The Detachment - Barry Eisler [116]
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