It wasn’t Henry V, Delilah thought, but she’d heard worse. And it was good to see how seasoned a player Kanezaki had become. It wasn’t so long ago that he would never have presumed to take charge of a team of such formidable operators—or that any of them would have taken him seriously if he had tried.
And while on one level she was happy for him, somewhere deeper down she felt a tiny germ of concern. She considered Kanezaki one of the good guys, but of course in the intelligence business good was a relative term. Relative, and flexible. She’d never known Kanezaki to do anything that wasn’t calculated to increase his information portfolio, or that wasn’t a quid pro quo for something he himself wanted. It was possible his interest now was simply about obscuring the girls’ faces in those videos and then publicizing them, and thereby neutralizing the threat the videos had come to represent to everyone in the room. But it was also possible he was playing for something more. In her experience, people didn’t beat swords into plowshares, any more than governments did. No, when people came across a sword—especially one others were trying to acquire—they tended to conclude that the best possibility would be to find a way by which they themselves could wield it.
chapter
sixty-seven
EVIE
Evie rode Margarita along the side of Manzanita Way, Evie bouncing lightly in the saddle, Margarita’s hoofs clomping on the dirt trail. Evie had a lump on the back of her head from the tumble down the stairs, and despite heroic quantities of ibuprofen, her ankle was throbbing, too, but after what had happened the pain was almost glorious, a kind of proof of life. It was a beautiful day—the sky bright blue; the canopy of leaves above the cracked, gray-top road lit in various hues of yellow and orange and red; the midday air crisp and cool in the shadows and radiantly warm in the sun. If the houses hadn’t all been mansions at the ends of long, winding, cobblestoned driveways, and mostly shrouded by moss-covered stone walls and dense clumps of old-growth trees, she might have thought she was far off in the country somewhere, rather than thirty miles south of San Francisco in one of the most exclusive enclaves of Silicon Valley’s moneyed elite. Well, she could see why people would live here, if they could afford it, and why so many of them owned horses. She hadn’t ridden in years and promised to make more time for it once this craziness was done. And it would be done. She believed that. She had to.
Her task was to identify anything that looked like surveillance. Rain had gone over a map with her, explaining where Rispel or another enemy could be expected to set up in preparation for an ambush. The man seemed to have a knack for getting in the head of an adversary, and Evie had been struck by how the others, who were themselves all veterans of one kind or another, had deferred to him. And she had been even more impressed by the way Marvin, who had outthought NSA Director Anders and his goon, Delgado, had periodically nodded in approval at Rain’s thinking.
Good security could be thought of as concentric circles, Rain had explained, with the outer circles tending to be more cost-effective and intended, among other things, to buy more time. Think castles, he had said: moat, ramparts, walls, battlements, keep. Meaning you could gain a significant advantage by finding a way to bypass the outer circles and attacking the inner layers directly. Which is exactly what they hoped to do here, and exactly what Rispel or whoever else had been preempting them would be expecting.
Depending on her resources, Rain said, Rispel would deploy surveillance, both mobile and static. A mobile unit would have at least four miles of ground to cover—the circumference of roads around Grimble’s and the adjacent properties—and would therefore be faced with too much risk of missing a small team attempting to gain entry. So there would also likely be a static unit or units, positioned at choke points. On the one hand, these teams would be impossible to avoid. On the other hand, they would be easier to spot—which is what Evie was trying to do now.
They walked along, Margarita’s hoofs clop-clopping pleasingly in the stillness. As pretty a road as it was, it seemed not much favored by pedestrians—maybe because it was the middle of the week, maybe because the road didn’t really lead anywhere. A few of the houses she passed had gardening crews at work, and there were two construction sites. Beyond that and some birdsong in the trees overhead, everything was quiet.