“Hold on,” Dox said. “Everybody hold on.” He turned to Livia. “I know where you’re coming from, and you know I respect it. But you can’t talk to people like that. Larison’s right. You don’t know him. Just like he doesn’t know you. And if we fall into the habit of thinking the worst of each other instead of being generous, the Hobbses and Rispels and Schraders of the world won’t have to kill us. We’ll do it for them. So let’s all just take a deep breath, keep talking, and most of all keep listening to each other. Okay?”
Larison appreciated the support. He’d seen Dox back Livia before and was glad it wasn’t just a reflex. “The Cleavon Little version was better,” he said. “But thanks.”
Dox laughed. They were all quiet for a moment. Livia looked at Larison and said, “I’m sorry.”
She was a proud, prickly person, and maniacal when it came to protecting children. Larison knew the apology wasn’t easy for her. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “But look, I still don’t understand the plan. Yeah, if the intel is good, we could kick down the door, shoot some people, and drag out Schrader. We could take that risk. Hopefully none of us would get killed in the process. But for what? What’s the upside, compared to doing nothing?”
Livia started to say something, but Dox, maybe worried she might be impolitic again, jumped in. “If those videos get released, it’s not just the men in them who’ll be all over the Internet. It’ll be their victims. That’s a whole lot of innocent lives permanently ruined.”
The truth was, Larison didn’t care. He didn’t know the girls. He didn’t know the circumstances. And while he might feel sorry for them in the abstract, it wasn’t enough to motivate him to risk his life. And if Livia wanted to judge him for that, she just wasn’t thinking clearly. He didn’t see her on a crusade to feed the hungry or house the homeless or whatever. As far as he was concerned, everyone had their own shit, picked their own battles, and did their own cost-benefit ratios.
But there was no point in having that argument. So all he said was “All right. What about an anonymous tip to the Marshal Service? How would that hurt these girls?”
“I had the same thought,” Livia said. “The problem is, one, we don’t know how soon they’d go in. If they wait, Schrader’s dead-man switch could upload something more damaging than the initial warning. And two, whenever they go in, they’d be going in as law enforcement. Playing by rules that could wind up with Schrader dead—either in the crossfire, or by action of whoever’s holding him. It sounds safer, but it’s not.”
Larison wasn’t buying it. “You just don’t trust anyone else.”
She looked at him. “Do you?”
It was a fair question, and there was no point in answering it. “I still don’t see the endgame,” he said. “Even if we break Schrader out, Hamilton says he has to operate the system himself. From one of his houses. His own voice. Now maybe you could record his voice and that would work, though maybe not, and if it didn’t, you wouldn’t have a lot to fall back on. So what we’re talking about is his live voice, presumably reciting a secret phrase, and with no stress in it. How are you going to overcome all that? In the end, that dead-man switch is just going to do what it was made to do.”
“Kanezaki can get us drugs,” Dox said. “Beta blockers and other anti-anxiety agents.”
“You’re shitting me,” Larison said.
“Nope. He says CIA has studied this kind of thing, and that with enough Klonopin and Propranolol, Schrader could have a shotgun to his head and there’d be as much stress in his voice as if he were dozing in his favorite recliner.”
Larison shook his head. “Your tax dollars at work.”
“So if we can get him out,” Dox said, “and get him to one of his houses, and give him a beta-blocker cocktail, we can reset the system. And buy Maya and Evie time to figure out how to take control of it.”