The Detachment

possible?”
    There was a long pause, then he said, “I think the public’s been…prepped for this, yes. Even before nine-eleven, but especially since then. There’s a ratchet effect, and nothing, not even killing bin Laden, seems to change it. I can see where some people could realize they could take advantage, whether out of greed or rationalized patriotism or whatever. What does Horton want you to do?”
    “I think you can imagine.”
    “The plotters?”
    I didn’t answer.
    “Shorrock?”
    Again, I didn’t answer.
    “It might be true,” he said, after a moment. “In which case, you’re doing something pretty heroic. But…if the people behind this thing get wind of your involvement, I think you’re going face opposition like you’ve never seen.”
    “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, remembering, again, Larison’s admonitions about Horton.
    “You trust Horton?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Then why are you doing this? The money?”
    There was a time when Kanezaki’s inquiries were obvious and callow. He’d come a long way.
    “Not just the money. I wouldn’t call it heroic, the way you did, but…look, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for me to do something good for a change.”
    “If it is good. You only have Horton’s word to go on, is that right?”
    “That’s why I called you. I was hoping for some kind of corroborating evidence, one way or the other.”
    “I wish I’d been able to find something. So far not.”
    “Let me ask you something. Horton…does he have any vulnerabilities?” I was thinking of what Larison had said about hostages to fortune. I wondered whether Horton had one of his own.
    “My friend, that’s a line I can’t cross. I’m not going to help you take out an American army colonel.”
    “I’m not asking you to. But…if this thing turns out to be other than what it’s been billed as, heroism might require a different course. Just keep it in mind.”
    “The two operators you asked me to follow up on—Larison and Treven. Are they involved?”
    But I’d said enough. I told him let’s just stay in touch—after all, he wanted to know if Horton was right and what was being done about it, and I wanted an early warning system in case I was being set up. He told me he’d keep trying to find out more, and I headed off to Vienna.
    Horton’s intel had been spotty. He had Finch’s roundtrip Washington to London flights, and he knew his schedule of meetings in London. The meetings ended two days before the return flight, and Horton claimed to be ninety percent sure Finch would spend those two days in Vienna, taking a roundtrip flight from London on his own dime before heading back to Washington on his government-sanctioned ticket. What we didn’t know, though, was on what flight Finch would arrive, or where he would be staying. We might have called various airlines and Viennese hotels to “confirm” the reservation of a Mr. Jack Finch, but doing so would have created too many possibilities of an airline or hotel employee learning from the evening news about the selfsame Jack Finch’s demise, finding the previous call to be too weird under the circumstances to be merely a coincidence, and contacting the authorities, who might then want to check on whether other airlines and hotels had received similar calls. If Finch had been conducting his business like a good, oblivious civilian, Horton would have been able to nail down his travel details easily enough. The fact that he couldn’t indicated some security consciousness on the part of Finch, and suggested too that Horton felt circumscribed in his ability to look, lest his inquiries tip Finch off. Regardless, the upshot was that the locus of our attention had to be the sister. If we could get a fix on her, we would also be fixing Finch. After that, we would have to improvise.
    On the one hand, Emma Capps, widowed but retaining her married name, was fairly easy to track. For starters, we had both her home and work addresses, courtesy of standard IRS paperwork. We also had plenty of photographs, scraped from the university’s website, from Capps’s Facebook page, and from Capps’s own website, where she blogged about trends in the art world and advertised her paintings—impressive oil works that were at once recognizably realistic but also bathed in an otherworldly, melting luminescence. On the other hand, none of us was particularly familiar with Vienna, we knew nothing of Capps’s daily habits, and we had