Ben thought it extremely unlikely the man would try to drop two FBI agents in his own bar. Still, he watched him closely, ready to draw and use the desk for cover if Taibbi did anything the least bit froggy.

“We’re on duty,” Paula said. “But thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” Taibbi said. He pulled the stopper out of a decanter and poured a large measure of what looked like whiskey into a glass. “How about you, tough guy?” he said, looking over his shoulder. “You look like a whiskey guy to me.”

“Nah, milk’s more my speed.”

Taibbi chuckled. He picked up his glass, took a swallow, and let out a long breath. He turned his back to the bureau and leaned against it, looking Ben up and down. “The FBI must have been short on decent wiseasses when they hired you.”

“Yes, sir,” Paula said, shooting eye daggers at Ben. “That’s about right. Now, those hypotheticals you were going to tell us about?”

Taibbi took another swallow. “What’s the worst thing that happens if you get made on surveillance?”

Ben looked at him. “Depends on the target.”

Taibbi’s eyes narrowed. “‘Target,’ huh? Not ‘subject’?”

Ben thought, shit. Paula said, “My associate here did some other things before joining the Bureau. You might have noticed that.”

My associate, Ben thought. She didn’t know what name Taibbi had seen on the ID, so she didn’t use one. She was good. At the moment, he had to admit, better than he was.

“Did he now?” Taibbi said.

“Well?” Ben said. “What’s the worst thing?”

Taibbi rolled the glass between his palms. “In my experience? You’re embarrassed. Maybe you blow the case.”

Ben waited.

“So you understand, that’s all we were expecting. That was the limit of our downside. McGlade told us this guy was surveillance conscious, sure, but that’s like saying someone with the fucking Ebola virus is feeling a little under the weather. It doesn’t exactly prepare you for what you’re about to face.”

He took another swallow of whiskey, and Ben was fascinated to see the way real tension was creeping into his expression and posture. The man didn’t like what he was remembering.

“We followed Larison from the airport. He took the bus and we used a four-person tag team. All we needed to do was track him to his mistress’s place, if there was a mistress, get a photo, email it to McGlade, back at the bar by midnight. Easy money for an evening’s work. Well, let me tell you about our easy money. We’d been rotating the point to keep Larison from getting a fix on anyone. My guy Carlos went first, and rotated out when Larison changed buses in San Jose. By the time we’d tracked Larison to Barrio Dent, a suburb on the east side of downtown, Carlos was on point for the third time. We’d been careful as hell, but Larison must have made Carlos anyway. I had visual contact with Carlos, he had the eye on Larison. All of a sudden, Carlos stops under a streetlight, looks confused. Looks left, looks right. I’m thinking, fuck, Larison slipped him. We blew it.”

He took a swallow of whiskey and let out a long breath.

“And just as I’m thinking that, Larison appears out of the dark like a fucking apparition. I know how that sounds, and I don’t care. I’m telling you, the man was gone, and then he was there. He did something, it looked like, just touched Carlos lightly from behind, and then he was gone again, like fucking vapor. Carlos starts staggering around, clutching his neck, there was this slurping sound. I ran over. Fucking blood like I’ve never seen-and I promise you, I’ve seen blood-blood is geysering out of Carlos’s neck, just shooting out all around his hands and between his fingers. Larison must have used a punch knife or something, you got that? Something sharp as a razor. Opened Carlos up like a fucking beer can, he knew exactly where to put the cut. Jesus, I’m telling you, I never saw anything like it. Carlos went down and bled out in ten seconds. I had blood inside my shoes, my socks were soaked from standing in it.”

He took another swallow of whiskey and shuddered. “Hypothetically, that is.”

Ben had no doubt Taibbi was telling the truth. First, because unless he had natural Oscar potential as an actor, he couldn’t have feigned what Ben had just seen. Second, because Ben understood Larison. He knew the training. The reflexes. The mind-set.

Ben said, “Why didn’t you go after him?”

“What, that night? I told you, we might as well have been chasing the humidity under that streetlight.”

“No, another time. You’d traced him to Barrio Dent. And you’re local. You could have found him.”

Taibbi’s expression was grim. “Maybe one of us did.”

Ben and Paula said nothing. Taibbi finished what was in his glass and refilled it.

“Yeah, Carlos had a brother, they were both part of my crew. The brother’s name was Juan. Juan was a tough little bastard, and he worshipped his big brother. He was out of his mind from what Larison did. It was all, ‘Let’s get that motherfucker’ this, and ‘Let’s get him’ that. I told him we needed to keep cool heads and cut our losses. That this guy was out of our league and we’d gotten off lightly, see? I’ve been around long enough I can make that kind of call. But Juan was young and stupid.”

“And it was his brother,” Ben said, thinking of Alex.

“Yeah, it was his brother. Hard to let that go. Well, he stormed off, telling us how we were pussies and cowards and could all go to hell. Which I’m sure we all will, eventually, it’s just Juan found a way to get himself there first.”

“What happened?” Ben asked.

“Don’t know what happened. My guess is, Juan went back to Barrio Dent looking for Larison. Somehow, he found him. Maybe he got lucky, if you can call it that. They found his body in a sewer in Los Yoses, another little suburb adjacent to Barrio Dent. Skull crushed from behind. Larison must have come up behind him, just like he did Carlos. Only difference was, Juan’s wallet was missing, so the police wrote it off as a robbery. Juan wasn’t exactly an honest citizen, by the way, so it’s not like the police knocked themselves out trying to figure out what happened to him.”

“His wallet was gone?” Ben said, imagining Larison.

“Yeah. I figured it was Larison’s way of making it look like a robbery instead of an execution. Less interesting that way to the gendarmerie.”

“You say the brothers were named Carlos and Juan?” Paula said.

“That’s right. Carlos and Juan Cole.”

“The deaths occurred in Barrio Dent and Los Yoses?”

“Yeah, like I said.”

“Close to each other?”

“Maybe two kilometers apart.”

“Can you tell us where precisely?”

“He did Carlos across the street from a restaurant called La Trattoria in Barrio Dent. Just north of the Citibank on the central avenue leading from San Jose to the suburbs. You can’t miss it, there’s only a single streetlight, the rest of the street is dark. That’s why Larison chose it.”

Ben knew that’s why Larison chose it. He’d spotted the tail and then led them into an ambush.

“And Juan?” Paula said.

“Around the corner from a restaurant called Spoon in Los Yoses. One block southeast from the restaurant. The corner with the sewer.”

“Any other contact with Larison after that?” she asked.

“Are you kidding me? Let me tell you something. I think you can surmise that I don’t have a whole lot of rules in my life. But I’ve got one: you don’t fuck with the angel of death.”

“Angel of death?” Ben said.

Taibbi looked at him, squinting slightly as though trying to decide something. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about, amigo. I can tell you do.”

He took a swallow of whiskey, then looked into the glass. “I served in Vietnam, and I’ve known some pretty tough customers along the way. But I’ve known only three men who I’d call death personified. One was a guy named Jake, and he’s long dead. Another, went by the name of Jasper, is supposed to be in business for himself now, and believe me, you don’t want to be the subject of that business. The last was a part-Japanese guy named Rain, and no one knows what happened to him. Larison is in that league. He killed Carlos about as casually as I spit tobacco. And Juan, too. Snuffed them out and then evaporated like some evil fucking mist. Like I told Juan before he went and threw his life away, we were lucky. With a guy like Larison, it could have been worse.”