The Detachment

anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military.
—James Fallows
The environment most hospitable to coups d’etat is one is which political apathy prevails as the dominant style.
—Andrew Janos

V ienna seemed an unlikely locale for killing the president’s counterterrorism advisor.
    When Horton had briefed Dox and me in Los Angeles, I’d initially pictured Washington, where Finch worked, or maybe some beachside place, where he might enjoy a summer vacation with his family. But as it turned out, Finch wasn’t in Washington just then, and nor did he have a family. What he did have was a single sibling—a sister, who taught at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and whom Finch tended to visit whenever he was in Europe on official business. At the moment, as it happened, he was in London, tasked, no doubt, with reassuring the British that the Special Relationship was still special, along with the other important activities presidential counterterrorism advisors are expected to carry out. The problem with London was that the people he was meeting would have their own security details, meaning getting close to him would involve penetrating veritable Venn diagrams of overlapping protection. But Vienna was neither an announced part of Finch’s itinerary, nor an official one. Unless art professors in the former seat of the Hapsburg Empire had their own bodyguards, Finch’s security would be all we had to worry about, and with luck, even that would be light, perhaps even nonexistent.
    I had called Kanezaki from a payphone after going through security at LAX. My fellow passengers and I went through the new security machines with our arms raised over our heads as though we were criminals. A few chose to get patted down instead, like prisoners. No one seemed to mind the new normal.
    Kanezaki hadn’t learned anything about Horton, but he did mention that a certain Tim Shorrock, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, had died of an apparent heart attack in Las Vegas. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” he asked.
    “Why would I know anything about it?”
    “Just seems like a lot of coincidences. Horton is obviously a key member of the counterterrorism community—”
    “It’s nice you guys have a community now, with members. It makes it sound so friendly.”
    “—and a heart attack for Shorrock, at the same time Horton is reaching out to you, makes me wonder. Especially because apparently Shorrock was some kind of fitness fanatic.”
    “You ever hear of an earthquake causing a church to collapse on its parishioners?” I asked. “It happens. Same as a fitness fanatic with a faulty valve or whatever. I tend to think of it as God indulging his sense of irony. Or maybe his sense of humor.”
    “Maybe. Did you ever meet with Horton?”
    “Maybe.”
    “You were going to keep me posted, remember?”
    I might have reminded him that keeping him posted was in exchange for his finding out about what Horton was planning, which he hadn’t done. But if I told him that, he would just respond that he had tried but hadn’t managed, and anyway that he had come through with information about Treven and Larison. It would be a circle jerk at best; more likely, it would erode some of the trust and goodwill Kanezaki and I had spent years building.
    Still, I hesitated to tell him, even in broad strokes, what Horton was up to. Need-to-know and other aspects of operational security are a long-honed reflex in me. But if Larison was right, it was in my interest to learn everything I could about Horton, who might be as much opposition as he was client. Offering some information of mine in exchange for data that might give me a clearer view of the movement of pieces on the board, and of the players behind them, would be a smart trade.
    “It’ll sound a little crazy,” I said.
    He chuckled. “It’s a crazy business. My own COS tried to have me taken out, remember?”
    Back when he’d been a green CIA recruit in Tokyo, Kanezaki had run dangerously afoul of his chief of station, a certain James Biddle, who tried to hire me to kill him. I warned Kanezaki, instead, and that warning had fostered a relationship that had since become highly useful to me.
    “All right. Horton says there’s a coup afoot in America.” When I was done giving him the 30,000-foot view of the landscape, I asked, “You think that’s