Inside Out (31 page)

Larison opened the passenger-side door and stepped out, taking the backpack with him. He tossed it onto the driver’s side of the hood. It landed with a dull
thunk
. They stood there, watching each other.

Larison nodded toward the bag. “Open it.”

Ben unzipped the bag. He couldn’t resist a peek. Just a bunch of whitish, yellowish stones, really. Hard to believe it was worth a hundred million. And everything else it had cost.

He turned the bag toward Larison and held it open. “Okay?”

Larison nodded. “Zip it up again.”

Ben did. He slid it across the hood. Larison picked it up and put it on the passenger seat.

“We’re done?” Ben said.

Larison closed the door. “Unless you want me to drop you off somewhere.”

“No offense, but I think I’d rather walk.”

Larison laughed. “No offense taken.”

Larison walked around the front of the car. Ben took a step
back. He didn’t think Larison had any intention of trying to disarm him, but why take a chance.

Larison stood by the open driver side. He held the door, and for a second, he seemed unsteady.

“You all right?” Ben said. “You look … tired.”

Larison blinked. “I don’t sleep well.”

They were silent for a moment. Larison looked back at the road they’d come in on. “You don’t have to worry about them suborning you,” he said. “They get you to suborn yourself.”

“I’m not following you.”

Larison held out his hand. “Let’s hope you don’t.”

Ben hesitated, then transferred the Glock to his left. They shook.

Larison got in the car. He looked off into the distance at something Ben couldn’t see.

“That sound,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t imagine. Don’t let them do that to you.”

He squeezed the bridge of his nose and sighed. “God, I wish I could sleep.”

He blew out a long breath, put the car in gear, and drove off.

Ben stood in the shadows of the swaying trees after Larison was gone. He thought,
Caspers
. Then,
Ecologia
.

He clicked on the phone and saw he had reception again. No doubt, Larison had been carrying a jammer. He brought up a map and found a Metro station—West Falls Church—less than a two-mile walk from where he stood.

He thought,
Ulrich
.

It was still early. And K Street wasn’t far.

Larison drove east into Arlington, where he parked the car in a strip mall and transferred the diamonds into a nylon bag. There was an envelope inside. He hadn’t noticed it at the cemetery. He held it up to the dome light, saw nothing untoward, and opened it. It was from Hort. A phone number. And a message telling him to call. There was something he needed to know.

He frowned at the note for a long moment, then pocketed it. He waved a portable metal detector over the diamonds and got no reading. Okay, no tracking device in a fake stone. In a few days, maybe a week, he’d visit a jewelry store with some samples and confirm that he’d received what he’d bargained for. And God help them if he hadn’t.

He hooked up the jammer to an external battery and left it in the car’s glove compartment. If the car had a transmitter, it would
be out of commission for at least another six hours. By then, Larison would be long gone.

He bought a backpack in a sporting goods store and put the nylon bag of diamonds inside it. He used the satellite phone to reset the dead-man trigger on the tapes. Then he found a bus stop and waited, his head down, his baseball cap pulled low.

He supposed he should have felt happy, or at least relieved. But he didn’t. He’d always intended to release the tapes after he’d received the diamonds. And now he couldn’t. He’d been exposed, and Nico was at risk. Yes, as long as the tapes were out there, Nico would be safe. And he’d gotten the money. But he’d also been neutralized. There wouldn’t be any justice. And more than anything else, he’d wanted this thing to end with justice.

He tried to focus on what was in the backpack. At least there was that.

He took out the letter from Hort and looked at it again. He didn’t need to call. What could Hort tell him, anyway?

But what the hell, there wasn’t any downside. They couldn’t trace the sat call. And maybe he would learn something useful, not from anything Hort intentionally told him, of course, but by reading between the lines.

He keyed in the number. Hort picked up immediately. “Horton.”

Larison waited a moment. It was strange to be talking to him again, just the two of them, the way it had been so many times in the past. It felt like an impossibly long time ago.

“Why’d you want me to call you?”

There was a pause. Hort said, “I was expecting to hear from the courier first.”

“The courier is fine. He’s good. I hope you’ll treat him better than you treated me.”

There was another pause. Hort said, “You’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you. But bear with me. It gets better as it goes along.”

Larison felt his scalp prickle. He said nothing.

“I figured your next stop would be a jewelry store somewhere. I wanted to let you know before you got there that the ‘diamonds’ you’re carrying are fake. They’re plastic. Hold a hot flame, like a butane torch, to any of them. Or hit one hard with a hammer. You’ll see.”

Larison felt an icy rage begin to spread out from his chest. It crept down his stomach and up his neck. A red haze misted his vision.

“You just made the biggest fucking mistake of your life,” he said, his voice near a whisper.

“Hear me out now. There’s good news, too.”

“Yeah, the good news is, I’m going to listen to you scream before I let you die.”

But he hadn’t hung up, and he knew how Hort would read that. Well, let him. It wouldn’t change the way this thing was going to end.

“Instead of the diamonds, I’m offering you a million dollars—diamonds, currency, gold, whatever you want.”

“Forget it.”

“On top of which, my protection and another million a year if you come back to work with me.”

A bus pulled up. Two people got off. The doors closed and it pulled away.

“What are you talking about?”

“Think about it. You could never have spent that money anyway. Most of what you were going to spend would have been for security. If you’re working with me, you won’t need that, you’ll already have it.”

“In exchange for what, exactly?”

“Peace of mind, ultimately.”

Larison laughed harshly. “You’re offering me peace of mind. That’s funny.”

“I know what you planned to do with those tapes after you got the diamonds. Well, you can’t now that Nico’s exposed. But it was the wrong way to go about it anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“You want people to pay for what happened to you? We’ll make them pay.”

“I want you to pay!”

“I already have, son. I have the same nightmares you do.”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t do it. You don’t live with that fucking sound in your ears.”

“I live with all kinds of things. It’s the others that don’t. Well, I want them to pay, too. And there’s something more.”

“What?”

“You need to be on the inside, son. You can’t cut loose, not after the things you’ve done. You’ve tried nihilism. And it’s been caustic to your soul, I know.”

Larison squeezed his eyes shut. He felt like his head was being crushed in a vise. “I can’t. I can’t take this anymore.”

“We’ll get you help. The best help there is. Between the money and what’s on those tapes, we can change some things that should have been changed a long time ago.”

Larison opened his eyes and breathed through his mouth. He felt sick. He’d been such an idiot, thinking he could get free. An idiot.

“The million is yours no matter what. You earned it. You paid for it. Tell me how to get it to you and it’s done. If you want the rest—the million a year, the protection, the power to set some wrong things right—we need to talk more.”

Idiot. Fucking idiot. You could have killed him. You could have—

“Think it over. Take your time.”

—killed him, you—

His stomach clenched. He clicked off the phone, leaned over, and convulsively threw up onto the curb. He gasped, his back heaving, then gagged and threw up again.

You could have killed him
.

He stood there for a moment sucking wind, his hands on his knees, his eyes and nose streaming.

And not just Hort. He could have killed Marcy, too. Why hadn’t he? What stupid, pathetic sentiment had permitted him to be so fatally, disgustingly stupid? He told himself he would never make a mistake like that again, and even as he thought it he knew how meaningless the vow was now, how hollow.

When he felt a little steadier, he looked around. There was a gas station across the street. He walked over and found a guy in blue coveralls in the garage.

“I need to borrow a hammer,” Larison said, his voice ragged.

He could tell the guy wanted to refuse, and was almost glad for it. He looked at the guy, struggling to control his rage, wanting someone to vent it on. The guy figured out refusing would be a bad idea. He leaned over and pulled a large orange dead blow hammer off the floor. He handed it to Larison. “This is all I’ve got,” he said.

Larison hefted it. It weighed about four pounds. He imagined the damage it would do to a man’s skull. He said, “I’ll be right back.”

He walked around to the side of the building, took a diamond out of the bag, and set it on the concrete sidewalk. He put the bag down, lowered his stance, and gripped the hammer. He looked at the diamond for a moment. It was meaningless, inert.

He raised the hammer over his head and smashed it down. The diamond—the plastic—exploded beneath it. Shards flew in a thousand different directions.

He pulled another from the pack and smashed it with the hammer. It exploded exactly like the first. He did it again. And again. He attacked the bag with the hammer, blasting it, savaging it, beating it the way he wanted to beat Hort’s brains.

He realized he was screaming. He stopped and looked up. The gas station guy was looking at him from around the corner, appalled and afraid and frozen to the spot.

Grimacing, his breath snorting through his nose, Larison stalked over to him, the hammer dangling from his hand like a war club. The guy’s eyes widened and his face went pale.

Larison stopped an arm’s length from the guy. He looked at
him for a long moment, grinning with hate. He held out the hammer. “Thanks,” he said.

The guy took it without a word or even a nod. Larison went back to the bus stop. He left the bag where he’d dropped it.

Another bus pulled up. The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. He got on. He didn’t even know where it was going.

It didn’t matter. What mattered was that even through his rage and his nausea, his horror at how close he’d been and at how badly he’d blown it, he understood what he was going to do.

Accept Hort’s offer.

Take the money.

And when he was ready, when he had regrouped and resettled and refocused, get to Hort. He thought the courier, the blond guy from the unit, might be the right place to start. He was good, Larison could see that much. But he saw something else, too: The guy wasn’t happy. He knew he was being manipulated, and was looking for a way out. Maybe Larison could give him one.

He smiled grimly. Because when he found Hort, he would do things to him, do everything to him, until he made the sound Larison could never get out of his ears.

This time, it would be like music.

Ulrich’s secure line buzzed. He looked at the phone, wondering if it would be better to just not answer. It was never good news. Never.

Still.

“Ulrich.”

“Clements. Okay to talk?”

“Why do you always ask me that? Yes, it’s okay. It’s always okay. This is a fucking secure line, do you not know that?”

There was a pause. “Are you watching CNN?”

“No.”

“There was a shooting in Arlington. Two dead.”

Ulrich clenched his jaw. “Theirs or ours?”

“Ours.”

Ulrich didn’t say anything. He felt numb. The numbness wasn’t unpleasant. At the moment, he much preferred it to whatever sensation it must have been blocking.

“We can still turn this around,” Clements said.

Ulrich laughed. It started slowly and built to a cackle. He thought of these idiots, blundering about, thinking they had a clue, relentlessly ruining his life. It wouldn’t last, he knew, but for now, he relished the humor element in the whole thing.

“You want to know how you can tell when a war is lost?” he said, wiping his eyes. “When people describe it as ‘still winnable.’ Well, that’s what I’ve been doing with myself all along on this. I keep telling myself it’s still winnable. But it’s not. It’s just not. There are too many idiots. I can’t keep fighting them. I can’t keep fighting you.”

He set the phone back in the cradle and put his face in his hands. He laughed again. And then he was crying.

People wouldn’t understand. He’d worked so hard to keep the country safe. Yes, he’d authorized some difficult things, some questionable things. But what looked questionable now didn’t look at all that way after 9/11. Back then, no one was questioning anything. They all just wanted to be safe, never mind how. So what, he was going to be hanged now for refusing to let a bunch of rules and procedures and bureaucracy prevent him from keeping people safe? What was the alternative? Dot his
I’
s and dash his
T
’s and just let the next attack happen? That would have been the real crime.

He blew out a long breath. It didn’t matter. He’d known the risks, hadn’t he? He’d never been in the military, but he’d performed his own kind of service. Soldiers risked life and limb defending America. He’d risked his job, his reputation, his own freedom in the same cause. How many people could make that claim? No matter what happened, he had every reason to be proud of what he’d done. And his family did, too. Even if no one else could understand, they would.