Inside Outt

you did. I can’t believe it. I guess the polite thing would be to thank you.”
    Tell her the rest. Tell her he’s not dead. Tell her.
    But wasn’t she indicating now that she didn’t want to know? Didn’t that change—
    “Goodbye, Agent whatever your name is and whoever you are.”
    She closed the door in his face.
    He stood there for a long moment, telling himself to ring the bell, get it out, finish what he’d come here for.
    He didn’t. Instead, he walked back to the car, feeling slightly ill. He wondered whether he’d proven something. If so, he wished he knew what it was.
    He drove back to Orlando.
    He had some tough decisions to make. Decide wrong one way, and he could take the fall for Ulrich. Decide wrong the other way, and he could spend the rest of his life anesthetizing himself like Paula. Or looking for some crazy Hail Mary way out, like Larison.
    It seemed like the safest alternative was to do what Hort had asked. Track down the men he wanted. It would buy him time. After all, Hort couldn’t monitor everything that happened in the field. He might learn something, the way he had from Larison. Speaking of whom, he could track him down, too. He’d done it before. He could do it again. There was no telling who else Hort had screwed along the way. Put together a few disgruntled former soldiers, and Hort could wind up on the wrong end of a fragging. With Clements and the CIA and the rest of the damn oligarchs or whatever they called themselves alongside him.
    He hoped he was making the right decision. Hort said he knew people. Would he have seen this coming? Would he have known this was the way Ben would perceive the situation, the way he would persuade himself he still had free will even as he was doing Hort’s bidding?
    He didn’t know. He’d have to be careful.
    You come a certain distance, you can’t just turn around.
    Yeah, he could see that now. He couldn’t just walk away. He was too deep inside. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t find a way out.
    But should he? There was a lot of damage you could do from the inside, if that’s what you wanted.
    He smiled grimly. Yeah, if damage was the objective, inside could be awfully goddamned good.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
    As always, all places in this book are described as I found them. You can see location photos and find other information on my website at
    http://www.barryeisler.com/photo.php
    During the year in which I wrote this book, various people privy to its plot were concerned the CIA interrogation tapes would surface and overtake the story. I told them not to worry: those tapes would never see the light of day. They haven’t. And they never will.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    I couldn’t have written
Inside Out
without the books and other sources I mention after these acknowledgments, and I couldn’t have written it without the generous help of my agent, editor, friends, and family, either. My thanks to:
    My agent, Dan Conaway of Writers House, and editor, Mark Tavani of Ballantine, for getting what I was trying to do with this story from the beginning, enriching it considerably with their input, and for reading and rereading the sex scene beyond what editorial requirements could ordinarily explain.
    A whole bunch of superb bloggers and other journalists, for the reporting and commentary out of which this story grew. To name just a few: Juan Cole,
Informed Comment
; Digby,
Hullabaloo
; Amy Goodman,
Democracy Now!
; Glenn Greenwald,
Unclaimed Territory
; Hilzoy,
Obsidian Wings
(Hilzoy, come back!); Scott Horton,
No Comment
; Josh Marshall,
Talking Points Memo
; Andrew Sullivan,
The Daily Dish
; Marcy Wheeler,
Firedoglake
. Some others I admire have characters named after them in this book and in my other books, too—see if you can spot them. And you can find even more on the blogroll of Heart of the Matter at www.barryeisler.com/blog.html . If you like your journalism independent rather than corporate-owned and corporate-addled, I recommend reading these people every day.
    The
Washington Post’s
Barton Gellman, author of the superb
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,
for coining the term “information laundering” that appears in the prologue.
    John Alkire, Tom Bourke, Jason Evans, Scott Gentry, and Ken Rosenberg, for their expertise on international banking, and for steering me toward uncut diamonds as an appropriate means of anonymous exchange.
    Ron Winston, for sharing his peerless expertise on diamonds and the diamond industry.
    Tom Hayse,