inclined can find women of a certain professional disposition. If we get done in time tonight, I’m fixing to visit one of those areas myself.”
“I think you might be confusing your own proclivities with those of our friend.”
“I’m not sure ‘proclivities’ is the word I’d use, but okay, I suppose I see your point.”
“Look, if he stays out for whatever reason, you just keep watching him. The later he gets back to the hotel, in fact, the better. I just need that one-minute heads-up regardless.”
I clicked off, then called Treven and told him to coordinate with Dox to watch the restaurant and the route to the hotel. I hoped we could finish this thing tonight. If we couldn’t, our next chance would be in the morning, which would mean watching the hotel entrance all night and trying to do the job in daylight. And every minute you spend in that kind of proximity to a target, you have to remember someone might be targeting you.
An hour later, Larison and I were strolling the cramped streets of a neighborhood near the hotel, each of us having separately examined the area as thoroughly as we could in the short time available. We compared notes on points of ingress and egress; noted the locations of ATMs, which would be equipped with cameras; and agreed on the overall approach we would employ. All we had to do now was wait.
“Why go to Washington?” he said at one point. “Forget it. Go after Hort before he comes after you.”
Horton had told me the third job would be in D.C. The plan was for the four of us to meet up there after Vienna and receive instructions after we’d arrived.
“How?” I said. “A JSOC colonel? Who knows you’d like nothing more than to take him down and get those diamonds back? What’s your plan?”
He looked at me. “I know how to get to him. How to get to him where he lives.”
“How?” I said, intrigued.
He shook his head. “Not now. When you’re ready. When you look me in the eye and tell me you understand there’s no other way.”
“Then we’ll have to wait.”
I watched him. I could see he was frustrated and trying to suppress it.
“What does your friend Dox think?” he said, after a moment.
I saw no advantage to confirming a personal attachment. “I don’t know that I’d call him my friend.”
“Don’t bullshit me. He acts like he doesn’t care about anything other than getting paid and laid, but I can see that’s an act. You know how he looks when we’re all together?”
“How?”
“Like a Rottweiler watching out for his master. I wish I had someone like that guarding my back.”
“I’m not his master.”
“You know what I mean. Behind the good ol’ boy facade, he just looks loyal. Fiercely loyal. And you don’t show much, but I have a feeling you must have done something to earn that. I can tell you’ve been through the shit together. I just don’t know what kind of shit.”
I wound up telling him about Hong Kong, and Hilger, and how Dox had walked away from a five-million- dollar payday to save my life, and how I’d killed two innocent people just to buy time to save Dox’s life. I wondered if I was being stupid. But something made me want to tell him. I wasn’t sure what, but I’ve learned to trust my gut.
When I was done, he said, “So they used Dox to get to you.”
The question made me uneasy. I wondered if I’d told him too much. But something still told me it would be useful for him to know. I didn’t know why.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Is there anyone else like that? Someone you care about? But who couldn’t protect themselves? Who would be…what’s the expression? A hostage to fortune?”
My mind instantly flashed on my small son, Koichiro, whom I’d seen only twice, as an infant in New York, whose mother would have told him by now his father was dead. Whose mother, indeed, had tried to make it so.
I didn’t answer. I’d told him enough already. Maybe too much.
He nodded and said, “Well, whoever that person is, he or she is now a hostage to Hort.”
I stopped and looked at him, trying to read his expression in the dim light. “Is that what he has on you?”
He answered the same way I had, by saying nothing.
It was hard to imagine this stone killer being that attached to anyone else. But I supposed people might say the same about me.
“Who?” I asked.
His mouth twisted into something midway between a smile and a grimace. “The particulars don’t really matter, do they?”
I thought of Koichiro again, then said, “Probably not.”
We might have moved on at that point, but instead we lingered, caught in that frustrating space between the desire for understanding and the futility of words for achieving it.
“How do you even know Horton has these diamonds?” I said. I knew he would read the small expression of interest as a weakening, and that it might therefore draw him out.
It did. He said, “Because he took them from me.”
He went on to tell me an astonishing story about CIA videos of terror suspects being gruesomely tortured by American interrogators, how the videos were made, who was in them, who stood to be sacrificed as fall guys if the videos ever got out.
“I read about this a few years ago,” I said. “I wondered why the Agency was admitting to making those tapes, and to destroying them.”
“Well, now you know. They were missing, not destroyed.”
“Missing because you took them.”
He nodded. “The diamonds were a ransom for the tapes’ return. But Hort stole them from me.”
I almost asked why he hadn’t retaliated by releasing the tapes, but then realized: the hostage. Horton, it seemed, had collected the necessary cards, and then called Larison’s bluff.
“When I checked up on you?” I said. “My source told me you were dead.”
He smiled coldly. “Greatly exaggerated.”
“You staged that?”
A young couple was heading toward us, walking hand-in-hand, the hard consonants of their German echoing off the close-set buildings and the stone sidewalk. Larison paused. They might not have understood English, but at a minimum they would have recognized it, and why give them a recollection of having passed two American men near where a body would soon be found?
When they were safely beyond us, Larison said, “As a way of throwing off the animosity I knew I was going to stir up. Hort saw through it.”
“Still, that’s a hell of a feat that you managed to stay ahead of them at all. You must have had the whole U.S. government hunting for you.”
“It was…interesting. I had to keep moving. A lot of buses, some hitchhiking. Rarely more than one night in the same town.”
“Yeah, I’ve done some of that myself. You see any good parts of the country?”
For a moment, he didn’t answer. His eyes drifted away, and his mouth loosened slightly as though in mild wonderment, or even reverence.
“I liked The Lost Coast,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get back, someday.”
Something had happened there, though I doubted he’d tell me what. Knowing Larison, it was probably something dark. I decided not to press.
“The tapes,” I said. “Are you in them?”
We started walking again, in silence. Finally he said, “I’m not proud of everything I’ve done. Are you?”
I found myself considering the question. Considering it carefully.
