Inside Out by Barry Eisler Read Free Book Online Page A

for that possibility would be worse than the dreams. Though perhaps not by much.
    The hell with it, he was too keyed up anyway. He swung his feet to the floor, picked up the Glock 18C machine pistol from the carpet next to him, and stood. He was fully clothed, all theway down to his boots and three spare 33-round magazines of armor-piercing ammunition in the pockets of his Blackhawk integrated tourniquet pants. They weren’t going to take him dazed and blinking in his skivvies the way they’d done Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They weren’t going to take him at all.
    He walked through the dark to the bathroom and pissed, then came back and dragged the mattress from behind the couch and back onto the bed frame. He’d moved it to the floor the night before when he arrived. A small thing, but it could buy an extra second by creating the wrong focal point when a room was breached, and a second in a gunfight was like an hour any other time.
    Truth is, it was a wonder he could sleep at all. He’d been planning this thing for years, and now it was finally happening. He’d just declared war on the U.S. government. And they were going to come at him with everything they had.
    If he was lucky, the CIA would try to handle the whole thing in-house and the opposition would be limited and incompetent. More likely, given the sums involved, Christians in Action would have to bring in someone from the White House, and the White House would mobilize the NSA. The public didn’t really know what the NSA was capable of—didn’t
want
to know—but Larison had seen firsthand the results of operations like Pinwale, where the NSA got caught illegally reading vast quantities of American emails, along with some even more impressive ones that hadn’t leaked, and the thought of the puzzle palace training all that firepower exclusively on him was both exhilarating and terrifying.
    And then there was Hort. Impossible to say whether JSOC would be brought into this. But even if they were kept out, it didn’t mean Hort wouldn’t find his way in. Not everything Hort did had JSOC’s blessing, or even its knowledge. Larison had learned that the hard way and he wouldn’t forget it. Behind the avuncular exterior that was part of what made men worship him, Hort was one of the most ruthless and capable operators Larison had ever known.
    He set the Glock down and started doing push-ups. He wantedto go out as little as possible, so these in-room workouts were all he could afford right now. And he needed something to burn off his anxiety.
    The trick was to assume the worst and act accordingly. The NSA searched for patterns; Larison would give them none. His movements were random, he paid for everything in cash, and when he had to show ID, he could draw on a half dozen identities, all of them guaranteed sterile because he’d created them himself. It had been a long time since he’d trusted JSOC.
    He finished two hundred and fifty push-ups, flipped over onto his back, and started a set of sit-ups. His breathing and heart rate were slightly elevated. He felt good. Working out always took the edge off when he was feeling paranoid.
    Hort represented a different facet of the same problem. Hort would try to exploit what he knew about Larison to anticipate Larison’s next move and then plan an ambush accordingly. Larison had seen Hort get inside his enemies’ minds and predict what they would do next. The man knew people so well, at times he seemed almost psychic. So much so, in fact, that Larison had from time to time considered eliminating the threat Hort might now represent.
    A surge of latent paranoia suddenly gripped him and he wondered if he’d made a mistake, if he should have taken out Hort after all. But Hort was no soft target, for one thing. For another, Larison wanted to avoid yet another doomed face tormenting his dreams. Not that Hort didn’t deserve it. But they all deserved it. Guilty or innocent, it didn’t make any difference.
    He amped up the