The Killer Collective (John Rain, #10; Ben Treven #4; Livia Lone #3)(2)

But I didn’t.

They used Larison to make the initial contact. Larison, one of the most dangerous and volatile men I’d ever known. And, following the detachment we’d assembled to stop a series of false-flag attacks designed to instigate a coup in America, one of the few I trusted.

I was living in Kamakura, clear of Tokyo at last. Flush with an unexpected fortune in uncut diamonds from the job with Larison and the detachment, I’d bought property—a plot of hilltop land with a view of Sagami Bay, obtained via a painstaking series of cutouts and a lot of laundered money. Through further cutouts and at even greater expense, I’d hired a specialist in such matters, a man named Takishita, who found me a minka, a traditional Japanese farmhouse, standing derelict in Gifu province, the snow country sometimes known as the Japanese Alps. Takishita purchased the three-hundred-year-old structure on my behalf and had it disassembled and transported to my land in Kamakura, where he reassembled it, building in electricity, plumbing, large windows, and other modern conveniences, but in all material respects maintaining and, indeed, enhancing the design’s original beauty. He even created a modest but lovely karesansui—a traditional rock garden—outside the living-room window, which would take on different hues with each change of the seasons: autumn colors, winter snow, spring rains, summer sun.

The work took over three years, but I was in no hurry. I told myself a home was worth waiting for, and worth getting right. But when the project was finally done, I grew restless again, and I realized the minka’s purpose had been more to keep me busy than to provide a place to live. I would sit on a cushion by the irori, the open-air hearth in the middle of the living room, reading Bashō’s travel memoir, Oku no Hosomichi—The Narrow Road to the Interior—in Japanese and English, occasionally correcting what I felt was an inelegant line of translation, and I would feel like an artful forgery. Half-Japanese and half-American had always meant neither, and no amount of mastery—whether of judo, of language, of culture—would ever change that.

The distractions of the project behind me, I came to understand that building something of value was a way of sublimating, of suppressing my torment about having ruined things with Delilah—a bizarre act of self-sabotage, considering all the forces that had previously tried and failed to set us against each other. Every day, I wanted to contact her. Every day, I knew I should. And every day, I didn’t. My minka was beautiful, but it came to feel more a fortress than a home. A fortress of solitude.

So Larison’s contact, when it came, felt like a relief. I should have taken it instead as a warning.

I used an encrypted satellite phone to call the number he’d posted on the secure site. That I even maintained the untraceable unit was, of course, at odds with the notion of my “retirement.” But we rarely see what we prefer to overlook.

He picked up on the first buzz, his gravelly whisper instantly recognizable. “You just won me a bet with myself.”

I imagined it was just a crack, but I didn’t like it. In my business, being predictable is one step from being dead.

Of course, I wasn’t in the business. I was retired.

“What do you mean?”

“I bet that you wouldn’t have taken down the site. And that you’d still be checking it.”

“Should I be wishing you’d lost?”

“I doubt it. You kept it intact because it’s better to know if someone’s looking than to make him find you another way. I was betting on you being smart.”

I liked his explanation better than what I was beginning to suspect myself—that maybe I just wanted to be found.

“How are you?” I said, surprised and a little discomfited at how pleased I was to be talking to him. “Getting any sleep?” Once, in Vienna, he’d told me he was plagued by bad dreams. The things he’d done in SpecOps to cause those dreams, he wouldn’t speak of at all.

“Sometimes,” he said. “It’s never going to be good. But . . . sometimes it’s better. You?”

“I’m retired.”

He laughed.

I felt a touch of irritation. “Why’s that funny?”

“Hey, it’s not me you have to convince. It seems Hort has someone in need of your services.”

The “services” I’d been known for were jobs demanding the appearance of natural causes. When a bullet, a blade, or a bomb would do, you could hire anyone. But when it absolutely had to look like something other than a contract hit, I’d pretty much had the market to myself.

“Horton?” I said. “I half expected you would have killed him by now.”

Once upon a time, Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton had been a legend in SpecOps. He was the one who’d tapped me to lead the detachment through which I’d met Larison. But his endless manipulations and deceit had made him a lot of enemies—Larison foremost among them.

“I might still. But I like imagining him smoking an after-dinner cigar on the porch of his little cabin outside Lynchburg, wondering every time if tonight’s the night I ghost up out of the woods and punch his ticket.”

“So he reached out to you, what, as a way of keeping his enemies close?”

“One possibility, sure.”

“What are the others? He’s retired, isn’t he?”

Larison laughed. “Yeah, same as you.”