Inside Out

Ben wiped his lips with the back of a hand. He’d already spent so much time thinking, the hell with the unit, he was out, he could never trust Hort again… and here was the man himself, telling him not only that he was back in if he wanted, but acting like he’d never even left. Telling him he was needed.

It was confusing as hell. But also…

It felt good. So good.

A rivulet of sweat ran down into his eye. He blinked. “Give me that handkerchief, will you?”

Hort handed it to him. Ben unfolded it and wiped his face.

He gave the handkerchief back to Hort. “You said something about a shit storm?”

Hort nodded and stood. “I did. But first, let’s get you the hell out of here.”

4. An Extremely Unpleasant Death

Larison woke before dawn in another anonymous motel, this one along I-64 just outside Richmond, Virginia. He scrubbed a hand across the dark stubble on his face and considered trying to go back to sleep. Without the pills, though, the dreams were too much to face. He realized he should have weaned himself sooner, gotten used to sleeping unassisted before starting the op. But the pills would have dulled the edge he’d need if a bunch of guys in black fatigues and face masks blew his door with a shaped charge and came swarming into the room with chloroform, flex-cuffs, and a hood. Being unprepared for that possibility would be worse than the dreams. Though perhaps not by much.

The hell with it, he was too keyed up anyway. He swung his feet to the floor, picked up the Glock 18C machine pistol from the carpet next to him, and stood. He was fully clothed, all the way down to his boots and three spare 33-round magazines of armor-piercing ammunition in the pockets of his Blackhawk integrated tourniquet pants. They weren’t going to take him dazed and blinking in his skivvies the way they’d done Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They weren’t going to take him at all.

He walked through the dark to the bathroom and pissed, then came back and dragged the mattress from behind the couch and back onto the bed frame. He’d moved it to the floor the night before when he arrived. A small thing, but it could buy an extra second by creating the wrong focal point when a room was breached, and a second in a gunfight was like an hour any other time.

Truth is, it was a wonder he could sleep at all. He’d been pla

If he was lucky, the CIA would try to handle the whole thing in-house and the opposition would be limited and incompetent. More likely, given the sums involved, Christians in Action would have to bring in someone from the White House, and the White House would mobilize the NSA. The public didn’t really know what the NSA was capable of-didn’t want to know-but Larison had seen firsthand the results of operations like Pinwale, where the NSA got caught illegally reading vast quantities of American emails, along with some even more impressive ones that hadn’t leaked, and the thought of the puzzle palace training all that firepower exclusively on him was both exhilarating and terrifying.

And then there was Hort. Impossible to say whether JSOC would be brought into this. But even if they were kept out, it didn’t mean Hort wouldn’t find his way in. Not everything Hort did had JSOC’s blessing, or even its knowledge. Larison had learned that the hard way and he wouldn’t forget it. Behind the avuncular exterior that was part of what made men worship him, Hort was one of the most ruthless and capable operators Larison had ever known.

He set the Glock down and started doing push-ups. He wanted to go out as little as possible, so these in-room workouts were all he could afford right now. And he needed something to burn off his anxiety.

The trick was to assume the worst and act accordingly. The NSA searched for patterns; Larison would give them none. His movements were random, he paid for everything in cash, and when he had to show ID, he could draw on a half dozen identities, all of them guaranteed sterile because he’d created them himself. It had been a long time since he’d trusted JSOC.

He finished two hundred and fifty push-ups, flipped over onto his back, and started a set of sit-ups. His breathing and heart rate were slightly elevated. He felt good. Working out always took the edge off when he was feeling paranoid.

Hort represented a different facet of the same problem. Hort would try to exploit what he knew about Larison to anticipate Larison’s next move and then plan an ambush accordingly. Larison had seen Hort get inside his enemies’ minds and predict what they would do next. The man knew people so well, at times he seemed almost psychic. So much so, in fact, that Larison had from time to time considered eliminating the threat Hort might now represent.

A surge of latent paranoia suddenly gripped him and he wondered if he’d made a mistake, if he should have taken out Hort after all. But Hort was no soft target, for one thing. For another, Larison wanted to avoid yet another doomed face tormenting his dreams. Not that Hort didn’t deserve it. But they all deserved it. Guilty or i

He amped up the speed of his sit-ups, bludgeoning back the paranoia. He cranked out two hundred and fifty and rolled to his feet. He was still breathing through his nose. He started doing squats.

He wondered whether he should have taken a chance and staked out his ex-wife. She was still in Kissimmee, the town near Orlando where they’d lived in the years before Larison had ostensibly died-she’d grown up there and her folks were still local, and with Larison traveling so much, it had been comfortable for her, especially with the baby. For anyone who managed to co

Squat, stand. Squat, stand. On every other rep, he leaped into the air and landed on his toes. Sweat trickled down his sides.

Anyway, Marcy didn’t know anything about him. She never had. Their whole marriage had been a pathetic farce. He couldn’t even blame her for the baby. Really, he should have thanked her. It made everything he had to do afterward easier. The main thing was, operationally, she was a dead end. He was fine.

Then why was he pushing the workout so hard?

Because you’re keyed up, that’s all. Who wouldn’t be?

He finished the squats and went straight into lunges. Two fifty, five hundred, it didn’t really matter. He could go practically forever, it was just a question of time.

It was all so strange. He was officially dead, he’d been hiding for years, he’d severed all contact with anyone who’d known him as Larison. And yet it was only now that he felt everything was about to irrevocably change. He had the overwhelming sense of being perched on the edge of a dark precipice. He had no choice but to leap, not seeing what was on the other side, knowing only that it would be everything he always wanted, on the one hand.

Or an extremely unpleasant death, on the other.

He wondered for a moment whether he really had a preference. Did it matter?

He decided it didn’t. After the sobbing, the begging, after the awful… sound they all made, the men he’d interrogated had all eventually reached that point of surrender, of not caring how they were released, wanting only for it to be over. It was strange that he should feel a kinship with them now.