The Detachment - Barry Eisler [30]
He rotated his neck, cracking the joints, and started doing some yoga stretches. It was a tricky situation. On the one hand, Hort had repeatedly proven himself manipulative and worse. On the other hand, if what he claimed about Shorrock was true, that he was planning domestic mass casualty attacks, taking the man out could save thousands of American lives.
But was that really the reason he was here? He’d never been so confused about his own motivations…hell, he’d never been confused at all. The deal had always been simple: a photograph; a file; intelligence on who, what, and where. How was always up to him. Why was never even a consideration. Now, everything was different. Maybe it was all a natural transition. Maybe before he’d been nothing but a tool, albeit a sharp one, and now he was waking up to the way real hitters played the game. Yeah, maybe. That’s what Hort had told him, anyway—that he was beginning to understand the way the world really worked, that he was on his way to being a player in his own right.
He was afraid of those security tapes, he had to admit. The way Hort had presented it, it was the CIA that had the tapes—the deputy director, a guy named Stephen Clements, specifically—and Hort was leaning on Clements to keep the tapes under wraps. But Treven wondered. Isn’t that exactly how an operator like Hort would position this kind of leverage? Someone else is trying to extort you, and I’m your best friend who’s stopping him. How could he ever really know? If he stepped out of line, he could easily find himself arrested and charged with murder. Regardless of the truth of it all, Hort would just tell him he was sorry, he’d done all he could to prevent it from happening.
He knew he couldn’t live this way forever. At some point, he would have to go after Clements, and probably Hort, too. That, or just tell them all to fuck off and take his chances. He wondered if the real reason he’d accepted Hort’s orders this time was just to defer that day of reckoning.
Or was it something else? Having learned through multiple near-death experiences just how much of the noble-sounding king and country rhetoric was bullshit designed to fool the impressionable and empower the corrupt, was it possible he still craved being on the inside so much he was pretending not to know better? When he put it that way, it felt pathetic, but the notion of abandoning the military—abandoning the ISA—was horrible. Just imagining it made him feel anxious to the point of panic. What would he do? Who would he be?
He blew out a long breath and popped up on his palms in upward facing dog, his pelvis on the floor, his back arched. He liked the yoga. He found he didn’t bounce back quite as quickly as he had in his football and wrestling days, and that the esoteric stretches seemed to help.
One of the attendants walked over, an attractive brunette wearing a spa uniform with a nametag reading Alisa. Treven had noticed her watching him earlier and wondered if she was interested. Apparently that would be a yes.
“I didn’t figure you for a yoga aficionado,” she said.
“I don’t know about aficionado,” Treven said, coming to his feet. “But I like the stretches.”
“It’s smart. A lot of guys who are into weights don’t stretch enough.”
“Do you teach this stuff?”
“Personal trainer. I don’t think you need it, though. I was watching you, you know what you’re doing.”
She was certainly easy on the eyes, and any other time, he would have been happy to follow wherever this led. But not today.
“Well, I better wrap it up,” he said. “You can only do so much