The Detachment - Barry Eisler [117]
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