The Detachment

I was sure of.
    It was a little awkward with Treven. He was still active-duty military, and he didn’t say where he was going. I had the feeling the life wasn’t for him, but that neither was retirement, not even with a tax-free twenty-five million. I thought maybe he was just someone who needed a structure, and a direction, like a train needs a set of tracks.
    I still wondered for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate whether he might have been working both sides of the op at one point. Maybe it was that he didn’t kill Horton when he could have. At the time, I couldn’t fault his reasoning, but I also suspected reason wasn’t the real basis for his reluctance. I sensed the presence of some kind of attachment there, something between him and Horton. Or maybe what I sensed was just Treven trying to cling to that structure I thought he needed, a structure that had always given him purpose but that events were peeling away from him. Maybe the fear of losing that structure had caused him to reach out to Horton at some point, to try to play both sides against the middle. But I supposed it didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but a part of me was glad I would probably never know. I didn’t want to have to do something about it. It was easier to let it go.
    Larison was also sketchy about his next moves, and I assumed he was going to his lover. I hoped it would work out for him. My own attempt at romance with a civilian had resulted in the civilian in question trying to have me killed. And she was the mother of my child. Of course, I said nothing to him, neither about his personal life nor about Horton.
    He thanked me when we said goodbye, and I wasn’t sure for what—for keeping his secret; for keeping him from walking away from us in a way he would have regretted; for taking the chance I had taken in trusting him.
    “Don’t mention it,” I said. “It was all just self-preservation.”
    “Bullshit,” he said. “I owe you.”
    “Owe me what? You brought me in on an op that made me twenty-five million.”
    He didn’t answer right away, and I realized he was thinking his original plan hadn’t involved my keeping the diamonds. And that his recollection of whatever he’d originally planned must have been producing uncharacteristic stirrings of conscience. I thought I’d been lucky things had worked out as they had. It could easily have gone another way.
    “I don’t know where I’ll be, exactly,” he said. “But if you need me, I’ll have your back.”
    Coming from Larison, an offer like that would be as rare as it was meaningful. I appreciated it, and I told him so. I had a feeling I’d see him again, and I told him that, too.
    And so our detachment dissolved. For a time, anyway.
    I went back to Tokyo, of course, as I always seem to, like a salmon swimming upriver to the spot where it was born. I settled in, and enjoyed the feeling of a lull in my life. The city continued to recover steadily from the trauma of the earthquake and tsunami, and I gave an impossibly large and appropriately anonymous amount to relief efforts in the north. Revelations about the corruption that led to the Fukushima reactor meltdown were astonishing, even for a cynic like me. Still, nothing seemed to come of it. Japan, it seemed, at least in terms of apathy, was not so different from America.
    Because there, too, the news was astonishing. Revelations, indictments, charges of treason. Most of it true, as Horton had foretold, the lies woven so carefully into the fabric that no one who didn’t understand the entire tapestry would ever spot them. Horton, again as he foretold, developed an enormous following. There were calls for him to run for president. To his credit, I supposed, he demurred, and I imagined that what people believed was his noble resistance to the allure of power would one day burnish his legend.
    But despite all the revelations and arrests and the outrage, I didn’t really see all that much change. The wars kept grinding along. There were no populist revolts, no peasants with pitchforks storming the Capitol or burning the barons of Wall Street, even in effigy. There was talk of a third party—a second party would have been the more accurate way to put it, I thought—but nothing meaningful came of it. Though Wikileaks was the conduit for everything that was coming out, the New York Times and all the others were getting the credit, as though they would have touched any of it if