Nico was riding a board in and then paddling it back out, sometimes with some other surfers, other times alone, and Larison was watching from the sand, admiring the way Nico got the most out of his waves, enjoying the occasional flash of brilliant teeth against smooth, cappuccino-colored skin, the lean muscles that stood out whenever he cut back against a wave or moved his arms to recover his balance. A few times, as he got close to the beach, Nico caught his eye and smiled. Larison smiled back, wondering. He guessed Nico was at least ten years younger. Some guys liked hooking up with someone older, more experienced. Some didn’t. He knew which he hoped the gorgeous creature on the surfboard would be.

After about a half hour, Larison had walked down the hot sand and stood with his feet in the cool, clear water. He watched Nico surfing in, glad to see he was heading right in his direction.

Nico rode in about twenty feet from the beach, then slowly sank into the water as the wave’s force depleted. He picked up his board and waded over to Larison, smiling, rivulets of water running down his skin, his chest and shoulders broken out in gooseflesh.

“You like to surf?” he asked in Spanish-accented English.

Larison was surprised. When he didn’t want to be spotted as an American, he was adept at projecting something else, and thought he had been. “How do you know I speak English?” he asked.

The smile broadened. “You seem so happy. I think maybe you’ve never been here before.”

Larison should have been irritated or on guard that this guy had made him. But he wasn’t. In fact, for reasons that just then he didn’t really understand, he felt secretly glad.

“Well, you’re right about that,” he said.

“So? You like to surf?”

Larison smiled. “I like surfers.”

A blush appeared behind Nico’s tan cheeks, a blush Larison found surprisingly disarming, even endearing.

They had dinner that night, then made love in Larison’s hotel room. Larison was ordinarily aggressive in bed, and usually attracted men who sensed the conflicted rage in him and wanted to be on the receiving end of it. But Nico brought out something different in him, something much more gentle, even tender. They’d spent the next two days and nights together, and Larison had concocted an excuse to delay his return to Honduras for two days more. He would have tried to stay even longer, but Nico had to return to San Jose, where he had a small architectural practice. They drove back to the capital city together in Nico’s old Jetta. As they sat in the idling car at the curb of the airport passenger drop-off, there were a dozen things Larison wanted to say, none of which he could find the courage to articulate.

“Do you want to see me again?” Nico asked, as Larison hesitated, his hand on the door handle.

“Yes,” Larison said, meeting his eyes and then looking away, both hopeful and terribly afraid of what might be said next.

“I want to see you, too.”

Larison looked at him again, hoping Nico would see how much his words meant, and understand why Larison couldn’t answer.

“You’re married, aren’t you?” Nico said.

Larison looked away, ashamed but also strangely grateful for Nico’s ability to read him, to understand what other people could never see.

He wanted to lie. Instead he found himself nodding, unable to meet Nico’s eyes.

“It’s okay,” he heard Nico say. “I thought so. I’m glad you told me.”

“It’s… complicated.”

“Of course it is,” Nico said, without a trace of sarcasm or condescension.

“Can we… let’s just see what happens. I want to see you again. This feels different.” He couldn’t believe what he was saying. He swallowed. “Special.”

“I’m out, you know. Everyone knows I’m gay-my family, my firm. I don’t really want to go back to halfway in the closet, you know?”

Larison nodded, his mind a roiling mass of emotions. He’d never had this kind of conversation before, with anyone. He’d never even imagined having it. He never would have dared.

“But I would do that,” Nico said. “For you.”

Larison looked at him. He couldn’t speak. He felt an excitement that was becoming indistinguishable from panic.

And just then, in that mad moment, gripped by impossible hope, Larison felt something bloom in his mind. An idea-no, not even an idea, just a possibility, a possibility he’d never considered before but whose contours he was immediately able to recognize.

“Give me some time,” he heard himself saying. “There are some things I can do… to find a way out of what I’m in. Can you do that? Can you be patient?”

Nico smiled shyly and said, “For you, Dan,” and Larison was immediately glad he’d told Nico his real first name. Ordinarily he wouldn’t do that, but from the first instant there had been something about Nico that had made Larison want to be honest with him. About the things he could be, anyway.

He took Nico’s card but didn’t embrace him. He knew Nico wanted him to, but also knew Nico sensed that he was already melting back into his public self and that any contact in that guise would be unacceptable.

After that, he was able to find a way to visit Costa Rica at least twice a year, sometimes as many as four. He traveled only under legends he himself had developed. He was extremely paranoid about communication, creating an encrypted email account for each of them under false identities and instructing Nico how to use it without establishing any possible connection to either of them. The security procedures were unfamiliar to Nico, but he understood Larison’s fanaticism to be an outgrowth of his fear of being outed, and was always exceptionally careful as a result. In fact, Nico displayed an aptitude and even eagerness for some of the security tools of the trade, which gratified Larison not only for the obvious substantive reasons, but also because he knew it was a sign of Nico’s devotion and desire to please him, as well.

Of course, meeting repeatedly in Costa Rica and staying in Nico’s apartment was suboptimal from a security standpoint, but Larison didn’t have the money to fly both of them to neutral locations or to pay for hotels. It was all he could do to conceal from Marcy the money he was diverting from his military salary for coach travel to Costa Rica. More than that would have risked causing suspicions.

But now they would be able to travel anywhere, live anywhere. He’d come to love Costa Rica and what it represented, but he thought it would be wise to move on, at least for a while, when this thing was done. He’d asked Nico before about someplace new-Barcelona, maybe, or Buenos Aires. Nico had been reluctant because his practice was based in San Jose. So Larison had told him he was working on something big, a sale of his company that would set them both up for life. Larison would finally leave his wife, buy them land somewhere, and Nico could design the house while he worked on establishing a new practice. How did that sound? Nico said it sounded wonderful, though Larison sensed he didn’t really believe it could be true. Well, he’d see soon enough.

The sun was now completely blotted out by looming office buildings and darkness was seeping into the sky. He came to a Hilton hotel and decided it would do as well as any other. He walked in, hoping he’d be able to sleep a little better this time than last.