Paris is a Bitch

hands in a
you win
gesture. “All right. You two cover the entrance of the Kodokan. Treven and I will wait here and fan out behind you when you start following him.”
    Beckley smiled—a little snidely, Treven thought. And it did seem like Larison, maybe in a weak attempt to save face, was pretending to issue orders that had in fact just been issued to him.
    Beckley and Krichmond went out. Larison turned and watched through the window as they walked away.
    Treven said, “You think he’s going to come out again at the same time? Hort said he was so surveillance conscious.”
    Larison took a sip of coffee. “Why do you think Hort sent those Blackwater bozos along with us?”
    It was a little annoying that Larison hadn’t just answered the question. Treven paused, then said, “He doesn’t trust us, obviously.”
    “That’s right. They’re working for him, not with us. Remember that.”
    Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton was Treven’s commander in the ISA, and had once been Larison’s, too, before Larison had gone rogue and tried to blackmail Uncle Sam for a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds in exchange for videos of American operatives torturing Muslim prisoners. He’d almost gotten away with it, too, but Hort had played him and kept the diamonds for himself. Treven wasn’t entirely sure why. On the one hand, Hort’s patriotism and integrity were unquestionable. A black man who might have been denied advancement in other areas but who was not only promoted, but held in awe by the army meritocracy, he loved the military and he loved the men who served under him. Yet none of that had prevented him from screwing Larison when he’d needed to, as he’d once tried to screw Treven. He’d told Treven why: America was being run by a kind of oligarchy, which didn’t seem to trouble Hort much except that the oligarchy had become greedy and incompetent—grievous sins, apparently, in Hort’s strange moral universe. The country needed better management, he’d said. He was starting something big, and the diamonds were a part of it. So, he hoped, would be Treven and Larison, and this guy Rain they’d been sent to find, too, if he could be persuaded.
    So of course Hort didn’t trust them. They weren’t over here under duress, exactly, but it wasn’t all a positive inducement, win-win dynamic, either. Larison had to be looking for payback, as well as a chance to recover the diamonds. And Treven had wised up enough to recognize the strings Hort had been using to manipulate him, and to know he needed to find a way to cut them, too. There was the little matter of some unfortunate security videos, for example, that could implicate Treven in the murder of a prominent former administration official. It didn’t matter that it had been a CIA op and that Treven had nothing to do with the man’s death. What mattered was that Hort and the CIA had the tapes, and might use them if Treven got out of line. So for the moment, the whole arrangement felt like an unstable alliance of convenience, all shifting allegiances and conflicting motives. Hort would never have sent them off without a means of monitoring them, and under the circumstances, Larison’s injunction that he remember who Beckley and Krichmond were really working for felt gratuitous, even a little insulting. Maybe the man was just chafing at the fact that the Blackwater guys didn’t seem to give a shit about what Larison assumed was his own authority. Treven decided to let it go.
    But what he wouldn’t let go was that Larison had ignored his question. “Same place, same time, same way out, two nights in a row?” he said. “That sound like our guy?”
    Larison glanced at him, and Treven could have sworn the man was almost smiling.
    “Depends,” Larison said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Rain spotted them last night for sure, when they were there for longer. Very likely, he spotted them again tonight, too.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I would have spotted them. Because if this guy is who Hort says he is, he would have spotted them. Because if he’s not good enough to have spotted them, Hort wouldn’t even be bothering with him.”
    Treven considered. “So what does that mean, if he spotted them but comes out the same way at the same time anyway?”
    This time, Larison did smile. “It means I’m glad it’s not us walking point.”

W hen I left the Kodokan, I knew someone would be waiting for me. Most likely it would be the pair