“Blackwater? We don’t want contractors getting hold of those tapes. Are you crazy?”
“What were our alternatives? You want JSOC running the op?”
Shit. Clements had a point. “You trust those guys?”
“More than I trust Horton.”
Another good point. “What about Horton’s guy? The one in the photo. Treven.”
“Like I said, he’s been ordered to stand down.”
“You really think Horton is just going to tell his man to walk away?”
Clements stroked his chin. “I see what you’re saying. Well, I have two Ground Branch guys there now per what we discussed previously. They’re not equipped for a snatch, and two is too few anyway, but you’re right, it wouldn’t hurt to have them keep looking for Treven.”
“Good. And even more important, make sure the contractors have the photo. If Treven shows up at the snatch point, they should assume he’s there to interfere. And you know, it’s not like they’d be expecting him, so it would be understandable if he accidentally got caught in the crossfire.”
“You’re right. I’ll make sure the Blackwater operators know who to look for.”
“And the Ground Branch guys. And what to do if they see him.”
Clements nodded and turned to walk away. “They’ll know.”
22. Big and Bad
Paula came out of the bathroom, obviously done with her call. Ben said, “How’s the Bureau today?”
She looked at him. “They say my role here is done.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m supposed to return to Washington.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“You know it’s a bad thing. It means that’s it for the law. The assassins are going to take over now.”
Ben sighed. She was so earnest with the law-and-order shit.
“Look,” he said, “for what it’s worth, I’ve been ordered to stand down, too.”
“You have not.”
“Yeah, I have.”
“What about Larison?”
“He’s someone else’s problem now.”
“You can just care, and then not care, like flipping a light switch?”
“You’re assuming I cared to begin with.”
“You know, I’ll bet a lot of people believe you when you tell them something like that. I’ll bet there are times when you even believe yourself.”
“Look, it’s too early in the morning for you to psychoanalyze me, okay? Why don’t you just fly back to Washington, and next time I’m in town, we can have a drink.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t drink?”
“I don’t think I’m just flying back to Washington with my wings clipped. And I don’t think you are, either.”
Ben didn’t answer. It felt like it was her move.
“You’re not, are you?”
He sighed. “I’m supposed to observe.”
“You’re not a very good liar.”
“Actually, I’m an accomplished liar. It just that this time, I’m not lying.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“I don’t know, exactly. All I know is my team is out, and some other team has been brought in. My coach doesn’t think the new team understands the game and is going to lose. Badly. He wants me to be on hand.”
“In case they need a pinch hitter?”
“Just to observe.”
“Well, that sounds good to me.”
“Look-”
“Don’t even start. I’m not going to just walk away. So we can do this separately and trip each other up, or we can keep coordinating.”
“I don’t know that our coordination has been all that coordinated.”
“We’ve gotten this far.”
Ben knew he could lose her easily enough. But he didn’t know what her people knew. If they’d briefed her on Nico’s particulars, losing her wouldn’t help. She’d just be waiting wherever he arrived.
“Let’s get some breakfast,” he said. “I don’t know when we’ll get another chance. It feels like something big and bad is on the way, and I want to be in position when it arrives.”
23. One Way or the Other
Larison waited in front of the gate at JFK for his flight to San Salvador, his eyes moving from the announcements board to the faces of the people swirling through the area and then back again. He wanted desperately to fly directly to San Jose International, but if they had the resources to watch airports, that would be the one they’d key on. From San Salvador he could catch a nonstop to one of the smaller towns-Limón or Tamarindo or Quepos-and then finish the journey by train or bus. Or better yet, by motorcycle.
He was still shaky. He’d called from a Jersey City motel room, expecting the conversation to be brief and one-sided, expecting them to be meek, even if it was just playacting while they tried to buy themselves time. He was going to be in complete control. So he’d never really recovered from the first words they said to him:
Hello, Daniel Larison.
He’d made it through the call. He listened wordlessly as they explained how they would send contractors to rape Nico’s nieces and nephews and mutilate his parents and sisters and brothers-in-law; and then, when the happiness, the coherence, the sanity of Nico’s family had been torn and broken and shattered, they would explain to Nico why it had all happened. Because of the man Nico was seeing, who wasn’t who he said he was. Who did a stupid thing to antagonize powerful people, who kept on doing it even after he’d been warned of the consequences to Nico and his family.
When they stopped talking, Larison had paused for a moment to demonstrate his composure. When he spoke, his voice was calm, emotionless, the same voice he would have used had he not heard a single word they’d just uttered. He said, I’ll call again on Friday with instructions on how to deliver the diamonds. If you don’t deliver, I will release the tapes. And anything that happens to Nico or his family will seem mild after what I will do to you and yours.
Then he had hung up. For a long moment he stood still, his eyes unfocused, his heart hammering. Then his legs buckled and he collapsed and curled up on the floor on his side and sobbed uncontrollably for almost ten minutes. He knew he had to move-triangulating on a cloned satellite call was almost impossible, but it was almost impossible that they’d identified him so quickly, too. But he couldn’t move. Shame and horror and self-pity and fear and grief had simply overwhelmed him.
Finally, it subsided. He picked himself up, staggered to the sink, and splashed cold water on his face. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, his eyes red, his cheeks dripping and unshaven, his teeth bared, his nostrils flaring with his agitated breathing. He looked like a nightmare.
Then be a nightmare.
Yes, that was it. Make them pay. Make them pay for everything.
But first, he had to move. That lesson had been drilled into him from the start: No matter what you were hit with, no matter the pain or shock or confusion, never stop moving. Never give them a stationary target.
A corollary lesson was that when you’re ambushed, your best chance of prevailing almost always involved a simple strategy:
Attack back.
They’d be expecting that, of course. In fact, as the shock of the call wore off, to be replaced by a seething determination, he began to understand they were baiting him, hoping he would be provoked.
What he would do, therefore, wouldn’t be a surprise. How he would do it would be everything.
He checked his watch. He tried not to imagine what it would be like to be impossibly rich. He could have chartered a jet, he could have been on the ground in San Jose in three hours. Instead, he was glued to this seat in an airport, waiting for the interminable minutes to pass.
The worst part was that he couldn’t figure out what the vulnerability had been. It was distracting him, his mind wouldn’t let it go, he kept going over every aspect of his preparations and his movements and he couldn’t identify a single thing he’d done wrong. The only thing he could remotely come up with was those two brothers, the ones who’d been tailing him and who he’d assumed had just been petty criminals. Maybe they’d been more than that… but even if so, who were they, and how had they been tailing him in the first place? He’d been so careful not to create patterns, but somewhere, he must have done something, he just couldn’t understand what. Maybe the NSA had capabilities beyond even what he’d known of? Maybe he’d made some small mistake, and their supercomputers had unraveled everything from that?