The Detachment

I’d be traveling under, but it would delay them, and under the circumstances a delay would be good enough.
    Probably I was being overcautious. Parsimony suggested this was no more than what it looked like: JSOC wanting to contract out a particularly sensitive job, and probably one that involved natural causes. But as an organizing principle, parsimony has its limitations. Like most of what exists in nature, it can be manipulated by men.

T wo days later, I sat alone at a corner table of the Beverly Wilshire’s The Blvd, enjoying a bowl of oatmeal and an Economic Energizer smoothie and slowly working my way through a pot of coffee, surrounded by a mixture of hotel guests in tourist garb and studio factotums preening about deal points over power breakfasts. I liked the hotel and would have spent the night there, but didn’t want to be a guest at the same place where, if things didn’t go well, I might have to leave Horton’s body behind. Instead, I’d stayed at the nearby Four Seasons, then strolled over to take advantage of the Beverly Wilshire’s low-key but pervasive security, which would make things more challenging for Horton’s forces if the meeting were a setup. Multiple entrances and exits on three separate streets would also complicate things for anyone planning something untoward. And on top of all the sound tactical reasons, it didn’t hurt that I liked their food.
    Kanezaki had come through with information on Larison and Treven. Daniel Larison was indeed a former ISA operator, but was now deceased, blown up in the bombing attack on Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto in Karachi on October 18, 2007. Either the death was staged, or this guy was someone else who had stepped into the dead Larison’s shoes. And Treven was apparently Ben Treven, ISA, though this wasn’t a sure thing either because Kanezaki couldn’t get photographs that I might use to match against the men I’d met. But I supposed it didn’t matter all that much what their names were. What mattered was they were working for Horton.
    I’d called Horton earlier that morning to let him know where he could find me, then headed straight over to ensure I could get a table with a view of the restaurant’s hotel and street entrances. Dox was a few tables away, facing me, concealed from the entrances by one of the giant, wood-paneled pillars.
    We’d spent the previous evening catching up over dinner at XIV, a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. Over the chef’s tasting menu of heir-loom tomato & peach salad and Dungeness crab ravioli and other such delectables, Dox told me he’d grown bored with the little patch of paradise he’d built in Bali.
    “It’s beautiful and all, you’ve been there,” he said, stroking his sandy-colored goatee. “I always thought it would be exactly what I wanted, my own place on the other side of the world. You know, far from the mad-ding crowd, and all that, but…I don’t know, maybe it’s not Bali, maybe it’s the life.”
    “How so?”
    “Well, shit. I can get work pretty much anytime I want it…there’s so much from the CIA and the Pentagon I’m not even taking anything from foreign clients anymore. I’m just tired of playing whack-a-mole with Achmed, I guess. I mean, what’s the point of being in the fire brigade, if the people you’re working for keep tossing matches on the underbrush? I should be glad, I realize—the big bad Global War on Terror means a nice annuity for people like you and me. What the hell, maybe it’s a midlife crisis. Maybe I should just buy a fancy car.” He took a healthy swallow of the Bombay Sapphire he was drinking, then said, “What about you and Delilah? How’s that going?”
    I was drinking a 2007 Emilio’s Terrace from Napa Valley I’d discovered, strangely enough, in Bangkok. It was a cabernet and still young, but the fruit was delicious anyway. I felt vaguely sad for a moment to imagine how it might taste when it was really ready, in another decade or so. I looked at the dark liquid in the glass and said, “It’s not.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It means I left her in Paris. I’m back in Tokyo.”
    “Back in Tokyo?” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I thought you loved Paris. Hell, I thought you loved Delilah.”
    I sighed. “She wouldn’t leave the Mossad. I don’t know how many times I told her that one of us in the life and the other trying to leave it was making me insane. I finally just…I gave her an ultimatum.”
    “I