The Detachment

Their eyes were bulging now and they were beginning to pant. They looked at Larison. They looked at each other. The one on the right shook his head, as though pleading or in disbelief. Suddenly, the one on the left turned his head and shouted, “Colonel Horton! To protect his daughter!”

The other guy screamed, “Shut the fuck up!” Larison instantly swung the pistol over. There was a crack about the loudness of someone snapping his fingers and the guy’s head smacked into the wall behind him. Then he lay suddenly slumped and still, a neat hole just above his left eye.

“Congratulations,” Larison said to the remaining guy. “You won the first round. But you have to keep going.”

“Jesus!” the guy spluttered. “Jesus Christ!”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Larison said. “I said, you have to keep going.”

The guy was starting to hyperventilate. “You’re just going to kill me, too!”

Larison shrugged. “Maybe not. Make me like you. Make me feel grateful to you. I’m as human as the next guy.”

“Oh, my God!” the guy wailed.

“Calm down,” Larison said. “I know it’s stressful. This is the most important moment of your life, and you don’t have much time. Because, and I think you know this now, I’m not very patient.”

“Horton…Horton sent us. What else do you want to know?”

“Who else did he send?”

“I don’t know of anyone else!”

“You sure?”

“Yes!”

“His name is Raymond Trent,” Treven called from the front. “North Carolina driver’s license. The dead guy was Carl Ryan. Virginia.”

“All right, Ray,” Larison said. “What’s your connection to Horton?”

Ray swallowed. “We freelance for him.”

“What does that mean?”

“We do…contract work.”

“You’re contractors?”

“Yes. No. I mean, we freelance. Sometimes Horton asks us to do things on the side. You know, moonlighting. Off the books.”

“What else has he had you do?”

“I don’t know, all kinds of stuff.”

Larison didn’t answer, and after a moment, Ray hurriedly went on. “Black bag work. Eavesdropping. Surveillance. Sometimes a hit.”

So far, Larison hadn’t elicited anything we hadn’t already assumed. But I was thinking about the four guys we’d dropped at the Capital Hilton. That was an important op for Horton, and we were no easy target, so I knew he would have cared enough to send only the very best. My sense was that Ray and Carl were backup, a B team. If they were pinch-hitting for the four dead guys here, where else would they have to step in? What else would Horton have in mind for them?

“What do you think?” I said to Larison. “Are you liking this guy? Feeling grateful for what he’s telling us?”

Larison kept his eyes on the guy and shook his head. “No.”

Ray said, “Look, I don’t want to die here, okay? This is just a job for me. I’m not trying to protect anyone. Just tell me what you want, I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“How long are you supposed to watch Kei?” I said.

“Horton told us probably a few days,” Ray said. “Until further notice. He paid for a week.”

“How long have you been out here?” I said.

“Horton called us four days ago. We flew in the next morning.”

That tracked with when we took out the team at the Hilton. Horton must have gotten paranoid-though obviously not without reason-and called on these guys just in case one of us learned about his daughter and decided to make a run at her.

“Did he mention any other travel?” I said. “Any other assignments?”

“No. He just asked us to keep our schedules open-to let him know if anything was going to tie us up in the next couple weeks so he could have first dibs.”

If that was true, it meant Horton was planning something else, or was at least planning for a contingency. But that was neither surprising, nor particularly useful.

“Nothing else?” I said.

“No.”

I decided to try for a long shot. “Nothing about schools?”

He looked genuinely puzzled by that. “Schools?”

I was disappointed, though not surprised. After all, it wasn’t likely Horton would have shared anything operational with these two beyond what was immediately necessary. But Kanezaki had said there was chatter about possible school attacks. And Treven and I had been speculating about the same thing.

Larison said, “Tell me how to get to Hort.”

“Get to him? I couldn’t get to him myself. But wait…wait. Maybe I can help you think of something. I mean, he lives in the Washington area, I think. I could call him, on a pretext, tell him-”

He was just blathering now. Scheherazade, without even a story to tell. “-that I need to meet with him in person, something like that. Flush him out for you.”

“I don’t think he knows anything,” I said to Larison. “There’s no real reason to think he would.”

Larison nodded. “I agree.”

Ray said, “Look, I’m really trying to help you. I really am.”

Larison said, “I believe you,” and shot him in the forehead. Ray’s head snapped back, then his body sagged and he slumped over against his partner.

“Maybe we’ll get something from the phones,” Treven said from up front.

“I doubt it,” I said.

Larison took Ray’s body by the collar and dragged it forward, away from the rear and side sliding doors. “If we grab Kei, it’ll all be academic,” he said. “But it’s nice that Hort keeps losing guys like this. At some point, he’s going to get short on volunteers.”

I hauled the other one forward and we covered them with a tarp. We could reveal them to Kei as circumstances warranted, but I wanted to have the option. No sense freaking her out without a reason.

I didn’t mind that the two of them were dead. If Larison hadn’t been so quick to do it, I would have taken care of it myself. They were certainly here to do the same to us. Besides, as Larison had observed, it was two fewer pieces on the opposition side of the board.

But I’d have to watch him with Kei. Dox had been right. It wasn’t just that he was professional to the point of ruthlessness. There was something beyond that, something that made me wonder if he took not just pride in his work, but also a little too much pleasure.

I watched La Baig, in full daylight now, from the passenger-side peephole in the van. Larison had headed out around the corner to a small commercial parking lot on Harold Way, where he’d do some light stretches and calisthenics like someone warming up for a run or doing one of the WODs he and Dox seemed enamored of. I estimated we’d have at least a full minute from when Kei first appeared at the corner of Selma and La Baig to when she reached our position-enough time to alert Larison and for him to react. Treven was still at the wheel of the van, waiting for word from me. We had energy bars, canned coffee, and big mouth water bottles to piss in. The only thing left was to wait.

At a little past eight, I spotted someone heading toward us on the east side of the street. There had been several false alarms already-a jogger, a dog walker, two young women probably on their way to the bus and then to work-and I tried not to get excited. But as this one came closer and the sun slanted in on her face, I saw it was her. My heart kicked up a notch. “Here she comes,” I said, without taking my eye from the peephole.

“Got it,” Treven said. “Calling Larison now.” A moment later, I heard him say, “She’s on her way.”

Treven fired up the engine. I kept watching Kei. Her hair was tied back and she was wearing cut-off shorts and a white tee shirt under a navy fleece zip-up. A leather mailbag was slung over her left shoulder. A beautiful kid, even better in person than in the photos I’d seen. Leggy, curvy, with a long, confident stride. Someone who knew where she was going and how she would get there, and who wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way.

Well, she hadn’t counted on us. But with a little luck, we’d be no more than a bump in the road for her, immediately felt and quickly forgotten.

I watched her pass Harold Way. There was Larison, jogging down Harold, emerging right behind her.

“Go,” I said to Treven.

He put the van in reverse, cut the wheel right, and backed up all the way to the sidewalk on the other side of the street-essentially the middle part of a K-turn. Not too fast, not too sudden, just someone turning in reverse out of the motel parking lot to head south on La Baig. He stopped just as Larison reached Kei. Maybe she heard him coming; maybe some vestigial portion of her brain sensed the danger he radiated. Maybe both. Whatever it was, she started to turn. Too late.

Larison smacked her smartly on the side of the neck with the palm of his hand. Sometimes known as the “brachial stun,” the blow is intended to disrupt the brachial plexus network of nerve fibers, or, depending on the location of impact, the carotid sinus. Either way, the result can be temporary loss of coordination, unconsciousness, or even, if the blow is sufficiently severe and well placed, death.

The van stopped. Kei staggered and Larison clasped an arm around her. I moved from the peephole, threw open the rear doors, and caught Kei as Larison pushed her into me. We hauled her into the van and had the doors closed behind us two seconds after. Treven accelerated smoothly south and made a right on Sunset, so calm and courteous he even remembered to use the turning signal.

Kei hadn’t lost full consciousness, she was just dazed. We pulled the mailbag off her, secured her wrists behind her back with flex ties, and sat her up against the passenger-side wall. I knelt in front of her and quickly patted her down. Nothing. Whatever she was carrying, it must have been in the mailbag. Larison started going through it. He would disable her phone and confirm there were no tracking devices. Not likely there were, but it was possible Horton had implemented backup measures, hoping to protect her just in case.

I looked into her eyes. I could see she was coming back to herself. We didn’t need to do anything to resuscitate her.

After a moment, she blinked hard. She looked around the van, and then at me. “What the fuck?” she said. “Who are you? What is this?”

“It’s a kidnapping,” I said, using a word she would clearly understand and that would provide some immediate context amid her current confusion. “This isn’t a joke. It’s about your father. Colonel Horton. You understand?”

“My father…what did he do? What the fuck?”

“It doesn’t matter what he did. All you need to know is that he owes us something and we’re using you to get it. Do you understand?”

She looked from my face to Larison’s and back, and I could see how scared she suddenly was. She didn’t answer. I realized there was no need to let her see the bodies of the men her father had sent. She was frightened enough as it was.

“We’re going to take your picture now,” I said. “To show to your father.”

Larison handed me a copy of that day’s Los Angeles Times, which we’d scooped up from a driveway on the way to the motel that morning. I propped it on her lap. Larison moved in close and snapped a few shots with her phone. We’d send Horton the proof from his daughter’s own phone. That would increase his sense of how thoroughly we controlled her, and keep our phones clean.

I took the newspaper off her and tossed it aside. “We’re going to try to make this go smoothly. But there are two ways you could get hurt. One is, if your father doesn’t do what we want. Two is, if you don’t do what we want.”

She was breathing hard now and I knew she was fighting panic. Fighting it well. I respected her for it. And with the respect came a sudden and surprising dose of self-loathing.

I suppressed the feeling. I’d deal with the emotional fallout later. Like I always had before.

I looked in her eyes. “You’re worried that we’re letting you see our faces, is that it?”

She nodded. She was smart-smart enough to know that if a kidnapper lets you see his face, it means he’s not worried about you being a witness later. Meaning, probably, he’s not planning on letting you be alive later.

“It doesn’t matter if you see us,” I told her. “Your father is going to know exactly who we are. And he’ll explain to you when this is done why you can’t go to the police. So we’re not worried about you seeing our faces. Does that make sense?”

She nodded again.

“All right,” I said. “I get the feeling you’re smart. So you probably know about secondary crime scenes, and how you should never let someone take you to one, because once you’re at the secondary crime scene, the criminal can do anything he wants to you. And that’s true. But the thing is, you’re already at the secondary crime scene. We’re alone in this van, we have total control of the environment, and total control of you. If we wanted to hurt you, we’d be hurting you right now. But we’re not. And we want to keep it that way. Are you with me so far?”

“Yes,” she said, and I was glad she felt in control enough to trust herself to speak.

“In a little while,” I said, “we’re going to transfer you. First to another car, then to a hotel room. We’re going to keep your wrists tied and before the transfer we’re going to blindfold you, but we don’t want to make you any more uncomfortable than that. We don’t want to gag you, for example. I don’t know if you’ve ever been gagged, but I can tell you, it’s a horrible way to spend a few days. Much worse than you’d guess. Mimi, are we going to have to gag you?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Are you going to try to run away? Or fight us? Or in any way not do what we tell you to do?”

“No.”

“Look, for me, this is mostly just business.” I tipped my head toward Larison. “But for my associate here, it’s extremely personal. You don’t want to give him a reason, okay? Trust me, he’s looking for one.”

She looked past me at Larison, and I could tell from her expression that she believed. Believed utterly.

I let another moment go by, then said, “But I’m sure you’re going to be fine. Now, do you have any questions?”

She nodded. “Where are you taking me?”

“I can’t tell you that, other than to say it’s someplace where we can manage you, and where no one’s going to be able to find you until we let you go. Anything else?”

“What did my father do?”

“You’re going to have to ask him that. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Why do you keep asking me if I want to ask you anything, when you know you’re not going to answer?”

I smiled sadly, admiring how quickly she’d mastered herself, and liking the moxie she’d accessed even in the midst of shock and distress.

“You ask good questions,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t answer them all. I can tell you this, though. We’re going to change cars a couple times. You and I are going to ride in the trunk in one of them. And it’s going to be at least a few hours before we’re someplace comfortable, someplace with a bathroom. If you need to go before then, we’re going to need to put you in an adult diaper. Can you make it?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m trying to make this as easy on you as I can, Mimi. But yeah, you better believe that I’m serious.”

Kei declined the diaper, and I was relieved. Maybe it wasn’t worth much under the circumstances, but I really didn’t want to subject her to the indignity. This was going to be hard enough as it was.

We spent the next two hours driving under virtually every overpass on the 101, the 110, and the 10, and going in and out of various underground parking garages, too. I took the passenger seat; Larison stayed in back with Kei. When I was satisfied, I called Dox. “You ready?”

“Ready, partner.”

“All right. We’re on our way.”

We made a left off Venice Boulevard onto South Redondo. As we came to the stop sign on Bangor Street, I saw the Fusion, waiting to make a right-Dox. He pulled out ahead of us, and we followed him south toward the 10. As soon as we were under the overpass, Dox cut right and swerved to a stop on the sidewalk. The trunk popped open. Treven hit the hazard lights, cut right onto the sidewalk and then back onto the street, skidding to a stop so that the passenger side of the van was right alongside the open trunk of the Fusion. I jumped into the back and slid open the side door. Larison was already standing there with Kei, still wrist-tied and now blindfolded. The two of us lifted her easily into the trunk and I squirmed in beside her. Larison slammed the trunk shut and Dox peeled out back onto the road, accelerating to the end of the tunnel, then rapidly decelerating and emerging at a normal speed. Treven would be right behind him in the van, same timing, same formation as when we entered.

What we were doing was creating a kind of shell game using the overpasses and the garages. We still didn’t know how Horton had tracked us to the Capital Hilton, and our working assumption was that he had used spy satellites. We had to assume he had access to the resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. If so, and if he had a fixed point for a target-such as, say, Dulles Airport, or outside his daughter’s house-it was possible he could track that target from the fixed point to wherever the target went, virtually indefinitely. If our working assumption was right, we’d been lucky in Washington, maybe in the hotel parking garage, maybe elsewhere between D.C. and Los Angeles. But we didn’t want to rely on luck again. Every time we drove the van under an overpass, or in and out of a garage, we created the possibility that we’d switched Kei into one of the dozens of vehicles that emerged from under the overpass at around the same time we did, or from the garage afterward. Multiply this dynamic by dozens of overpasses and garages times dozens of cars, many of which would themselves continue under other overpasses and into other garages, and we could create a dataset too big for Horton to act on, at least in the time we would permit him.

The plan now was for Treven and Larison to continue the shell game for the next couple hours, then to ditch the van, bleach it out, and get back to the hotel using buses and the Metro system. By the time they were done, Horton would be facing thousands of possibilities, each of which would have to be manually tracked, assuming it could be tracked at all. As for Dox and me, we did one more switch, into the U-Haul truck, which we had left in a giant underground garage in a mall in Westwood. Dox stayed at the wheel and I stayed in the cargo area with Kei.

At a little past noon, I felt a series of short turns that told me were back at the motel. “How are you holding up?” I asked Kei.

“I need a bathroom. Badly. Please don’t put me in a diaper.”

I checked my watch. “Can you hold on for three more minutes?”

She glared at me. “Barely.”

The truck stopped. “Face the front of the truck,” I told her. She complied. A moment later, the cargo doors opened and Dox climbed in. He was carrying an extra-large cargo carrier, 59 by 24 by 24 inches. Just roomy enough for someone of Kei’s dimensions. He pulled the doors shut behind him.

“All right, Mimi,” I said. “One more transfer.”

Dox, looking distinctly reluctant, set down the cargo bag and held it open. Kei grimaced, then stepped into it and curled up on her side. “I’m not going to gag you,” I told her. “Remember our deal.”

I was betting I’d be able to spot when she was planning an insurrection, and that I’d be able to preempt it. In the meantime, she would bide her time, believing she was lulling me. That was fine. The net effect was that she would be unconsciously inhibited by what she thought was hope. Meaning she would be comfortable. And, more importantly, more cooperative.

We zipped her in and opened the door. Dox picked up the bag as though it was filled with nothing but Styrofoam peanuts, slung it over a shoulder, and carried her into the motel. I shut the truck doors and followed him in.

We set her down in the room, unzipped the bag, and helped her to her feet. I opened the folding knife I was carrying and let her see it. Dox was holding the Wilson-not because he wanted to, but because I’d told him to. I wanted to give her every possible psychological excuse not to resist, including the obvious facts of our numbers, our size-or Dox’s size, anyway-and our weapons.

“I’m going to untie your wrists,” I said. “Take your time in the bathroom. We won’t watch you, but the door stays open. If you do anything we don’t like, we’ll have to diaper you, hogtie you, gag you, and put a hood on you, and leave you like that for what could be days. It’s up to you.”

I stepped behind her and quickly patted her down. Larison already had, and even if he hadn’t, it wasn’t likely she was carrying, but this was Horton’s daughter, after all, and it would be foolish to assume any woman couldn’t be equipped with pepper spray or an FS Hideaway knife. Better to double check. But Kei had no weapons, nor even anything that could be used for one. I took hold of her wrists and cut the flex ties.

She hurried into the bathroom. It was tiny and windowless, and with the door open there was nowhere she could go for concealment. And I’d already checked it for anything that could remotely be used as an improvised weapon. About the only thing she might have done was to wrap her fist in a towel, smash the mirror, and pick up a long shard using the towel as a kind of handle. I judged such a move at this point extremely unlikely. If I was wrong, though, I would have plenty of time to get an upraised desk chair between us, while Dox approached her from behind.

I turned away while Dox dragged a dresser in front of the door. A small thing, but enough to dissuade her from thinking she could get away with a mad dash for the exit. I heard her urinating for a long time. When the sound stopped, I glanced over just to be cautious, but everything was fine-she had already stood and had quickly pulled up her jeans.

She came out of the bathroom and said, “I’m hungry.”

I nodded. “We’ll give you some food in a minute. First, I want you to lie facedown on the floor.”

“Why?”

“Because it’ll slow you down and keep you from being tempted to do something that might get you hurt. The alternative is, we tie you up again. I need a bathroom break myself, and I don’t want fewer than two people watching you when you’re free to move about.”

She hesitated, then did as I told her. I used the bathroom, then Dox followed suit. When he was done, I told Kei she could sit on one of the beds. She did so.

Dox sat across from her and said, “I apologize for inconveniencing you, Ms. Kei. We’re in a tight spot, and it was your dad who put us here. We need to give him a little incentive to do the right thing. Which I believe he will. Despite the late unpleasantness, he’s always struck me as the kind of man who responds to incentives.”

“That’s what you call this?” she said. “Inconveniencing me?”

“Well,” Dox said, “in the end, I don’t know that it matters so much what we call it. But I do apologize regardless. Now, you said you’re hungry. We’ve got some pretty good chow from a fancy supermarket, if you like. You look like a salad girl to me, am I right?”

“If by salad you mean cheeseburger, then yeah.”

“A cheeseburger’s a tall order at the moment,” Dox said. “But maybe later. In the meantime, we’ve got a few sandwiches in a cooler, left over from yesterday. Not as fresh as you might like, but I expect they’ll taste fine if you’re hungry enough. What would you like? Roast beef, I’m guessing now? With a tasty smoothie to wash it down?”

“Whatever. Yes.”

I sat in the desk chair, watching Dox feeding her and doing what he could to make her comfortable under the circumstances. Women were his weakness, I knew, the lady’s man bluster mostly a cover for the bottom line fact that he really just adored them. And his southern code of chivalry was no bullshit, either. He wasn’t happy about what we were doing, and I realized I’d have to watch him with Kei for the opposite reason I’d have to watch Larison. Where Larison was likely to let his evident hatred of Horton cause him to harm Kei, Dox might get too attached and grow to feel too guilty, and therefore become too susceptible to manipulation.

“Why don’t you tell me what my dad did to you?” Kei asked him at one point. “What difference would it make if you did?”

Dox took a sip of the smoothie he was drinking. I was aware that he’d broken bread with her, and felt uneasy about it.

“Wouldn’t make any difference to us,” he said. “But I don’t want to mix you up in this anymore than we already have. I mean, you’re close with your daddy, right?”

I saw her weigh the pros and cons of possible responses before settling on the truth. “Yes,” she said. “We’re close. Which is why I want to know what he could have done to wrong you. I really can’t imagine it.”

Dox smiled. “I can tell he’s lucky to have you for a daughter. And all I can tell you is, part of the burden of being a man, and the nature of the defect that defines us, is that we sometimes have to do things we can’t tell our loved ones about.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because sometimes things need to be done in the world, and telling you would make you complicit. By keeping you innocent, we save you from having to join us in hell. It might not sound like much, but it is a comfort when you’re faced with hard choices.”

“But that’s ridiculous. You make women sound like children. You think we can’t decide for ourselves? That’s completely demeaning.”

“Demeaning? Hell, I wish someone would do it for me.”

“No, you don’t. You like keeping it all to yourself because doing so makes you feel powerful.”

Dox looked perplexed. “I don’t think so.”

“I do. You say my dad did something to you, something so horrible that now in your mind it justifies kidnapping and threatening his daughter? You’re willing to do all that, but not even to tell me what this is all about?”

Nicely played, I thought. I waited to see how Dox would respond.

“We did some work for your dad,” Dox said. “Not the kind of work I’m going to discuss with you. And then, to hide the fact that we did the work, he hired some people to do the same kind of work on us. You follow? You really want to know more?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. And you don’t have to be afraid to tell me.”

“Well, it’s not-”

“It’s not a matter of fear,” I said. “Like Dox said, the less you know, the better for you. And for your father.”

She looked at him. “Your name is Dox?”

“I told you,” I said, “your father already knows who we are. We’re not trying to keep our identities secret from you.”

“Then what’s your name?” she said.

She really was smart. She was doing what she could to glean information that at some point might be operationally useful. And she was also establishing rapport, making herself seem human and making her captors feel human, which in itself might create tactical opportunities for her, or, at a minimum, make it more emotionally difficult for us to harm her.

“You can call me Rain,” I said. “But enough questions for now, okay? We’re tired. We’ll have plenty of time to talk more later, if you want.”

I had a feeling Dox might have liked to protest, but he must have thought better of it.

I was a little concerned about Kei. She had a natural interrogator’s personality-smart, likeable, unthreatening, and inquisitive under the guise of sincere interest. Dox was obviously being careful in response to her inquiries, but I wondered how he might comport himself in my absence. He obviously wanted her to like him. Partly to make her comfortable, partly to assuage his guilt, and partly because, after all, she was gorgeous, and he just couldn’t help himself.

We flex-tied one of Kei’s wrists to a bedpost and passed a couple hours silently, Dox watching her while I catnapped on the floor. I was awakened by a knock.

Dox and I took out our guns and approached the door. “Yes?” I said.

“It’s us,” I heard Larison say.

I had previously placed a strip of duct tape over the peephole to prevent anyone on the other side of the door from knowing by the blockage of light that someone was looking through it. I put my face up close and removed the duct tape. Larison and Treven, as advertised.

I moved the dresser, then let them in and bolted the door behind them. “Any trouble?” I said.

Treven shook his head. “No. Ditched those guys, ditched the van, no problems.”

If Kei wondered whom he was referring to by “those guys,” she didn’t ask.

“All right then,” I said. “If everything’s good to go, it’s time to call Horton.”

Larison looked at Kei and smiled. “Yes, it is.”

It was a long time before Larison was ready to call Hort. He didn’t know how they’d been tracked in D.C.-satellite, surveillance cameras, drone aircraft, whatever-and he needed to be certain it wasn’t going to happen again. So he ramped up his already stringent procedures, spending hours in buses, taxis, malls, and on the subway, making sure he wasn’t just flushing out possible foot and vehicular surveillance, but also that he was obscuring his movements against more remote potential watchers, as well.

He was glad he’d managed to persuade the others that their only move was to take Kei hostage. It had the benefit of being true, of course, but he had his own, additional reasons for wanting Kei as leverage against Hort: he recognized that the value of his threat to release the torture tapes was diminishing.

Larison had long understood that America’s political elites insisted on counter-terror policies like disappearances, torture, drone strikes, and invasions because the elites perversely benefited from the increased terror the policies inevitably produced. He understood the policies weren’t a response to the threat, but were rather the cause of the threat, and that this was by design. A frightened populace was a controllable populace. Endless war and metastasizing security procedures meant enormous profits for the corporations the politicians served. In this sense, the possible publication of graphic videos of American servicemen torturing screaming Muslim prisoners had always been, from the perspective of America’s elites, as much a promise as a threat.

Still, in ordinary times, people would have reacted to videos of gruesome torture with disgust and horror. In the most emotionally irrefutable way, the tapes would implicate various establishment players, and the reputations of the men who had ordered the barbarism in the videos would have been sullied; their careers, derailed. And that highly personal threat had outweighed the government’s institutional interest in finding ways to increase the danger of terrorism-at least enough for the government to agree to cough up a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds.

But everything had changed now. America was under attack, and who would object to what was on the tapes now? Object, hell-they’d clamor for more. The people who had ordered what was shown on the tapes wouldn’t be censured. They’d be heroes.

And that, in essence, was the problem. Circumstances were now eroding the value of the cards he held, so much so that he wondered whether neutralizing the extortion value of the tapes was the purpose of the attacks. Well, even if it wasn’t the primary purpose, it must have occurred to somebody. And regardless, the effect was the same. The value of his assets was declining, and he knew he needed new ones. Hort’s daughter was one. The daughter, and what she would lead to.

Eventually, he made his way to the graffitied roll-down storefronts and cracked cinderblock walls and peeling real estate lease signs of the blighted industrial district. For a while, he wandered among the jobless, solitary men who gravitated to the area, casualties of a hollowed-out economy. He liked the cover they gave him, liked that no one knew them or cared about them or could tell one from the other, liked knowing that as he made himself complicit among them, the world’s callousness and indifference would envelop him, as well.

He paused with his back to the brick facade of a recycling center and looked around. The skyscrapers of the downtown jutted up into a faded blue sky a mile or so behind him. Absent those distant monoliths, he might have been almost anywhere. An old mill town, a dying burg in the rust belt. There was no panic buying here. There was nothing to buy, and no money to use to buy it. It was the last place politicians would ever care about, the last place security forces would ever be sent to protect. He felt anonymous. He felt secure.

He took out Kei’s phone, popped in the battery, and fired it up. He had a number for Hort, but he assumed Hort would have a separate, clean phone exclusively for personal use. He checked Kei’s speed dial entries and immediately saw one called “Dad.” The number wasn’t the one he had, so yes, a separate, personal phone.

He brought up the photos he had taken in the van and keyed the entry for “Dad,” enjoying the feeling of invading Hort’s privacy this way. He waited while the photos uploaded, then called Hort.

One ring, then, “Hey sweet girl, I was just about to open those photos you sent me. How are you?”

“Your sweet girl’s fine,” Larison said. “For now.”

There was a long pause. Larison relished the silence. Could there have been a more pristine way for Hort to convey his sudden shock, and violation, and helplessness? His confusion and impotent rage and, soon enough, his despair?

“I swear to almighty God-”

Larison cut him off. “Look at the photos. She’s alive. For now. The guys you sent to protect her, not so much.”

There was another pause during which Larison assumed Hort was checking the photos. Then Hort said, “Let her go. Just let her go. She didn’t do anything to you-”

“You did something to me.”

“Yes. And this is between you and me, and no one else.”

“It must be killing you, Hort. To know, right now, that you’re the one who taught me to identify the target’s most vulnerable area. And to attack him there. And you showed me how, remember? You got to me through Nico.”

“That’s right, I did. You know what’ll happen to him if anything happens to my daughter?”

Larison laughed. “You’ve already pointed a gun at him, Hort. Now you’re threatening to point another? What are you going to do, have his nieces raped and his nephews killed and the other shit you threatened before, twice over?”

“It doesn’t matter. If anything happens to her, I will never, ever stop until I’ve found you. And yes, I will start with your man Nico, and every goddamned member of his extended family, one at a time and saving Nico for last so he can know what happened and who was the cause of the deaths of everyone he loved and the ruination of his entire life. I’ll see to it all personally.”

“You’re missing something really important, Hort. You know what it is? I. Don’t. Care. So go ahead. Hang up. Go after Nico right now. Try me.”

Silence. Then: “Tell me what you want.”

“I want my diamonds.”

“What else?”

“A guarantee that the dogs you’ve sicced on us are called off.”

“And you’ll let my daughter go?”

“Yes.”

“Unharmed?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then.”

“How?”

“I’ll bring you the diamonds myself. And I’ll make an announcement tomorrow that I believe will set your mind at ease on the other thing.”

“What announcement?”

“I can’t tell you now. But you’ll be able to watch it on television. I’ll make the announcement and immediately fly to L.A. I can meet you tomorrow night, if you like.”

Despite everything, Larison couldn’t help being touched by the man’s devotion. He must have known he would be coming here to die.

But then he wondered if he was giving Hort’s humanity too much credit. Hort was a clever bastard, and had outplayed Larison before. He’d have to be careful. Consider every angle. Look at the whole thing from Hort’s perspective, and see if he could detect any weaknesses in his own position.

“You might be able to track us,” Larison said. “We’ve been careful, but you got to us at the Hilton, so maybe you’ll find a way again. The difference is, this time, I’ll be with Mimi. You breach that door, you better be sure you can put a bullet in my brain in less than one second. Because that’s how long it’ll take me to put one in hers.”

“Nobody’s going to be breaching any doors,” Hort said. “I just want her safe. I don’t care about the rest, you were right. You can have whatever you want, as long as you let her go.”

Larison considered. It was hard to imagine Hort was going to risk his daughter over the diamonds. The question was, would he call off the dogs. And how would Larison know, one way or the other?

But as he thought about it, he realized it might not even matter. Once he had the diamonds, and Hort was dead, and Rain, Treven, and Dox were all dead, too, let the government try to track him. They’d be wasting their time. Because they’d be looking for a ghost.

The next morning, the five of us clustered around the television in the motel room. The president was making an announcement from the Rose Garden, and we assumed Horton would have something to do with it.

We’d dragged in the futons and done the night in shifts. Kei slept on one bed; the rest of us used the futons and sleeping bags and the remaining bed, with at least one of us awake at all times. Larison seemed not to sleep much, and when he did, he moaned occasionally and once had cried out. I had my own difficult nights, and therefore my own sense of what horrors might haunt him in his dreams.

Kei had been cooperative. In the presence of all four of us, she had been less talkative, recognizing, perhaps, that we might be easier to manipulate in ones and twos than we would be en masse. I was glad for the respite. I didn’t want her to get to Dox.

At nine o’clock our time, noon in Washington, two men strode out of the White House-the president, in the usual dark suit; and Horton, purposeful in his Army Service Uniform, the full fruit salad resplendent on his chest. They walked toward the assembled press corps, then Horton stood back while the president took the lectern.

“Good afternoon,” the president said. “I have two brief announcements.

“First, given the recent series of unprecedented attacks on the American homeland and an ongoing state of emergency, I have, as Commander in Chief, ordered National Guard units to key positions in American cities. These Guard units will liaise with and reinforce local law enforcement to ensure we have the maximum possible on-the-ground ability to detect, defuse, and defend against further attacks. And, should the worst happen, to assist in providing critical care to first responders.

“Second, I’m pleased to announce that the position of the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, opened by the tragic death of Tim Shorrock, has been filled. For security reasons, the name of Tim’s replacement will be classified.”

I wondered about that. Shorrock’s name hadn’t been classified. Maybe it was just a reaction to current events. Or the usual governmental reflex toward more secrecy. Or both.

“However,” the president continued, “my new counterterrorism advisor is right here beside me. I’m grateful to have the advice and assistance of Colonel Scott Horton as my administration combats the continued terrorist threat. Colonel Horton has a long and distinguished career in serving and protecting our nation, and his considerable national security experience will be an invaluable asset as he joins my cabinet. Please direct any questions you have to Colonel Horton.”

The president stepped back. A few reporters shouted questions, but the president ignored them. Horton stepped forward and took the lectern.

“Ladies and gentleman,” he said, surveying the crowd. “I will be brief.”

Maybe it was the solemnity of Horton’s expression-itself, I suspected, the product of the heavy knowledge of his daughter’s predicament. Maybe it was his erect military bearing, or his baritone, or that cultured southern accent. Whatever it was, even through the television, I could sense the collective attention of the press corps focusing, cohering, anticipating.

“As the president just told us,” Horton said, “even as we speak, National Guard units have been deployed to major American cities. The president also spoke of a state of emergency. And while I believe he is correct to use this term, I also believe his application was mistaken. You see, the emergency we currently face is far less from any terrorist threat than it is from our government’s overreaction to that threat.”

I thought, What the fuck? And couldn’t process anything beyond that.

There was silence among the reporters. They were staring at Horton, their bodies seemingly frozen. No one was taking notes. I looked at the president, who was standing a few paces behind Horton and to the side. His face was a mask of poorly concealed shock and rage.

“After all,” Horton went on, “in America, what is a federal government-declared ‘state of emergency’? There is no constitutional basis for such a concept. What does it consist of? When does it end? And while these questions would be problematical enough were they merely rhetorical, they do have answers. I can tell you that today, in the corridors of power in this country, men are seriously contemplating and even planning for the suspension of the Constitution and the imposition of martial law. Our so-called ‘state of emergency’ is intended to act as a bridge to that suspension and that imposition.”

The onlookers in the Rose Garden were still completely silent. On our end, even Dox was apparently at a loss for words.

“Today,” Horton went on, “I would like to ask of all Americans a simple question. If the terrorists told us they would go on with these attacks until we tore up the Constitution and surrendered our liberties, what would we say? I submit to you that we would rightly tell them they could go to hell. And yet, we’re willing to do these very things as long as we believe it’s of our own volition. In the end, though, what’s the difference? Either way, the Constitution is destroyed. Either way, our cherished liberties, which our forefathers have fought and died for, which I and members of my family all the way back to the Civil War have fought and died for, are cashed in and gone for good.”

Still total silence, bordering on shock, coming through the television.

“I have therefore wrestled with the president’s invitation to serve his administration. I ask myself, what should I do? Anyone who tells you that proximity to power, especially during a crisis, is not tempting, is a liar. So the temptation, naturally, is to serve. And why not? After all, I have served my country my entire adult life. The problem, I have come to realize, is that today, I cannot serve our nation by serving the president. Today, service to one would be antithetical to the other. The service the president requires of me could and doubtless will be capably fulfilled by someone else. What’s needed instead, and needed urgently, is an example, and I hope others will follow mine.”

He paused. No one moved. The attention of everyone, there and in our motel room, was riveted on Horton.

“Therefore,” he said, “I must resign my position in this administration and my commission in the United States Army, effective immediately. And I encourage all service personnel who are asked to destroy the Constitution in the diabolical guise of saving it to follow my example. I encourage all Americans, of every stripe, to resist the government’s current attempt to pervert and subvert the constitutional guarantee that our government can only be of, by, and for the people. And I encourage all people who cherish their safety more than their liberty to move to North Korea, where they can live in a society more closely aligned to their preferences than the one we have created here in the United States of America.”

He paused, then said, “It may be that none will heed my call. I am at peace with that. Because I’ll be damned-I will be damned-if I allow any group of cave-dwelling, hate-filled, fanatical losers who have nothing more to offer the world than cowardly attacks on innocent civilians, to coerce me into surrendering the liberties I cherish, that I love, and that I am determined to bequeath to my children just as my parents bequeathed them to me.”

He looked out at the faces of the people assembled before him, then pivoted and walked toward the White House, his head high, his posture erect. There was another moment of stunned silence, then the reporters leaped to their feet and began shouting a cacophony of questions. For a single second, the president looked utterly flustered. Then he, too, turned and strode back toward the White House.

We all stared at the television. Finally, Dox broke the silence.

“What the fucking fuck?” he said.

I got up and turned off the television, having no desire to listen to the inevitable feeble-minded cable news commentary. I turned and looked at Larison, Treven, and Dox. “What the hell was that?”

Dox nodded. “Is it just me, or did that sound to anyone else like a man running for high office?”

“It did,” I said. “But what office? If they get what they want, I don’t think these guys are planning on holding an election any time soon. And, by any time soon, I mean ‘ever.’”

No one spoke. I said, “I mean, did that sound like a guy who’s trying to launch a coup? Who had the president’s counterterrorism advisor killed so he could take the dead man’s position?”

“You think we could have been wrong?” Dox said. “About what Horton was really up to? About who sent those unfortunates after us in D.C.?”

“But who else could have known we were there?” I said. “Unless Horton had told someone, someone who…I don’t know, had his own reasons for wanting us taken out.”

“No,” Treven said. “Hort would never have breached operational security unless he wanted us removed.”

Larison inclined his head toward Kei, who was sitting on one of the beds, one wrist flex-tied to a bedpost. “And besides,” he said, “what about the two men who were trying to protect her?”

“Could someone else have sent them to make it look like Horton had?” I said, thinking aloud.

Larison shook his head. “That’s getting a little far-fetched, I think. Parsimony suggests we’re right about Hort’s goals. But I agree, his tactics are…surprising. On the other hand, Hort never does what you’re expecting him to do. He always has an angle. The question is, what’s his angle here? You think he thinks this will save her?”

Dox glanced at Kei. “She’s not going to actually need saving, all right? We just need her father to think she will.”

It was a stupid thing to say in front of Kei. Yes, it was true, but we were counting on her fear that we might harm her to make her more cooperative. But he’d said it, and she’d heard it. Arguing with him wouldn’t change that.

Larison looked at Dox. “It doesn’t matter what we might or might not do to his daughter. It’s Hort’s perspective that matters. And I promise you, he doesn’t doubt me.”

There was a slight emphasis on the last word. To defuse another confrontation, I said, “We’ve demanded two things. The diamonds, and that he call off the dogs. The question is, how does his stunt pertain to any of that?”

“It doesn’t,” Treven said. “It has no impact on the first, and prevents him from doing the second. So my guess? The stunt was already in the works. It has nothing to do with his daughter. It’s about something else.”

That sounded right. “Okay,” I said. “But what?”

No one said anything. Dox turned to Kei. “Darlin’, if you have any insights into what that was all about just now on the TV, this would be a great time to share them.”

She didn’t respond at first, and I realized that seeing her father, whether because of what he had done, or just because of her circumstances, had affected her. She was trying to master her emotions.

“Maybe you’re just missing something incredibly obvious,” she said, after a moment. “My father’s an honorable man.”

Dox smiled sadly. “Well, respectfully, you don’t know him the way we do.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t know him the way I do.”

We were all quiet again. I checked the secure site. There was a message from Horton.

“He’s coming,” I said. “Tonight, with the diamonds. Expects to arrive at LAX around eight o’clock on a private jet. Says he can’t risk commercial because of the diamonds. The TSA is going apeshit, everything’s being hand-searched. Says he’ll meet us anywhere we want.”

“He gave you his itinerary?” Treven said.

I nodded. No one had to point out the significance. Either Horton was trying, pretty obviously, to lure us into a trap. Or he was telling us we could kill him without resistance, if we’d just let his daughter go.

But it had to be the second one. He knew we wouldn’t expose ourselves more than necessary. Only one of us would show up for the diamonds. The rest would be somewhere else, holding a decidedly non-metaphorical gun to his daughter’s head.

“He told me his announcement would set our minds at ease,” Larison said. “What are we missing? I don’t see it.”

No one responded. I didn’t think we were going to figure it out. We’d just have to ask Horton. And then I realized.

“We’re not supposed to see it,” I said. “He wants a chance to talk to us. Whoever goes to pick up the diamonds, Horton wants it to involve a conversation, not just an exchange of a bag.”

“What does that get him?” Dox said.

I looked at Kei. “I don’t know. But we need to decide who’s going to meet him.”

Dox stood. “Hell, I’ll do it.”

I wondered if it was a bluff. I knew he felt protective of Kei, and was worried about Larison.

“No,” I said. “I want Horton to feel that special tingling sensation you can only fully appreciate when you wonder whether a former Marine sniper is watching you through a scope right that very second.”

“I can’t,” Larison said. “Much as I’d like to. Of the four of us, the one Hort fears most is me. Because he knows, with me, it’s personal. If you want to ensure compliance, you want him to picture his daughter, alone and helpless with me.”

I didn’t particularly care for the thought of Larison alone with Kei, but I couldn’t disagree with his assessment.

Treven said, “I’ll go.”

The truth was, I would have preferred to handle it myself. I didn’t trust Treven. He’d been exceptionally quiet on the subway in L.A. when we’d first discussed going after Horton, and he’d been right at the Capital Hilton, when he’d accused me of suspecting he had a hand in our being set up about the cyanide. But I had no way of knowing, and besides, I didn’t want another confrontation. Whatever the relationship between the four of us, it plainly hadn’t yet evolved to the point where disagreements could be settled without the possibility of a firefight.

Strangely enough, I wasn’t unduly concerned that Treven might abscond with the diamonds. A hundred million dollars is a lot of money, true. But you wouldn’t live long to spend it if Larison, Dox, and I were after you. Better to settle for an already galactic twenty-five million and live to enjoy it, too. I imagined Larison had performed the same calculus and had arrived at the same conclusion.

“You’ll have to do a hell of an SDR,” I said. “We don’t know-”

He held up a hand. “How he tracked us in Washington. I know. Satellites, drones, surveillance cameras, etc. I’ll be careful.”

I nodded again, recognizing I was micromanaging, unable, it seemed, not to.

“He’ll want to know when his daughter will be released,” Larison said. “Tell him only after we’ve had the diamonds certified by an expert. If he thinks he’s going to hand off another bag full of plastic, I’m going to make him pay.”

“The diamonds are only half of it,” Dox said. “How’s he going to call off the heat now that he’s just a civilian? And how would we even know, one way or the other?”

I realized Larison didn’t care about heat. He only wanted the diamonds. That wasn’t an entirely new development, but still, it made me uneasy. I sensed I was going to have to do something about him, something extreme. But I didn’t know what. Or maybe I just didn’t want to face it.

I looked at Treven. “Horton’s going to give you assurances regarding the heat. We just don’t know what form those assurances will take. Let’s assume for the moment they’ll be worth something, because if they weren’t, he’d be putting his daughter at greater risk. So whatever he says, you just tell him you’ll pass the information along to the rest of us, and we’ll get back to him.”

“He’s not going to like that,” Treven said.

Larison smiled. “He’s going to hate it. But he’ll have no choice. He’s not going to risk sending you back to us empty-handed.”

Then he looked at Dox and said, “Not as long as I’m here, anyway.”

Treven sat in a corner of the vast, ornate waiting room of Los Angeles’ Union Station, waiting for Hort. The Glock was concealed in an unzipped black hip pouch on the large, mahogany-and-leather chair next to him, but he wasn’t expecting any immediate trouble. Even if Hort hadn’t just left the government and resigned his commission, his options were fairly limited. Bring in a team for a snatch? They’d have to drag Treven out through the station, assuming they survived the preceding firefight. A straight-up hit? That would get Hort nothing, except maybe a dead daughter. No, the most likely scenario-next to Hort trying nothing at all, given the way they had him by the balls-was that Hort would have forces hanging back and hoping to follow Treven to wherever Kei was being held. Which is why they’d told Hort via the secure site the meeting would be at Union Station. With its multiple levels and points of ingress and egress; its numerous train, subway, and bus lines; and its proximity to three highways and countless surface roads, it would take an army to properly cover the place.

He’d been a little surprised when Rain had agreed to let him be the one to meet Hort. The man had good instincts, and had zeroed in on Treven at the Capital Hilton. But he never had anything firm to go with, and probably had decided he would just have to keep his suspicions in reserve. For the time being, anyway.

He watched all manner of people coming and going along the tiled floors and through the huge archways, the sounds of their cell phone conversations swallowed up amid the high, beamed ceiling and art deco chandeliers, and periodically drowned out by announcements about the importance of being watchful and immediately reporting any suspicious activity. There was a tension in the air that reminded him of the immediate aftermath of 9/11: people hurrying more than normal, as though passage through a train station had become the equivalent of a lethal game of musical chairs; expressions pinched and suspicious and fearful; eyes darting, trying to read faces to which their owners previously had always been happily oblivious. There were cops positioned everywhere, and a half dozen soldiers patrolling in Army Combat Uniforms, their M-16s held ready. Not Hort’s men, though. These were reservists, and to an operator like Treven, the difference between a part-timer and a JSOC black ops vet was the difference between a kid playing touch football and an NFL pro. Hort’s guys were invisible right up until the moment they were pulling a bag over your head or putting a bullet in your brain. These guys were nothing more than security theater. Their purpose was to look butch, and reassure a jittery public that Something Was Being Done, and Treven supposed they were ably carrying out the role.

Hort showed up at a little past nine o’clock. He was dressed in civilian clothes-khaki pants, a green polo shirt-and carrying a blue nylon gym bag. His face was uncharacteristically drawn, borderline exhausted. He looked like a man who’d lost big, and was now terrified of losing everything else on top of it.

He walked slowly through the waiting area, his head tracking left and right, and then saw Treven. As he walked over, Treven wrapped his fingers around the grip of the Glock and kept his thumb on the exterior of the hip pouch. He could fire right through the thing, if necessary, and the gun would remain concealed until he did. He scanned the room and saw no one suspicious coming in behind Hort, or from elsewhere.

Hort stopped a few feet away. He didn’t sit and Treven didn’t stand.

“I’m glad it’s you,” Hort said.

Treven scanned the room again. “You shouldn’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Because that hotel thing was the second time you’ve tried to have me killed. I was an idiot to tell you what Larison was planning. He was right. I should have just helped take you out.”

“Those men weren’t there for you. You’re the one who told me where I could find you, remember? I know you’re the only one I can trust. You know what that means to me, after all that’s happened between us? Do you have any idea how grateful I am that you would give me a second chance?”

It was more or less what he’d been expecting. Which made the fact that he was tempted to believe it doubly irritating. “You have what we asked for?” he said.

Hort tossed the gym bag onto the chair next to Treven. “It’s all in there. Just a nylon bag, too, no room for tracking devices, though I expect you’ll want to check anyway.”

“We’ll check the contents, too. With an expert.”

“That’s understandable. Still, I assure you, the contents are what you have asked for. And now, I’m going to offer one more thing, and ask for one more favor.”

“What?”

“If you want to take me to one of the canyon drives, or the national forest, or to some other quiet place, I will kneel and look off into the distance and you can put a bullet in the back of my head. All you have to do is say the word.”

“Is that the offer, or the favor?”

Hort smiled tightly. “That’s the offer. The favor is, hear me out first. And, no matter what you decide, please. Let my little girl go.”

His voice cracked on the last word. Treven couldn’t believe it. He’d never seen Hort other than confident, competent, always in control. It felt like what they’d done had broken him, and despite everything, Treven was suddenly ashamed.

But he couldn’t afford to indulge that feeling, much less to show it. “That’s two favors,” he said.

“I don’t care how you count them. And I don’t care what you do to me. I have never begged anyone for anything in my life, and I am begging you. Just let her go.”

Treven gestured with his head. “Let me see your ankles. And turn around.”

Hort complied. He wasn’t carrying a firearm.

Treven looked around the room. Still no problems. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Maybe to one of those quiet places you mentioned. You can say whatever you want me to hear on the way.”

They walked through the station and down to the Red Line subway. Treven kept them on the platform while a train roared in and then squealed out. When its departing passengers had moved off, and the two of them were alone for a moment, Treven switched on a bug detector Rain had given him. No response.

“You carrying a mobile phone?” he asked.

Hort nodded. “Yes, but I’ve removed the battery. I thought you might ask.”

All right, then. Either Hort was clean, or he was carrying a device he would switch on later. To counter that possibility, Treven would turn the detector on again when they were alone.

Another train came and went, leaving the platform momentarily empty again, and this time Treven was sure no one was following them, at least through visual contact. They waited again and then got on the next train. It was about half full, everyone looking like a civilian, albeit a tense one. Treven had Hort sit a few seats forward and facing the same direction so he could go through the gym bag without having to worry about Hort trying to disarm him while he was distracted. Not that disarming him would do any good, but it was best to deny an enemy both motive and opportunity.

As the car sped along, swaying in the close confines of the tunnel, he unzipped the bag. Thousands of small, pale stones, some yellowish, some light gray, most of them translucent white. He dug his hand in and moved it around carefully. Nothing other than the stones. He felt thoroughly along the handles of the bag and its seams. No telltale bulges or wires. No transmitters. It was a just a bag. Okay.

At the Vermont/Beverly stop, he had them step out and wait on the platform again. No question, unless Hort had enough people with him to blanket every train on the Red Line, they were clean. They got back on the next train. They rode it to North Hollywood, the end of the line, got off, and walked to Chandler Boulevard, where earlier Treven had parked another stolen car. This one was a dark blue Honda Accord sedan, one of the bestselling and therefore most common cars in America, which a harried housewife had been foolish enough to leave with the key in the ignition while she ran for just a minute into a Culver City dry cleaner carrying a load of shirts.

He gave Hort the key. “You drive,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

It was hard to imagine Hort still had access to the kind of domestic surveillance apparatus he might have been able to call into play before his resignation. Besides, unlike the others, Treven knew Hort hadn’t used that apparatus in fixing them at the Capital Hilton-he had simple human intelligence from Treven to thank for that. Also, it was night, meaning the birds would have a harder time tracking them. Even so, he had Hort drive an extensive surveillance detection run that incorporated the kinds of overpass and garage maneuvers they’d used to obscure their movements after snatching Kei. Rain’s bug detector remained silent as they drove.

They finished on Lake Hollywood Drive, a lonely, serpentine section of the Hollywood Hills overlooking the Hollywood Reservoir. When they came to a curve partly concealed by scrub bushes and some dried-out trees, Treven told Hort to pull off the road and park. Ordinarily, Treven wouldn’t have liked the spot for a meeting like this because there was always the chance of a cop driving by. But doubtless Los Angeles law enforcement was more focused on protecting critical infrastructure just now than they were on rousting horny kids parked in the Hills.

Hort cut the lights and the ignition and looked out through the driver-side window. “Not a bad spot to dump a body,” he said. “I do hope you’ll hear me out first.”

“I’m listening.”

“You mind if I have a cigar?”

Treven squeezed the grip of the Glock, reassured by its familiar heft. “Whatever you like.”

Hort thumbed the switch for the driver-side window, then eased a canister and a cigar guillotine from his front pants pocket. He unscrewed the canister, slid out a cigar, and expertly clipped one end with the guillotine. He tossed the clipped end through the open window, put the cut end in his mouth, slid a wooden match out of the canister, popped it with a thumbnail, waited a moment, then slowly lit the end of the cigar, rotating it methodically to get it going evenly. When he was satisfied, he waved the match out and held it until it was cold before tossing it, too, out the window.

“Cuban Montecristo,” he said, settling back in the car seat. “Forgive me, I only have the one.”

Treven kept the Glock on him. “Enjoy it.”

The implication was clear and there was no need to say it. It’s probably your last.

Hort blew out a cloud of the sweet-smelling smoke. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m behind these false flag attacks. That I’m part of it.”

“You’re going to tell me you’re not?”

“Not in the way you think.”

Treven’s eyes were adjusting to the dark. A gibbous moon was rising, its pale light glowing down on the road surface and reflecting on the reservoir below them. “Explain, then.”

“Did Rain brief you on what I told him this coup is supposed to be all about?”

“Yes.”

“What did he tell you?”

“The system is broken. The plotters wanted a pretext for seizing power so they could fix everything and then give it back. You thought the whole thing was insane, and wanted us to take out key personnel to stop it.”

“I’d call that an accurate summary.”

“But then we found out the personnel you had us take out weren’t part of the coup. They were opposed to it.”

“That is also accurate.”

“Then what the hell are you doing, Hort? Whose side are you on?”

Hort sighed. “The plotters are correct in believing the system is broken. They are also correct in believing that without immediate and radical surgery, the patient will surely die. But they are incorrect in believing a coup is what’s required. A coup would kill the patient in the name of saving her. What is required is something slightly different.”

“What?”

Hort looked at him. “An attempted coup.”

Treven didn’t respond. He tried to take what he already understood and sort it through the new framework Hort had just suggested. “You’re saying…you wanted the coup to start?”

Hort nodded. “And then to stop. And to be exposed for what it really was.”

“Why? What does that accomplish?”

“Maybe nothing. In which case, the republic shrivels and dies more or less on schedule, just as it was going to anyway. But maybe, maybe…people wake up.”

“To what?”

“To how close they were to losing everything they ought to cherish but have in fact come to take for granted. Did you watch my little speech at the White House?”

“Yeah.”

“When I talked about how we would never surrender our liberties if terrorists were explicitly demanding we do so? That’s the truth. You know that, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, I was giving the country a little preview there. Shaping the battlefield.”

“I don’t follow.”

Hort drew on the cigar, held the smoke in his mouth, then slowly blew it out through the window. “The republic is being bled dry by a national security complex so grotesque and metastasized even Dwight Eisenhower wouldn’t have recognized it in his worst nightmares and most dire predictions. People are okay with this state of affairs because they don’t sense something is being taken from them. But if this country’s oligarchy is exposed for what it really is, and for what it’s really doing, there’s a chance people would fight back. A chance. You understand?”

Treven thought. “You’re saying even if someone would willingly give something up, he’ll fight to preserve it if he thinks someone is trying to steal it.”

“Precisely.”

“Then why did you resign?”

“Because, when this thing is snuffed out, the disgusted and disillusioned masses will need a hero. Someone of unimpeachable character and battle-hardened judgment. Someone who has demonstrated by his actions and his sacrifices that he is a selfless servant of the nation who cannot be seduced by power or anything else.”

Not for the first time, Treven realized Hort was accustomed to operating at levels of manipulation, deceit, and strategy that Treven found alien. He didn’t know whether to feel envious, or relieved.

“That speech,” he said. “Dox said it sounded like you were running for office.”

“In a sense, I was.”

“What office?”

“If things go well, a blue ribbon commission will be formed to investigate the causes of the attempted coup, identify the plotters, and recommend changes to ensure such a thing can never happen again. I will be the head of that commission. And I will ensure that its work is in the best interests of the nation.”

Treven squeezed the grip of the Glock as though reminding himself it was still there. “But…you said you wanted the coup to be exposed for what it really was.”

Hort chuckled grimly. “Well…for what it almost really was.”

“What does that mean?”

“Following the recent string of attacks, it’s important the citizenry believes an insatiably greedy oligarchy was to blame. Even though the truth is, most of the oligarchy is pleased with the status quo and wouldn’t want to change it. The main thing is that people understand how close they came to losing everything. And that they never know I was involved in steering the course of events.”

“Because then you wouldn’t be able to steer anymore.”

“That’s right. And if I couldn’t, then this whole thing might go haywire. The coup could become permanent. At a minimum, the innocent could be punished along with the guilty.”

“But you are guilty.”

“Yes, I am. I have the blood of countless Americans on my hands now. I slaughtered them, men, women, and children, no matter that it was for a larger purpose, and if there is a hell, I will rightly burn there forever.”

He drew on the cigar and held the smoke for a moment as though trying to calm himself. Then he blew it forcefully out through the window.

“But while I am alive, I am determined to ensure their sacrifice was not in vain. And for that, I need your help. Because you have put me in an untenable position.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I wasn’t planning on resigning my position and making my speech quite so soon. I needed that position in order to continue to steer things in their proper direction. But then you people went and kidnapped my daughter and forced my hand.”

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

“What I’m talking about is, Dan Gillmor, the new head of the National Counterterrorism Center, who has been running the jihadist groups behind the attacks, is not yet satisfied that the country has been driven sufficiently insane for it to accept a suspension of the Constitution and the imposition of martial law. He has one more attack in mind. Which he believes will provide him with the blank check he craves.”

Treven felt the blood drain from his face. “A school.”

Hort looked at him. “Yes, that’s right. A mass casualty attack on an elementary school. With that, the president will be able to do anything he wants, and the rest of the government and the people will encourage him to do so. The coup will become a fait accompli. I will no longer be able to stop it.”

Treven was so angry he could have shot him. “Goddamn it, Hort, what the fuck were you thinking?”

“It doesn’t matter what I was thinking. What matters is where we are.”

“Bullshit. Why did you have to resign now?”

“Because I could not have disappeared to Los Angeles on the very day the president made me his counterterrorism advisor if I hadn’t. Because I believe there is only a slim chance I will be leaving this meeting alive, and coming out here to die without first having set the example I needed to set would not have been productive.”

“So you’re risking the lives of, what, dozens of school children? Scores? On top of all the people you’ve already killed? To save your own daughter?”

There was no response.

“You know what we should do, Hort? We should put a bullet in her head so you can know what it’s going to be like for all the parents that you’ve done the same thing to. The same. Fucking. Thing.”

The interior of the car was silent. A lone cricket chirped outside.

“Please don’t do that,” Hort said quietly.

“The only reason I won’t is because I’m not like you.”

“I know that, and I’m grateful. But Larison is. Please, don’t let him.”

“Larison can do what he wants.” He wasn’t sure whether he meant it, or whether in his anger he was just trying to torment Hort.

“Listen to me. I have given you the diamonds. You can kill me now, if that’s what you want. Put me in the trunk and drive me to wherever Larison is so he can piss on my body, I believe he would enjoy that. But if you care about your country, let me live just a little while longer. There’s no one else who intends to put things right. And no else in a position to do so.”

Treven shook his head in disgust. “You are the most self-serving, lying hypocrite I’ve ever known.”

“I’m aware my request that you let me live long enough to set things right is self-serving. I can only say that if you prefer, you’re welcome to shoot me here instead. Either way, please, Ben. I’m asking you. Let my girl go. She didn’t do anything to you, or to anybody. You don’t even know her. Please. Just let her go.”

His voice broke and he stopped. He cleared his throat, blew out a long breath, and wiped the back of his hand savagely across his cheeks, one way, then the other.

For a while, they sat silently, Hort’s cigar slowly dying in the darkness.

“The others,” Treven said, aware he was conceding something and that Hort would recognize as much. “They don’t want just the diamonds. They want you to clear us. Get us off whatever hit lists you’ve put us on.”

“I’m a civilian now, Ben. I can’t do anything anymore. I could though, as the head of the commission I mentioned.”

Treven stared at him. “You’re unbelievable.”

“I thought you might find it to be another disgracefully self-serving statement,” Hort said. “But it is a fact.”

Treven didn’t respond. Once again, it was what he expected from Hort. But that didn’t necessarily make it a lie, either.

“Look at it this way,” Hort said. “You have the diamonds. And I’m a civilian now, you can get to me anytime. Let me finish what I have begun. Help me stop the school attack. And let Mimi go. What’s the downside to you? Just let her go.”

Treven watched him. He’d never seen Hort look so diminished. He wasn’t sure if it was some objective thing that had happened to the man, or if it was the new light in which he was seeing him.

“Why’d you try to take us out at the Capital Hilton?” he said, after a moment.

“I didn’t try to have you taken out. I told you, I was after the others.”

“I’m not buying it. You would have told me.”

“How? You had no cell phone, at least not one you were ever using. And you didn’t check in with me.”

It might have been true. Impossible to know for sure. But he hated that he wanted to believe it.

“Whatever. Why’d you try to have the others taken out, then?”

“You know why. They know too much. About my involvement. About everything.”

“So do I.”

“I told you, you’re the only one I trust.”

“Even if I believed you, and I don’t, the others? As far as they’re concerned, you’re as motivated to kill them now as you were before. Maybe more so.”

“It may be that I still have the motivation. But I no longer have the means. You have to get it through your head, I’m just a civilian now. You have the diamonds, you can go anywhere you want. And as I said, you can always come after me later. You could even come after my daughter if I do anything to cross you. I don’t see what I could reasonably do to stop you.”

Treven thought. They’d all agreed that if he had the opportunity as expected, he should kill Hort. Maybe they’d discover afterward that the “diamonds” he’d given them were fake, like the ones he’d given to Larison. Maybe they’d still be hunted by a national security state on steroids. But if having his own daughter in jeopardy wasn’t enough to get Hort to play ball this time, the working assumption was that nothing ever would. This way, they’d at least have the satisfaction of knowing he’d died before they did.

The problem was, a lot of what Hort had told him made sense, if sense was the right word for it. The situation wasn’t what they’d been assuming it to be. Hort alive might be more useful to them than he would be dead. He might be able to stop the coup and set things right, as he’d put it. Without him, this fucking thing he’d set in motion would probably take on an unstoppable life of its own, if it hadn’t already.

And there was that school to think about. How was he going to feel, if he knew about something like that and let it happen anyway? He’d done a lot of dark things in the course of his job, he knew, a lot of ambiguous things. Some of them kept him awake at night. Some made him wonder about punishment and reckonings and even hell. But he could honestly say everything he’d ever done was intended to keep Americans safe. Sometimes he felt like that knowledge was all that kept him sane in the face of what the task sometimes required. So what was he supposed to do now? How would he live with himself if some people blew up a school-a school, for Christ’s sake-and he could have stopped it, but didn’t? Compared to that, the possibility of someone blackmailing him with some bullshit video suddenly seemed unimportant.

He wasn’t sure. He didn’t trust his own motivations much more than he trusted Hort’s. And he didn’t know what the others were going to say. They’d made an agreement, and these weren’t the kind of people who took you to court for a breach of contract.

“Shall I finish this cigar?” Hort said. “Is it my last?”

Treven hoped he wasn’t being played. If he was, he supposed he was a three-time loser. He would deserve whatever he got.

“Just tell me about the goddamn school,” he said.

Waiting for Treven made for a stressful night. Dox brought in pizza; we ate; and then, to pass the time, we watched the news, which was nothing but breathless so-called “terrorism experts” fantasizing about the latest existential threat and how it could best be combated, along with blow-dried talking heads obsessing over the semiotics of Horton’s stunning departure from the Rose Garden earlier that day.

As the evening went on, Larison had gotten paranoid, becoming convinced that Hort had brought a team that had snatched Treven and tortured our location out of him. He’d pointed his Glock at Kei and had sworn if anyone breached the door, she was going to be the first to die. To which Dox had said, with uncharacteristic menace, “Put your gun away. You’re scaring her.”

“She should be scared,” Larison had answered.

“Well, congratulations then, because she is. Now, like I said, put your gun away and stop talking like that. There’s no need for it.”

Larison looked at him. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

Dox pulled his Wilson Combat. “Son, this time I’m not doing Cleavon Little for you. You get in a mess with me, you’re going to have to find your own way out.”

“Both of you, shut the fuck up,” I said, deliberately playing the alpha. If it worked, and they accepted my dominant position, it would give them a reason to listen and a means of saving face. If they didn’t accept my position, things were about to get a whole lot worse.

There was a long and tense silence. Then, reluctantly, Larison slid his Glock back in his waistband. Dox, watching Larison unblinkingly, slowly did the same.

I motioned Larison over to the bathroom. “Give us a minute,” I said to Dox.

We went inside and I closed the door behind us. “Look,” I said quietly. “He’s got a soft spot for girls, and when you scare her like that, it presses his buttons.”

“That’s his problem.”

“All right. But you’re a professional. What’s the upside for you? What are you getting out of it?”

He didn’t answer.

“My point is, it’s not like you. We’ve spent a decent amount of time together at this point-two hits, a cross-country drive, a snatch-and you’re always in control. What’s got you running so hot now?”

He looked away. “I don’t know.”

“You want to talk?”

He laughed. “You trying to be my shrink?”

“I’m trying to be your friend.”

“Well, don’t.”

I looked at him. “How many people do you know who would understand the shit you’ve done? And how it weighs on you?”

Again, he didn’t answer.

“Look,” I said, “do what you want. But you have to stop running so hot. It’s making Dox jumpy, and it’s starting to make me jumpy. If I can help, let me help, but either way, we all need you cool. I need you cool. Like you usually are. Okay?”

After a long moment, he nodded. “Okay.”

We went out and returned to waiting. No one waved any more guns. I was going to have to do something about Larison, and I didn’t know what. Shake him? Shoot him? How could I get through to him? I thought, if I ever work with a team again, just kill me, and then had to stifle a crazy laugh because, with this team, that was exactly the problem.

At nearly one in the morning, there was a soft knock at the door. All of us stood, save Kei, who still had one wrist flex-tied to a bedpost. All the guns came out again. Larison was looking at Kei; Dox was looking at Larison. I checked the peephole. It was Treven.

“Easy,” I said to Larison and Dox. “It’s him.”

I opened the door and Treven came in. He was holding a gym bag. That was encouraging. I locked the door behind him.

“You get the diamonds?” Larison said.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t brief us yet.” I gestured to Kei. “Dox, could you put the headphones on her?”

We’d picked up a pair of over-the-ear headphones and a radio so we could talk in her presence without being overheard. Dox put the headphones on himself, adjusted the radio volume to his satisfaction, and then slipped the headphones onto Kei’s head and over her ears. She bore it well, her expression neutral but not blank; her posture, resigned but not beaten.

“Right here,” Treven said, holding up the bag.

Larison nodded. I didn’t like how eager he looked. “Did you do him?” he said.

There was a pause. Treven said, “No.”

Larison’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Treven said. “I could have. But based on what he told me, I think it would have been a mistake to do it right now.”

“Goddamn it,” Larison said, “Hort always has a line of shit. Always. When the hell are you going to figure that out?”

Treven looked at him. “You know,” he said, “I’m getting a little tired of you.”

I thought, Christ, here we go again.

“Listen,” I said, in my best command voice. “We’re all a little strung out. You’re professionals, you know the signs and you know the causes. We’ve been going balls-out for a week now, Las Vegas to Vienna, back to the East Coast, gun fights, three days non-stop driving in a portable sauna all the way to California, worrying about satellites and drones and however the hell Horton tracked us in D.C….no privacy, no breaks, and barely any sleep. It’s amazing we haven’t killed each other yet. But let’s not kill each other now, okay? We need to dial it down. Or we’re all going to die.”

No one spoke. Either the moment had passed, or Dox was going to have to do another movie impression. Or we were all going to shoot each other. One of the three, anyway.

Finally, Larison said, “What did he say?”

Treven looked at me and said, “You were right about the schools.”

We all listened quietly while he briefed us. When he was done, Larison said, “You can’t really believe him. Don’t you see what he’s doing?”

I looked at Treven. “He told you where and when the school attack is supposed to go down?”

Treven nodded. “Lincoln, Nebraska. Smack in the middle of the country. Three days from now, on the first day back from summer vacation. Some kind of back-to-school assembly that morning in the auditorium, apparently. This guy Gillmor is running a team of four guys. Hort says they’re going to show up with machine pistols and just hose the room down. Nothing fancy, not a lot of logistics, just pure horror and destruction tailor-made for cable news.”

“Exactly,” Larison said. “It’s another setup. We’re supposed to show up with our hair on fire exactly when and where Hort tells us to. This time, he’ll have snipers positioned in vehicles all around the school. He fixes us, finishes us, goes home and has a beer.”

“There’s one more thing,” Treven said. “They’re going to hit the building with drone-fired Hellfire missiles while the shooters are inside.”

“What’s the point?” Dox said. “Kill the shooters?”

“Yes,” Treven said. “Just like Hort was trying to kill us after we did Shorrock and Finch. And also increase the destruction. But don’t you see? If we try to stop this, we won’t all be fixable in the same place at the same time. Some of us would have to take out the shooters. Someone else would have to take out the drone, or find the ground team operating it.”

“So Hort fixes us in two places instead of one,” Larison said. “It’s the same bullshit, and you’re falling for it. Again.”

“What if you’re wrong?” Dox said to Larison. “What if Horton’s telling the truth? A bunch of children are going to be slaughtered, and we’ll be part of it.”

Larison looked incredulous. “Part of it how?”

“We took out Shorrock and Finch,” Dox said. “We helped set this in motion.”

“Not our fault,” Larison said. “We thought we were stopping it, remember?”

“You didn’t care if we stopped it, started it, or fucked it in the ass,” Dox said. “You just wanted your damn diamonds.”

For just an instant, Larison’s expression twisted. I read it as, What did you mean by that? I sensed him fight to not glance at Treven, who shook his head the tiniest fraction, as if to say, I didn’t tell them.

Hort’s words flashed in my mind:

He’s a man who has too much to keep hidden. A man in turmoil.

I wasn’t sure how I knew. It was all preconscious, nothing I could articulate. But I knew. Larison was gay. Treven knew, and Larison knew Treven knew, his secret.

It was over in an instant. I didn’t think Dox had spotted it, and I suspected Treven and Larison would have been confident neither Dox nor I had noticed anything, either. I didn’t even know what it meant, exactly. Was this what was stressing Larison out? Why would Dox or I even care?

But Larison cared. That was clear. It was a secret, and he wanted to keep it that way.

“It doesn’t matter what I wanted,” Larison said, fully in control again. “What matters is that whatever these people might or might not be planning at a school or anywhere else, it has nothing to do with us. Even beyond the fact that you can bet it’s an ambush. And even if we survived it, you want to do something that would help put Hort back in power? We’re lucky he’s defanged for the moment. You want him coming after us again? Because he would. His motives haven’t changed, only his means.”

“You can all do what you want,” Treven said. “I’ve already made up my mind. I’m not going to stand by and let this thing happen. I’ve done a lot of fucked-up things in my life, but I’m not going to do that.”

“Fine,” Larison said. “We’ll have the diamonds confirmed tomorrow. If they check out, we split them a quarter apiece and go our separate ways.”

There was no disputing his logic, but still I didn’t like his point. What would he do if he thought we knew his secret? Would we be at risk? But Treven knew, and Larison seemed to tolerate that. But what about the diamonds? Was he really going to walk away from three-quarters of what had originally been his own?

Dox looked at me. “I’m not going to stand by and let this happen, either. Even if the diamonds check out, how could we enjoy the money if it came at the cost of the lives of a bunch of schoolchildren?”

“What the hell does one have to do with the other?” Larison said.

Dox ignored him. “Can you contact your Asiatic friend and see what he can do? Either to head it off himself, or, if he can’t, to help us out with a little intel and the necessary hardware.”

I nodded. But inside, I was struggling. I wondered whether among the four of us, Larison was the only one without a conscience. Or whether he was the only one with a brain.

My mind flashed to that breakfast meeting with Horton, and the conviction I’d heard in his little speech about having to meet your maker. He hadn’t been thinking about what he’d done. He’d been thinking about what he was about to do. And I was an idiot to have missed it.

“I’ll see what he can do,” I said. “And tomorrow, Larison and I will take a sampling of the diamonds to a jeweler. If they check out, we’re all free agents again.”

No one pushed back about the division of labor. Everyone understood that no one was going to be left alone with the diamonds, and no one was going to be the sole conduit for an expert’s certification.

Things had gotten hellishly fraught. Being part of this detachment reminded me about the old maxim for war: Easy to get into. Hard to get out of.

“One thing you might not be considering,” I said to Larison.

He looked at me. “What’s that?”

“My contact. He told me if we could get him proof, he could get us a pass. Get us off the president’s hit list or whatever it is we’ve landed on.”

Larison shook his head disgustedly. “You don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hort says he wants the same thing? Proof that these attacks have been false flag?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Hort has an uncanny ability to frame whatever he wants so that it sounds like exactly what you want.”

“But we want the proof either way.”

“Then go get it. I told you, I’m done.”

There was nothing more to say. We bunked down in shifts again, but I barely slept at all. I was putting myself in Larison’s shoes, seeing us the way I imagined he did. And the image was keeping me wide awake.

Early the next morning, Larison and I went out with our share of the diamonds to have them tested. It was a little awkward to be walking around with a fanny pack that, if the diamonds were real, contained something in the neighborhood of twenty-five million dollars, but the safest thing to do at this point was for each of us to be responsible for his own share. Certainly Larison wasn’t going to take his eyes off his portion-he’d been screwed by a switch before, and he wasn’t going to let it happen again.

We did a thorough surveillance detection run, finishing up at the Beverly Wilshire, where Horton and I had shared breakfast an impossibly long time before. The previous night, I’d uploaded to the secure site a thorough briefing on the contents of Treven’s conversation with Horton. I used a lobby payphone to call Kanezaki now.

“You find anything?” I said, when he’d picked up.

“Yes. And it tracks with what Horton told you.”

“How so?”

“Two things. First, during one of his revolving-door stints outside of government, Gillmor headed up a DARPA-funded company called Novel Air Capability. Usually called NAC.”

“Okay.”

“What I’m telling you is top secret SCI-”

“Give me a break.”

“Sorry. I guess it’s a habit. Anyway, NAC has created a prototype drone. They call it the Viper.”

“That’s a scary name.”

“Well, they needed to come up with something good to match the Predator and the Reaper. Anyway, this is an extremely versatile aircraft. Component parts, thirty minutes assembly time. It’s small-with the wings folded, it’ll go in a truck about the size of the one I got you. Vertical takeoff and landing; stealth configuration; twenty-four hours loiter time; capable of carrying and firing two Hellfire missiles.”

“Shit.”

“It gets worse. The ground control system is radically simplified and mobile. They call it the Viper Eye.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“You ever see someone flying a radio-controlled plane?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s pretty much what we’re talking about. The only real difference is that this one is operated by video rather than line-of-sight. That’s because of the distances the Viper can travel, and so that the operator gets a bird’s-eye view of whatever he’s targeting. But the control system itself just looks like a ruggedized laptop with a couple of joysticks attached. You don’t need the kind of training a traditional Predator or Reaper ground station operator gets. You really only need a few runs to acquire fundamental competence with the system. They’re marketing it to domestic law enforcement.”

“Without the Hellfires, I hope.”

“Yeah, as a domestic spy drone. But the point is, it’s designed for ease of transport, ease of training, ease of use.”

“Let me guess. One of them has gone missing.”

“That’s right.”

“You think that’s what they’re going to use on this school.”

“This school, and if that doesn’t do the trick, on others.”

I didn’t answer. I was remembering my conversation with Treven in the truck, when I’d told him I thought schools were going to be the next thing. I realized I hadn’t fully believed it at the time. Hadn’t accepted, deep down, that anybody would go that far. But of course, that was naive. The triumph of hope over experience.

“You there?” he said.

“I’m here.”

“Anyway, I think the plan is for Gillmor’s unwitting false flag team to get into the school auditorium and shoot it up with automatic pistols. If Horton is right, and it’s only a four-man team, some people will get out. Four’s not enough to lock down the whole school, just enough to do major damage once the team is inside. So there will be some witnesses. And while the team is in the building, Gillmor’s going to level the place with two Hellfire missile strikes. The survivors will talk about a bunch of crazed Islamic terrorists screaming Allahu Akbar, and the working assumption will be they used pre-positioned high explosives to go out like martyrs.”

I considered. “Are you sure of your information?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because if that’s the plan, there are a lot of problems. First, you’re going to have witnesses describing a strange airplane. Maybe with rockets flying off the wings.”

“You think that’s a problem? It’s barely relevant. First of all, Iran has publicly announced the development of its own drones. So even if there’s a sighting, a senior White House official calls up a pet reporter and ‘leaks’ that the government thinks it was Iran. The public is already prepped to hate Iran like some kind of nation state version of Emmanuel Goldstein, so when the pet reporter reports the anonymous government ‘leak,’ it slots perfectly into an existing narrative, and the public swallows it as fact.”

“If I didn’t know better,” I said, suppressing a smile despite everything else, “I’d think you had your own roster of pet reporters.”

“Hey, in this town, it’s more important than an entourage. Anyway, forget about Iran. The bottom line is, anytime there’s a major event, you get a certain number of witnesses describing strange pre-and post-incident occurrences. The corporate media’s been trained to ignore it unless they’re told otherwise.”

“What if someone shoots video with a cell phone?”

“People have shot video of UFOs. Of the Loch Ness Monster. It’s always explainable.”

“Are you telling me the Loch Ness Monster is real?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

“What about the debris? The FBI will pick through the place. Forensics teams will be able to tell what caused the explosion.”

“Look what the FBI did on the anthrax investigation. They’ll be instructed to tell the public what the public needs to hear, and to close the case. And outside of a few blogs the establishment media will be instructed to marginalize, that’ll be the end of it.”

“But we’re talking about physical evidence. On the scene.”

“John, listen. You don’t get it. The country is traumatized. People want to believe in their leaders, so they will. They won’t be able to believe the truth. Look, it doesn’t matter whether the CIA killed Kennedy. It doesn’t matter whether nine-eleven was an inside job. Even if you could prove such things, the proof would be ignored, because as a matter of almost religious faith, the country can’t accept such notions. Especially at a time like this.”

“But Horton’s whole plan is to expose this thing for what it was. More or less.”

“That’s different. Or at least, I hope it is. Horton isn’t a nobody with a cell phone camera and a conspiracy theory. He’s an insider, with a reputation he’s carefully stage-managed. That reputation he’s created-his brand-is essentially a counternarrative. He’s undermining ‘I can’t believe Americans would do such things’ with ‘I’m an American, and a hero, too, and you know I’m honest.’ Horton is one communications-savvy bastard, I’m telling you.”

I couldn’t help smiling a little. “I guess it takes one to know one.”

“You’re right, it does.”

“Okay. Let’s assume your information is good. Can you stop this thing?”

“Maybe. With your help.”

“How did I know you were going to say that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Why can’t you just call the Lincoln police?”

“And tell them what? I heard someone’s going to bomb a school?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Assuming they would even take me seriously, and assuming I didn’t get disappeared to a black site for doing it, the plotters would just divert to a secondary target. Remember, this is just four guys with machine pistols and a monstrously portable drone. There’s no pre-positioning and there’s almost no planning. The whole thing is nothing but a fire-and-forget exercise-if they want, they can just choose another school. And, absent the shooters-who they won’t need after the first one because the Allahu Akbar witnesses will already have been created and will already have insured the proper narrative structure-they can repeat as necessary. We have to stop them in the act.”

“Well, then send some people in.”

“Who? I don’t have that kind of juice with the paramilitary branch. Besides, who’s going to gear up and parachute into Lincoln, Nebraska, on my say-so?

“Goddamn it, stop manipulating me.”

“I may be manipulating you, but I’m telling you the truth.”

Christ, he sounded just like his mentor, my late friend Tatsu. For a moment, it made me sad. Tatsu would have been proud of his protege.

“What’s your plan,” I said, hating that I was conceding.

“Some element of you and your guys can drop the shooters before they get inside. They’re not well trained, they’re not expecting any opposition. A school is about as much as they can handle.”

“What about the Viper?”

“If I can locate the operator, you drop him, too.”

“That’s a big if. And, forgive me, I prefer not to loiter around ground targets that have been selected for double Hellfire missile strikes.”

“I have a few ideas, and a few leads I’m chasing down. I don’t expect the operator will be far from the school. The less distance the Viper has to fly, the less chances for sightings. Likewise, they’ll want to launch the missiles close on to the target. Less opportunity for people to see two plumes of fire tracking in from miles away.”

“But you said-”

“Yes, in the end, it’s all explainable. But no sense having to explain more than necessary.”

“It doesn’t sound like you have much to go on.”

“I don’t, yet. But one more thing. If you’re the operator, given the parameters I just described, what else do you need?”

I thought. “Someplace…quiet. Private, removed. So I can park, assemble the drone, and get it airborne without anyone seeing. And then operate it without interruption.”

“Bingo. And how many places like that do you think there are in the vicinity of Lincoln?”

“Probably a lot.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem. But I’m looking into it. Plus there’s one more thing that could be a game-changer.”

“What’s that?”

“I have a friend in one of the phone companies.”

“A friend.”

“Whatever you want to call him. He’s been monitoring Gillmor’s mobile phone for me.”

I smiled. There was something satisfying about the tools of the national security state being turned against their owners.

“You think Gillmor’s the operator?”

“He’s had the training. He has the access. Plus, did you catch at the president’s announcement that Gillmor wasn’t named? For security reasons?”

“Yeah, I wondered about that at the time.”

“I don’t think they want that much publicly known about this guy before the attacks. They want him to have the freedom to move about as he needs depending on how many schools need to be hit. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that my read of the country’s mood is that they’re not going to need to hit too many. We’re close to a tipping point already.”

“Yeah, I get that feeling, too.”

“Also,” he said, “if you were committed enough to blow up a school, or multiple schools, how many people could you outsource it to? How many people could you count on to not lose their nerve at the last minute? Yeah, I think it’s going to be Gillmor. And if it is, we should be able to track his phone all the way to Nebraska.”

I thought for a minute. On the one hand, I didn’t want to do this. It was too dangerous; there were too many possibilities for setups; there were too many unknowns and too many hidden agendas.

But on the other hand…

What I had told Horton that first morning was true: I’ve taken more lives than I’ll ever be able to remember. When I was younger, I had ways of shielding myself from thinking about all the mothers, fathers, wives, siblings, children. I ignored whatever elements in a target’s file might have caused me discomfort. I assured myself that if the target had enemies, he must be in the life. My subconscious mantra was that if I didn’t do it, someone else would. Rationalization was my narcotic. And, as with all drugs, over time, I habituated to mine. I needed more and more to accomplish less and less. Eventually, there was no dose at all that could confer the comfort I craved.

Now, with too many yesterdays and fewer and fewer tomorrows, I find I’m increasingly troubled by knowledge I was once adroit in avoiding. The knowledge that following my brief encounters with every stranger I agreed to eliminate, I left nothing but tears and trauma, a wreckage of interwoven lives forever riven and malformed. The knowledge that there would never be a way to account for the amount of pain I have brought into the world. The knowledge that the world would have been marginally better off if I had never been born to begin with.

There was no way to resurrect the lives I’d taken or rectify the damage I’d done. That side of the balance sheet was immutable. The only thing, maybe, was to offset it. To do something to save more lives than I’d cost, prevent more pain than I’d inflicted.

It wasn’t much. But what else did I have to hope for?

Hating the feeling of being manipulated, and of being a fool, I said, “We’ll need some hardware.”

“Of course.”

“And a private plane to get us to Lincoln. Even if we had time to drive, we’re all too strung out at this point. I think we’d kill each other before we got there.”

“I’ll get you there.”

“I need to talk to the others. I’ll call you back later today.”

I hung up and checked my watch. Almost ten o’clock. Stores were opening soon.

“Come on,” I said to Larison. “I’ll brief you on the way.”

We walked to Harry Winston on Rodeo Drive, the store we’d agreed on after looking on the Internet that morning. We wanted someone reputable, and we figured Harry Winston was about as reputable as it got. Neither of us had been happy to leave our hardware at the motel, but we couldn’t very well walk into a jewelry store carrying, either. Larison’s danger vibe was enough of a problem. If an alert security guard then saw a bulge in our waistbands or around our ankles, we would have a little too much explaining to do.

En route, I briefed him on Kanezaki’s intel. Unsurprisingly, he wanted no part of it. I wanted to bring up that weird moment from the night before, when Dox had employed, innocently, I was sure, a sodomy reference. But I didn’t know how to do it. Don’t worry, I don’t give a damn? Or, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone? What if I was wrong? And what good would it do anyway? But the thought that Larison had a secret, and might suspect that Dox and I had stumbled upon it, concerned me. This was a guy who was more than capable of killing to keep his private matters private.

We got to the store at just after ten o’clock. A gemologist named Walt LaFeber helped us. He seated us in front of a glass table in the corner of the store while he went around to the other side. On the table were a microscope and a number of other instruments.

I took out an envelope in which we had placed twenty stones of varying sizes, and emptied it carefully on the table. LaFeber picked up one of the larger stones and touched it with what looked like a current detector.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “it’s just called a diamond tester. Diamonds are very good conductors of heat, and the instrument measures thermal conductivity. Yours looks good so far.”

He examined the stone with various other devices, which, he explained as he worked, identified color, hardness, specific gravity, and various internal characteristics.

After about ten minutes, he said, “Congratulations, this is quite a fine stone.”

“It’s real?” Larison said. “A real diamond?”

“Oh, yes. Quite.”

“How much would you say it’s worth?” Larison asked.

“Based on its size-nearly five carats-and its structure, shape, and color, I’d say you’re looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand dollars. Possibly more. A very fine stone.”

“That’s a nice neighborhood,” I said, and even Larison smiled.

LaFeber checked the rest of the stones. They weren’t all as impressive as the first one, but he estimated the least of them at over five thousand dollars. It looked like Horton had delivered.

There was no charge for the service. It was strange. We’d shown him stones worth in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars, and didn’t even have to pay anything. I supposed it was one way the rich got richer.

We thanked LaFeber and walked out into the sunlight of Rodeo Drive, oblivious consumers flowing past us. Shopping, it seemed, would be the last thing to go, even in the face of rolling terror attacks.

We headed east on Wilshire Boulevard. I considered that I was suddenly worth something like twenty-five million dollars. But the thought felt unreal. Not just because of the amount. But because I still had to live to spend it. And because, at the moment, I couldn’t say the prospects for that looked particularly promising.

Larison and Rain boarded a bus on Wilshire and rode it toward Koreatown, where they would change to a Metro train. The wrong direction from the hotel in Santa Monica, but they were taking zero chances and weren’t going to follow a direct route to anywhere, especially now that they had the diamonds. Not today; maybe not ever again. Which was fine by Larison. He’d been living in a state of low-grade paranoia for years now. He accepted it. He was accustomed to it. He had no more problem with the necessity of watching his back to protect his life than he had with the necessity of brushing to preserve his teeth. It was just the way things were.

Rain was good cover. Larison made people nervous, but when civilian eyes lighted on Rain’s Asian features, they were reassured and kept right on going. Larison could almost see the unconscious calculation appear for an instant in their expressions: not Muslim-looking. Peaceful Japanese. No problem.

He almost couldn’t believe he had the diamonds. This is what he’d worked for, what he’d planned for, what he’d taken on the entire U.S. government for. True, Hort wasn’t dead-that punk Treven had fallen for yet another line of trademarked Hort bullshit-but Larison supposed he could accept that, at least for the moment. The original plan was to use Rain, Dox, and Treven to take out Hort, and then to close up shop by doing them, too. But Hort was a civilian now, he could be gotten to, so maybe it didn’t really matter if the order of operations had been reversed. In the scheme of combat plans being changed by a collision with battlefield reality, this was a pretty minor alteration. And, in the end, an irrelevant one.

He’d act at his first opportunity, probably as soon as they got back to the motel and he was armed again. There were really only two considerations. First was the noise of the gunshots. But they still had the suppressed weapons they’d taken from the dead guys outside Kei’s apartment. If he could access one of those without alerting anyone to what he was up to, the noise part would be taken care of.

Second was the reaction of whoever didn’t get shot first. Action always beat reaction, and he was fairly sure he could drop all three of them before the last to go had a meaningful chance to react. But fairly sure wasn’t entirely comforting under the circumstances, given the penalty he would incur for a miscalculation. Treven, Rain, and Dox were all formidable men, and Larison had to expect an exceptionally fast reaction when the shooting began. He decided he would drop Treven first, because Treven was the best combat shooter. Then Rain, because Rain had the sharpest instincts. And Dox last, because he was the biggest target and therefore the hardest to miss.

Dox. He hadn’t much cared for the big sniper initially, but his respect for him had grown. That stunt at the Hilton in D.C. was one for the record books, and Larison had to acknowledge that without it, they almost certainly all would have shot each other a second later. And when they’d almost gotten into it the night before, he couldn’t help but be impressed by how easily Dox had shed his good ol’ boy persona and suddenly presented himself as lethally calm and quiet. It was a rare man who could maintain that kind of dangerous poise in Larison’s presence. He wondered if maybe he ought to revise the order of operations and take out Dox first.

The problem was, some part of him didn’t want to take out any of them. Not even Treven, who had been dumb enough to let Hort walk away when he so easily could have left his body facedown in a remote canyon pass in the Hollywood Hills.

They were competent. Reliable. And they worked well as a team. Yes, Treven was annoyingly earnest, and Dox was a ham, and Rain reminded Larison too much of himself for Larison ever to fully trust him. But…fuck, every time he ran through a scenario of dropping them, he found that unlike his usual dispassionate appraisal of angles and distances and odds, he felt something heavy and unpleasant and ominous, instead. As though some part of his mind was imagining what it was going to be like to live with the knowledge, and the images, that would dog him afterward, and was asking him, warning him, not to take on that weight. The cost, as Rain had put it. He was carrying too much already.

He tried to shut that shit down, but he couldn’t. He reminded himself he had no choice, that it was a simple matter of operational security. He wasn’t persuaded. He told himself they would do the same to him. He didn’t believe it. He reasoned that it was better to make a mistake in one direction and live than to make one in the other direction and die. The words rang hollow.

The worst part had been when Rain had pulled him aside and tried to talk to him. What had he said? I’m trying to be your friend. And the hell of it was, Larison thought it was true.

But he’d also felt himself slip for an instant when that clown Dox had said the thing about ass-fucking. How many times had that sort of thing happened a million years ago in the barracks? Every time it had, some part of Larison’s mind started to panic that he’d been busted, that someone knew, or suspected, and was taunting him. But it was never the case. It was just how people talked. And he’d learned to suppress the reflex. So why had he slipped the night before? He thought Rain had spotted it, but he couldn’t be sure. The man didn’t show much.

But what if he had? First Treven, then Hort, now Rain and Dox…the number of people who knew, knew what he was, was growing. It was getting out of control, and if he didn’t shut it down now, he would lose the ability outright.

He understood on some level that it shouldn’t matter. Attitudes were changing, even DADT was dead…but the thought of people knowing, of looking at him differently, treating him differently…he hated it. It would be like revealing a terrible, exploitable weakness.

And that wasn’t all, either. There were also the people who knew he was alive and relevant, rather than presumed dead and therefore forgotten. That number was growing, too. It was possible Hort would have told others besides Treven, Dox, and Rain, and if he had, then the genie was already out of the bottle. But Larison guessed Hort hadn’t. Hort liked to keep his cards close to the vest. And if he had told others, so what? Then the damage was done. Regardless, the thing to do now was to shut it all down while shutting it down was still as least theoretically possible.

He looked out the window at the passing urban landscape, and felt more trapped than he ever had in his life. What the hell was wrong with him? His mind was telling him one thing. His gut wouldn’t go along for the ride.

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be outed. But he so wanted to be able to sleep again, to lie down on a bed without dreading what he would see when he closed his eyes and he was left alone and defenseless with his dreams.

He was afraid of being weak. And he was afraid that failing to do the tactically sound thing here was the weakest move of all.

The trick would be to not think about it. Get back to the motel, get the Glock, wait for the moment, see the opportunity, act to exploit it. Yes, like that. No thinking. Just pattern recognition, and reflex, and done.

And not just Treven, Rain, and Dox. Kei, too. No one left who knew anything about him, or who could tie him to anything, or had any way to track him.

Except Hort, of course. But Larison would clip that loose end in short order, too. And then he’d be done. Free of all these entanglements. Free.

He didn’t have to like it. He just had to do it.

Treven and Dox waited at the motel with Kei. Kei was sitting on one bed; Dox, on the other; Treven, increasingly antsy because Rain and Larison had been gone so long, pacing in what little space the room afforded.

Treven hated waiting. When he was alone, he could wait patiently for days, even for weeks. But this was different. The whole operation was shot through with problems. Larison was acting increasingly unstable. There had been several near blow-ups among them, any one of which, had it gone critical, would have been fatal. And then there was Hort, suddenly scrambling all the pieces on the board with his stunt at the White House.

He hoped he’d done the right thing in letting the man live. He told himself it was logical, but part of him wasn’t buying that, part of him knew it was emotional. Treven looked at Larison and Rain and Dox and didn’t want to be like them. He needed some line he wouldn’t cross, some sense of command authority and unit loyalty. Something that would represent the difference between a soldier with a conscience and a killer under contract. Wherever that thin line was, he knew he was dancing right along the edge of it now. Killing his commander would push him over forever.

But his decision gnawed at him anyway. Hort was dangerous. He might have been tracking them right at that very moment through means none of them fully appreciated. Sure, the others assumed Hort had found them in Washington via satellites and surveillance cameras and all the rest because they didn’t know Treven had simply tipped the man off, but that didn’t mean the satellites and surveillance cameras didn’t exist. And sure, Hort had made his big speech and stepped down, and so presumably had lost his official access. But he still had friends in high places, and low ones, too. It was Hort himself who had schooled Treven in Sun Tsu: When strong, feign weakness. When weak, feign strength. Hort had certainly acted weak in the car last night, and the more Treven thought about it, the more nervous it made him.

Dox was making him nervous now, too. The big sniper was sitting with his back against the headboard and his legs stretched out on the bed. His eyes were closed and he held his Wilson Combat in his lap, as serene as a sleeping toddler and the gun a favorite stuffed animal. The man had at least as much patience as Treven, it was obvious from the stillness with which he sat while they waited. It made sense-it would be a piss-poor sniper who couldn’t wait out a target-and, ordinarily, Treven would have admired and even been reassured by the trait. But now, it was making him feel like the source of Dox’s apparent serenity was some secret knowledge Treven himself lacked.

Dox, his eyes still closed, said, “What’s on your mind, son?”

Christ, did the guy read minds, too? “What do you mean?”

Dox opened his eyes. “Well, either you’re trying to wear out the carpet in our luxury suite here, or something’s making you antsy.”

“It’s nothing. I just don’t like waiting.”

“I thought you ISA studs could outwait a rock. You trying to disabuse me?”

Treven chuckled. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s all right. I’m feeling antsy myself.”

Treven looked at him. Propped serenely on the bed, he looked about as antsy as a statue.

“That’s how you act when you’re antsy?”

Dox grinned. “Oh, yeah. My blood pressure’s way up at the moment. When I’m feeling relaxed, I’m practically invisible.”

Treven couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking. “Well, what’s bugging you?”

“Your friend, to be honest.”

“Larison?”

Dox nodded and turned to Kei, who, though she hadn’t said or done anything different since they started talking, somehow seemed to be following their conversation with interest.

“Darlin’,” he said, “would you mind wearing the headphones for a few minutes? Nothing special, just the dreaded OpSec, which is what we badasses call operational security.”

“I don’t mind listening,” Kei said.

Dox smiled a little sadly. “I know you don’t. Would you trust me, though?”

Amazingly, Kei nodded as though she indeed did trust him. Dox, Treven decided, just had a way with people. Those kids in the minivan at the Capital Hilton had practically fallen in love with him inside five minutes. And now, he’d somehow gotten a woman who he’d helped kidnap to apparently believe he had her best interests at heart. Treven wished he knew the trick. He would have liked to be able to do it himself.

Dox got up and put the headphones on Kei, then walked over to Treven. “Let me ask you something,” he said quietly. “How well do you know that hombre?”

Treven wondered where he was going with this. “Not that well. I tracked him down in Costa Rica for Hort, and then we wound up working together on this fucked-up op.”

“Then you don’t really know him.”

“Why are you asking?”

“I’m just trying to get a handle on him. I’m usually good at reading people, but when I try to read Larison, it’s like the pages are blank. That, or it’s too dark to see them.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“What do you think he’s thinking right now?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, if you were him, and you just found out the diamonds are real, and Horton is now a civilian, and you don’t give a shit about schoolchildren being murdered, what do you do?”

Treven didn’t answer. He’d been half-consciously grappling with the same question.

Dox waited, then said, “Do you just take your cut of the diamonds and walk away?”

“I don’t know.”

“Cause that’s a lot of loose ends you’re leaving behind.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“And that’s just the cold-hearted calculus of the cold-hearted operator I’m trying to imagine. It could be even worse.”

“How?”

“You think Larison has any…secrets?”

Treven was suddenly and profoundly aware that, this whole time, he’d been wrongly assuming Dox was a little bit dull. And, equally suddenly and profoundly, that he’d been completely, dangerously wrong about that. He wondered how many people had come to the same realization in the moment before Dox put out their lights forever. He supposed he should count himself lucky, for having learned the lesson so cheaply.

“Secrets?” he said, hoping his expression hadn’t betrayed anything.

Dox looked at him, the hillbilly gone, the expression more akin to that of a human polygraph. “Secrets,” Dox said again. “Because, if he had any, and he had reason to believe that we might know or even suspect those secrets, I’m a little concerned about what conclusions he might draw.”

Treven didn’t answer. He thought Dox was right, but wasn’t sure about the implications of acknowledging it.

“I think you know what I’m talking about,” Dox said. “And that’s why you’re not answering. You think I’m wrong?”

Treven shook his head. “No.”

“Well, we can handle Larison. One way or the other. But one thing I cannot abide is what he might do to this girl here. If those diamonds are legit, we don’t need her anymore. And we’ve put her through enough. I say we let her go. What do you say to that?”

“Just let her go?”

Dox nodded. “Right now. Before the angel of death gets back here and starts trying to implement whatever conclusions he might have arrived at during this morning’s absence.”

Treven thought. He didn’t want to be a party to the girl’s death anymore than Dox did. But it was also dangerous to do this kind of thing without even an attempt at consensus.

“Look,” he said, “even if I agreed with you, and I’m not saying I don’t, we can’t just let her walk out of here right now. Rain and Larison aren’t back yet, and we have to assume she’d go straight to the police.”

“She doesn’t even know where she is,” Dox said. “I could take her out blindfolded, drop her off wherever, and drive away, and that would be that.”

“Are you that sure she couldn’t find her way back here? There are sounds, smells…some identifying thing we missed in this room. Or a sense of the turns you make and the distances you go. She’s smart. I can see that, and so can you.”

“All right then, what would you say if I drove her someplace and waited for you all to call me? I could let her go then, with plenty of time for all of us to vamoose.”

“What if the diamonds aren’t real? We don’t know yet.”

“What if they’re not? Look at her. You going to put a bullet in her head? Or watch while Larison does?”

Treven didn’t answer.

“Of course you’re not,” Dox said. “And you should be proud and relieved that you couldn’t-that your parents didn’t raise someone who could. Now, this has gone on long enough. If Horton has called our bluff, I say so be it. We’ve got other things to do, like stopping a group of ruthless zealots from massacring a bunch of schoolchildren in the name of the greater good.”

The reference to his parents, both long gone, hit home. For a moment, Treven wondered whether Dox had deliberately seemed to suggest the impractical idea that they let Kei go immediately because he knew it would get Treven to object on practical, and therefore persuadable, grounds. He realized Dox must have been waiting for the right moment to initiate this whole conversation. He’d probably been hoping Treven would give him an opening, and, when he sensed they were likely running out of time, he’d found one himself. Treven felt like an idiot for having thought the man was dull. If there was a dull one in the room, it was himself.

“Christ,” he said. “Larison’s going to get back here and go postal. And Rain might, too.”

“Rain’ll be just fine. I know him. As for Larison, well, he’s unarmed for the moment. I recommend we keep him that way, until we’re sure he’s had time to properly adjust to our new circumstances.”

Treven thought for a moment. “If the diamonds are real,” he said, “I think Larison will get over this. I think.”

Dox nodded as though already knowing where Treven was going. And approving of it.

“But if they’re not real,” Treven said, “and he feels like Hort fucked him again, and we were complicit, we’re going to have to kill him. Because if we don’t, he’ll kill us.”

Dox nodded again, and again Treven had the uncomfortable sense that he’d been guided along to his conclusions by exceptionally deft hands.

But that didn’t change the essential accuracy of the conclusions themselves. “All right,” he said. “Get her out of here. You better hurry. They could be back soon.”

Dox looked at him, then held out his hand. “Ben Treven, I’m glad to know you’re one of the good guys.”

Treven shook his hand. “I wouldn’t go that far. Now go.”

Rain and Larison got back about an hour after Dox had left with Kei. Treven unlocked the door and let them in with his left hand. In his right, he held the Glock.

They came in and he locked the door behind them. They glanced around the room and at the open bathroom door. Treven braced himself.

“Where’s the girl?” Larison said.

“With Dox,” Treven said.

“Oh, shit,” Rain said, putting his fingers to his temples like a man struggling with a migraine. “I knew this was going to happen.”

“Knew what was going to happen?” Larison said. He turned to Treven. “Where are they?”

Rain said, “He took her, didn’t he?”

Treven nodded.

Larison’s face darkened. “Took her? What the fuck is going on?”

Treven looked at Larison. “I’ll tell you the truth. He thought you were going to come back here and kill her. And you know what? I agreed with him.”

“What if I was?” Larison said. “Hort was supposed to call off the dogs. Instead, he neutered himself. He broke the deal. That means he pays the price.”

“Are the diamonds real?” Treven said.

Rain nodded. “They’re real.”

“Good,” Treven said, still looking at Larison. “That’s more than enough. We’re not going to kill some innocent girl because of your grudge against her father. I don’t care what you call it. That’s what it is.”

Rain said, “All right, let’s be practical for a minute. We can all kill each other afterward, if we still want to. What did you work out with Dox?”

“I’m supposed to call him when you two are back,” Treven said. “And then the four of us are supposed to meet at some cafe you like in Beverly Hills.”

“Shit,” Rain said, “we just came from Beverly Hills. What cafe? Urth?”

“That’s the one. The guy is pretty particular about his food.”

“He has one of the cell phones?”

“Yes.”

“All right, call him. But best to use a payphone. No sense blowing more than one of the phones.”

“You want me to change the location?”

“No, I don’t want to say anything about where we’re meeting on an open line. Urth is fine. We paid up for the room?”

“We’re paid up.”

“What’s Dox driving?”

“The Honda I boosted.”

“Then the truck’s still here?”

Treven nodded his head toward the bed stand. “Keys are right there.”

“All right. There’s a payphone on the northwest corner of Lincoln and Pico. Call Dox, tell him we’ll meet him as planned as soon as we can.”

“Where’s my gun?” Larison said.

“Top dresser drawer,” Treven said. “Yours and his.” He waited a moment, but Larison didn’t move for the dresser. That was good. If he had, Treven was going to shoot him right then and there. He wondered if Larison understood that.

“We’ll pull the truck around in about fifteen minutes,” Rain said. He seemed to know exactly what was going on, and Treven wondered what he had planned. Talk to Larison? Kill him? He couldn’t read Rain much better than he could read Larison.

Whichever it was, he hoped Rain knew what he was doing. He nodded and went out.

Larison wanted to go to the dresser and get the Glock. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to do with it, but he felt so outplayed and so boxed in that he just needed to be holding a weapon. It was like this sometimes when he woke from one of the dreams, arms shaking and heart hammering and torso slicked with sweat, and the only thing that could bring him down was the feel of a weapon in one hand and solid objects, totems of the waking world, under the other. But Rain was standing between him and the dresser, and he didn’t know what Rain would do if he made a move. Would Rain try to stop him? Larison had sixty pounds on the man, maybe more, but he’d watched Rain take out those contractors in Tokyo and they were even bigger than Larison. Anyway, even if he could beat Rain hand-to-hand, there wouldn’t be much value to reaching the gun if he got to it with a broken arm, or worse. He decided the safer course was to stand down, for now.

Rain was watching him, and Larison had the sense the man knew exactly what he was thinking.

“Well?” Rain said. “What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?” he said, telling himself he was playing for time.

“What would you say if I told you about a four-man team, three of whom independently came to the same conclusion about the fourth member?”

Larison didn’t answer.

“In case I’m not being clear,” Rain went on, “the conclusion I’m referring to is that you were going to come back here and punch that girl’s ticket.”

“So what?”

“Were we right?”

“What difference does it make?”

“In a way, none. Because when you have three people out of four thinking the worst of you, there’s a problem even if the three people are mistaken. And that problem is you.”

Larison didn’t answer. Christ, if he only had that gun. Just the feel of it in his hand. To hold all this shit at bay.

Rain watched him. “You want to know what Treven didn’t say?”

Again, Larison didn’t answer. The dresser was eight feet away. Could Rain really stop him?

“He didn’t say the other thing we were all thinking. Which is that you weren’t just going to punch Kei’s ticket. You were going to try to punch everyone’s.”

Larison gritted his teeth. He’d never felt so exposed. They knew too much about him. They’d seen through him. Somehow he’d faltered. It was all out in the open now. All of it.

“Were we wrong?” Rain asked.

Larison looked at him. “Stop fucking around. You want to finish this, let’s finish it.”

“What do you think I’m trying to do?”

“You’re trying to fuck with my head, and I don’t like it.”

Rain walked over to the dresser.

Larison, distracted by his own inner turmoil, was slow to react. He said, “Don’t!” But in the time it took him to get the word out, Rain had already opened the drawer. Rain glanced back at him, then reached in and came out with the Glock.

Larison watched, fascinated. A weird placidity settled over him. He tried to think of something to say. Nothing came out. There was a moment of weakness in his knees, but he thought that was relief more than fear. Yes, relief.

Rain checked the load in the Glock. He held the gun and looked at Larison. His expression was grimly purposeful.

Larison smiled. It seemed important to let Rain know he wasn’t afraid. That, on some level, he was even complicit.

Rain tossed him the gun. Larison was so astonished he almost couldn’t react. At the last instant, he got his hands up and caught it. He stood staring at it for a moment in shock.

“What a waste,” Rain said. “Overall, we’ve been a pretty solid detachment. We’ve survived two ambushes and a hunt by the national security state; we’ve scored a hundred million dollars; our biggest enemy just neutered himself, as you put it…and we’re going to cash all that in because we just can’t help killing each other. Does that make sense to you?”

Larison blinked. Was Rain fucking with him? He could tell by the Glock’s weight the magazine was full. Still, he racked the slide to be sure. A bullet ejected. Larison caught it in the air and looked at it. Standard nine-millimeter round. The gun was loaded.

“What are you doing?” Larison said. He was holding the gun, but he felt suddenly terrified.

“I’m doing for you what Dox once did for me. The thing I told you about in Vienna-Kwai Chung.”

“You told me he saved your life.”

“That was the obvious part. He also proved to me I could trust somebody. Of the two, I think the second had the more lasting effect.”

Larison tried to think of something to say and couldn’t access the words.

“How do you think Horton wants it?” Rain said. “You think he wants you killing everyone who might know your secrets? Or trusting people to watch your back?”

Larison looked at him. He wanted to ask what Rain meant by “secrets.” But to ask would be to reveal. And besides, he could sense, on some deep, unexplainable level, that Rain…already knew. The same way he could sense that he also didn’t care.

“What about the others?” he heard himself say. Christ, it sounded so weak. So pleading.

“Dox expects people to act honorably,” Rain said. “If you let him down in that regard, he also believes the honorable thing is to track you down and shoot you. But he does like to give people the benefit of the doubt.”

“I can’t figure him out.”

“He grows on you. Anyway, you think Dox or Treven cares about you as anything other than a friend or a foe? Each of us just pocketed more money than we can ever spend. The trick now is to live to enjoy it. And we have a better chance of doing that watching each other’s backs than we do trying to preemptively kill each other. Isn’t that what you told me in Vienna you wished you had? Someone who really had your back? Well, how are you going to get that if you reflexively kill people because you’re terrified of trusting them?”

Larison blew out a long breath. Then another. He felt like he was going to jump out of his skin and told himself to Calm. The Fuck. Down.

Rain looked at him. “You mind if I take my gun out of the dresser?”

Larison shook his head. A minute ago, he would have killed Rain to stop him. Now…it didn’t matter.

Rain took out the Wilson Combat, checked the load, and eased it into his waistband.

“What’s the plan?” Larison said, unable to let go of his own gun, though he had no intention of using it.

“Well, it might be selfish,” Rain said, “but I’m pretty sure the three of us are going to Nebraska to try to stop a massacre.”

“Why is that selfish?”

“Because you could argue we’re not doing it to save the lives of others. You could argue we’re doing it so we can live with ourselves.”

Larison didn’t answer. He knew Rain was deliberately echoing what Larison had told him in Vienna, about the nightmares. It had been weak of him to tell Rain that, and he wasn’t sure why he had. But…the idea that there was something he could do, that there was a way to beat back those awful dreams…he wanted to believe it.

“I didn’t know it when I agreed to this op,” Rain said. “At least, I didn’t know it consciously. But I need to take all the shit I’ve done and the horror I’ve inflicted and do something good with it. And yes, Horton used that notion to manipulate me, and even though it turns out I was wrong about what the op was really about, it also turns out that maybe I’m going to get my chance anyway. And I don’t want to blow it.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because if we make the wrong choice here, I don’t think there’s a way back. I’ve come close before, very close, right up to the edge of the abyss. I don’t want to fall into it. And right now, I’m teetering.”

Larison swallowed. He thought he’d never been so confused. Or so suddenly exhausted.

“I need…a little time,” he said.

Rain nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, I remember the shock of trusting someone. It fucked me up, too. You get used to it, after a while.”

Larison shoved the Glock in his waistband. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “What the hell did you just talk me into?”

“I didn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. You were just trying not to hear it.”

Rain held out his hand. After a moment, warily, Larison shook it.

Dox drove the Honda Treven had stolen east, toward Union Station. From there, Kei could catch a Red Line train and be home in no time.

He’d hated having to zip her back into the cargo bag to get her to the car, but Treven was right, no sense taking chances about her figuring out where they’d held her. The truth was, he was less worried about her being able to run to the police than he was that she’d feel bad if she didn’t. Better to just deny her the ability, and therefore save her the guilt.

The worst part of it was how willingly she’d let him do it. He’d taken the headphones off her and said, “Darlin’, I’m not comfortable waiting around for the bogeyman to get back here. He’s just too unpredictable for my tastes. So, with your permission, I’d like to take you home now.”

She’d looked into his eyes, smart enough to search for a lie, trusting enough to want to believe none was there, insightful enough to see that none was. Then she’d nodded and said, “Okay.” And that was that. He carried her out in the bag, unzipped it inside the trunk, closed her inside, and drove off, taking care to use an indirect route with plenty of bridges and underground parking garages along the way.

He’d been driving for nearly an hour when his mobile phone rang. He picked up. “Yeah.”

Treven’s voice: “All right, they’re back. The stones are real.”

“Well, that’s good news. What’s going on with our friend?”

“I don’t know. Your friend is alone with him right now. Trying to talk him down, I think.”

Dox didn’t like the sound of that. “Talk him down?”

“I don’t know what to tell you. He asked me to step out and call you from a payphone. And to tell you we’d meet as planned as soon as the three of us can get there.”

Dox hoped there would be three left. If whatever talk Rain was trying didn’t work out, there would likely be only two. Or one.

“All right, thanks for letting me know. I’ll see you in a little while.”

He clicked off and finished the route on Ducommun Street, an empty cul-de-sac a few blocks from Union Station, where he parked in front of the busted chain-link fence in front of an abandoned warehouse. He got out with Kei’s mailbag and looked around, squinting against the sun and the heat. Someone had spray-painted No Parking, Tow-Away in now-faded red on the boarded-up doors of the building, but amid the weeds growing through the cracks in the pavement and the garbage collecting at the bottom of the teetering loading dock, he didn’t think he was likely to encounter any objections.

He walked around to the trunk and opened it. Kei shut her eyes and lifted a hand to shield her sweaty face from the sudden invasion of light.

She squinted up at him fearfully. “You’re really going to let me go?”

He wondered if he could feel more low. He was never doing something like this again, no matter what the stakes. Never.

He held out his hand. “I promise you, I am. And I’m sorry, that was a long drive. I can see where you might have started to doubt me. Plus, it must have been god-awful hot in there.”

She paused for a moment, then took his hand and sat up. She looked around.

“We’re a few blocks from Union Station,” he said, “but, as you can see, not in the most upstanding of neighborhoods. If you don’t mind, I’ll just follow you in the car while you walk the few blocks to make sure you make it all right.”

She put some weight on his hand and stepped out of the trunk. She looked around again. “Okay.”

She was still holding his hand. He squeezed hers briefly and then let go.

“I know it’s pretty lame under the circumstances,” he said, “but I apologize for what we did to you. I shouldn’t have let myself get caught up in it. It was wrong, and I’m truly sorry.”

She said, “Thank you.”

He shook his head, ashamed. “You don’t have one single thing to thank me for. I did a terrible thing to you.”

She looked at him. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me. You were the reason I wasn’t scared.”

That only made it worse. “I don’t think that’s worth very much, actually.”

“It was to me.”

“Darlin’,” he said gently, “are you familiar with a thing called the Stockholm Syndrome?”

“I know what it is. And I don’t have it. If the police had kicked in the door to that room, I wouldn’t have shielded you with my body, I can tell you that.”

He smiled. Ordinarily, he might have taken an opportunity like that to comment on the possible upside of her throwing her body over his. Instead, he said, “Well, now you’ve gone and burst my bubble.”

She laughed, just a little. “It could have been a lot worse for me. You made it better. I kept looking at that scary guy, Larison, and thinking, ‘Dox wouldn’t let him.’”

He wondered if she was playing him. “You really thought that?”

She nodded. “I did.”

He looked down at the ground. “If I did something to make this a little less worse of an ordeal for you, I’m glad. But it was still an ordeal, and I was still a part of it. Trust me, I know you’re bursting with relief and gratitude right now, but later? It’s all going to settle in. You’ll realize what you’ve been through. Being held like we held you is no joke.”

“You sound like you know.”

He wondered whether he should say more, and then did anyway. “Not so long ago, some men held me. I’m not going to tell you what they did, other than that it involved electric shocks, repeated drownings, and threats to Nessie. So yes, I’m not unacquainted with what you’re going to be dealing with in the coming days and weeks. I wish there were something I could do about it, but I can’t, other than to say again I’m sorry.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Nessie?”

He shook his head, knowing he shouldn’t have joked like that, determined not to follow up. “Never mind.”

He handed her the mailbag. She took it.

“What did my father do to you?” she said.

He shook his head again. “I don’t want to talk about it. It never should have had anything to do with you. I want you to tell me something else, instead.”

“What?”

He looked around at the cracked road, the barbed wire, everything baking under the unblinking Los Angeles sun.

“What are your plans? I mean, for the future. Film school…you want to make movies?”

She smiled. “That’s what I want. Pretty far afield from my dad, huh?”

“I’d say. But I’m glad. I like movies. When am I going to get to see yours?”

“I don’t know. I wrote a script I think is great. But financing is hard these days. We’ll see.”

“Financing, huh?”

She shook her head slightly as though not understanding what he was getting at.

“When you get home,” he said, “check the bottom of your mailbag. There are a bunch of little stones in there. They don’t look like much, but they’re diamonds. I don’t know what movies cost, and probably what I put in there wouldn’t be enough for Harry Potter, but I think they’ll get you started.”

She looked at him, then said, “Are you serious?”

He gave her a mock-stern look. “In the short time you’ve known me, have I ever not been?”

She looked at him for a moment longer, then stepped in wordlessly and hugged him. He hugged her back, but tentatively. He was ashamed to receive her gratitude, and he also didn’t like how good she felt in his arms. The Wilson Combat was in his front waistband, coming between them, and he supposed that worked as a metaphor.

After a moment, he broke the embrace. “All right, you.” he said. “Now git. I’ll follow you to make sure you reach the station all right. And I’ll keep an eye out for your movie.”

She hesitated. “Am I ever going to see you again?”

He shook his head. “That’s Stockholm Syndrome talking.”

“The hell it is.”

He smiled, and tried not to show how crappy he felt. “Well, I know your cell phone number. Who knows?”

“Will you call me someday? Not right away. Just…after this has started to seem unreal.”

He kept the smile in place. “I’d like that.” The way he’d phrased it, it wasn’t even a lie.

He followed her to the station as planned. When he was satisfied she was in a safe area, he pulled out alongside her. She turned and looked at him, and he thought she was going to come to the car. So he gritted his teeth and held up a hand in goodbye, and pulled out into traffic. He checked the rearview as he drove and the sight of her standing on the sidewalk, alone and watching him leave, made him feel sadder than he’d felt in a long time.

The next morning, the four of us stood on the tarmac at sleepy Santa Monica Airport. Kanezaki had flown commercial to LAX that morning, where he was changing to a chartered jet that would pick us up here. We could have met him at LAX, but security at major airports was extreme at the moment and we didn’t want to risk it-even if we’d been willing to leave the firearms behind, which we weren’t. So I’d dropped the others off at Santa Monica Airport and then driven the truck to a nearby U-Haul place, hoping Kanezaki would only be hit with a penalty for accidentally returning the truck on the wrong side of the country, rather than the cost of replacing a truck he’d failed to return entirely.

We’d spent the night at another downmarket L.A. motel. Kei was gone, and it was a relief-even, I thought, for Larison. Larison and Dox had spoken, but they’d been out of earshot and I couldn’t hear what was said. At the end of it, though, Dox had pulled the obviously stunned Larison in for one of his big hugs. Larison seemed as surprised and discomfited as I’d been when it had first happened to me. I wanted to tell him he’d get used to-Dox would say enjoy-it after a while, but I supposed he’d work that out on his own. In the meantime, it was good he was figuring out that while there might not be a worse enemy than Dox, there was also no better friend.

I hoped I’d done the right thing in tossing Larison that Glock. When I looked back on it, I felt like I wasn’t entirely sure of my own motivations. It was either the noblest, or the stupidest thing I’d ever done. And the problem was, it was still too early to tell.

I’d checked the secure site that morning. There was a single message from Horton:

Call me. This thing has got to be stopped.

And thank you. I won’t forget it.

The last part must have been about letting Kei go, and maybe specifically for saving her from Larison. Probably, in the overwhelming relief that must have washed over him after several nights of the worst fears he’d ever grappled with, he’d meant it. But I doubted his gratitude would last. I decided not to call. Larison had been right. Horton was an inveterate manipulator, and I didn’t want to give him another chance to lay out a line of bullshit.

There wasn’t much traffic at the tiny airport, and I had no trouble recognizing the plane Kanezaki had told me to watch for: an oddly bulbous private turboprop with a set of stubby wings under its nose and the main wings set way back. A Piaggio P180 Avanti. It came in from the northwest, taxied, turned, and stopped. The door opened and Kanezaki walked out onto the tarmac. He saw us and waved.

We all climbed on. I paused to shake Kanezaki’s hand; Dox, naturally, suffocated him with a hug. Kanezaki closed the door behind us, and five minutes later, we were airborne, the pilot on course for Lincoln.

“Damn,” Dox said, reclining in one of the plush, leather-clad seats. “I might have to get me one of these.”

The strange thing was, he could. But I didn’t think he really meant it. The money still didn’t feel real. We had too much heat on us, for one thing. And we were too focused on stopping this horror we’d inadvertently helped start, for another.

“I was right about Gillmor,” Kanezaki said. “He’s in Lincoln now.”

“Your friend is tracking his cell phone?” I asked.

He nodded. “Which means we need to divide the labor. We’re expecting four shooters on-site, and a ground team-presumably one man-operating the drone from somewhere else. You guys need to decide how to take it all down.”

“Depends partly on what toys you brought us,” Dox said.

Kanezaki got up and went to the back of the plane, then came back with a couple of long canvas bags. He set one on the floor and handed the other to Dox.

Dox unzipped the bag and grinned like it was Christmas morning. “Well, goddamn,” he said, extracting and hefting a long black carbine. “Knight’s Armament SR-25, integral suppressor, twenty-round magazine, and oooh, the Leupold Mark 4 HAMR. Haven’t played with one of these before. Gonna be somewhere I can zero it?”

“We’ll find a place,” Kanezaki said. “Lots of open fields where we’re going.”

He knelt and unzipped the other bag. “Here’s your commo,” he said. “INVISIO Digital Ears X5 Headset and X50 Multi-Comm. Hands-free, in the ear, boom mic. All encrypted and we’ll all be able to talk to each other.”

“Other weapons?” Larison asked.

Kanezaki reached into the bag and took out a pistol I was quite familiar with. “HK MK23 SOCOM, Knights Armament suppressor. One each.”

He handed it to Larison, who reflexively checked the load. Treven said, “Great gun, but with the suppressor it’s the size of a rifle. What do we carry it in?”

Kanezaki went to the back again and came back with a large black attache case. He opened it. An HK with attached suppressor was held in place with foam inside. “I know there’s no good way to conceal one of these on your body in an urban environment,” he said. “But you can access it inside the bag in less than a second. By the time it’s out, it won’t matter who sees it. And if the attaches aren’t the right cover, I have gym bags, too.”

Treven nodded, satisfied.

I said, “Body armor, I hope? You know, just in case.”

“Dragon Skin vests,” Kanezaki said. “Capable of stopping multiple 7.62 rounds.”

He pulled out a folder and opened it. “This is a satellite and street view of the school and environs,” he said. “Some of it is Google; some is military. It should at least give you some ideas. I have a van waiting on the other end. After we land, we’ll do a drive-by.”

We looked at the maps. The school was a square brick building outside the downtown, two stories, surrounded mostly by dirt and grass fields. It had one main entrance, but secondary points of ingress and egress on the other three sides.

“If all four shooters plan on using the front entrance,” I said, “then we’re good to go. But if they split up, we’ll need a man on each side of the building. Which leaves us one short to engage the drone operator.”

Kanezaki looked up. “You’re not counting me.”

“That’s right,” I said, “I’m not. Tom, we’ve been through this before. You’re a great intel guy but you’re not a door-kicker. Pick the wrong entrance to cover, and you might wind up in a one-on-four. It doesn’t make sense.”

Dox said, “I think there’s a better way.”

We all looked at him. He said, “Look at these buildings around the school. What do we have here…a church, a video store, car dealer, and a Holiday Inn, it looks like. Nothing but flat fields in between, and from any one of those vantage points, I have full coverage of two sides of the school. With a spotter on the ground for target confirmation, and my new friend the SR-25 here, and with the distances being so short, I could drop four targets in four seconds. If Tom here does the spotting for me, I say that would free up Treven and Larison to cover the other two sides of the building. And free up Rain to engage the drone operator, wherever he’s set up shop.”

I didn’t know whether he really needed Kanezaki to do the spotting, or if he was just giving him something to do to placate him. I said, “Either the spotting for you, or the driving for me. Depends on where and when we locate Gillmor, and what the terrain is like.”

No one objected. I thought it was a sensible approach. Treven and Dox were the two best combat shooters, Dox was the only sniper, and that left me for the guy operating the drone, who would likely be alone and, even if armed, distracted by the task at hand.

“What’s security like at this school?” Treven asked.

“In ordinary times,” Kanezaki said, “nonexistent. But with all the speculation about attacks on schools, a lot of towns are putting police in place at the entrances. I think we’ll see some of that.”

Treven nodded. “Security theater.”

“Exactly,” Larison said. “One or at most two bored cops at the entrance with their .38s holstered? Speed, surprise, and violence of action, and they’ll be dead before they even realize there’s a problem.”

“The area looks like eighty percent farmland and fields,” I said. “Lots of room for privacy. If your friend can’t give us a fix on Gillmor’s cell phone, we’re going to have a hell of a time finding him.”

“I’m working on it,” Kanezaki said grimly. “In the meantime, let’s see if can figure out from these maps where we would set up if we were Gillmor.”

We spent the rest of the flight refining our plan and getting some much needed sleep. When we landed, it was evening, and though residual heat still radiated from the tarmac as we got off the plane, the day was getting cooler. We pulled on baseball caps and sunglasses just in case anyone was looking for us all the way out in Lincoln. “Only way to travel,” Dox said, the SR-25 bag slung over his shoulder as we headed to the car rental to get Kanezaki’s promised van.

We picked up food, then drove out to the school. The sun was getting low in a blue, cloudless sky that went on forever, and even in the van, the air smelled of cut grass.

The school was on the edge of town, an area that was mostly single family houses, with a few farms and a single mixed office and retail center. I thought the plotters might have chosen the school for its relative remoteness: fewer potential witnesses to describe aspects of the carnage the plotters didn’t want seen.

A little farther out, we passed a construction site. Dox said, “Hang on, I like the look of this.”

We circled around and drove back through the plume of dust we’d kicked up on the road behind us. “Doesn’t look like much is happening here,” Dox said.

He was right. There was no equipment and no material, just a four-story I-beam and cinderblock skeleton without even a chain-link fence around it. No windows in place, no roof, no doors.

“I believe what we’re looking at,” Dox said, “is an abandoned building site, popularly known as a victim of America’s ongoing recession. Also known as an ideal urban sniper hide. Look at that-line-of-sight to the front of the school, two-hundred yards. Easy pickings. I’d like to go in when it’s dark and confirm, but I believe we just found my place. What time are our terrorists due to arrive?”

“The assembly’s at eight forty-five,” Kanezaki said. “So probably just after that.”

“Well then, I propose we insert me at zero three hundred, the still of the night. I’ll zero the rifle at first light. Won’t be many people around, and the suppressor will reduce the sound some. You didn’t bring a sleeping bag, did you?”

“Shit, no,” Kanezaki said. “I didn’t think of it.”

“That’s all right, I’m sure there’s a Wal-Mart around here. I’ll pick up some thermal hunting gear and a foam pad to prone out on. Watch the sunrise, it’ll be nice.”

We got Dox his gear, and went back to the building site after dark. Dox went in, and reported that he liked what he found. Then he and Treven, who looked the most at home in the area, checked us into an anonymous highway motel, two adjoining rooms on the second of two floors. We ate and checked the gear and went over our plans. Kanezaki used a satellite phone to call his telephone company friend. Apparently, Gillmor had his phone on the day before in Lincoln, but it was off now.

“If we can’t locate him,” I said, “the op’s blown.”

Kanezaki nodded. “I’ll have to call in a bomb threat. Get them to evacuate the school. But all that does is divert the attack. And next time, we might not know what school.”

We were all quiet. I knew we all felt like we had to stop this. And we knew if we couldn’t stop it here, we probably couldn’t stop it at all.

Kanezaki said, “What about Horton?”

“What about him?” I said.

“I know he stepped down, but he’s still got contacts. Maybe he knows something, or could find out. Can you call him?”

“He might not be well inclined to us just now,” Larison said.

I thought about the secure site message. “No, I think you’re wrong about that. But I’ve reached the point where I wouldn’t trust anything he tells me.”

Larison smiled. “Better late than never.”

“What can it hurt?” Kanezaki said. “Use my sat phone. No way to triangulate on its location.”

I thought for a moment. He was right-it was hard to see the harm. But Horton had lied to me and set us up. I felt like I had nothing to say to him. I didn’t even plan on letting him live when this was all over.

But that was stupid. Tactics first. “All right, give me the phone,” I said.

Horton picked up so fast, he might have been waiting for the call. “Horton.”

“You wanted me to call you.”

“Thank God you did. I was getting ready to call the Lincoln police with a bomb threat. But that wouldn’t stop the attack, it would-”

“Only divert it, I know.”

“Please tell me you’re there. And you’re going to stop this thing.”

“The last time you figured out where I was going to be, you sent four shooters.”

“That was, bar none, the biggest mistake of my life.”

I imagined the sentiment was heartfelt. Not that it mattered. “How did you track us there?” I said, thinking about Treven.

“National technical means.”

Maybe it was true. I had no way of knowing. I wasn’t even sure why I’d bothered asking. It just felt like a loose end, and it bothered me.

“If you’re in Lincoln,” he said, “I want to help. Anyway I can.”

“We’re here,” I said, hating that I was giving him the satisfaction.

“Good.”

“So is Gillmor.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I need to know where. His cell phone is turned off. Do you have any way of tracking him?”

There was a pause, then, “Let me make some calls. How can I reach you?”

“I’ll call you.”

“Thank you,” he said, and I clicked off.

Nobody slept. At three in the morning, Kanezaki drove Dox out to the building site. I called Horton. He still hadn’t found anything. Kanezaki’s phone company friend told him Gillmor’s phone was still dark. I started to feel very bleak. It wasn’t just that we weren’t going to be able to stop the attack. It was that I was going to feel responsible for setting it all in motion.

I resolved that, no matter how this turned out and no matter how long I had to wait, Horton was going to die. It was thin, and I supposed in the end it wouldn’t really matter, but the thought was distracting, at least, and mildly comforting. It helped me drift off for a while.

When it started getting light outside, I called Horton again, expecting the worst.

“Good news,” he said.

I tried not to get my hopes up. “What?”

“That drone. The Viper. When it’s powered up, it navigates by GPS. It has to uplink to the satellite. So-”

“We’ll know where it took off from.”

“Correct. I have a friend in the NRO who is watching for that signal and that signal alone. As soon as we have the coordinates, I will get them to you.”

“We might not have much time. We don’t even know for sure that he’s going to be in the Lincoln area.”

“I know. But we should be all right. The Viper can loiter for a whole day. I doubt Gillmor wants to run it for that long, but he doesn’t have to wait until the very last minute, either. My guess is, he’ll have it up at least an hour before the shooters go in. That’ll allow him some wiggle room in case he has any mechanical or other problems. But I need to be able to reach you.”

I gave him Kanezaki’s sat phone number, glad I didn’t have to give him a cell. “I’ll be in a car,” I said. “Call me as soon as you know.”

I told the others, then used the commo to raise Dox. “Hey,” I said. “I’m not waking you, am I?”

He chuckled. “I like when you tease me. What’s going on?”

I told him.

“Well, that’s good,” he said, sounding mildly pleased-mildly pleased, I knew from experience, being his only affect when he was in his sniping zone, no matter what the news he was reacting to.

“How’s the view?” I said.

“Pretty in this light. I can see everything.”

“You’re on the roof?”

“One floor down. Doubt anyone could see me from overhead, but why take chances?”

“All right, good hunting.”

“You, too, partner. If you don’t take out that drone, my good work will be wasted. And I don’t think Treven and Larison will be happy, either.”

What he meant is that Treven and Larison, on the ground at the school, would be well within the Hellfire blast radius, and therefore incinerated. Along with God knew how many children.

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that.”

“Okay. No pressure or anything.”

“Right. I’ll talk to you as soon as we know more.”

We pulled on the Dragon Skin vests, and set out at a little before eight. We would have liked to get in position earlier, but outside Dox’s sniper hide, concealment and blending opportunities were scarce. Strange men loitering outside a school tend to draw attention. The good news was, the shooters faced the same problem.

While Kanezaki drove, we all checked the gear one last time. Good to go. We dropped off Treven and Larison a few blocks from the school. They were wearing jeans and tee shirts and baseball caps. With the gym bags in which they were carrying the HKs, they easily could have been a couple of locals on their way to a job in a hardware store or at a construction site. We wished each other good luck, and no one said what was really on our minds: if I didn’t hear from Horton soon, we were going to have to come up with a hell of a Plan B.

But we did hear from him, ten minutes later. “We got him,” he said, with uncharacteristic excitement. “Not in Lincoln, but close by. Tiny town called Palmyra. Spelled Palm, Yankee, Romeo, Alpha. Nothing but farmland. You have a navigation system?”

“Yes. Give me the coordinates.”

He did. I input the information. “Twenty-five miles,” I said to Kanezaki. “Keep going on Route 2. I’ll tell you when to turn.”

He punched it. “Watch your speed,” I said. “Can’t afford to get pulled over.”

“If we get chased, we get chased,” he said, and I supposed at this point it was true.

“What else can you tell me?” I said to Hort.

“It’s obvious Gillmor chose the spot for proximity to the school but also for privacy. Most of the area is flat, and not well suited for the clandestine launch of a drone, but he’s at the end of a dirt road. Looks like an abandoned granary or something, in a depression by a pond and surrounded by trees. He could put the drone up there, get it up high, and I doubt anyone would ever see it. It’ll reach the school without ever passing over anything but fields and farmland.”

“How long is the dirt road?”

“A little under a quarter mile.”

I wasn’t going to approach using the obvious route, let alone one as likely as a road. “Other points of ingress?”

“None. But the fields look perfectly crossable.”

“You’re looking at the satellite photos. What’s my best point of access?”

“Drive east of the road and go in by foot. That’ll put you on the other side of the granary, and should give you some cover and concealment. I imagine Gillmor is armed.”

“All right, I’ll let the rest of the team know. Call me if there’s a change.”

“Roger that.”

“Oh, and Horton?”

“Yes?”

“If this is another setup, you better kill every last one of us. Because if there’s even one left, he will find you.”

There was a pause. “I don’t expect to live long in any event, but yes, understood. And good luck.”

I clicked off. Kanezaki had the van up to nearly a hundred. I was glad the road was flat and straight, but I thought the van might tear itself apart en route regardless.

“Okay,” I said, using the commo, “that was Horton. We’ve got a fix on Gillmor. Kanezaki and I are on the way, ETA fifteen minutes. Assuming we don’t crash first.”

“I’m in position,” Treven said. “Teachers are arriving. And some kids. Cop at the front entrance.”

“In position,” Larison said. “Dox, you there?”

“Not only am I here,” Dox said, in his serene sniper voice, “but I’m looking at you at this very moment right through my little reticled scope. I’m glad we worked out all our animosity earlier, aren’t you?”

There was no answer. Dox said, “Hey, man, I’m just kidding.”

“Goddamn it, don’t kid like that!” I said, fearing another eruption, hoping my intervention would placate Larison.

We hit a pothole and the van almost went into orbit. “Jesus!” I said, pulling my seatbelt tighter.

Kanezaki, serene as Dox, said, “Sorry.”

He kept it pinned until we turned off the two-lane, and by the time we came to the dirt road to the granary, he had it under the speed limit. We kept going for another quarter mile, and then he pulled over to the side in a dip in the road. “I’m not waiting in the van,” he said. “And we don’t have time to argue about it.”

He was probably right. “Okay,” I said. “Stay to my left as we approach. When we get to the granary, you circle left, I’ll circle right. Let me engage Gillmor first, okay?”

“Why?”

“It’s not about the glory. If the drone’s still on the ground, we can just shoot him, or you can, it doesn’t matter to me. But if the drone’s up, we have to try to make him bring it back, right?”

“That’s a good point.”

“Yeah, I try to think of things like that.”

“Okay, you engage him first.”

“Good idea. Also, let’s not assume he’s alone. Keep your eyes open. If Gillmor’s at the controls and you see someone else, then by all means, shoot the other guy, he’ll just be security, and that’ll be one less thing we have to worry about.”

“Got it.”

He looked scared. It wasn’t confidence-inspiring.

I glanced at the HK he was holding. “You know how to use that, right?”

“I’ve had the training, yeah.”

Which was another way of saying, but not the experience.

“Okay,” I said. “Remember. Aggressive stance, gorilla grip, front site on the target, press the trigger.”

He gave me a tight grin. “Dox always said you micromanage.”

Damn it, he was right. He was either going to perform or not. Whatever I said to him at this point wasn’t going to make the difference.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.” For the benefit of the others, I said, “Kanezaki and I are moving in on the granary now. Should be on target in five minutes.”

We headed north a quarter mile across flat grassland, then west, keeping low and moving quickly. There was a stand of trees between us and our objective, but, other than that, no cover or concealment anywhere. I tried not to think about snipers and what we would look like if one were watching us from that granary. When we reached the trees, we paused. I could see the granary. It was circular, about twenty feet high, but it was crumbling and offered no sniper hides, at least nothing that looked in our direction. Thank God. I couldn’t see around it. There was a truck partly visible next to a pond to the right, which might have been good news, but no sign of people. We were going to be in a hell of a jam if Hort’s intel was wrong, and there was nobody here.

“Children going in the front entrance,” I heard Dox say in the ear-piece. “Lots of ’em. Walking in from the neighborhood and some getting dropped off by their parents. No sign of our shooters.”

“My side’s clear, too,” Larison said.

“Same,” Treven said.

“John, I hope you’re in position,” Dox said. “Our timeline’s getting kind of tight.”

I didn’t want to speak, but I tapped the boom twice with a finger.

“Roger that,” Dox said.

I looked at Kanezaki. He was pale. I hoped he was going to be okay. I inclined my head toward the granary. He nodded once and we moved in, our guns up now. I didn’t know who’d trained him, but I had to admit they’d done a good job. Despite his obvious fear, he had his HK out at high-ready, his head was swiveling to increase his range of vision, and he propelled himself with a nice, smooth shuffle.

We reached the wall of the granary. It smelled of earth and hay and I had the urge to cling to it you always get just before you move out from your last position of decent cover. Still no sign of anyone at the truck.

I signaled left to Kanezaki. He nodded and moved off. I headed right.

At the limit of the structure’s circumference, I crouched and darted my head around and then back. In the instant I’d been exposed I’d seen Gillmor, a tall, wiry Caucasian in hunting fatigues and with a graying high-and-tight. He was standing, facing the road, working the keyboard of what looked like a large laptop suspended at waist level from a strap around his neck.

I stepped around, the HK on him. I checked my flanks quickly, then said in a loud, command voice, “Gillmor. Do not move.”

He started and glanced over at me. But his hands stayed at the controls.

“Get your hands up!” I shouted.

I heard Dox in my ear: “Shooters have arrived. Running at the front entrance. Larison, you win the prescience prize. Engaging them now.”

I heard a soft crack. Another. Then two more.

“Thank you for playing,” Dox said. “Next contestants.”

“Your four shooters are done!” I said, swiveling left and right to check my flanks. “They didn’t even make it inside. Now hands up, or you’re dead right there!”

He raised his hands and turned to look at me.

“Circle him!” I called out to Kanezaki. “Watch the truck, I don’t know if there’s anyone inside it.”

Kanezaki moved out, past Gillmor, his HK up.

Gillmor glanced at him, then back to me. “Who sent you? Was it Horton?”

“Call it back,” I said. “The drone.”

“No.”

“Call it back,” I said, my voice flat-lining. “I won’t ask again. I will shoot you in the head.”

“It doesn’t matter whether I die,” he said, nodding. “The mission will still succeed.”

Okay, I thought, and shot him in the head. The HK kicked, there was a crack about as loud as the thump of a sewing machine, and a hole appeared in his forehead. His body shuddered, his knees buckled, and he folded to the ground on his back.

“Jesus Christ!” Kanezaki shouted. “How are we going to stop the drone now?”

“Check the truck!” I said. “And stay alert.”

I heard Dox chuckle. “Cop’s freakin’ out. He’s wondering, ‘Who were these four guys who were charging me, and why did their heads all suddenly uncork?’”

I rushed to Gillmor’s body and examined the laptop. Two joy sticks, telemetry readouts, a video feed that looked like it was coming from a camera in the drone. I recognized the terrain from the maps we’d been reviewing. The east/west rural highway we’d driven in on from Lincoln. The river just south of it.

Oh shit, he’s programmed it to go straight for-

Gunshots to my right. I spun. Kanezaki was down. I saw movement at the far end of the truck.

I charged for the granary.

No time to think about Kanezaki. I hoped he’d taken the hits in the Dragon Skin, but I didn’t know. “Dox,” I said into the commo boom as I got to cover, “Gillmor’s down, but he’s programmed the drone to go straight to the school. I think he set the Hellfires to go at the last minute and then for the drone to follow them in, or maybe for them to detonate on impact with the drone. It’s coming at you from due east. ETA three, maybe four minutes. Can you take it down?”

“I don’t know. Where are its avionics?”

I darted my head around and back. Three gunshots rang out from the far side of the truck and rounds struck the granary wall. Chunks of dislodged concrete hit me.

“I don’t know, I didn’t design the fucking thing! The nose, I guess.”

“Guess you can’t ask Gillmor?”

Another gunshot, another spray of concrete. I was distantly aware that if the shooter was firing even when I didn’t show myself, he couldn’t be that good.

“Gillmor’s dead!” I said.

“Well, under the circumstances and assuming we don’t have any other drone architecture experts on hand, I’d have to call that a fail.”

Unless, I thought, the shooter was covering for someone coming in from my left. I moved out to the other side of the granary, the HK up. “Treven, Larison, you need to clear out of there now.”

“I’m going in,” Treven said. “They have to evacuate.”

“You don’t have time!”

“Gotta try.”

There was a pause.

“Goddamn it,” Larison said. “I knew this was going to happen. I’m going in, too.”

“Use the sides,” Dox said calmly. “If you come around to the front, you will have to engage a very upset police officer.”

“Roger that,” Treven said.

“Going in,” Larison said. “Goddamn it.”

The other side of the granary was clear. It was just the one guy, then. And he wasn’t that good. I wondered if I could charge the truck from here.

“Dox,” I said. “Do you see it?”

“Not yet, but I’m looking.”

I heard Treven and Larison shouting, “There is a bomb in the school! This is not a joke and it is not a drill! Everyone needs to evacuate now and scatter to at least one hundred yards! Move! Move!”

“Come on, baby,” I heard Dox say. “Where are you? Come to Dox.”

I sucked in a deep breath and blew it out, readying myself to charge the truck. I counted one, two-

I heard three soft cracks, then a gunshot. I tore around the side of the granary and straight for the truck.

There was no need. Kanezaki was on his feet, to the left of the truck, the HK up at chin level and angled to the ground, smoke drifting up from the muzzle of the suppressor. I dropped down and looked under the chassis of the truck. There was a prone body on the other side.

“Is he dead?” I called out.

“I think so.” He sounded like he was in shock.

“Well, fucking make sure!”

I heard another soft crack. Then, “He’s dead.”

Dox, in my ear: “Goddamn it, I am taking fire.”

He said it so calmly it took me a minute to understand what it meant. “Someone’s shooting at you?”

Treven and Larison were still shouting. Sounded like pandemonium inside the school.

“Yeah,” Dox said, “it’s that cop. He must have seen me. Good eyes. He’d need a hell of a lucky shot to hit me from there, but still I’d be grateful if someone could knock him down or something. I’d prefer not to shoot a police officer. Treven, Larison?”

“I’m on it,” Larison said.

“Thank you,” Dox said. “Still no sign of the drone. Kids are all running out of the school, though. Nice work there.”

A few seconds went by. I heard a sound-half thud, half crunch-and Dox said, “Thank you, Mister Larison! Ooh, that had to hurt.”

“What happened?” I said.

“Clubbed the cop,” Larison said. “Took his gun.”

I heard him say, “Here, I’m sorry about that, sir. We’re from the government, we’re not here to hurt anyone. The school’s under attack and you need to run away from it before the bomb blows up, do you understand? Just run with the kids, they need you.”

“I see it,” Dox said. “Going pretty fast. Gonna have to lead it some.”

Kanezaki and I ran to the drone controls. “You all right?” I said.

“He hit me in the vest. Knocked me down. I’m okay.”

Gillmor, on his back, his legs folded under him, his eyes staring and sightless, was still holding the controls. We looked at the screen. I could see the school through the drone’s camera. The drone was heading right for it.

I heard a soft crack. The image on the screen shuddered, then stabilized. “Hit it, but not on the nose,” Dox said. I heard a series of additional cracks. The screen image shuddered violently, but stabilized again.

“The hell’s that thing made of?” Dox said. “I just put sixteen rounds in it. All right, switching magazines.”

“Larison, Treven, get the fuck out of there,” I said. “You’ve done all you can. There’s no more time. Go!”

The school was at the center of the screen and rapidly expanding. I thought the drone couldn’t be more than a few seconds from impact.

“All right, sweetheart,” I heard Dox say. “Come here. Come take what I’ve got for you.”

There was a methodical drumbeat of cracks. The image of the school shuddered. It shook. It stabilized, filling the whole screen-

And then the camera veered and began to spin wildly.

“All right!” Dox said, jubilation creeping into his normally supercalm sniper tone. “Score one for the home team.”

The sky flashed past on the screen, then the ground, then everything was moving so fast I couldn’t make out any features at all. A moment later, the screen went dark.

“Where did it go down?” I said.

“Not the school,” Dox said. “The parking lot, though. Hot damn, that was close. Nobody hurt, I don’t think.”

“Did the warheads detonate?”

“No, sir. Gillmor must have had them set to blow on nose-first impact.”

“Treven, Larison, you all right?”

“Fine,” Larison said. “Walking away southeast.”

I heard sirens in the background. “Same,” Treven said. “Could use a pickup. Feeling a little conspicuous at the moment.”

“Go to the bug-out,” I said. “Dox, you especially. That cop is going to report sniper fire coming from your position. We’ll rendezvous in twenty minutes. Or less, the way Kanezaki drives.”

I expected Treven and Larison would be able to ghost away just fine in the tumult outside the school. But it wouldn’t be long before coherent witnesses came forward and described them to arriving police. And Dox needed to get far from his hide.

Kanezaki pulled out an iPhone and took photographs of Gillmor’s body and the controls on top of it.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“This is our proof.” He started moving the phone in a small circle, talking as he did so. I realized he must have switched to video mode.

“We need to go,” I said.

He held up a finger. “The man on the ground is the new head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Dan Gillmor, who was controlling the drone that attacked a school in Lincoln today. This is Palmyra, Nebraska, about twenty-five miles away.”

He walked over to the guy he’d shot and took his picture, too, then filmed the truck and its license plates, talking the whole time, dates and coordinates and identifying details. Then we ran back to the van, which he proceeded to drive as though the trip out were just a warm-up. We reached the bug-out point, a church a mile from the school, in under fifteen minutes. Kanezaki cut his speed and pulled into the parking lot.

“It’s us,” I said into the commo, and Dox, Larison, and Treven melted out from behind a dumpster. They got in the van and we drove off at a normal speed.

I climbed in back. Everybody shook hands. I said to Dox, “Good shooting.”

“Hell,” Dox said, “if it had been good, I would have dropped it on the first shot.”

“Hey,” Treven said, “you put it down. That’s all that counts.”

“Well,” Dox said, looking at me, “I don’t want to blame anyone else for how long it took me, but I don’t think the avionics in that particular model of drone are in the nose, unless they’re severely hardened. I finally just shot the shit out of the thing, and hoped I’d hit something vital. Which apparently I did.”

We all laughed. “Tom,” Dox said. “Are you all right? Did I hear you say you were hit?”

“In the vest,” he said. “I’m okay.”

“You’re going to be sore later,” I said. “But the hell with that. Nice shooting.”

“You shot Gillmor?” Dox said. “I thought that was Rain.”

“No, his security,” Kanezaki said.

“Who had me pinned down,” I added.

“Oo-rah!” Dox said. “Somebody give me that man a cigar. Was that your first kill?”

“I guess it was,” Kanezaki said.

“You guess,” Dox said. “That’s funny. Well, you know what they say. You never forget your first. Glad he was shooting back at you. That’ll make it a little easier later.”

I looked at Larison. “Thanks for listening to me.”

He paused, then said, “I was having my doubts on the way into that school a minute ahead of a couple of Hellfire missiles. But…yeah.”

He turned to Dox and said, “Don’t ever fuck with me again about being in your sights. Ever. You understand?”

I thought, Christ, here we go again. But Dox just grinned and said, “All right, all right, I was just trying to relieve the tension. Message received and I will not do it again.”

He held out his hand and, after a moment, Larison shook it.

“Where are we heading?” I said. “The airport’s the other way.”

“I want to get the hell out of Nebraska,” Kanezaki said. “Let’s just keep driving and we’ll figure it out as we go.”

“My God, not another road trip,” Dox said. “I’m still recovering from the last one.”

We all laughed at that. I realized I didn’t even care where we were going.

We only made it as far as Des Moines. The parasympathetic backlash against a combat adrenaline surge is ferocious, and we were all exhausted already. As soon as we knew we were safely outside Lincoln, we started to flag. We pulled over at a highway motel, and checked into two adjoining rooms. We watched the news for a while, but it was all extremely confused. Overall, it was being presented as a failed terror attack, which on one level, of course, it was. As things stood, it seemed like it was going to help the plotters’ aims, albeit not as much as a successful attack would have. But people were still panicking about the ostensibly new threat, and how they couldn’t send their children to school anymore, and how the government had to do more to protect them. Maybe with the emergence of evidence of what happened, including Kanezaki’s photographs and video, the narrative might change. And, of course, maybe Horton would do something to steer things in the direction he said he wanted them to go in. But overall, the whole thing was dispiriting. We watched until we couldn’t take it anymore. Then we all passed out.

When we woke, we turned on the television again, and it seemed the narrative had indeed changed. Now there was talk about a group of secret commandos who had killed the jihadists and foiled the plot and evacuated the children. I wondered what was next.

Kanezaki uploaded his material to Wikileaks. Without more, it might get dismissed as fringe conspiracy theory stuff. Some anonymous spokesman would explain how Gillmor had been operating the drone to take out the terrorists; that the terrorists had learned of his position and gunned him down in cold blood, causing the drone to crash; but that his resourceful men had still managed to eliminate the terrorist threat, even as their brave leader lay dying.

I found I didn’t care all that much. We’d done what we could. And we’d done it well. Now all I had to do was find a way to slip out of the country and enjoy my twenty-five million.

Kanezaki’s sat phone buzzed. It was Horton. Kanezaki handed the phone to me.

“Thank you,” he said. “I do not deserve to be the beneficiary of your acts, but I am.”

“How so?”

“I’m certain that very soon, I will be sent to hell, one way or the other. But in the meantime, you have given me the tools I need to redirect this thing as I always hoped, and to turn it into a force for good.”

“All the people who were killed in those attacks,” I said. “I’m glad it’ll have been for the greater good.”

I felt vaguely hypocritical saying it. On the other hand, I’d never bombed a bunch of innocents.

“It would have been worse if it had been for nothing,” he said. “Or for less than nothing.”

“Well, then, you got what you wanted.” I thought, but didn’t say, you’re still going to die. But I supposed he knew that. He’d already acknowledged as much.

“There are two things I want you to know,” he said.

“All right.”

“First, I have introduced into proper channels the notion that you four men were inadvertently placed on the president’s kill list. That your presence there was due to an intelligence failure that itself was the result of your intrepid penetration of the organization sponsoring these attacks. That in fact it was you, all of you, who ignored the danger of a mistaken nationwide manhunt to continue your mission and save the children at that school. You will face no further hostilities from any American military, intelligence, or law enforcement personnel, or otherwise.”