Inside Outt

there copies?”
    “No. One set of originals, and that’s what the blackmailer has.”
    “Even so, do we know that whoever took them and whoever is using them are the same? If they’ve been brokered, every middleman in the chain would have made copies.”
    “My gut tells me they haven’t been passed around. First, because in all these years, no one’s heard a peep about these tapes being circulated. Second, if you’re smart enough to steal the tapes, you’re smart enough not to broker them. The risks are similar, but the real payoff only comes when you hit up Uncle Sam. Who else is going to come up with a hundred million dollars in diamonds?”
    Ben couldn’t find any fault in Hort’s reasoning. “All right. What do we have to go on about the blackmailer?”
    “So far, nothing. Initial call placed from a cloned sat phone. Communication through an anonymous private email account established at the caller’s instruction after that. We traced the points of access, of course. They’re all over the eastern United States. We’ve tried to triangulate. No luck. No tie-in with surveillance cameras outside an Internet café, nothing like that. The people we’re dealing with are good, no question.”
    “So working backwards from the blackmail doesn’t get us anything. What about from the initial theft? Assuming we’re dealing with the same person or group.”
    Hort nodded slowly. “There, I think I might have a lead or two.”
    Something in Hort’s tone, and in his use of “I” instead of “we,” contained a world of subterranean meaning. Ben paused, knowing Hort wanted him to figure it out.
    “You haven’t told the CIA.”
    Hort looked at Ben and nodded again, obviously pleased. “Go on.”
    “You don’t trust them?”
    Hort snorted. “You could say that. Right now they’re running around like a bunch of hyperactive retards. They’re going to fuck this up if we let them. So we’re not going to let them.”
    Ben thought for a moment, sensing he was missing something, not sure of what it was. “Is it just the CIA? Who else knows about this?”
    Hort smiled. “The DCI contacted the Justice Department. Federal blackmail case, standard operating procedure.”
    “And if the FBI recovers those tapes…”
    “Exactly. Their goal will be prosecution. They’ll preserve the tapes as criminal evidence. Eventually, they’ll leak. And you’ve got Abu Ghraib all over again, multiplied by about a thousand. You put those tapes on Al Jazeera, forget about just guaranteeing al Qaeda’s monthly recruitment numbers, it’ll ignite the whole Muslim world.”
    “Oh, man.”
    “So now we have three overlapping investigations. The CIA, which caused this monumental goat-fuck to start with. The Justice Department, which if they recover the tapes will, with all their good intentions and by-the-book behavior, wind up doing the same damage the blackmailer is threatening.”
    “And me.”
    “I’d call that
us
. But yes.”
    Ben nodded. He couldn’t deny, he liked the sound of the plural better. “Us, then.”
    He thought for a minute. The whole thing had been so smoothly delivered. But there was something missing at the center of it. Something obvious.
    “Why?” he said.
    “I told you, I can’t trust the others.”
    “No, I’m asking you why not one of the other guys in the unit. Why’d you come to me?”
    “Well, for starters, I had to get you out of a hellhole in Manila.”
    “The real reason.”
    Hort sighed. “I’m dealing with manpower issues right now, that’s why. Most of the ISA is tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Among the ones who aren’t, two are recovering from injuries you inflicted when you met up with them in California. And another operator you might remember, Atrios, isn’t reporting in again, ever.”
    Ben was glad Hort hadn’t tried to bullshit him about how special he was. The truth was, there wasn’t a man in the unit who wasn’t in some way the best.
    He thought again. There was something nagging at him… and then he realized.
    “This whole time, we’ve been talking about ‘the blackmailer.’ Singular. You used it. And you didn’t correct me when I did.”
    Hort smiled. “Is that right?”
    “You know who it is.”
    Hort’s smile broadened. “Just don’t forget who trained you, son, all right?”
    Ben felt an absurd flush of pride and tried to ignore it. “Who?”
    “A good man with a lot of demons, demons that finally got the better of him. His name is