The Detachment

I hadn’t killed anyone in almost four years. But all good things come to an end, eventually.

It was good to be living in Tokyo again. The face of the city had changed, as it continuously does, and the great Touhoku quake and tsunami continued to make their presence known in the form of dimmed lights and weakened summer air conditioning, along with an atmosphere newly balanced between anxiety and determination, but in its eternal, essential energy, Tokyo is immutable. Yes, during my sojourn in safer climes, there had occurred an unfortunate profusion of Starbucks and Dean amp; Delucas, along with their innumerable imitators, but the havens that mattered remained impervious to this latest infestation. There was still jazz at Body amp; Soul in Minami Aoyama, where no seat is too far from the stage for a quiet word of thanks to the band members at the end of the evening; coffee at Cafe de l’Ambre in Ginza, where even as he nears his hundredth birthday, proprietor Sekiguchi-sensei arrives daily to roast his own beans, as he has for the last six decades; a tipple at Campbelltoun Loch in Yurakucho, where, if you can secure one of the eight seats in his hidden basement establishment, owner and bartender Nakamura-san will recommend one of his rare bottlings to help melt away, however briefly, the world you came to him to forget.

My sleep was sometimes restless, though I told myself no one was looking for me anymore. But I knew if they were, they’d start with a place I’d been known to frequent. Unless you had unlimited manpower, you couldn’t use the bars or coffee houses or jazz clubs I liked. There were too many of them in Tokyo, for one thing, and my visits would be too hard to predict. You might wait for months, maybe forever, and though there are harder surveillance duty stations than the oases haunted by Tokyo’s roving night denizens, eventually you’d start to stand out, especially if you were a foreigner. Meanwhile, whoever was paying would be getting impatient for results.

Which made the Kodokan a unique vulnerability. I’d trained there for nearly twenty-five years before powerful enemies forced me to flee the city, enemies I had, by one means or another, managed to outlast. Judo at the Kodokan had been my only indulgence of anything like a routine, a pattern that could be used to fix me in time and place. Going back to it might have been my way of reassuring myself that my enemies really were all dead. Or it could have been a way of saying come out, come out, wherever you are.

Randori, or free training, was held in the daidojo, a modern, two-storied space of four connected competition zones open to bleachers ringing the area a floor above. On any given night, as many as two hundred judoka wearing the traditional white judogi, male and female, Japanese and foreign, buzz-cut college stars and grizzled veterans, take to the training hall, and the vast space is filled with cries of commitment and grunts of defense; earnest discussions of tactics and techniques in mutually incomprehensible tongues; the drum beat of bodies colliding with the tatami and the cymbal slaps of palms offsetting the impact with ukemi landings. I’ve always loved the cacophony of the daidojo. I’ve stood in it when it’s empty, too, and its solemn daytime stillness, its enormous sense of patience and potential, has its own magic, but it’s the sound of evening training that imbues the space with purpose, that brings the dormant hall to life.

On training nights the bleachers are usually empty, though nor is it unusual to see a few people sitting here and there and watching the judoka practicing below: a student, waiting for a friend; a parent, wondering whether to enroll a child; a martial arts enthusiast, making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of modern judo. So I wasn’t unduly concerned one night at the sight of two extra large Caucasians sitting together in the stands, thickly muscled arms crossed over the railing, leaning forward like carrion birds on a telephone line. I logged them the way I reflexively log anything out of place in my environment, giving no sign that I had particularly noticed them or particularly cared, and continued randori with the partner I happened to be training with, a stocky kid with a visiting college team who I hadn’t yet let score against me.

My play had reached a level at which for the most part I was able to anticipate an opponent’s attack in the instant before he launched it, subtly adjust my position accordingly, and frustrate his plan without his knowing exactly why he’d been unable to execute. After a while of this invisible interference, often an opponent would try to force an opening, or muscle a throw, or would otherwise over-commit himself, at which point, depending on my mood, I might throw him. Other times, I was content merely to flow from counter to counter, preventing battles rather than fighting them. A different approach than had characterized my younger days at the Kodokan, when my style had more to do with aggression and bravado than it did with elegance and efficiency. As the offspring of a Japanese father and Caucasian American mother, I once wore a heavy chip on my shoulder. My appearance was always Japanese enough, but appearances have almost nothing to do with prejudice in Japan. In fact, the society’s worst animus is reserved for ethnic Koreans, and burakumin-descendents of leather workers-and those others guilty of hiding their impurities behind seemingly Japanese faces. Of course, my formative years are long behind me now. These days, with my dark hair increasingly shot through with gray, I no longer pine for a country that might welcome me as its own. It took time, but I’ve learned not to engage in those conflicts I’ve always lost before.

From their size, close-cropped hair, and Oakley wraparound shades, favored these days by Special Forces and their private sector counterparts, I made the visitors as military, maybe serving, maybe ex. That in itself was unremarkable: the Kodokan is hardly unknown among the American soldiers, Marines, and airmen stationed in Japan. Plenty of them come to visit, and even to train. Still, I prefer to assume the worst, especially when the assumption costs me little. I let the college kid throw me with tai-otoshi, the throw he’d been trying for all night and obviously his money move. In my former line of work, being underestimated was something to cultivate. I might have been out of the life, but I wasn’t out of the habit.

I was careful when I left that night, my alertness at a higher than usual pitch. I checked the places I would set up if I’d been trying to get to me: behind the concrete pillars flanking the building’s entrance on Hakusan-dori; the parked cars along the busy, eight-lane street; the entrance to the Mita-sen subway line to my left. I saw only oblivious sarariman commuters, their interchangeable dark suits limp and rumpled from the diesel-laced humidity, their brows beaded with sweat but their expressions relieved at the prospect of a few undemanding hours at home before the next day’s corporate exertions. Several riders on motor scooters went by, the two-stroke engines of their machines whining in and then fading out as they passed, but they weren’t wearing the full-face helmets favored by motorcycle drive-by gunners, and they never even slowed or looked at me. A woman rode a bicycle past me on the sidewalk, a chubby-cheeked toddler secured in a basket attached to the handlebars, his arms outstretched and his tiny hands balled into fists at what I didn’t know. No one felt out of place, and I saw no sign of the soldiers. If they didn’t show up again, I’d classify their one-night presence as a nonevent.

But they did show up again, the following night. And this time, they stayed only briefly, probably just long enough to scan through the scores of judoka and confirm the presence of their target. If I hadn’t been doing my own frequent, unobtrusive scans of the spectator seats, I would have missed their appearance entirely.

I continued training until eight and then showered as usual, not wanting to do anything out of the ordinary, anything that might suggest I’d spotted something and was preparing for it. But I was preparing, and as a plan unspooled in my mind and adrenaline snaked out through my body, and as the presence of danger and the certainty of how I would deal with it settled into place with an awful, familiar clarity, I had to acknowledge to myself that I’d been preparing my whole life, and that whatever intervals of quiet I had ever briefly indulged were as meaningful and relevant as dreams. Only the preparation was real-the preparation, and the purpose it always enabled.

Ben Treven and Daniel Larison sat on stools at the window counter of a Douter Coffee shop fifty yards south of the Kodokan on Hakusan-dori, sipping black coffee and waiting for the two contractors to return. Treven had wanted to join them, to get a firsthand look at the man whom up until the week before he’d thought to be a myth, but Larison had insisted there was no upside to sending in more than two of them, and Treven knew he was right. It bothered him how easily and naturally Larison had established himself as the alpha of the team, but he also had to admit that Larison, in his mid-forties, ten years Treven’s senior, had seen more of the shit even than Treven had, and had survived heavier opposition. He told himself if he kept his mouth shut he might learn something, and he supposed it was true. But after ten years in the Intelligence Support Activity, the deliberately blandly named covert arm of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, he wasn’t used to running into people who acted like his tactical superiors, and even fewer he thought might be right about it.

Treven was facing the window in the direction of the Kodokan, and saw the contractors, whom he knew only as Beckley and Krichman, approaching before Larison did. He nodded his head slightly. “Here they come.”

Larison had instructed all of them to use their mobile phones as little as possible and to keep them shut off, with the batteries removed, except at previously agreed-upon intervals. The units were all rented, of course, and all under false identities, but good security involved multiple layers. The CIA’s careless use of cell phones in the Abu Omar rendition from Milan had led to the issuance of arrest warrants from an Italian judge for a bunch of CIA officials, including the Milan station chief, and Treven figured Larison was applying the lessons of that op to this one. Still, the current precautions struck him as excessive-they weren’t here to kill or kidnap Rain, after all, only to contact him. On the other hand, just as with sending only the two contractors into the Kodokan for the initial recon, he supposed there was no real downside to the extra care.

The contractors came in and stood so they were facing Treven and Larison and had a view of the street. Treven had seen plenty of foreigners in this section of the city, but even so he knew they were all conspicuous. Treven’s blond hair and green eyes had always been somewhat of a surveillance liability, of course, but he figured that to the average Japanese, such features wouldn’t much distinguish him from Larison, with his dark hair and olive skin, or from any other Caucasian foreigner, for that matter. What the natives would notice, and remember, was the collective size of the four of them. Treven, a heavyweight wrestler in high school and linebacker for Stanford before dropping out, was actually the smallest of the group. Larison was obviously into weights, and, if Hort could be believed, maybe steroids, too. And the contractors could almost have been pro wrestlers. Treven wondered if Hort had selected them in the hope their size might intimidate Rain when they made contact. He doubted it would make a difference. Size only mattered in a fair fight, and from what he’d heard of Rain, the man was too smart to ever allow a fight to be fair.

“He’s there,” the man called Beckley said. “Training, just like last night.”

Larison nodded. “Maybe we should switch off now,” he said in his low, raspy voice. “Two nights in a row, he’s probably spotted you. Treven and I can take the point.”

“He didn’t spot us,” Krichman said. “We were in the stands, he barely even glanced our way.”

Beckley grunted in agreement. “Look, if the guy were that surveillance conscious, he wouldn’t be showing up at the same location at the same time every night in the first place. He didn’t see us.”

Larison took a sip of coffee. “He any good? The judo, I mean.”

Krichman shrugged. “I don’t know. Seemed like he had his hands full with the kid he was training with.”

Larison took another sip of coffee and paused as though thinking. “You know, it probably doesn’t really matter that much whether he saw you or not. We know he’s here, we can just brace him on his way out.”

“Yeah, we could,” Krichman said, his tone indicating the man found the idea hopelessly unambitious. “But what kind of leverage do we have then? We found him at the Kodokan. Tomorrow he could just go and train somewhere else. Or give up training, period. We want him to feel pressured, isn’t that what Hort said? So let’s show him we know where he lives. Brace him there, make him feel we’re into his life in a big way. That’s how you get people to play ball-by getting them by the balls.”

Treven couldn’t disagree with the man’s assessment overall. He was surprised Larison didn’t see it that way, too. But Larison must have realized his oversight, because he said, “That makes sense. But come on, he must have seen you. Treven and I should take the point.”

“Look,” Beckley said, his tone indicating the tail end of patience, “he didn’t see us. Krichman and I will take the point.” He gestured to one of the buttons on his damp navy shirt. “You’ll see everything we see, through this. If he spots us, and I doubt he will, we’ll switch off like we planned. Okay?”

The button was actually the lens of a high definition pocket video camera that shot color in daylight and infrared-enhanced black-and-white at night. Each of them was similarly outfitted, and each unit transmitted wirelessly to the others on the network. A separate unit, about the size of a pack of playing cards, could be held in the hand to display what the other units were transmitting. It was nothing fancy, just a stripped-down and slightly modified version of the Eagle Eyes monitoring system that was increasingly popular with various government agencies, but it enabled a small surveillance team to spread out beyond what traditional line-of-sight would allow, and also enabled each team member to know the position of all the others without excessive reliance on cell phones or other verbal communication.

Larison raised his hands in a you win gesture. “All right. You two cover the entrance of the Kodokan. Treven and I will wait here and fall in behind you when you start following him.”

Beckley smiled-a little snidely, Treven thought. And it did seem like Larison, maybe in a weak attempt to save face, was pretending to issue orders that had in fact just been issued to him.

Beckley and Krichman went out. Larison turned and watched through the window as they walked away.

Treven said, “You think he’s going to come out again at the same time? Hort said he was so surveillance conscious.”

Larison took a sip of coffee. “Why do you think Hort sent those assholes along with us?”

It was a little annoying that Larison hadn’t just answered the question. Treven paused, then said, “He doesn’t trust us, obviously.”

“That’s right. They’re working for him, not with us. Remember that.”

Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton was Treven’s commander in the ISA, and had once been Larison’s, too, before Larison had gone rogue, faked his own death, and tried to blackmail Uncle Sam for a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds in exchange for videos of American operatives torturing Muslim prisoners. He’d almost gotten away with it, too, but Hort had played him and kept the diamonds for himself. Treven wasn’t entirely sure why. On the one hand, Hort’s patriotism and integrity were unquestionable. A black man who might have been denied advancement in other areas but who was not only promoted, but held in awe by the army meritocracy, he loved the military and he loved the men who served under him. Yet none of that had prevented him from fucking Larison when he’d needed to, as he’d once tried to fuck Treven. He’d told Treven why: America was being run by a kind of oligarchy, which didn’t seem to trouble Hort much except that the oligarchy had become greedy and incompetent-grievous sins, apparently, in Hort’s strange moral universe. The country needed better management, he’d said. He was starting something big, and the diamonds were a part of it. So, he hoped, would be Treven and Larison, and this guy Rain they’d been sent to find, too, if he could be persuaded.

So of course Hort didn’t trust them. They weren’t under duress, exactly, but it wasn’t all a positive inducement, win-win dynamic, either. Larison had to be looking for payback, as well as a chance to recover the diamonds. And Treven had wised up enough to recognize the strings Hort had been using to manipulate him, and to know he needed to find a way to cut them, too. There was the little matter of some unfortunate security videos, for example, that could implicate Treven in the murder of a prominent former administration official. It didn’t matter that it had been a CIA op and that Treven had nothing to do with the man’s death. What mattered was that Hort and the CIA had the tapes, and might use them if Treven got out of line. So for the moment, the whole arrangement felt like an unstable alliance of convenience, all shifting allegiances and conflicting motives. Hort would never have sent them off without a means of monitoring them, and under the circumstances, Larison’s injunction that he remember who Beckley and Krichman were really working for felt gratuitous, even a little insulting. Maybe the man was just chafing at the fact that the contractors didn’t seem to give a shit about what Larison assumed was his own authority. Treven decided to let it go.

But what he wouldn’t let go was that Larison had ignored his question. “Same place, same time, same way out, two nights in a row?” he said. “That sound like our guy?”

Larison glanced at him, and Treven could have sworn the man was almost smiling.

“Depends,” Larison said.

“What do you mean?”

“Rain spotted them last night for sure, when they were there for longer. Very likely, he spotted them again tonight, too.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I would have spotted them. Because if this guy is who Hort says he is, he would have spotted them. Because if he’s not good enough to have spotted them, Hort wouldn’t even be bothering with him.”

Treven considered. “So what does that mean, if he spotted them but comes out the same way at the same time anyway?”

This time, Larison did smile. “It means I’m glad it’s not us walking point.”

When I left the Kodokan, I knew someone would be waiting for me. Most likely it would be the pair of giants I’d seen twice inside. Possibly they were just recon, and someone else would be set up outside, but if whoever it was had more manpower, the sensible thing would have been to rotate different members of the team to deny me the chance to get multiple IDs. Of course, it wasn’t impossible that I was supposed to see the two I’d already spotted-after all, their bulk was hard to miss-so that I’d keep searching for them when I went outside and consequently overlook the real threat. But if that had been the game, they would have stayed longer that evening, to be sure I had a chance to see them again. My gut told me it was just the two of them, handling both recon and action.

I kept to the left side of the exit corridor as I left the building, using the book and souvenir kiosk as concealment until the last moment to deny them additional seconds to prepare for my appearance. I doubted they had guns-firearms are tightly restricted in Japan, and anyone with the connections to acquire them would likely have fielded a larger and less conspicuous team. A sniper rifle would have been even harder to get than a pistol, and even if they’d managed to procure one, what were they going to do, rent an apartment overlooking the entrance of the Kodokan? Too much trouble, too much paper trail. There were better ways.

As I hit the glass doors, I kept my head steady but let my eyes sweep the sidewalk and street within my field of vision. Nothing yet. The night before, I’d gone left and taken the subway, and though I hadn’t seen them at the time, I now assumed they’d been lurking somewhere and had logged my movements. So if they were hoping to follow me tonight and introduce themselves on terrain they found more favorable, they’d set up to the right. If the plan was for me to walk into them, they’d be to the left. No way to be sure, but other things being equal, I prefer to see what’s coming. And why not let them see me repeating the pattern I’d established the night before? It would give them a little more data to rely on in underestimating me. I turned left onto the sidewalk, my eyes still moving, checking hot spots, my ears trained for footfalls behind me.

I spotted the first instantly, leaning against one of the pillars fronting the building. He was bigger even than I’d estimated from seeing him in the stands. His hands were visible and one of them held a cigarette. Not the best cover for action in Tokyo. The country is a little behind the times on the nonsmoking front, and with the exception of smokers visiting Starbucks and hospital intensive care units, no one goes outside for a tobacco break, especially in the wet summer heat.

I passed him and hit the stairs of Kasuga station, keeping my head down to conceal my face from the security camera staring down from the ceiling, my footsteps echoing along the concrete walls. Ordinarily, I found the cameras a hindrance if not an outright threat, but for the moment, their presence was cause for comfort. No one wants to do a hit in the Tokyo metropolitan subway system, where the number of closed circuit video cameras could make a Las Vegas casino blush. In the past, the cameras had never been a particular concern, but then again my specialty had always been the appearance of natural causes-one of the advantages of which is that no one examines security tapes afterward, trying to find out what happened. The Mossad team that did the Hamas official in Dubai, for example, had likely been planning on the appearance of a heart attack, and so wasn’t worried about the hotel and airport cameras that filmed them. But they’d blown the job, and what was obviously an assassination led to an investigation. I wondered at the time why they hadn’t called me. Maybe Delilah had told them I was out of the life. I smiled bitterly at the notion, and the memory, and kept moving down the stairs.

I turned the corner into the station proper and there was the second guy, standing under the florescent lights in front of the ticket vending machines, looking at the wall map above like an extra-large, extra-confused tourist. Kasuga isn’t a main thoroughfare, and the area was mostly deserted-just a glassy-eyed ticket puncher in a booth, looking about as sentient as a potted plant, and a couple of high school kids who were testing their English trying to help my new friend find whatever it was he was looking for. I heard him grumble that he was fine as I moved past and could almost have sympathized-having a civilian address you when you’re trying to be invisible is always a bitch. I slid a prepaid pass into the ticket machine and went through to the platform.

I strolled slowly along, the grimy tracks below me and to my right, the white tiled wall gleaming to my left. I passed a few Tokyoites standing here and there-a girl with tea-colored hair and garish makeup texting on a mobile, a sarariman absently practicing his golf swing, a couple of people I recognized from the Kodokan-but no one who tickled my radar. About two thirds of the way to the end I stopped and stood with my back close to the wall. But for the hum of an air conditioning unit, the platform was silent. From somewhere inside the tunnel to my left, I could just hear dripping water.

I might have glanced back, but doing so would only confirm what I already knew: they had fallen in behind me. They’d keep well down the platform, and when a train arrived they’d get on it, two or three cars away. At each stop, they’d check through the sliding doors to see if I was getting off, and follow me when I did. When they’d tailed me to a venue they found sufficiently dark, or isolated, or otherwise suitable for the business at hand, they’d do what they came for and depart.

But that’s the problem with dark, isolated, and otherwise suitable venues. Like tracer rounds, they work in both directions.

I felt a rumble approaching from far down in the tunnel to my right, and a voice over a public address system announced the arrival of a Meguro-bound train. The rumble grew louder. I glanced to my right and glimpsed the two giants, pressed against the wall about halfway down the platform-the spot I’d most likely overlook if I glanced in the direction of an approaching train. Not too close to alarm me; not so far that they’d get picked up in the natural angle of my vision. I didn’t know who I was dealing with, but the positioning showed some experience.

It wouldn’t have been hard to lose them. I doubted they knew the city well at all and they couldn’t possibly have known it the way I do. But I didn’t see the point. A long time ago, in another context, a man I considered dangerous told me the next time he saw me, he would kill me. I took him at his word, and prevented him from carrying out his promise. It was the same now. If these guys wanted to meet me, we’d get the meeting over with tonight. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder, wondering when they’d show up next. And I wasn’t going to look for an opportunity to politely ask them about the nature of their interest, either. When you’ve spent a lifetime in my former line of work, and when two guys this big show up at your only possible known locale and start following you, it’s time to assume the worst, and to act accordingly.

The train hurtled out of the tunnel and began to slow, its brakes hissing, its wheels screeching against the metal tracks. It shuddered to a stop and the doors slid open. A few passengers stepped out. I walked into a mostly empty compartment and stood facing the doors, just in case. No one else got on. After a moment, a loudspeaker voice warned passengers the train was leaving, and then the doors hissed closed and the train jerked into motion.

I thought I’d take them to Jinbocho, two stops away on the Mita line and best known for its numerous antiquarian book shops. I liked the area, too, for a coffee shop not far from the station, appropriately enough called Saboru, the Japanese word for lounging, loafing, playing hooky, or otherwise taking a timeout from the world. Though I would only take the giants past the coffee shop, not inside. And the timeout I had in mind for them was going to be longer than what saboru ordinarily implied.

When the train stopped at Jinbocho station, I got unhurriedly off and headed for the A7 exit. I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t need to. They might have been sufficiently familiar with Tokyo to know how quickly you can lose the subject of surveillance in the shifting nighttime crowds, the unmarked, narrow alleys, of a section of the city as old and labyrinthine as Jinbocho. Or they might not have been even that familiar, in which case they’d lack the confidence to let anything more than a short gap open up between us. Either way, they would stay close now until their first opportunity.

When I was a kid, I had to learn to deal with bullies. First in Japan, where small half-breeds like me attracted the righteous attentions of larger children for whom cruelty and joy were indistinguishable; later, after my father died, in small town America, where I was an exotic half-Asian kid with limited English and a funny accent. During my first week at the American public school in which my newly-widowed mother had enrolled me, I’d noticed a much larger kid eyeing me, a meaty, crew-cut blond boy the other kids called the Bear. The Bear had acquired his nickname, apparently, because his favorite thing to do was to grab his victims in a frontal bear hug, squeeze them senseless, then throw them to the ground, where he could hurt and humiliate them at will. I saw one hapless kid get the treatment-the Bear sucked him in; the kid tried to push away but then his arms crumbled; the Bear threw him down and beat the crap out of him. I figured everyone he’d ever grabbed must have reacted the same way: if someone is trying to draw you in to squeeze you to death, you’d naturally resist. So it stood to reason that the Bear might not be prepared for someone who failed to resist his embrace. Who, instead, embraced him back.

It didn’t take long for my turn to come. Though I lacked the frame of reference at the time, I recognized the behaviors-the looks, the comments, the accidental-on-purpose hallway shoulder slams-that for bullies on both sides of the Pacific constituted a kind of foreplay. And I instinctively understood that the little signs were all a tactical weakness, too, because they informed the intended victim of what was coming, and when. I resolved never to display such warnings myself, and I never have.

It was on a grass berm behind the school’s weedy baseball field that the Bear decided to consummate our incipient relationship. I’d studied him enough, and was experienced enough, to recognize even before he did that this would be the place and time. So when he nudged his friends and pointed at me, it was almost comforting, like watching an actor dutifully playing his part in a drama the conclusion of which I already knew. He swaggered over to where I was standing and demanded, What are you looking at? It was so much what I’d expected, I think I might have smiled a little, because although I didn’t respond, for an instant I thought I saw doubt pass across his features like the shadow of a fast-moving cloud. But then it was gone, and he was again accusing me of looking at him, the one line of inquiry apparently having exhausted his creative capacity, and he threw out his arms and lunged at me, just as I’d hoped he would.

As his arms circled my back and he started to pull me in, I shot my hands forward and dug my fingers into the back of his neck, my elbows braced against his chest. I felt him jerk in surprise but he only knew the one move and it had always worked before, so he didn’t stop-he locked his hands and started to squeeze, but now I was squeezing, too, my biceps tightening with the effort, my forearms corded, bringing his head alongside mine, and as our left cheeks connected I dug my face in, bit into his earlobe, and ripped it free with a jerk of my head. He screamed, suddenly trying to push me away, but I was clamped onto him like pliers and I bit him again, this time on the back of the ear. Cartilage crunched and tore loose and my mouth was filled with hot, coppery blood, and a primal frenzy swept through me as I realized how I’d made him bleed. He screamed again, lost his balance, and fell onto his back with me on top of him. I spat out what I’d chewed off, reared up, and started raining punches down on his face. He covered up blindly, in a panic. Someone tried to grab me but I slipped free and darted in for another go at his ear. This time I couldn’t find it-there was too much blood, and not enough ear-but just the feeling of the renewed attack made the Bear shriek in terror and scramble from beneath me as the other kids pulled me loose.

We both stood, the Bear crying now, his eyes wide in disbelief, his left hand groping shakily at the mutilated stump on the side of his head. The two kids who were holding my arms let me go and stepped warily to the sides, as though realizing they’d been standing too close to a wild animal. I looked at the Bear, my fists balled, my nostrils flaring, and felt a bloody smile spread across my face. I took a step toward him, and with a hitching, anguished squeak, the Bear turned and fled for the safety of the school.

The Bear’s parents made a fuss, threatening a lawsuit and excoriating my mother for raising such a wanton, savage child. The school held disciplinary proceedings, and for a while it looked like I might be expelled. But the hearings turned to a discussion of previous incidents in which the Bear had been involved, and of how he was so much bigger than I was, and I sensed in the official expressions of disapproval something pro forma, something with the aroma of a whitewash. Eventually, I realized that some cabal of frustrated teachers and outraged parents had been secretly pleased at the Bear’s comeuppance, and had used the hearings as the means by which they could achieve an outcome that had already been decided. It was the first time I’d seen such a thing, but later, I came to understand the dynamic is common, occurring, for example, every time some government appoints a blue ribbon commission to investigate the latest scandal. In the end, my run-in with the Bear blew over. Surgeons were able to save what was left of his ear. He grew his hair long to cover his deformity, and he never came near me again.

I learned two things from my encounter with the Bear. First, the importance of surprise. It didn’t matter what size, skills, or other advantages your enemy had if you didn’t give him a chance to deploy any of it.

Second, that there’s always an aftermath. Following the fight, I was lucky not to have gotten in more trouble with the authorities. Meaning it was better to take care of such matters in a way that couldn’t be attributed to you. Winning the fight itself wouldn’t mean much if you lost more afterward, legally or otherwise.

At the top of the stairs, I turned left onto the nameless narrow street fronting Saboru, with its eccentric mountain hut facade and profusion of potted plants around the door and under the windows. The light hadn’t yet entirely leached from the sky, but the area was already thick with shadows. A few knots of pedestrians passed me, probably heading home from work, or perhaps for a beer and yakitori in nearby Kanda. I knew my pursuers were close behind me, but they wouldn’t be comfortable yet-the pedestrian density wasn’t quite right. They’d be waiting for an especially congested area, where there would be so many people and so much tumult that no one would notice what had happened until several seconds after the fact. Or for an especially empty area, where there would be no witnesses at all.

I had a knife, a Benchmade folder, clipped inside my front pants pocket. But I would use it only for contingencies. Knives make a lot of mess, all of it laced with DNA. Guns, too, create an evidence trail. For sheer walk-awayedness, there’s really nothing like bare hands.

Past Saboru, the neighborhood grew more residential; the yellow streetlights, fewer and farther between. Within a block, the sparse clusters of pedestrians had evaporated entirely. Over the incessant background screech of cicadas I could just hear a set of footfalls from ten meters back. Coming, no doubt, from whichever of them was keeping me in visual contact. The secondary guy would be about the same distance behind the first, needing only to maintain visual contact with him. If they narrowed the gap between them, it would mean action was at hand. I wasn’t going to give them that chance.

There was a small parking lot on the left side of the intersection ahead. I had noted it on one of my periodic tactical explorations of the city’s terrain, and liked it because among a cluster of dim vending machines to its rear was the entrance to a series of alleys, more like crevices, really, leading back to the street we were walking on now. In fact, I’d just passed a gate that led from one of the alleys, though I doubted my pursuers would notice it, or, even if they did, would understand its current significance. From the sound of the lead guy’s distance behind me, I estimated that I could make it through the alley to the inside of the gate at about the same time the first guy would be pausing at the parking lot’s corner, trying to figure out where I’d gone, and the second guy would be passing the gate.

I made a left into the parking lot, and then, the instant I’d turned the corner, accelerated and turned left into the entrance to the alleys. Another left, past a row of garbage cans, and I was at the inside of the gate I’d just passed. I paused, my back to the wall, enveloped in darkness, and watched as the secondary guy passed my position. I waited several seconds before gripping the metal rail at the top of the gate and moving it back and forth to confirm solidity and soundlessness. Then I hopped up, eased my belly over, put a hand on each side, and rotated my legs around, landing catlike on the street side. There was the second guy, just a few meters ahead, approaching the edge of the parking lot. He was moving so slowly, it seemed he was aware his partner would have stopped just around the corner to look for me, and was trying to give him time. I wondered for an instant how he could have known his partner had paused-maybe just a sensible precaution when turning a corner?-but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was closing in on him, and that for the moment I had his back.

I traded stealth for speed, knowing I had only an instant before he might check behind him, and in fact as I reached him, he was just beginning to turn. But too late. I leaped into him, planting my left foot in the small of his back as though trying to climb a steep set of stairs. His body bowed violently forward and his head and arms flew back, and a startled grunt, loud enough, I was aware, for his partner to hear from around the corner, forced itself from his lungs. As he plunged to his knees, I wrapped my left arm around his neck, trapping his upturned face against my abdomen, secured my left wrist with my right hand, and arched savagely up and back. His neck snapped as easily as if it had been made of kindling, and with a similar sound. I let him go and he crumbled to the ground.

His partner appeared instantly from around the corner. He cried out, “Oh, fuck,” the vernacular, and the accent, I was distantly aware, both American, and lunged at me. I had no time to get out of the way, but neither the inclination. Instead, I held my position, extending my torso away from him so he was forced to reach for me, and twisted slightly counterclockwise as we came to grips. I extended my left leg, planted the sole of my foot against his right knee, grabbed both his biceps, and used his momentum to spin him counterclockwise in hiza-guruma. He was overbalanced and couldn’t get his legs out to correct because of the way I was blocking his knee. There was an instant of resistance, and then he was sailing past me, perpendicular to the ground, trying to twist away from me and turn his body toward the coming impact. But he was moving too fast for that now, and I was assisting his rapid descent, applying pressure to his shoulders to make them fall faster than his feet, wanting his cranium to bear the brunt. He hit the pavement with a thud I could feel as well as hear, his shoulders connecting first, then the back of his skull as his head snapped back. I dropped to my knees next to him but he wasn’t out, and even shocked and dazed as he must have been, he managed to turn into me and go for my eyes with his left hand. I grabbed his wrist with my left hand, slamming my elbow into his face on the way, snaked my right arm under his shoulder, secured my own left wrist, extended my body across his chest, and broke his elbow with ude-garami. He shrieked and tried to buck me loose. I scrambled back, reared up, and blasted a palm heel into his nose. The back of his head bounced into the pavement and I hit him again the same way. He rolled away from me, trying to get up, and I launched myself onto his back, throwing my left arm around his neck, catching my right bicep, planting my right hand against the back of his head, and strangling him with classic hadaka-jime. He struggled and thrashed and I kept an eye on his remaining good arm, in case he tried to access a concealed weapon. The choke was deep, though, and his brain was getting no oxygen. In a few seconds he was still and, a few more after that, gone.

I released my grip and came shakily to my feet, my heart hammering. I wiped sweat from my eyes with my sleeve and looked around. There had been that single scream, but I saw no one, at least not yet. Not likely either of them was carrying identification, but I felt I could afford a moment to check.

I knelt and pulled the guy I’d strangled onto his back. He rolled over with liquid ease, his broken arm flopping unnaturally to the pavement next to him. I patted his front pants pockets. A folding knife in the right. Something hard and rectangular in the left-a cell phone? I pulled it out and saw that it was a phone, as I’d hoped. But there was something else in the pocket. I reached back in and felt something metallic. I pulled whatever it was out and stared at it. It took me a moment to realize what I was holding: a small video camera.

Oh, shit.

A wire extended from the unit, disappearing beneath his clothes. I slipped my fingers between the buttons of his shirt and tore it open. The wire ran to one of the buttons. I leaned in-it wasn’t easy to see in the dim light-and looked more closely. Shit, it was no button at all, but a lens. And I was staring right into it.

I tore the wire free and stuffed the camera and phone into my pockets, then scrambled over to where the other guy lay. He was similarly equipped. I pocketed the second phone and camera, too, then walked off, keeping to the quiet streets paralleling Yasukuni-dori. I would take the batteries out of the phones to make sure they were untraceable and examine the cameras when I was safely away from the bodies. If the two giants had been using the equipment only to monitor each other, I would be okay.

But I had a feeling they weren’t just monitoring each other. And if I was right, I was in for another visit, and soon.

Larison stood just beyond the ambit of a streetlight, watching the silent images on the handheld video feed. One second, an empty street; the next, a crazy montage of kaleidoscopic images: limbs/grimaces/a car/a building/the sky flashing past. Darkness. Then the sky again, and glimpses of Rain, apparently going through Beckley’s pockets. Rain’s face in close-up, peering with dawning recognition directly into the button lens on Beckley’s cooling torso. A flash of static, then, finally, darkness.

He heard rapid footfalls from the direction of the Jinbocho subway station and looked up to see Treven come tearing around the corner. Larison pocketed the video monitor and stepped into the street with his arms forward, palms out.

“Stop,” he said. “It’s already over.”

Treven slowed, his face registering confusion. Probably he’d been expecting Larison to be riding to the rescue, too, no matter how futile a rescue attempt would be at this point. Meaning he hadn’t absorbed what Larison had told him about the contractors not being part of the team.

“Go!” Treven said, moving to go around. “Didn’t you see the video? Rain ambushed them!”

Larison moved with him and shoved him back. Treven’s face darkened and he dropped his weight like a bull about to charge.

Larison held up his hands again. “Don’t make a scene,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do. They’re already dead.”

“We don’t know that. Rain’s gone, okay, but-”

“They. Are. Dead.”

Treven straightened and some of the tension went out of his body. “What about the cell phones?” he said. “The equipment. We need to retrieve it.”

“Rain took it all.”

“How the hell do you-”

“Wouldn’t you have? But it doesn’t matter. I watched him, over the video feed. He took the equipment and he’s gone.”

Treven watched him silently for a moment. Then he said, “You were close enough. You could have done something, if you’d wanted to.”

Larison glanced at the street behind him, then back at Treven. In some ways, he sympathized with Treven, who Larison understood was grappling with his recent first contact with the real world in the same way Larison once had. On the other hand, he didn’t care for Treven’s stubborn patriotism, which he found sanctimonious and naive. And he hated that Treven knew his secret, having discovered Nico, Larison’s other life, when he’d tracked Larison to Costa Rica, looking for the torture tapes Larison had stolen.

“You manipulated them,” Treven said. “All that talk about taking the point…you goaded them. Because you knew what would happen.”

Larison shrugged. “What did I owe them? They were sent over here to spy on me. On both of us.”

Treven’s expression was incredulous bordering on disgusted. “They were Americans.”

Larison blew out a long breath. The contractors had been a hindrance, and he had gotten rid of them. It was no more complicated than that. He tried to remember a time when such a thing would have been a problem, when he might have paused beforehand and maybe even felt a pang of conscience after. He couldn’t. It had been too long ago, and too much had happened since.

“What does that have to do with anything?” he said.

Treven shook his head. “You’re a burnout.”

Larison didn’t respond. He didn’t know what to do. Kill Treven? But he needed him to get to Hort, and anyway Hort knew about Nico, too.

But once Hort was dead…

Once Hort was dead, the only person who would even know Larison was alive, let alone about his other life, would be Treven. Plus Rain, soon enough, and this other guy they were supposed to find. Larison needed them for now, he knew that. But once Hort was dead, all they’d represent would be downside.

Use the others to finish Hort, then finish them, too. Walk away with the diamonds, and silence everyone who posed a threat.

It was perfect. It could be done. All he had to do was bait the hook. The rest would take care of itself.

He tried not to smile. “Let’s just call Rain,” he said.

I had nearly reached Ogawamachi subway station, where I would catch a train and examine the items I’d taken from the two dead men, when one of their phones vibrated. I stopped and checked the readout-just a number, no name.

I looked around at the bustling street scene, cars crawling, pedestrians hurrying past me, the sky dark now, the area lit only by streetlights and headlights and storefronts. I pressed the “receive call” key, held the unit to my ear, and listened.

A low voice, almost a whisper, said in American-accented English, “I know who you are. Don’t worry, I won’t say your name on an open line. You took the phones you’re carrying from the two men I was with. It’s okay. I know they don’t need phones anymore.”

The natural question was, Who is this? I ignored it because of its likely futility, in favor of something more relevant.

“What do you want?”

“To meet you. I have a message from a fan.”

“Tell me over the phone.”

“No. If this is going to work, we’ll need to establish our bona fides.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“My partner and me.”

“Two messengers?”

“There were four originally, but yes.”

I paused, thinking about the video camera, trying to get my mind around what the hell this could be about. The evening was still sultry and I realized my shirt was soaked with sweat.

“Look,” the voice said, “I wasn’t any more enamored of the two guys you just met than you were. If I had been, I wouldn’t have encouraged them to get so close. I sent them inside twice. I knew you’d see them.”

I wondered whether that was bullshit. But the timing of the call and the calm confidence of the voice suggested I was talking to someone who’d foreseen this, even planned it.

“It’s up to you,” the voice said. “But I have something you’ll want. A unit that was receiving from the two you’re carrying now. Take your time examining them, you’ll see I’m telling the truth. Then, if you want the one I’m holding, we can meet.”

I considered proposing a creative rectal use for the unit he claimed to be carrying, but decided against it. The calculus was the same as for the two giants. I could face this now, tonight, or I could spend the rest of my days wondering who was after me, what they wanted, how far they were willing to go. And let whoever it was answer my questions at a time and in a manner of their choosing, not mine.

“Where are you right now?” I asked.

“If you’re still on foot, we can’t be more than a half mile apart.”

“There’s a coffee shop near the subway station I came out of. I’m assuming you were somewhere behind the two who followed me out?”

“That’s right.”

“You passed it ten seconds after you hit the street. Big yellow sign, distinctive frontage. On the right coming around from the station.”

I clicked off and pulled the batteries from the phones and the video cameras. The timing wasn’t great-if they’d been behind me the whole time, they were closer to Saboru than I was. I would have preferred to get there first and watch from the street. But there would have been disadvantages in proposing someplace farther away, too. First, I would have had to give explicit rather than oblique instructions over the phone. Second, they would have had more to time to set something up, if that’s what this was about. Overall, I judged my chances best if I could keep them on a short clock.

It took me less than ten minutes to get back to Saboru. I made two circuits, the first wide, the second passing directly in front. Sepia lights glowed in the windows but the bamboo plantings made it impossible to see inside. I stood at the dim corner of the street for a moment, looking left and right, considering. The cicadas had gone temporarily quiet, and the only sound was of the suzumushi-bell crickets-Saboru’s centenarian proprietor keeps in a cage by the entrance because he finds their evening music pleasing. I saw no Caucasians and nothing seemed out of place. My guess was, whoever had called me was already inside.

I walked over and went in, my gaze sweeping the softly lit interior. A young hostess offered to seat me and I told her as I continued to check tables no thank you, I expected my friends were already here. The ground floor was about half-filled with an ordinary assortment of after-work sarariman types and loafing college students. There was a quiet background murmur of conversation mixed with J-pop music emanating from speakers affixed to the corners of the low ceiling. No foreigners, nothing out of place. I took the wooden stairs to the second floor. Again, nothing. Then to the basement, squatting as I descended the stairs to get a view of what I was up against before I’d gone all the way down.

I spotted them immediately, in a corner booth, their backs to the brick wall, both big and fit-looking. One, in his thirties, with blond hair and a strong jaw, quintessentially American; the other, about a decade older, with shorter, dark hair and darker skin, harder to place. I wondered which had spoken to me and for some reason sensed it was the darker one. There was something dangerous-looking about him, an explosive quality I could feel from across the room even though he was sitting perfectly still. Their hands were open, resting on the pitted wooden table. A good sign, or at least the absence of a bad one. They kept still and watched me, their steady gaze the only indication there was any connection between us.

I kept moving, sweeping the cave-like room with my eyes, confirming there was no one else here who looked like he didn’t belong. There was another table open in the opposite corner. I inclined my head toward it to indicate they should follow, walked over, and stood by the bench with my back to the wall. I didn’t want to sit in the spot they had chosen, or to offer them a view of the stairs while I was denied it. And I wanted to have a chance to see them head to toe, to watch how they moved, as they had just done me.

They got up and walked slowly over, no sudden movements, keeping their hands clearly visible. We all sat down wordlessly and watched each other for a moment. A waitress came by and handed us menus, which were in Japanese. The darker guy glanced at his, then looked at me with the trace of a smile. “What do you recommend?”

I’d been right: the same quiet, raspy voice I’d heard on the phone. “I hear the house coffee is good,” I said.

He glanced at the blond guy, who shrugged. Their demeanors intrigued me. The blond guy seemed on edge, as he ought to have been, as indeed I was. The dark guy, on the other hand, was incongruously relaxed, and seemed almost to be enjoying himself.

I ordered three coffees and three waters and the waitress moved off. I nodded at the dark guy. “What do I call you?”

“Larison.”

I turned my head to the other guy, who said, “Treven.”

“All right, Larison and Treven. What do you want?” The more on-point question, of course, would have been, Who do you want me to kill? But it didn’t matter which route we took. We’d arrive at the same destination.

“We were sent just to find you,” Larison said. “The one who wants something from you is Colonel Horton. Scott Horton.”

The name was familiar, but for a moment, I couldn’t place it. Then I remembered something from Reagan-era Afghanistan, a time that felt to me now, when I considered it at all, so remote it could have been someone else’s life. The CIA had recruited former soldiers like me to train and equip the Mujahadeen who were fighting the Soviets, and though deniability had been imperative, there were a few active-duty military in theater, too, to liaise with the irregulars. There had been a young Special Forces noncom everyone called Hort, whom we’d teased because, despite his obvious capability and courage, he was black, and so an absurd choice for a covert role in Afghanistan. He assured us, though, that this was the point: if he was captured, Uncle Sam wanted to be able to say to the Russians, You think we’d be stupid enough to send a black soldier to blend in Afghanistan? Must have been a freelancer, a black Muslim answering the call of jihad. See how your wars are radicalizing people? What a shame.

I said, “This guy cut his teeth in Afghanistan?”

Larison nodded. “Training the Muj, yeah.”

“White guy?”

“No. Black.”

“Does he go by a nickname?”

“Hort.”

Sounded like a match. He must have received a commission somewhere along the way and then never left the military. I estimated that today he’d be about fifty. “And he’s a colonel now,” I said, more musing than asking a question.

“Head of the ISA,” Treven said.

I nodded, impressed. It was a long way from deniable cannon fodder to the head of the Intelligence Support Activity, the U.S. military’s most formidable unit of covert killers.

“And you?” I asked, looking at Larison, then Treven. “ISA?”

Treven nodded. He didn’t seem entirely happy about the fact, or maybe he was just uncomfortable acknowledging an affiliation he would ordinarily reflexively deny.

Larison said, “Once upon a time. These days, I just consult.”

“Pay’s better?”

Larison smiled. “You tell me.”

“The pay’s okay,” I said. “Healthcare’s not so great.”

Treven glanced at Larison-a little impatiently, I thought. Maybe the kind of guy who liked to get right down to business. He didn’t understand this was business. Larison and I were trying to feel each other out.

“And the other two?” I said.

“Contractors,” Larison said. “One of the Blackwater-type successors. I can’t keep track.”

I glanced at Treven, then back to Larison. “So, ISA, a consultant, contractors…That’s a fairly eclectic gang you’ve got there.”

“We didn’t ask for the contractors,” Larison said, turning his palms up slightly from the table in a what can you do gesture. “That was Hort. I guess you could say he…overstaffed this thing.”

“And you downsized it.”

He dipped his head slightly as though in respect or appreciation. “You and I both.”

He seemed determined to let me know there were no hard feelings about the two dead giants-indeed, to acknowledge he’d deliberately sacrificed them. And now he was implying some distance between himself and Horton, too, and implying some commonality between himself and me. I wasn’t sure why.

“What’s Horton’s interest?” I asked.

“We don’t know the particulars,” Treven said. “All he told us was, he’s rebuilding, and he wants to make you an offer.”

“Rebuilding what?”

“I don’t know. Something about an operation you took down, run by a guy named Jim Hilger.”

Hilger. I didn’t show it, but I was surprised to hear the name. In all the times we’d crossed paths, first in Hong Kong, where he was brokering the sale of radiologically-tipped missiles and nuclear materiel, and then in Holland, where he’d been running an op to blow up the port in Rotterdam and drive up the price of oil, his affiliations had never been entirely clear to me. The last time I’d run into him was in Amsterdam, which was the last time he ran into anyone. If Horton had been involved with the late Jim Hilger, whatever he wanted was apt to be hazardous.

“What do you know about Hilger?” I asked.

Treven shook his head. “No more than I just told you.”

Larison said, “I’ve heard of him.”

“Who did he work for? Was he government? Corporate?”

Larison laughed. “You really think there’s a difference?”

Treven frowned just the tiniest amount, and I sensed Larison’s comment made him uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure why. Well, neither was going to tell me more. And, given Hilger’s current condition, I supposed it didn’t matter anyway.

“Anything else?” I said.

Treven said, “Yeah. This thing Hort’s trying to rebuild is going to include a former Marine sniper named Dox, who you’re supposed to know.”

I didn’t respond. I hadn’t seen Dox in a while, but we were in touch and I knew he was still living in Bali. He didn’t need work, but this would probably interest him anyway. It wasn’t a question of money with Dox. He just liked to be in the thick of it.

A part of my mind whispered, And you? I ignored it.

Larison said, “You might want to contact Dox yourself. If you don’t, we have to, and what’s the point of getting more contractors killed?”

Again, I was intrigued by his hint that he didn’t mind what happened to the contractor elements of his team.

The waitress returned with our order and left. Larison took a sip of coffee and nodded appreciatively. Treven didn’t touch his.

I drained my water glass and looked at them. “What does Horton have on you two?”

Neither of them responded. Well, he had something. And now they had something on me.

But then Larison surprised me. He said, “The video recorder is in my pocket. Mind if I reach for it?”

The question was appropriate. In a situation like this one, with someone like me, you want to keep your hands visible. Especially once you’ve established that you’re too smart to reach for something suddenly. The only reasonable inference would be that you’re going for a weapon, and the inference would lead to an unfriendly response.

I gestured that he should feel free. He stood and slowly extracted from his front pocket a unit like the two I’d taken from the giants. He placed it in the center of the table and sat back down. Then he glanced at Treven, who repeated the move, producing an identical unit.

I made no move to pick up the recorders. I’d expected the intent of the initial offer was only to get me to meet them, but now they seemed actually to be following through on it. Give up leverage for free? If they’d been clumsy civilians, maybe I could have read it as a naive attempt to beget goodwill with goodwill. But neither of these guys was naive. On the contrary, both of them had the quiet, weighty aura of men who’ve repeatedly killed and survived, an experience that tends to extinguish belief in the power of goodwill, along with most other such happy indulgences.

“There are no copies,” Larison said. “We don’t have anything on you. You want us to get lost, we’ll walk out of here right now. But the next team Hort sends, they won’t give you the video. They’ll use it.”

Probably he was lying about the copies, but I would never know for sure until someone tried to use them against me, and that would happen only if friendlier tactics proved useless. So Larison could be expected to try something relatively subtle to begin with. And so far he’d handled it deftly, I had to admit. You never want to present extortion as a threat: doing so just needlessly engages the subject’s ego and creates unhelpful resistance. Instead, you want to present the threat as though it has nothing to do with you, as though in fact you’re on the subject’s side. Maybe that explained the hints about a gap between Horton and them. It would have been a good way to help me persuade myself that my problem wasn’t with these two, but with someone else. If he was ruthless enough, and I sensed he was, he might even have sacrificed the two giants for the same end.

“Look,” Larison said, “no one can just disappear anymore. Everyone is findable. It’s a condition of modern life. You want total security? You have to disconnect. Live off the grid, remotely, no contact with the outside world. But if you like cities, and judo, and jazz, and coffee houses, and culture, all of which is part of your file, you don’t have a chance if someone like Hort is determined to find you. The only way is to make it so the people who are looking for you, stop looking for you.”

“How do you do that?” I asked, my tone casual.

He took another sip of coffee. “You wait for the right opportunity.”

“Or you make one,” I suggested.

He nodded. “Or you make one. And I’ll tell you one other thing. If you decide to accept Hort’s offer, whatever it is? Charge him for it. Charge him a lot. He can afford it.”

He sounded unhappy as he said the words, even acrimonious, and if I hadn’t picked up earlier on some kind of rift, I couldn’t miss it now. Whatever Horton was up to, I decided it must be important to him, if it was generating animosity in someone as seemingly formidable as Larison.

No one said anything after that. Larison obviously knew when it was time to shut up and let the prospect close the deal with himself, and Treven was smart enough to follow the older man’s lead.

We sipped our coffee in silence. Either this was an impressive piece of theater that included two dead extras, or what they were telling me, and what they were hinting at, was largely true. Horton wanted to make Dox and me an offer, most likely one we couldn’t refuse. He’d made similar offers already to Treven and Larison, who were unhappy about it and looking for an alliance or some other way out, but were also smart enough to keep those particular cards concealed for now. As for copies of the evening’s home video, for now there was no way to know. And for the moment, it didn’t really matter.

For the third time that night, I saw no advantage in waiting. I finished my coffee and took the video units from the table.

“How do I contact Horton?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“You heard right.”

“I’m listening.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Used to do.”

He laughed. “And yet, here you are.”

I ignored it. “He wants to meet me.”

“You think it’s a setup?”

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

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

“Any truth to that?”

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

It was true, then. “What else?”

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

“Why?”

“We’ve been in Afghanistan for over a decade now. Iraq for nearly that long. Plus other places that don’t make it into the news quite so much. A decade of global war means a lot of prominence for the military. They get what they want, and they want a lot.”

“What about a former ISA operator, last name Larison? And a current ISA guy, last name Treven?”

“The names don’t mean anything to me, but I can look. And I’ll keep my ear to the ground for anything on what Horton might want with you.”

Coming from Kanezaki, that might actually mean something. “I appreciate it.”

“Do the same for me. I’d like to know what he’s up to. You’re not easy to find, so he must be motivated.”

I sensed a hint of professional jealousy in the comment. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to share his assets. Or his former assets. And as a return favor, it wasn’t much. I told him I’d keep him posted and clicked off.

The third call was to Dox. “It’s me,” I said, when he’d picked up.

“‘Me’? Who’s ‘me’?” he said in his thick southern drawl.

We’d been through this before. “You know who ‘me’ is.”

He laughed, obviously pleased. “I know, I know, just trying to see-”

“If you can get me to say my name on the phone, I know. You’re going to have to try harder than that.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You’re getting older. I’ll get you sooner or later. How’ve you been, man? Goddamn if it’s not good to hear your voice, even with no name behind it.”

I briefed him on what was going on, and I could imagine him grinning on the other end.

“Sounds like someone’s going to get a mighty special going-away party,” he said.

“Yeah, and they want us to cater.”

“Well, I’m usually amenable to preparing some tasty victuals, if the per diem’s right. But what about you? I thought you were out of the catering business.”

“I’m just going to listen to a proposal.”

He laughed. “Whatever you say, partner.”

Dox was perfectly comfortable employing his deadly talents and could never understand my ambivalence. I said, “I’ll let you know what I learn.”

“Let me know? You’re fixing to go out there alone?”

“Look, there’s no sense-”

“I’ll tell you about sense. There’s no sense in leaving your dick flapping in the breeze while you walk into God knows what. I’ll meet you there and cover your back. And don’t tell me you don’t need it. You say that every time, and plenty of times you’ve been wrong.”

He was right, of course. He was as reliable a man as I’d ever known, and had once even walked away from a five-million-dollar payday to save my life. I just don’t like to have to rely on anyone.

But under the circumstances, the reflex felt like stupidity, like denial. “All right,” I said. “They’re paying me just for the face-to-face. I’ll split it with you.”

“Fair enough. What about your particulars? Secure site?”

Where possible, and especially with travel or other details that could be used to fix me in time or place, I prefer to communicate via an encrypted Internet site. Lately I’d begun carrying a Fire Vault and Tor equipped iPad-small, convenient, and a lot more secure than dedicated machines in Internet cafes, which are often compromised. “You know me,” I said.

“Yeah, I do, and I’ve learned to see some of the wisdom behind what lesser men would call your paranoia.”

I told him I’d post something within eighteen hours, then clicked off and strolled over to an Internet kiosk. There were plenty of seats available on all four daily JAL flights to Honolulu. Not the most direct route possible, but no sense in being obvious. I’d buy the ticket at Narita the next day, and likewise would take care of the L.A. leg once I landed. And I’d fly business, not first. Creating a larger data set for them to sift through wouldn’t indefinitely prevent them from zeroing in on the legend I’d be traveling under, but it would delay them, and under the circumstances a delay would be good enough.

Probably I was being overcautious. Parsimony suggested this was no more than what it looked like: JSOC wanting to contract out a particularly sensitive job, and probably one that involved natural causes. But as an organizing principle, parsimony has its limitations. Like most of what exists in nature, it can be manipulated by men.

Two days later, I sat alone at a corner table of the Beverly Wilshire’s The Blvd, enjoying a bowl of oatmeal and an Economic Energizer smoothie and slowly working my way through a pot of coffee, surrounded by a mixture of hotel guests in tourist garb and studio factotums preening about deal points over power breakfasts. I liked the hotel and would have spent the night there, but didn’t want to be a guest at the same place where, if things didn’t go well, I might have to leave Horton’s body behind. Instead, I’d stayed at the nearby Four Seasons, then strolled over to take advantage of the Beverly Wilshire’s low-key but pervasive security, which would make things more challenging for Horton’s forces if the meeting were a setup. Multiple entrances and exits on three separate streets would also complicate things for anyone planning something untoward. And on top of all the sound tactical reasons, it didn’t hurt that I liked their food.

Kanezaki had come through with information on Larison and Treven. Daniel Larison was indeed a former ISA operator, but was now deceased, blown up in the bombing attack on Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto in Karachi on October 18, 2007. Either the death was staged, or this guy was someone else who had stepped into the dead Larison’s shoes. And Treven was apparently Ben Treven, ISA, though this wasn’t a sure thing either because Kanezaki couldn’t get photographs that I might use to match against the men I’d met. But I supposed it didn’t matter all that much what their names were. What mattered was they were working for Horton.

I’d called Horton earlier that morning to let him know where he could find me, then headed straight over to ensure I could get a table with a view of the restaurant’s hotel and street entrances. Dox was a few tables away, facing me, concealed from the entrances by one of the giant, wood-paneled pillars.

We’d spent the previous evening catching up over dinner at XIV, a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. Over the chef’s tasting menu of heir-loom tomato amp; peach salad and Dungeness crab ravioli and other such delectables, Dox told me he’d grown bored with the little patch of paradise he’d built in Bali.

“It’s beautiful and all, you’ve been there,” he said, stroking his sandy-colored goatee. “I always thought it would be exactly what I wanted, my own place on the other side of the world. You know, far from the mad-ding crowd, and all that, but…I don’t know, maybe it’s not Bali, maybe it’s the life.”

“How so?”

“Well, shit. I can get work pretty much anytime I want it…there’s so much from the CIA and the Pentagon I’m not even taking anything from foreign clients anymore. I’m just tired of playing whack-a-mole with Achmed, I guess. I mean, what’s the point of being in the fire brigade, if the people you’re working for keep tossing matches on the underbrush? I should be glad, I realize-the big bad Global War on Terror means a nice annuity for people like you and me. What the hell, maybe it’s a midlife crisis. Maybe I should just buy a fancy car.” He took a healthy swallow of the Bombay Sapphire he was drinking, then said, “What about you and Delilah? How’s that going?”

I was drinking a 2007 Emilio’s Terrace from Napa Valley I’d discovered, strangely enough, in Bangkok. It was a cabernet and still young, but the fruit was delicious anyway. I felt vaguely sad for a moment to imagine how it might taste when it was really ready, in another decade or so. I looked at the dark liquid in the glass and said, “It’s not.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I left her in Paris. I’m back in Tokyo.”

“Back in Tokyo?” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I thought you loved Paris. Hell, I thought you loved Delilah.”

I sighed. “She wouldn’t leave the Mossad. I don’t know how many times I told her that one of us in the life and the other trying to leave it was making me insane. I finally just…I gave her an ultimatum.”

“I think I can tell by where you’re living these days how that worked out.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “Probably for the best.”

“I don’t know. Thought you two had something special, tell you the truth.”

I nodded. The three of us had been through a lot together: first, as opposing players on hair triggers; then, when the Mossad had brought me in to take out a rogue Israeli bomb maker named Manheim Lavi, on the same team; and then, most improbably, watching each other’s backs for reasons that had nothing to do with national interests and everything to do with personal allegiances. What had bloomed between Delilah and me, I knew, was as improbable as it was precious.

“You think about her?” he asked.

I looked away. “What do you think?”

“Well, what was it about her being in the life you didn’t like, exactly? I’m in the life, and you seem to tolerate me.”

“I don’t live with you.”

“Is that really the critical difference?”

“Yeah, it is. I was trying to learn…how to relax over there. You know? New city, nobody knows me, nobody’s looking for me. I just want to take it down a notch, not always feel like I need to be looking over my shoulder. Well, how am I ever going to manage that when I’m around someone whose job could bring a shitstorm onto us at any minute, and once actually did?”

He frowned. “Someone made a run at y’all in Paris?”

I nodded, remembering. “Paris is a bitch.”

He dipped his head gravely and looked at me. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime. But partner, you, relaxing? That I’d like to see. Go ahead, do it for me, just for a minute. But let’s bet on it first. I could use the money.”

I didn’t answer. I hated when he pulled the psychoanalysis shit with me. I hated it more when there was substance to his observations.

“Anyway,” he went on, “here you are, back in the life but without Delilah. Even with me as a dinner companion, it doesn’t seem like such a great bargain, if you want my opinion. Which I know you don’t, but there it is.”

“I’m not ‘back in the life.’ Someone tracked me down. I’m trying to straighten it out. It’s not like I have much choice.”

I expected him to laugh at my protestations, which would have been classic Dox. That he didn’t irritated me even more.

“What?” I said.

He raised his eyebrows in mock innocence. “I didn’t say anything.”

“I know. It’s not like you. What are you thinking?”

He leaned back and scratched his belly. “Just that…maybe you were more bothered by what Delilah does in the life than you were by the life itself.”

I didn’t answer. Delilah did a lot of things for the Mossad. But chief among them were long-term honey trap operations with high-value targets. She was a gorgeous natural blonde, intelligent, confident, and sophisticated, and she knew how to work all of it. I doubted they’d ever had anyone on the payroll as effective as she was, not that they ever appreciated her for it. In fact, she’d told me the missions they sent her on-to literally sleep with the enemy-made her continually suspect, even stained in the eyes of management. Which was part of the reason I found it maddening she wouldn’t quit. What did she owe them? Why was she loyal? They didn’t deserve her.

“You going to tell me it never bothered you, her going off for a month at a time without being able to tell you where or who with? You going to tell me you never woke up alone in your big bed in the middle of the night, wondering if right then, at that very moment, she might be straining the gravy with-”

“‘Straining the gravy’?”

“Yeah, it means-”

“Forget it, I can imagine.”

“It’s all right, it means-”

“You made your point.”

He grinned. “I wasn’t being too oblique?”

“No, you weren’t being too oblique.”

The grin widened, for the most part his usual shit-eater but with some sympathy in it, too. I might have argued further, but what would have been the point? Like Kanezaki, he could think what he wanted. What mattered at the moment was, he was armed-a Wilson Combat Supergrade Compact. I’d asked him how he’d managed to procure it so soon after arriving from Bali, and he’d smiled and told me only, “The old underground redneck railroad.” It was comforting to know he had my back in the Beverly Wilshire now, amid the ambient music piped in from the high ceiling, the oblivious background chatter, the incongruous tinkling of quality silverware cutting fine food on high-end china.

Forty minutes after I’d been seated, I saw a black man come in through the restaurant entrance. Older than I remembered, of course, his head hairless now, the body thicker with age but obviously still powerful. He spoke briefly with a hostess, who gestured to where I was sitting and then led him over. I watched as they approached, noting that he was carrying what looked like a ballistic nylon computer case but that otherwise his hands were empty, and that the red, short-sleeved, collared shirt he wore, tucked into a pair of khaki trousers, would offer relatively poor opportunities for concealed carry. He was dressed to reassure me, but I’d still check his ankles and for any telltale irregularities in the fit of his clothes, and watch the entrances to see who came in behind him.

I stood as they came near and shook his hand when he offered it. When the hostess had moved off, he said, “John Rain. Goddamn, but I don’t think you’ve changed a bit. What’s your secret?”

“Avoiding trouble, mostly.”

He laughed. “You’re keeping busy, is what I hear.”

“Not recently, no.”

“Well, I hope we can change all that. Shame for a man like you to be idle.”

We sat down and he placed the computer case on the table between us. He glanced around the restaurant, his gaze settling momentarily on Dox. He might have pretended not to recognize him, but because I assumed he had access to military photos, that would have put me on edge. So it was smart of him instead to say, “I imagine he’s supposed to shoot me if things here go sideways.”

I was glad he acknowledged it. If he’d invited Dox over, I would have had to spell things out. “Something like that.”

“An understandable precaution. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. I left my men outside, and I myself am unarmed.” He slid his seat back from the table and eased up his pants legs. Nothing but socks, from ankle to bulging calf. “Okay? I’m just here to talk.”

It was bold of him to show up without protection, especially after losing two men in Tokyo. But I supposed he’d put himself in my position, and knew I wouldn’t take a chance on killing him before at least learning more.

I was carrying a full spectrum portable bug detector in my pocket-all transmitter frequencies and mobile phone frequencies within five feet. It had been vibrating silently since his arrival.

“I need you to turn off your phone,” I said. “And take out the battery.” He could have called someone before arriving, someone who could be recording our conversation now. Or he could have the phone itself set to a dictation function. And if it wasn’t a phone setting off the detector, it must have been a transmitter.

“Of course,” he said. Because he didn’t ask me to do the same, and because my phone was turned off, I assumed the detector he must have been carrying, which would have been set to ignore his own phone, was quiet. He took out his phone, powered it down, removed the battery, and placed the empty unit on the table. The vibrating in my pocket stopped.

He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, his fingers laced together. “Well, you’ll be unsurprised to learn it’s about a job. One requiring your unique set of skills.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do, but all right, I’ll spell it out. That’s why we’re here, after all.”

He ordered a full breakfast-a Blvd Omelet, with mushrooms and black truffles; orange juice; a pot of coffee. I wondered how much of it had to do with appetite, and how much to demonstrate how relaxed he was.

When the waiter had moved off, he said, “Does the name Tim Shorrock mean anything to you?”

The name was familiar, but for the moment, I couldn’t place it. “Should it?”

He shrugged. “It depends on how closely you follow these things. He’s not the most prominent player in the Beltway establishment, but he is the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center.”

The information clicked with the name’s familiarity, and I felt a small adrenaline surge as I realized what Horton wanted. Without even thinking, I shook my head and said, “No.”

There was a pause. He said, “No, you don’t want the job?”

“No one would want it. It’s too difficult and it’s too dangerous.”

A detached part of my mind registered that I was objecting on practical grounds, not on principle. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought my response wasn’t so much a refusal as it was a negotiating gambit.

“Look, we’ve both come all this way. If you’re not in too much of a hurry, why don’t you just hear me out?”

His point was completely reasonable. And yet I sensed danger within it. Why?

Because you’re interested. Admit it. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t even have come.

No. I came to find out what this is about. Because forewarned is forearmed. Sound tactics, that’s all.

The rejoinder felt weak. Kanezaki and Dox, always chuckling at me when I said I wanted out. Were they right? Did they know me better than I knew myself?

The waiter brought over Horton’s beverages and departed. Horton stirred some cream into his coffee and said, “The National Counterterrorism Center focuses primarily on analysis and coordination, but Shorrock has been developing an ops capability. You see, prior to nine-eleven, al Qaeda wasn’t able to recruit Muslim Americans, but that’s changed.”

“You’re talking about the Fort Hood shootings?”

“And the attempted Northwest Air bombing, the attempted Times Square bombing, the planned D.C. Metro bombing, the planned Portland bombing…all the work of American Muslims.”

I laughed. “You mean after a decade of two open wars, a dozen covert ones, predator strikes, torture, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, hysteria about mosques…American Muslims are getting susceptible to calls for revenge? It’s shocking.”

He took a sip of coffee, then set the cup down. “I wish I could share your levity. But the problem is getting worse.”

“What does this have to do with Shorrock?”

“His men are involved with several domestic cells. Theoretically, Shorrock is supposed to penetrate a cell just deeply enough to gather evidence sufficient for criminal prosecution. In fact, he is now running these cells for real. You follow?”

“Shorrock’s a secret radical?”

“Shorrock is planning a series of false flag attacks on America.”

I didn’t like where this was going. “Why?”

He looked at me. “To provide an emotional and political pretext for the suspension of the Constitution.”

“You’re talking about a coup,” I said, my tone doubtful. “In America.”

“A coup against the Constitution, yes. You don’t think it can happen here? Do yourself a favor. Even if you don’t want the job. Google COINTELPRO, or Operation Mockingbird, oh, and especially Operation Northwoods. You might also look into Operation Ajax, Operation Gladio, Operation Mongoose, and the so-called Strategy of Tension. And those are just the ones that have leaked. There are others. Unless you think the Reichstag Fire and the Gleiwitz incident and the Russian apartment bombings were unique to their respective times and places and could never happen elsewhere, least of all in America. But you don’t strike me as that naive.”

“Was nine-eleven an inside job, too?”

“It wasn’t, though the way it’s been exploited, it might as well have been. But are you arguing that because not all cataclysms occur behind a false flag, that none of them do?”

The waiter brought over the omelet and Horton started in on it. I wondered how much of what he was telling me was true. And why, if it were true, I would even consider getting involved.

“You want some?” he said, chewing and gesturing to the omelet. “It’s delicious.”

“Why are you coming to me for this?”

He swallowed and nodded as though expecting the question. “The plotters are prominent individuals in politics, the military, corporations, and the media. They can’t just be killed or otherwise obviously removed, or the factions they represent would sense a threat and retaliate. I need their misfortunes to look natural for as long as possible, so we can do maximum damage to the plot before opposition can coalesce.”

I didn’t care for his premature use of we. But natural would explain why he was interested in me. “What else?”

“Some of the targets have significant security details, meaning you’ll need a team. That’s where your man Dox comes in, along with my men, Larison and Treven. This job could actually stand for a larger detachment, but size entails risks, too. I think the four of you can manage.”

“I don’t buy it. You don’t have the manpower in the ISA?”

“The manpower? Sure. The expertise? My friend, you’re being too modest. There are people who say you pushed a man in front of a moving Tokyo train in such a manner that a dozen bystanders didn’t see it, that even the security cameras didn’t pick it up.”

I didn’t see any advantage to correcting him, but the target in question had actually committed suicide with no assistance from me, and I was as surprised as everyone else standing on the platform when it happened. But my employer at the time believed it had been my doing and was awed. Funny, how legends get started.

“What do you have on Treven and Larison?”

“That’s between them and me.”

“Are they even part of the ISA?”

“They’re status is…”

“Deniable?”

“I suppose you could put it that way.”

“I hear ‘deniable’ and think, ‘hung out to dry if it comes to that.’”

He nodded. “Then don’t let it come to that.”

“And you want me to run this,” I said. “Not one of your guys.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got the most experience with this kind of thing. You know what you’re doing, and the other men will respect you. Plus they’re accustomed to following orders. You’re not. No disrespect.”

I looked at him, considering. He really thought I was going to do this. “Plus,” he said, “Larison, while a capable soldier, needs guidance.”

I sensed beneath the simple sentence a great deal of meaning. “What kind of guidance?”

“Discipline, for one. He’s like a gun-you want to make sure he’s always pointed in the right direction.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Let’s just say…he’s a man who has too much to keep hidden. A man in turmoil.”

First Larison, trying to show me there was distance between him and Horton. And now Horton, doing the same. I might have said something, but didn’t want to give away to one the possible maneuvering of the other.

“Why are you telling me so much?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t take the job if I didn’t.”

“I’m not taking the job either way.”

I expected him to say, Then why are you listening? But he didn’t. He’d know I’d be asking that question of myself, and answering it more convincingly than he could.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “What’s been relentlessly drilled into the heads of the American citizenry since nine-eleven, and following every attack and attempted attack since then?”

I glanced over at the restaurant entrance. “I don’t know. That they hate your freedoms, I guess.”

“Close. That we have to give up our freedoms. Every time there’s an attack or attempted attack, the government claims that to keep America safe, it needs more power and that the citizenry has to give up more freedom. Hell, by now, if the terrorists ever did hate us for our freedoms, they’d hate us a lot less. But they don’t. They hate us more. Meanwhile, Americans are being taught that if their country is attacked, it’s because they haven’t given up enough freedom, and all they have to do is give up a little more. Some determined individuals have recognized the situation is ripe for exploitation, and they’re on the verge of doing something about it.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes while he worked on his omelet. Dox kept a watchful eye on us, his left hand resting on the table, his right out of view.

When the plates had been cleared and we were down to just coffee, I said, “Here’s the problem. Let’s say everything you’ve told me is true. You still couldn’t pay me enough to take out the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.”

I wondered why I was still acting as though we were negotiating, rather than just telling him outright I had no interest under any circumstances. Was I really considering this? I wondered again whether Dox and Kanezaki were right about me, whether all my protestations about wanting out of the life were bullshit. But then why would I have pushed Delilah so hard to leave?

Horton was looking at me-a little critically, I thought. “You don’t care?” he said.

I shrugged. “It has nothing to do with me.”

“Nothing to do with you? What’s your country?”

“Are you talking about my passports?”

“I’m talking about your allegiances.”

“I don’t pledge allegiance to anyone who doesn’t pledge it back.”

“Let me ask you this, then. How many people have you killed?”

“More than I’ll ever remember.”

“Then what’s one more?”

I looked at him. “If he’s a threat? Nothing.”

He nodded. “I understand. It’s the same for me. I’ve taken a lot of lives, directly and indirectly, and some of them were under fairly questionable circumstances, I have to admit. One day, I believe I will have to face my maker and account for what I’ve done. Do you believe the same?”

I didn’t answer. Somewhere in my mind, an image slipped past the guards. A boy in Manila, clinging to his mother’s dress, crying for the father I’d taken from him. I remembered his voice, regressed, childlike. Mama, Mama. A voice I sometimes hear in my dreams.

“Occasionally I wonder,” Horton said, “when that day comes, if it could help my case to be able to say, ‘Yes, I’ve taken many lives. But look how many lives I’ve saved.’ You ever wonder anything like that? You ever wonder if there’s anything that could redeem men like us?”

Again, I said nothing. That single prison break from memory was emboldening others. Another boy, about my age at the time, supine on the steaming, pre-dawn river grass, whispering in a tongue I couldn’t understand, tears rolling from his eyes as his life ebbed through a chest wound into the sodden ground beneath him. A wound I had delivered.

Enough. Enough.

“Here’s the thing,” Horton said. “If we don’t stop this, in a few weeks’ time you’re going to turn on CNN and see video of the most horrific civilian carnage you can imagine. Rolling mass casualty attacks on the homeland calculated to cause maximum suffering and to achieve maximum media impact. You will watch those videos, and see the anguish of the survivors and listen to the bereavement of the families of the dead and you will know that it happened because you stood down. Because you could have done something about it but just didn’t care to. And on the day you stand before your maker, as one day you will, you’ll have to explain all that to him, explain to him and to the spirits of the slaughtered thousands how none of it was really your fault. You want that on your conscience? You want that on your soul?”

His delivery was strong, even impassioned, and I wondered what was feeding his fervor. His own sleepless nights, I decided. The wrong decisions he’d made, where he had pulled the trigger too quickly and shot an innocent, or held back too long and lost a friend. A mission he had missed. A wrong order he had issued. The deaths he had caused in trying to save lives.

A detached part of me was impressed at how effectively he’d made his case. He had at least three selling points he was prepared to use, and when each of the first two-loosely speaking, patriotism and “It’s just one more”-failed to elicit a response, he smoothly abandoned it and continued his reconnaissance by fire. My determined silence in response to his third line of inquiry would have told him all he needed to know. Not the specifics-the fallout of having been raised a Catholic, the increasing weight of the life I’ve lived and the lives I’ve taken, my nebulous hopes for some means of atonement, maybe even redemption-but the general, and accurate sense that he’d hit a nerve.

I sighed and glanced at the computer case. “What’s in there?”

“Particulars for Shorrock. Oh, and the fifty thousand we discussed. Yours, whatever you decide.”

Smart. I’ve rarely been shorted on a financial arrangement. No one wants to needlessly antagonize someone like me.

“What are you offering for this suicide mission?”

“There’s no reason it should involve suicide. Still, I’m offering one million dollars.”

I didn’t say anything. I had to admit, it was an attention-getting number. “Divide it with your team any way you see fit,” he said. “And don’t tell me it’s not enough. I know that game, and I respect you for playing it, but we both know that even if you decide to keep only a quarter for yourself, that’s more than you’ve ever been paid for a single job in your life. The next one will pay even better, too, but this one is one million, no more.”

I considered milking him for expenses, but decided there was no point. It was true, a quarter million for a hit was a huge premium, even factoring in the difficulty of the target.

“How are we supposed to get to someone like Shorrock?”

“I’d recommend this coming weekend, at the GovSec Expo in Las Vegas.”

“GovSec?”

“Government Security Expo and Conference. Every homeland security, defense, law enforcement, and intelligence contractor in America, all under the roof of the Wynn convention center, jostling for a more favorable position at the government teat.”

“What’s Shorrock doing there?”

“Nominally, he’s there to give the Saturday morning keynote. In fact, he’s there to be wooed by the boards of a half dozen contractors who are trying to lure him away from government service into a seven-figure advisory position. Access like Shorrock’s is worth more than a dozen lobbyists to these people. He’ll be getting the royal treatment all weekend.”

“You know how hard it would be to be to get close enough and alone enough to make something like this look natural, in a casino?”

“You’ll have some special tools. Go ahead, take a look in the case.”

I opened it. Inside were two Primatene asthma inhalers, held in place with Velcro straps.

“What are they?” I asked.

“The one with the red top is aerosolized hydrogen cyanide, three thousand parts per million.”

I whistled softly. Three thousand ppm is about what’s delivered in a gas chamber.

“That’s right. You spray it in a man’s mouth, or even just in his face, and he will be dead in under thirty seconds. But it dissipates extremely rapidly, and is-”

“Hard to detect, I know.”

“Especially if you’re not specifically looking for it. You’ll want to hold your breath when you administer it and I’d advise that you not linger in the vicinity, either.”

“Even so, three thousand ppm…”

“Yeah, it’s dangerous stuff, true. But you see the vial with the blue top? That’s the antidote, in case you accidentally inhale some yourself.”

“Hydroxocobalamin? Sodium thiosulfate?”

“You know your compounds. It’s both-they work best together. There are also hydroxocobalamin ampules in there, labeled adrenaline for bee stings in case anyone goes looking, and syringes. If you decide to go the cyanide route, and obviously it’s up to you, I recommend you all dose yourselves beforehand, just in case.”

“What else is in there?” I said, feeling myself getting sucked in, wondering why I wasn’t trying harder not to.

“Everything you could reasonably need. Encrypted phones, miniature wireless audio and video, everything. You work with me, you don’t need to spend time in a military surplus store. This is state of the art.”

Maybe so. It would still all need to be examined for tracking devices.

I looked around the dining room. Waiters moved briskly from table to table, carrying trays of pastries and fresh-squeezed juice and omelets to order. The tourists munched on forkfuls of eggs Benedict, excited at how soon the Rodeo Drive boutiques would be opening for them. The movie industry types smiled vacuously as they did their deals, bleached teeth radiant against salon tans. Dox sat watchfully, still as a statue of Buddha.

I’d need to test the spray before we went live. I might have tried it on Horton then and there and let him take his chances with the antidote, but it would have caused too much of a commotion. Well, I’d think of something. As for injecting myself with the contents of a syringe Horton or anyone else provided me, the chances of that were about zero. Anyway, I wouldn’t need to. There were commercial kits available.

I realized that, even with myself, I was raising only practical concerns. And neatly addressing them.

I asked myself what I was doing. I’d left Delilah because she wouldn’t get out of the life. But it seemed that, if anything, the problem wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in the life. The problem was, I wanted it too much. I was like a recovering alcoholic, and being with Delilah was making me want to drink.

So what was the first thing I’d done after leaving her? It looked like I’d found myself a bar.

I looked over at Dox. Just a prearranged signal, and he’d put a bullet in Horton’s head, then follow me out through the side entrance.

The problem was, I didn’t know if that would be the end of trouble for me, or the beginning.

Or maybe that was a rationalization. I didn’t know. Maybe Dox and Kanezaki were right about me.

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I’ve only ever had two clients I found out were lying to me,” I said. “You know what happened to them?”

“I can imagine,” he said dryly.

“When I do a deal, the client’s life is his collateral. You comfortable with that?”

“It’s what I expected.”

“No women or children. No non-principals. No B-teams.”

“Understood.”

“Have you told Treven and Larison how much you’re paying?”

“No, I have not.”

He probably thought I wanted to hold out on them. “Make sure you do,” I said. “We’re going to split this four ways even, and I don’t want any confusion about the size of the pie.”

He sipped his coffee. “I admire an honest man.”

“Where are they now?”

He smiled just slightly. “Waiting for you. In Las Vegas.”

I sat on one of the twin beds in a room at an off-strip Embassy Suites, Dox to my left, Larison and Treven facing us on the opposite bed. We would all check into the Wynn later that day, but once we were there, it would be better if we were seen together as little as possible. This would be our only chance to discuss Shorrock face-to-face.

It was strange to be in charge of the op. I prefer to be in charge of nothing larger than myself, and though I supposed that several years and multiple close calls of teaming with Dox and sometimes Delilah constituted a kind of practice, managing Larison and Treven was going to be a challenge. Neither struck me as a natural team player, and I imagined each was accustomed to long stretches alone in the field and to doing things his own way. Also, because I knew Horton had something on each of them, though I didn’t know what, it meant that in addition to whatever innate alpha male stubbornness I might encounter in taking charge of things, I also had to remember that their agendas might range considerably beyond the money the op represented.

But Horton was right-I needed four at least, and even so it wasn’t going to be easy. We knew Shorrock would be staying at the Wynn, but that was about all. We didn’t know what room he’d be in, and, outside the keynote, we had no details about his schedule. Given the size of the resort, without more it would take a lot of luck to find and fix him, let alone make him expire of “natural causes.” Nonetheless, I had an idea for how we might close to him, and I might have proposed it directly. But I decided it would be better to solicit opinions. I had no command authority over these people, and I sensed things would go more smoothly if I helped them reach their own conclusions, rather than presenting them with mine. So I asked Treven and Larison what they thought.

“The keynote,” Treven said immediately. “Cover the exits, follow him when he’s done, rotate the point, wait for the opportunity.”

It was the response I was expecting from Treven, who struck me as a little more eager and a little less devious than Larison, and I didn’t like it. “The keynote’s tempting because it’s our only real fixed point,” I said. “But that’s also the problem. Most likely he’ll be surrounded by hangers-on before and after. And worse, because it’s on his public schedule and therefore an obvious vulnerability, his security detail will be alert and keeping very close. It couldn’t hurt to try, especially if we find we can’t pick him up any other way, but I don’t think it’s our first choice.”

“Then what?” Treven said.

I rubbed my chin as though thinking. “The file says he’s a fitness fanatic,” I said. “I wonder if there’s something we could do with that.”

“You think the gym?” Treven said.

I nodded slowly as though favorably considering his idea. “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.” I turned to Dox. “What do you think?”

A dog was barking outside, the sound high-pitched and screechy, probably a small breed and apparently an exceptionally neurotic one. It had been going off intermittently since we’d checked in and its fingers-on-a-blackboard pitch made it hard to tune out. Dox got up, opened the drapes a crack, and looked down. “Wish that mutt would simmer down,” he said. “Looks like somebody tied it up by the pool. Nobody’s even there, what the hell’s it yapping at? Lucky for it I don’t have my rifle.”

When Dox was engaged-on what he was watching through his sniper scope, for example-his focus was supernatural. But when he wasn’t all the way on, he tended to be all the way off. “What do you think?” I said again, drawing on the patience our partnership required.

Dox let the drapes fall closed and sat back down on the bed. “Shoot, partner, you know I do my best work outdoors. I defer to you on this kind of situation. Main thing, it seems to me, is that we get him alone and away from all the cameras for a minute. Could be that means something with the gym. Or maybe a lavatory. Figure he’ll be drinking a lot of coffee, or green tea if he’s a health nut, he’ll have to hit the head at some point. Follow him in, spray him in the face, head back to L.A. for a beer.”

“We’ll need to test the cyanide first,” Larison said. “And assuming it works as advertised, pick up a commercial antagonist. No telling what Hort has in that ‘antidote.’”

At some point, when the moment was right, I’d press him on what was up between Horton and him. But not now. “How do you see it?” I said, looking at him. “The keynote, or the gym?”

Larison smiled, and I wondered if he knew what I was doing. “I think we can exploit the gym,” he said.

“I’m not saying we can’t,” Treven said quickly. “But it’ll take some luck. The file says he’s into CrossFit. Well, I do some CrossFit WODs myself, and you’d have a hard time predicting on any given day whether you’ll find me in the gym or out on the road. So for all we know, Shorrock could decide the hell with the gym, I’ll go for a run and see the sights.”

“Wads?” I asked, not revealing that I was pleased by his objections.

“Workout Of the Day,” Dox and Larison answered simultaneously.

I mentally corrected to WOD. “Am I the only guy who’s not doing this CrossFit stuff?”

“You do it already,” Dox said. “You just don’t know the name.”

“Well,” I said, “whatever Shorrock does, let’s take the potential obstacles one-by-one and see if the workout intel could be useful. First, how likely is it he’ll go for a run?”

Dox tugged on his goatee. “Hundred degree heat, hordes of tourists to dodge? Plus I guarantee the gym at the Wynn is fancy, and there’ll be ladies in spandex. Who’d want to miss that? So I’d bet against a run.”

As was often the case, I wouldn’t have put it the way Dox did, but I couldn’t disagree with his logic.

“All right,” Treven said, holding up a hand in a maybe so, but… gesture. “Let’s assume he’ll be at the gym at some point. It’s still a huge window. A real CrossFit guy would get up extra early if necessary to squeeze in a WOD before a full day of meetings. Or he might skip lunch to get one in, or maybe right before bedtime.”

The dog barked again. Dox said, “Christ almighty. That is the worst bark I’ve ever had to endure. Sounds like someone’s giving the damn thing an electrified enema.”

I tried not to picture it. Which of course just made it worse.

“You’re right,” I said, looking at Treven. “Still, if there were a way we could catch him at the gym, it could really put us in business. It’s not on his schedule, so not a hot spot from the perspective of his security detail. In fact, if one of us could be in there when he arrived, we’d likely be overlooked. He’s supposed to have two Secret Service bodyguards, right? That’s not a full detail. If it were the president, they’d have a full team to clear every room ahead of time, whether he was announced or not. But with just two, they’ll be focused more on anyone trying to follow Shorrock than they will be on people who are already in a place he randomly decides to visit.”

There was quiet for a moment. Treven said, “Well, we could try rotating through the gym. We’re all in shape, so to anyone else in the gym, the staff or whoever, a ninety-minute workout wouldn’t seem unusual, and probably each of us could kill a good amount of time showering or using the sauna or whatever in the locker room before and after. If we rotate through one at a time, two hours each, that’s an eight-hour window we’d have covered. Still fifty-fifty in a sixteen-hour day, but not bad, either.”

I nodded, pleased. I had the same idea, of course, but by expressing it as a vague wish, I’d let Treven turn it into a plan he could now feel was his own.

“It’s an interesting suggestion,” I said. “And now that you mention it, I think we might do even better. We don’t need wall-to-wall coverage, do we? Figure Shorrock will work out for at least an hour. If he’s not there when the first of us is ready to leave, the next person could show up, say, thirty minutes later and still easily overlap with Shorrock. That means we’re up to almost ten hours of coverage. And I’m betting he’s more likely to show up early than late. The part of his day that’ll be easiest to manage is the part before the meetings. Plus, the main reason he’s out here is to be wined and dined. That would all happen at night. So if we play it right, we’re actually doing significantly better than fifty-fifty.”

Dox drummed his hands on his belly. “Not bad odds, for Vegas. And there’s one other possibility, though I’d call it a long shot given the Sin City venue and all that. The file says he’s a church-going man. Every Sunday.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Well, he’s scheduled to leave on Sunday. Maybe a pious man would stop at a local house of worship on his way out of town. By the time his flight gets to the East Coast, with the three-hour time difference, he’d be too late for anything back home.”

I nodded. “Agreed, a long shot, and hard to know where he’d be going ahead of time, assuming he goes at all.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Though how many churches could there be in Las Vegas?”

“Hundreds,” I said. “If you want to make money in hospitals, you build where people are sick.”

Larison said, “I like the gym. We can rotate like Treven said, with thirty-minute intervals in between to extend our coverage. Whichever one of us sees him in there can alert the others. They have extensive spa facilities, and if he uses any of it-toilet, shower, steam room, hot tub, sauna-we’ll only need him alone for a second. Sauna or toilet would be perfect, in fact. Easily explained as a heart attack with the first, embolism with the second.”

I nodded thoughtfully, again trying to convey that these were persuasive points I hadn’t fully considered myself.

“Doing a man in the steam room,” Dox said. “When you say it like that, it sounds dirty.”

I didn’t bother pointing out that no one else had said it like that.

Treven said, “The gym makes sense.”

The dog barked again. Dox winced and said, “Car alarms, people who yell on cell phones in public, and people who don’t bring their yapping dogs inside. And people who put their seats all the way back in coach, while we’re on the subject. I swear, there’s no more civility in the world. Listen, I’m gonna grab a soda from the machine. Anyone want anything?”

The others shook their heads. Dox stepped out.

We talked more about how to approach Shorrock, what we’d do if he showed up in the gym, what we’d do if he didn’t. I noted Dox had been gone a little longer than a trip to the vending machine would have warranted, and wondered if maybe he’d felt an uncharacteristic need for some privacy and had actually gone out to use a restroom in the lobby.

“What about reconnaissance?” Treven asked. “We need to walk the resort to get the layout and nail down details. We can’t do it together, obviously, but we’ll be conspicuous as singletons wandering the casino. It’s strange behavior, and staff monitoring the cameras might pick up on it.”

No one responded right away, and in the silence, I realized the dog had finally stopped yapping. It was a relief.

“That’s a good point,” I said. “What I usually do in a situation like this is get an escort. They don’t care what you do or what you talk about as long as they’re being paid, and if they notice you watching your back or doing anything tactical, they usually attribute it to the fact that you’re married and afraid of being seen.”

“Works for me,” Treven said. “I’ve done it myself.”

Larison nodded. “It’s a good idea.”

There was the sound of a keycard sliding into the door lock, and a moment later Dox walked in. He was grinning.

“Well, the cyanide works,” he said, holding up the canister.

For an instant, I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then it hit me. I said, “You didn’t.”

Dox nodded. “I did. If I had to listen to that thing for one more minute, I was going postal, I swear. This way, it was two birds with one stone. The cyanide works, and we get to enjoy the sounds of silence.”

I shook my head and sighed, thinking I should have seen it coming.

“Oh, come on,” Dox said. “Tell me you didn’t think of it yourself.”

Treven said, “I wish I had.”

We all laughed at that, and maybe the laughter was good. Nothing brought a team together better than shared laughter-well, shared fighting, maybe, but bar fights were a younger man’s game, and anyway we couldn’t afford the attention. But the momentary sense of camaraderie struck me as likely to be just that: momentary. Nothing more than a lull, a veneer temporarily obscuring differences that might soon impel each of us to very different sides of a board, the contours of which I sensed but couldn’t yet discern.

Treven benchpressed a hundred eighty pounds at a dead weight station in the spacious Wynn fitness center, taking his time, going easy. He could have put another hundred on the bar, but that kind of weight would have been conspicuous, and besides, he was only here in case Shorrock showed up, not for a real workout. Shorrock was scheduled to check in that day, with the keynote tomorrow, and though check-in was at three, it wasn’t inconceivable he’d arrive earlier. So Treven had started in at the gym at noon, doing nothing other than the length of his workout to distinguish himself from the other guests who’d been coming and going. It had been nearly two hours already, and no sign of Shorrock. It was about time for him to move on and let Dox, who was on deck, take over. It was silly, but he’d been hoping he’d be the one to make the initial contact. He wasn’t used to feeling like the junior member of a team, and although it embarrassed him to admit it, he wanted a chance to prove himself.

They’d been here for three days now, and knew the public layout of the hotel well enough to be employees. They’d been over every inch of the property-every bar, every restaurant, every club, every store, every men’s room. The parking garages, the pools, the perimeter. Everything. They were as ready as they could be on short notice and given the other constraints they were operating under. All they needed now was a little break, something they could leverage into something bigger.

He set the bar back on the rack and walked over to the mats to stretch. He hoped he was doing the right thing, taking out Shorrock. He’d always been fine knowing the military would disown him if he ever blew an op, but at least he’d always been able to comfortably assume his actions had been sanctioned by the proper chain of command. This one was different. The president had an assassination list, true-in fact, its existence had recently leaked, along with the fact that among its targets were American citizens. None of which was news to anyone in the ISA, but it wasn’t like the president had called him personally. Treven didn’t know where Hort’s orders had come from, or whether there had been orders at all. But what was he supposed to do? The kind of shit the military used him for was so deniable he hadn’t received written orders in longer than he could remember. If he’d asked Hort for something in writing now, Hort probably would have referred him for a psych evaluation.

He rotated his neck, cracking the joints, and started doing some yoga stretches. It was a tricky situation. On the one hand, Hort had repeatedly proven himself manipulative and worse. On the other hand, if what he claimed about Shorrock was true, that he was planning domestic mass casualty attacks, taking the man out could save thousands of American lives.

But was that really the reason he was here? He’d never been so confused about his own motivations…hell, he’d never been confused at all. The deal had always been simple: a photograph; a file; intelligence on who, what, and where. How was always up to him. Why was never even a consideration. Now, everything was different. Maybe it was all a natural transition. Maybe before he’d been nothing but a tool, albeit a sharp one, and now he was waking up to the way real hitters played the game. Yeah, maybe. That’s what Hort had told him, anyway-that he was beginning to understand the way the world really worked, that he was on his way to being a player in his own right.

He was afraid of those security tapes, he had to admit. The way Hort had presented it, it was the CIA that had the tapes-the deputy director, a guy named Stephen Clements, specifically-and Hort was leaning on Clements to keep the tapes under wraps. But Treven wondered. Isn’t that exactly how an operator like Hort would position this kind of leverage? Someone else is trying to extort you, and I’m your best friend who’s stopping him. How could he ever really know? If he stepped out of line, he could easily find himself arrested and charged with murder. Regardless of the truth of it all, Hort would just tell him he was sorry, he’d done all he could to prevent it from happening.

He knew he couldn’t live this way forever. At some point, he would have to go after Clements, and probably Hort, too. That, or just tell them all to fuck off and take his chances. He wondered if the real reason he’d accepted Hort’s orders this time was just to defer that day of reckoning.

Or was it something else? Having learned through multiple near-death experiences just how much of the noble-sounding king and country rhetoric was bullshit designed to fool the impressionable and empower the corrupt, was it possible he still craved being on the inside so much he was pretending not to know better? When he put it that way, it felt pathetic, but the notion of abandoning the military-abandoning the ISA-was horrible. Just imagining it made him feel anxious to the point of panic. What would he do? Who would he be?

He blew out a long breath and popped up on his palms in upward facing dog, his pelvis on the floor, his back arched. He liked the yoga. He found he didn’t bounce back quite as quickly as he had in his football and wrestling days, and that the esoteric stretches seemed to help.

One of the attendants walked over, an attractive brunette wearing a spa uniform with a nametag reading Alisa. Treven had noticed her watching him earlier and wondered if she was interested. Apparently that would be a yes.

“I didn’t figure you for a yoga aficionado,” she said.

“I don’t know about aficionado,” Treven said, coming to his feet. “But I like the stretches.”

“It’s smart. A lot of guys who are into weights don’t stretch enough.”

“Do you teach this stuff?”

“Personal trainer. I don’t think you need it, though. I was watching you, you know what you’re doing.”

She was certainly easy on the eyes, and any other time, he would have been happy to follow wherever this led. But not today.

“Well, I better wrap it up,” he said. “You can only do so much yoga in a day.”

She smiled, just a hint of Oh, well in the way her eyes lingered on his. “Can I bring you anything? A towel, water…?”

“No, I’m good. Thanks for asking.”

“Okay, then.” She held his gaze for another instant, then turned to head back to the front of the room. Treven was about to follow her when a muscular, crew-cut guy in a dark suit came in. Treven made him instantly as a bodyguard-the build, the watchful presence, and no way was the guy here for a workout wearing a suit.

“Oh, one thing,” Treven said to Alisa, who turned back to face him. “The spa. There’s a steam room in there, right?”

He was stalling for time, wanting to see what the bodyguard did and who might come in behind him. It wasn’t necessarily going to be Shorrock. The Wynn did a lot of business with VIPs. Whoever it might be, he knew he’d look less noteworthy chatting up one of the attendants than he would on his own.

“There is,” Alisa said. “The steam is infused with Eucalyptus, so it’ll really clear out your pores and open up your sinuses.”

“I’ll have to give it a try. I don’t think I’ve ever had a Eucalyptus steam bath before.”

She smiled. “You’ll like it. I use the women’s every day I’m here.”

Treven tracked the bodyguard in his peripheral vision. The man scoped the room, but not carefully. Treven had the sense he was only confirming there was no other way in or out. And why be more thorough than that? Shorrock was important, true, but it wasn’t as though he was the president. And like Rain had said, if Shorrock was doing something unscheduled, the security detail would be more focused on someone following him than they would be on people who were already there.

“Every day?” Treven said. “You must have the cleanest pores in Vegas.”

Alisa laughed. “I don’t know about that, but it’s definitely good for your skin.”

The bodyguard walked back to the glass doors and held one open, and bam, in walked Shorrock. Treven felt his heart rate kick up a notch. Son of a bitch, they had him.

“I’ll tell you,” Treven said, keeping Shorrock in his peripheral vision, “I’ve always been jealous of people who get to work out for a living.”

“You look like you’re doing okay,” Alisa said, glancing down at his torso. “What are you in town for?”

The guard, he noted, hadn’t come back in. Shorrock was heading for the back of the room, where the free weights were.

“Just a reunion with some friends,” Treven said. She’d pinged him with that glance and the question about his plans. If he pinged back, she’d escalate. “Play some poker, maybe see that Cirque de Soleil show.”

She nodded, noting, no doubt, that this was the second time he’d failed to return a volley. “Enjoy,” she said. But then, keeping the door open: “And let me know how that steam bath goes.”

He smiled. “I will.”

He knew it would look odd if he stuck around much longer, but he thought he could afford to take just a few minutes more and see if he could pick up anything operational.

He walked to the water cooler and filled a cup, then strolled over to the front of the room to grab a towel. Through the glass he could see the bodyguard, pacing slowly in front of the salon, which put him between the elevators and the entrances to the gym and the spa. Yeah, the guy wasn’t worried about people who were in the gym already, but he might key on new arrivals. Treven thought Dox should hold off, that it was time to send in Rain. Rain was the only one of them whose size wasn’t itself conspicuous, plus he was Asian, or Asian-looking, anyway, which likely put him generally outside the kind of profiling Shorrock’s bodyguards would be doing. And beyond that, there was something about Rain’s demeanor that made him easy to overlook. There was a stillness about him when he was in public that might initially be mistaken for blandness, or even timidity. It was the mistake the contractors had made, and Treven would never forget the way the average-sized, meek-seeming Japanese guy he had assumed Rain to be had suddenly decloaked and dropped the two much larger men with his bare hands before anybody could even get there to stop it.

Besides, they’d agreed Rain would do the actual hit. He had the most esoteric experience-the rest of them were strictly firearms guys. In fact, of all the men Treven had killed, more than he could remember in combat, assassinations, and self-defense, he couldn’t think of a time he’d used anything other than a gun. Not that it would be so terribly complicated to spray someone in the face with cyanide, but on the other hand aerosolized cyanide was dangerous shit, and in an op anything could go wrong. The surest, and safest, way to deliver the dose would be directly into the target’s open mouth, and if there was anyone who could get close enough to make that happen, he guessed it was Rain.

He walked back to the free weights area. Shorrock, a wiry guy of about fifty wearing Under Armour shorts and a tee shirt, was doing pushups, his movements crisp and efficient. He had an iPod Shuffle strapped to his arm. Treven noticed he’d set down an aluminum water bottle at the base of the dumbbell rack, probably filled with some sports drink. The guy looked at home in the gym. Treven started to turn away, then noticed something on the carpet next to the water bottle. Son of a bitch, it was a keycard, in the hotel’s signature flaming red.

His mind raced through the implications. They’d expected Shorrock to take a locker in the spa. Obviously he hadn’t-maybe because he didn’t have time, maybe because Eucalyptus steam baths weren’t his thing. He’d come straight to the fitness center, after which, presumably, he’d be heading straight back to his room.

Was there a way to get the room number? There was a sign-in sheet at the desk outside. To use the gym, Treven had needed to write down his name and room number. The people at the desk then checked the computer to confirm he was a registered guest. Presumably, Shorrock had filled out the form, too. Maybe the bodyguards had told him not to, but Treven doubted it. Their security posture seemed pretty relaxed. It was a Las Vegas casino, after all-what could possibly happen?

He stood behind the massive pillar in the center of the room so the bodyguard outside couldn’t see him if he looked in, and glanced around to confirm no one was within earshot. The place was huge and the closest people were on the treadmills and exercise bikes, a good fifteen feet away. The whirring of the machines was audible from where he stood.

He pulled his cell phone from his shorts pocket and called Rain. “He’s here,” he said quietly.

There was a brief pause. Rain said, “Okay. I know you can’t plausibly stick around much longer. We’ll rotate my partner in and I’ll head to the spa to wait.”

“No, the spa’s no good. I’m pretty sure he’s not using it. He set his keycard down on the floor right here, so I’m guessing he never got a locker.”

“His keycard?”

Treven moved from one side of the pillar to the other to ensure no one had approached. “Yeah, we’re thinking the same thing. I’ll check the sign-in sheet at the desk and see if I can learn his room number. You send your partner down to the spa-have him tell the desk he’s just checking it out to see if he wants to spend the forty bucks. There’s a bodyguard outside but I don’t think he’ll care about your partner if he’s heading into the spa instead of the gym. I’ll swap our friend’s card for mine-”

“Don’t forget, the Wynn stamps guest names on the cards. They’re not just keys, they’re like credit cards for the resort.”

“He’d have to look awfully closely to notice that-he’s just going to see his red plastic keycard where he left it, not the little gold lettering on the bottom.”

“You’re right. Keep going.”

“I’ll head to the spa like I need to hit the head, and hand off the key to your partner. He lets you into our friend’s room, then heads back to the spa on some pretext, gives me back the key, and I swap it back. You take care of business in the room, perfect privacy, and we’re done.”

“The room’s too risky. Security detail might routinely check it just before our friend goes in.”

“Fuck, that’s true.”

“Plus these keys are smart cards. They can be programmed to log the times they’re used. No way to know whether the Wynn does that, but if they do, and someone were to check, it would look strange for the key to have been used to access his room while he was signed in at the gym.”

“Then why not take the key off him when the job’s done and disappear it? Keys get lost all the time, who knows where it’s gone. Anyway, no key, no evidence.”

Silence for a moment. Then Rain said, “That’s true. Still, if I let myself in and a bodyguard shows up for a sweep, the whole op is blown. But now that you’ve got me thinking, the key’s still useful. Do what you said. Call me if you can get the room number. If you can, I’ll call it from a hotel phone. If no one answers, I’ll take a chance on going in, plant one of the wireless cameras, and get out.”

“So we can know when he’s coming and going and then pick him up by the elevators.”

“Exactly. And maybe overhear something about his schedule, too. Better to anticipate him than follow him. I’ll let the others know what’s going on.”

“Understood. Okay, let me see what I can do here. I’ll call you back.”

He clicked off and put the phone back in his pocket. Shorrock had switched to sit-ups, twisting alternately left and right at the apex of each rep. Looked like a warm-up routine of bodyweight calisthenics. Treven took out his room card and undid the Traser watch he was wearing. He walked over to the dumbbell rack, squatted as though to select the one he wanted, and dropped the watch next to the base of the rack. As Shorrock came up, twisting to his left and away from Treven’s position, Treven hefted a dumbbell with his right hand and smoothly swapped the keycards with his left. He moved a few paces away, used the dumbbell to do a tricep stretch for a few moments, then set the weight back in its place and headed out.

The bodyguard was still pacing by the salon and paid Treven no particular notice. Why would he? Treven had come from the gym. The guard had already classified him as harmless. Mistake.

He stopped at the sign-in desk. There was another pretty woman stationed there, a new one whose nametag read Victoria, not the woman who’d signed him in two hours earlier. “Hi,” he said. “I’m going to use the spa now, but if I want to come back later, am I still covered?”

“Absolutely, sir,” Victoria said. “Spa privileges are always applicable for the whole day you’ve paid for them, or else they’re already included in your resort package. But you’re good either way.”

“Terrific,” Treven said. He glanced down at the sign-in sheet. The last entry read, Shorrock. And under room number, 5818. “Do I have to sign in again?”

“No, sir, you’re fine. Enjoy the facilities. Joshua inside will give you a tour, if you like.”

Treven thanked her and went in. The place was huge and absurdly deluxe-half locker room, half gentleman’s club, all leather and granite and inlaid mosaic tile-and he couldn’t imagine what it must have cost. An attendant-Joshua, from the nametag-came over and asked him if he needed anything, a tour, instructions, recommendations. Treven told him he was fine and the man moved discreetly off.

Treven took out the phone, sat in one of the overstuffed leather chairs, and called Rain. “Got the key,” he said quietly. “Room 5818. Repeat: 5818. I’m in the spa.”

“Good. My partner’s on the way.”

Treven clicked off and tried to look like he was relaxing. Three minutes later, Dox walked in. “Hot damn,” he exclaimed, the hick accent especially thick. “Have you ever seen anything like this? I swear, I love Las Vegas!”

Treven winced inside. There was something to be said for hiding in plain sight, but Dox was pushing it.

Joshua walked over. “Would you like a tour of the facilities, sir?”

“It’s good of you to offer, son,” Dox said, “but I’m already a believer. Wondered whether a glorified locker room would be worth forty dollars, but you’ve set my mind at ease. Just going to take a little look around so I can see what I’ll be coming back to.”

“Very good,” Joshua said. “If you need anything at all, please just ask.”

“Well,” Dox said, “now that you ask, you got anything to drink?”

“Cucumber infused water? Or citrus infused?”

“Oooh, a cucumber infusion. That sounds nice. I’d like to try one, if you don’t mind.”

Joshua walked over to a crystal cooler filled with water, ice, and cucumber slices, and began filling a glass. Treven got up and walked past Dox, palming him the keycard without looking at him as he went by. He went inside one of the toilet stalls, from which he heard Dox say with theatrical satisfaction, “I swear, that is refreshing and delicious. You’re a good man, Mister Joshua, and I’ll be back in a little while for sure. Going to be the best forty dollars I’ve ever spent.”

Treven used the toilet, then got himself a cucumber infusion and returned to the leather chair, where he leafed through a hotel magazine. A soft-looking guy in a plush hotel robe, his face red and dripping with sweat, presumably from the eucalyptus steam room, came from around the corner and sat nearby. Too bad. Well, they couldn’t expect to have the area to themselves. They’d been pretty lucky already.

Less than ten minutes later, Dox was back. He started to head toward Treven, then saw the guy in the robe. He stopped and called out, “Mister Joshua, I forgot to ask you. Will I need bathing attire to enjoy the hot tub? Or is a more natural state of affairs permissible at this facility?”

Joshua appeared from around the corner. “Uh, it’s, whatever you’re comfortable with, sir,” he stammered.

“Well, I’m comfortable with just about anything myself. It’s anyone else I don’t want to make uncomfortable. Some people, you know, they don’t like the sight of the naughty bits.” He smiled at the guy in the robe as though he might be a prime example.

In spite of the tension, or actually because of it, Treven had to suppress a laugh. Joshua said, “Really, sir, it’s entirely up to you.”

Dox beamed. “Thank you again, Mister Joshua. I’ll just help myself to another cucumber infusion and be on my way. Sorry for distracting you from your duties.”

“No distraction at all, sir,” Joshua said. “If you need anything else, please just let me know.”

Joshua disappeared around the corner again. Dox picked up one of the hotel magazines. “The Robb Report,” he said, flipping through it. “Lifestyles of the rich and famous. Look at this, a new Veyron Super Sport for two point four million dollars. Yeah, the old model just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. Maybe I’ll order one, if things go well at blackjack tonight.” He set the magazine down and walked off.

The guy in the robe started to get up. “There’s a new Veyron?” he said.

Treven was out of his seat so fast he might have been a Veyron himself. “Wow, I need to see that,” he said, snatching up the magazine. He held it in one palm and it opened naturally to the page where Dox had wedged Shorrock’s room key.

“Jeez,” the guy in the robe said. “You going to buy one right now?”

Treven palmed the key and made an expression of chagrin. “You’re right,” he said, “that was rude.” He held out the magazine.

“No, that’s okay,” the guy said. “I can wait.”

Treven glanced at his wrist. “Oh, shit, I left my watch in the gym. No, take it, I shouldn’t have grabbed it like that and anyway, I need to get my watch.” He handed it over and headed back to the gym, wondering if Dox was as dumb as he seemed. He was starting to think maybe not.

He walked past the bodyguard, who glanced at him without interest, and into the gym. Alisa saw him and said, “Did you forget something?”

“I did, actually. My watch. Did anyone turn one in?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so. Where did you leave it?”

“Back by the dumbbells. I’ll take a look.”

He started to head back. Shorrock was gone. So was the water bottle. So was the keycard.

Shit, shit, shit…

He glanced around wildly, momentarily forgetting himself. Shorrock was on an elliptical machine. He’d been obscured by one of the pillars. Okay, okay. The water bottle and keycard were on the floor next to him-he must have been in the habit of taking his things with him as he moved from station to station. And he obviously hadn’t noticed the card wasn’t his. The problem was, the card was now on the floor right next to him, and the glass wall he was facing was reflecting like a mirror because the corridor outside it was lit less brightly than the gym itself. And unlike before, when he was twisting from side to side as he did sit-ups, the elliptical machine had him facing unwaveringly ahead into the mirrored glass.

He had to swap the keys back. If Shorrock made it back to his room with the wrong key, he’d know somebody had switched them. The security detail seemed relatively relaxed, but this would be a giant red flag. They wouldn’t leave Shorrock alone for a minute, not to mention all the attention that would be focused on the guy whose key Shorrock had wound up with.

He remembered why he was ostensibly in here, and walked over to the dumbbell rack. Alisa came up alongside him. “Left side or the right side?” she said.

Shit, this was getting more complicated. “Left side,” he said.

She knelt down. An idea came to him. He squatted down next to her and pulled the laces loose on one of his sneakers.

“There it is,” she said. “You’re in luck.” She reached back and retrieved it, then stood and handed it to Treven.

He smiled. “Nothing like a little luck in Vegas.”

They started heading back to the front, passing the elliptical machines. Alisa said, “So, are you going to try the-”

Treven tripped. He let the watch go flying and arrested his fall by placing his hand on the floor right next to Shorrock’s key. Alisa lunged for the watch. She missed it, but her attention had been drawn long enough for Treven to make the switch. He was betting Shorrock’s gaze had followed her lateral movement rather than his downward one, but even if not, he’d look down and see his card and water bottle exactly as he’d left them.

“Shit,” Treven said, straightening up. “That’s embarrassing.”

Alisa picked up the watch, glanced at it, and gave it back to him. “Looks like it’s okay.”

Treven looked at it and nodded. “These are good watches.”

She looked down at his feet and smiled. “You better tie that lace.”

He bent and took care of it and they headed back to the front. “Okay,” he said, “this time I’m trying the steam room. I’ll be safer in my bare feet.”

“Let me know how it goes,” she said, giving him another smile.

He headed back into the spa and called Rain. “We’re good. Cards are switched back. Our friend is still at it. He’ll probably be an hour or so. You should head down here to the spa in case he pops in to use a toilet. Other than that, though, I don’t think he’s coming.”

“It’s okay,” Rain said. “The camera’s in place. That’ll be a huge help. If we can’t get to him in the spa, we’ll get another chance.”

Treven hoped he was right. But two near things in a row-the magazine, then Shorrock moving the key-had him on edge. Both had been saved by luck. It was hard to imagine they’d be that lucky a third time.

Getting a camera into Shorrock’s room was a lucky break, but we still had to exploit it. Overall, though, the signs were good. We had him on audio, discussing his plans for the evening: dinner at the Michelin-starred French restaurant Alex at seven; drinks at the nightclub Tryst at ten; the casino floor for gambling, or “gaming,” as the industry marketeers insist on prettifying it, before and after. I thought there was a decent chance we could wrap the whole thing up that night.

Larison and I, each accompanied by an interchangeable platinum blonde Las Vegas escort, managed to get tables at Alex, and even better, Larison had line-of-sight to the private dining room where Shorrock was being entertained. Halfway through the long meal, I felt my mobile phone vibrate in my pocket-the signal from Larison that Shorrock was heading toward the restroom. I excused myself quickly and got there ahead of him, just as we’d planned. It was empty, even the stall doors all slightly ajar. My heart kicked up a notch. This was it.

I stood at the urinal on the far right as though taking a leisurely piss and waited. A moment later, I heard the door open behind me. I concentrated on listening and resisted the urge to glance back. Footsteps, coming closer. And suddenly there he was, walking up to the urinal on the far left, obeying the unspoken men’s room etiquette that you leave as much space between you and the other guy as the arrangement of urinals will allow.

Larison would have signaled Dox by now, who would be waiting just outside the restaurant so I could duck out and hand off the cyanide canister when it was done. There was only a remote chance that anyone in the restaurant might immediately fall under suspicion, but I didn’t want to be holding the murder weapon if it happened.

I glanced over and saw Shorrock was swaying slightly, his face flushed from alcohol. My phone buzzed in my pocket-Larison again, the signal for someone else on the way. But damn it, I only needed a second. I dropped my hand into my pants pocket, gripped the canister, and started to pull it out. Just as it started to clear my pocket and in the instant before I turned and advanced on Shorrock, I heard the door open again. I froze and let the canister drop back. Footsteps, and then another patron was standing between Shorrock and me, unzipping his pants.

“Hey, Tim,” the guy said. “How are you enjoying the meal?”

“Unreal,” Shorrock said. “I can’t believe there are still three more courses. I’m stuffed.”

“Trust me, you have to save room for the poached apple cream puff. You’ll die.”

I ignored the irony and kept my eyes fixed on the marble wall in front of me, hoping unrealistically that Shorrock would be so overloaded with wine that he’d piss long enough for the other guy to depart first. But it wasn’t to be. Shorrock shook off, zipped up, and headed over to the sink. I heard water running for a moment, then heard him say, “See you in a minute.” And then he was gone, the opportunity gone with him.

I didn’t give up hope. It was a safe bet the industry executives who were wooing Shorrock had bought him not just the chef’s tasting menu, but also the accompanying wine course-a wine course that would result in frequent additional trips to the rest room. And it did-once more at Alex, and twice afterward, at the nightclub, Tryst. But every time, the restroom was occupied afterward: by another diner at Alex; by a washroom attendant at Tryst.

After Tryst we improvised, trailing Shorrock and his party onto the casino floor, keeping Dox at a slot machine where he could watch Shorrock play blackjack and signal me the moment Shorrock excused himself for what looked like a bathroom break. Everything went smoothly, better than I would have reasonably expected, in fact-other than that I couldn’t get him alone.

What was doubly frustrating was that even though we knew the room he was staying in, we couldn’t get to him there. The two Secret Service guys had been keeping a fairly low profile, maybe because Shorrock wasn’t in the same league as, say, the secretary of defense, maybe because they were relying in part on the hotel’s own extensive security systems, maybe because Shorrock preferred his security detail to give him room to breathe. Whatever it was, one of them always stood guard outside Shorrock’s room when Shorrock was in it, as I’d confirmed via a discreet trip to the 58^th floor, aided by a dental mirror, the day before. We could fix him in the room, but we couldn’t finish him there. It would have to be somewhere else.

The next day was the same. Shorrock used the gym in the morning, but not the spa, not even for a toilet break. The lunchtime keynote was a no-go because of the likely security posture. Then there was Shanghai cuisine at Wing Lei restaurant for dinner; a head-splitting mix from a DJ called Pizzo at XS nightclub; and more blackjack, this time with Treven watching from a slot machine. Five restroom visits overall, not one of them offering a moment alone.

At just before one in the morning, Treven called and told me Shorrock’s party was breaking up. He was heading toward his room, flanked by the bodyguards, and there was nothing more to be done that night, his last at the convention. Dox would monitor him until he was asleep via the camera I’d emplaced, and barring anything new, we would try for one more shot at him in the gym in the morning. But if that didn’t pan out, in the absence of some fresh intel regarding his subsequent movements, a stop at a church, for example, as Dox had been hoping, we were done.

I headed back to my room and opened the drapes, then sat silently in the reflected lights of the Strip outside and below.

It was dispiriting. I’ve never failed to complete a job, and I was disturbed at the sudden prospect of blowing this one. It was, I had to admit, nothing high-minded. Just the old and simple obsession with finishing what I’d started and doing it exceptionally well. Not a pretty motivation, no doubt, but at that moment, at least an honest one.

I ran through an increasingly wild set of scenarios, feeling the temptation to try something higher-risk. But that was Vegas talking, encouraging me to redeem my losses with increasingly reckless spins of the wheel. I’ve lasted a long time by not being stupid. It wasn’t a good time to start.

I sat for a long time in the disconsolate glow, waiting for the feel of being on the hunt, the sharp adrenaline edge, to subside. I was tired but I knew I couldn’t sleep. I had just decided to boil the tension out of myself in the room’s generous bathtub when my mobile buzzed-Dox. I snatched it up and said, “Tell me he’s going to church in the morning and I’ll buy you a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.”

“Oh, he’s going to need to go to church, but I don’t know if he will.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, partner, I am watching our friend, whose daily workouts have obviously gifted him with a level of stamina to which you can only aspire, banging the hell out of a call girl even as we speak.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“No, sir. She arrived ten minutes ago, but I didn’t call you because I heard a knock but couldn’t see what was happening-they must have started in the corridor or in the extra bathroom, and the camera feed’s only of the main room of the suite. But he’s got her on the couch now, and oh yeah, oh, look at that, he’s turning her over, a little doggy-style, I like this man’s proclivities! Tell me, partner, why is it so hilarious to watch other people fucking?”

I didn’t answer. My mind was racing. There had to be a way we could use this. There had to be.

“Hot damn, look at him go! I am proud, proud to know that our great nation is being steered by men of such exceptional energy and passion. Not to mention rectitude.”

Rectitude. That was it.

“We’ve got him,” I said. “This is our chance.”

“I don’t see what you mean. Right now, the man couldn’t be more un-alone.”

“No, but he’ll be alone soon. I want you to keep watching-”

“Yes, sir, I love my work.”

“-and the second she leaves, buzz me, then meet me on the casino floor. There’s a phone bank, just to the right of Blush nightclub when you’re facing the entrance. The second she leaves, understand?”

“Understood,” he said, his tone suddenly all business.

I clicked off and took three slow, deep breaths, forcing myself to pause, to think it through from every angle. If I missed even just one variable, we would blow the whole thing. But there was a chance. Dox had been joking about rectitude, but rectitude, or more accurately, the threatened loss of its facade, was what we suddenly stood to exploit. I thought about the shame this married, church-going, top-secret-SCI-cleared intelligence official would fear if word-if a damn celebrity porn video, from what Dox was describing-got out. And I thought about how, of all the emotions, it’s shame that most craves solitude, the very solitude we now required.

I imagined an approach, and quickly realized that with just a little luck, I wouldn’t even need the cyanide. I decided to do it the old-fashioned way-more difficult, but also more certain. I closed my eyes and began to picture every step, every variable, every when/then possibility.

When I was done visualizing all of it, I took a roll of sports tape from my toiletry kit and wrapped my forearms and wrists, all the way down to the first joint on my thumbs. Then I pulled on a long-sleeved white tee shirt, buttoned a blue oxford cloth shirt over it, and slipped on a navy blazer whose sleeves were a touch too long. Taped wrists and long sleeves might attract some attention at one of the card tables, but I wasn’t going to be gambling, or at least not in the Vegas sense of the word.

My mobile vibrated forty minutes later-Shorrock must have had the girl for an hour, and I supposed there were few professionals as punctual as a Vegas call girl. I stuffed a pair of deerskin gloves into one of the blazer jacket pockets and the sports tape into the other, then headed down.

Dox was waiting when I arrived, and I was pleased to note the continued density of the crowds on the casino floor, which would offer plenty of concealment. “Let’s walk,” I said, and while we circumnavigated the resort, I explained the plan, and his role in it.

When we were done, we walked back to the phone bank next to Blush. I stood close while he dialed Shorrock’s room, and he held the phone away from his ear so I could hear. Two rings, then a “Yes?” in a slightly nervous tone. I wondered whether Shorrock was concerned the girl, or her company, was calling, whether he was suffering from an afterglow comprised mostly of guilt and fear.

“Mister Shorrock,” Dox said, in his deepest hick drawl.

“Yes?”

“I’ll get right to the point. My associate just left your room. While she was there, she placed a camera under the television in the main room. We used that camera to record a video of your escapades on the couch.”

“What?”

“May I recommend that you just walk over to the television in question and feel along its bottom edge? You’ll find the camera, and then I can tell you how we can settle this so no one else ever sees the video we made.”

“This…this is ridiculous. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sir, just go retrieve the camera if you would. Oh, and by the way, doggy-style is one of my favorite positions, too. Well done, sir, well done.”

That was a nice touch, I thought, and not one I’d scripted. The trick was to feed the subject critical bits of information that would cause him to believe you had more. That, and his growing panic, would prevent him from thinking clearly, and from asking potentially show-stopping questions like, Oh yeah? What was the girl’s name, then? Which, if Dox really were her associate, he could be expected to know.

There was silence for a moment, presumably while Shorrock examined the television and located the camera. Then he said, “What…what is this about?”

“Sir, it’s about you compensating me for giving you the thumb drive on which your steamy encounter with a Las Vegas prostitute is now clearly recorded.”

“This is a hoax. Who are you?”

There was no conviction in his voice, and I decided he was just trying to be careful about what he said. At the moment, fear of being recorded would naturally be prominent in his mind.

“Right now, sir, I’m the only person who can save you from personal and professional humiliation and destruction. Which I would sincerely like you to help me do.”

“Help you how?”

“Just by paying me a thousand dollars in cash. Which, I think you’ll agree under the circumstances, is a hell of a bargain.”

In the business he was in, Shorrock would know something about blackmail, and his next question demonstrated experience. “Just for the sake of argument, if it were true that you had some sort of tape, which you don’t, because nothing untoward happened, but if you did, you’d keep a copy and turn your blackmail demands into an annuity. Why would anyone want to play your game?”

“Sir, that is a reasonable concern and I can only assure you that I’ve been playing this game, as you call it, for a long time, and my discretion is the reason I’ve been able to continue without undue fuss. Have you ever heard about anyone being caught out at the Wynn? Of course not, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because every time this happens, I’m paid promptly for delivering the incriminating recording and that’s the end of the matter. But if you want to be the first person to get huffy and take a stand, that’s up to you. Personally, I’d recommend you do what everyone else does, which is fork over the thousand, chalk it up to experience, and live to fight another day.”

There was a pause, during which Shorrock must have been mentally running the odds. His voice was tight, but he managed to say, “Okay, just because I can’t sleep and this amuses me. Even if I wanted to pay you, I don’t have a thousand in cash with me.”

An objection about price, not principle. That, and the fact that he hadn’t hung up, made me confident this was going to work.

“Of course you don’t, sir, that’s not unusual after a night of gambling. Which is why I’m standing right next to an ATM. So here’s the deal. You come down and withdraw the money. I’ll be watching from somewhere on the casino floor. When you have the money, I’ll stroll on by. I’ll give you a thumb drive and you’ll give me the cash. A very discreet exchange and considering the damage it’ll prevent, I’d say it’ll be the best money you’ll ever spend in your life. But if you’re not here in five minutes, I’ll assume you’re not interested-in which case, you can watch the trailer of the video on select Internet sites. And who knows? Maybe on the evening news, too.”

I knew we had him even before he said, “Where are you?”

“Not far from Blush nightclub. There’s an ATM to the club’s right as you’re facing the entrance. That’s the one to use. Oh, and I almost hate to ask this under the circumstances, but could I trouble you to return the camera to me? They’re expensive.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“I understand, sir, and I know this is unpleasant, but if you just follow the plan, in five minutes the whole thing will be behind you. And if it makes you feel better, again you’re hardly the first. Vegas, you know what I mean?”

Dox hung up and we moved off to separate slot machines with a view of the ATM. I imagined what Shorrock would be doing now: trying to control his panic, weighing the odds of his thousand dollars buying him what it was supposed to buy, coming up with a story for why the bodyguard outside his room had to stay put and not trail him despite security protocol to the contrary. He only had a few minutes to figure it all out, and again the time pressure would be key to preventing him from coming up with anything we hadn’t foreseen. His most obvious move, aside from compliance, would be to have the bodyguard, or both of them, tail him and move in on Dox when he revealed himself from the casino floor. I didn’t think he’d do it-there wasn’t much upside to a move like that, only a lot of risk-but if he did, we’d stay put and repeat when he returned to his room.

It turned out there was no need to worry: Shorrock came alone. I watched him scanning the casino floor, but there were too many patrons communing with slot machines for him to pick out Dox or me. When he’d passed my position, I got up and made my way to the men’s room. I felt a small adrenaline rush spreading through my trunk and limbs and deliberately breathed slowly and deeply to manage it.

The bathroom was shaped like an L, with sinks along the horizontal axis and urinals and stalls along the vertical. It appeared to be empty. I pulled on the deerskin gloves and quickly checked each stall door to confirm no one was inside. Outside, Dox would be taking Shorrock’s money and explaining that he didn’t have the thumb drive on him-that he’d taped it to the back of the folding diaper-changing table in the farthest stall, the large one designed for handicapped use. The one I now quietly entered, latching the door behind me.

The stall was exceptionally private: high, white marble walls resting on casters just an inch above the tiled floor; close-fitting wood-paneled doors; no cracks or gaps anywhere through which someone might catch a glimpse from without. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, held it for a beat, then slowly released it. I only needed a few seconds alone with him. It was ridiculous I hadn’t found those seconds yet, but I felt like the time was finally at hand.

I kept my eyes closed and concentrated on listening. A moment passed, and I heard a single set of footsteps around the corner of the L. If it was someone else, he might stop at the urinals or the sinks. But the footsteps were moving quickly, deliberately. And they kept coming, past the unoccupied stalls, closer and closer to my position.

Three seconds, I thought. It won’t matter if someone walks in after that. Just three seconds.

The footsteps stopped outside the stall door. Someone pulled on the handle. The latch rattled.

“Hey,” a voice called. “Is someone in there?”

Shorrock was an intelligence professional. Even frightened and confused, he might be alerted by an incongruity. I had to keep it natural for as long as I could.

“Yeah, someone’s in here,” I said. “Is this the only stall?”

“Just hurry, okay? It’s an emergency.”

If he’d been thinking clearly, he would have claimed to be handicapped, which would have been calculated to make the current, likely un-handicapped occupant feel guilty and accordingly move more quickly. Apparently, he was under stress sufficient to make that kind of calculation impossible. Which meant he would miss other things, too, or catch on only when it was too late.

I pressed the button on the wall control and the toilet flushed. I wasn’t worried about him recognizing me from one of the restaurants or other venues in which I’d gotten close to him-people don’t usually notice me unless I want them to. But even if he did notice, and wonder, the momentary puzzlement and distraction would work to my advantage.

I unlatched and opened the door, keeping my left hand to my side and slightly behind me and keeping my body close to my other hand as it pushed the door outward and to the right. Gloves would seem weird enough to possibly induce a rapid response, and I didn’t want him to see them until it no longer mattered.

“All right,” I said, “it’s all yours.”

“Thanks,” Shorrock said, shouldering past me. As he did so, I pivoted counterclockwise and popped a palm heel strike into the base of his cranium. Not hard enough to injure his neck or drive him into the marble wall on the other side of the stall, where he could break his nose or lose a tooth. But enough to scramble his circuits for a second at least, which is how long it took me to step inside behind him and latch the door.

He had stumbled from the palm heel but he didn’t fall, and as he started to turn and try to face me, I threw my left arm around his neck, catching his trachea in the crook of my elbow, caught my right bicep, and planted my right hand firmly on the back of his skull. Hadaka-jime again, as versatile as it is effective. I tightened everything up, clamping his carotids in the walnut-cracker vice formed by my bicep and forearm, burying my face in his back and turtling it between my shoulders. I felt panic course through his body and he tried to twist away, one way, then the other, neither to any avail. I let him shove me into one of the marble walls and hung on, concentrating on maintaining the correct pressure. Unlike the choke I had put on that giant contractor in Tokyo, which was deliberately deep and cutting, this one was calibrated. It was firm enough to occlude the carotid arteries, but not so deep that it would result in bruising. As any judoka can attest, a proper choke isn’t necessarily painful, and doesn’t even have to interfere with breathing. Strangled on the mat by an expert, you might pass out with almost no distress at all.

I felt him raise a foot to try to stomp my instep, which showed some training, but I easily shifted to avoid the shot. He scrabbled back for my eyes but couldn’t reach them. His twisting and flailing became more frantic. He scratched madly at my hands and arms, but his nails scraped harmlessly against the tape and multiple layers of material. Then, all at once, I felt the tension drain from his torso. His arms dropped limply to his sides and his body sagged against me. I leaned against the wall, breathing evenly, concentrating on the steady pressure. I heard a set of footsteps enter the room, but they stopped at the bend in the L, probably at one of the urinals. It didn’t matter anymore-time was finally on my side. Moments passed, then I heard a toilet flush, the sounds of water running in a sink, paper towels being used and discarded, then footsteps again, this time departing.

When I was sure Shorrock was beyond recovery, I laid him flat on the floor and quickly went through his pockets. All he was carrying was his room key and the camera I’d placed in his room. He must have refused to turn the latter over when Dox told him he’d have to retrieve the thumb drive from the bathroom. Probably he thought he was maintaining some leverage. It didn’t matter. The main thing was, we had it back now, and wouldn’t have to worry about anyone finding it in his room and raising suspicions. And having his key was useful, too, in case the times of his coming and going might be stored on it. I didn’t expect that anyone would be investigating, but the less evidence, the better. I took a thousand dollars from one of my pockets and put it in one of Shorrock’s. Probably no one would look into his immediate pre-death ATM withdrawal, but if anyone did, it would look strange if the money weren’t on him.

I examined his fingertips to ensure he hadn’t managed to scrape any skin or hair off me while he was struggling-I hadn’t felt anything, but adrenaline masks pain and it wasn’t impossible that he’d managed to scratch my scalp or pull some hair. I found nothing. I took the sports tape from the blazer pocket and wrapped it sticky side-out around both hands, then methodically patted down the floor under and around Shorrock. The Wynn’s cleaning people must have been pros, because I came up with only a bit of lint and a few strands of pubic and head hair. I had no way of knowing whether any of it came from me, but now it wouldn’t matter. I turned Shorrock over and patted down his back, too, where my face had touched him. A few new hairs, probably his. But again, now a moot point regardless. I unwound the tape carefully over the toilet, balled it up, and pocketed it again. Then I flushed the toilet, eliminating any matter that had fallen into it unseen.

I was almost done. I paused, taking a moment to think, to double check my progress against a mental checklist. Everything was in order. Just one last thing.

I undid Shorrock’s belt, pulled his pants and briefs down to his ankles, and wrestled him into a sitting position on the toilet. Then I stepped back, extending an arm to keep him upright as long as possible. When I withdrew my arm, Shorrock slumped forward and to the right, landing face down on the floor next to the toilet. I knew I hadn’t left a mark on his face or otherwise, but even if I had, the minor damage caused by a fall from the toilet would be adequate explanation. As for the death itself, it would look like some sort of cardiac event-a problem in the plumbing, possibly, or perhaps something electrical. There might be an autopsy: he was prominent enough for that, and there was the anomaly and irony of someone so fitness-obsessed perishing from an apparent heart attack. But when they found nothing, a body devoid of evidence of what had happened or why, wise physicians would stroke their chins and opine about the Brugada syndrome and the long QT syndrome, and potential abnormalities in sodium and potassium channels, and lethal arrhythmias hitting with the destructiveness and unpredictability of rogue waves, all in the same solemn tones that were once the exclusive province of monks invoking the mysteries of the will of God.

I gripped the top of the marble stall divider and listened intently for a moment. Nothing. I pulled myself up, rotated over the edge, and lowered myself to the stall on the other side. I heard someone else come in, so I latched the door and waited, using the extra moment to run through my mental checklist again and ensure I was overlooking nothing. When I heard the latest patron leave, I moved out, pocketing the gloves en route.

I saw Dox sitting at a slot machine outside, watching the entrance, and dipped my head once to let him know it was done. We would call Larison and Treven from the road, giving ourselves a head start, then reconvene later, far from the Wynn. But I wouldn’t tell either of them I’d eschewed the cyanide. Or Horton, for that matter. I prefer people not to know what I can do with my hands. It makes it easier for me to do it to them, if it comes to that.

We’d had some bad luck along the way. A few near misses, or rather, near hits. But it had worked out fine in the end. A perfectly natural-looking death for Shorrock, a clean getaway, an exceptional payday. And maybe, for once, some larger good that would come from all of it. On balance, not a single thing to complain about.

That in itself should have told me something was seriously wrong.

Larison and Treven drove through the desert on Interstate 15, the sun rising behind them. Larison had heard from Rain and Dox two hours earlier that the job was done, and they were on their way back to Los Angeles to meet and debrief.

Rain had been vague about how and when he’d finished Shorrock, and Larison had a feeling that while some of this reticence was due to sensible communications security, Rain also didn’t want to let on that he’d waited to inform Larison and Treven so that he and Dox could get a head start leaving town. Larison understood. He would have done the same. As far as Rain knew, Larison and Treven could be under orders to tie up loose ends by eliminating Rain and Dox once Shorrock was done. They weren’t, though Larison’s actual plans weren’t so far off from what Rain probably suspected. Regardless, it was natural that Rain would be careful. Assassinating the assassins was practically SOP for a job as high-profile as this one.

Larison had called Hort from a sterile phone while on the road and briefed him. Hort told him to check in when he knew more, but hadn’t asked where he and Treven would be meeting Rain and Dox. Hort would understand that Larison had the same concerns about Hort that Rain had about Larison.

The car was a gray Ford Taurus rented at LAX, with no navigation system or automated toll payer that someone might use to track them. Treven was driving, nice and easy, not a mile over the speed limit, just a couple of white guys heading back to California after a few days of gambling. Larison looked out the window at the passing brown hills and dusty chaparral and considered how much he ought to tell him. A lot, he decided. There was no other way to properly motivate him. But he had to do it cleverly, and with certain key omissions. Treven’s instincts might be blunted by an excess of infantile patriotism, but he was far from stupid.

He turned and looked at Treven. “So what has he got on you?”

Treven glanced at him, then back to the road. “Who?”

“You know who. Hort.”

There was a pause. “Why do you think he’s got something on me?”

“Because Hort has something on everyone. It’s how he works.”

Treven didn’t answer. Larison said, “You know what he has on me.”

Treven nodded.

Larison said, “You know what he told me will happen if I ever release those torture videos?”

Treven nodded again. “Your friend will be killed.”

Larison was weirdly grateful that Treven would be so oblique. The man knew perfectly well what Nico was to Larison. For an instant, Larison imagined what it would be like to be able to trust someone with his secret, and then, with a scary, giddy rush, what it would be like not to have to keep it a secret at all.

He shook off the feeling and said, “He told me they would send contractors to rape Nico’s nieces and nephews and mutilate his parents and sisters and brothers-in-law. Bring down the wrath of God on his entire extended family, every last one of them. And then tell Nico why it had happened, how it had been my fault.”

There was another pause. Treven said, “Then don’t release the tapes.”

“Yeah? And what is it you’re not supposed to do? Who’s getting fucked on your side to keep you in line?”

Treven didn’t answer.

Thinking he needed to push a little harder, Larison said, “Do I really need to point out that we have similar problems? Which might have similar solutions, if we try to solve them together?”

“Meaning?”

“How can I answer that if you won’t tell me what he’s got on you?”

They drove in silence. A revelation of Larison’s own to build trust, the possibility of working together to create hope, silence to draw Treven out. If the man was going to open up, this would be the time.

Come on, Larison thought. Talk. Once you start, you’ll keep going.

He had just begun to think he’d miscalulated when Treven said, “You know that former vice presidential chief of staff you told me about? The one who was tortured to death in his office?”

Larison smiled. “Ulrich.”

“Yeah, David Ulrich.”

Larison’s smile lingered. “I thought you might have been the one who did him.”

“I wasn’t. But I was in his office shortly before it happened, and I tuned him up pretty hard. Hort says the CIA has security tapes that place me there at the time of his death.”

“You believe him?”

“There was no other way for him to know I was there.”

“Well, then, I’d say you have a real problem on your hands. Unless you don’t mind being Hort’s fuckboy for the rest of your life.”

“It’s the CIA that has the tapes.”

“Hort told you that?”

Treven didn’t answer.

“Because that’s what he would tell you. You know that, right?”

Again, no answer.

“Look,” Larison said. “I’d lay good odds Hort has those tapes himself. He’s not going to tell you that, otherwise you know he’s the one squeezing your nuts. Instead, he positions himself as the guy who’s trying to help you relieve the pressure. It’s the way it’s done.”

“Yeah. I get it.”

“And even if it were true the CIA did have the tapes, they don’t give a shit about you, not as long as you don’t get in their business. Get rid of Hort and you don’t have to worry about anyone using those tapes against you, regardless of who’s holding them.”

“Get rid of him?”

“Come on. You’re telling me you’ve never considered it? How stupid do you think I am?”

Treven shook his head. “You don’t need me for that. You can make Hort dead on your own.”

“But there’s something else I want.”

There was a pause. Treven said, “The diamonds.”

“Correct. And that’s not a one-man job. It’ll take two, minimum.”

“But you’re thinking four would be more like it.”

Larison smiled. No, Treven wasn’t stupid at all.

“We’re talking about a hundred million dollars,” Larison said. “Rain and Dox could have a quarter each. So could you. Once we have the diamonds, I’ll take care of Hort gratis.”

Treven didn’t answer, and Larison couldn’t tell what he was thinking. But he could guess. Twenty-five million and the removal of the man who was blackmailing him? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance?

“Well?” Larison said. “Are you in?”

There was a long pause. Larison waited, letting the silence do its work.

Finally, Treven said, “You’d have to tell me the plan first.”

Larison smiled. Treven was in. Now all he had to do was dangle the diamonds in front of Rain and Dox, too.

I called Horton as Dox drove us past Pasadena. There are those who would suggest I’m paranoid, or they would if they were still alive, anyway, but I didn’t want anyone triangulating on the position of our rental car while we were on some deserted stretch of Route 15, with no alternate routes possible and nowhere to run or hide.

“It’s done,” I told him.

“I heard,” he said, pleasure in his rich baritone.

That was pretty fast-Dox and I had left Las Vegas less than four hours earlier. Ordinarily, a body can sit for a long time in a closed restroom stall without anyone noticing anything amiss. Usually it’ll be discovered by a cleaning person, trying to clear and close the bathroom before getting to work. Maybe an early morning crew had found Shorrock. More likely, the bodyguards went looking for him when he didn’t come back from his mysterious solo errand. I realized I should have foreseen they’d find him sooner than normal. But it didn’t really matter.

“You hear about any problems?” I asked.

“None at all. Glad to see your reputation is well deserved.”

“We were lucky.”

“I doubt it. You used what I gave you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, to save you from asking the obvious question, your remuneration has already been distributed per your instructions. You can each confirm receipt.”

The conversation was so familiar I might have been having deja vu. It was appalling, how natural it felt to be doing this again. How…normal. As though I’d been forced to use only my weak hand for the last few years, and was at last again able to use my strong one.

“I’ll tell the others.”

“Good. And if you’re heading back to the area where we previously met, I’d like to see you again.”

Alarm bells went off in my head. “Why?”

“To brief you on the next one.”

“Why do we have to meet for that?”

“Because I’m not going to put the details in writing or say them over the phone. Look, under the circumstances, I completely understand your hesitation. So, needless to say, we can meet anywhere or anyway that’s comfortable for you.”

I didn’t like it. Ordinarily, the probable quality and quantity of the opposition were such that I could implement satisfactory countermeasures. But Horton could bring some exceptionally heavy firepower into play if he wanted to. I imagined a SWAT team, briefed about the presence of Shorrock’s armed-and-dangerous killer, surrounding a restaurant with me inside it.

“The guy who just left the project isn’t enough?” I said, stalling for time.

“Not quite. I need two more personnel changes to make sure the project doesn’t get off the ground. If it does, it’s going to cost the company a lot of money. You’ve proven you’re the man for this. Finish the job and there’s a hell of a bonus.”

I didn’t know if I wanted this. But what did I want?

“Where are you now?” I said, improvising.

“In the city.”

“Close to where we met before?”

“I could be there in twenty minutes.”

“Go to the same hotel. I’ll call in less than an hour.”

“Good.”

I clicked off.

“He’s got some more work for us?” Dox said.

“Two more. And a big completion bonus, apparently. How’s that sound to you?”

He smiled. “Sounds like money, partner.”

“Maybe. How do you feel about a face-to-face?”

“You worried he’s gonna be Jack Ruby to our Lee Harvey Oswald?”

“Something like that.”

He reached under the seat and produced the Wilson Combat. “Old Oswald should have carried one of these.”

I thought about it for a moment, and decided there was a way. “Head to West Hollywood,” I said.

When we were off the highway and had driven a couple of miles west on Santa Monica Boulevard, I called Horton again. At this point, anyone listening in wouldn’t have time to scramble a team after us, so the momentary breach of communication security I was about to commit would be harmless. “Urth Caffe,” I told him. I knew the place from previous visits to L.A., and though I liked their coffee, we wouldn’t be enjoying it today. “Corner of Melrose Avenue and Westmount Drive.”

“I’ll be there in under ten minutes.”

I clicked off. Horton was a precise man, and it occurred to me that he must know the city reasonably well to be able to instantly offer such an estimate. I wasn’t sure what that meant, if it meant anything, but I filed the information away for subsequent consideration.

We parked on Westmount, just south of Melrose, and got out. The air felt cool compared to the blast furnace heat of Las Vegas, and the late morning sky above the mixed palm and deciduous trees was a clear, hard blue. We both headed to the restroom in Urth, squeezing past tables of chattering, oblivious Angelenos clustered around metal tables under the shadows of green umbrellas on the sidewalk and patio. The coffee smelled like heaven, but we didn’t have time and I was already amped for the meeting with Horton. Maybe later.

We went back to the car, Dox in the backseat this time while I took the wheel. I drove around the block, right turn following right turn, single family bungalows, walk-up apartment houses, low slung commercial establishments like Bodhi Tree Bookstore and Peace Gallery, repeat. Knots of pedestrian shoppers shifted and glided along the sun-drenched sidewalks, but no sign of Horton. And no sign of anything untoward, either-black Chevy Suburbans with darked-out windows; sedans with hard-looking men inside idling at the curb; a formation in sunglasses and unseasonable jackets taking up positions around the perimeter of the restaurant and beginning to move in.

My phone buzzed-Horton. I clicked on and said, “Yeah.”

“I’m here, but I don’t see you.”

“Walk out of the restaurant left on Melrose and immediately turn left onto Westmount. We’ll be there in a minute.”

“Still being cautious, I see.”

“I’m sure it’s unnecessary.”

He chuckled. “I fully understand.”

I clicked off and handed my phone back to Dox. “Phones off,” I said. “And take out the batteries.” Horton knew the number, and someone could triangulate on it while we drove. Probably unnecessary, as Horton put it, along with my other precautions, but if you’re serious about having something life-saving in place the one percent of the time you really need it, you’ll have to have it in place the other ninety-nine percent, too.

Dox laughed. “This about automobile cell phone use being illegal in the great state of California?”

“No,” I said, glancing in the rearview and trying to hide my exasperation. Dox’s cell phone habits had once nearly gotten us killed in Bangkok. “It’s about-”

He laughed. “I know, I know, we don’t want anyone triangulating on us. Just pulling your leg, partner. Though I don’t know why I bother, it’s so easy.”

I sighed. Probably I would never get used to it. I always go quiet in the moments before a mission, but Dox needed to crack jokes, most of them at my expense.

I turned on the bug detector and circled the block again, right on Westbourne, right on Sherwood, right on Westmount. I spotted Horton halfway up the street, on the sidewalk to our right, heading toward us. He was dressed the way he had been the other day-short-sleeved shirt, tucked in, nowhere good to conceal a gun except in an ankle holster. Or maybe, for the moment, in the back of his waistband, which we couldn’t see from our current position, but Dox had the window down now, the Wilson Combat just below it, and if Horton’s hands went anywhere we couldn’t see them, he’d have to be able to draw faster than Dox could shoot, which was another way of saying he’d be dead right there.

We pulled up next to him and I indicated he should get in the front passenger seat. He nodded, but first courteously hiked up his pants to expose his ankles, then turned around so we could confirm he wasn’t carrying in the small of his back, either. He got in and I did a quick K-turn that would be the first of the maneuvers I would make to ensure we weren’t being followed. The bug detector was still.

“I appreciate the two of you taking the time,” Horton said. “And let me say, nice work in Las Vegas. We’ll never know how many lives you saved and how many grievous injuries you prevented, but from what Shorrock was planning, probably it was thousands.”

“Don’t thank me,” Dox said. “I’m just here to shoot you if something goes wrong.”

Horton was smart enough not to mistake Dox’s genial tone for a lack of serious purpose. He said, “Well, then, let’s make sure nothing goes wrong.”

I headed south on La Cienega, then kept us on neighborhood streets to weed out traffic. I judged it unlikely Horton would risk having us followed-he would have known that as our passenger he would literally have a gun to his head. Still, I stopped several times to make sure no one was behind us and did a few strategic U-turns, too. With Horton’s reach, of course, I couldn’t rule out satellite surveillance in addition to the more common vehicular variety, but that wasn’t an immediate threat and Dox and I could deal with the possibility later. I knew Horton might have seen and memorized the plates as we approached to pick him up, too, but I’d rented the car under an identity that wouldn’t lead back to me. As long as we were careful, we’d be all right.

When I was satisfied no one was trying to tail us, I said, “If we’ve already saved all these lives, why do you need the other two plotters taken out, too?”