The Detachment - Barry Eisler [115]
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. Don’t worry, I don’t give a damn? Or, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone? What if I was wrong? And what good would it do anyway? But the thought that Larison had a secret, and might suspect that Dox and I had stumbled upon it, concerned me. This was a guy who was more than capable of killing to keep his private matters private.
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