The Detachment

the side door closed, then got into the passenger seat. I walked over and he rolled the window down.
    “Thanks,” I said. “To both of you.”
    Yuki looked at me and I could have sworn she was almost smiling.
    “I don’t want to know,” she said, shaking her head. Then she pointed at Kanezaki and said, “We’re even, Mister State Department.”
    He nodded grimly. “You could say that.”
    I wondered what the hell he’d done for her. Whatever it was, he’d called in his marker, and she’d paid it off.
    Hopefully not at higher interest than she’d been expecting.

W e stayed off the interstates on our way out of Maryland, heading northwest and crossing the Potomac at the Point of Rocks Bridge, far from the Beltway and Route 95, Dox driving while I rode shotgun. The sun was getting low in the sky, but there was still plenty of daylight left. I wanted it to get dark. I kept half-expecting a phalanx of police cars to swing into position behind us, lights on and sirens screaming. It didn’t make sense, of course, but then neither did those four guys at the Hilton. The only thing I was sure of was that the farther we got from the city, the better I’d feel.
    We kept the radio on to see if there was any news about the hotel shooting. There was plenty, but it was confused and incomplete. Witnesses claiming to have heard gunshots; police cordoning off the hotel; the cops saying little other than that they were investigating a possible shooting. It might have been routine; it might have been Horton behind the scenes, leaning on the locals in the name of “national security,” and concealing the identities, and affiliations, of the dead men.
    We talked about what had happened at the hotel, about what could have been the flaw in our security. If we couldn’t identify it, we had to assume it was still a problem, and the feeling of some hidden vulnerability that could undermine us at any time was maddening.
    “You’re sure you weren’t followed,” I said as we drove.
    “Hell, yes,” Dox said. “We did a solid detection run from the airport. Multiple cab changes, a subway ride, you know the drill. No one could have been on us without our knowing.”
    I fought the urge to remind him that he shouldn’t have been using the airport itself. But I recognized the impulse as driven by an urge to lash out, not by anything possibly productive. Besides, even if they should have steered clear of the airport to start with, if they weren’t followed, they weren’t followed.
    “You said you went to a gun show,” I said. “What about that?”
    “We did a run after that, too. One hundred percent clean.”
    “What about—”
    “The hotel, right? Made the reservation from a gas station payphone in Merrifield, Virginia. After I was already for damn sure we were clean.”
    “All right, what about—”
    “Our cell phones were off the whole time. Larison double checked us. That boy’s as paranoid as you.”
    I considered. “You think he or Treven could have tipped Horton off?”
    “Hard to say. Maybe the hotel shooters were supposed to drop just us, not the two of them. If so, though, somebody didn’t get the memo, ’cause Larison and Treven shot the shit out of all four of them. You saw it, too.”
    I nodded, frustrated and angry. Being tracked when you think you’re untrackable is one of the worst, most vulnerable feelings there are.
    “Know what I think?” Dox said.
    “Tell me.”
    “I think we’re entering an age where freelancers like you and me are going to have to consider the attractions of retirement. I mean, there are just too many ways the opposition can get a handle on us now. Video cameras everywhere, surveillance drones being deployed over American cities, the NSA spying domestically, the government and all the Internet and telecom companies working together, satellites and supercomputers crunching all that data…I just think we’re in a world now where, if the man wants to find you, you’re going to get found. Which means you either work for the man, or you don’t work at all.”
    I didn’t answer. Maybe he was right. Maybe things had reached a point where there was no room for men like us anymore. Maybe we’d become vestiges, anachronisms, cogs on one last circuit within a machine that no longer had any use for us, a machine that was preparing to snap us off and spit us out so it could grind along even more senselessly and relentlessly than it ever had before.
    Outside Culpeper, as it