“Maybe.”
“You were going to keep me posted, remember?”
I might have reminded him that keeping him posted was in exchange for his finding out about what Horton was planning, which he hadn’t done. But if I told him that, he would just respond that he had tried but hadn’t managed, and anyway that he had come through with information about Treven and Larison. It would be a circle jerk at best; more likely, it would erode some of the trust and goodwill Kanezaki and I had spent years building.
Still, I hesitated to tell him, even in broad strokes, what Horton was up to. Need-to-know and other aspects of operational security are a long-honed reflex in me. But if Larison was right, it was in my interest to learn everything I could about Horton, who might be as much opposition as he was client. Offering some information of mine in exchange for data that might give me a clearer view of the movement of pieces on the board, and of the players behind them, would be a smart trade.
“It’ll sound a little crazy,” I said.
He chuckled. “It’s a crazy business. My own COS tried to have me taken out, remember?”
Back when he’d been a green CIA recruit in Tokyo, Kanezaki had run dangerously afoul of his chief of station, a certain James Biddle, who tried to hire me to kill him. I warned Kanezaki, instead, and that warning had fostered a relationship that had since become highly useful to me.
“All right. Horton says there’s a coup afoot in America.” When I was done giving him the 30,000-foot view of the landscape, I asked, “You think that’s possible?”
There was a long pause, then he said, “I think the public’s been…prepped for this, yes. Even before nine-eleven, but especially since then. There’s a ratchet effect, and nothing, not even killing bin Laden, seems to change it. I can see where some people could realize they could take advantage, whether out of greed or rationalized patriotism or whatever. What does Horton want you to do?”
“I think you can imagine.”
“The plotters?”
I didn’t answer.
“Shorrock?”
Again, I didn’t answer.
“It might be true,” he said, after a moment. “In which case, you’re doing something pretty heroic. But…if the people behind this thing get wind of your involvement, I think you’re going face opposition like you’ve never seen.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, remembering, again, Larison’s admonitions about Horton.
“You trust Horton?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why are you doing this? The money?”
There was a time when Kanezaki’s inquiries were obvious and callow. He’d come a long way.
“Not just the money. I wouldn’t call it heroic, the way you did, but…look, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for me to do something good for a change.”
“If it is good. You only have Horton’s word to go on, is that right?”
“That’s why I called you. I was hoping for some kind of corroborating evidence, one way or the other.”
“I wish I’d been able to find something. So far not.”
“Let me ask you something. Horton…does he have any vulnerabilities?” I was thinking of what Larison had said about hostages to fortune. I wondered whether Horton had one of his own.
“My friend, that’s a line I can’t cross. I’m not going to help you take out an American army colonel.”
“I’m not asking you to. But…if this thing turns out to be other than what it’s been billed as, heroism might require a different course. Just keep it in mind.”
“The two operators you asked me to follow up on-Larison and Treven. Are they involved?”
But I’d said enough. I told him let’s just stay in touch-after all, he wanted to know if Horton was right and what was being done about it, and I wanted an early warning system in case I was being set up. He told me he’d keep trying to find out more, and I headed off to Vienna.
Horton’s intel had been spotty. He had Finch’s roundtrip Washington to London flights, and he knew his schedule of meetings in London. The meetings ended two days before the return flight, and Horton claimed to be ninety percent sure Finch would spend those two days in Vienna, taking a roundtrip flight from London on his own dime before heading back to Washington on his government-sanctioned ticket. What we didn’t know, though, was on what flight Finch would arrive, or where he would be staying. We might have called various airlines and Viennese hotels to “confirm” the reservation of a Mr. Jack Finch, but doing so would have created too many possibilities of an airline or hotel employee learning from the evening news about the selfsame Jack Finch’s demise, finding the previous call to be too weird under the circumstances to be merely a coincidence, and contacting the authorities, who might then want to check on whether other airlines and hotels had received similar calls. If Finch had been conducting his business like a good, oblivious civilian, Horton would have been able to nail down his travel details easily enough. The fact that he couldn’t indicated some security consciousness on the part of Finch, and suggested too that Horton felt circumscribed in his ability to look, lest his inquiries tip Finch off. Regardless, the upshot was that the locus of our attention had to be the sister. If we could get a fix on her, we would also be fixing Finch. After that, we would have to improvise.
On the one hand, Emma Capps, widowed but retaining her married name, was fairly easy to track. For starters, we had both her home and work addresses, courtesy of standard IRS paperwork. We also had plenty of photographs, scraped from the university’s website, from Capps’s Facebook page, and from Capps’s own website, where she blogged about trends in the art world and advertised her paintings-impressive oil works that were at once recognizably realistic but also bathed in an otherworldly, melting luminescence. On the other hand, none of us was particularly familiar with Vienna, we knew nothing of Capps’s daily habits, and we had only four days before Finch was expected to arrive in the city.
Still, an experienced four-man team, operating within urban concealment, can typically nail down the details of a civilian’s routine within a matter of days, and so it was for us with Capps. The fourth-floor flat in the declasse 15th District, near Westbanhof, the main train station; morning yoga at Bikram Yoga College, a few blocks away; breakfast at Cafe Westend, also in her neighborhood; the university in the afternoon, where, given the paucity of students because of the summer break, we assumed she was painting rather than teaching. She was an attractive woman of about fifty with wavy brown hair, an erect posture, and a purposeful stride-easy to watch in both senses of the phrase. She seemed to live alone, and I wondered what had happened to her deceased husband, and how old she’d been when she’d lost him, and whether there had been any children beforehand. If there had been, presumably they were now grown and living on their own. Horton hadn’t included such details in her file, either because he didn’t have them, or, more likely, because he understood that no one other than a sociopath wants to become overly familiar with the humanity of someone targeted, even peripherally, in an op. And, indeed, as we watched Capps and learned her routines, I felt an inchoate hope that there were children somewhere, or a lover, or someone else in her life besides the brother we were about to take away.
On the fourth day we were watching her, the day we expected Finch to arrive, she stayed at the university later than usual. The four of us had shadowed her from her neighborhood that morning and were now taking turns circling the university, and at first I was concerned when she failed to emerge around five as she had previously. I would have expected her to meet Finch at the airport, or at least at Westbanhof Station. Could he have been coming in on a late flight? Had he canceled, or had Horton been wrong about him coming in the first place? But then I realized there was another possibility-simply that Finch, who had been visiting his sister here for many years, would know his way around and require no escort. So maybe the deviation in routine was a good sign.
Turned out it was. Capps left the university at close to six. There were plenty of pedestrians about, all enjoying the late summer daylight, and there were also lots of bicyclists and motor scooters and cars, so following Capps without being observed was easy. I stayed on her from a discreet distance, then watched her enter Cafe Pruckel, a classic Viennese coffee shop in one of the glorious nineteenth-century buildings that characterized the area-where, with the kind of serendipity that occasionally smiles down upon an op, Dox was presently taking a load off while Treven, Larison and I worked the street. I called him on the mobile he was carrying.
“Our girl is coming to see you,” I said when he picked up. “Did you-”
“Saw her already, amigo. I’m at one of the sidewalk tables, enjoying a tasty espresso and apple strudel mit Schlag.”
“‘Mit Schlag’?”
“Means with whipped cream.”
“I know what it means.”
“Oh. Well, when in Rome and all that, you know, I just like to blend.”
For a moment, I pictured enormous, goateed Dox amidst the effete students and artistes of the area. What I pictured couldn’t fairly be characterized as blending.
“That’s…admirable,” I said.
“Danke, buddy, I appreciate it. Anyway, what’s the plan?”
“Stay put for now. One of us will get a table on the other side of the building or inside so we have a view of both entrances. She might be meeting her friend there.”
The oblique references were probably unnecessary-the phones Horton had supplied were encrypted, and at this distance we were connected by their radio function rather than through a cell tower. But no sense taking chances.
“Roger that. Tell you what, get here soon so I can get up and drain the dragon. I’ve got three espressos inside me at this point and I think at least two are trying to get out.”
“Hold it in for five more minutes. I’ll buzz you as soon as we have someone else inside.”
“Can we make it four? I swear, I am currently engaged in mortal bladiatorial combat, and-”
“Look, I’ll try,” I said, exasperated. I clicked off and called Larison and Treven. Larison headed into the cafe; Treven, who was on a rented motor scooter, stayed outside.