The Detachment

price of oil, his affiliations had never been entirely clear to me. The last time I’d run into him was in Amsterdam, which was the last time he ran into anyone. If Horton had been involved with the late Jim Hilger, whatever he wanted was apt to be hazardous.
    “What do you know about Hilger?” I asked.
    Treven shook his head. “No more than I just told you.”
    Larison said, “I’ve heard of him.”
    “Who did he work for? Was he government? Corporate?”
    Larison laughed. “You really think there’s a difference?”
    Treven frowned just the tiniest amount, and I sensed Larison’s comment made him uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure why. Well, neither was going to tell me more. And, given Hilger’s current condition, I supposed it didn’t matter anyway.
    “Anything else?” I said.
    Treven said, “Yeah. This thing Hort’s trying to rebuild is going to include a former Marine sniper named Dox, who you’re supposed to know.”
    I didn’t respond. I hadn’t seen Dox in a while, but we were in touch and I knew he was still living in Bali. He didn’t need work, but this would probably interest him anyway. It wasn’t a question of money with Dox. He just liked to be in the thick of it.
    A part of my mind whispered, And you? I ignored it.
    Larison said, “You might want to contact Dox yourself. If you don’t, we have to, and what’s the point of getting more contractors killed?”
    Again, I was intrigued by his hint that he didn’t mind what happened to the contractor elements of his team.
    The waitress returned with our order and left. Larison took a sip of coffee and nodded appreciatively. Treven didn’t touch his.
    I drained my water glass and looked at them. “What does Horton have on you two?”
    Neither of them responded. Well, he had something. And now they had something on me.
    But then Larison surprised me. He said, “The video recorder is in my pocket. Mind if I reach for it?”
    The question was appropriate. In a situation like this one, with someone like me, you want to keep your hands visible. Especially once you’ve established that you’re too smart to reach for something suddenly. The only reasonable inference would be that you’re going for a weapon, and the inference would lead to an unfriendly response.
    I gestured that he should feel free. He stood and slowly extracted from his front pocket a unit like the two I’d taken from the giants. He placed it in the center of the table and sat back down. Then he glanced at Treven, who repeated the move, producing an identical unit.
    I made no move to pick up the recorders. I’d expected the intent of the initial offer was only to get me to meet them, but now they seemed actually to be following through on it. Give up leverage for free? If they’d been clumsy civilians, maybe I could have read it as a naïve attempt to beget goodwill with goodwill. But neither of these guys was naïve. On the contrary, both of them had the quiet, weighty aura of men who’ve repeatedly killed and survived, an experience that tends to extinguish belief in the power of goodwill, along with most other such happy indulgences.
    “There are no copies,” Larison said. “We don’t have anything on you. You want us to get lost, we’ll walk out of here right now. But the next team Hort sends, they won’t give you the video. They’ll use it.”
    Probably he was lying about the copies, but I would never know for sure until someone tried to use them against me, and that would happen only if friendlier tactics proved useless. So Larison could be expected to try something relatively subtle to begin with. And so far he’d handled it deftly, I had to admit. You never want to present extortion as a threat: doing so just needlessly engages the subject’s ego and creates unhelpful resistance. Instead, you want to present the threat as though it has nothing to do with you, as though in fact you’re on the subject’s side. Maybe that explained the hints about a gap between Horton and them. It would have been a good way to help me persuade myself that my problem wasn’t with these two, but with someone else. If he was ruthless enough, and I sensed he was, he might even have sacrificed the two giants for the same end.
    “Look,” Larison said, “no one can just disappear anymore. Everyone is findable. It’s a condition of modern life. You want total security? You have to disconnect. Live off the grid, remotely, no contact with the outside world. But if you like