The Detachment - Barry Eisler [138]
He thanked me when we said goodbye, and I wasn’t sure for what—for keeping his secret; for keeping him from walking away from us in a way he would have regretted; for taking the chance I had taken in trusting him.
“Don’t mention it,” I said. “It was all just self-preservation.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “I owe you.”
“Owe me what? You brought me in on an op that made me twenty-five million.”
He didn’t answer right away, and I realized he was thinking his original plan hadn’t involved my keeping the diamonds. And that his recollection of whatever he’d originally planned must have been producing uncharacteristic stirrings of conscience. I thought I’d been lucky things had worked out as they had. It could easily have gone another way.
“I don’t know where I’ll be, exactly,” he said. “But if you need me, I’ll have your back.”
Coming from Larison, an offer like that would be as rare as it was meaningful. I appreciated it, and I told him so. I had a feeling I’d see him again, and I told him that, too.
And so our detachment dissolved. For a time, anyway.
I went back to Tokyo, of course, as I always seem to, like a salmon swimming upriver to the spot where it was born. I settled in, and enjoyed the feeling of a lull in my life. The city continued to recover steadily from the trauma of the earthquake and tsunami, and I gave an impossibly large and appropriately anonymous amount to relief efforts in the north. Revelations about the corruption that led to the Fukushima reactor meltdown were astonishing, even for a cynic like me. Still, nothing seemed to come of it. Japan, it seemed, at least in terms of apathy, was not so different from America.
Because there, too, the news was astonishing. Revelations, indictments, charges of treason. Most of it true, as Horton had foretold, the lies woven so carefully into the fabric that no one who didn’t understand the entire tapestry would ever spot them. Horton, again as he foretold, developed an enormous following. There were calls for him to run for president. To his credit, I supposed, he demurred, and I imagined that what people believed was his noble resistance to the allure of power would one day burnish his legend.
But despite all the revelations and arrests and the outrage, I didn’t really see all that much change. The wars kept grinding along. There were no populist revolts, no peasants with pitchforks storming the Capitol or burning the barons of Wall Street, even in effigy. There was talk of a third party—a second party would have been the more accurate way to put it, I thought—but nothing meaningful came of it. Though Wikileaks was the conduit for everything that was coming out, the New York Times and all the others were getting the credit, as though they would have touched any of it if Wikileaks hadn’t forced them, exactly as Kanezaki had said. Overall, people seemed to want to understand perfidy as a problem with personalities rather than as something insidious in their institutions.
Horton kept at it, working the levers of his popularity and power, but I had the sense the commission, far from being a vehicle he could steer as he wanted, was more a vessel that was gradually coming to control and contain his ambitions. I wondered how disappointed he was, and whether, in the dark, quiet hours of the very early morning, he ever lay in the sleepless grip of something like despair, the souls of all the lives he’d cut short pressing in close upon him.
I wasn’t worried about his coming after any of us. I thought he’d been telling the truth when he’d said he didn’t think we could do him much damage. And killing one of us without killing us all would have been dangerous. If any of us decided he was a threat again, Horton would have a real problem to contend with. And then there was his daughter, of course. Maybe she’d told him Dox was a softie. But Horton wouldn’t know about the rest of us. Would he really risk reprisals? I doubted it.
Watching his faraway machinations from my haven in Tokyo, as remote as the Marvel