The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(8)

There was another beat. Devereaux said, “I want to see these videos.”

“I don’t have a copy. Hamilton showed me something on some sort of encrypted website. So what are we going to do?”

Devereaux’s expression was impassive, but Hobbs could tell the man didn’t like having to go on Hobbs’s word. Or not knowing exactly what Hobbs had seen.

Devereaux sighed. “I’ll talk to Lisa Rispel.”

Hobbs nodded, pleased. “I’ve heard she’s very . . . effective.”

“That’s right,” Devereaux said. “She was my most dependable case officer when I was head of the Counterterrorism Center, and my deputy when I was director of CIA. I told the Senate committee she would make a great successor, and she has. But you knew all that.”

“I meant the black-site interrogations. People say she was willing to do whatever it took. Even eager.”

Devereaux frowned. “No one was eager, Uriah. We did what needed to be done.”

“The word is, she went to lengths that made even some of her colleagues queasy.”

“As I said: Lisa did what needed to be done. And if some of her colleagues weren’t willing to do the same, that’s on them, not her.”

“I don’t have a problem with it,” Hobbs said. “We want someone ruthless for this, don’t we?”

He might have added, And with her history, if push comes to shove she’ll be an ideal cutout, too. But Devereaux would intuit that. No need to make him uncomfortable by saying it out loud.

“All the resources of Justice are at your disposal,” Hobbs said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be in a position to tell anyone what we’ve done here. What I do know is that whoever figures out a way to fix this will have the president in his debt.”

He wondered if Devereaux would appreciate how discreet he was being. How many face-saving asides he had offered. Because even if he couldn’t prove it in court, he sensed in his gut the truth of what Devereaux had been working so hard to conceal.

Devereaux knew Schrader. Well enough to be worried about appearing in those videos.

He only hoped Devereaux hadn’t figured out the same about him.





chapter

six





KANEZAKI


Tom Kanezaki sat in a plush chair across from DCI Lisa Rispel in the corner of Rispel’s spacious seventh-floor office, a pot of tea and two cups and saucers arrayed before them. On the wall opposite were dozens of photographs of Rispel with presidents and potentates and plutocrats, all hung so as to dominate the view, regardless of where Rispel might seat a visitor. Today, Kanezaki would have preferred the seat across from her desk. That she had invited him into the corner suggested a faux intimacy. Her warmup—a few banal thoughts with regard to his upbringing in the States by nisei parents; fulsome congratulations on ops well executed; and respectful murmurs about an impressive twenty-year rise in the ranks overall—only deepened his suspicions. Well, nothing to be done but to sip the tea, politely deflect the praise, and wait for her to arrive at whatever was the real matter at hand.

“By the way,” she said, leaning back as though the real business was done and they were now just chitchatting, “I understand that from time to time you’ve employed a contractor, a former Marine sniper—nom de guerre Dox.”

He offered a friendly smile to conceal his unease. “When it comes to contractors, aren’t we trained to neither confirm nor deny?”

She smiled back. It was a warm smile, one he imagined she had practiced many times in front of a mirror, along with the vaguely regal bearing he assumed she’d cultivated as part of an act as if philosophy. In fairness, the image had carried her to CIA’s top job before her fiftieth birthday, even in the face of widespread political concerns about her treatment of detainees.

“We are,” she said. “But I believe that’s more for testimony before the Senate.”

Kanezaki chuckled at the intel-insiders joke. He had learned early on that the key to power within CIA and the broader intelligence community was to develop your own network—for information, of course, but also for action—and Dox was one of the proverbial jewels in the crown. They’d been working together for years, initially at arm’s length, and then increasingly on the rare and surprising basis of trust. He didn’t know how Rispel had learned about the connection. Her own network, he supposed. Spies among the spies.

“I’ve worked with him a few times, yes. Discreet and reliable. Why?”

The smile faded and she eyed him coolly—a duchess losing patience with a favored retainer.

“Is he effective?” she said.

“I thought that would go without saying.”

He didn’t know why he was sparring with her. The rope-a-dope would have been smarter. Maybe because he felt protective of Dox. Not that the big sniper needed anyone else to protect him.

“Can you contact him?”

“I can try,” he said, remembering his training: It’s not enough to know your way in. You have to know your way out. “He doesn’t always respond.”

“I thought you said he was reliable.”

“About carrying out a job. Not necessarily about accepting one.”

“Compunctions, then?”