“I get it,” Evie said. “But how are you getting ahold of this stuff? Because—”
“I had the same thought,” Kanezaki said. “Outside of what you and Maya have done using Guardian Angel, it’s all through my own networks. Nothing via CIA or any other official channels.”
Ten minutes later, they were airborne, the cabin dimmed, the urban lights of Northern Virginia disappearing below them, the darkness of Shenandoah National Park and Monongahela National Forest coming into view. Maya stayed glued to her laptop, pillaging Guardian Angel for anything that might be useful about Grimble. But ten minutes after takeoff, Kanezaki watched while one after the other the rest of them grabbed pillows and blankets, reclined their seats, and dropped off—the aftermath, Kanezaki knew, of adrenaline and parasympathetic backlash. Napoleon had observed that the greatest danger occurs at the moment of victory, and Kanezaki was glad they had this interregnum to rest and recover.
He would have liked to join them. But the cross-country flight was his last chance to deal with logistics and matériel. And while he had an extensive network of suppliers of arms and related gear, and private jet owners, and safe house operators, and doctors, requisitioning bicycles and especially horses, particularly in the middle of the night, was definitely going to be a novel experience.
Beyond which, for the moment, he was too keyed up to sleep anyway. He’d failed to anticipate Rispel’s ruthlessness or her resourcefulness, and as a result, Ali was dead. It could have been Maya; it could have been any of them. Going forward, he wouldn’t allow himself to miss anything. He couldn’t.
And there was something else. He wanted those videos. Preventing them from falling into Rispel’s hands would feel like a stalemate, one achieved at great cost. Gaining control over them himself would be victory.
He’d always understood that knowledge is power, and he had sought knowledge accordingly. But the most powerful knowledge of all was knowledge you had—and that others lacked. Which was to say, knowledge was power only when it was your knowledge. What gave you power over others was their ignorance. Asymmetrical knowledge, otherwise known as intelligence. And he was in the intelligence business.
But these videos were something else entirely. They weren’t knowledge. They were power itself. And power like that could only be entrusted to someone who would know how to wield it wisely.
Someone like himself.
chapter
sixty-five
DOX
Dox was standing between Larison and Labee, reviewing documents about Grimble’s compound they’d printed and laid out on a table. It had been a short flight from Seattle, made shorter by the fact that Dox had passed out cold before the private plane Kanezaki had secured had even left the runway. Well, smoke ’em if you got ’em, as the saying went, and he’d learned as a Marine it was even truer when it came to sleep.
They were in an empty building now, part of a nondescript office park north of San Jose International Airport along Route 101. Another item Kanezaki had scored for them, complete with a kitchen someone had left stocked with breakfast items and plenty of coffee. Dox wouldn’t have said so out of fear it would come across as condescending, but he was proud of the man. When they’d first met, Kanezaki had been nothing but a green CIA case officer. But since then, he’d been betrayed, disillusioned, blooded, and repeatedly promoted, and through it all had managed to assemble a private network that would have been the envy of any gunrunner, smuggler, trafficker, or other outlaw Dox had ever heard of.
Larison was reading a news article about the compound. “Look at this place,” he said. “Twenty-three acres. A three-acre pond with two artificial waterfalls. Ten buildings, including a guardhouse, guesthouse, bridge house, boathouse, teahouse—”
“Everything but a henhouse,” Dox said.
“—a barn, and a moon pavilion, whatever the hell that is. The main residence is modeled after an early seventeenth-century Kyoto palace. Thousands of tons of materials imported from Japan. Everything hand-planed and joined on the site without using nails or any other machine-made materials. Is this guy insane?”