The Chaos Kind (John Rain, #11, Livia Lone, #5)

by Barry Eisler

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.