The Detachment

It’s the same for me. I’ve taken a lot of lives, directly and indirectly, and some of them were under fairly questionable circumstances, I have to admit. One day, I believe I will have to face my maker and account for what I’ve done. Do you believe the same?”
    I didn’t answer. Somewhere in my mind, an image slipped past the guards. A boy in Manila, clinging to his mother’s dress, crying for the father I’d taken from him. I remembered his voice, regressed, childlike. Mama, Mama. A voice I sometimes hear in my dreams.
    “Occasionally I wonder,” Horton said, “when that day comes, if it could help my case to be able to say, ‘Yes, I’ve taken many lives. But look how many lives I’ve saved.’ You ever wonder anything like that? You ever wonder if there’s anything that could redeem men like us?”
    Again, I said nothing. That single prison break from memory was emboldening others. Another boy, about my age at the time, supine on the steaming, pre-dawn river grass, whispering in a tongue I couldn’t understand, tears rolling from his eyes as his life ebbed through a chest wound into the sodden ground beneath him. A wound I had delivered.
    Enough. Enough.
    “Here’s the thing,” Horton said. “If we don’t stop this, in a few weeks’ time you’re going to turn on CNN and see video of the most horrific civilian carnage you can imagine. Rolling mass casualty attacks on the homeland calculated to cause maximum suffering and to achieve maximum media impact. You will watch those videos, and see the anguish of the survivors and listen to the bereavement of the families of the dead and you will know that it happened because you stood down. Because you could have done something about it but just didn’t care to. And on the day you stand before your maker, as one day you will, you’ll have to explain all that to him, explain to him and to the spirits of the slaughtered thousands how none of it was really your fault. You want that on your conscience? You want that on your soul?”
    His delivery was strong, even impassioned, and I wondered what was feeding his fervor. His own sleepless nights, I decided. The wrong decisions he’d made, where he had pulled the trigger too quickly and shot an innocent, or held back too long and lost a friend. A mission he had missed. A wrong order he had issued. The deaths he had caused in trying to save lives.
    A detached part of me was impressed at how effectively he’d made his case. He had at least three selling points he was prepared to use, and when each of the first two—loosely speaking, patriotism and “It’s just one more”—failed to elicit a response, he smoothly abandoned it and continued his reconnaissance by fire. My determined silence in response to his third line of inquiry would have told him all he needed to know. Not the specifics—the fallout of having been raised a Catholic, the increasing weight of the life I’ve lived and the lives I’ve taken, my nebulous hopes for some means of atonement, maybe even redemption—but the general, and accurate sense that he’d hit a nerve.
    I sighed and glanced at the computer case. “What’s in there?”
    “Particulars for Shorrock. Oh, and the fifty thousand we discussed. Yours, whatever you decide.”
    Smart. I’ve rarely been shorted on a financial arrangement. No one wants to needlessly antagonize someone like me.
    “What are you offering for this suicide mission?”
    “There’s no reason it should involve suicide. Still, I’m offering one million dollars.”
    I didn’t say anything. I had to admit, it was an attention-getting number. “Divide it with your team any way you see fit,” he said. “And don’t tell me it’s not enough. I know that game, and I respect you for playing it, but we both know that even if you decide to keep only a quarter for yourself, that’s more than you’ve ever been paid for a single job in your life. The next one will pay even better, too, but this one is one million, no more.”
    I considered milking him for expenses, but decided there was no point. It was true, a quarter million for a hit was a huge premium, even factoring in the difficulty of the target.
    “How are we supposed to get to someone like Shorrock?”
    “I’d recommend this coming weekend, at the GovSec Expo in Las Vegas.”
    “GovSec?”
    “Government Security Expo and Conference. Every homeland security, defense, law enforcement, and intelligence contractor in America, all under