“How do you know so much about this?” I said.
There was a pause, then he said, “Because I’m part of it.”
I glanced over at him, then back to the road. “Part of it how?”
“Never mind how. I was brought in, I played along, I want to stop it.”
“Without leaving a return address.”
“By the time the third and final critical player succumbs to ‘natural causes,’ they might catch on to me, in which case I’m prepared to face the music, which I expect will be a funeral dirge. But yes, in the meantime, I have a chance to destroy this thing root and branch. For that, I need an untraceable outside detachment, and speed, and no signs of foul play.”
We drove in silence for a few moments. Horton turned to Dox.
“Can you take that gun off my back long enough to tell me what you think about all this?”
I glanced in the rearview and saw Dox grin. He said, “I’ve just been waiting to hear about the per diem.”
Treven listened to Rain’s briefing over the sounds of the speeding L.A. Metro subway car, both impressed and concerned. Impressed that Rain had spotted a weakness in Shorrock’s defenses, had immediately improvised to exploit it, and had finished Shorrock with the cyanide as planned. Concerned that Rain and Dox had since met Hort and now seemed to be controlling the flow of information in both directions. He wasn’t used to having a buffer between himself and Hort, and even aside from what he recognized was an unworthy, petulant reaction to being placed on the periphery, he also understood that having to rely on Rain and Dox as intermediaries put him at an operational disadvantage.
The late morning train was mostly empty, a few bored-looking passengers dispersed among the seats. The four of them stood facing each other in the center of the car, swaying slightly as it hurtled along, Rain’s voice just audible although their faces were only inches apart. Rain had called them with instructions for the meeting, and Treven assumed he’d chosen the subway to frustrate any satellite surveillance Hort might be employing to track him. There were video cameras in the stations, of course, but even if Hort had access to a local feed, he’d have to know where to look and there would be layers of local bureaucracy to wade through. By the time anyone had a fix on their position, they’d all be long gone.
Larison said, “You think this Finch thing is for real?”
Rain took a moment before answering. “I didn’t know if Shorrock was for real, either. But the money’s been deposited.”
“He’s offering three hundred apiece for Finch,” Dox said. “And he says it’ll be five hundred apiece for the third one, whoever that turns out to be. That’s over a million for each of us when this is all done. I don’t know about you, but where I come from that’s a lot of green.”
“Where do you think Hort’s getting all this money to throw around?” Larison said, and Treven wondered where he was going with this, how much he was going to tell them.
“I don’t know,” Rain said. “Do you?”
Larison glanced casually around the swaying train car, then said, “What if I told you that instead of exposing ourselves for one million, we could protect ourselves, and walk away with twenty-five million?”
“Twenty-five million…dollars?” Dox said.
Larison nodded. “Apiece.”
Dox laughed. “You’re bullshitting us. Protect ourselves how, kill the president?”
Larison shook his head. “Kill Hort.”
Dox laughed again, but Treven could tell from his expression the number had gotten his attention.
Rain said, “What does he have on you?”
Larison smiled coldly. “That’s not what matters. What matters is, Hort is holding one hundred million in uncut diamonds. Well, make that ninety-nine million, after paying us. Portable, convertible, completely untraceable.”
Rain said nothing. Treven wondered whether he believed it.
“It’s a lot of upside,” Larison said. “But you want to know something? The diamonds are really just a bonus. They’re not even the point.”
“You know,” Dox said, “I’ve always wanted to be involved in a conversation where someone would say, ‘the hundred million dollars isn’t even the point.’ Between that and the twins in the bathtub at the Suko-thai in Bangkok, I can now retire a contented man.”
Larison flashed his cold smile again. “What I mean is, focusing on the money makes it sound like we have a choice. We don’t.”
“What do you mean?” Rain said.
“I mean, you don’t understand Hort. So let me explain a few things about him. One, he always protects himself from blowback. Therefore two, when he’s done using us for whatever Shorrock and the rest of this is really about, he’ll move to silence us. Therefore three, one of these hits, maybe the next one, maybe the third, will be nothing but a setup to fix us in time and place.”
“But he just paid us a million even,” Dox said.
Larison nodded. “To establish his bona fides. And to make us believe the rest of what he’s promising is real. You see why he’s structuring it this way? To get our greed to override our judgment.”
Dox glanced at Rain. Treven read the glance as I’m deferring to you on this, partner.
Rain said nothing. The man’s expression and tone never seemed to vary. It made him hard to read. That was bad enough, but after seeing what Rain had done to the contractors, and knowing that he’d efficiently taken Shorrock off the board, too, Treven was starting to find Rain’s mildly flat-lined demeanor outright unnerving.
“Do you get it now?” Larison said. “After what we just did in Las Vegas, as long as Hort is alive, he’s a threat to all of us.”
“You knew this going in,” Rain said.
“I wanted us all to be in the same boat, facing the same set of options, if that’s what you mean. But I didn’t con you. I didn’t mislead you. You made your own decision for your own reasons. Anyway, even if I’d told you what I thought, you wouldn’t have listened. I’m not sure you’re listening even now.”
No one said anything.
“All right,” Larison said. “Go ahead and let him jerk your strings. Chase after his promises, if you want. Eventually, you’ll die trying. Or, you can recognize what’s going on here, preempt the threat, and walk away clean with twenty-five million apiece in the process.”
Treven had the sick sense that he had been turned into a bystander on all of this. Kill Finch? Turn on Hort? No one was asking him what he thought. And the truth was, he wasn’t sure himself.
He couldn’t disagree with Larison’s analysis of the current state of play-after all, he knew firsthand how manipulative and ruthless Hort could be. And the points Larison had made about the security video placing Treven at a murder scene were persuasive, too. If Larison was right, the choice was pretty straightforward: kill or be killed.
Still, the thought of taking out Hort made him anxious, almost dizzy. Could he really do this? To his own commander? He tried to think of it as a fragging, like what enlisted men had sometimes done to incompetent lieutenants in Vietnam. But when he imagined himself putting a round into Hort’s forehead, the neat hole, the momentary pressure bulge of the eyes from cavitation in the cranium, the instantaneous loss of expression from the face and rigidity from the body…something inside him rebelled.
What would he do afterward? Hort would be replaced, naturally, but it was hard to imagine things ever going back to the way they were. He was afraid he would have committed a kind of patricide, that he’d be tormented by conscience, that his fellow elite soldiers would sense he’d committed some primordial sin, maybe even suspect precisely what it was. He’d bear the mark of Cain, always suspect, forever an outsider.
No. He wasn’t like Larison and Rain, and he didn’t want to be. He’d done his share of killing, most of it at close quarters, but except when it had been self-defense, it had always been under orders. He was part of something, why would he fuck that up? And who was Larison, anyway? A skilled operator, no doubt, but still, a loose cannon, a rogue. And Rain was beginning to strike him as a borderline sociopath. Dox was a buffoon, too dumb to know better. They did what they did for money, which meant they could always be bought. Had he really been considering turning on Hort, turning on the unit, to throw in his lot forever with this group of burnouts?