The Detachment - Barry Eisler [98]
Still, in ordinary times, people would have reacted to videos of gruesome torture with disgust and horror. In the most emotionally irrefutable way, the tapes would implicate various establishment players, and the reputations of the men who had ordered the barbarism in the videos would have been sullied; their careers, derailed. And that highly personal threat had outweighed the government’s institutional interest in finding ways to increase the danger of terrorism—at least enough for the government to agree to cough up a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds.
But everything had changed now. America was under attack, and who would object to what was on the tapes now? Object, hell—they’d clamor for more. The people who had ordered what was shown on the tapes wouldn’t be censured. They’d be heroes.
And that, in essence, was the problem. Circumstances were now eroding the value of the cards he held, so much so that he wondered whether neutralizing the extortion value of the tapes was the purpose of the attacks. Well, even if it wasn’t the primary purpose, it must have occurred to somebody. And regardless, the effect was the same. The value of his assets was declining, and he knew he needed new ones. Hort’s daughter was one. The daughter, and what she would lead to.
Eventually, he made his way to the graffitied roll-down storefronts and cracked cinderblock walls and peeling real estate lease signs of the blighted industrial district. For a while, he wandered among the jobless, solitary men who gravitated to the area, casualties of a hollowed-out economy. He liked the cover they gave him, liked that no one knew them or cared about them or could tell one from the other, liked knowing that as he made himself complicit among them, the world’s callousness and indifference would envelop him, as well.
He paused with his back to the brick façade of a recycling center and looked around. The skyscrapers of the downtown jutted up into a faded blue sky a mile or so behind him. Absent those distant monoliths, he might have been almost anywhere. An old mill town, a dying burg in the rust belt. There was no panic buying here. There was nothing to buy, and no money to use to buy it. It was the last place politicians would ever care about, the last place security forces would ever be sent to protect. He felt anonymous. He felt secure.
He took out Kei’s phone, popped in the battery, and fired it up. He had a number for Hort, but he assumed Hort would have a separate, clean phone exclusively for personal use. He checked Kei’s speed dial entries and immediately saw one called “Dad.” The number wasn’t the one he had, so yes, a separate, personal phone.
He brought up the photos he had taken in the van and keyed the entry for “Dad,” enjoying the feeling of invading Hort’s privacy this way. He waited while the photos uploaded, then called Hort.
One ring, then, “Hey sweet girl, I was just about to open those photos you sent me. How are you?”
“Your sweet girl’s fine,” Larison said. “For now.”
There was a long pause. Larison relished the silence. Could there have been a more pristine way for Hort to convey his sudden shock, and violation, and helplessness? His confusion and impotent rage and, soon enough, his despair?
“I swear to almighty God—”
Larison cut him off. “Look at the photos. She’s alive. For now. The guys you sent to protect her, not so much.”
There was another pause during which Larison assumed Hort was checking the photos. Then Hort said, “Let her go. Just let her go. She didn’t do anything to you—”
“You did something to me.”
“Yes. And this is between you and me, and no one else.”
“It must be killing you, Hort. To know, right now, that you’re the one who taught me to identify the target’s most vulnerable area. And to attack