Dox and I took out our guns and approached the door. “Yes?” I said.
“It’s us,” I heard Larison say.
I had previously placed a strip of duct tape over the peephole to prevent anyone on the other side of the door from knowing by the blockage of light that someone was looking through it. I put my face up close and removed the duct tape. Larison and Treven, as advertised.
I moved the dresser, then let them in and bolted the door behind them. “Any trouble?” I said.
Treven shook his head. “No. Ditched those guys, ditched the van, no problems.”
If Kei wondered whom he was referring to by “those guys,” she didn’t ask.
“All right then,” I said. “If everything’s good to go, it’s time to call Horton.”
Larison looked at Kei and smiled. “Yes, it is.”
It was a long time before Larison was ready to call Hort. He didn’t know how they’d been tracked in D.C.-satellite, surveillance cameras, drone aircraft, whatever-and he needed to be certain it wasn’t going to happen again. So he ramped up his already stringent procedures, spending hours in buses, taxis, malls, and on the subway, making sure he wasn’t just flushing out possible foot and vehicular surveillance, but also that he was obscuring his movements against more remote potential watchers, as well.
He was glad he’d managed to persuade the others that their only move was to take Kei hostage. It had the benefit of being true, of course, but he had his own, additional reasons for wanting Kei as leverage against Hort: he recognized that the value of his threat to release the torture tapes was diminishing.
Larison had long understood that America’s political elites insisted on counter-terror policies like disappearances, torture, drone strikes, and invasions because the elites perversely benefited from the increased terror the policies inevitably produced. He understood the policies weren’t a response to the threat, but were rather the cause of the threat, and that this was by design. A frightened populace was a controllable populace. Endless war and metastasizing security procedures meant enormous profits for the corporations the politicians served. In this sense, the possible publication of graphic videos of American servicemen torturing screaming Muslim prisoners had always been, from the perspective of America’s elites, as much a promise as a threat.
Still, in ordinary times, people would have reacted to videos of gruesome torture with disgust and horror. In the most emotionally irrefutable way, the tapes would implicate various establishment players, and the reputations of the men who had ordered the barbarism in the videos would have been sullied; their careers, derailed. And that highly personal threat had outweighed the government’s institutional interest in finding ways to increase the danger of terrorism-at least enough for the government to agree to cough up a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds.
But everything had changed now. America was under attack, and who would object to what was on the tapes now? Object, hell-they’d clamor for more. The people who had ordered what was shown on the tapes wouldn’t be censured. They’d be heroes.
And that, in essence, was the problem. Circumstances were now eroding the value of the cards he held, so much so that he wondered whether neutralizing the extortion value of the tapes was the purpose of the attacks. Well, even if it wasn’t the primary purpose, it must have occurred to somebody. And regardless, the effect was the same. The value of his assets was declining, and he knew he needed new ones. Hort’s daughter was one. The daughter, and what she would lead to.
Eventually, he made his way to the graffitied roll-down storefronts and cracked cinderblock walls and peeling real estate lease signs of the blighted industrial district. For a while, he wandered among the jobless, solitary men who gravitated to the area, casualties of a hollowed-out economy. He liked the cover they gave him, liked that no one knew them or cared about them or could tell one from the other, liked knowing that as he made himself complicit among them, the world’s callousness and indifference would envelop him, as well.
He paused with his back to the brick facade of a recycling center and looked around. The skyscrapers of the downtown jutted up into a faded blue sky a mile or so behind him. Absent those distant monoliths, he might have been almost anywhere. An old mill town, a dying burg in the rust belt. There was no panic buying here. There was nothing to buy, and no money to use to buy it. It was the last place politicians would ever care about, the last place security forces would ever be sent to protect. He felt anonymous. He felt secure.
He took out Kei’s phone, popped in the battery, and fired it up. He had a number for Hort, but he assumed Hort would have a separate, clean phone exclusively for personal use. He checked Kei’s speed dial entries and immediately saw one called “Dad.” The number wasn’t the one he had, so yes, a separate, personal phone.
He brought up the photos he had taken in the van and keyed the entry for “Dad,” enjoying the feeling of invading Hort’s privacy this way. He waited while the photos uploaded, then called Hort.
One ring, then, “Hey sweet girl, I was just about to open those photos you sent me. How are you?”
“Your sweet girl’s fine,” Larison said. “For now.”
There was a long pause. Larison relished the silence. Could there have been a more pristine way for Hort to convey his sudden shock, and violation, and helplessness? His confusion and impotent rage and, soon enough, his despair?
“I swear to almighty God-”
Larison cut him off. “Look at the photos. She’s alive. For now. The guys you sent to protect her, not so much.”
There was another pause during which Larison assumed Hort was checking the photos. Then Hort said, “Let her go. Just let her go. She didn’t do anything to you-”
“You did something to me.”
“Yes. And this is between you and me, and no one else.”
“It must be killing you, Hort. To know, right now, that you’re the one who taught me to identify the target’s most vulnerable area. And to attack him there. And you showed me how, remember? You got to me through Nico.”
“That’s right, I did. You know what’ll happen to him if anything happens to my daughter?”
Larison laughed. “You’ve already pointed a gun at him, Hort. Now you’re threatening to point another? What are you going to do, have his nieces raped and his nephews killed and the other shit you threatened before, twice over?”
“It doesn’t matter. If anything happens to her, I will never, ever stop until I’ve found you. And yes, I will start with your man Nico, and every goddamned member of his extended family, one at a time and saving Nico for last so he can know what happened and who was the cause of the deaths of everyone he loved and the ruination of his entire life. I’ll see to it all personally.”
“You’re missing something really important, Hort. You know what it is? I. Don’t. Care. So go ahead. Hang up. Go after Nico right now. Try me.”
Silence. Then: “Tell me what you want.”
“I want my diamonds.”
“What else?”
“A guarantee that the dogs you’ve sicced on us are called off.”
“And you’ll let my daughter go?”
“Yes.”
“Unharmed?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then.”
“How?”
“I’ll bring you the diamonds myself. And I’ll make an announcement tomorrow that I believe will set your mind at ease on the other thing.”
“What announcement?”
“I can’t tell you now. But you’ll be able to watch it on television. I’ll make the announcement and immediately fly to L.A. I can meet you tomorrow night, if you like.”
Despite everything, Larison couldn’t help being touched by the man’s devotion. He must have known he would be coming here to die.
But then he wondered if he was giving Hort’s humanity too much credit. Hort was a clever bastard, and had outplayed Larison before. He’d have to be careful. Consider every angle. Look at the whole thing from Hort’s perspective, and see if he could detect any weaknesses in his own position.
“You might be able to track us,” Larison said. “We’ve been careful, but you got to us at the Hilton, so maybe you’ll find a way again. The difference is, this time, I’ll be with Mimi. You breach that door, you better be sure you can put a bullet in my brain in less than one second. Because that’s how long it’ll take me to put one in hers.”
“Nobody’s going to be breaching any doors,” Hort said. “I just want her safe. I don’t care about the rest, you were right. You can have whatever you want, as long as you let her go.”
Larison considered. It was hard to imagine Hort was going to risk his daughter over the diamonds. The question was, would he call off the dogs. And how would Larison know, one way or the other?