The Detachment

awakened by a knock.
    Dox and I took out our guns and approached the door. “Yes?” I said.
    “It’s us,” I heard Larison say.
    I had previously placed a strip of duct tape over the peephole to prevent anyone on the other side of the door from knowing by the blockage of light that someone was looking through it. I put my face up close and removed the duct tape. Larison and Treven, as advertised.
    I moved the dresser, then let them in and bolted the door behind them. “Any trouble?” I said.
    Treven shook his head. “No. Ditched those guys, ditched the van, no problems.”
    If Kei wondered whom he was referring to by “those guys,” she didn’t ask.
    “All right then,” I said. “If everything’s good to go, it’s time to call Horton.”
    Larison looked at Kei and smiled. “Yes, it is.”

I t was a long time before Larison was ready to call Hort. He didn’t know how they’d been tracked in D.C.—satellite, surveillance cameras, drone aircraft, whatever—and he needed to be certain it wasn’t going to happen again. So he ramped up his already stringent procedures, spending hours in buses, taxis, malls, and on the subway, making sure he wasn’t just flushing out possible foot and vehicular surveillance, but also that he was obscuring his movements against more remote potential watchers, as well.
    He was glad he’d managed to persuade the others that their only move was to take Kei hostage. It had the benefit of being true, of course, but he had his own, additional reasons for wanting Kei as leverage against Hort: he recognized that the value of his threat to release the torture tapes was diminishing.
    Larison had long understood that America’s political elites insisted on counter-terror policies like disappearances, torture, drone strikes, and invasions because the elites perversely benefited from the increased terror the policies inevitably produced. He understood the policies weren’t a response to the threat, but were rather the cause of the threat, and that this was by design. A frightened populace was a controllable populace. Endless war and metastasizing security procedures meant enormous profits for the corporations the politicians served. In this sense, the possible publication of graphic videos of American servicemen torturing screaming Muslim prisoners had always been, from the perspective of America’s elites, as much a promise as a threat.
    Still, in ordinary times, people would have reacted to videos of gruesome torture with disgust and horror. In the most emotionally irrefutable way, the tapes would implicate various establishment players, and the reputations of the men who had ordered the barbarism in the videos would have been sullied; their careers, derailed. And that highly personal threat had outweighed the government’s institutional interest in finding ways to increase the danger of terrorism—at least enough for the government to agree to cough up a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds.
    But everything had changed now. America was under attack, and who would object to what was on the tapes now? Object, hell—they’d clamor for more. The people who had ordered what was shown on the tapes wouldn’t be censured. They’d be heroes.
    And that, in essence, was the problem. Circumstances were now eroding the value of the cards he held, so much so that he wondered whether neutralizing the extortion value of the tapes was the purpose of the attacks. Well, even if it wasn’t the primary purpose, it must have occurred to somebody. And regardless, the effect was the same. The value of his assets was declining, and he knew he needed new ones. Hort’s daughter was one. The daughter, and what she would lead to.
    Eventually, he made his way to the graffitied roll-down storefronts and cracked cinderblock walls and peeling real estate lease signs of the blighted industrial district. For a while, he wandered among the jobless, solitary men who gravitated to the area, casualties of a hollowed-out economy. He liked the cover they gave him, liked that no one knew them or cared about them or could tell one from the other, liked knowing that as he made himself complicit among them, the world’s callousness and indifference would envelop him, as well.
    He paused with his back to the brick façade of a recycling center and looked around. The skyscrapers of the downtown jutted up into a faded blue sky a mile or so behind him. Absent those distant monoliths, he might have been