The Detachment - Barry Eisler [79]
We also stopped at a Starbucks so I could access their free Wi-Fi, and I checked the secure site. I half-expected a message from Horton, trying to explain away the unexplainable. But he must have known how useless that would be under the circumstances. He’d used us, then tried to clip us like the loose end we now represented. We knew he would try again, just as he knew we’d be gunning to get to him first. The state of play was so clear that anything anyone might have said would have been useless, even absurd.
There was a message from Kanezaki, though. He described the attack at the White House, which the media had gotten more or less right after the initial, confused reports. And he said the NSA was picking up chatter about more attacks coming. There were rumors about the president considering a major response. Kanezaki wanted me to call him, and I wrote that I couldn’t, not for another day or two. After the ambush at the hotel, my paranoia was at a full simmer. Maybe Horton had managed to stitch together enough data from airport surveillance cameras and satellite imagery to track us to the Hilton. He’d been expecting us in the city, after all. If so, and if he’d lost track of us after the hotel, then even with all the technology in the world, for the time being we’d be the proverbial needle in a haystack. I didn’t want to take any chance at all about a call being traced to a location this far west, from which the opposition might predict our further trajectory. From which Horton might even guess where we were ultimately heading, and why.
On the afternoon of the second day, Treven was driving while I rode shotgun. Mostly the roads were eerily quiet, but periodically, the quiet would be shattered by a passing military convoy, after which, the absence of traffic would be more spooky still.
I asked Treven the same security questions I had put to Dox, but got no additional insights. If he was hiding something, he was hiding it well. He told me a little about himself. Cut his teeth in Mogadishu. Climbed the ops ladder from Airborne to SF to ISA. A very competent man, no doubt, both from the resume and from what I’d seen at the hotel. But I didn’t feel the kind of connection with him that I’d started to feel with Larison. In Larison, I sensed turmoil, but also purpose. In Treven, what I sensed felt more like…confusion. And compensation. For what, I didn’t know.
We were listening to a country music station when, just as a day before, the deejay’s typically smooth and soothing voice cut in high-pitched and earnest after a song.
“Following on yesterday’s attack on the White House,” he said, “we have another horrifying report. A suicide bombing in the Mall of America in Minneapolis. Reports of a truck driven into the building, and a partial structural collapse. I know you can’t see it, this is radio, but I’m watching the video now and I have to tell you, my God, my God, it’s unspeakable. It’s like the twin towers again…Folks, I’m sorry to tell you, but yesterday was not a one-off. These have got to be coordinated. Let’s pray the government is doing something to protect us.”
“Holy fucking shit,” Treven said, and that was all, there was nothing else to say. We drove grimly on, listening for more, dreading that we’d hear it.
Outside of Memphis, we did. Two more suicide bombings: one at a Giants game at AT&T Park in San Francisco; the other at a church in Lubbock, Texas. More mass casualties. Lurid descriptions of victims, the burned and buried and blinded. Reporters interviewing dazed survivors, hysterical people trying to find their family members, wailing parents clutching the mangled bodies of their daughters and sons.
“Country’s going to go mad from this,” Treven said grimly.
I nodded. “That’s exactly the idea. If nine-eleven, plus a little anthrax afterward, could make the country mad, imagine what you could get away with if you could increase that kind of fear. And sustain it.”
We drove on. The radio was nothing but special reports now. The attacks had driven everything