Inside Outt

a threat.”
    “Maybe not before, but you are now. Because of what I told you. Just wanting information makes you a threat. You want to know how they’ll hang you out to dry before they hang you literally? I’ve seen it done. I don’t even know you, and I can tell you how they’ll set you up before they knock you down.”
    Ben wanted to believe Larison was just bullshitting him, but somehow… it didn’t feel like bullshit.
    “Here,” Larison said, “I’ll tell you first what Hort told you about me. I’m a psycho case, right? Anger management. Combat stress. Steroid abuse. Did he tell you I’m gay?”
    “He didn’t.”
    “Then he was hoping you’d find out for yourself. Conclusions you come to yourself are more persuasive. Didn’t they teach you that at the Farm?”
    “I don’t think he knew.”
    “He knew. If he didn’t tell you, it’s only because he knew you’d find out some other way.”
    “I don’t see what that even has to do with it.”
    “No? You’re going to honestly tell me it doesn’t make me suspect? Alien? A freak? You need all that, if you’re going to hunt someone. Hort was just providing it. Probably doesn’t even think of it as deception, or even as manipulation. He’s just giving you the tools you need to carry out a job. You think anyone we ever tortured and killed in the big, bad war on terror was white and Christian? It doesn’t work that way. You can’t do that shit to your own kind. They have to be turned into the
other
first. Dehumanized. You and I… we’re like prisoners being set against each other by the guards. If you can’t see that, you’re nothing but a tool.”
    A month earlier, Ben would have laughed at something like that, thought it was demented. But now…
    “You said you’d tell me how they’d set me up.”
    “Easy. You got in a lot of fights growing up, didn’t you?”
    The truth is, the description was an understatement. “Maybe. What about it?”
    “On the one hand, nothing. Everyone in the unit got in fights as a kid. There’s a correlation between childhood fights and subsequent combat capability, that’s all. But to the public? It becomes ‘history of disciplinary problems and violence.’”
    “I cheated on tests, too. Hopefully they won’t nail me with that.”
    “You been in any fights lately? Bar brawls, anything like that?”
    Ben didn’t answer. But with Manila so fresh in his mind, he knew his silence was answer enough.
    “Yeah, I thought so. Now you have ‘anger management issues.’ ‘Inability to control violent temper.’ I’m guessing you’re divorced, am I right?”
    Again, Ben didn’t answer.
    “That would be ‘inability to form lasting social bonds.’ Likewise if you’re at all estranged from any kids you have. And if you ever really uncorked and got in trouble with local law enforcement, they’ll use that to crucify you. They love to mention when someone’s been arrested. Who needs a conviction? An arrest is just as good.”
    Ben tried telling himself it was like a fortune-teller’s trick, that these things applied to everyone, that Larison could have done the same with anybody. But he didn’t believe it. He thought of Manila… of Ami, of the jail. He’d never imagined how those things could be woven into a narrative by someone else. And was the narrative even untrue?
    “Ever downloaded porn? ‘Deviant.’ Any solitary hobbies? ‘Loner.’ Talked to an army shrink? ‘Psychiatric patient.’ Look what the brass did to Graner and the rest after Abu Ghraib. Look at what the Bureau did to that guy Steven Hatfill, or to Bruce Ivins, when they needed to convince the public they’d found the anthrax villain. You think any of those people thought they were vulnerable? You need to wake up, my friend. You need to understand the way the system works.”
    “You make it sound like there’s some kind of conspiracy.”
    Larison laughed. “Conspiracy? How can there be a conspiracy when everyone is complicit?”
    Ben wanted to dismiss what Larison had told him as nothing but a paranoid rant. But he couldn’t. At least not until he’d learned about the Caspers. And Ecologia.
    “All right,” Larison said. “We’re going to split up now. Find a place to pull over.”
    Leaving it up to Ben was smart. Larison had chosen the general direction, so he knew Ben wasn’t driving him into a setup. He’d know that if he were to choose a specific spot to stop on top of it, it would make Ben twitchy.
    Ben