respect you. Plus they’re accustomed to following orders. You’re not. No disrespect.”
I looked at him, considering. He really thought I was going to do this. “Plus,” he said, “Larison, while a capable soldier, needs guidance.”
I sensed beneath the simple sentence a great deal of meaning. “What kind of guidance?”
“Discipline, for one. He’s like a gun-you want to make sure he’s always pointed in the right direction.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Let’s just say…he’s a man who has too much to keep hidden. A man in turmoil.”
First Larison, trying to show me there was distance between him and Horton. And now Horton, doing the same. I might have said something, but didn’t want to give away to one the possible maneuvering of the other.
“Why are you telling me so much?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t take the job if I didn’t.”
“I’m not taking the job either way.”
I expected him to say,
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “What’s been relentlessly drilled into the heads of the American citizenry since nine-eleven, and following every attack and attempted attack since then?”
I glanced over at the restaurant entrance. “I don’t know. That they hate your freedoms, I guess.”
“Close. That we have to give up our freedoms. Every time there’s an attack or attempted attack, the government claims that to keep America safe, it needs more power and that the citizenry has to give up more freedom. Hell, by now, if the terrorists ever did hate us for our freedoms, they’d hate us a lot less. But they don’t. They hate us more. Meanwhile, Americans are being taught that if their country is attacked, it’s because they haven’t given up enough freedom, and all they have to do is give up a little more. Some determined individuals have recognized the situation is ripe for exploitation, and they’re on the verge of doing something about it.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes while he worked on his omelet. Dox kept a watchful eye on us, his left hand resting on the table, his right out of view.
When the plates had been cleared and we were down to just coffee, I said, “Here’s the problem. Let’s say everything you’ve told me is true. You still couldn’t pay me enough to take out the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.”
I wondered why I was still acting as though we were negotiating, rather than just telling him outright I had no interest under any circumstances. Was I really considering this? I wondered again whether Dox and Kanezaki were right about me, whether all my protestations about wanting out of the life were bullshit. But then why would I have pushed Delilah so hard to leave?
Horton was looking at me-a little critically, I thought. “You don’t care?” he said.
I shrugged. “It has nothing to do with me.”
“Nothing to do with you? What’s your country?”
“Are you talking about my passports?”
“I’m talking about your allegiances.”
“I don’t pledge allegiance to anyone who doesn’t pledge it back.”
“Let me ask you this, then. How many people have you killed?”
“More than I’ll ever remember.”
“Then what’s one more?”
I looked at him. “If he’s a threat? Nothing.”
He nodded. “I understand. It’s the same for me. I’ve taken a lot of lives, directly and indirectly, and some of them were under fairly questionable circumstances, I have to admit. One day, I believe I will have to face my maker and account for what I’ve done. Do you believe the same?”
I didn’t answer. Somewhere in my mind, an image slipped past the guards. A boy in Manila, clinging to his mother’s dress, crying for the father I’d taken from him. I remembered his voice, regressed, childlike.
“Occasionally I wonder,” Horton said, “when that day comes, if it could help my case to be able to say, ‘Yes, I’ve taken many lives. But look how many lives I’ve saved.’ You ever wonder anything like that? You ever wonder if there’s anything that could redeem men like us?”
Again, I said nothing. That single prison break from memory was emboldening others. Another boy, about my age at the time, supine on the steaming, pre-dawn river grass, whispering in a tongue I couldn’t understand, tears rolling from his eyes as his life ebbed through a chest wound into the sodden ground beneath him. A wound I had delivered.
“Here’s the thing,” Horton said. “If we don’t stop this, in a few weeks’ time you’re going to turn on CNN and see video of the most horrific civilian carnage you can imagine. Rolling mass casualty attacks on the homeland calculated to cause maximum suffering and to achieve maximum media impact. You will watch those videos, and see the anguish of the survivors and listen to the bereavement of the families of the dead and you will know that it happened because you stood down. Because you could have done something about it but just didn’t care to. And on the day you stand before your maker, as one day you will, you’ll have to explain all that to him, explain to him and to the spirits of the slaughtered thousands how none of it was really your fault. You want that on your conscience? You want that on your soul?”
His delivery was strong, even impassioned, and I wondered what was feeding his fervor. His own sleepless nights, I decided. The wrong decisions he’d made, where he had pulled the trigger too quickly and shot an innocent, or held back too long and lost a friend. A mission he had missed. A wrong order he had issued. The deaths he had caused in trying to save lives.
A detached part of me was impressed at how effectively he’d made his case. He had at least three selling points he was prepared to use, and when each of the first two-loosely speaking, patriotism and “It’s just one more”-failed to elicit a response, he smoothly abandoned it and continued his reconnaissance by fire. My determined silence in response to his third line of inquiry would have told him all he needed to know. Not the specifics-the fallout of having been raised a Catholic, the increasing weight of the life I’ve lived and the lives I’ve taken, my nebulous hopes for some means of atonement, maybe even redemption-but the general, and accurate sense that he’d hit a nerve.
I sighed and glanced at the computer case. “What’s in there?”
“Particulars for Shorrock. Oh, and the fifty thousand we discussed. Yours, whatever you decide.”
Smart. I’ve rarely been shorted on a financial arrangement. No one wants to needlessly antagonize someone like me.
“What are you offering for this suicide mission?”
“There’s no reason it should involve suicide. Still, I’m offering one million dollars.”
I didn’t say anything. I had to admit, it was an attention-getting number. “Divide it with your team any way you see fit,” he said. “And don’t tell me it’s not enough. I know that game, and I respect you for playing it, but we both know that even if you decide to keep only a quarter for yourself, that’s more than you’ve ever been paid for a single job in your life. The next one will pay even better, too, but this one is one million, no more.”
I considered milking him for expenses, but decided there was no point. It was true, a quarter million for a hit was a huge premium, even factoring in the difficulty of the target.
“How are we supposed to get to someone like Shorrock?”
“I’d recommend this coming weekend, at the GovSec Expo in Las Vegas.”
“GovSec?”
“Government Security Expo and Conference. Every homeland security, defense, law enforcement, and intelligence contractor in America, all under the roof of the Wynn convention center, jostling for a more favorable position at the government teat.”
“What’s Shorrock doing there?”
“Nominally, he’s there to give the Saturday morning keynote. In fact, he’s there to be wooed by the boards of a half dozen contractors who are trying to lure him away from government service into a seven-figure advisory position. Access like Shorrock’s is worth more than a dozen lobbyists to these people. He’ll be getting the royal treatment all weekend.”
