The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(38)

He was actually glad Rispel had summoned him. From what he’d seen on the news, Seattle was boiling over, and Dox, Larison, and Manus were flying blind without him. A meeting with Rispel would be a chance at more intel, or at least more insight. Beyond which, the anxiety of wondering how she was going to play it with him had been an unpleasant distraction. Best to get past it.

No cozy seat in the corner this time. Rispel didn’t even get up from behind her desk when the admin let him in. Or say anything after the admin had left and closed the door. Kanezaki sat, suppressing the urge to speak. You go first, he thought. You’re the one who wanted the meeting.

“I’ve just received some quite disturbing news from DNI Devereaux,” Rispel said after a moment. “About Seattle.”

Well, he’d been right. It was about both Devereaux and Seattle. “Yes?”

“I’m afraid that, through no fault of my own, I’ve put you in a bad position.”

That, he hadn’t been expecting. “Yes?”

“This . . . Manus matter. I was given to understand it was a payback operation, as I told you. It seems in fact it was related to Andrew Schrader, who as I’m sure you’ve seen on the news has been waltzed out of his prison cell by mysterious forces.”

Kanezaki had already planned on playing dumb, and despite Rispel’s unforeseen gambit he saw no reason to change the plan now. “I was wondering why I never heard from you this morning.”

“I had operators in the area tracking Manus. Six of them. They were massacred in a park.”

“I saw it on the news. Those were your people?”

She nodded. “Are you certain your man Dox had nothing to do with this?”

Your man. He recognized the trap she was laying out—an easy opportunity to claim that Dox had never been anywhere near the park. But Dox had told him there had been a scout, a woman posing as a jogger, and he couldn’t be sure of how much Rispel might know. So all he said was “I can’t imagine why he would have been involved.”

“Have you been in touch with him?”

Another potential trap. “Of course. He wanted to know what happened to the target. Why he was ‘all dressed up but didn’t have a prom date,’ is I think how he put it.” At any rate it sounded like something Dox would say.

Rispel nodded. He could tell she wasn’t convinced.

“Well,” she said after a moment. “It seems I’ve been used. Not for the first time. But that’s another story. For now, suffice to say that it seems this Manus thing wasn’t about payback for Anders, as I was given to understand, but rather about securing, or silencing, Schrader.”

He remembered something one of his instructors had told him: The best way to conceal a lie is to wrap it in truth. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I do, either. Did Dox say anything else?”

He saw risks in the truth and risks in the lie. He chose the lie. “Just that he had the same concerns you do about current events. Told me the job wasn’t worth the per diem.”

“He’s in the wind, then?”

“Are you asking if I can contact him?”

“Or track him down, yes.”

“I can try. But when he doesn’t feel like answering, he doesn’t. And if I try to contact him another way, I doubt he’ll feel it’s friendly.”

She sighed. “It’s strange. The team I had monitoring Manus. Before they were all annihilated, the leader checked in with me. She said she saw two men in the park bracing Manus. Could that have been Dox? If it was, then he and Manus must have been cooperating. There’s no other possible explanation for how Manus could have prevailed against a team of six trained operators.”

Another thing he hadn’t seen coming. “Manus was in the park? You had me position Dox near Pike Place. The fish market.”

“Yes, Manus had spent the night in a hostel nearby. Dox didn’t mention any of this to you?”

“No. He told me he waited all morning near the market, heard the news about the shooting and then the prison break, and pulled the plug.” He realized he was being too reactive, giving her too much leeway to shape the conversation. “But if you had six operators . . . why did you even need Dox?”

She frowned. “Compartmentalization, for one thing. Deniability, for another.”

“Who were the operators?”

“Honestly, Tom, what difference does it make?”

“You have a lot of questions about Dox, but none about the operators?”

She pursed her lips. “Your man Dox is alive. The operators are dead. I’d say they’ve proven their bona fides. Dox, on the other hand, is an open question.”

She looked away for a moment, drumming her fingers on her desk. “The DNI has informed me that Schrader is likely in possession of some extremely compromising material regarding some extremely highly placed people. I don’t know the details. But the DNI is afraid this . . . prison break was engineered by Russian forces. Or possibly Chinese.”

He’d tried hard to game out all the possibilities, but that one he hadn’t seen coming. “Wait a minute . . . You mean the DNI told you to take out Manus as a payback operation, and now he says he thinks, what, the FSB or MSS broke Schrader out of prison because of blackmail videos? Did he explain any connection between the two? Or try to resolve the discrepancy?”