The Detachment (2 page)

From their size, close-cropped hair, and Oakley wraparound shades, favored these days by Special Forces and their private sector counterparts, I made the visitors as military, maybe serving, maybe ex. That in itself was unremarkable: the Kodokan is hardly unknown among the American soldiers, Marines, and airmen stationed in Japan. Plenty of them come to visit, and even to train. Still, I prefer to assume the worst, especially when the assumption costs me little. I let the college kid throw me with
tai-otoshi
, the throw he’d been trying for all night and obviously his money move. In my former line of work, being underestimated was something to cultivate. I might have been out of the life, but I wasn’t out of the habit.

I was careful when I left that night, my alertness at a higher than usual pitch. I checked the places I would set up if I’d been trying to get to me: behind the concrete pillars flanking the building’s entrance on Hakusan-dori; the parked cars along the busy, eight-lane street; the entrance to the Mita-sen subway line to my left. I saw only oblivious
sarariman
commuters, their interchangeable dark suits limp and rumpled from the diesel-laced humidity, their brows beaded with sweat but their expressions relieved at the prospect of a few undemanding hours at home before the next day’s corporate exertions. Several riders on motor scooters went by, the two-stroke engines of their machines whining in and then fading out as they passed, but they weren’t wearing the full-face helmets favored by motorcycle drive-by gunners, and they never even slowed or looked at me. A woman rode a bicycle past me on the sidewalk, a chubby-cheeked toddler secured in a basket attached to the handlebars, his arms outstretched and his tiny hands balled into fists at what I didn’t know. No one felt out of place, and I saw no sign of the soldiers. If they didn’t show up again, I’d classify their one-night presence as a nonevent.

But they did show up again, the following night. And this time, they stayed only briefly, probably just long enough to scan through the scores of
judoka
and confirm the presence of their target. If I hadn’t been doing my own frequent, unobtrusive scans of the spectator seats, I would have missed their appearance entirely.

I continued training until eight and then showered as usual, not wanting to do anything out of the ordinary, anything that might suggest I’d spotted something and was preparing for it. But I was preparing, and as a plan unspooled in my mind and adrenaline snaked out through my body, and as the presence of danger and the certainty of how I would deal with it settled into place with an awful, familiar clarity, I had to acknowledge to myself that I’d been preparing my whole life, and that whatever intervals of quiet I had ever briefly indulged were as meaningful and relevant as dreams. Only the preparation was real—the preparation, and the purpose it always enabled.

B
en Treven and Daniel Larison sat on stools at the window counter of a Douter Coffee shop fifty yards south of the Kodokan on Hakusan-dori, sipping black coffee and waiting for the two contractors to return. Treven had wanted to join them, to get a firsthand look at the man whom up until the week before he’d thought to be a myth, but Larison had insisted there was no upside to sending in more than two of them, and Treven knew he was right. It bothered him how easily and naturally Larison had established himself as the alpha of the team, but he also had to admit that Larison, in his mid-forties, ten years Treven’s senior, had seen more of the shit even than Treven had, and had survived heavier opposition. He told himself if he kept his mouth shut he might learn something, and he supposed it was true. But after ten years in the Intelligence Support Activity, the deliberately blandly named covert arm of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, he wasn’t used to running into people who acted like his tactical superiors, and even fewer he thought might be right about it.

Treven was facing the window in the direction of the Kodokan, and saw the contractors, whom he knew only as Beckley and Krichman, approaching before Larison did. He nodded his head slightly. “Here they come.”

Larison had instructed all of them to use their mobile phones as little as possible and to keep them shut off, with the batteries removed, except at previously agreed-upon intervals. The units were all rented, of course, and all under false identities, but good security involved multiple layers. The CIA’s careless use of cell phones in the Abu Omar rendition from Milan had led to the issuance of arrest warrants from an Italian judge for a bunch of CIA officials, including the Milan station chief, and Treven figured Larison was applying the lessons of that op to this one. Still, the current precautions struck him as excessive—they weren’t here to kill or kidnap Rain, after all, only to contact him. On the other hand, just as with sending only the two contractors into the Kodokan for the initial recon, he supposed there was no real downside to the extra care.

The contractors came in and stood so they were facing Treven and Larison and had a view of the street. Treven had seen plenty of foreigners in this section of the city, but even so he knew they were all conspicuous. Treven’s blond hair and green eyes had always been somewhat of a surveillance liability, of course, but he figured that to the average Japanese, such features wouldn’t much distinguish him from Larison, with his dark hair and olive skin, or from any other Caucasian foreigner, for that matter. What the natives would notice, and remember, was the collective size of the four of them. Treven, a heavyweight wrestler in high school and linebacker for Stanford before dropping out, was actually the smallest of the group. Larison was obviously into weights, and, if Hort could be believed, maybe steroids, too. And the contractors could almost have been pro wrestlers. Treven wondered if Hort had selected them in the hope their size might intimidate Rain when they made contact. He doubted it would make a difference. Size only mattered in a fair fight, and from what he’d heard of Rain, the man was too smart to ever allow a fight to be fair.

“He’s there,” the man called Beckley said. “Training, just like last night.”

Larison nodded. “Maybe we should switch off now,” he said in his low, raspy voice. “Two nights in a row, he’s probably spotted you. Treven and I can take the point.”

“He didn’t spot us,” Krichman said. “We were in the stands, he barely even glanced our way.”

Beckley grunted in agreement. “Look, if the guy were that surveillance conscious, he wouldn’t be showing up at the same location at the same time every night in the first place. He didn’t see us.”

Larison took a sip of coffee. “He any good? The judo, I mean.”

Krichman shrugged. “I don’t know. Seemed like he had his hands full with the kid he was training with.”

Larison took another sip of coffee and paused as though thinking. “You know, it probably doesn’t really matter that much whether he saw you or not. We know he’s here, we can just brace him on his way out.”

“Yeah, we could,” Krichman said, his tone indicating the man found the idea hopelessly unambitious. “But what kind of leverage do we have then? We found him at the Kodokan. Tomorrow he could just go and train somewhere else. Or give up training, period. We want him to feel pressured, isn’t that what Hort said? So let’s show him we know where he lives. Brace him there, make him feel we’re into his life in a big way. That’s how you get people to play ball—by getting them
by
the balls.”

Treven couldn’t disagree with the man’s assessment overall. He was surprised Larison didn’t see it that way, too. But Larison must have realized his oversight, because he said, “That makes sense. But come on, he must have seen you. Treven and I should take the point.”

“Look,” Beckley said, his tone indicating the tail end of patience, “he didn’t see us. Krichman and I will take the point.” He gestured to one of the buttons on his damp navy shirt. “You’ll see everything we see, through this. If he spots us, and I doubt he will, we’ll switch off like we planned. Okay?”

The button was actually the lens of a high definition pocket video camera that shot color in daylight and infrared-enhanced black-and-white at night. Each of them was similarly outfitted, and each unit transmitted wirelessly to the others on the network. A separate unit, about the size of a pack of playing cards, could be held in the hand to display what the other units were transmitting. It was nothing fancy, just a stripped-down and slightly modified version of the Eagle Eyes monitoring system that was increasingly popular with various government agencies, but it enabled a small surveillance team to spread out beyond what traditional line-of-sight would allow, and also enabled each team member to know the position of all the others without excessive reliance on cell phones or other verbal communication.

Larison raised his hands in a
you win
gesture. “All right. You two cover the entrance of the Kodokan. Treven and I will wait here and fall in behind you when you start following him.”

Beckley smiled—a little snidely, Treven thought. And it did seem like Larison, maybe in a weak attempt to save face, was pretending to issue orders that had in fact just been issued to him.

Beckley and Krichman went out. Larison turned and watched through the window as they walked away.

Treven said, “You think he’s going to come out again at the same time? Hort said he was so surveillance conscious.”

Larison took a sip of coffee. “Why do you think Hort sent those assholes along with us?”

It was a little annoying that Larison hadn’t just answered the question. Treven paused, then said, “He doesn’t trust us, obviously.”

“That’s right. They’re working for him, not with us. Remember that.”

Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton was Treven’s commander in the ISA, and had once been Larison’s, too, before Larison had gone rogue, faked his own death, and tried to blackmail Uncle Sam for a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds in exchange for videos of American operatives torturing Muslim prisoners. He’d almost gotten away with it, too, but Hort had played him and kept the diamonds for himself. Treven wasn’t entirely sure why. On the one hand, Hort’s patriotism and integrity were unquestionable. A black man who might have been denied advancement in other areas but who was not only promoted, but held in awe by the army meritocracy, he loved the military and he loved the men who served under him. Yet none of that had prevented him from fucking Larison when he’d needed to, as he’d once tried to fuck Treven. He’d told Treven why: America was being run by a kind of oligarchy, which didn’t seem to trouble Hort much except that the oligarchy had become greedy and incompetent—grievous sins, apparently, in Hort’s strange moral universe. The country needed better management, he’d said. He was starting something big, and the diamonds were a part of it. So, he hoped, would be Treven and Larison, and this guy Rain they’d been sent to find, too, if he could be persuaded.

So of course Hort didn’t trust them. They weren’t under duress, exactly, but it wasn’t all a positive inducement, win-win dynamic, either. Larison had to be looking for payback, as well as a chance to recover the diamonds. And Treven had wised up enough to recognize the strings Hort had been using to manipulate him, and to know he needed to find a way to cut them, too. There was the little matter of some unfortunate security videos, for example, that could implicate Treven in the murder of a prominent former administration official. It didn’t matter that it had been a CIA op and that Treven had nothing to do with the man’s death. What mattered was that Hort and the CIA had the tapes, and might use them if Treven got out of line. So for the moment, the whole arrangement felt like an unstable alliance of convenience, all shifting allegiances and conflicting motives. Hort would never have sent them off without a means of monitoring them, and under the circumstances, Larison’s injunction that he remember who Beckley and Krichman were really working for felt gratuitous, even a little insulting. Maybe the man was just chafing at the fact that the contractors didn’t seem to give a shit about what Larison assumed was his own authority. Treven decided to let it go.

But what he wouldn’t let go was that Larison had ignored his question. “Same place, same time, same way out, two nights in a row?” he said. “That sound like our guy?”

Larison glanced at him, and Treven could have sworn the man was almost smiling.

“Depends,” Larison said.

“What do you mean?”

“Rain spotted them last night for sure, when they were there for longer. Very likely, he spotted them again tonight, too.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I would have spotted them. Because if this guy is who Hort says he is, he would have spotted them. Because if he’s not good enough to have spotted them, Hort wouldn’t even be bothering with him.”

Treven considered. “So what does that mean, if he spotted them but comes out the same way at the same time anyway?”

This time, Larison did smile. “It means I’m glad it’s not us walking point.”