Inside Out (3 page)

Ulrich glanced down at a small sign in the pathway next to him. Through the frost obscuring the face of it he read
Silence and Respect
.

He took off a glove, reached into his coat pocket, and clicked off the Dictaphone he’d been running since this otherwise off-the-record meeting began. Then he came out with a tube of ChapStick to conceal what he’d really been up to. He rubbed the ChapStick across his lips, dropped it back into his pocket, and pulled the glove back on. It wasn’t the first time he’d taped these sorts of conversations and he doubted it would be the last. He knew he would never need the recordings, but it would still feel good to have them. If his enemies ever breached all his other defenses and threatened to close in on him, he could brandish his recordings like a suicide bomb. A last-ditch threat in case the worst should ever happen. And the worst had never looked more likely than it did right now.

Still, on balance he was starting to feel a little better. He’d been rattled there for a moment, true, especially when they’d mentioned the Caspers, but that was before he’d had a chance to consider the options. Now, the more he thought about it, the more he realized he had assets he could deploy. Everybody was exposed on this, if
not legally, then at least politically. The main thing was, he had a plan. And no one could work a plan the way he could.

“Remember,” he said. “The
New York Times
. Two interrogation tapes, as far as you know, destroyed years ago. Now go. Get it done.”

The New York Times
,
December 6, 2007

All told, more than three thousand suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies
.

GEORGE W. BUSH

They literally were chaining people up for days …. If they ever had videos of this, it’s something out of the thirteenth century
.

BOB WOODWARD

So it appears we now have evidence Ghul was in a CIA prison. Where he is today is still a mystery …
.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OFFICE OF LEGAL COUNSEL MEMO

The New York Times
,
March 2, 2009

Ben Treven could feel the Australians looking at him again, sizing him up for whether he’d make a good victim tonight. He brushed his blond hair out of his face and kept his gaze on nothing in particular, nodding his head slightly as though he was enjoying the pulsing house music. He knew the smart thing was to ignore them, but part of him couldn’t help hoping they’d take their wordless interview just a little further. It had been a hell of a day and he could feel that old, crazy urge to unload on someone. If these guys wanted to give him a reason, it was up to them.

The three of them were in civilian clothes, but he’d heard the accents and seen the swagger and took them for sailors on shore leave. Manila’s Burgos Street, an eternally crumbling matrix of neon and girly bars and massage parlors, had ingested them as it had ingested generations of sailors and marines and sex tourists
before them. It would appropriate their money, alleviate their lust, and expel them afterward like pale effluent into the dank Manila night.

The burliest of the three missed his shot at the spotlit pool table, and as he stepped away to make room for his buddy, he squinted and waved a hand up and down in Ben’s line of sight, palm forward, as though wiping a window. The gesture read,
Hello? Anybody there?

Ben kept his expression blank.
Oh yeah, pal, somebody’s here. And believe me, you don’t want to meet him
.

A petite Filipina waitress in heels and a microscopic skirt sauntered over to the pool table, balancing a tray of San Miguels one-handed. Ben hadn’t seen her earlier—she must have just started her shift. She took the Australians’ pesos, distributed their beers, and studiously failed to respond to their leering smiles. Then she turned and headed in Ben’s direction, the Australians’ eyes following her ass.

“You need another drink, sweetie?” she asked Ben, smiling, her eyes dark, her teeth white against the smooth brown skin of her face.

He was standing with his back to the bar and she would have known he could have just ordered from the bartender. He didn’t know whether her interest was personal or professional. He wondered whether it would irritate the Australians.

He shook his head and offered only a polite smile. “Thanks, I’m good.”

She leaned a little closer. “Are your eyes … green?”

“That’s what people tell me.”

She smiled again. “It’s my favorite color. If you need anything, just tell me, okay?”

“I will. Thanks.”

He told himself that as long as he didn’t do anything to provoke them, it wasn’t his fault. But he also recognized that he was ignoring them almost ostentatiously now, that a more effective way to avoid a problem would have been to raise his Bombay Sapphire
and give them a cold smile:
I’m aware of you, I’m not afraid of you, I’m being friendly so you can now look for trouble elsewhere without having to acknowledge you’ve backed down to the guy you were initially assessing
.

He took a swallow of the gin and set the glass down on the bar. Yeah, that would have been the better way. But that afternoon his ex-wife had told him she never wanted to see him again, that their daughter, Ami, believed the man now raising her was her real father, that he shouldn’t have tracked them down in the first place, and what could he have been thinking after they hadn’t heard from him in nearly three years? She hadn’t even seemed angry when he’d approached her in the rain in front of Ami’s suburban Manila school, just uncomfortable, as though he was no more than an old acquaintance she would have preferred not to run into. She’d countered his protests, ignored his entreaties, and dismissed him with obvious relief. And instead of doing the minimally dignified thing and just leaving, he had lurked around the corner, getting wetter and angrier, until he heard the school bell, and then he had watched pathetically from behind a tree as his ex-wife collected their small daughter, kissing her and taking her by the hand and leading her away before Ben even had time to get a good look at her face. And now he was on his third double Bombay Sapphire, and these chumps were giving him the stink eye, and the bar was too noisy and the spotlights too glaring and Manila was too fucking polluted and humid and he was sick of it, he was sick of all of it, and someone was going to pay.

The burly Australian waved again. Ben maintained his thousand-yard stare. The Australian cocked his head and said something to his buddies; over the music and the noise of conversation at the bar, Ben couldn’t hear what. The three of them started walking over. Ben noted they hadn’t put down their pool cues. His heart kicked a little harder and he felt his mouth wanting to twist into a smile.

The Australians took their time, watching him, continuing to gauge him as they approached. None of the bar’s patrons, generally
young, mostly western, universally stupid, seemed to notice. Ben remained motionless. The Australians weren’t sure what he was, and Ben knew they would bark before they got up the courage to bite. Amateurs.

They stopped an arm’s distance in front of him, three abreast, the burly one in the middle, the pool cue in his left hand, his right arm draped across his buddy’s shoulder. He said, “Looking out of it there, mate. Too much to drink, eh?”

Ben kept his gaze unfocused, noting the placement of their hips and hands, smiling now as though at some private joke. The burly one was clearly the leader. Drop him suddenly and violently and the other two would be useless for anything other than hauling his carcass home. There were so many ways to do it, too, it was almost sad to have to choose. The guy’s weight was on his right foot, exposing the instep to a stomp. His knees were open, too, and so were his balls. Or start with the throat, move to the head, then work your way down in whatever time you had before the guy collapsed.

The guy leaned in, his eyes trained on Ben’s face. “You hear me, mate? I’m talking to you.”

Still Ben didn’t look at them. “I know. It’s making it harder for me to ignore you.”

The guy furrowed his brow. “You’re trying to ignore us, is that it?”

In a different mood, Ben might have felt sorry for the guy. He might have just met the guy’s eyes and let him know with a look what was a second away from happening. Then maybe give them a face-saving way out, maybe tell them he was just here to chill, sorry if he’d done anything to offend them, fair enough?

Yeah, in a different mood.

The guy glanced left and right at his buddies as though sharing his amusement, but in fact seeking reassurance. “You believe this guy?” he said. Then he turned back to Ben. “Hey. Look at me when I talk to you.”

Ben felt it coming. He wasn’t even trying to stop it anymore.

The guy raised his right hand and went to jab his outstretched finger into Ben’s chest. “I said—”

Ben shot his left hand out and wrapped the guy’s finger in his fist. He stepped in and bent the finger savagely back. There was a sound like snapping tinder. The guy shrieked and plummeted to his knees. The sounds of conversation and laughter ceased and Ben could sense people reorienting, trying to figure out what had caused that bloodcurdling sound. Ben bent what was left of the finger farther back and twisted it. The guy shrieked again, his face contorted in pain.

The guy to the left choked up on his pool cue and started to bring it around, and Ben instantly realized he’d been wrong about them turning tail. A klaxon went off in his mind and some deep-seated setting instantly ratcheted from
bar fight
to
combat
. He snatched his glass off the bar and flung gin into the guy’s face. The guy recoiled and started to turn away. Ben grabbed a bar stool and swung it in a tight arc, going for center mass, getting his hips and full hundred and ninety behind it. The guy made the mistake of trying to duck, and the stool caught him in the head instead of the shoulder and blasted him sideways.

Somebody shouted. People started scrambling away. The third guy was backpedaling, his left arm out, his right hand reaching for the back of his belt, obviously going for a weapon, trying to gain an additional half second to deploy it. Ben bellowed a war cry and lunged forward, swatting away the guy’s outstretched arm, grabbing and securing his right wrist, attacking his eyes with his free hand. The guy screamed and tried to shake free and something clattered to the floor. Ben shot a knee into his balls. The guy doubled over and Ben let him go. He saw the first guy was coming shakily to his feet. He stepped in, wrapped his fingers in the first guy’s hair, yanked him forward, and clubbed him in the back of the neck. The guy’s arms spasmed and Ben felt something crack under his fist.

He spun to face the other two. They were twisting and groaning. The first guy was splayed on the floor, motionless.

A thought flashed through his mind, sobering in its clarity:
did I kill him?

He looked toward the exit. The patrons had scattered to the periphery and the center of the bar was clear, but ten feet away, between Ben and the door, four wiry Filipinos were pointing pistols at him. Off-duty cops? Another thought flashed through his mind:

Shit, what are the chances?

Two of them were starting to fan out to his flanks now, the two in the center moving forward, pistols still forward, one guy producing a pair of handcuffs from the back of his belt.

Right now? Chances look about a hundred percent
.

Even if he’d been armed, and he wasn’t, dropping all four without getting shot in return would have required a hell of a lot of luck. He briefly considered raising his arms to show he was no threat and just walking past them to the exit. But their quick reaction to the disturbance, and the tactical way they were approaching him now, told Ben these guys were experienced, that they’d be happy to shoot him before suffering the humiliation of letting him just walk on by.

Ben looked around and saw people holding up cellphones. They were taking his picture. Or video.

He glanced at the Australians again. Two were still twisting. The other was still inert. The red haze was suddenly gone and a chill rippled through him. He raised his hands, palms forward, and thought,
Oh, shit
.

Ulrich looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows and watched the K Street traffic twelve stories below, his feet perched on his mahogany desk, a wireless headset snug against his ear. “Thanks, Jim,” he said. “Really appreciated your time last week. And my client is just delighted the senator understands how counterproductive any additional regulation would be on top of what the industry is already burdened with. If you have any other questions, I know it would be their pleasure to arrange another golf outing. And of course you can count on their complete support. You bet. Thanks again.”