The Detachment - Barry Eisler [134]
I looked at Larison. “Thanks for listening to me.”
He paused, then said, “I was having my doubts on the way into that school a minute ahead of a couple of Hellfire missiles. But…yeah.”
He turned to Dox and said, “Don’t ever fuck with me again about being in your sights. Ever. You understand?”
I thought, Christ, here we go again. But Dox just grinned and said, “All right, all right, I was just trying to relieve the tension. Message received and I will not do it again.”
He held out his hand and, after a moment, Larison shook it.
“Where are we heading?” I said. “The airport’s the other way.”
“I want to get the hell out of Nebraska,” Kanezaki said. “Let’s just keep driving and we’ll figure it out as we go.”
“My God, not another road trip,” Dox said. “I’m still recovering from the last one.”
We all laughed at that. I realized I didn’t even care where we were going.
We only made it as far as Des Moines. The parasympathetic backlash against a combat adrenaline surge is ferocious, and we were all exhausted already. As soon as we knew we were safely outside Lincoln, we started to flag. We pulled over at a highway motel, and checked into two adjoining rooms. We watched the news for a while, but it was all extremely confused. Overall, it was being presented as a failed terror attack, which on one level, of course, it was. As things stood, it seemed like it was going to help the plotters’ aims, albeit not as much as a successful attack would have. But people were still panicking about the ostensibly new threat, and how they couldn’t send their children to school anymore, and how the government had to do more to protect them. Maybe with the emergence of evidence of what happened, including Kanezaki’s photographs and video, the narrative might change. And, of course, maybe Horton would do something to steer things in the direction he said he wanted them to go in. But overall, the whole thing was dispiriting. We watched until we couldn’t take it anymore. Then we all passed out.
When we woke, we turned on the television again, and it seemed the narrative had indeed changed. Now there was talk about a group of secret commandos who had killed the jihadists and foiled the plot and evacuated the children. I wondered what was next.
Kanezaki uploaded his material to Wikileaks. Without more, it might get dismissed as fringe conspiracy theory stuff. Some anonymous spokesman would explain how Gillmor had been operating the drone to take out the terrorists; that the terrorists had learned of his position and gunned him down in cold blood, causing the drone to crash; but that his resourceful men had still managed to eliminate the terrorist threat, even as their brave leader lay dying.
I found I didn’t care all that much. We’d done what we could. And we’d done it well. Now all I had to do was find a way to slip out of the country and enjoy my twenty-five million.
Kanezaki’s sat phone buzzed. It was Horton. Kanezaki handed the phone to me.
“Thank you,” he said. “I do not deserve to be the beneficiary of your acts, but I am.”
“How so?”
“I’m certain that very soon, I will be sent to hell, one way or the other. But in the meantime, you have given me the tools I need to redirect this thing as I always hoped, and to turn it into a force for good.”
“All the people who were killed in those attacks,” I said. “I’m glad it’ll have been for the greater good.”
I felt vaguely hypocritical saying it. On the other hand, I’d never bombed a bunch of innocents.
“It would have been worse if it had been for nothing,” he said. “Or for less than nothing.”
“Well, then, you got what you wanted.” I thought, but didn’t say, you’re still going to die. But I supposed he knew that. He’d already acknowledged as much.
“There are two things I want you to know,” he said.
“All right.”
“First, I have introduced into proper channels the notion that you four men were inadvertently placed on the president’s kill list. That your presence there was due to an intelligence failure that itself was the result of your intrepid penetration of the organization