The Detachment

Horton nodded as though expecting the question. “Shorrock was the tip of the spear, so he was the most important immediate target. But while the spear still exists, its tip can be relatively easily replaced. There are two more key players, the loss of whom will completely end anybody’s hopes of using false flag attacks as the basis for a power grab.”

“Who?”

“Are you interested?”

“I can’t answer that if I don’t know who.”

He paused, then said, “Have you heard of Jack Finch?”

“No.”

“He keeps a low profile for a man in a powerful position.”

“Which is?”

“The president’s counterterrorism advisor.”

Dox laughed. “You sure do pick some hard targets. I’m afraid to ask who the third one might be.”

Horton said, “Let’s just keep talking about them one at a time for now.”

“What’s Finch’s role in the plot?” I asked.

“Finch,” Horton said, “is what you might think of as an information broker.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he is the modern incarnation of the illustrious J. Edgar Hoover, who as you might know maintained his position as head of the FBI for nearly half a century by amassing incriminating files on all the important players in Washington, including every president he served under.”

Dox laughed again. “Sounds like old Murdoch and Fox News.”

“In a sense,” Horton said, “it is. But more focused. And more extensive.”

“What does any of that have to do with the coup?” I said.

“The first step is the provocation, which was Shorrock’s department. After the provocation, though, the plotters need to ensure that certain key players in the government-the president, highly placed military and law enforcement personnel, and the judiciary, if there’s a challenge-support the president’s assumption of emergency powers in response to the crisis. You can see why this is critical. America is a big, fractious place. There are a number of people who want things to be run more efficiently, as they might put it. But not enough of them to guarantee success in the face of opposition.”

“He’s got dirt on the president?” Dox said.

Horton chuckled. “He has dirt on everybody. I told you, like Hoover. But Hoover didn’t have much more than phone taps and surveillance photos. Finch has intercepted email, Internet browsing histories, copies of security video feeds, records of hacked offshore bank accounts-everything you can imagine in an interconnected digital age. We’re talking about dossiers documenting financial corruption and sexual depravity, in such detail they’d make Hoover weep with envy.”

“I’m not buying it,” I said. “I don’t care how many people Finch controls. The president can’t just suspend the Constitution and get away with it.”

“Ah,” Horton said, “but he won’t call it a suspension. He’ll simply ask for certain emergency powers to deal with the crisis, and he’ll ask Congress for these powers for only ninety days, the powers to expire unless Congress agrees to renew them. Very serious and sober people will talk about the unprecedented nature of the threat, and how the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact, and other such things, and they’ll show how independent and level-headed they are by telling the president he can have only thirty days, renewable, they’ll be damned if they agree to ninety.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say it could be done. Still, what’s the point?”

“What do you mean?”

“The point of all of it. These people…don’t they already have enough? Power, money…they’re already running things. Why upset the apple cart if they’ve got all the apples?”

“The people behind this don’t care about apples. They’re doing this because, in their misguided way, they care about their country.”

“They’re going to destroy it to save it?”

“They don’t think of it as destruction. In their minds, America’s democracy is suffering from a fatal disease. Legislative gridlock, capture of the government by special interests, a war machine that’s become like an out-of-control parasite on the economy.”

“Are they wrong?”

“They’re not wrong, but their means of redress are. Their plan is to take the reins of power, set things right, and then return power to the people.”

Dox laughed. “Yeah, that always works out well.”

“They don’t think the chances are good. They just think they’re better than the chances of the current course, which they judge to be nil. Like an emergency procedure for a patient who, if heroic measures aren’t undertaken, is going to die regardless.”

“Sounds pretty insane,” I said.

“It is insane. In no small part because they’re not factoring in the cost of the thousands of people who will have to be terrorized, burned, maimed, crippled, traumatized, and killed in order to create the groundwork for their plan. And this is why we need to stop it.”

I told myself I should just walk away. We’d done Shorrock. That was enough.

But then I thought of something. Something I should have spotted sooner.

“How do you know so much about this?” I said.

There was a pause, then he said, “Because I’m part of it.”

I glanced over at him, then back to the road. “Part of it how?”

“Never mind how. I was brought in, I played along, I want to stop it.”

“Without leaving a return address.”

“By the time the third and final critical player succumbs to ‘natural causes,’ they might catch on to me, in which case I’m prepared to face the music, which I expect will be a funeral dirge. But yes, in the meantime, I have a chance to destroy this thing root and branch. For that, I need an untraceable outside detachment, and speed, and no signs of foul play.”

We drove in silence for a few moments. Horton turned to Dox.

“Can you take that gun off my back long enough to tell me what you think about all this?”

I glanced in the rearview and saw Dox grin. He said, “I’ve just been waiting to hear about the per diem.”

Treven listened to Rain’s briefing over the sounds of the speeding L.A. Metro subway car, both impressed and concerned. Impressed that Rain had spotted a weakness in Shorrock’s defenses, had immediately improvised to exploit it, and had finished Shorrock with the cyanide as planned. Concerned that Rain and Dox had since met Hort and now seemed to be controlling the flow of information in both directions. He wasn’t used to having a buffer between himself and Hort, and even aside from what he recognized was an unworthy, petulant reaction to being placed on the periphery, he also understood that having to rely on Rain and Dox as intermediaries put him at an operational disadvantage.

The late morning train was mostly empty, a few bored-looking passengers dispersed among the seats. The four of them stood facing each other in the center of the car, swaying slightly as it hurtled along, Rain’s voice just audible although their faces were only inches apart. Rain had called them with instructions for the meeting, and Treven assumed he’d chosen the subway to frustrate any satellite surveillance Hort might be employing to track him. There were video cameras in the stations, of course, but even if Hort had access to a local feed, he’d have to know where to look and there would be layers of local bureaucracy to wade through. By the time anyone had a fix on their position, they’d all be long gone.

Larison said, “You think this Finch thing is for real?”

Rain took a moment before answering. “I didn’t know if Shorrock was for real, either. But the money’s been deposited.”

“He’s offering three hundred apiece for Finch,” Dox said. “And he says it’ll be five hundred apiece for the third one, whoever that turns out to be. That’s over a million for each of us when this is all done. I don’t know about you, but where I come from that’s a lot of green.”

“Where do you think Hort’s getting all this money to throw around?” Larison said, and Treven wondered where he was going with this, how much he was going to tell them.

“I don’t know,” Rain said. “Do you?”

Larison glanced casually around the swaying train car, then said, “What if I told you that instead of exposing ourselves for one million, we could protect ourselves, and walk away with twenty-five million?”

“Twenty-five million…dollars?” Dox said.

Larison nodded. “Apiece.”

Dox laughed. “You’re bullshitting us. Protect ourselves how, kill the president?”

Larison shook his head. “Kill Hort.”

Dox laughed again, but Treven could tell from his expression the number had gotten his attention.

Rain said, “What does he have on you?”

Larison smiled coldly. “That’s not what matters. What matters is, Hort is holding one hundred million in uncut diamonds. Well, make that ninety-nine million, after paying us. Portable, convertible, completely untraceable.”

Rain said nothing. Treven wondered whether he believed it.

“It’s a lot of upside,” Larison said. “But you want to know something? The diamonds are really just a bonus. They’re not even the point.”

“You know,” Dox said, “I’ve always wanted to be involved in a conversation where someone would say, ‘the hundred million dollars isn’t even the point.’ Between that and the twins in the bathtub at the Suko-thai in Bangkok, I can now retire a contented man.”

Larison flashed his cold smile again. “What I mean is, focusing on the money makes it sound like we have a choice. We don’t.”

“What do you mean?” Rain said.

“I mean, you don’t understand Hort. So let me explain a few things about him. One, he always protects himself from blowback. Therefore two, when he’s done using us for whatever Shorrock and the rest of this is really about, he’ll move to silence us. Therefore three, one of these hits, maybe the next one, maybe the third, will be nothing but a setup to fix us in time and place.”

“But he just paid us a million even,” Dox said.

Larison nodded. “To establish his bona fides. And to make us believe the rest of what he’s promising is real. You see why he’s structuring it this way? To get our greed to override our judgment.”

Dox glanced at Rain. Treven read the glance as I’m deferring to you on this, partner.

Rain said nothing. The man’s expression and tone never seemed to vary. It made him hard to read. That was bad enough, but after seeing what Rain had done to the contractors, and knowing that he’d efficiently taken Shorrock off the board, too, Treven was starting to find Rain’s mildly flat-lined demeanor outright unnerving.

“Do you get it now?” Larison said. “After what we just did in Las Vegas, as long as Hort is alive, he’s a threat to all of us.”

“You knew this going in,” Rain said.

“I wanted us all to be in the same boat, facing the same set of options, if that’s what you mean. But I didn’t con you. I didn’t mislead you. You made your own decision for your own reasons. Anyway, even if I’d told you what I thought, you wouldn’t have listened. I’m not sure you’re listening even now.”

No one said anything.

“All right,” Larison said. “Go ahead and let him jerk your strings. Chase after his promises, if you want. Eventually, you’ll die trying. Or, you can recognize what’s going on here, preempt the threat, and walk away clean with twenty-five million apiece in the process.”

Treven had the sick sense that he had been turned into a bystander on all of this. Kill Finch? Turn on Hort? No one was asking him what he thought. And the truth was, he wasn’t sure himself.

He couldn’t disagree with Larison’s analysis of the current state of play-after all, he knew firsthand how manipulative and ruthless Hort could be. And the points Larison had made about the security video placing Treven at a murder scene were persuasive, too. If Larison was right, the choice was pretty straightforward: kill or be killed.

Still, the thought of taking out Hort made him anxious, almost dizzy. Could he really do this? To his own commander? He tried to think of it as a fragging, like what enlisted men had sometimes done to incompetent lieutenants in Vietnam. But when he imagined himself putting a round into Hort’s forehead, the neat hole, the momentary pressure bulge of the eyes from cavitation in the cranium, the instantaneous loss of expression from the face and rigidity from the body…something inside him rebelled.

What would he do afterward? Hort would be replaced, naturally, but it was hard to imagine things ever going back to the way they were. He was afraid he would have committed a kind of patricide, that he’d be tormented by conscience, that his fellow elite soldiers would sense he’d committed some primordial sin, maybe even suspect precisely what it was. He’d bear the mark of Cain, always suspect, forever an outsider.

No. He wasn’t like Larison and Rain, and he didn’t want to be. He’d done his share of killing, most of it at close quarters, but except when it had been self-defense, it had always been under orders. He was part of something, why would he fuck that up? And who was Larison, anyway? A skilled operator, no doubt, but still, a loose cannon, a rogue. And Rain was beginning to strike him as a borderline sociopath. Dox was a buffoon, too dumb to know better. They did what they did for money, which meant they could always be bought. Had he really been considering turning on Hort, turning on the unit, to throw in his lot forever with this group of burnouts?

And then suddenly, he saw a way through this. A way to protect himself, stay on the inside, and get clear of Rain, Larison, and Dox. All at the same time.

“You might be right,” Rain said, over the sounds of the train. “But still, I want to finish Finch. That’s what I was hired to do, and I’m not in the habit of turning on a client just for a better payday, even a much better one. If you and Treven want in, we’ll split the fee three hundred apiece. Otherwise Dox and I can handle it alone, and we walk away with no hard feelings.”

Larison said, “You’re making a mistake.”

“Do you want in on Finch?” Rain said.

Larison looked away for a moment as though considering. Then he said, “What would you do if you found out Hort is lying to us about Shorrock and Finch? About what all this is about?”

Rain said nothing.

“Yeah,” Larison said. “I thought so. All right, I’m in on Finch. Because soon enough, you’ll be in on Hort.”

Later, after they’d split up, Treven did a long surveillance detection run. When he was sure he was alone, he used a payphone at a gas station to call Hort. Hort picked up with a typically noncommittal, “Yes?”

“It’s me,” Treven said.

There was a pause, then, “It’s good to hear your voice, son. Nice work in Las Vegas.”

“That wasn’t me so much.”

“Could you have done it with fewer players?”

“Probably not, no.”

“Then it couldn’t have been done without you. Which is why I wanted you to be a part of it in the first place.”

Treven didn’t answer. He felt like he’d arrived at a fork in the road. Whichever way he went, there’d be no turning back. Ever.

“What’s on your mind, son?” Hort said.

Treven took a deep breath. “There’s something you need to know,” he said.

Faced with intractable national problems on one hand, and an energetic and capable military on the other, it can be all too seductive to start viewing the military as a cost-effective solution. -The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012, Charles J. Dunlap

I am beginning to think the only way the national government can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military. -James Fallows

The environment most hospitable to coups d’etat is one is which political apathy prevails as the dominant style. -Andrew Janos

Vienna seemed an unlikely locale for killing the president’s counterterrorism advisor.

When Horton had briefed Dox and me in Los Angeles, I’d initially pictured Washington, where Finch worked, or maybe some beachside place, where he might enjoy a summer vacation with his family. But as it turned out, Finch wasn’t in Washington just then, and nor did he have a family. What he did have was a single sibling-a sister, who taught at the Universitat fur Angewandte Kunst Wien, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and whom Finch tended to visit whenever he was in Europe on official business. At the moment, as it happened, he was in London, tasked, no doubt, with reassuring the British that the Special Relationship was still special, along with the other important activities presidential counterterrorism advisors are expected to carry out. The problem with London was that the people he was meeting would have their own security details, meaning getting close to him would involve penetrating veritable Venn diagrams of overlapping protection. But Vienna was neither an announced part of Finch’s itinerary, nor an official one. Unless art professors in the former seat of the Hapsburg Empire had their own bodyguards, Finch’s security would be all we had to worry about, and with luck, even that would be light, perhaps even nonexistent.

I had called Kanezaki from a payphone after going through security at LAX. My fellow passengers and I went through the new security machines with our arms raised over our heads as though we were criminals. A few chose to get patted down instead, like prisoners. No one seemed to mind the new normal.

Kanezaki hadn’t learned anything about Horton, but he did mention that a certain Tim Shorrock, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, had died of an apparent heart attack in Las Vegas. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” he asked.

“Why would I know anything about it?”

“Just seems like a lot of coincidences. Horton is obviously a key member of the counterterrorism community-”

“It’s nice you guys have a community now, with members. It makes it sound so friendly.”

“-and a heart attack for Shorrock, at the same time Horton is reaching out to you, makes me wonder. Especially because apparently Shorrock was some kind of fitness fanatic.”

“You ever hear of an earthquake causing a church to collapse on its parishioners?” I asked. “It happens. Same as a fitness fanatic with a faulty valve or whatever. I tend to think of it as God indulging his sense of irony. Or maybe his sense of humor.”

“Maybe. Did you ever meet with Horton?”

“Maybe.”

“You were going to keep me posted, remember?”

I might have reminded him that keeping him posted was in exchange for his finding out about what Horton was planning, which he hadn’t done. But if I told him that, he would just respond that he had tried but hadn’t managed, and anyway that he had come through with information about Treven and Larison. It would be a circle jerk at best; more likely, it would erode some of the trust and goodwill Kanezaki and I had spent years building.

Still, I hesitated to tell him, even in broad strokes, what Horton was up to. Need-to-know and other aspects of operational security are a long-honed reflex in me. But if Larison was right, it was in my interest to learn everything I could about Horton, who might be as much opposition as he was client. Offering some information of mine in exchange for data that might give me a clearer view of the movement of pieces on the board, and of the players behind them, would be a smart trade.

“It’ll sound a little crazy,” I said.

He chuckled. “It’s a crazy business. My own COS tried to have me taken out, remember?”

Back when he’d been a green CIA recruit in Tokyo, Kanezaki had run dangerously afoul of his chief of station, a certain James Biddle, who tried to hire me to kill him. I warned Kanezaki, instead, and that warning had fostered a relationship that had since become highly useful to me.

“All right. Horton says there’s a coup afoot in America.” When I was done giving him the 30,000-foot view of the landscape, I asked, “You think that’s possible?”

There was a long pause, then he said, “I think the public’s been…prepped for this, yes. Even before nine-eleven, but especially since then. There’s a ratchet effect, and nothing, not even killing bin Laden, seems to change it. I can see where some people could realize they could take advantage, whether out of greed or rationalized patriotism or whatever. What does Horton want you to do?”

“I think you can imagine.”

“The plotters?”

I didn’t answer.

“Shorrock?”

Again, I didn’t answer.

“It might be true,” he said, after a moment. “In which case, you’re doing something pretty heroic. But…if the people behind this thing get wind of your involvement, I think you’re going face opposition like you’ve never seen.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, remembering, again, Larison’s admonitions about Horton.

“You trust Horton?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why are you doing this? The money?”

There was a time when Kanezaki’s inquiries were obvious and callow. He’d come a long way.

“Not just the money. I wouldn’t call it heroic, the way you did, but…look, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for me to do something good for a change.”

“If it is good. You only have Horton’s word to go on, is that right?”

“That’s why I called you. I was hoping for some kind of corroborating evidence, one way or the other.”

“I wish I’d been able to find something. So far not.”

“Let me ask you something. Horton…does he have any vulnerabilities?” I was thinking of what Larison had said about hostages to fortune. I wondered whether Horton had one of his own.

“My friend, that’s a line I can’t cross. I’m not going to help you take out an American army colonel.”

“I’m not asking you to. But…if this thing turns out to be other than what it’s been billed as, heroism might require a different course. Just keep it in mind.”

“The two operators you asked me to follow up on-Larison and Treven. Are they involved?”

But I’d said enough. I told him let’s just stay in touch-after all, he wanted to know if Horton was right and what was being done about it, and I wanted an early warning system in case I was being set up. He told me he’d keep trying to find out more, and I headed off to Vienna.

Horton’s intel had been spotty. He had Finch’s roundtrip Washington to London flights, and he knew his schedule of meetings in London. The meetings ended two days before the return flight, and Horton claimed to be ninety percent sure Finch would spend those two days in Vienna, taking a roundtrip flight from London on his own dime before heading back to Washington on his government-sanctioned ticket. What we didn’t know, though, was on what flight Finch would arrive, or where he would be staying. We might have called various airlines and Viennese hotels to “confirm” the reservation of a Mr. Jack Finch, but doing so would have created too many possibilities of an airline or hotel employee learning from the evening news about the selfsame Jack Finch’s demise, finding the previous call to be too weird under the circumstances to be merely a coincidence, and contacting the authorities, who might then want to check on whether other airlines and hotels had received similar calls. If Finch had been conducting his business like a good, oblivious civilian, Horton would have been able to nail down his travel details easily enough. The fact that he couldn’t indicated some security consciousness on the part of Finch, and suggested too that Horton felt circumscribed in his ability to look, lest his inquiries tip Finch off. Regardless, the upshot was that the locus of our attention had to be the sister. If we could get a fix on her, we would also be fixing Finch. After that, we would have to improvise.

On the one hand, Emma Capps, widowed but retaining her married name, was fairly easy to track. For starters, we had both her home and work addresses, courtesy of standard IRS paperwork. We also had plenty of photographs, scraped from the university’s website, from Capps’s Facebook page, and from Capps’s own website, where she blogged about trends in the art world and advertised her paintings-impressive oil works that were at once recognizably realistic but also bathed in an otherworldly, melting luminescence. On the other hand, none of us was particularly familiar with Vienna, we knew nothing of Capps’s daily habits, and we had only four days before Finch was expected to arrive in the city.

Still, an experienced four-man team, operating within urban concealment, can typically nail down the details of a civilian’s routine within a matter of days, and so it was for us with Capps. The fourth-floor flat in the declasse 15^th District, near Westbanhof, the main train station; morning yoga at Bikram Yoga College, a few blocks away; breakfast at Cafe Westend, also in her neighborhood; the university in the afternoon, where, given the paucity of students because of the summer break, we assumed she was painting rather than teaching. She was an attractive woman of about fifty with wavy brown hair, an erect posture, and a purposeful stride-easy to watch in both senses of the phrase. She seemed to live alone, and I wondered what had happened to her deceased husband, and how old she’d been when she’d lost him, and whether there had been any children beforehand. If there had been, presumably they were now grown and living on their own. Horton hadn’t included such details in her file, either because he didn’t have them, or, more likely, because he understood that no one other than a sociopath wants to become overly familiar with the humanity of someone targeted, even peripherally, in an op. And, indeed, as we watched Capps and learned her routines, I felt an inchoate hope that there were children somewhere, or a lover, or someone else in her life besides the brother we were about to take away.

On the fourth day we were watching her, the day we expected Finch to arrive, she stayed at the university later than usual. The four of us had shadowed her from her neighborhood that morning and were now taking turns circling the university, and at first I was concerned when she failed to emerge around five as she had previously. I would have expected her to meet Finch at the airport, or at least at Westbanhof Station. Could he have been coming in on a late flight? Had he canceled, or had Horton been wrong about him coming in the first place? But then I realized there was another possibility-simply that Finch, who had been visiting his sister here for many years, would know his way around and require no escort. So maybe the deviation in routine was a good sign.

Turned out it was. Capps left the university at close to six. There were plenty of pedestrians about, all enjoying the late summer daylight, and there were also lots of bicyclists and motor scooters and cars, so following Capps without being observed was easy. I stayed on her from a discreet distance, then watched her enter Cafe Pruckel, a classic Viennese coffee shop in one of the glorious nineteenth-century buildings that characterized the area-where, with the kind of serendipity that occasionally smiles down upon an op, Dox was presently taking a load off while Treven, Larison and I worked the street. I called him on the mobile he was carrying.

“Our girl is coming to see you,” I said when he picked up. “Did you-”

“Saw her already, amigo. I’m at one of the sidewalk tables, enjoying a tasty espresso and apple strudel mit Schlag.”

“‘Mit Schlag’?”

“Means with whipped cream.”

“I know what it means.”

“Oh. Well, when in Rome and all that, you know, I just like to blend.”

For a moment, I pictured enormous, goateed Dox amidst the effete students and artistes of the area. What I pictured couldn’t fairly be characterized as blending.

“That’s…admirable,” I said.

“Danke, buddy, I appreciate it. Anyway, what’s the plan?”

“Stay put for now. One of us will get a table on the other side of the building or inside so we have a view of both entrances. She might be meeting her friend there.”

The oblique references were probably unnecessary-the phones Horton had supplied were encrypted, and at this distance we were connected by their radio function rather than through a cell tower. But no sense taking chances.

“Roger that. Tell you what, get here soon so I can get up and drain the dragon. I’ve got three espressos inside me at this point and I think at least two are trying to get out.”

“Hold it in for five more minutes. I’ll buzz you as soon as we have someone else inside.”

“Can we make it four? I swear, I am currently engaged in mortal bladiatorial combat, and-”

“Look, I’ll try,” I said, exasperated. I clicked off and called Larison and Treven. Larison headed into the cafe; Treven, who was on a rented motor scooter, stayed outside.

Once Larison had confirmed he was inside and could see Capps, I told Dox to pull out. If Capps was indeed meeting Finch here, I didn’t want to give him the chance to log more of us than was strictly necessary.

I waited on a bench under the shade of some trees in the nearby Stadtpark, just a harmless-looking Japanese tourist taking in the sights and sounds and smells, savoring the sense of loneliness and freedom that comes only from solitary sojourns in strange lands, where all the everyday things seem subtly wondrous and different and new, where there’s no one to please or disappoint or explain to, where the traveler finds himself suspended between the beguilement of the comforts he left behind, and the allure of an imaginary future he senses but knows he can never really have.

I passed nearly an hour that way, the day’s heat slowly loosening, the trees’ shadows lengthening, pensioners and lovers and dog walkers drifting past me, occasionally enjoying an adjacent park bench. Maybe Horton’s intel had been faulty. Maybe Finch wouldn’t show. Maybe I’d get credit in the next life, or the afterlife, for trying, for a good faith effort that had ultimately failed to produce results.

My mobile buzzed. Larison’s number. I clicked answer. “Yeah.”

“Gang’s all here,” he said in his gravelly whisper.

I could hear the sounds of the cafe around him-music, conversation, laughter. “Good. Sound quality okay?”

The phones we were carrying were equipped with the latest listening gear-integrated electronic amplifiers. State of the art, as Horton had promised. Not as powerful as a parabolic mic, but a hell of a lot smaller and less obtrusive. Depending on overall acoustics, the user could eavesdrop on a quiet conversation as much as thirty feet away through a pair of ordinary wire-line earbuds, the kind Larison would be wearing right now.

“Excellent,” he said.

“Good. Let me know if you find out where we’ll be dining and staying.”

“I will.”

“Does it look like just us? Or should we expect extra company?

“Unless the extra company is cooling its heels outside, it looks like just us.”

So Finch was traveling without security. Unexpected, given his position, and even more so given the quality of enemy he must have developed through his information-brokering hobbies. Maybe he felt the dirt he had banked made him untouchable. Maybe he felt his side trip to Vienna had been planned discreetly enough to offer adequate protection. It didn’t matter. I’d have Treven make a pass on the motor scooter and Dox on foot to confirm, but for now it seemed like good news for us.

“All right,” I said. “If you learn anything or need anything, we’re nearby.”

“Copacetic for now.”

I clicked off and considered. For the moment, I didn’t want to say anything to Larison, but in my mind his cover was already blown. Even if Finch was relaxed enough to travel without a bodyguard, the way he had planned this trip suggested a degree of security sensitivity-certainly enough for him to log Larison and his danger vibe. Dox had commented on it, too, on our drive west from Las Vegas. “That hombre could make Satan’s neck hairs stand on end,” was how he’d put it. “He’s a reloader for sure.”

“A reloader?” I’d asked.

“Yeah, I’d empty the whole magazine into him, then reload and do it again, just to be sure.”

I agreed with his assessment. If Larison had a weakness, it was that danger aura he put out. Most men who have it just can’t cloak it. And if Finch picked up on it, he’d sure as hell take note if he spotted Larison again later that evening.

Ten minutes later, Larison buzzed me again. “Good news,” he said. “We’re eating at a place called Expidit. That’s how it sounds, anyway, I don’t know how it’s spelled. Like ‘expedite’ but with ‘it’ at the end, not ‘ite.’”

“I’ll see what I can find online. What about lodging?”

“A hotel called the Hollman Bell something. Again, I couldn’t make it out exactly. But that should be enough to work with.”

“Arrival time?”

“They’re done with their drinks and waved the waiter off when he asked if they wanted another, so I’d guess soon.”

“Okay, let me know if they head out. I’m going to try to find the restaurant and hotel.”

It took me only a minute to locate the Xpedit restaurant and Hollman Beletage Design and Boutique Hotel, both within a half mile of the university. Finch must have chosen the hotel for its proximity, and probably Capps had proposed the restaurant for the same reason.

I thought for a moment, then called Larison again. “Does our friend have a bag with him?” I asked.

“No.”

That meant he’d already checked in at the hotel. It also made it more likely that he and Capps would be on foot the rest of the evening. With no bag to carry, it would be a shame to waste the glorious weather by taking a cab.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s how I want us to play it. I’ll let the other guys know we’re going to stay nice and loose for the duration. No sense following too closely if we know where things are going to wind up. You stay put when they leave. I don’t want our friend seeing you get up at the same time he does, or to spot you later tonight.”

I expected some pushback, because no professional likes someone suggesting he’s been made. But Larison surprised me, saying only, “Agreed. Where do you want me?”

“Give them ten minutes, then head to the hotel. It’s the Hollman Beletage, on Kollnerhofgasse less than a half mile northwest of here. Find it on a map, but don’t look it up directly.”

“You don’t want a record of multiple Google searches of the restaurant and hotel.”

“I didn’t use Google, but yes. No sense leaving an electronic paper trail. Not that anyone’s going to be looking.”

Again he said, “Agreed.”

“Spend an hour getting to know the area, then let’s talk again. I’ll be doing the same.”

I clicked off, then called Dox and Treven to pass on the information Larison had given me. I told them to keep a loose eye on the restaurant, and to let me know when Finch and Capps showed up and when they were leaving. For the moment, the restaurant was of secondary interest: a possibility, but probably less promising than the hotel, where he was more likely to be alone. I might change that assessment after reconnoitering both, along with the route in between. The Xpedit restroom might be a possibility. Or, assuming Capps and Finch said their goodnights at the restaurant and she didn’t walk him to the hotel, some dark stretch of sidewalk, or an alley, on the way from one to the other. Whatever I decided, I wanted to avoid, if possible, using the cyanide, which Horton had deposited and we had retrieved at a dead drop at the base of the Mozart statue in the Burggarten, like something straight out of a John le Carre spy novel. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was reluctant. Maybe it was the inherent danger of such a powerful compound. Maybe it was some vestigial security discomfort in doing things the way Horton wanted, the way he expected. Maybe it was a perverse pride in doing the work up close, without tools, in a way almost no one else ever could.

I checked the restaurant first, and could immediately see it was unlikely to work. It was a large, open, L-shaped room, with enormous windows fronting the sidewalks outside. There was a hostess standing by the door, which meant I couldn’t slip in undetected for an on-site examination now without being remembered later. A hostess also suggested the need for reservations, and while presumably they would take walk-ins on an as-available basis, the place was pretty full. If a table were open, I could put Dox or Treven inside, hopefully somewhere that offered a view of Finch and Capps. Or I could lurk outside, keeping an eye on Capps and Finch through the large windows, then moving quickly inside if Finch got up to use the restroom. But that would almost certainly involve a “Would you mind if I used your restroom?” exchange with the hostess, at exactly the time one of the diners would subsequently turn up dead in said restroom. And if I couldn’t get to Finch, say because another patron was in the restroom at the same time he was, he’d see me, making it harder for me to get close later on.

I moved on to the hotel, noting with disappointment that there were no good venues on the way, even assuming I could be sure of Finch’s exact route and anticipate him accordingly. But as soon as I reached the hotel, I felt reassured. Call it assassination feng shui: the vibe was just more favorable. The entrance was in the center of an antique, balustraded building that occupied an entire short block. There was no doorman, no bellboy, and no driveway, just a dark, wooden door under an orange awning, flanked on the left by a clothes shop and on the right by a tobacco vendor and a hardware store, all currently closed. Parked cars lined the narrow street alongside the building, creating concealment possibilities around the hotel entrance. I saw not a single pedestrian, and compared to the revelry of the Ringstrasse, this part of the city was practically sepulchral.

I walked around the block, my footfalls against the stone sidewalk the only sound of any note. There was a restaurant around the corner, and two cafes down the street, but they were small affairs, presumably catering to people in the neighborhood and not attracting crowds from farther away. Everything else was either residential, or closed. I saw no security cameras anywhere, and was grateful that, for the moment, at least, Vienna wasn’t as blanketed with the devices as Tokyo, London, and, increasingly, major American cities.

I stepped inside the entranceway, ready to provide a story in Japanese-accented broken English about needing a restroom, and was surprised to see that I wasn’t yet in the hotel. The front entrance was shared, it seemed, with an apartment complex. To my right was another dark wooden door, marked with the hotel’s signature orange; ahead of me was a long flight of wide stone stairs leading to a landing and then continuing on around and above it. Between the hotel and the apartment complex, how much foot traffic could be expected here at night? Not a great deal, I suspected, and the later Finch stayed out for dinner, the greater the likelihood that when he arrived at the hotel, we would have the moment alone I needed.

On the mosaic tiled floor alongside the staircase, I noticed some painting equipment-a tarp, several cans, a ladder, coveralls-and indeed, the corridor smelled of freshly applied oil paint. Nothing worth stealing, so the workmen probably just left it when they quit for the day. I walked over for a closer look, and saw a roll of translucent plastic sheeting the workers must have been using to keep splatter off the tiled floor. I pulled on the deerskin gloves I was carrying, knelt, and unrolled about a foot worth of plastic. It was strong and heavy-about ten mils, I guessed, maybe more-but still flexible. I gripped a corner and tried, unsuccessfully, to drive my thumb through it. I drummed my fingers along the roll and looked around, an idea forming in my mind.

There was a box cutter on the tarp next to the paint cans. I used it to cut off about a three-foot length of the plastic sheeting, which I laid out on the floor alongside the equipment, and then replaced the roll and the box cutter as I’d found them. I stepped outside, called Larison, and told him what I wanted him to do. Then I called Dox, who confirmed that he and Treven were close by the restaurant and that Finch and Capps were inside.

“Good,” I told him. “I want you to give them plenty of space. All I need to know is when they leave, whether they’re heading toward the hotel together or whether they say goodnight before, and when our friend is a minute away from the hotel.”

“You sure he’s going back to the hotel? It’s a nice city and the weather’s good, he might want to go to a club or something.”

I thought of Finch, whose file photos had revealed a balding, colorless bureaucrat of about fifty-not so different in appearance, in fact, from J. Edgar Hoover, to whom Horton had compared him. “You think our guy is going clubbing?” I asked.

There was a pause. “Well, not clubbing, maybe. But there are areas of the city where a gentleman who’s so inclined can find women of a certain professional disposition. If we get done in time tonight, I’m fixing to visit one of those areas myself.”

“I think you might be confusing your own proclivities with those of our friend.”

“I’m not sure ‘proclivities’ is the word I’d use, but okay, I suppose I see your point.”

“Look, if he stays out for whatever reason, you just keep watching him. The later he gets back to the hotel, in fact, the better. I just need that one-minute heads-up regardless.”

I clicked off, then called Treven and told him to coordinate with Dox to watch the restaurant and the route to the hotel. I hoped we could finish this thing tonight. If we couldn’t, our next chance would be in the morning, which would mean watching the hotel entrance all night and trying to do the job in daylight. And every minute you spend in that kind of proximity to a target, you have to remember someone might be targeting you.

An hour later, Larison and I were strolling the cramped streets of a neighborhood near the hotel, each of us having separately examined the area as thoroughly as we could in the short time available. We compared notes on points of ingress and egress; noted the locations of ATMs, which would be equipped with cameras; and agreed on the overall approach we would employ. All we had to do now was wait.

“Why go to Washington?” he said at one point. “Forget it. Go after Hort before he comes after you.”

Horton had told me the third job would be in D.C. The plan was for the four of us to meet up there after Vienna and receive instructions after we’d arrived.

“How?” I said. “A JSOC colonel? Who knows you’d like nothing more than to take him down and get those diamonds back? What’s your plan?”

He looked at me. “I know how to get to him. How to get to him where he lives.”

“How?” I said, intrigued.

He shook his head. “Not now. When you’re ready. When you look me in the eye and tell me you understand there’s no other way.”

“Then we’ll have to wait.”

I watched him. I could see he was frustrated and trying to suppress it.

“What does your friend Dox think?” he said, after a moment.

I saw no advantage to confirming a personal attachment. “I don’t know that I’d call him my friend.”

“Don’t bullshit me. He acts like he doesn’t care about anything other than getting paid and laid, but I can see that’s an act. You know how he looks when we’re all together?”

“How?”

“Like a Rottweiler watching out for his master. I wish I had someone like that guarding my back.”

“I’m not his master.”

“You know what I mean. Behind the good ol’ boy facade, he just looks loyal. Fiercely loyal. And you don’t show much, but I have a feeling you must have done something to earn that. I can tell you’ve been through the shit together. I just don’t know what kind of shit.”

I wound up telling him about Hong Kong, and Hilger, and how Dox had walked away from a five-million-dollar payday to save my life, and how I’d killed two innocent people just to buy time to save Dox’s life. I wondered if I was being stupid. But something made me want to tell him. I wasn’t sure what, but I’ve learned to trust my gut.

When I was done, he said, “So they used Dox to get to you.”

The question made me uneasy. I wondered if I’d told him too much. But something still told me it would be useful for him to know. I didn’t know why.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Is there anyone else like that? Someone you care about? But who couldn’t protect themselves? Who would be…what’s the expression? A hostage to fortune?”

My mind instantly flashed on my small son, Koichiro, whom I’d seen only twice, as an infant in New York, whose mother would have told him by now his father was dead. Whose mother, indeed, had tried to make it so.

I didn’t answer. I’d told him enough already. Maybe too much.

He nodded and said, “Well, whoever that person is, he or she is now a hostage to Hort.”

I stopped and looked at him, trying to read his expression in the dim light. “Is that what he has on you?”

He answered the same way I had, by saying nothing.

It was hard to imagine this stone killer being that attached to anyone else. But I supposed people might say the same about me.

“Who?” I asked.

His mouth twisted into something midway between a smile and a grimace. “The particulars don’t really matter, do they?”

I thought of Koichiro again, then said, “Probably not.”

We might have moved on at that point, but instead we lingered, caught in that frustrating space between the desire for understanding and the futility of words for achieving it.

“How do you even know Horton has these diamonds?” I said. I knew he would read the small expression of interest as a weakening, and that it might therefore draw him out.

It did. He said, “Because he took them from me.”

He went on to tell me an astonishing story about CIA videos of terror suspects being gruesomely tortured by American interrogators, how the videos were made, who was in them, who stood to be sacrificed as fall guys if the videos ever got out.

“I read about this a few years ago,” I said. “I wondered why the Agency was admitting to making those tapes, and to destroying them.”

“Well, now you know. They were missing, not destroyed.”

“Missing because you took them.”

He nodded. “The diamonds were a ransom for the tapes’ return. But Hort stole them from me.”

I almost asked why he hadn’t retaliated by releasing the tapes, but then realized: the hostage. Horton, it seemed, had collected the necessary cards, and then called Larison’s bluff.

“When I checked up on you?” I said. “My source told me you were dead.”

He smiled coldly. “Greatly exaggerated.”

“You staged that?”

A young couple was heading toward us, walking hand-in-hand, the hard consonants of their German echoing off the close-set buildings and the stone sidewalk. Larison paused. They might not have understood English, but at a minimum they would have recognized it, and why give them a recollection of having passed two American men near where a body would soon be found?

When they were safely beyond us, Larison said, “As a way of throwing off the animosity I knew I was going to stir up. Hort saw through it.”

“Still, that’s a hell of a feat that you managed to stay ahead of them at all. You must have had the whole U.S. government hunting for you.”

“It was…interesting. I had to keep moving. A lot of buses, some hitchhiking. Rarely more than one night in the same town.”

“Yeah, I’ve done some of that myself. You see any good parts of the country?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer. His eyes drifted away, and his mouth loosened slightly as though in mild wonderment, or even reverence.

“I liked The Lost Coast,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get back, someday.”

Something had happened there, though I doubted he’d tell me what. Knowing Larison, it was probably something dark. I decided not to press.

“The tapes,” I said. “Are you in them?”

We started walking again, in silence. Finally he said, “I’m not proud of everything I’ve done. Are you?”

I found myself considering the question. Considering it carefully.

“There are…things,” I said. “Things that weigh on me. What a friend of mine calls ‘the cost of it.’ You know what I’m talking about?”

He nodded. “Of course.”

“I don’t know about you, but when I look back, and I’m being honest with myself, which mostly I try to do, it occurs to me that I’ve done more bad in the world than I’ve ever done good.”

I wondered why I’d said that to him. I’d never thought it before. At least not in those words. Was it what Horton had said to me over breakfast that morning?

I thought he was going to blow it off. Instead, he said, “I have…dreams. Really bad ones. Related to some of the shit I’ve done, the shit that’s on those tapes. I couldn’t tell you the last time I lay down at night without dreading what I would face in my sleep. Or the last time I slept through the night without waking up covered in sweat and going for the weapon on the bedstand next to me. The truth is…”

In the dark, I saw his teeth gleam in a smile that faltered into a grimace.

“The truth is,” he went on, “I’m pretty fucked up. But what can you do? A shark has to keep swimming, or it dies.”

I thought of Midori, the mother of my son. “You know, I once said the same thing to a woman I was trying to explain myself to.”

“Yeah? Did she understand?”

I remembered the last time I’d seen her, in New York, and what she’d tried to do just beforehand.

“That would be a no,” I said, and we both laughed.

My phone buzzed. Dox. I picked up and said, “What’s the status?”

“Our diners have just left the restaurant. A nice familial hug goodnight, and our guy is currently on his way to your position alone and on foot, ETA ten minutes. Guess you were right about the clubbing.”

“Good. Have-”

“Already done. Our friend on the scooter is zigzagging the street near you. He’ll see the diner when he’s one minute out. When you get a buzz from scooter man, it’s a one-minute ETA. And I’ll move in close but not too close in case you need me. Good luck.”

“Okay, good.” I clicked off and said to Larison, “Less than ten minutes. Let’s get in position.”

We headed toward the hotel. As we neared the end of Sonnenfels-gasse, just two blocks away, a uniformed cop turned the corner, heading toward us. I wasn’t unduly alarmed-there was no reason for him to pay any particular attention to us, and Larison and I had already established that “inebriated drinking companions” would be our cover for action in case we were stopped. I retracted into my harmless Japanese persona and prepared to just walk on by in the shadows.

But a few meters away, he called out, “Hey.” Larison, I realized, and that damn danger aura he put out. The cop must have keyed on it, consciously or unconsciously.

I gave him a small, unsteady wave and moved to go around, but he stopped and put up his hand to indicate we should do the same. Shit.

The cop said, “Wo gehen Sie so Spat noch hin?” I shook my head. Even if I’d understood his words, and I didn’t, I would have pretended not to. The less basis we had for engagement, the more likely he would be to give up in frustration, or otherwise to lose interest and move on.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he said, and this I did understand. Do you speak German?

Larison answered in slurred Spanish: “Solamente espanol, y un poco de ingles.” Only Spanish, and a little English-close enough to the Portuguese I spoke from my time in Brazil to be easily comprehensible.

The cop looked at me. I said, “Mit Schlag?”

I was hoping he would smile at that and move on, but he didn’t. He said, in English now, “You are at hotel? Here?”

This was going south fast. Our cover was solid and we hadn’t committed any crimes, but I didn’t want a cop taking a close look at any of us. And if he detained us much longer, we wouldn’t be in position in time to intercept Finch at the hotel.

“Hotel?” he said again. “Here?”

I shook my head and said in Japanese-accented English, “The Sacher Vien.” It was a famous hotel in the center of the city, though not, of course, one where any of us was actually staying.

Larison said, “Voy a vomitar.” I’m going to vomit.

I glanced over at him to see where he was going with this. He clamped a hand over his mouth as though trying to dam a rising tide of puke.

No, I thought. Don’t take out the cop. If we do, we can’t do Finch…

Larison groaned through his fingers. The cop said, “Was zum Teufel?”

Larison’s body convulsed, his head shooting forward, his ass jerking back. Vomit spewed from his mouth all over his shoes.

The cop jumped back and cried out, “Verdammt nochmal!”

Larison straightened, gasping, his cheeks puffing, his hands massaging his stomach. A perfect pantomime of a drunken man about to blow for the second time in as many seconds.

“Hotel!” the cop said, pointing in the direction we’d been walking. “Go to hotel. Jetzt! Now!”

“Yes,” I said, thinking, thank God. “Hotel.”

Larison groaned again. The cop stepped to the side and again gestured angrily in the direction we’d been walking. I took Larison’s arm and led him past. From behind us, I heard the cop muttering something disgustedly. I imagined it was along the lines of asshole was lucky he didn’t puke on my shoes.

“Nice going,” I said, when we had turned the corner. “What did you do, finger in your throat?”

“Yeah. While I was clutching my face.” He coughed and spat.

“For a minute there, I thought you were gearing up to drop him. Which would have been a mistake.”

“No, I just wanted to dare him to pull me into his cruiser with puke all over my shoes. I had a feeling he’d realize he had more important things to do.”

“Where did you learn your Spanish?”

“Ops. Latin America.” It was a sufficiently vague description to make clear he didn’t want to talk about it more. Not that we had time.

“We still have a few minutes,” I said. “Quick, knock the puke off your shoes. We don’t want to track anything into the hotel.”

He whacked his feet against the side of a building a few times, then stamped and scraped his soles along the ground. Between that and the two hundred meters we still had to walk, we’d be fine.

Treven buzzed my mobile just as we arrived at the hotel entrance. ETA one minute. Cutting it a little close, but still manageable. Larison stayed outside, hunkering down between two parked cars just a few meters from the doorway, as I pulled on my gloves and went in. The corridor was still satisfyingly quiet. I quickly slipped into one of the coveralls that had been left on the tarp. They were a little large, but not excessively so. I grabbed a can of paint and a paintbrush and the length of plastic sheeting I’d cut, put the paint can on the floor next to the interior hotel entranceway, and started running the brush up and down the wall like a painter on the midnight shift. The whole thing was sufficiently incongruous to give Finch pause while he tried to sort it through, but by the time he had figured out what was wrong with this picture, it would already be too late.

A moment later, I heard the exterior door open. I glanced right and saw Finch on his way in, then looked back to the work I was ostensibly engaged in, not wanting to alarm him by paying him undue attention. In my peripheral vision, I watched him come closer. Five meters. Four. Three.

He slowed, perhaps in concern at what the hell a workman was doing here, alone and this late at night. But then the exterior door opened behind him. I glanced right again and saw Larison coming in, looking formidable, purposeful, and deadly. Finch turned and I knew that for the next half second, his mind would be fully occupied with trying to place Larison’s face; realizing he’d seen it earlier, in Cafe Pruckel; weighing whether this could be happenstance or whether he should be concerned; deciding that the man he’d just made twice was too dangerous-looking to be merely a coincidence; combining that datapoint with the incongruous presence of a “workman” who was now behind him…

I set down the brush and headed in, taking hold of both ends of the length of plastic sheeting, palms up and thumbs out, turning my hands over and crossing my arms as I moved to create an isosceles triangle with my forearms as the long lines and the plastic as the base. Finch must have heard me coming because he started to turn, but too late. I dropped the plastic over his head and levered my forearms against the back of his skull, molding the plastic across his face, dragging him backward to ruin his balance. He clawed at what was covering his eyes and nose and mouth, but his fingers couldn’t penetrate the thick plastic. He got off a single, muffled cry, but then couldn’t draw breath for another. He tried to turn and I let him, staying with him, steering him toward the dark of the stairs, keeping him disoriented and off balance. He groped behind for me and I put a knee in his lower back, bending him over it, keeping my face well clear of his flailing arms. He tried scratching at my hands and forearms, but was stymied by the gloves and the same kind of wrist tape I had used in Las Vegas.

I knew his oxygen was getting used up rapidly and it was only a matter of seconds before his brain started to shut down. I glanced up and saw Larison, wearing his own gloves, his head turned to watch us, holding closed the exterior door against the small possibility of a late arriving hotel guest or apartment dweller. In a moment, Finch would be still, and at that point, even if someone came through the interior door, they would likely turn left toward the exterior door and key on Larison, remaining oblivious to the silent tableau in the dark behind them. And if anyone happened to come down the stairs, I would switch to Samaritan mode, talking to Finch’s body as though trying to rouse a drunken acquaintance. Not a great detail for someone to remember, especially after our earlier encounter with the cop, but not necessarily fatal, either.

Finch’s legs sagged and he went to his knees, his chest bucking and jerking as his lungs desperately tried to suck air, his hands again clawing, feebly now, against the plastic sealed across his face. And then, in extremis, some lingering, rational part of his brain must have asserted itself, because his right hand stopped clawing at his face and dropped to his front pants pocket. My mind flashed knife! and I shot my knee into his elbow to disrupt him-a second time, again. But the angle was awkward and the blow attenuated and he managed to get his hand into his pocket. I was about to change my grip to cover the plastic over his nose and mouth with my left hand while I grabbed the wrist of his knife hand with my right, but Larison had seen what was happening and came charging back from the exterior door, seizing Finch’s hand just as it came free, a gravity-assisted folding knife popping open en route. Larison started to twist Finch’s hand to make him drop the knife, and I whispered urgently, “No! No damage!” Finch’s arm shook and he tried to turn the knife to cut Larison’s hands, but Larison had too secure a grip, and whatever reserves Finch had drawn upon to access the weapon had been his last. His body went limp, the knife clattered to the floor, and he collapsed back into me.

“Get back to the door,” I said. “Fast.” Only a small chance anyone would come in at exactly that moment, but Murphy’s Law had a way of turning small chances into inevitable events, and this was the one moment there would be nothing we could do to conceal what was happening. Larison dashed back to the door while I dragged Finch to the stairs. “Two minutes,” I said, to let Larison know that’s how long I wanted to keep the plastic in place, to be certain Finch was done.

I counted off the time and, when I was satisfied, eased the plastic away and laid Finch out at the foot of the stairs. I examined his face for damage and noted none. I took the paint can and brush and replaced them as I had found them. Then I scanned the tile floor, looking for any scuff marks Finch’s heels might have left. Yes, there they were, two sets of about a meter each from when I had dragged him. I grabbed a cloth from where the painting equipment was placed, and rubbed them away. Larison glanced back but he must have understood what I was doing because he said nothing.

I recovered the knife and placed it back in Finch’s pocket. Hard to imagine anyone would be in a position to note its absence if we took it, but it’s best to doctor a crime scene as little as possible. The coveralls, though, I would keep. If they were missed at all, anything could explain their absence, and I didn’t want to chance leaving behind something that might be contaminated with my hair or clothing fibers. For the same reason, I kept the cloth I’d just used, which might be examined and found to contain some of the material from Finch’s heels.

I took a quick look around the hallway and saw nothing out of place. Well, Finch’s body on the stairs, of course, but that looked like what it was supposed to be: a man in sudden distress, perhaps respiratory, perhaps cardiac, staggers over to the stairs to sit, stumbles, and collapses. The manner of his death might have left some minor petechiae-ruptured capillaries-in his face and eyes, but I expected this would be minimal and of little forensic note under the circumstances. The truly suspicious might wonder at the coincidence of his being stricken in the very hotel where he had a reservation and where he might therefore be anticipated, but like car accidents, which happen mostly in a driver’s own neighborhood simply because that’s where he most often drives, the coincidence of the location of Finch’s collapse was also easily explained, and therefore, also, easily dismissed.

I nodded to Larison and we headed out, splitting up immediately. Larison went right; I went straight, crossing the street and cutting through a small shopping arcade, currently closed and dark. I would have gone left and therefore more directly away from Larison, but that was the direction in which we’d encountered the cop, and I didn’t want to risk bumping into him again.

I wondered about the knife. It had been a near thing and I realized I’d been complacent because Finch didn’t look the type. Plus, how the hell had he gotten it through security on his flights? Maybe he had a checked bag. Or maybe there was some sort of special dispensation for government officials. There usually is.

Twenty minutes later, after discarding in various refuse containers the coveralls and the plastic sheeting I had used to kill Finch, I called Dox. Larison would be doing the same with Treven. “It’s done,” I told him.

“No trouble?”

“A little,” I said, thinking about the cop. “But we handled it.”

“Good to hear. You’re okay?”

“Fine.”

“You want to meet and brief?”

“Better to do it on the other side of the pond. No sense being seen together here unless there’s a good reason.”

“Other than my fine company. But don’t worry, it’s okay.”

I wondered for a moment whether I’d hurt his feelings. Did he really want to just…get together? Celebrate, or something?

But he quickly disabused me with a laugh. “Just kidding. Actually, since there are no more trains at this hour, I was thinking I might find a companion more closely suited to my proclivities, as you like to call them.”

“Sure, knock yourself out. Just check for the Adam’s Apple, okay?”

Once, in Bangkok, Dox was all set to go off with a gorgeous lady boy when at the last moment I had taken pity and warned him. But saving him from an embarrassing mistake and letting him live it down were two different things.

He laughed. “Yes, sir, I have learned my lesson. Anyway, I’m looking forward to an evening on the town. Don’t forget, this was a nice payday. Though I feel like you’ve done most of the heavy lifting.”

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing it under the circumstances if you didn’t have my back.”

There was a pause, then he said, “I appreciate that, man. Thank you.”

I thought of the way he’d carried me, as I was bleeding out, over a giant shoulder in Hong Kong, of the transfusion he’d saved me with afterward. “It’s just the truth.”

“You’re not going to get all sentimental on me, though, are you?”

I smiled. “Never.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we’re not getting together tonight. I’d probably give you a big hug, and you might embarrass yourself by hugging me back.”

“Yeah, thanks for that. I appreciate it.”

He laughed. “Okay, then. Gonna party like a rock star and I’ll see you soon.”

I clicked off and walked alone through Vienna.

I thought about everything Larison had said earlier. I told myself, just one more.

The mantra of many an alcoholic.

Larison walked slowly back to the hotel, trying to avoid civilians, keeping to the shadows. His mind was racing and his emotions were roiling and he knew when he was feeling like this the people around him could sense it, like some weird disturbance in an urban force field. A prostitute trolling at the edge of a park he passed started to smile at him with practiced professionalism, and then the smile faltered. A cloud passed across her face and she took a step away, half turning as though preparing to run. In a more superstitious culture, he knew, she might have crossed herself.

He walked on, his head tracking left and right, checking hot spots, logging his surroundings. How could Rain be so stupid about what he was up against with Hort? With Treven, he understood the psychology-the attachment to the unit, the command structure, the blessing of higher authority. But Rain, obviously, didn’t need that kind of support network, and had long lived outside it. Then what was making the man hesitate? If his motives were purely mercenary, the diamonds were the obvious play. Was this really about doing something good in the world? The notion was vaguely seductive, but come on. All Larison wanted, the best he could hope for, was to eliminate the threat, get back the diamonds, and live out the rest of his days somewhere quiet with Nico, someplace with a beach and the sound of the ocean and no memories, a place where the dreams might eventually slacken and abate. Beyond that didn’t matter. If death were really the end, then everything Larison had done, and all the torments it caused him, would die with him. If there were a hell, it would be his new address. Whatever he might do in whatever time he might have left would have no impact on any of it, one way or the other, and to imagine otherwise was nothing but a childish fantasy.

It was a little sad, actually. He respected Rain. Felt in some ways the man was even a kindred spirit-another self-contained, lethal loner, professionally paranoid, personally aloof.

But what difference did any of that make? In his position, sentiment was a weakness, and in his line of work, weaknesses got you killed.

Still, he was surprised to feel an uncharacteristic sense of regret at the thought of taking out Rain and the others. He wondered if it was a sign of aging, or whether it might be some last, twitching vestige of a conscience he’d long since left for dead. What if it was? He’d read his Thoreau in high school. How did it go again? Something like, What’s the point of having a conscience, if you don’t listen to it?

But Thoreau had never been a soldier. And if there was one thing he’d learned from Hort, it was that the mission came before the man. The mission. And the current mission couldn’t be more clear: eliminate Hort and recover the diamonds. Protect Nico. Protect himself.

As for the rest…well, it was a rare mission that didn’t involve collateral damage. You didn’t welcome it, but you couldn’t shrink from it, either. In the end, he supposed, all men do what they have to.

The trick was living with it afterward. But he’d had plenty of practice with that.

I arrived in D.C. on an Amtrak train from New York, having flown to JFK from Munich. I preferred not to use obvious routes to or from the places I might be expected. Dox, Larison, and Treven had traveled somewhat less circuitously, and had therefore arrived ahead of me, but that was their risk, not mine.

The meeting was at the downtown Capital Hilton, a large and appropriately anonymous conference hotel Dox had recommended and where he’d made a room reservation. I had the cab drop me off at the Hay Adams, across from the White House, instead, thinking I’d walk the few blocks to the Hilton rather than give the driver a chance to note my actual destination. But instead of heading straight to the meeting, I succumbed to a strange urge to join the throng of tourists milling along the tall iron security fence at the edge of the expansive front lawn.

I strolled over, my pores opening immediately in the afternoon humidity. It was a cloudy day, but somehow the absence of sun exacerbated the heat, which felt like it was radiating from everything rather than from some single, identifiable source. Even the squirrels in Lafayette Square seemed listless, lethargic, as motionless as the nearby humans slouching on park benches and sweating under the useless foliage in rolled shirt-sleeves and loosened ties.

As I exited the park, I was immediately struck by how fortified the area was. Pennsylvania Avenue had been shut down to automobile traffic, presumably out of fear of truck bombs. There were steel vehicle traps through which delivery trucks had to pass for inspection; multiple guard posts; swarms of uniformed cops and military personnel patrolling on foot, on bicycles, and in cars. The windows of the far-off building itself stared insensate through the thick iron bars separating the grounds from the citizenry, as blank and impenetrable as the tactical shades of the scores of men guarding them. What had once been a residence and office was now, in essence, a bunker.

I moved on, heading southwest in the beginning of a long loop that would give me ample opportunities to confirm I wasn’t being followed before arriving at the Hilton. Outside the garrisoned grounds of the White House, the city was unremarkable, even bland. The streets were wide and straight; the architecture unimaginative; the ambiance, nonexistent. I noted that, along with London and New York, Washington seemed one of the few remaining cities where men were determined to wear jackets and ties even in the summer. The difference being that in London and New York, the men knew how to dress. But what they lacked in sartorial sense, Washington’s office workers made up for with a certain bounce in their gait. I wondered what might account for their perkiness, and decided it was proximity to power. After all, a dog wags its tail even when it’s begging for a scrap, not only when it receives one.

I had called Horton from the airport and briefed him on what happened in Vienna. As with Shorrock, he’d already heard. He told me the money had been deposited and proposed that we meet to discuss the next assignment. But I saw no upside to a face-to-face. We still had the communications gear he’d given me in L.A. I’d ditched the cyanide, and didn’t think I’d need a replacement. So I declined, telling him to use a secure site I’d set up, instead.

I paused in another park, fished the iPad out of my shoulder bag, and found a public Wi-Fi network. I checked the bank account and confirmed deposit of the three hundred thousand. Then I checked the secure site to see if Horton had uploaded the target file.

He had. I opened it and saw the name. I would have recognized it even if it hadn’t been immediately followed by her title:

Diane Schmalz. U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

No, I thought, shaking my head at the screen. Not a chance.

He was ignoring my rules about women and children. Maybe he thought I wasn’t serious, that the money would matter more. If so, he was wrong. I’d lived by my rules for a long time, and even the one deviation hadn’t really been an exception, because I did it for personal reasons, not as part of a job. I wasn’t going to change now.

But what if killing her saves thousands?

No. I didn’t care. If there’s one thing I know as well as I know killing, it’s how subornment works. One baby step at a time. The art of getting someone to cross a line he doesn’t even see until he looks back and realizes it’s already impossibly far behind him.

I glanced through the file. Photographs. Home addresses, both in D.C. and a weekend place in western Maryland. Schedule. No observed security consciousness and no protection, because no Supreme Court Justice had ever been assassinated.

But it didn’t make sense. I’d never had much interest in what passes for justice in America, but I knew Schmalz’s name, and I knew she had a reputation as one of the court’s last guardians of civil liberties. It was hard to imagine her being part of a plot to end those liberties. If anything, I would have expected her to be on the other side.

I scanned down and saw that Horton must have anticipated my concern. He had written:

When the president declares his assumption of emergency powers, he’ll be sued. There are four authoritarian Justices who will back him. The other four might or might not. Schmalz would absolutely oppose him, leading to a possible five-four defeat. Not necessarily fatal to their plans, but certainly it would be a major public relations setback not to secure the Supreme Court’s blessing along with that of Congress.

Schmalz’s son is a lawyer, married with three small children. He is a closeted homosexual and the plotters have graphic photographic and video evidence of his infidelities. He has also twice threatened suicide, and received therapy and other treatment afterward. Schmalz understands that were her son’s homosexuality revealed, it would destroy his family and career, devastate her grandchildren, and likely cause this unstable man to take his own life. She will do what’s she’s told to prevent all this.

But not if she passes away beforehand.

I reread the relevant paragraphs and felt an uncharacteristic anger taking hold of me. One of my rules has always been no acts against non-principals. Meaning no deaths of non-principals primarily, but still, I’ve never liked the idea of solving a problem with Person A by going after Person B. Kill Schmalz? If I really wanted to do something good in the world, I thought, I ought to go after the people who were threatening to ruin her son and grandchildren just to secure a favorable vote.

I wondered why Horton didn’t do something arguably less extreme. Find some way to out the son in advance and defuse the blackmail bomb by preempting it? Maybe he thought that would tip his hand to the plotters in a way that a kindly-looking grandmother’s peaceful demise in her sleep wouldn’t.

But I didn’t care. I didn’t like the smell of this thing anymore, or where it seemed to be taking me. The others could do what they wanted. I was out.

I exited the site and purged the browser, then found a payphone, called the Hilton, and asked for James Hendricks, the name Dox had told me he would check in under. “We on?” I said.

“Gang’s all here, partner. Twelve-thirty-four.”

That meant they were in room 901. My habit with Dox was to use a simple code when mentioning exact dates, times, room numbers and the like. We just added three to each digit. It wasn’t much and wouldn’t be all that difficult to crack, but one more layer of defense never hurt anyone.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said, then hung up and unobtrusively wiped down the handset with a handkerchief. Being in the belly of the beast was making me twitchy.

I headed over to the Hilton. The lobby was crowded, apparently due to the annual convention of something called The American Constitution Society. I couldn’t help smiling a little. If you only knew.

I took the elevator to the tenth floor, then the stairs down to nine. I emerged into the middle of a narrow corridor about a hundred meters long. I looked left, and at the far end saw two men in suits and shades who looked like bodyguards waiting outside a VIP’s room. Not so unusual, and easily explained by the convention downstairs or by one of the nearby embassies. Still, I wasn’t sorry to see from a sign that 901 was to the right. I walked to the end of the corridor, made a left, and found the room. I knocked once and the door opened instantly-Treven. He must have been watching through the peephole. I nodded in acknowledgement and walked in. Dox and Larison were sitting across from each other on the room’s twin beds, eating sandwiches. I heard Treven latching the door behind me.

“You hungry?” Dox said, holding up an Au Bon Pain bag. “We got tuna, turkey, and roast beef.”

On the beds alongside them were a couple of pistols. A Wilson Combat, which must have been Dox’s; a Glock that I assumed was Larison’s. I wondered if Treven was carrying, too. Seeing the guns gave me mixed feelings. In general, better to be armed, yes, but I didn’t know Larison or Treven well enough to like the feeling of their carrying firearms around me.

“Where’d you get the hardware?” I said. “The underground redneck railroad again?”

Dox grinned. “This time, just a gun show in Chantilly. You know, better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Picked out a Wilson for you, too. These hombres here like their Glocks, but you know me.”

He handed me a Tactical Supergrade Compact and two spare magazines. I put the magazines in my front pockets, then checked the load and secured the gun in my waistband. It felt good. If Larison and Treven were going to be carrying, I was glad I was, too.

“Sandwich?” Dox asked.

“No, I’m good,” I said. “You eat, I’ll talk.”

I sat down next to Dox. Treven hesitated, then did the same next to Larison, across from me. I briefed them all on what had happened in Vienna. Then I told them who the next target was. And told them I was out, and why.

“I don’t get it,” Dox said, when I was done. “I mean, who cares if her son is gay? I thought we were living in the twenty-first century. Hell, I love gay men. If they stick to loving each other, it just means more ladies for me.”

“It’s not that he’s gay,” I said. “It’s that he’s closeted. That’s the exploitable aspect. Although I agree it’s a shame.”

Larison and Treven hadn’t said anything yet. I was surprised they were being so quiet.

“Anyway,” Dox said, “I’m not exactly okay with euthanizing a little old lady. But even more than that…damn, a Supreme Court Justice? I mean, we’re already practically making history here with some of the targets we just took down. But being the first to rack up a Supreme? I’m starting to feel like we might be growing bullseyes on our backs, and I don’t think I like it.”

“I don’t care one way or the other,” Larison said. “You know why I’m in this. But if you feel like we’re growing targets on our backs, congratulations, it means you’re starting to wake up.”

I looked at Treven. “You want this?” I said. “Do it yourself and it’s a two-million dollar payday.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Larison said, looking at Treven. “It’s a setup. This whole fucking thing is a setup. Go out on your own and you’ll be the first one to get picked off.”

A long moment went by. Treven said, “Whether you’re in this for the money, or whether it’s because you want to save a lot of lives, the calculus is the same. A false flag terror attack is still a terror attack. Innocent people die either way. If removing one more player makes the difference, I’ll do it, with or without the rest of you.”

“A player?” Dox said. “Have you ever seen a picture of this woman? She looks like my grandma. I’m not holding a damn pillow over her face, no sir. Give me nightmares for the rest of my life.”

I didn’t like Treven’s response. It struck me as the product of bluster, not of thought. I wondered why he’d be so touchy. Had he been feeling left out? Jealous that he hadn’t been at the center of things with Shorrock and Finch? It seemed silly that someone so capable and experienced could also be so adolescent. If I could have been paid either way and stayed at the periphery, I would have been glad to.

But it was all the same to me. “Here,” I said, firing up the iPad and accessing the secure site. I input my pass code, then saw a message from Kanezaki: Call me ASAP.

I deleted the message and handed the iPad to Treven. “Hold on,” I said. “Looks like we might have some new information about Horton.” I popped the batteries in my phone, turned it on, and called Kanezaki.

He picked up instantly. “Did you do Jack Finch?” he said.

I was taken aback but didn’t show it. “What are you talking about?” I saw the others glance over.

“Stop playing with me. The president is about to announce his replacement. Colonel Horton.”

My stomach lurched. “Finch’s replacement is…Horton?” I said. Larison was nodding as though he already knew.

“That’s not all. Shorrock, the guy you say died in Las Vegas because of an ironic act of God? He was giving secret testimony to Congress about abuses within the National Counterterrorism Center. He was just a civilian manager, he wouldn’t know an op if one snuck up and bit him on the ass, the last guy in the world to want to run, or to be able to run, a false flag attack. But you know who’s replacing him?”

I felt sick. “No.”

“The number two guy there, Dan Gillmor. And Gillmor’s no civilian appointee. He’s former JSOC, one of Horton’s guys. Been part of the military/intelligence/corporate/security complex his entire life. And he’s a fanatic. Knights of Malta like James Jesus Angleton and William Casey, crusader challenge coins-”

“Crusader challenge coins?”

“Some of these guys, like Erik Prince, think what we’re doing in the Middle East is a holy war, a new Crusades. It’s a network of zealots. And this one is now perfectly positioned to run the groups Horton told you were being used for these impending false flag attacks. Now his interfering boss is out of the way, and he’s number one. He can do anything he wants without having to explain himself to some meddling civilian.”

I didn’t say anything. There was so much to process, I couldn’t sort it all through.

Dox, Larison, and Treven were all watching me, their sandwiches forgotten. I’d said little, but my expression and posture must have told them everything.

“Did you do it?” Kanezaki said. “Shorrock? Finch? Was it you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Jesus Christ, John. You’re not preventing a coup. You just cleared the way to one.”

Still I didn’t answer. I was struggling to connect the dots. Larison was right. I’d been an idiot. An idiot.

“Do you get it?” Kanezaki said. “Horton isn’t trying to stop this thing. He’s one of the plotters. He mixed a lot of truth into his lies just to-”

“Stop,” I said. “Let me think.”

Dox said, “What’s going on?”

I held up a hand, palm out, and said to Kanezaki, “This announcement about Horton’s new position. When is it scheduled to happen?”

“I don’t know. But the word is, soon.”

“What about Gillmor? When will that be announced?”

“The same.”

I put my thumb over the phone’s microphone and looked over at the others. My mind was racing but I kept my voice calm. “Schmalz is a setup. We need to get out of here. Get ready. Just trying to learn a little more, then I’ll fill you in and we’ll talk about how to bug out.”

The three of them stood. There was an electric feeling building in the room that I didn’t like.

I moved my thumb and said to Kanezaki, “Anything else?”

“Yes. Why are you asking about the timing? Of the announcement about Horton and Gillmor.”

“If the announcements are any time soon, Horton didn’t care that I could hear of them before doing the third target. That means the third target was a setup.”

“Third target…there’s another? Who?”

“Diane Schmalz.”

“The Supreme Court Justice? Are you fucking insane?”

“Relax. I was already going to turn it down. But he never expected me to do it in the first place. It was just a ploy to get me to Washington.”

“Shit. You’re in Washington now?”

“Yes.”

“You need to get out of the city. D.C. is the last place you want Horton hunting for you. Especially now, he has local resources that can lock down that place like he’s closing the door on a closet.”

“Thanks for the information,” I said, preparing to click off. “I’ll call you when I’m somewhere safe.”

“Wait,” he said. “Hold on. Just got something on my screen. It’s…oh, fuck.”

“What?”

“Terror alert. Goes out to everyone in the intelligence and law enforcement communities. CIA, FBI, local and state police, everyone. It says…hang on, okay, Shorrock and Finch didn’t die, they were murdered. According to toxicology tests, with cyanide. And that you were involved. You, the two ISA operators you asked me about, and Dox. And that you’re all armed, special-ops trained, and believed to be in the Washington metro area right now, planning another terror attack.”

It had to be Horton. No one else knew about the cyanide. And Horton didn’t know that I hadn’t even used it.

“You can’t get out of there now,” Kanezaki said. “Every airport, every train station, every bus station, they’ll be crawling with personnel. Every surveillance camera in the city will be looking for you.”

“Do they have photographs?”

“Grainy in the alert. Like blow-ups from surveillance cameras.”

Las Vegas, I guessed. Our best bet would be cabs, at least to start with. The farther we got from the city center, the less concentrated the opposition would be. But we had to move fast.

“All right, at least they’re grainy,” I said. “I doubt the average cop-”

“You don’t get it. You’re not going to be arrested. The president has an assassination list, don’t you know that? There’s a NOFORN addendum to this alert that says you’re on it. All four of you. They’ll shoot you on sight. And if you do wind up captured, there’s Guantanamo, Bagram, Camp No, the Salt Pit…and those are just the ones that have been disclosed. There are others they can put you in the Red Cross has never heard of, let alone visited, you understand? You’ll have a number, that’s it. No one will know your name. John, some of these places, you might as well be on another planet, or in another dimension. You get there, you’re just-”

“I need to go. I’ll call you.”

“Wait. Let me help you.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because you’re the only ones who can stop this thing now.”

“Bullshit. Spill it to the media. Don’t you have contacts at the New York Times?”

He laughed. “You think the Times would do anything with this, even if I had proof? They sat on Bush’s illegal domestic surveillance program until after he was safely reelected. Their editor-in-chief asks the White House for permission to publish, for God’s sake, and is proud of it, too.”

“Then one of the networks. ABC, CNN, whatever.”

He laughed again. “Did you catch Jeremy Scahill’s report about the Agency’s secret prison in Somalia? The seventh floor had apoplexy, it was so dead-on accurate. They used Barbara Starr and Luis Martinez to discredit it. ABC and CNN, the watchdog media.”

“Then call Scahill.”

“The people we’re up against will just instruct the networks to ignore or discredit him. The networks work for us, John. Which I admit is mostly useful and I’ve taken advantage of it many times myself. But it’s working against us right now.”

“Wikileaks, then.”

“Now you’re making sense. But I don’t have any proof. Get me some.”

“No. I don’t want to get further into this. I want to get out.”

“You’re telling me you’re not going to make Horton pay for setting you up?”

I didn’t answer.

“You think he’s going to stop coming after you? You know as well as I do that he’ll be more motivated now than ever.”

Again I said nothing.

“Damn it, John, let me help you.”

I was in a box and I couldn’t see a way out of it. “Goddamn it. How?”

“I’ll come to you. Put you in the trunk of my car and drive you out of the city.”

“The trunk? There are four of us. What kind of car do you have?”

“Honda.”

“What model?”

There was a pause. “Civic.”

I looked over at the collective mass of Larison, Treven, and Dox. “No way,” I said.

“You’d be amazed what you can fit into a tight space with a little Crisco,” Dox offered, apparently having intuited what we were talking about.

“You have a better idea?” Kanezaki said.

“We’re talking about eight hundred, maybe nine hundred pounds. You couldn’t get us all in there with a chainsaw and a blender. And even if you could, the back of the car would be riding suspiciously low.”

“I’ll borrow my sister’s minivan. You can all hunker down. As long as no one stops me, no one will see you. It’s built to hold seven, the shocks won’t even be noticeably compressed.”

That sounded more promising. “When can you be here?”

“Where are you?”

If it had been anyone but Kanezaki, I would have been suspicious of a setup. But I trusted him as much as I did anyone other than Dox. Plus, I had no choice.

“Capital Hilton,” I said.

“She lives in Chevy Chase. It’s not that far, but we’re getting into rush hour now.”

“Can you have her meet you someplace in between and swap cars there?”

“That’s a good idea. I’ll be there in an hour. Maybe less. If there’s a problem, I can’t reach her or she’s out with her kids somewhere, or whatever, I’ll call you.”

“Leave a message on the secure site. My phone will be out of commission.”

“Right, okay.”

“We’ll meet you in the lowest level of the parking garage. Away from the elevators.”

“Got it. See you soon.”

I clicked off and disabled and pocketed the phone. Larison, Treven, and Dox had moved out from between the beds and away from each other. Everyone’s arms were loose and their hands open. They looked liked gunslingers in a western a half-second away from drawing.

“What the fuck is going on?” Treven said.

I didn’t like the accusatory tone I heard in the question, and reminded myself to be extra calm in my response. Four armed, dangerous, and suddenly distrustful men in a small room…if things got out of hand, it was going to be very bad.

“You were right,” I said, looking at Larison. “Horton set us up. Shorrock has been replaced by one of Horton’s guys, and Finch is about to be replaced by Horton himself. The government just issued some kind of all-points terror alert saying the four of us killed both of them with cyanide. We were just put on the presidents’ kill list. And they know we’re in D.C.”

“Horton and that damn cyanide,” Dox said. “So that was just supposed to incriminate us and sound scary to the public, too?”

I nodded. “Yeah. And the hell of it is, I never even used it. And no one else…”

I stopped, realizing I’d missed something obvious. Dangerously obvious.

Treven’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

I didn’t answer. I realized there were three people who thought I’d used cyanide on Shorrock: not just Horton, but also Larison and Treven. Either one of them, or both, could have mistakenly told Horton that I’d used the cyanide. That would have given him additional confidence to order the faked toxicology reports. He would have believed there really would be evidence of cyanide if anyone examined the corpses more thoroughly.

“Then how did you do Shorrock?” Larison said. “The way you did Finch?”

I was struck that despite the tension in the room, he could remain so detached and professionally curious.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. But if Larison and Treven were working for Horton, they wouldn’t be on that terror alert, right? Unless the idea were to make it look like we were all in the same boat, when in fact…

Treven tensed. In my peripheral vision, I saw Dox spot it, too.

There was a blur of movement, and an instant later all four of us had our guns out. Treven and I were pointing at each other. Dox was aiming at Treven. Larison had the muzzle of his angled toward the floor, but his head and eyes tracked from Treven to Dox to me and back again.

“You think I had something to do with this?” Treven said. “I’m as fucked as you are.”

I saw his hands were as steady as mine. “Put your gun down if you want to get unfucked,” I said.

Treven said nothing.

Larison’s head kept tracking. He looked like a rattlesnake trying to make up his mind about in which direction to strike.

I thought we had maybe two more seconds before the tension boiled over. I couldn’t figure out a way to stop it.

Suddenly, Dox brought the muzzle of his Wilson Combat up to his own neck. “Hold it,” he said. “The next man makes a move, the nigger gets it.”

I blinked and thought, What the fuck?

“Drop it,” he said. “Or I swear, I’ll blow this nigger’s head all over this town!”

He looked from one of us to the other, his eyes wide in faux lunacy.

Larison started to grin, then guffawed. “All right,” he said. “You win. You win.” He eased his pistol into the back of his waistband and held up his hands.

Treven glanced at Larison, then his eyes went back to Dox. His pistol stayed on me. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

“Good Lordy-Lord,” Dox said, his voice a falsetto now. “He’s desperate. Do what he say! Do what he say!”

“You’re crazy,” Treven said, but he lowered his gun a few inches. I did the same.

“What,” Dox said, “y’all never saw Blazing Saddles? Cleavon Little? I always wondered if it’d work for real.”

Treven’s gun dropped a little more. “You’re crazy,” he said again.

Dox kept his own gun in position at his neck. “Well, it’s a film, you see. A very fine film, in which-”

“I know the movie,” Treven said.

Dox took the gun from his neck and slid it into the back of his waistband. “Well, maybe the part you’re missing, and this could be due to the subtlety of my delivery, is that two seconds ago we were on the verge of committing a big old group suicide here. Besides hoping to get y’all to come to your senses, that’s what I was trying to demonstrate. You see, placing my weapon to my own neck was a metaphor-”

“We get it,” I said, slowly lowering my gun. Treven did the same.

“I’m waiting for someone to thank me for not doing the campfire scene,” Dox said.

Larison was still grinning, and I imagined this was the first time he appreciated just how cool Dox could be when the shit was hitting the fan. And how much method there was to his hillbilly madness. “Oh baby, you are so talented,” he said, and it was incongruous enough to make me realize it must have been another line from the movie.

“And they are so dumb,” Dox said, confirming my suspicion. They both laughed, and I thought maybe they would be okay now. He wasn’t a man you’d want to fuck with, but laugh at Dox’s jokes and chances were good you’d have a friend for life.

Treven, though, was still an open question. I slid the gun back into my waistband. Treven hesitated, but then followed suit.

“Let’s try to stay chilly,” I said. “We have enough people trying to kill us just now without doing the job for them.” Dox and Larison were still laughing, so the message was mostly for Treven. And, I supposed, for myself.

I briefed them on my conversation with Kanezaki. We all agreed that, overall, our safest move was to stay put until we met him in the garage.

“I should have known these targets and this thing were too big for them to leave us alone afterward,” Dox said. “I let the damn money cloud my reason.”

No one spoke. Dox looked at Larison. “I believe you’ve earned the right to say ‘I told you so.’”

Larison shook his head. “The question is, what do we do now?”

“Exactly,” Treven said. “Wherever your guy takes us, all right, we’re out of the crosshairs, at least for the moment, but what do we do then?”

I turned to Larison. “You said you had a way of getting to Horton.”

He nodded. “If you’re really ready to hear it.”

I looked at him. “I am.”

“Okay, then. We’re going to need your friend’s car. Not just to get out of the area. To get back to Los Angeles.”

Larison briefed us on the vulnerability he had discovered. It was Horton’s daughter.

“She’s a film school grad student at UCLA,” he explained. “Name is Mimi Kei. Parents are divorced and she uses her mother’s maiden name. The mother’s Japanese.”

“But I checked him out on Wikipedia,” I said. “When you first mentioned his name, in Tokyo. There wasn’t much outside a few highlights of his military career, but it said he’s divorced with no children.”

“He doesn’t want people to know about her,” Larison said. “He has a lot of enemies. That’s probably why she uses her mother’s name. Makes it that much harder for anyone to make the connection.”

“Well, how did you make it?” Dox asked.

Larison smiled. “I always knew if I ever got exposed and someone came after me, it would be Hort, and I wanted an insurance policy against that possibility. So after I pulled my little disappearing act, but before I made my move with the torture tapes, I tracked him. Caught a lucky break, observed him having lunch one day with a pretty young woman in downtown D.C. Followed her back to Georgetown University. Spent some time on Facebook and found her. Her page was privacy protected, but it was easy enough to use the name to confirm she was an undergrad at Georgetown, to track the name Kei to Hort’s failed marriage, and then to do some judicious social engineering to get her to accept a friend request from a Facebook profile I created. I can tell you from her photo page that she’s close with both her parents. And more importantly, that Hort dotes on her. You should see his face in the photos of them together. I guarantee you, take her as collateral, and Hort will do anything we tell him.”

I realized that an hour earlier, I had reacted with anger and disgust that the plotters were threatening someone’s family. And yet here I was, contemplating the same. I had two routes of rationalization available: first, that unlike Schmalz, Horton had brought this on himself. Second, that unlike those of the plotters, our threats against Mimi Kei would be bluffs.

I looked at Larison’s expression, and realized we weren’t going to see eye to eye on that last point. I would have to watch him. Closely.

“And she’s at UCLA now?” I asked.

Larison nodded. “Second-year this fall. Taking summer classes even as we speak. I’ve been keeping tabs.”

“That’s why he knows L.A. so well,” I said. “I wondered about that the two times I met him there. In fact, he suggested L.A. to me. I first thought he was just proposing it as a convenient point between Washington and Tokyo, but no. He was looking for an excuse to visit his daughter.”

Larison smiled again. “His little girl.”

“All right,” Treven said, “but what’s the play? We don’t know where she lives, we don’t know her habits, I don’t think we know much about UCLA. Where do we grab her? Where do we hold her? Without the right tools, I don’t see how we’re going to ensure she’s quiet and cooperative without being brutal. And look, we’ll do what we have to do, but if we fuck her up too much, it’s hard to say which way it’ll cut with Hort. We want to threaten her, absolutely, but if we have to start actually doing it, we lose leverage.”

“I don’t know about that,” Larison said. “I’d even argue that hurting her, with the promise of much worse, would be the ideal way to ensure Hort is as compliant and cooperative as possible. But I’m confident he’ll do what we want either way.”

“Okay,” Treven said. “Assume we grab her. Hold her somewhere, threaten to hurt her if Hort doesn’t cooperate. But cooperate how? Even if he calls off the dogs, the second his daughter is safe, they’ll be on us again. You planning on holding her forever?”

“Not forever,” Larison said. “Just long enough to recover the diamonds.”

“You’re still thinking about the diamonds?” Dox said. “Shit, I’m just looking for a way to get the president to take my ass off his personal assassination list, and not put me in one of his secret prisons for the rest of my life.”

“It’s the same thing,” Larison said. “You ever thought about how much security you can buy with twenty-five million dollars?”

“I know you want those diamonds back,” I said. “But I don’t think the diamonds alone are going to solve the problems we have now. We need to be clear about our new situation, and how we address it.”

Larison rubbed his hands together. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know exactly. But I agree it’s going to involve the daughter one way or the other. Find something that’ll act as…well, if not a guarantee of our safety, then at least an inhibition on Horton’s ability to direct forces against us. Anyway, we don’t have to figure it all out now. We’ll have plenty of time while we’re driving.”

Dox said, “Road trip!”

I checked the secure site. Kanezaki, confirming the pickup was on schedule.

“My contact should be here in just a few minutes,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”

We wiped down the surfaces we might have touched and policed up all sandwich wrappers and other visible evidence that anyone had been in here. Not that anyone would be looking, and there would likely be some hair and other DNA evidence regardless of our other efforts, but better to leave less of a trail to follow than more.

We moved to the door. I looked through the peephole-all clear. I was about to turn the handle when I remembered the two bodyguards I’d seen at the other end of the hallway. I hesitated.

Larison said, “What is it?”

I turned to them. “When you all arrived, was there a security detail at the other end of the hallway on this floor?”

They all shook their heads.

Well, that was odd. These weren’t the kind of men who would overlook something like that.

“Why are you asking?” Larison said.

“Because there was one when I got here. Two bodyguards, who must have taken up their position after you all arrived but before I did.”

No one said anything, so I went on. “Could be a coincidence, of course. Just a high-profile guest who happened to check in after you arrived but before I did. But still.”

I paused and considered. As always, I assumed the worst, the worst in this instance meaning that Horton had somehow anticipated us, or followed the others, and had people in place in the hotel even now.

Put yourself in their shoes. They’d be expecting you to take the stairs, not the elevator. Which, from their perspective, would be perfect. Suppressed weapons, no witnesses, all loose ends disposed of quickly, quietly, cleanly.

“Here’s how we’re going to play it,” I said. “Treven and I are going to head out into the main corridor first. If those two guys I saw are just someone’s diplomatic security detail, fine, we’ll hold the elevator for Dox and Larison and we’ll all go down together. But if they’re not just security, and we have a problem…”

I thought for a moment. I wanted Treven alongside, not behind me, so that was good. But…

I looked at Dox and Larison. “If we have a problem, Treven and I will drop and create a clear field of fire for the two of you. Whatever happens, we’re going to use the elevator. I don’t like the idea of the stairs right now. Everyone okay with this?”

They all nodded. I checked the peephole again, turned the handle with my jacket sleeve, and opened the door. The three of them moved out past me and I closed the door behind us as softly as I could. Then I moved ahead again.

I looked at Treven. “You’re too tight,” I said softly.

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you look tense. Even if those guys are legitimate, they’re watching for trouble. I don’t want to do anything that makes them remember us. And if they’re not legitimate, let’s not do anything to make them feel like we’re clued in. Not until we’re clearing leather and putting rounds in their heads. Okay?”

He frowned more deeply.

“Goddamn it,” I said, “it’s not a criticism. Just relax and follow my lead, okay? Relax.”

We turned the corner into the main corridor. I saw the two bodyguards, same position as before. My heart kicked up a notch.

“I told him,” I said, remembering a banal sports conversation I’d once overheard. “I told him, ‘What the hell were they thinking, trying to play a zone defense against Kentucky?’ I mean, you don’t play a zone against Kentucky.” I actually had no idea what this even meant, but it must have meant something.

To his credit, Treven picked up the vibe immediately and ran with it. He laughed and said, “I was saying the same thing. Told them, ‘not unless you want to get your ass kicked, you don’t.’”

The two bodyguards peeled off from the wall and started moving toward us. Rather, the two not-bodyguards. My heart started hammering harder.

“Best part?” I said. “Those dipshits were betting. Against someone trying to play a zone against Kentucky! Kentucky, can you believe that?”

The two not-bodyguards’ hands were empty. But they were wearing suits. There were a lot of possibilities for concealed carry.

“You know what?” Treven said. “I love people like that. People who bet without thinking. Think they know the odds when they don’t. Means more money for me.”

We reached the elevator bank. The not-bodyguards were ten meters away. “Excuse me,” the one on the left said, his eyes invisible behind his shades. “We’ll need to see some identification.”

“Identification?” I said, my tone indicating this was the most absurd sentence anyone had ever uttered. I reached out and pressed the down button with a knuckle.

I saw movement at the far end of the corridor. Two more guys in suits and shades, rounding the corner. These two holding guns.

“No problem,” Treven said. He reached down as though for a wallet, instead coming out with a Glock and shooting both of them in their foreheads so instantly that the first guy hadn’t even begun to drop by the time the second had been drilled clean, too. The bam! bam! of the two shots was thunderous in the long corridor. I pulled the Supergrade and dropped to the floor so fast I actually reached it before the two dead guys. Treven was right there next to me, already firing at the two new guys, as was I. There were more shots from behind us, and the two new guys were suddenly jerking like puppets on strings, convulsed from multiple hits.

The shooting stopped and the corridor was suddenly silent again, the air pungent with the smell of gun smoke. I glanced back and saw Larison and Dox moving smoothly forward, each with his weapon out at eye level and in a two-handed grip. I looked at the two guys farther down the corridor. They were splayed face-up on the carpet, their legs twisted beneath them. I kept the Supergrade on them and came to my feet, staying close to the wall. Treven changed to a kneeling position just below me. The second two downed men were too far away for us to be sure they were dead, and we weren’t taking any chances.

“Was that relaxed enough?” Treven said mildly, keeping his eyes and the muzzle of the Glock pointed downrange.

“That was very relaxed,” I said.

The elevator chimes sounded-the doors on the far left. “Shit,” I said, fighting the urge to approach it tactically with the Supergrade out. If there were more opposition inside, I wanted to be ready. But if it were a bunch of civilians, we’d have major witness problems.

But they hadn’t known when we’d be leaving the room. And elevators are too unreliable to use tactically. If there were more opposition, they’d be pouring in from the stairwells. Assuming they weren’t deliberately waiting there.

I walked over, getting the Supergrade back into my waistband and under my jacket just as the doors opened. I glanced inside. Two young Indian men, fresh-faced, navy slacks and starched white shirts. Wearing American Constitution Society badges on lanyards. They were close to the back wall, from which they wouldn’t be able to see the carnage outside.

“Hi there,” I said, with a friendly wave. I was trying to indicate to Treven, Dox, and Larison that there were civilians in the elevator, and that they should put away the hardware so we could get the hell out of there.

“Going down?” one of them said to me, in the characteristically sunny accent.

“Yes,” I said, putting my arm out to block the doors. “Could you just hold the elevator for a second?” I turned toward Dox and Larison and called, “Someone’s being kind enough to hold the elevator for us. Let’s hurry.”

We were lucky no one had poked a head out into the corridor so far. I supposed most of the rooms were empty at this time of day, but still, we had to beat feet.

The second Indian guy sniffed. “Do you smell something strange? Smoke, I think. Like something is burning.”

“Yeah,” I said, “a maintenance man just came through here. He said it was a problem with the ventilation system, nothing to worry about.”

Dox, Larison, and Treven all collapsed into the elevator and I followed them in. The Indian guys suddenly looked very small. They backed up against the wall but it was still a tight squeeze. I pressed the garage floor button with a knuckle and the doors closed.

“Thank you,” Dox said, smiling a smile that to my mind looked completely maniacal. “Would have hated to have to wait for the next one.”

For a moment, no one said anything. There was nothing but the absurd sound of Muzak being pumped through unseen speakers.

“Are you gentlemen…with the convention?” the first Indian guy said. He was looking at Larison. Obviously, some deep portion of his midbrain was screaming, Danger! But he was a thoroughly modern man, and trapped in an elevator, too, and so rather than running for the hills the way our far more sensible ancestors might have, he was trying to make conversation with an obvious predator, instead.

“Not exactly,” Larison said.

The elevator stopped on the fourth floor. The tension inside as we waited for the doors to open was explosive. The Indian guys must have been picking up on it, and I wondered what the hell they thought.

The doors opened. Two pretty young women in skirts and heels, and both with American Constitution Society badges around their necks, surveyed the crowd inside. “It’s okay,” one of them said. “We’ll wait for the next one.”

I knew I had maybe a second before Dox shoved the Indian guys against the wall to make room for the ladies. “Thanks,” I said, and hit the close button. The doors slid shut and mercifully, we were moving again.

“We are supporters of the Constitution, of course,” Dox said. “And we revere that august document. But tragically, we’re not in town long enough to be part of the convention itself. How about you? Sounds like you’ve come some distance to be here.”

I wanted to throttle him. Was he trying to get these two to remember us?

“Indeed, all the way from New Delhi,” the second guy said. “We are studying sensible ways to amend our own constitution in India. And we often joke that perhaps you Americans could lend us yours, because you seem no longer to be using it yourselves.”

The elevator chimed and came to a stop at the lobby level. Treven and I got out and Larison and Dox flattened against one of the walls to make room for the Indian guys.

“Well, goodbye,” the first one said, as they got out.

“And have a good day,” the second one added.

“And you, too,” Dox said. “And thanks for appreciating our Constitution. It’s nice that somebody does.”

The doors closed. “Jesus,” I said. “Why didn’t you just give them a business card? Or your phone number?”

He looked hurt. “Just being a good ambassador, man. They came a long way, and for a worthy purpose.”

“Yeah, and in about a half hour, when they’re being questioned by hotel security and the D.C. Metro Police and JSOC fucking assassins, they’ll remember very clearly the four men who got on their elevator on the ninth floor, the floor where four bodies were discovered riddled with bullet holes, the floor that reeked of gun smoke.”

A long moment went by. Dox said, “Well, when you put it like that, I guess I can see your point.”

The elevator chimed again. Garage level. We all reached around to the back of our waistbands and hugged the side walls.

The doors opened. We looked left, then right. All quiet, and all clear. We headed out toward the far end of the garage, keeping plenty of space between ourselves to make it harder for possible ambushers. We were all hyper alert. My mind was screaming, How the hell did they track you here? But I shoved the thought away. The problem now was how to get out. We could worry about the rest later.

The garage was full, probably from the convention, and we could have been attacked from any direction as we crossed it. Every parked car, the far side of every load-bearing pillar…everything felt like a potential threat. By the time we had reached the far end, the feeling of a concrete wall at my back was as sweet as a cold glass of water after a trek across the desert.

Larison looked around. “Your man’s not here.”

I checked my watch. “Give him a few minutes. Could be traffic, could be anything.”

“I don’t like it,” Treven said. “If this is another setup, we’re going to be pinned down. Let’s find our own car, hotwire it, and get the hell out of here.”

“If we have to,” I said. “But unless we’re ready to ram the gate, we’ll need a vehicle with the ticket left inside. That, plus one old enough to hot wire, probably isn’t a huge cross section. And I know we could explain that we lost the ticket, but I’d rather not have that conversation if we can avoid it. Let’s just give him a few minutes.”

On cue, I heard tires squealing against concrete on the other end of the garage. A silver minivan. Darkened outside windows. Come on, I thought. Kanezaki.

The van came closer. Kanezaki? I couldn’t tell with the florescent lights against the windshield.

I could feel the tension building as the van approached. The rest of them were imagining the same thing I was: the side door opening and the four of us getting raked with automatic gunfire.

The van swung around and pulled up right alongside us. We couldn’t see anything through the darkened windows. None of us had drawn a weapon yet, but if that side door slid open…

The passenger-side window came down, and an attractive young Asian woman in a halter top, shorts, and a ponytail leaned across. “I’m Tom’s sister,” she said. “How’s the weather?”

I was so stunned I almost didn’t answer. She’d presented her bona fides, and was now asking me for mine. Was she a spook, too? Did Kanezaki train her? And why was she here anyway, instead of him?

“It’s…rainy,” I said, guessing this was the right response.

She nodded. “Get in.”

The side door slid open. Two little girls in booster seats, their faces and hair an appealing Asian/Caucasian mix, were in the middle row. They looked at the four of us curiously.

“Are you…where’s Tom?” I said.

“He got held up. Look, I’m in a little bit of a hurry, okay? Gotta get these guys to play practice by six, and I wasn’t expecting a trip into the city first.”

“Right.” I looked at the others. From their expressions, I gathered they were finding this as surreal as I was.

Larison broke the tension. “Come on,” he said to Treven. “Let’s get in back.”

Somehow, the two of them managed to squeeze into the third row. Dox took the second row middle seat, between the two girls. I got in front.

She drove around to the booth. There was an automated kiosk where she could have used a credit card, but either she was too savvy for that, or too briefed by Kanezaki. Or too lucky. Whatever it was, she pulled into the lane with an attendant, a bored-looking Latina.

“I can’t believe this,” she said to the attendant, rolling down the window, “but I pulled into the wrong garage.”

I kept my eyes straight ahead, and in my peripheral vision saw her hand the attendant a ticket. There was a pause.

“Okay, no problem,” the attendant said. The gate went up.

“Thanks,” Tom’s sister said, and we drove out into the hothouse sun.

“What do I call you?” I said.

She slipped on a pair of shades and made a right onto L Street. “My name’s Yukie. Most people call me Yuki.”

I noticed a tattoo on the back of her right shoulder. Two kanji: one for love, the other for war. Love of war? Militancy? It was a neologism, not a real word, the kind of thing favored by otaku-computer geeks-and bosozoku-motorcycle gangs, so I wasn’t sure what it signified.

“Okay, Yuki. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Where’s your brother?”

“Hopefully on his way to White Flint Mall in Maryland. That’s where he told me to take you, and if he’s not there, I’ll drop you off and you’ll have to wait for him. I’m sorry, but I’m running late as it is.”

She made another right, this one onto 15^th Street. She used the turning signal well in advance. Either a conscientious driver, or someone who didn’t want to give a cop even the tiniest excuse for stopping the van. Or both.

“You seemed…very competent back there,” I said. “If you don’t mind my saying.”

She glanced over at me, then back to the road. “Look, I’m not stupid, okay? If Tom works at the State Department, you guys are the Swedish figure skating team. He’s my brother and I owe him a lot. Let’s just leave it at that.”

She signaled again and we made a right onto K Street.

The little girl on the passenger side said, “What’s your name, mister?”

I glanced back, but she was looking at Dox.

“Well, my friends call me Dox, little darling. Which is short for unorthodox. You can call me that, too, but only if we’re going to be friends.”

“We can be friends,” she said, and giggled.

“All right then,” he said. He reached out and shook her tiny hand with mock formality. “And what shall I call you?”

“I’m Rina.”

“Rina. Well, that is a lovely name. It’s very fine to meet you, Rina.”

The girl on the other side said, “And I’m Rika.”

Dox turned and shook her hand, too. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen two such pretty girls. Are you twins?”

Rika said, “Yes!”

Rina said, “Are not! I’m six and she’s four.”

Rika said, “Why can’t we be twins?”

Rina said, “Tell her, Dox. It’s because twins have to be born at the same time.”

And it went on from there.

They were ridiculously cute. I thought of my own son, Koichiro. He’d be about their age now. What had they ever done to anyone? I couldn’t imagine anyone more innocent. And I’d put them in danger.

“Tom’s a good man,” I said to Yuki, as we made a right onto Connecticut Avenue, heading northwest toward the Maryland border.

She nodded. “He’s a good brother.”

“But I don’t think…I don’t think he understood what he might be getting you into. There was a…problem back at the hotel. You’ll probably be seeing it on the news tonight.”

“Seriously. I don’t want to hear it.”

“What I mean is, if that garage had any kind of surveillance cameras in position to record license plates, it’s going to be a problem for you. The people who are looking for us are going to want to know what you were doing in that garage.”

“Then it’s a good thing I changed the plates.”

“You what?”

“Look, I wasn’t always the inveterate suburban soccer mom who appears before you today, okay? I told you, I’m not stupid. I borrowed a set of plates from someone on a nice, leafy, non-surveillance camera neighborhood street. And with a little luck, I’ll get to return them before they’re even missed. So after I drop you all off, it’ll be like we never even met.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Well, I’ll still be glad we did.”

She looked at me, sidelong, with a little smile of her own. “Don’t flirt with me, okay? Remember, I am a suburban soccer mom.”

A phone buzzed. I looked down and saw a unit in the beverage holder, flashing. She picked it up and glanced at it, then handed it to me. “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s Tom.”

I flipped it open. “Hey.”

“You must be with my sister.”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m on my way to where she’s taking you. Traffic’s going to be hell, but I shouldn’t be more than thirty minutes. I’ll tell you more then.”

“We’re going to need a vehicle. And a Civic won’t do it.”

“It’s taken care of. I’ll see you soon.”

He clicked off. I put the phone back in the beverage holder. “Sounds like we’re on schedule,” I said.

“Good.”

The ride to the mall took about forty minutes. Dox entertained the kids by telling them stories of parachuting out of airplanes and what happens if a chute doesn’t open, and insisting they had to be patient and wait until they were older before doing it themselves, and advising them they’d have to get permission from their mother before they could go with him. I envied his touch. I’ve never been good with children. I think because they sense things adults have learned to suppress.

Yuki made a right into the parking lot and circled counterclockwise over to a satellite parking area. It was far from the mall and mostly empty, the few vehicles belonging to employees, I guessed, not to mall patrons who would have had to trek across the baking pavement to reach the stores. One of the vehicles was a large U-Haul truck-twelve feet, I estimated, maybe fourteen. It struck me as a little odd that it would be parked in a shopping mall, and so far from the building itself, and I wondered if this might be what Kanezaki meant when he said the vehicle was “taken care of.”

It was indeed. As we pulled closer, the driver-side door opened and Kanezaki stepped out. He looked like pretty much any other D.C. area drone on his way home from the office-suit jacket gone, tie loosened, skin a little oily from repeated trips between air-conditioned buildings and the blast furnace outside. He still had the wireframe spectacles, but he was a little thinner than I remembered, a new maturity in his eyes and his features. Still the same guy I’d first run into in Tokyo so many years earlier, yes, but no longer a fresh-faced, idealistic kid. He’d been grappling with the real world since then, and its weight had left marks.

Yuki pulled in alongside the truck. I got out and shook Kanezaki’s hand. “Keys are in it,” he said, characteristically dispensing with small talk. “You should go.”

“You have anything new for me?”

He waved to Yuki. “The truck’s not enough?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. No new intel. But when I do, I’ll upload it to the secure site.”

“What do we do with the truck? When does it need to be back?”

“I got it for a month. Hopefully by then the pressure will be off and we’ll figure something out. The rental agreement is in the glove compartment.”

The side door slid open and Rina and Rika both exclaimed, “Uncle Tomo!”

Kanezaki waved to them.

I said, “Uncle Tomo?”

He shrugged. “You know, for Tomohisa. Uncle Tom sounds odd, anyway.”

Dox squeezed out and shook Kanezaki’s hand. “Good to see you, man,” he said. “Seems like you’re always helping us out of a jam.”

“And always in exchange for something,” I said.

Larison and Treven got out. Rina called out, “Uncle Tomo, what are you doing here?”

“Your mom’s picking me up, hon! It’s a long story. I’ll tell you on the way.”

He turned to the four of us. “I don’t know where you’re going, and it’s better if I don’t. Just make it far away. They’re going to be looking for you in the capital, and they can look hard there.”

Larison eyeballed the truck. “I like your choice of ride.”

Kanezaki nodded. “Nobody’s going to notice a moving truck. This one’s got Wyoming plates and no one looks twice even here in Maryland. Plus, two or even three of you can stay concealed in back while one drives. They’re looking for four, so best if you’re not seen together. Speaking of which. You should go.”

“My lord,” Dox said. “It’s going to be a goddamn sauna back there. Anybody mind if I drive?”

No one said anything. Dox got in the truck. Treven and Larison went around to the back.

“I didn’t have time to pick up water or anything else,” Kanezaki said. “It’s got a full tank of gas and I bought a bunch of boxes and rolls of bubble wrap so you’ll at least have something to sit on in back, but that’s about it. When it’s dark and you’re well clear of the city, you can stop and pick up whatever you need. I’ll be in touch as soon as I learn more.”

“There was a problem at the hotel,” I said.

He looked at me, his expression strained. “What do you mean?”

“Four guys. They must have been Horton’s. Somehow they followed us, or anticipated us. They came up short. I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it.”

He didn’t say anything. He just looked over at the van. At his nieces.

“Sounds like your sister’s pretty smart,” I said. “She told me she borrowed the plates on the van from some random car in a suburban neighborhood. There must be tens of thousands of vans like hers in the D.C. area. She’s safe. No one can track her.”

He wiped the sweat off his forehead and ran his fingers back through his hair. “Jesus. I didn’t…Jesus.”

He went to the van and slid the side door closed, then got into the passenger seat. I walked over and he rolled the window down.

“Thanks,” I said. “To both of you.”

Yuki looked at me and I could have sworn she was almost smiling.

“I don’t want to know,” she said, shaking her head. Then she pointed at Kanezaki and said, “We’re even, Mister State Department.”

He nodded grimly. “You could say that.”

I wondered what the hell he’d done for her. Whatever it was, he’d called in his marker, and she’d paid it off.

Hopefully not at higher interest than she’d been expecting.

We stayed off the interstates on our way out of Maryland, heading northwest and crossing the Potomac at the Point of Rocks Bridge, far from the Beltway and Route 95, Dox driving while I rode shotgun. The sun was getting low in the sky, but there was still plenty of daylight left. I wanted it to get dark. I kept half-expecting a phalanx of police cars to swing into position behind us, lights on and sirens screaming. It didn’t make sense, of course, but then neither did those four guys at the Hilton. The only thing I was sure of was that the farther we got from the city, the better I’d feel.

We kept the radio on to see if there was any news about the hotel shooting. There was plenty, but it was confused and incomplete. Witnesses claiming to have heard gunshots; police cordoning off the hotel; the cops saying little other than that they were investigating a possible shooting. It might have been routine; it might have been Horton behind the scenes, leaning on the locals in the name of “national security,” and concealing the identities, and affiliations, of the dead men.

We talked about what had happened at the hotel, about what could have been the flaw in our security. If we couldn’t identify it, we had to assume it was still a problem, and the feeling of some hidden vulnerability that could undermine us at any time was maddening.

“You’re sure you weren’t followed,” I said as we drove.

“Hell, yes,” Dox said. “We did a solid detection run from the airport. Multiple cab changes, a subway ride, you know the drill. No one could have been on us without our knowing.”

I fought the urge to remind him that he shouldn’t have been using the airport itself. But I recognized the impulse as driven by an urge to lash out, not by anything possibly productive. Besides, even if they should have steered clear of the airport to start with, if they weren’t followed, they weren’t followed.

“You said you went to a gun show,” I said. “What about that?”

“We did a run after that, too. One hundred percent clean.”

“What about-”

“The hotel, right? Made the reservation from a gas station payphone in Merrifield, Virginia. After I was already for damn sure we were clean.”

“All right, what about-”

“Our cell phones were off the whole time. Larison double checked us. That boy’s as paranoid as you.”

I considered. “You think he or Treven could have tipped Horton off?”

“Hard to say. Maybe the hotel shooters were supposed to drop just us, not the two of them. If so, though, somebody didn’t get the memo, ’cause Larison and Treven shot the shit out of all four of them. You saw it, too.”

I nodded, frustrated and angry. Being tracked when you think you’re untrackable is one of the worst, most vulnerable feelings there are.

“Know what I think?” Dox said.

“Tell me.”

“I think we’re entering an age where freelancers like you and me are going to have to consider the attractions of retirement. I mean, there are just too many ways the opposition can get a handle on us now. Video cameras everywhere, surveillance drones being deployed over American cities, the NSA spying domestically, the government and all the Internet and telecom companies working together, satellites and supercomputers crunching all that data…I just think we’re in a world now where, if the man wants to find you, you’re going to get found. Which means you either work for the man, or you don’t work at all.”

I didn’t answer. Maybe he was right. Maybe things had reached a point where there was no room for men like us anymore. Maybe we’d become vestiges, anachronisms, cogs on one last circuit within a machine that no longer had any use for us, a machine that was preparing to snap us off and spit us out so it could grind along even more senselessly and relentlessly than it ever had before.

Outside Culpeper, as it was finally beginning to get dark, we pulled over at a gas station to fuel up and use the bathroom. Treven and Larison were soaked with sweat but they volunteered to spend a little more time in back because they were already used to it. I briefed them about the radio reports, but there wasn’t much to tell. There was a brief discussion about who should pick up provisions. Treven had green eyes, Larison had that danger aura, and I was Asian. And Treven and Larison both looked like they’d just emerged from a steam room. That left Dox as the least noticeable, and least memorable, of the four of us. He bought a road atlas, a lot of bottled water, and some granola bars, and we headed back out into the slowly cooling night.

We kept moving south, the radio nothing but anodyne local news and traffic reports. Then the announcer’s voice became suddenly alive and urgent.

“We have a developing situation,” he said. “Reports of an attack on the White House. A suicide bombing.”

“Jesus Christ almighty,” Dox said, reaching for the volume.

The announcer said, “Police and paramedics are arriving at the scene. We have reports of horrific injuries. As far as we know, no one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. It’s not clear whether the president is even in the White House at this time.”

“What the hell are they talking about?” I said. “That place is a fortress. A suicide bombing? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe another airplane?”

“They would have said as much.”

He glanced at me, his face grim, then back to the road. “Whatever it is, it looks like we cleared the way for it. Damn. Goddamn. Should we stop and let Larison and Treven know?”

“No, keep driving. This was supposed to happen while we were in the city, you get that? It’s sealed off now. I’ll bet they’ve got National Guard units stopping traffic on the Beltway, everything. I want to put as much distance as possible between us and whatever’s going on back in Washington.”

I told myself it wasn’t our fault. But Dox’s words kept echoing in my mind.

Whatever it is, it looks like we cleared the way for it.

We drove on, listening. There was nothing new, mostly repeats of what had already been said, in tones alternating between hysteria and ecstasy. Gradually, a little clarity emerged. It wasn’t an attack on the White House itself, but on one of the guard posts outside. Still, it was a huge explosion. There were scores of civilian casualties, and a section of the iron-barred fence that protected the property had been destroyed. Apparently the president was all right. He was in the White House, and was going to address the nation at nine o’clock.

“Prime time,” Dox observed, his tone disgusted. “Likely a coincidence.”

At Buckingham, Virginia, we left Route 15 and started tracking west. When we were just outside Appomattox, the president went live.

“We all know what happened tonight,” he said. “A cowardly individual blew himself up outside the White House, murdering and injuring many scores of innocent civilians. No one in the White House itself was injured, and, other than some damage to a fence, the building’s security was not compromised.

“What we don’t yet know precisely is who committed this atrocity, or why. But rest assured, our nation’s military, law enforcement, and intelligence services are assembling answers to those questions now. And when they have completed their task, justice will be done to the perpetrators.”

“That’s what they’re calling military action these days,” Dox said. “Justice. I guess it has a better ring to it than invasion, bombardment, and slaughter.”

“Shh.”

“Now, I want to address a rumor,” the president went on. “First, that before blowing himself up, the terrorist shouted, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ which means ‘God is great’ in Arabic, and is a common Islamic invocation and sometimes a war cry. We don’t have confirmation of this, and it is irresponsible of the media to report it as though it has in fact been confirmed.”

“Rumor?” Dox said. “Who started the rumor? Sounds like the president is starting it himself!”

“That’s exactly what he’s doing, either deliberately, or because it’s being fed to him.”

“Well, how the hell-”

“Shh. He’s talking again.”

“Our task tonight,” the president went on, “is to pray for the victims and their families. And to thank the men and women of our armed forces and intelligence services, who, even as I speak, are risking their lives to protect our homeland and our liberties. Let us pray for them, as well.”

There was the clamor of reporters trying to ask questions, and then the announcer was back on, explaining that the president had left the briefing room.

Dox glanced over at me, then back to the road. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean it, John. I mean…this is some top level shit we’re mixed up in here.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, false flag terror attacks? And we’ve been fingered for it? Forgive me if I sound gloomy, but I don’t see a clear way out of this.”

“You do sound gloomy.”

He laughed softly. “Well, cheer me up then.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Not to mention-”

“I know. We cleared the way for it.”

We didn’t stop again until Roanoke. It was nearly midnight and we’d been driving for over eight hours. Dox and I briefed Treven and Larison about the incident outside the White House. No one said anything, but I knew we were all thinking the same thing: we were fucked.

We picked up fast food, gassed up again, and agreed to change positions. “It’s not that bad,” Treven said. “A lot cooler than before, and your friend was smart to pick up that bubble wrap. It’s actually pretty comfortable, if you’re lying down on it.”

Dox and I had discussed our discomfort at the prospect of being closed up in the cargo area, helpless and blind, while Treven and Larison drove. If someone put a lock on the exterior, the truck would be turned into a prison. Not that anyone was carrying a lock or had time to buy one, but still. But in the end, it didn’t matter, because what choice did we have? None of us could risk public transportation. Dox had been right about our odds of hiding from the modern surveillance state. And Larison had been right when he’d told Treven that going off alone meant being the first one picked off. If we were going to resolve this, our best chance was to stick together, and to find a way to attack back.

Treven and Larison were indifferent about what we ate, so I was glad when, on the morning of the second day, Dox insisted we stop at a Whole Foods outside Nashville. We loaded up with enough chow to see us comfortably all the way to the Pacific, then found a Wal-Mart and threw a couple futons and sleeping bags in the back. The futons were something, but Dox had been right, it was a damn sauna back there when the sun was high, and there wasn’t any good way to cool it down. We considered buying bags of ice but then decided against it. We didn’t want to take a chance on the melting runoff attracting the attention of some highway patrol.

We also stopped at a Starbucks so I could access their free Wi-Fi, and I checked the secure site. I half-expected a message from Horton, trying to explain away the unexplainable. But he must have known how useless that would be under the circumstances. He’d used us, then tried to clip us like the loose end we now represented. We knew he would try again, just as he knew we’d be gunning to get to him first. The state of play was so clear that anything anyone might have said would have been useless, even absurd.

There was a message from Kanezaki, though. He described the attack at the White House, which the media had gotten more or less right after the initial, confused reports. And he said the NSA was picking up chatter about more attacks coming. There were rumors about the president considering a major response. Kanezaki wanted me to call him, and I wrote that I couldn’t, not for another day or two. After the ambush at the hotel, my paranoia was at a full simmer. Maybe Horton had managed to stitch together enough data from airport surveillance cameras and satellite imagery to track us to the Hilton. He’d been expecting us in the city, after all. If so, and if he’d lost track of us after the hotel, then even with all the technology in the world, for the time being we’d be the proverbial needle in a haystack. I didn’t want to take any chance at all about a call being traced to a location this far west, from which the opposition might predict our further trajectory. From which Horton might even guess where we were ultimately heading, and why.

On the afternoon of the second day, Treven was driving while I rode shotgun. Mostly the roads were eerily quiet, but periodically, the quiet would be shattered by a passing military convoy, after which, the absence of traffic would be more spooky still.

I asked Treven the same security questions I had put to Dox, but got no additional insights. If he was hiding something, he was hiding it well. He told me a little about himself. Cut his teeth in Mogadishu. Climbed the ops ladder from Airborne to SF to ISA. A very competent man, no doubt, both from the resume and from what I’d seen at the hotel. But I didn’t feel the kind of connection with him that I’d started to feel with Larison. In Larison, I sensed turmoil, but also purpose. In Treven, what I sensed felt more like…confusion. And compensation. For what, I didn’t know.

We were listening to a country music station when, just as a day before, the deejay’s typically smooth and soothing voice cut in high-pitched and earnest after a song.

“Following on yesterday’s attack on the White House,” he said, “we have another horrifying report. A suicide bombing in the Mall of America in Minneapolis. Reports of a truck driven into the building, and a partial structural collapse. I know you can’t see it, this is radio, but I’m watching the video now and I have to tell you, my God, my God, it’s unspeakable. It’s like the twin towers again…Folks, I’m sorry to tell you, but yesterday was not a one-off. These have got to be coordinated. Let’s pray the government is doing something to protect us.”

“Holy fucking shit,” Treven said, and that was all, there was nothing else to say. We drove grimly on, listening for more, dreading that we’d hear it.

Outside of Memphis, we did. Two more suicide bombings: one at a Giants game at AT amp;T Park in San Francisco; the other at a church in Lubbock, Texas. More mass casualties. Lurid descriptions of victims, the burned and buried and blinded. Reporters interviewing dazed survivors, hysterical people trying to find their family members, wailing parents clutching the mangled bodies of their daughters and sons.

“Country’s going to go mad from this,” Treven said grimly.

I nodded. “That’s exactly the idea. If nine-eleven, plus a little anthrax afterward, could make the country mad, imagine what you could get away with if you could increase that kind of fear. And sustain it.”

We drove on. The radio was nothing but special reports now. The attacks had driven everything else off the air. When the shows got tired of recycling the same news, they took to interviewing people in the streets. It was hardly a random sampling, and maybe there were some hardcore pacifists out there who were getting overlooked, or who were afraid to speak up, but the impression I was left with after hours of nonstop radio was that the country was in the grip of atavistic rage. There were calls to intern male Muslims, to close the borders, to nuke Mecca and Medina.

“I’d feel the same way,” Treven said. “If I didn’t know what was really going on.”

“Doesn’t matter who’s behind it. Either the response is tactically sound, or it’s not.”

“I’m not talking about tactics. I’m talking about how I’d feel.”

“I get it. And that’s the beauty of what they’re doing. Think about it. Four attacks so far. The White House-a key symbol of the nation. The biggest mall in the country-a key symbol of consumer shopping and the economy. A church-to make people feel their religion is under attack. And an attack on sports-the country’s secular religion. Everything the culture identifies with and holds sacred, and distributed all over the land. There’s only one thing missing so far to make the country lose what’s left of its reason, and give in entirely to the kind of feelings you’re talking about.”

“What?” Treven said.

“A school. One, maybe more.”

He glanced over at me. “Christ.”

“Yeah. My guess is, if they can’t get what they want based on what they’ve done so far, they’ll ratchet it up. Schools would do it. Think Beslan. Or that camp in Norway.”

“You think they’d go that far?”

“You see any indications otherwise?”

We drove on to the hysterical cadences of the incessant recycled news stories. I watched the country going past, green hills and forests and terraced farmland, towns with names like McCrory and Bald Knob and Judsonia. The sky was an absurd, bright blue. The road was gray in the shimmering heat and looked like it might stretch on forever.

Most of the airtime was filled with speculation. Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda in Yemen. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Iran. Libya. The Muslim Brotherhood. Sleeper cells in America, and how many more there could be. Why they hated us, why they loved death more than life. The topography outside the windows was indifferent and unaltered, but I felt the country we were driving through had changed irrevocably since we’d begun this journey, a time that itself already felt improbable, distant, surreal. I imagined the four of us in the truck as some sort of germ, silently delivered into America’s arterial system, hunted by rogue T cells even as the unseen body politic around us convulsed in fever and delirium.

I hated that we’d been part of the horror we listened to over the radio. But what could we do, except try to protect ourselves?

Periodically, we stopped for bathroom breaks and provisions. There was panic buying everywhere: duct tape, plastic, canned food, bottled water. Iodine tablets were impossible to find, and apparently there was a thriving black market for Mexican knockoff Cipro, the anthrax treatment. We saw Wal-Marts being emptied of water purification and camping supplies. Gun sales had gone through the roof, and ammunition was sold out.

We kept driving in shifts: two in the front to make sure no one fell asleep at the wheel; two in the cargo area getting some rest, at least theoretically; our only breaks at highway rest stops, where we parked far from other vehicles so that whichever two of us were riding in back could get in and out without being noticed.

I was dozing in the back with Treven when I was awakened by the feel of the truck coming to a stop. There was no light leaking into the cargo area. It must have been night.

There were three knocks on the door outside-the all-clear signal we’d been using to prevent misunderstandings. I had already accessed the Supergrade, and kept it in my hand anyway.

The door opened, and I saw Larison and Dox. It was twilight outside, not yet dark. I could hear crickets in the grass, but, other than that, the evening was silent. The air on my skin felt wonderfully fresh and cool. The air on my skin felt wonderfully fresh and cool.

“Where are we?” I said, getting out and sliding the Supergrade into my waistband. My legs were stiff and I did a few squats to loosen up.

“Lavaca, Arkansas,” Larison said. “Just south of the Ozark National Forest.”

Dox stuck his head inside the cargo area. “My lord, is that what it smells like back there? I guess I got numb to it when it was my turn. Think we all might want to find a place to shower when we get to L.A.”

I swung my arms around and shook them out to get the blood moving. “We’re not even out of Arkansas yet? Jesus, this country is big.”

Larison started stretching, too. “We’re just a few miles from the Oklahoma border. Almost halfway there.”

I looked around. We were on a dirt road. An old barn stood to our left, looking deserted, a small reservoir beside it. The sky, indigo overhead and behind us and deep blue fading to pink in the west, was clear. A crescent moon was already up, and the first stars were out.

“Why are we stopping?” I said. “You ready to change up?”

“I’m good either way,” Larison said. “But the president’s doing another prime time speech. Thought you might want to hear it.”

I looked around again. It was a deserted enough place that I thought we could risk a break. I checked my watch. It was a few minutes before eight-almost nine o’clock in Washington.

We all pissed at the edge of the nearby woods, then rolled down the truck windows and stood outside the cabin, Dox and Larison on the driver’s side, Treven and I opposite, listening to the announcer uselessly reminding us about the day’s events, and speculating on how the president might address them. Once again, I was struck by the feeling of being part of what was happening, and yet also distinct, isolated, remote from it.

At nine o’clock sharp, the president spoke. His tone was measured and grave.

“Today our nation suffered an unprecedented string of horrific and cowardly attacks on civilian targets. We have evidence that some of these attacks have been carried out by sleeper cells of Islamic fanatics. Others have been committed by individuals who we believe to be self-radicalized.”

“‘Self-radicalized’?” Dox said. “What the hell does that even mean? Some guy’s sitting there minding his own business, and he just radicalizes himself?”

“Today I met with leaders of Congress,” the president went on. “We discussed new legislation that will ensure I have the appropriate tools to fulfill my obligation to keep the nation safe in the face of this unprecedented threat. I was very pleased at the impressively bipartisan nature of our discussions. No one is playing politics with the safety of the American people. We will announce new measures based on these discussions very soon. I will also announce a reshuffling of certain key positions in my administration intended to ensure that we have the most flexible, streamlined, and effective team possible to keep the American people safe.

“At a time like this, it is impossible for us as Americans not to recall that terrible day when fanatics flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and, thwarted by brave passengers, into a field in Pennsylvania. Impossible not to recall the horror of those atrocities. But let us recall, too, the courage, and resolve, and unity of purpose of that day, and of the days that followed. Even as we bury our dead and mourn with their families, let us commit ourselves to acting, and being, no less firm today.

“Make no mistake: our homeland is under attack. And make no mistake: we will defend ourselves. Thank you, and God bless America.”

A reporter shouted, “Mister President, do we have intelligence on further attacks?”

The president said, “I can’t comment on that at this time.”

“‘At this time,’” Dox said. “Sure sign that a politician is pissing down your back and telling you it’s raining. Same for ‘make no mistake,’ now that I mention it.”

Another reporter shouted, “Mister President, can you tell us anything about the new measures you’ve been discussing with Congressional leaders? And why, if we’re under attack, you still haven’t implemented them?”

The president said, “Our laws must be not only necessary, but also appropriate. It’s critical that in the course of combating the terrorist threat, we take care not to subvert our own values.”

“You slick bastard,” Dox said.

Another reporter shouted, “Mister President, can you comment on rumors that the deaths of Tim Shorrock and Jack Finch were related to these attacks? That they were intended to weaken your ability to respond?”

The president said, “Tim and Jack were American heroes who dedicated their lives to serving their country. I have no comment on rumors, other than to say that the work of the staffs they so ably led has continued unhampered, and that I will announce their replacements shortly.”

The president left to a cacophony of shouted questions, and the announcer started repeating what we had already just heard. Larison reached in and shut off the radio.

“Well,” he said. “Sounds like it’s all going more or less according to plan.”

“Other than the fact that we’re not supposed to still be alive,” Dox said. “We’re the goddamned fly in their ointment, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Then I saw it. What I’d been missing before.

“If it gets out that Finch was assassinated,” I said, “isn’t Horton worried people will wonder about the man who inherited Finch’s position?”

The others looked at me.

“Horton’s game is already high risk, but as this thing goes on, there’s bound to be talk about whether it was an inside job. And who’s the talk going to focus on? On the people who most obviously benefited. I mean, how big a leap is it from asking whether Finch was assassinated to wondering about the guy who replaced him?”

Larison said, “That’s probably why Hort wanted it to look like natural causes.”

“I thought the same thing,” I said. “But then Horton put out the story about the cyanide. Sure, it’s a great way of getting the whole U.S. national security state to try to hunt us down and permanently disappear us, but it also tends to implicate him, if only by highlighting the fact that he didn’t benefit from an accident, but from a political assassination, instead.”

Larison said, “I see your point. What do you think it means?”

It was frustrating. It felt like I was asking the right question, but I didn’t know how to answer it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Other than…whatever Horton is really up to, I don’t think we understand it yet.”

A few miles down the road, we found a Starbucks, where I checked the secure site again. Another message from Kanezaki:

Intel and chatter permeating the community are all about Islamist sleeper cells and more attacks on the way. I don’t know how it’s getting introduced because it’s all bullshit, but it seems to be coming from multiple sources and a consensus is taking hold that it’s accurate. Plus, nobody wants to be the one to err on the side of underestimating what’s on the way in case the shit really does hit the fan. They’re all talking about that August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief about how al Qaeda was determined to strike the United States. How it made Bush look bad.

I have a friend with the National Security Council. He says the president’s key advisors are steering him to announce what will be called a state of emergency, whatever the hell that really means. They’re recommending a choice from among three possible courses of action: 1) Ride it out and let the FBI and local law enforcement handle it; 2) Declare martial law and a suspension of the Constitution; and 3) Declare a “state of emergency” and deploy the National Guard to protect key governmental and civilian targets. Obviously, compared to the political softness of the first and the demonstrable insanity of the second, the third looks like the sensible choice. Plus it gives the president flexibility to ramp things up or dial them down, depending on the course of events.

There’s also chatter about attacks on schools. I think administration insiders will leak this. Reporters will then ask the president if it’s true, he’ll say no comment, and the establishment media will all support the Guard deployment and state of emergency, because if schools get attacked, parents will keep their kids home, they won’t be able to go to work, the economy will crater.

By the time they’re done, suspending the Constitution is going to seem like the only sane, centrist, responsible thing to do. This is fucked. We have to stop it.

Horton is the key. But I don’t know where he is or how to get to him. Call me as soon as you can.

I overheard some of the locals talking. One guy was typical, saying, “If we find out for sure the people behind these attacks are Muslims, I say we turn their goddamned countries into glass parking lots. That’s it, no more mister nice guy, no more talk, no more trying to understand each other. This is how you want it, this is what you get. But first, I say we ship every goddamned traitorous fifth columnist American Muslim back to their country of origin so they can be there, right at the center of the mushroom cloud, yes sir. And I’ll press the goddamned button myself, too. I guarantee you I won’t even be the first in line, either, there’ll be a whole lot of other Americans lined up to do the same.”

No one disagreed with him. I realized the hysteria was something we could hide in, at least among the populace, because we didn’t fit the profile of what had been ginned up in the public imagination.

We kept on, up and across the Oklahoma Panhandle, steering well clear of Oklahoma City and even of Amarillo, the grief and rage in Lubbock feeling uncomfortably close. Then the dusty, flat roads of New Mexico, through the Sitgreaves and Tonto national forests of Arizona, bypassing Phoenix by way of Prescott, and finally across the Colorado River and into California. We stayed on Interstate 10 the rest of the way in, skirting Joshua Tree National Park rather than using the quieter roads farther north, which would have taken us uncomfortably close to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms. Finally, with the sun coming up behind us, we reached the Pacific in Santa Monica. The whole thing had taken us three nights, on back roads and going not one mile above the applicable speed limit, most of it in a forced march blur, some of it in the cabin of the truck, other times in the stifling heat and dark of the cargo area, all of it while government forces hunted for us wherever they could. But we’d made it. We were here.

Now we just had to get to Mimi Kei. And through her, to Horton.

You can’t tell anymore the difference between what’s propaganda and what’s news. -FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein

But what if elites believe reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works…and often fails to work? -Jay Rosen, NYU School of Journalism

We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth. -Sydney Schanberg

We found a suitable-looking place called the Rest Haven Motel. It was a little ways off the Pier on a mixed commercial and residential street, a small, one-story building bleached by the Santa Monica sun, with a private parking lot in back and a second, detached unit of rooms with its own entrance. Quiet, but also close enough to the traffic and bustle of the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Lincoln Boulevard for us not to have to worry about standing out. Dox backed the truck in so Larison and Treven could slip out of the cargo area unnoticed, and paid cash for a room in the separate unit. Then we drifted in one-by-one. We all looked like hell-unshowered, unshaven, unkempt. Like people in trouble. Like men on the run.

We pulled the two twin mattresses onto the floor, then spent a few luxurious hours alternating in the tiny bathroom showering and shaving, and cat-napping on the mattresses and the box springs. Next, we examined the room for anything Kei might later use to identify where she’d been held. We policed up some matches and a motel pen; various placards advertising motel services and area attractions; and pulled a plastic insert with an address and phone number off the room phone. We would discard it all later, far from the motel. Finally, we got down to business.

The first thing we needed was commo. I’d examined the mobile phones Horton had given us and had found no tracking devices, but something had enabled him to fix us at the Capital Hilton, and we’d dumped his phones all the way back in Culpeper just to be sure. We needed new ones, and I tasked Dox, who had a forged ID he claimed was ice-cold, with procuring us four prepaids from multiple vendors. Larison and Treven’s job was to fix Mimi Kei. We didn’t know where she lived, so the starting point would be the UCLA Film School website and the school itself. I gave myself the glory job of finding a coin-operated laundry and washing our clothes. We were all wearing our last clean ones.

Before we set out, Larison used the motel’s free Wi-Fi and the iPad to access Mimi Kei’s Facebook page. She was beautiful-a half-black, half-Asian mix, early twenties, dark hair in ringlets down to her shoulders. Full lips and a vivacious smile. Larison had been right about the photos with Horton: the hard, professional countenance was completely absent, replaced by that of a beaming father.

“Interesting that she doesn’t identify him in the captions,” I said. “Just ‘my dad.’”

Larison nodded. “I’m sure he’s explained to her that she needs to be discreet about who her father is. It’s not like he’s the president, but he has some capable enemies. I’m guessing that’s why her page is so privacy protected, too. Unusual for a grad student doing her best to network in the movie world.”

Treven said, “We shouldn’t assume she’s just a clueless civilian. If Hort taught her some things about watching her back, he would have taught her others. It’s not impossible he’s even told her to be extra careful right now.”

I looked at him. “That’s a good point. And now you’ve got me wondering…”

I thought for a minute, then said, “We know Horton’s concerned about Kei’s safety. So what does he have in place to protect her?”

“No one knows about her,” Larison said.

“I don’t know about ‘no one,’” I said, “but yes. Horton’s protecting her, essentially, by making her an unknown. There’s a name for that, isn’t there?”

Treven nodded. “Security through obscurity.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Security through obscurity. Which can be a useful supplement to other forms of security, but would a man like Horton rely on it entirely? Rely on it to protect his daughter?”

“I see what you’re saying,” Dox said. “Maybe he’d rely on it in ordinary times, but now isn’t ordinary. He’s involved in false flag attacks and a planned coup, which is crazy enough, but on top of it all, he showed his hand when he made a run at us in D.C. He’s got to be worried about his daughter now.”

“Good,” I said. “Now, put yourself in his head. He tells himself it’s probably fine, no one has a way of even knowing about Kei, but still. What does he do?”

“He calls her,” Treven said. “Tells her to be careful.”

“Does she listen?”

Treven shook his head. “Film school student, far from his world? No. Not in a meaningful way. And even if she listened, he’d know she wouldn’t have the skills to really act on the warning.”

“Agreed. So now what does he do?”

Larison said, “He sends men. To watch her.”

I nodded. “Does he tell her he sent men?”

Treven said, “No. He doesn’t want to scare her.”

“Right,” I said. “Meaning they’re not functioning as bodyguards protecting a witting client. They need to hang back. So what are they doing right now?”

Larison said, “They’re figuring out what we would be doing. Where we would approach her. How. And they’re watching for that.”

I nodded. “And now we’re watching for them.”

There was nothing more to be said. Maybe we were giving Horton too much credit. Or maybe he deserved the credit but, after D.C., lacked the resources. Either way, we would assume the presence of opposition. And approach Kei accordingly.

Treven and Larison headed out. They took one room key; I kept the other. My job would likely take the least time, so I’d get back to the room first and could let the others in after.

I found a coin-operated laundry place on Lincoln less than a quarter mile from the motel. A woman in a headscarf was folding her clothes next to one of the driers. The other patrons kept glancing at her and away. They barely noticed me.

I threw the clothes in a couple of machines and, while I waited for them to cycle through, used the place’s Wi-Fi to check the secure site. There was a message from Kanezaki:

The D.C. area is on lock-down. All the spokespeople are giving the “Everything’s under control, don’t panic folks” routine, but behind the scenes, it’s a five-alarm freak-out. And they’re looking for you. The assumption is that you’re somewhere in the city, so that’s good. I hope you’re very far away.

The president is scheduled to give a big speech and announcement any day now. I don’t know what it’s going to be. I do know that a couple more attacks, and the country’s going to go completely insane. It feels like we’re at a tipping point.

We need a way to get to Horton. Call me.

I wrote him back: We’re working on something. Should know in a day or so. Will call then.

When the laundry was done, I carried it back to the motel and waited in the room. Dox was the first to arrive. Grinning as usual, he dropped two large paper grocery bags on one of the beds, reached inside one of them, and extracted four mobile phones and four wire-line earpieces.

“Mission accomplished,” he said. “Bought ’em from three different vendors with two different sets of ID, so they should be untraceable for as long as we’re likely to need ’em. No word from Larison and Treven?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. What else have you got in the bags?”

He reached inside and started removing the contents. “Exotic fruit salads, greens salads, various tasty wraps, some protein smoothies, the usual. Plus a six-pack of Red Bulls because, I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit peaked from our recent sojourn.”

I picked up one of the fruit salads. “Very thoughtful of you.”

“Well, with you on laundry detail, figured it was the least I could do. Did you bleach my whites and get my colors extra bright?”

I chuckled. “I think you’re going to have to settle for, it all at least smells clean.”

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “A little off topic. So, we snatch Mimi Kei. And tell old Horton we’re fixing to do harm to his daughter’s personage if he doesn’t play ball with the diamonds and otherwise. But what if we’re wrong about him? What if he doesn’t back down? How far are we willing to go? I mean, do we mail him a finger? An ear? What do we do?”

I nodded. “I know. I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“I don’t mean to sound like I’m going soft on you, but I have some acquaintance with what it’s like to be held hostage, ‘hostage’ in this case meaning waterboarding, shocks to my legendary genitals, and threats to remove said legendary genitals with sharp instruments if a certain someone didn’t comply with my captors’ demands. Any of that ring a bell with you?”

He was talking about Hilger, who’d held Dox hoping to get to me. It hadn’t gone as Hilger had planned, but Dox suffered anyway.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

“I’m just telling you, between the two of us, that I’m not comfortable hurting some girl who has nothing to do with any of this. I mean, my daddy taught me that gentlemen can kill each other, preferably with firearms, and that’s fine, but that we respect womenfolk. I’m sure that sounds fucked up to most of your more modern, egalitarian, self-actualized killers, but it’s how I was raised.”

“I hear you.”

“And I know you have a thing about no women and children, too.”

“Yes.”

“So…we’re just bluffing then.”

I nodded. “But I think when Horton understands Larison is involved in this, he won’t take the chance.”

“Well, that right there is the problem. See, I don’t think Larison is bluffing. I think that man-and no disrespect, ’cause he is obviously one capable sumbitch-I think he’s a little bit…Well, how do I put this. You know, some dogs, big dogs, they could kill you, but they don’t, because they’re good dogs. You can trust them. Other dogs, they’re looking at you, and you don’t know what the hell they’re thinking. Or which way it could go. That’s how Larison is to me. Any given moment, I don’t know what he’s going to do. I’m not sure even he knows.”

It interested me that each of them understood the other in canine terms. But I kept the thought to myself.

“Horton said something about Larison keeping too much hidden,” I said. “Being in turmoil.”

“Well, shit, everybody has something to keep hidden.”

“You have something to keep hidden?”

He grinned. “Just my midget porn fetish. Don’t tell anyone.”

“You and I are on the same page,” I said. “We’ll let Larison think what he wants, because the more scared Horton is, the better for us. But we’re not going to let him hurt anyone. If it comes to that, we’ll stop him.”

He nodded. “Thank you for that. I figured as much. Just wanted to make sure.”

We pulled our own clothes out of the pile of clean stuff and ate some of the provisions Dox had brought in. Then he napped while I watched the door, the Supergrade in hand. I watched the angle of the sun on the window curtains get increasingly sharp, and still no sign of Larison or Treven. Dox woke up and it was my turn to sleep while he stood sentry.

At a little past six, I was awakened instantly from a light sleep by three sharp knocks. I took a position on one side of the door, the Supergrade up and ready, while Dox opened it. It was Larison.

“Treven’s on the way,” he said. “Good news. I’ll wait until he’s here and then brief you. Is that grub? I’m starving.”

He grabbed a wrap and started devouring it. Treven showed fifteen minutes later. While he tucked in, too, Larison briefed us.

“We went online,” Larison said. “And found only four summer classes at the school. And only one on screenwriting, which is her thing. So we staked out the building where the class is held.”

“You see anyone?” I asked. “Anyone who looked like they were looking for us?”

“Hell yes,” Treven said. “We saw them-two of them-hanging out exactly where we would have been hanging out if we were trying to get to us.”

Larison said, “So we made sure not to be where we would have been if we’d known no one was looking for us.”

“The weird thing is, I understood all that,” Dox said.

“We picked up a couple of radios at a Radio Shack,” Larison said. “Not much range, but good enough for our purposes. We hung way back. Decided to take a chance, and it paid off.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “What kind of chance?”

“We don’t know how she gets to school,” Treven said. “Could be a car, could be a bus, could be a bicycle for all we know. We made Hort’s guys monitoring her building, so we couldn’t do the same. Which meant we had to take a guess. Car, bus, or bicycle. We guessed bus. We guessed right. Followed her onto an L.A. Metro bus.”

I still didn’t like it. “How’d you manage it without getting seen?”

“I staked out Hilgard and Charing Cross,” Larison said. “The stop right by the school.”

“And I waited at the next stop,” Treven said. “Hilgard and Sunset.”

“Totally lucky that it turns out she rides the bus,” Larison said. “But hey, sometimes you catch a break. When I saw her come out and wait at the Charing Cross stop, I radioed Treven. He got on at the next stop, right after her.”

“What about Horton’s guys?” I asked.

“One of them got on with her at Charing Cross,” Larison said. “The other stayed behind.”

I nodded. “So she’s definitely unwitting.”

“Right,” Larison said. “If she were witting, they’d both be staying close. Plus, she was wearing earbuds, listening to music, shit no bodyguard in the world would ever tolerate. As it was, the guy who got on with her was doing everything he could to keep away from her, and otherwise be unobtrusive. As we expected, they’re not trying to directly protect her, they’re trying to anticipate, and eliminate, the threat.”

I agreed with his assessment. “What else did you learn?”

Treven cracked a Red Bull. “I saw her get off at Sunset and Gordon. Hort’s guy got off with her. I waited and jumped out at the next one-Sunset and Bronson, otherwise Hort’s guy would have made me. But as the bus pulled away, I saw Kei walking north on a street called La Baig Avenue. If you look at La Baig-and we did, at an Internet place-you’ll see it leads to only two streets, Harold Way and Selma Avenue. The whole neighborhood looks super quiet, nothing but single family houses. No pedestrian traffic. No way to follow her, even if I’d gotten off at her stop, even if Hort’s guy hadn’t been there. So no way to get her exact address. But-”

“We don’t need her exact address,” I said. “Assuming she was going home on the bus, and not somewhere else, now we know her stop.”

Treven took a long pull of Red Bull. “Not just her stop, but her walking route to the stop. When you look at the map, you’ll see she must live on one of those three streets-La Baig, Harold, or Selma. Otherwise, she would have gotten out at an earlier stop-Sunset and Gower.”

Larison grinned. “But it’s even better. We did get her address.”

Treven grinned, too, looking like a kid who’d just pulled a brilliant prank. Larison gestured to him and said, “You tell them.”

“So I radioed Larison,” Treven said, still smiling, “and as I’m waiting for him, frustrated at getting so close and not being able to really close the deal, a mail truck went by. And I thought, shit, they’re just delivering the mail now. Which gave me an idea.”

“Pizza flyers,” Larison said, apparently unable to resist interrupting. “There was a guy out on Sunset distributing flyers for some pizza place. I gave him twenty bucks for his stack of flyers, then Treven caught up to the mailman.”

“Told him I was trying to reach people in the neighborhood,” Treven said. “Gave him two hundred bucks for letting me put the flyers into his mail bundles. He told me he could do it himself, but I told him hey, how do I know you won’t just throw them out? Let me put them in the bundles, it’ll only take a minute.”

“The pizza guy, and the mailman, they saw you?” I asked. “Could they remember you? Describe you?”

Treven shook his head. “We were wearing shades. Anyway, what if they could? The mailman would have to cop to taking bribes, and the pizza guy would have to admit he sold his flyers rather than giving them out. Even if someone made the connection between the flyers and Kei’s temporary disappearance, those two wouldn’t want to get involved.”

“Besides,” Larison said, “no one but Hort is even going to know Kei’s gone missing. The police won’t be involved. Even if they do get involved, we didn’t give them anything to go on. And anyway, right now, potential police, even FBI, is pretty much the least of our problems.”

He was right. “Well? What’s her address?”

“A nice little bungalow on Selma Avenue,” Treven said. “Again, we might not even need it because I think we’ll have a better shot at her by the bus stop than we would by the house. But it was good to confirm she was heading home anyway, and not to, say, a friend’s house or whatever. We’ll show it all to you on Google Maps. Looks like she’s renting a room from the family that lives there. But whatever. The main thing is, we know what time the first class is tomorrow morning, we know her bus stop, and she’s got an approximate six-minute walk along a nice quiet street to get there. Wearing her earbuds, if we’re really lucky.”

We were quiet for a moment. Dox said, “Well, I have successfully procured us food and phones, and Mister Rain has kindly laundered our gamey garments. But I believe the day’s glory goes to you.”

“Couldn’t have done it without clean clothes and food to look forward to,” Treven said, and we all laughed.

“It looks promising,” I said. “But there a few things to consider. And a few we need.”

They looked at me.

“Potential opposition aside,” I said, “the first class at UCLA begins at what, ten o’clock? So how early will we need to be in position?”

“No later than eight,” Treven said. “And probably earlier.”

“Right,” I said. “And if we’re thinking that, then Horton’s guys are thinking the same. That’s what they’ll be looking for.”

“Sunup,” Larison said. “Earlier, in fact.”

“Agreed,” I said. “The key will be to get there earlier than we would reasonably need to for Kei-because Horton’s guys expect us to be hunting Kei, when in fact, we’ll be hunting them.”

“Works out well anyway,” Dox said. “I mean, we really don’t know very much about her patterns. Does she like to go in early for a workout? Or to meet a friend for breakfast on campus, or to study in the library? We’ve been watching her for barely twenty-four hours, it could be anything. So we can’t afford to time things so precisely regardless. The earlier we get in position, the better, assuming we can find good concealment.”

Spoken like a true sniper, I thought. Waiting out a target was second nature for Dox. I think part of him even enjoyed it.

“All right,” I said, “we need to be in position before it gets light. Which means we have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. To start with, I want to get a firsthand look at her neighborhood. Discreetly. Maybe on a bicycle. I mean, who ever looks suspicious on a bicycle?”

Larison said, “What else?”

“A vehicle. Overall, the U-Haul truck is great cover. But if anyone witnesses the snatch, a U-Haul truck is going to be remembered, and looked for, like a giant neon sign. Even if we swap in some stolen plates, the truck itself will be radioactive.”

“That’s a good point,” Treven said. “Well, a panel truck would work. Could borrow one from a long-term parking lot. I doubt it would be missed until after it didn’t matter.”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” I said. “We park the truck somewhere nice and quiet, use the stolen panel truck for the snatch, and break the circuit by transferring Kei from one to the other. Let’s start walking this thing through.”

Dox popped a Red Bull and smiled. “Maybe I should have bought a few more of these.”

It was a long but productive night. One stolen GMC panel van; one stolen Ford Fusion; assorted items from a hardware store, a sporting goods place, a supermarket. Mapping out Kei’s neighborhood. Identifying the ideal spot for the snatch, and for the switch. Planning the op; positioning the vehicles. We’d slept for a few hours, gotten up while it was still dark, dispersed, and then regrouped near Kei’s house before sunup.

One problem from our perspective was that Selma Avenue, and La Baig, which led into it, permitted no parking on the street-not even any stopping, according to the signs. So if we parked the van anywhere near her house, we ran the risk of an annoyed neighbor coming out to talk to us or even calling the police. The good news was, there was a motel on the corner, a long, pink and blue, two-storied affair that stretched along the west side of La Baig for about two hundred feet starting at the corner of Sunset. We had parked the van there, on the side of the lot closest to Kei’s house, front end in, rear end facing La Baig. If Larison’s and Treven’s intel was sound, and Kei stuck to what we preliminarily assumed was her routine, we would be good to go. And if Horton’s guys were trying to identify trouble before it reached Kei, the first spot they’d check would be exactly where we’d parked the van.

Which is why three of us were watching it now: Larison, from between two parked cars in the driveway of a small apartment building across the street; Treven, from the dark stairwell in the center of the motel; and I, from a prone position on the balcony of the motel directly above the van. Dox was waiting in the stolen Fusion a few miles away. The chances of someone stumbling upon any of us at this hour were slim, but if it happened, Treven and Larison were dressed in the latest Nikes and Under Armour, just another couple of early morning L.A. fitness fanatics. I was less sportily attired, in jeans and a sweatshirt, and would have to be a drunk sleeping it off. Thin cover for action, but reasonable under the circumstances, and in all events better than nothing.

At just before sunup, as the first gray light crept into the sky, a dark Chevy Suburban pulled into the far end of the motel parking lot. I watched it from my perch and felt a warm surge of adrenaline spread through my torso. It was unusually early for anyone to be arriving at, or returning to, a motel. Nothing else at the motel, or in the surrounding neighborhood, had yet stirred.

The doors opened, but no interior light came on. Two big, clean-cut Caucasian men got out, both dressed casually in what looked in the dim light like jeans and bulky fleece jackets. They paused and looked around, then moved out, letting the doors click quietly closed behind them.

The earliness of the hour, the lack of an interior light, the quietly closed doors, the watchfulness…if these weren’t Horton’s men, they could only have been here to rob the motel. But thieves who moved as stealthily and professionally as these two typically have better uses for their talents than budget motels. They had to be here for us.

They moved silently along the row of parked cars, their heads swiveling, shining penlights into the interiors of the vehicles they passed. They swept their lights along the balcony of the motel’s second floor, too, but I saw the light coming my way and simply flattened myself against the ground beyond the angle of their vision.

They came to Treven’s position and checked the stairs, but I knew he would have melted away at their approach. I also knew he’d be back as soon as they had passed.

When they came to the van, they stopped. I knew what they were thinking. A panel van. Perfect for a snatch. And parked exactly where we would have parked it ourselves.

They shone their lights through the front windows and then tried the side doors, which we had locked.

Try the back door, I thought. You never know.

One of them stepped back, scanned, and took a notepad from one of the fleece pockets. He shone his light on the license plate and jotted down the number. Then he slipped the notepad back into his pocket and they circled to the rear of the van.

I was hoping they would give the door their simultaneous attention, but they were too good for that. One tried the door while the other one scanned behind them. I couldn’t see him, but I knew Larison would have moved out from concealment, up to the edge of the apartment building wall directly across the street. Either he or Treven could have shot them left-handed from this close, but we didn’t have suppressors, and couldn’t risk waking up the neighborhood with the sound of gunshots. Because of that, and because we had to assume they were armed, too, we had to be practically on top of them before they knew we were there if we were going to pull this off quietly.

One of them started to open the rear van door. The other was still watching behind them. Larison and Treven only needed a second, but they weren’t going to get it.

So I improvised. In ersatz sexual ecstasy, I moaned, “Oh, God, yes, don’t stop, don’t stop, fuck, yes, that’s so good, don’t stop…”

They both immediately oriented on the sudden disturbance. I knew the incongruity would cost them precious nanoseconds of processing time: they’d been attuned to a range of possible problems, including sounds of stealth and ambush. And now they were hearing sounds, but not ones they could quickly fit into the threat matrix through which they were approaching their current environment.

“Oh my God, yes!” I said. “Yes!”

For an instant, they were what-the-fuck paralyzed. Then they both reached inside their jackets.

Too late. Larison and Treven had already rushed up behind them, grabbed their gun arms, and jammed the muzzles of their own guns against the backs of their heads. I heard Larison say, “Freeze, or I’ll blow your brains through your face.” His voice had the kind of command authority that could stand down an attack dog.

I swung down off the balcony to the parking lot and circled around to the rear of the van. Before Horton’s men could overcome their surprise and make a tactical decision, I reached inside each of their jackets and extracted a suppressed Glock from a shoulder harness. Quiet enough, yes, but unfortunately for Horton’s men, a hell of a long draw.

I shoved one of the guns into my waistband and checked the load on the other. A round in the chamber, as expected, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure.

“Lean forward,” I told them. “Legs apart, knees straight, faces down, palms against the van. Or we’ll find out just how quiet these suppressers are.”

The threat was deliberate. I didn’t want them to count even a little on any hesitation we might have about the sound of gunshots.

They complied. I handed Larison the other suppressed pistol. He secured his own gun in his waistband and we covered the two of them while Treven searched for weapons. He came away with two folding knives, two mini-lights, two cell phones, two wallets, two notepads, and a set of car keys. He pocketed all of it, secured their wrists behind their backs with heavy plastic flex ties, opened the van doors, and got inside. The flex ties could be defeated by someone who knew what he was doing, but for now all we needed was to inhibit them and slow them down. Larison and I shoved them in, got in ourselves, pushed them face down onto the floor, and closed the doors behind us. Larison kept them covered while Treven moved to the driver’s seat. We’d punched peepholes in the van’s sides and back. I removed the duct tape covering them and looked through. Between Treven in front and the peepholes in back, we had three-hundred-sixty-degree coverage of the area around the van. So far, it seemed our brief interaction outside had attracted no attention.

One of Horton’s men said, “What are you going to do with us?”

Larison said, “The next one of you who talks without being asked a question first, I’m going to pistol whip.”

No one said anything after that. We watched the street for five minutes. It was getting lighter outside. Everything was quiet.

Treven stayed up front at the wheel, going through the items he’d taken from Horton’s men. I put the duct tape back in place over the peepholes and turned on the rear dome light. Larison and I sat Horton’s men up and pushed them back against the passenger-side wall, their legs splayed in front of them. I was going to ask them a few questions myself, but something about Larison’s body language-the confidence, and also the menace-made me realize he was going to handle it. And likely handle it well.

“Here’s how it’s going to work,” he said, placing the muzzle of the suppressed Glock first against one of their foreheads, and then against the other. “I’m going to ask you some questions. The first one who gives me useful, accurate information that tracks with what I already know, gets to live. Whoever loses the race to talk first gets an instant bullet in the head. That’s the game and there’s only one winner. You ready?”

The two men looked at him, then at each other. Sweat broke out on their foreheads. The inside of the van suddenly reeked of fear.

Larison pointed the ominously long suppressed barrel of the Glock at one, then the other. “Who sent you? Why? Where is he? How do we get to him? What else do you know? That’s it. Ready, set, go.”