Inside Out

It made sense. But it answered only how Hort had found him, not why. He knew he should ask, but he almost didn’t care. He had to fight the urge to blurt out, Please, just get me out of here…

He took a breath and said, “All right, you want something from me.”

Hort pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to mop the moisture off his face and scalp. “You’re a little more cynical than the last time I saw you.”

“I wonder why that would be.”

“You want me to just leave you here? I could, you know. The Australians want to extradite you. All I have to do is step aside and let it happen.”

Somehow, hearing the threat out loud eased Ben’s mind a little. If Hort were really going to leave, he would’ve just done it. And obviously, he hadn’t come all this way just to say hello.

“Maybe your brother could help you,” Hort said. “Good to have a lawyer in the family when you’ve been charged with murder. And the girl, Sarah Hosseini. Two smart lawyers. Strange to think of them protecting you instead of you protecting them, but there you have it.”

Hort had no way of knowing what had happened between Sarah and Ben-the way their distrust had alchemized to passion, maybe to even more. He was fishing on that one.

“Do they need protection?” Ben asked, his voice low, his tone casual.

There was a pause. Hort said, “No.”

Ben nodded, not exactly reassured. Alex and Sarah still knew a lot about Obsidian and about the failed op to disappear it. It wasn’t impossible someone on the National Security Council or wherever might get sufficiently uncomfortable about their knowledge to decide to revisit the issue. But at least Hort wasn’t threatening him with it. On the other hand, he’d learned from the Obsidian op that Hort could be a master bullshitter, at least when bullshitting was required by the mission. Maybe he just knew Ben well enough to know overt threats would be counterproductive. That didn’t mean the threat wasn’t there. It wasn’t in Hort’s character or his experience to display a weapon until he was ready to use it.

“All right,” Ben said. “So you’ve pulled all these strings, you’re ru

“You know you’re on YouTube now, right? Camera phones in the bar.”

Ben looked at him, his shame so enormous he couldn’t speak.

“Relax,” Hort said. “You got lucky. The spotlighting in the bar was pointed at the cameras. You can barely make out the action, let alone your face.”

Ben managed to nod, the whipsaw from horror to relief intensifying how sick he felt from what he did to the Aussie marine. He concentrated on his breathing, trying to get a grip on emotions that were slipping past his control.

Hort looked at him. Other than the useless rattle of the fan stirring the leaden air, the room was silent.

“So tell me, son,” he said. “What were you doing in that bar?”

Ben didn’t know why, but the question made him feel suddenly wary. “What do you mean, what was I doing? I was having a drink.”

“Why?”

“I had a lot to think about. Some shit has happened to me recently, you might have noticed that. I just wanted to be alone and think. You never had something like that?”

“All the time. But if you wanted to be alone so you could think, you didn’t need a bar. Your hotel room would have been just fine. Or you could have taken a walk. Or gone to the library.”

“They don’t serve gin in the library.”

“No, they don’t. The gin was part of what you wanted, I can see that.”

Ben was getting increasingly uncomfortable. It wasn’t just what Hort was saying. It was also the quietly confident way the man was looking at him, as though he knew Ben better than Ben knew himself.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Hort looked at him. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. But maybe you need me to spell it out for you.”

Ben held Hort’s gaze. But why did he feel like flinching?

“What you wanted,” Hort said, “was to fuck someone up. And you couldn’t do that in your room, or taking a walk, or visiting a local branch of the Manila public library system. But a bar on P. Burgos Street was pretty much tailor-made. Now, maybe you didn’t mean to kill the man whose neck you crushed, maybe you just wanted to hurt him. It doesn’t matter. Either way, you lost control. And an operator can never do that.”

“I didn’t-”

“Yes, you did. Now listen. I rocked your world recently, I get that. I wish it hadn’t needed to be that way, but yeah, I turned you upside down. Your commander betrayed you, you can never trust these people again, everything you believed in is wrong. That was more or less it, right?”

Ben didn’t answer. He hadn’t thought of it in those terms exactly, but… Shit, was he really that transparent? He could feel his face burning.

“So you decided it was over with you and the unit, you were done. The problem is, you’re a man with a lot of energy inside you and you needed to divert it to something else. So you flew to Manila, where your ex-wife lives with your daughter. You thought you were going to be a better person, didn’t you, maybe reconcile with your ex, be a father to your little girl. Attach yourself to something new, like a man falling in love on the rebound. But it didn’t go well, did it?”

Ben felt his shame coalescing into anger. “Back off, Hort.”

“No, I will not back off. You went to see them, didn’t you? And your woman turned you away. Or you saw her with another man. Or both, or whatever. Well, that’s two rejections in a row, twice your world’s been rocked. Now, some men deal with rejection and humiliation and confusion by wallowing in self-pity. Some of your more self-actualized types can let it roll off their backs. How about you? How do you deal with it?”

Ben stared at Hort, his lips thi

“For example,” Hort said, as though reading his mind, “how are you dealing with it right now?”

Ben ground his jaw shut and looked away. The breath was whistling in and out of his nostrils.

“Yeah, maybe now you’re starting to see it. You’ve got anger inside you, son. Maybe it’s all-natural, or maybe something happened along the way and made it worse. Either way, it’s in your nature to seek out enemies and destroy them. It’s what you do. It’s what you’re good at. Some people play the piano, some people race cars. You destroy enemies. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it. The country needs men like you and I wish we had more. But you need direction. You need that violence to be cha

Ben realized he was gripping the edge of the table, to steady himself or throw it aside he wasn’t even sure anymore. He opened his hands and flexed his fingers and concentrated again on slowing his breathing.

He knew Hort was right. If any of it had been bullshit, he’d have laughed it off. The way it was enraging him, though… why would that be?

Because the truth hurts.

“No one else talks to me like that,” he said after a moment. “No one.”

Hort nodded. “No one else cares enough to take the chance.”

“What do you want, then?”

“I want you to stop this foolishness. There’s a major shit storm heading our way right now and I need your help to stop it. So I need you to stop acting out like a wounded adolescent. I need you to be more self-aware and to show more self-control. Can I count on you for that?”