“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.
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.
