Hort looked at him. Other than the useless rattle of the fan stirring the leaden air, the room was silent.
'So tell me, son,' he said. 'What were you doing in that bar?'
Ben didn't know why, but the question made him feel suddenly wary. 'What do you mean, what was I doing? I was having a drink.'
'Why?'
'I had a lot to think about. Some shit has happened to me recently, you might have noticed that. I just wanted to be alone and think. You never had something like that?'
'All the time. But if you wanted to be alone so you could think, you didn't need a bar. Your hotel room would have been just fine. Or you could have taken a walk. Or gone to the library.'
'They don't serve gin in the library.'
'No, they don't. The gin was part of what you wanted, I can see that.'
Ben was getting increasingly uncomfortable. It wasn't just what Hort was saying. It was also the quietly confident way the man was looking at him, as though he knew Ben better than Ben knew himself.
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
Hort looked at him. 'You know exactly what I'm talking about. But maybe you need me to spell it out for you.'
Ben held Hort's gaze. But why did he feel like flinching?
'What you wanted,' Hort said, 'was to fuck someone up. And you couldn't do that in your room, or taking a walk, or visiting a local branch of the Manila public library system. But a bar on P. Burgos Street was pretty much tailor-made. Now, maybe you didn't mean to kill the man whose neck you crushed, maybe you just wanted to hurt him. It doesn't matter. Either way, you lost control. And an operator can never do that.'
'I didn't-'
'Yes, you did. Now listen. I rocked your world recently, I get that. I wish it hadn't needed to be that way, but yeah, I turned you upside down. Your commander betrayed you, you can never trust these people again, everything you believed in is wrong. That was more or less it, right?'
Ben didn't answer. He hadn't thought of it in those terms exactly, but… Shit, was he really that transparent? He could feel his face burning.
'So you decided it was over with you and the unit, you were done. The problem is, you're a man with a lot of energy inside you and you needed to divert it to something else. So you flew to Manila, where your ex-wife lives with your daughter. You thought you were going to be a better person, didn't you, maybe reconcile with your ex, be a father to your little girl. Attach yourself to something new, like a man falling in love on the rebound. But it didn't go well, did it?'
Ben felt his shame coalescing into anger. 'Back off, Hort.'
'No, I will not back off. You went to see them, didn't you? And your woman turned you away. Or you saw her with another man. Or both, or whatever. Well, that's two rejections in a row, twice your world's been rocked. Now, some men deal with rejection and humiliation and confusion by wallowing in self-pity. Some of your more self-actualized types can let it roll off their backs. How about you? How do you deal with it?'
Ben stared at Hort, his lips thinned, his nostrils flared. It was like being stripped, being stripped and laid bare. He wanted to blast the table out from between them and slam Hort into the wall, over and over until his eyes rolled up in his head and he learned to shut up, just shut the fuck up…
'For example,' Hort said, as though reading his mind, 'how are you dealing with it right now?'
Ben ground his jaw shut and looked away. The breath was whistling in and out of his nostrils.
'Yeah, maybe now you're starting to see it. You've got anger inside you, son. Maybe it's all-natural, or maybe something happened along the way and made it worse. Either way, it's in your nature to seek out enemies and destroy them. It's what you do. It's what you're good at. Some people play the piano, some people race cars. You destroy enemies. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with it. The country needs men like you and I wish we had more. But you need direction. You need that violence to be channeled. Because if somebody's not authorizing enemies on your behalf, you're going to go out and create some on your own, like an attack dog off its leash. You think what happened in Manila was a one-off? It wasn't. It was the beginning of the rest of your life.'
Ben realized he was gripping the edge of the table, to steady himself or throw it aside he wasn't even sure anymore. He opened his hands and flexed his fingers and concentrated again on slowing his breathing.
He knew Hort was right. If any of it had been bullshit, he'd have laughed it off. The way it was enraging him, though… why would that be?
Because the truth hurts.
'No one else talks to me like that,' he said after a moment. 'No one.'
Hort nodded. 'No one else cares enough to take the chance.'
'What do you want, then?'
'I want you to stop this foolishness. There's a major shit storm heading our way right now and I need your help to stop it. So I need you to stop acting out like a wounded adolescent. I need you to be more self-aware and to show more self-control. Can I count on you for that?'
Ben wiped his lips with the back of a hand. He'd already spent so much time thinking, the hell with the unit, he was out, he could never trust Hort again… and here was the man himself, telling him not only that he was back in if he wanted, but acting like he'd never even left. Telling him he was needed.
It was confusing as hell. But also…
It felt good. So good.
A rivulet of sweat ran down into his eye. He blinked. 'Give me that handkerchief, will you?'
Hort handed it to him. Ben unfolded it and wiped his face.
He gave the handkerchief back to Hort. 'You said something about a shit storm?'
Hort nodded and stood. 'I did. But first, let's get you the hell out of here.'
4
An Extremely Unpleasant Death Larison woke before dawn in another anonymous motel, this one along I-64 just outside Richmond, Virginia. He scrubbed a hand across the dark stubble on his face and considered trying to go back to sleep. Without the pills, though, the dreams were too much to face. He realized he should have weaned himself sooner, gotten used to sleeping unassisted before starting the op. But the pills would have dulled the edge he'd need if a bunch of guys in black fatigues and face masks blew his door with a shaped charge and came swarming into the room with chloroform, flex-cuffs, and a hood. Being unprepared for that possibility would be worse than the dreams. Though perhaps not by much.
The hell with it, he was too keyed up anyway. He swung his feet to the floor, picked up the Glock 18C machine pistol from the carpet next to him, and stood. He was fully clothed, all the way down to his boots and three spare 33-round magazines of armor-piercing ammunition in the pockets of his Blackhawk integrated tourniquet pants. They weren't going to take him dazed and blinking in his skivvies the way they'd done Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They weren't going to take him at all.
He walked through the dark to the bathroom and pissed, then came back and dragged the mattress from behind the couch and back onto the bed frame. He'd moved it to the floor the night before when he arrived. A small thing, but it could buy an extra second by creating the wrong focal point when a room was breached, and a second in a gunfight was like an hour any other time.
Truth is, it was a wonder he could sleep at all. He'd been planning this thing for years, and now it was finally happening. He'd just declared war on the U.S. government. And they were going to come at him with everything they had.
If he was lucky, the CIA would try to handle the whole thing in-house and the opposition would be limited and incompetent. More likely, given the sums involved, Christians in Action would have to bring in someone from the White House, and the White House would mobilize the NSA. The public didn't really know what the NSA was capable of-didn't want to know-but Larison had seen firsthand the results of operations like Pinwale, where the NSA got caught illegally reading vast quantities of American emails, along with some even more impressive ones that hadn't leaked, and the thought of the puzzle palace training all that firepower exclusively on him was both
