Inside Out (22 page)

“In case they need a pinch hitter?”

“Just to observe.”

“Well, that sounds good to me.”

“Look—”

“Don’t even start. I’m not going to just walk away. So we can do this separately and trip each other up, or we can keep coordinating.”

“I don’t know that our coordination has been all that coordinated.”

“We’ve gotten this far.”

Ben knew he could lose her easily enough. But he didn’t know what her people knew. If they’d briefed her on Nico’s particulars, losing her wouldn’t help. She’d just be waiting wherever he arrived.

“Let’s get some breakfast,” he said. “I don’t know when we’ll get another chance. It feels like something big and bad is on the way, and I want to be in position when it arrives.”

Larison waited in front of the gate at JFK for his flight to San Salvador, his eyes moving from the announcements board to the faces of the people swirling through the area and then back again. He wanted desperately to fly directly to San Jose International, but if they had the resources to watch airports, that would be the one they’d key on. From San Salvador he could catch a nonstop to one of the smaller towns—Limón or Tamarindo or Quepos—and then finish the journey by train or bus. Or better yet, by motorcycle.

He was still shaky. He’d called from a Jersey City motel room, expecting the conversation to be brief and one-sided, expecting them to be meek, even if it was just playacting while they tried to buy themselves time. He was going to be in complete control. So he’d never really recovered from the first words they said to him:

Hello, Daniel Larison
.

He’d made it through the call. He listened wordlessly as they explained how they would send contractors to rape Nico’s nieces and nephews and mutilate his parents and sisters and brothers-in-law; and then, when the happiness, the coherence, the sanity of Nico’s family had been torn and broken and shattered, they would explain to Nico why it had all happened. Because of the man Nico was seeing, who wasn’t who he said he was. Who did a stupid thing to antagonize powerful people, who kept on doing it even after he’d been warned of the consequences to Nico and his family.

When they stopped talking, Larison had paused for a moment to demonstrate his composure. When he spoke, his voice was calm, emotionless, the same voice he would have used had he not heard a single word they’d just uttered. He said,
I’ll call again on Friday with instructions on how to deliver the diamonds. If you don’t deliver, I will release the tapes. And anything that happens to Nico or his family will seem mild after what I will do to you and yours
.

Then he had hung up. For a long moment he stood still, his eyes unfocused, his heart hammering. Then his legs buckled and he collapsed and curled up on the floor on his side and sobbed uncontrollably for almost ten minutes. He knew he had to move—triangulating on a cloned satellite call was almost impossible, but it was almost impossible that they’d identified him so quickly, too. But he couldn’t move. Shame and horror and self-pity and fear and grief had simply overwhelmed him.

Finally, it subsided. He picked himself up, staggered to the sink, and splashed cold water on his face. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, his eyes red, his cheeks dripping and unshaven, his teeth bared, his nostrils flaring with his agitated breathing. He looked like a nightmare.

Then be a nightmare
.

Yes, that was it. Make them pay. Make them pay for everything.

But first, he had to move. That lesson had been drilled into him
from the start: No matter what you were hit with, no matter the pain or shock or confusion, never stop moving. Never give them a stationary target.

A corollary lesson was that when you’re ambushed, your best chance of prevailing almost always involved a simple strategy:

Attack back
.

They’d be expecting that, of course. In fact, as the shock of the call wore off, to be replaced by a seething determination, he began to understand they were baiting him, hoping he would be provoked.

What he would do, therefore, wouldn’t be a surprise. How he would do it would be everything.

He checked his watch. He tried not to imagine what it would be like to be impossibly rich. He could have chartered a jet, he could have been on the ground in San Jose in three hours. Instead, he was glued to this seat in an airport, waiting for the interminable minutes to pass.

The worst part was that he couldn’t figure out what the vulnerability had been. It was distracting him, his mind wouldn’t let it go, he kept going over every aspect of his preparations and his movements and he couldn’t identify a single thing he’d done wrong. The only thing he could remotely come up with was those two brothers, the ones who’d been tailing him and who he’d assumed had just been petty criminals. Maybe they’d been more than that … but even if so, who were they, and how had they been tailing him in the first place? He’d been so careful not to create patterns, but somewhere, he must have done something, he just couldn’t understand what. Maybe the NSA had capabilities beyond even what he’d known of? Maybe he’d made some small mistake, and their supercomputers had unraveled everything from that?

He checked his watch again. He’d always prided himself on the supernatural calm he could summon before combat, but it wasn’t working for him now. He’d imagined a dozen ways this might have ended badly. All of them were unpleasant, but he’d been prepared,
he could have faced it. What he’d never imagined was that they’d get to him through Nico.

He scrubbed a hand across his face. He was so exhausted. The announcements and the beeping from the goddamned golf carts … it was all so loud and cacophonous, his head was beginning to pound from it. The dreams were killing him, too; he’d had no idea how bad it was going to be without the pills. It wasn’t getting better, either—in fact, every night was worse than the one before. What had he been thinking, what monumental hubris had caused him to believe he could take on the entire fucking government and walk away from it clean? It was never going to work, he could see that now. Was it some kind of dramatic stand he was taking, Ahab slashing at the back of the whale even as it carried him down to drown in the dark and the deep? What the hell had he been trying to do?

If he was going to die anyway, he should release the tapes right now. All he had to do was log on to one of the sites he’d created, enter a password and then a command, and it would be done. Or fail to log in for a preset interval, that would do it, too. Would they really hurt Nico after that?

He decided they might. He couldn’t take that chance. And besides, maybe, maybe, maybe he could turn this around. Regain the momentum. Show them who they were fucking with.

The main thing was that the tapes would be released, one way or the other. He focused on that, thinking,
one way or the other, one way or the other
, until he started to feel a little calmer. One way or the other. That was pretty much the only thing still keeping him going in the face of the suffocating knowledge that he’d screwed up and probably doomed Nico and rendered all his own most ardent hopes into pathetic, childish fantasies. Knowing that the tapes would get out, one way or the other.

That, and imagining what he was going to do to the people who would be waiting for him in San Jose.

Ben and Paula fueled up with an enormous buffet breakfast in the InterContinental’s restaurant—omelettes, exotic fruits, and several cups of Costa Rica’s justifiably famous coffee. Ben had a feeling the rest of the day would be nothing but granola bars, and wanted to make sure they had plenty to run on, through the night if necessary.

When they were done, they headed over to Nico’s residence. Ben had briefed Paula on their cover for action—the story they would tell if anyone questioned their presence. They were Americans thinking about becoming part of the large Costa Rican expat community and were examining possible neighborhoods. They’d only break out the FBI credentials if it became necessary. Better to try something less remarkable first.

Both the residence and office were in Los Yoses, about a kilometer
from Spoon, each within walking distance of the other. It all fit: the regular appearances at Spoon, and Juan Cole’s “luck” in finding Larison there; Larison getting off the bus early in Barrio Dent to draw his pursuers away from the real locus of his interest in San Jose.

They started with a drive-by of the residence, a condominium on a narrow two-lane street just south of the main thoroughfare. The condo, gated, fronted with palm trees, and obviously deluxe, was eight stories tall and looked new. Everything else on the street was low-slung and slightly ramshackle. Directly across the street from the condo was an enormous construction site—from the size of it, the future home of another fancy collection of condos.

The street was on a short block open at both ends and with no turnoffs in the middle—the horizontal bar in an
H
. Ideally, that meant two sentries at each of the two possible access points—each end of the horizontal. The sentries’ job would be to warn the primary snatch team of the target’s approach. The reason for two was security in case of opposition. One sentry you could do. Finishing off two before either got a warning off was far more difficult, so the preference was always to use two on whatever point of access the target might use. The primary team would have line of sight to the building entrance or other X where they intended to actually do the snatch. If the snatch was clean, the sentries would move out fore and aft as the primary team left the scene with the target secured. If the primary team encountered opposition, the sentries could close with flanking fire.

Larison would know all this, just as Ben did. So the question was, what would I do if I were him? And the best way to answer that, Ben knew, was to look at the street as Larison knew it—as someone who had repeatedly walked it.

They parked on the main thoroughfare about a kilometer away and got out, baseball caps pulled low over sunglasses against the inevitable security camera tapes police would be examining if there were violence in the area. The sky was uniformly gray, the air heavy with humidity and the weight of impending rain. Despite
Los Yoses’s urban density, they were surrounded by the cries of birds and the buzz of tropical insects. By the time they reached the condo, they were both sweating.

Ben looked up and down the street. You wouldn’t want to approach from either end. You might be able to drop both sentries, but probably not before they got off a warning to their counterparts opposite and to the primary team. No, the way to achieve maximum surprise here was to initially bypass the sentries. Start from the inside and work your way out.

He crossed to the opposite side of the street and stood in front of the construction site, his back to the front of Nico’s building. Paula came up alongside him.

“What do you think?” she said.

He looked around the site. It sloped steeply from where they stood all the way down to the opposite block. So far, the only completed work was a foundation and a couple of skeletal concrete floors. But that, along with the foliage around it, would provide a lot of concealment. The downside was the uphill approach, the possibility of being pinned down from above by anyone who spotted you. But in Ben’s mind, the concealment was the key. That, and the lack of any better alternatives.

“I think he’ll come from here,” Ben said. “That’s what I’d do.”

“So where do we wait?”

“I want to see the office before I decide that. But if we set up here, I’m thinking we’ll park on Nico’s street. Not at the end, where Larison would be looking for sentries; not in front of the building, where he’d be looking for the primary team. In between, in an operational dead zone, with line of sight to where the primary team would set up and maybe to the sentries, too. And to where we expect Larison to emerge.”

They walked over to the office. It was a small gray building on a cul-de-sac, a sign in gold lettering on the front advertising
Gomez and Golindo, Architects
. Apparently Nico Velez wasn’t a name partner. That they used English rather than Spanish on the shingle suggested a foreign clientele—or perhaps that English had
some cachet in Costa Rican architectural circles. Neither of these details was likely to be operationally useful, but Ben logged them regardless, just in case.

The one-way street simplified things somewhat for a snatch team, requiring only two sentries instead of four. But still …

They walked to the end of the cul-de-sac. Amid the collection of modest apartments and single-family houses, some converted to professional use, there was a patch of thick grass and trees that led to a highway access ramp. Would Larison approach from there? It was either that or the street. Like everything else Ben had seen in San Jose, the buildings were all mini-fortresses, the windows and driveways gated and barred against crime, razor wire strung along potential access points. And many of the properties had yapping dogs patrolling within. No, Larison’s only two realistic options here were stealth through the trees or an open approach from the street.

“I think he’s going to start with the condo,” Ben said.

“Why?”

“He wouldn’t like the alternatives here. They’re more obvious, and there are fewer of them. Plus he’d know the terrain better around the condo. Presumably that’s where he stays when he’s visiting Nico. Maybe he’s seen the office, but I doubt he’s spent much time here.”

“Makes sense.”

Ben looked at his watch. It was past noon. Unlikely Larison could make it here so soon after this morning’s call—unless he were here already, which Ben seriously doubted. Running an op from the city of his secret lover would offer nothing but downside. Besides, Hort had said the emails and sat calls were coming from North America. No, Larison wasn’t here. But he could be arriving soon. And likewise the snatch teams.