The Detachment (30 page)

What we were doing was creating a kind of shell game using the overpasses and the garages. We still didn’t know how Horton had tracked us to the Capital Hilton, and our working assumption was that he had used spy satellites. We had to assume he had access to the resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. If so, and if he had a fixed point for a target—such as, say, Dulles Airport, or outside his daughter’s house—it was possible he could track that target from the fixed point to wherever the target went, virtually indefinitely. If our working assumption was right, we’d been lucky in Washington, maybe in the hotel parking garage, maybe elsewhere between D.C. and Los Angeles. But we didn’t want to rely on luck again. Every time we drove the van under an overpass, or in and out of a garage, we created the possibility that we’d switched Kei into one of the dozens of vehicles that emerged from under the overpass at around the same time we did, or from the garage afterward. Multiply this dynamic by dozens of overpasses and garages times dozens of cars, many of which would themselves continue under other overpasses and into other garages, and we could create a dataset too big for Horton to act on, at least in the time we would permit him.

The plan now was for Treven and Larison to continue the shell game for the next couple hours, then to ditch the van, bleach it out, and get back to the hotel using buses and the Metro system. By the time they were done, Horton would be facing thousands of possibilities, each of which would have to be manually tracked, assuming it could be tracked at all. As for Dox and me, we did one more switch, into the U-Haul truck, which we had left in a giant underground garage in a mall in Westwood. Dox stayed at the wheel and I stayed in the cargo area with Kei.

At a little past noon, I felt a series of short turns that told me were back at the motel. “How are you holding up?” I asked Kei.

“I need a bathroom. Badly. Please don’t put me in a diaper.”

I checked my watch. “Can you hold on for three more minutes?”

She glared at me. “Barely.”

The truck stopped. “Face the front of the truck,” I told her. She complied. A moment later, the cargo doors opened and Dox climbed in. He was carrying an extra-large cargo carrier, 59 by 24 by 24 inches. Just roomy enough for someone of Kei’s dimensions. He pulled the doors shut behind him.

“All right, Mimi,” I said. “One more transfer.”

Dox, looking distinctly reluctant, set down the cargo bag and held it open. Kei grimaced, then stepped into it and curled up on her side. “I’m not going to gag you,” I told her. “Remember our deal.”

I was betting I’d be able to spot when she was planning an insurrection, and that I’d be able to preempt it. In the meantime, she would bide her time, believing she was lulling me. That was fine. The net effect was that she would be unconsciously inhibited by what she thought was hope. Meaning she would be comfortable. And, more importantly, more cooperative.

We zipped her in and opened the door. Dox picked up the bag as though it was filled with nothing but Styrofoam peanuts, slung it over a shoulder, and carried her into the motel. I shut the truck doors and followed him in.

We set her down in the room, unzipped the bag, and helped her to her feet. I opened the folding knife I was carrying and let her see it. Dox was holding the Wilson—not because he wanted to, but because I’d told him to. I wanted to give her every possible psychological excuse not to resist, including the obvious facts of our numbers, our size—or Dox’s size, anyway—and our weapons.

“I’m going to untie your wrists,” I said. “Take your time in the bathroom. We won’t watch you, but the door stays open. If you do anything we don’t like, we’ll have to diaper you, hogtie you, gag you, and put a hood on you, and leave you like that for what could be days. It’s up to you.”

I stepped behind her and quickly patted her down. Larison already had, and even if he hadn’t, it wasn’t likely she was carrying, but this was Horton’s daughter, after all, and it would be foolish to assume any woman couldn’t be equipped with pepper spray or an FS Hideaway knife. Better to double check. But Kei had no weapons, nor even anything that could be used for one. I took hold of her wrists and cut the flex ties.

She hurried into the bathroom. It was tiny and windowless, and with the door open there was nowhere she could go for concealment. And I’d already checked it for anything that could remotely be used as an improvised weapon. About the only thing she might have done was to wrap her fist in a towel, smash the mirror, and pick up a long shard using the towel as a kind of handle. I judged such a move at this point extremely unlikely. If I was wrong, though, I would have plenty of time to get an upraised desk chair between us, while Dox approached her from behind.

I turned away while Dox dragged a dresser in front of the door. A small thing, but enough to dissuade her from thinking she could get away with a mad dash for the exit. I heard her urinating for a long time. When the sound stopped, I glanced over just to be cautious, but everything was fine—she had already stood and had quickly pulled up her jeans.

She came out of the bathroom and said, “I’m hungry.”

I nodded. “We’ll give you some food in a minute. First, I want you to lie facedown on the floor.”

“Why?”

“Because it’ll slow you down and keep you from being tempted to do something that might get you hurt. The alternative is, we tie you up again. I need a bathroom break myself, and I don’t want fewer than two people watching you when you’re free to move about.”

She hesitated, then did as I told her. I used the bathroom, then Dox followed suit. When he was done, I told Kei she could sit on one of the beds. She did so.

Dox sat across from her and said, “I apologize for inconveniencing you, Ms. Kei. We’re in a tight spot, and it was your dad who put us here. We need to give him a little incentive to do the right thing. Which I believe he will. Despite the late unpleasantness, he’s always struck me as the kind of man who responds to incentives.”

“That’s what you call this?” she said. “Inconveniencing me?”

“Well,” Dox said, “in the end, I don’t know that it matters so much what we call it. But I do apologize regardless. Now, you said you’re hungry. We’ve got some pretty good chow from a fancy supermarket, if you like. You look like a salad girl to me, am I right?”

“If by salad you mean cheeseburger, then yeah.”

“A cheeseburger’s a tall order at the moment,” Dox said. “But maybe later. In the meantime, we’ve got a few sandwiches in a cooler, left over from yesterday. Not as fresh as you might like, but I expect they’ll taste fine if you’re hungry enough. What would you like? Roast beef, I’m guessing now? With a tasty smoothie to wash it down?”

“Whatever. Yes.”

I sat in the desk chair, watching Dox feeding her and doing what he could to make her comfortable under the circumstances. Women were his weakness, I knew, the lady’s man bluster mostly a cover for the bottom line fact that he really just adored them. And his southern code of chivalry was no bullshit, either. He wasn’t happy about what we were doing, and I realized I’d have to watch him with Kei for the opposite reason I’d have to watch Larison. Where Larison was likely to let his evident hatred of Horton cause him to harm Kei, Dox might get too attached and grow to feel too guilty, and therefore become too susceptible to manipulation.

“Why don’t you tell me what my dad did to you?” Kei asked him at one point. “What difference would it make if you did?”

Dox took a sip of the smoothie he was drinking. I was aware that he’d broken bread with her, and felt uneasy about it.

“Wouldn’t make any difference to us,” he said. “But I don’t want to mix you up in this anymore than we already have. I mean, you’re close with your daddy, right?”

I saw her weigh the pros and cons of possible responses before settling on the truth. “Yes,” she said. “We’re close. Which is why I want to know what he could have done to wrong you. I really can’t imagine it.”

Dox smiled. “I can tell he’s lucky to have you for a daughter. And all I can tell you is, part of the burden of being a man, and the nature of the defect that defines us, is that we sometimes have to do things we can’t tell our loved ones about.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because sometimes things need to be done in the world, and telling you would make you complicit. By keeping you innocent, we save you from having to join us in hell. It might not sound like much, but it is a comfort when you’re faced with hard choices.”

“But that’s ridiculous. You make women sound like children. You think we can’t decide for ourselves? That’s completely demeaning.”

“Demeaning? Hell, I wish someone would do it for me.”

“No, you don’t. You like keeping it all to yourself because doing so makes you feel powerful.”

Dox looked perplexed. “I don’t think so.”

“I do. You say my dad did something to you, something so horrible that now in your mind it justifies kidnapping and threatening his daughter? You’re willing to do all that, but not even to tell me what this is all about?”

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.”

I
t 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 security procedures meant enormous profits for the corporations the politicians served. In this sense, the possible publication of graphic videos of American servicemen torturing screaming Muslim prisoners had always been, from the perspective of America’s elites, as much a promise as a threat.