Inside Outt

is personal to him. So you watch yourself, son. I told you, you’re good, but you’re not in his league. Not yet.”
    The “not yet” removed the sting. “I’ll be careful.”
    “Good. And hang on for a minute… okay, while we’ve been talking, I got a printout of Larison’s travel records from the ICE database. Looks like he did travel to Costa Rica, spring of 2005. Flight from Tegucigalpa, where he was TDY at the time. But nothing in April 2007.”
    “He traveled that first time under his own name?”
    “Yes, and it fits. Say something happened while he was there that first time, he met someone. After that, he wouldn’t want to keep going back under his own name. With one data point, there’s no pattern, nothing for anyone to look for. He had no way of knowing he’d get placed in Costa Rica through something else. Now, you say this McGlade claims Larison killed someone on one of these trips?”
    “That’s what he told us, yeah. The one where Larison traveled from Miami on April 17.”
    “Okay, that would be an Airbus A320, hundred and fifty seats. Figure two-thirds full, half the passengers women… my guess is, we’ll have to sift through something like forty or fifty names before we spot the one that isn’t like the others. Once we know what legend he was traveling under that day, we can cross-reference, see if he’s been using it for something else. This is promising. Good work, son.”
    Ben was annoyed at himself for needing the man’s approval. He wondered if Larison had been this way, or if that was something an operator grew out of. Maybe that’s what Hort meant about him becoming like Larison, if he kept developing this way. He wondered.
    Hort had also checked up on Taibbi. Vietnam combat veteran, three tours with the 82 nd Airborne, and a LRRP—long-range reconnaissance patrol. Meaning he was self-reliant, understood stealth, and would be handy with a variety of close-range weapons. A conviction in 1982 on arms trafficking charges. Pleaded guilty, served three years, moved to Costa Rica in 1987, and hadn’t had a problem with the law since then. According to his current passport and cell phone records, he was presently in Jacó, and Ben could reasonably expect to find him at his bar.
    He looked at Paula. She was asleep in the seat facing his, her head dipped forward. The cabin was aglow with the sun setting ahead of them, her face obscured by shadow.
    He watched her, enjoying the opportunity to do so unobserved. He liked her hair, liked that she kept it short and natural. Though with her face, he supposed she could do pretty much anything she wanted with her hair and things would be just fine.
    He wondered what it must be like for her at the Bureau, a black woman, clearly smarter and more capable than most of the people she had to answer to. Did she have to work twice as hard as her peers? Did she use her sex appeal, or did she try to suppress it? She didn’t wear a ring. Was she single? Did she date? Were guys intimidated about going out with a government agent? Did she ever have a thing for someone at work, and have to fight to try to hide it?
    He rotated his neck, cracking the joints, still watching her. What would she be like in bed? Would the professional façade be so important she couldn’t ever let it go? Or could she allow someone to see her naked, not just literally, but figuratively, too?
    She said no one ever saw her coming. If it was true, he decided, it was also a shame. He decided Paula coming would be a very fine thing to see.
    And then he thought of Sarah and was immediately ashamed of himself. But what could he really share with her? He never felt so alive as he did when he was hunting. Not a politically correct thing to admit, probably, and Sarah would have found it repellant, but wasn’t it true for everyone? That everyone loved to do the things they were good at? Yeah, he wasn’t the smoothest guy in the world, and sure, he had some development ahead of him, but Hort was right, there was nothing he was suited for like ops. He’d survived shit that would have killed most men, most good men, even, and he’d survived it because he was better. How could he not enjoy—how could he not exult in—what he did, what he was? And who was Sarah, or anyone else, to judge him for that?
    What was that saying?
People sleep soundly in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm them.
Something like that,