The Detachment - Barry Eisler [97]
Nicely played, I thought. I waited to see how Dox would respond.
“We did some work for your dad,” Dox said. “Not the kind of work I’m going to discuss with you. And then, to hide the fact that we did the work, he hired some people to do the same kind of work on us. You follow? You really want to know more?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do. And you don’t have to be afraid to tell me.”
“Well, it’s not—”
“It’s not a matter of fear,” I said. “Like Dox said, the less you know, the better for you. And for your father.”
She looked at him. “Your name is Dox?”
“I told you,” I said, “your father already knows who we are. We’re not trying to keep our identities secret from you.”
“Then what’s your name?” she said.
She really was smart. She was doing what she could to glean information that at some point might be operationally useful. And she was also establishing rapport, making herself seem human and making her captors feel human, which in itself might create tactical opportunities for her, or, at a minimum, make it more emotionally difficult for us to harm her.
“You can call me Rain,” I said. “But enough questions for now, okay? We’re tired. We’ll have plenty of time to talk more later, if you want.”
I had a feeling Dox might have liked to protest, but he must have thought better of it.
I was a little concerned about Kei. She had a natural interrogator’s personality—smart, likeable, unthreatening, and inquisitive under the guise of sincere interest. Dox was obviously being careful in response to her inquiries, but I wondered how he might comport himself in my absence. He obviously wanted her to like him. Partly to make her comfortable, partly to assuage his guilt, and partly because, after all, she was gorgeous, and he just couldn’t help himself.
We flex-tied one of Kei’s wrists to a bedpost and passed a couple hours silently, Dox watching her while I catnapped on the floor. I was awakened by a knock.
Dox and I took out our guns and approached the door. “Yes?” I said.
“It’s us,” I heard Larison say.
I had previously placed a strip of duct tape over the peephole to prevent anyone on the other side of the door from knowing by the blockage of light that someone was looking through it. I put my face up close and removed the duct tape. Larison and Treven, as advertised.
I moved the dresser, then let them in and bolted the door behind them. “Any trouble?” I said.
Treven shook his head. “No. Ditched those guys, ditched the van, no problems.”
If Kei wondered whom he was referring to by “those guys,” she didn’t ask.
“All right then,” I said. “If everything’s good to go, it’s time to call Horton.”
Larison looked at Kei and smiled. “Yes, it is.”
It was a long time before Larison was ready to call Hort. He didn’t know how they’d been tracked in D.C.—satellite, surveillance cameras, drone aircraft, whatever—and he needed to be certain it wasn’t going to happen again. So he ramped up his already stringent procedures, spending hours in buses, taxis, malls, and on the subway, making sure he wasn’t just flushing out possible foot and vehicular surveillance, but also that he was obscuring his movements against more remote potential watchers, as well.
He was glad he’d managed to persuade the others that their only move was to take Kei hostage. It had the benefit of being true, of course, but he had his own, additional reasons for wanting Kei as leverage against Hort: he recognized that the value of his threat to release the torture tapes was diminishing.
Larison had long understood that America’s political elites insisted on counter-terror policies like disappearances, torture, drone strikes, and invasions because the elites perversely benefited from the increased terror the policies inevitably produced. He understood the policies weren’t a response to the threat, but were rather the cause of the threat, and that this was by design. A frightened populace was a controllable populace. Endless war and metastasizing