The Killer Collective (John Rain, #10; Ben Treven #4; Livia Lone #3)
Barry Eisler
The months and days are the travelers of eternity.
—Bashō
prologue
Arrington smoked in the dark. Smoking meant so much, not just for its intrinsic pleasure, but because he knew what it did to him. Accepting the inherent risks involved, the price of the pleasure, elevated the activity from what might have been a mere indulgence to something more akin to a passion. After all, a man had to genuinely love—had to be committed to something—if he was willing to sacrifice himself for it.
Still, he didn’t do it all the time. He never wanted smoking to become rote or routine. It had to have impact. Mark the moment. Signify something special, even something extreme.
Tonight, it did all those things.
In some ways, what he had just learned defied reason, because how could something so awful also contain something so impossibly good? He had experienced a similar dynamic only once before: 9/11, when the news came at CIA about the Pentagon hit, and his first thought had been Kelly is there. Kelly, who only a month earlier had told him she wanted a divorce, and that she hoped they could do it amicably, with reasonable visitation rights so he could continue to be a father to their two small daughters, and with no more child support than what the law would require anyway.
And then she was gone. Extinguished. Suddenly, instead of a sad, impoverished divorcé, he was the widower of a martyred Defense Department employee, sanctified by her death, recipient of a six-figure life-insurance payout and a seven-figure September 11th Victim Compensation Fund settlement. Rich instead of poor. Celebrated instead of scorned.
That was the dirty little secret of 9/11, he thought. Not the conspiracy theories—the accusations about advance knowledge and controlled demolition and inside jobs. The real secret was that within the overall loss, there were also winners. After all, it was just a matter of statistics that half of marriages ended in divorce. And divorce was the chemotherapy of marriage, so expensive and toxic that only couples in extremis would attempt it as a cure. And if half of marriages were so cancerous that they justified treatment with the equivalent of chemotherapy, what did that say about the others? How many of the nondivorced had just learned to live with the illness because the cure seemed even worse than the disease?
And all those unhappy unions, the bad and the worse, ended that morning. With the widows and widowers consecrated by the nation and showered with cash.
He had sensed today’s similarity immediately, but the full ramifications were so vast that he needed this moment in his town house living room, the lights off, the tendrils of tobacco smoke curling up past his fingers and the nicotine sharpening his focus, to try to fully understand.
He’d initially thought it would be just another scandal for the Secret Service. He didn’t care about that, beyond the value he thought he might extract politically. And then he had a hunch. A long shot, he’d thought. But it turned out he’d been right. Spectacularly so.
On the one hand, the whole thing confirmed his deepest fears. The fears the Agency shrinks had pronounced as “overblown”—as though a psychiatrist had any basis to opine on geopolitics. The fears he knew his complacent colleagues laughed about behind his back. The ones they had used to derail his career.
But on the other hand . . . hadn’t it been discovered by exactly the right person? Who else would have known how to leverage it to protect the country? Who else would have had the will, and the insight, that all the people who had laughed at him, and marginalized him, and in the end jettisoned him, had lacked?
Doing it right would require some . . . difficult decisions. But when the health of an entire forest was at stake, you couldn’t afford to focus too much on individual trees. In fact, to protect the forest, sometimes firebreaks needed to be constructed, and certain trees removed.
The first step would be the least pleasant. There were security risks to eliminate. Information integrity to protect. Too many people knew, and the longer he waited, the worse the problem would become. Within a matter of days, in fact, if not sooner, it might already be too late.
Obviously, none of it could be done from within the government. Because the problem was the government. It had already been penetrated, as he’d always suspected. The only surprise was that the disease was even more advanced and widespread than he had imagined. But Arrington knew exactly how to ensure that things were taken care of the way they needed to be. An outside force. A kind of . . . supplement to the immune system of the body politic.
He stubbed out his cigarette and closed his eyes, his heart pounding as hard as the first time he’d jumped from a plane. Which, of course, made sense. Because the stakes were that high, the margin for error that narrow. But he was going to do this. He would make sure to follow through. And then they would see. They would all see.
He picked up the phone and made the call that would set everything in motion.
PART 1
chapter
one
RAIN
I told them no. But I might as well have said yes. The killing business has its own gravitational pull, and if you get too close, or stay too long, you’ll never break free.
Or maybe it’s just more comfortable to blame circumstances, or fate, or some other outside factor for results in fact engineered by ourselves. After all, I could have taken down the secure site. I could have severed that link. I could have roamed the earth as Bashō did, unmoored, untethered, as remote and untouchable as one of the solitary clouds that inspired the seventeenth-century poet in his ceaseless wanderings.