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,
Hort’s words flashed in my mind:
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?”
