The Detachment

Wikileaks hadn’t forced them, exactly as Kanezaki had said. Overall, people seemed to want to understand perfidy as a problem with personalities rather than as something insidious in their institutions.
    Horton kept at it, working the levers of his popularity and power, but I had the sense the commission, far from being a vehicle he could steer as he wanted, was more a vessel that was gradually coming to control and contain his ambitions. I wondered how disappointed he was, and whether, in the dark, quiet hours of the very early morning, he ever lay in the sleepless grip of something like despair, the souls of all the lives he’d cut short pressing in close upon him.
    I wasn’t worried about his coming after any of us. I thought he’d been telling the truth when he’d said he didn’t think we could do him much damage. And killing one of us without killing us all would have been dangerous. If any of us decided he was a threat again, Horton would have a real problem to contend with. And then there was his daughter, of course. Maybe she’d told him Dox was a softie. But Horton wouldn’t know about the rest of us. Would he really risk reprisals? I doubted it.
    Watching his faraway machinations from my haven in Tokyo, as remote as the Marvel Comics Watcher on the moon, I wondered whether Horton had misread his own country. Maybe democracies, maybe all cultures, had life cycles, the same as the humans who comprised them. And maybe there were things cultures could do to extend their lives—the equivalent of exercise and eating right, or, to analogize to what Horton had done, the equivalent of radical surgery—but those things would, in the end, matter only at the margins. Maybe, regardless of the efforts of the exceptional few, the genes hidden and inherent in a culture’s own DNA would dictate a length of years, and make inevitable the onset of sclerosis, and senility, and death, as ineluctably as the Fates cutting the thread of an individual life.
    I didn’t know what I wanted. I trained at the Kodokan and reflected at quiet shrines and enjoyed my jazz clubs and coffee houses and whisky bars. I took long, nocturnal walks through the damascene city, and considered what I’d been part of, and what I’d almost caused. I wondered about my son and I missed Delilah. I thought about Horton. I made no decisions.
    I was sleeping better than I had in a while. I hoped it would last.

My thanks to:
    Lara Perkins, for being an amazing editor and handling all the business stuff so well, too.
    Stephen Blower, Kodokan Fourth Dan, for his devastatingly elegant judo—and his generosity in describing (and demonstrating) what it’s like to play at Rain’s level.
    Mike Kleindl of Tokyo Food Life, for introducing Rain to L’Ambre and so many other fine Tokyo establishments.
    Dave Camarillo, author of Guerilla Jiu-Jitsu, for helping me choreograph the Tokyo sequence where Rain takes out the contractors, and for being a great teacher and friend, too.
    Ken Rosenberg, for helping with financial aspects of the backstory.
    Novelist Victoria Dahl, for Dox’s very wrong phrase, “straining the gravy.”
    Dr. Peter Zimetbaum, for the usual invaluable help on cardiology issues.
    Elke Sisco, for assistance with the German dialogue.
    Daniel Velez, for assistance with the Spanish dialogue. Albóndigas.
    Koichiro Fukasawa and Yukie Kito, for assistance with the Japanese.
    Novelist J.A. Konrath, because without his encouragement this novel might have been published by a legacy publisher, meaning you would have had to wait until next year to read it.
    Novelist Lee Goldberg, for Los Angeles culinary, cultural, and transportation advice.
    Ron Winston, for sharing his peerless expertise on diamonds.
    Clint Overland, a good man who’s done some bad things, for his insights into the attraction of using terrible skills for a noble end.
    The extraordinarily eclectic group of “foodies with a violence problem” who hang out at Marc “Animal” MacYoung’s and Dianna Gordon’s www.nononsenseselfdefense.com , for good humor, good fellowship, and a ton of insights, particularly regarding the real costs of violence.
    Jeroen Ten Berge of JeroenTenBerge.com and Rob Siders of 52Novels. com, for terrific cover design and formatting services.
    Tracy Mercer and the Four Seasons Palo Alto, for generous hospitality, endless jasmine tea, and perfect feng shui.
    Naomi Andrews, Alan Eisler, Judith Eisler, Montie Guthrie, Tom Hayes, Mike Killman, novelist