The Detachment

to have been, as indeed I was. The dark guy, on the other hand, was incongruously relaxed, and seemed almost to be enjoying himself.
    I ordered three coffees and three waters and the waitress moved off. I nodded at the dark guy. “What do I call you?”
    “Larison.”
    I turned my head to the other guy, who said, “Treven.”
    “All right, Larison and Treven. What do you want?” The more on-point question, of course, would have been, Who do you want me to kill? But it didn’t matter which route we took. We’d arrive at the same destination.
    “We were sent just to find you,” Larison said. “The one who wants something from you is Colonel Horton. Scott Horton.”
    The name was familiar, but for a moment, I couldn’t place it. Then I remembered something from Reagan-era Afghanistan, a time that felt to me now, when I considered it at all, so remote it could have been someone else’s life. The CIA had recruited former soldiers like me to train and equip the Mujahadeen who were fighting the Soviets, and though deniability had been imperative, there were a few active-duty military in theater, too, to liaise with the irregulars. There had been a young Special Forces noncom everyone called Hort, whom we’d teased because, despite his obvious capability and courage, he was black, and so an absurd choice for a covert role in Afghanistan. He assured us, though, that this was the point: if he was captured, Uncle Sam wanted to be able to say to the Russians, You think we’d be stupid enough to send a black soldier to blend in Afghanistan? Must have been a freelancer, a black Muslim answering the call of jihad. See how your wars are radicalizing people? What a shame.
    I said, “This guy cut his teeth in Afghanistan?”
    Larison nodded. “Training the Muj, yeah.”
    “White guy?”
    “No. Black.”
    “Does he go by a nickname?”
    “Hort.”
    Sounded like a match. He must have received a commission somewhere along the way and then never left the military. I estimated that today he’d be about fifty. “And he’s a colonel now,” I said, more musing than asking a question.
    “Head of the ISA,” Treven said.
    I nodded, impressed. It was a long way from deniable cannon fodder to the head of the Intelligence Support Activity, the U.S. military’s most formidable unit of covert killers.
    “And you?” I asked, looking at Larison, then Treven. “ISA?”
    Treven nodded. He didn’t seem entirely happy about the fact, or maybe he was just uncomfortable acknowledging an affiliation he would ordinarily reflexively deny.
    Larison said, “Once upon a time. These days, I just consult.”
    “Pay’s better?”
    Larison smiled. “You tell me.”
    “The pay’s okay,” I said. “Healthcare’s not so great.”
    Treven glanced at Larison—a little impatiently, I thought. Maybe the kind of guy who liked to get right down to business. He didn’t understand this was business. Larison and I were trying to feel each other out.
    “And the other two?” I said.
    “Contractors,” Larison said. “One of the Blackwater-type successors. I can’t keep track.”
    I glanced at Treven, then back to Larison. “So, ISA, a consultant, contractors…That’s a fairly eclectic gang you’ve got there.”
    “We didn’t ask for the contractors,” Larison said, turning his palms up slightly from the table in a what can you do gesture. “That was Hort. I guess you could say he…overstaffed this thing.”
    “And you downsized it.”
    He dipped his head slightly as though in respect or appreciation. “You and I both.”
    He seemed determined to let me know there were no hard feelings about the two dead giants—indeed, to acknowledge he’d deliberately sacrificed them. And now he was implying some distance between himself and Horton, too, and implying some commonality between himself and me. I wasn’t sure why.
    “What’s Horton’s interest?” I asked.
    “We don’t know the particulars,” Treven said. “All he told us was, he’s rebuilding, and he wants to make you an offer.”
    “Rebuilding what?”
    “I don’t know. Something about an operation you took down, run by a guy named Jim Hilger.”
    Hilger. I didn’t show it, but I was surprised to hear the name. In all the times we’d crossed paths, first in Hong Kong, where he was brokering the sale of radiologically-tipped missiles and nuclear materiel, and then in Holland, where he’d been running an op to blow up the port in Rotterdam and drive up the