“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.
We thanked LaFeber and walked out into the sunlight of Rodeo Drive, oblivious consumers flowing past us. Shopping, it seemed, would be the last thing to go, even in the face of rolling terror attacks.
We headed east on Wilshire Boulevard. I considered that I was suddenly worth something like twenty-five million dollars. But the thought felt unreal. Not just because of the amount. But because I still had to live to spend it. And because, at the moment, I couldn’t say the prospects for that looked particularly promising.
Larison and Rain boarded a bus on Wilshire and rode it toward Koreatown, where they would change to a Metro train. The wrong direction from the hotel in Santa Monica, but they were taking zero chances and weren’t going to follow a direct route to anywhere, especially now that they had the diamonds. Not today; maybe not ever again. Which was fine by Larison. He’d been living in a state of low-grade paranoia for years now. He accepted it. He was accustomed to it. He had no more problem with the necessity of watching his back to protect his life than he had with the necessity of brushing to preserve his teeth. It was just the way things were.
Rain was good cover. Larison made people nervous, but when civilian eyes lighted on Rain’s Asian features, they were reassured and kept right on going. Larison could almost see the unconscious calculation appear for an instant in their expressions: not Muslim-looking. Peaceful Japanese. No problem.
He almost couldn’t believe he had the diamonds. This is what he’d worked for, what he’d planned for, what he’d taken on the entire U.S. government for. True, Hort wasn’t dead-that punk Treven had fallen for yet another line of trademarked Hort bullshit-but Larison supposed he could accept that, at least for the moment. The original plan was to use Rain, Dox, and Treven to take out Hort, and then to close up shop by doing them, too. But Hort was a civilian now, he could be gotten to, so maybe it didn’t really matter if the order of operations had been reversed. In the scheme of combat plans being changed by a collision with battlefield reality, this was a pretty minor alteration. And, in the end, an irrelevant one.
He’d act at his first opportunity, probably as soon as they got back to the motel and he was armed again. There were really only two considerations. First was the noise of the gunshots. But they still had the suppressed weapons they’d taken from the dead guys outside Kei’s apartment. If he could access one of those without alerting anyone to what he was up to, the noise part would be taken care of.
Second was the reaction of whoever didn’t get shot first. Action always beat reaction, and he was fairly sure he could drop all three of them before the last to go had a meaningful chance to react. But fairly sure wasn’t entirely comforting under the circumstances, given the penalty he would incur for a miscalculation. Treven, Rain, and Dox were all formidable men, and Larison had to expect an exceptionally fast reaction when the shooting began. He decided he would drop Treven first, because Treven was the best combat shooter. Then Rain, because Rain had the sharpest instincts. And Dox last, because he was the biggest target and therefore the hardest to miss.
Dox. He hadn’t much cared for the big sniper initially, but his respect for him had grown. That stunt at the Hilton in D.C. was one for the record books, and Larison had to acknowledge that without it, they almost certainly all would have shot each other a second later. And when they’d almost gotten into it the night before, he couldn’t help but be impressed by how easily Dox had shed his good ol’ boy persona and suddenly presented himself as lethally calm and quiet. It was a rare man who could maintain that kind of dangerous poise in Larison’s presence. He wondered if maybe he ought to revise the order of operations and take out Dox first.
The problem was, some part of him didn’t want to take out any of them. Not even Treven, who had been dumb enough to let Hort walk away when he so easily could have left his body facedown in a remote canyon pass in the Hollywood Hills.
They were competent. Reliable. And they worked well as a team. Yes, Treven was annoyingly earnest, and Dox was a ham, and Rain reminded Larison too much of himself for Larison ever to fully trust him. But…fuck, every time he ran through a scenario of dropping them, he found that unlike his usual dispassionate appraisal of angles and distances and odds, he felt something heavy and unpleasant and ominous, instead. As though some part of his mind was imagining what it was going to be like to live with the knowledge, and the images, that would dog him afterward, and was asking him, warning him, not to take on that weight. The cost, as Rain had put it. He was carrying too much already.
He tried to shut that shit down, but he couldn’t. He reminded himself he had no choice, that it was a simple matter of operational security. He wasn’t persuaded. He told himself they would do the same to him. He didn’t believe it. He reasoned that it was better to make a mistake in one direction and live than to make one in the other direction and die. The words rang hollow.
The worst part had been when Rain had pulled him aside and tried to talk to him. What had he said? I’m trying to be your friend. And the hell of it was, Larison thought it was true.
But he’d also felt himself slip for an instant when that clown Dox had said the thing about ass-fucking. How many times had that sort of thing happened a million years ago in the barracks? Every time it had, some part of Larison’s mind started to panic that he’d been busted, that someone knew, or suspected, and was taunting him. But it was never the case. It was just how people talked. And he’d learned to suppress the reflex. So why had he slipped the night before? He thought Rain had spotted it, but he couldn’t be sure. The man didn’t show much.
But what if he had? First Treven, then Hort, now Rain and Dox…the number of people who knew, knew what he was, was growing. It was getting out of control, and if he didn’t shut it down now, he would lose the ability outright.
He understood on some level that it shouldn’t matter. Attitudes were changing, even DADT was dead…but the thought of people knowing, of looking at him differently, treating him differently…he hated it. It would be like revealing a terrible, exploitable weakness.
And that wasn’t all, either. There were also the people who knew he was alive and relevant, rather than presumed dead and therefore forgotten. That number was growing, too. It was possible Hort would have told others besides Treven, Dox, and Rain, and if he had, then the genie was already out of the bottle. But Larison guessed Hort hadn’t. Hort liked to keep his cards close to the vest. And if he had told others, so what? Then the damage was done. Regardless, the thing to do now was to shut it all down while shutting it down was still as least theoretically possible.
He looked out the window at the passing urban landscape, and felt more trapped than he ever had in his life. What the hell was wrong with him? His mind was telling him one thing. His gut wouldn’t go along for the ride.
He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be outed. But he so wanted to be able to sleep again, to lie down on a bed without dreading what he would see when he closed his eyes and he was left alone and defenseless with his dreams.
He was afraid of being weak. And he was afraid that failing to do the tactically sound thing here was the weakest move of all.
The trick would be to not think about it. Get back to the motel, get the Glock, wait for the moment, see the opportunity, act to exploit it. Yes, like that. No thinking. Just pattern recognition, and reflex, and done.
And not just Treven, Rain, and Dox. Kei, too. No one left who knew anything about him, or who could tie him to anything, or had any way to track him.
Except Hort, of course. But Larison would clip that loose end in short order, too. And then he’d be done. Free of all these entanglements. Free.
He didn’t have to like it. He just had to do it.
Treven and Dox waited at the motel with Kei. Kei was sitting on one bed; Dox, on the other; Treven, increasingly antsy because Rain and Larison had been gone so long, pacing in what little space the room afforded.
Treven hated waiting. When he was alone, he could wait patiently for days, even for weeks. But this was different. The whole operation was shot through with problems. Larison was acting increasingly unstable. There had been several near blow-ups among them, any one of which, had it gone critical, would have been fatal. And then there was Hort, suddenly scrambling all the pieces on the board with his stunt at the White House.
He hoped he’d done the right thing in letting the man live. He told himself it was logical, but part of him wasn’t buying that, part of him knew it was emotional. Treven looked at Larison and Rain and Dox and didn’t want to be like them. He needed some line he wouldn’t cross, some sense of command authority and unit loyalty. Something that would represent the difference between a soldier with a conscience and a killer under contract. Wherever that thin line was, he knew he was dancing right along the edge of it now. Killing his commander would push him over forever.
But his decision gnawed at him anyway. Hort was dangerous. He might have been tracking them right at that very moment through means none of them fully appreciated. Sure, the others assumed Hort had found them in Washington via satellites and surveillance cameras and all the rest because they didn’t know Treven had simply tipped the man off, but that didn’t mean the satellites and surveillance cameras didn’t exist. And sure, Hort had made his big speech and stepped down, and so presumably had lost his official access. But he still had friends in high places, and low ones, too. It was Hort himself who had schooled Treven in Sun Tsu: When strong, feign weakness. When weak, feign strength. Hort had certainly acted weak in the car last night, and the more Treven thought about it, the more nervous it made him.
Dox was making him nervous now, too. The big sniper was sitting with his back against the headboard and his legs stretched out on the bed. His eyes were closed and he held his Wilson Combat in his lap, as serene as a sleeping toddler and the gun a favorite stuffed animal. The man had at least as much patience as Treven, it was obvious from the stillness with which he sat while they waited. It made sense-it would be a piss-poor sniper who couldn’t wait out a target-and, ordinarily, Treven would have admired and even been reassured by the trait. But now, it was making him feel like the source of Dox’s apparent serenity was some secret knowledge Treven himself lacked.
Dox, his eyes still closed, said, “What’s on your mind, son?”
Christ, did the guy read minds, too? “What do you mean?”
Dox opened his eyes. “Well, either you’re trying to wear out the carpet in our luxury suite here, or something’s making you antsy.”
“It’s nothing. I just don’t like waiting.”
“I thought you ISA studs could outwait a rock. You trying to disabuse me?”
Treven chuckled. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s all right. I’m feeling antsy myself.”
Treven looked at him. Propped serenely on the bed, he looked about as antsy as a statue.
“That’s how you act when you’re antsy?”
Dox grinned. “Oh, yeah. My blood pressure’s way up at the moment. When I’m feeling relaxed, I’m practically invisible.”
Treven couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking. “Well, what’s bugging you?”