Fault Line by Barry Eisler

he was Russian? Hort asked in his gravelly baritone and cultured coastal drawl.
    Pretty sure, Ben said. He had the Slavic cheekbones and pale skin, and that flat expression, if you know what I mean. Plus he was standing there like he was untouchable.
    Right up until you touched him.
    He was going for a weapon.
    Don't worry, son, I believe you. No chance he was Israeli? They would have loved to take a crack at the two you sent to Valhalla.
    Ben thought about that. He'd even wondered at one point whether someone had considered handing this op off to the Mossad. Probably someone had, but with their better intel inside Iran, the Israelis might have figured out who the mole was, and no one would have been willing to take that chance, even with one of America's closest allies in the dreaded global war on terror. Plus there was always someone at JSOC lobbying for use of U.S. resources. They'd invested an enormous amount training-in fact, creating-Ben and a few others like him, and what was the point of having an attack dog if you didn't sometimes let him off the leash?
    I'm thinking he was FSB, Ben said. The FSB was the Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB.
    I hope not, Hort said. Those guys are like the mafia. Hell, with all those former KGB siloviki in office, they are the mafia.
    What do you want to do?
    I'll see what I can find out. But don't worry, even if he was FSB, it's not going to be obvious who did it. The other two had a lot of enemies.
    The Iranian enemies Hort was referring to were the Israelis. In fact, while he was in Istanbul, Ben had been eating food brought directly from Israel. If the op went sideways and he was killed, or if he was captured and used the cyanide pill he was carrying, there would be an autopsy, his stomach contents analyzed. Best for things to point in the direction of Israel. JSOC had laid down a few other false clues, as well, nothing too heavy-handed. Not a very nice trick to play on a friend, but the Israelis were realists and would understand. Anyway, what could Russia really do to Israel that it wasn't doing already? Sell arms to Damascus? Deliver nuclear fuel to Tehran? And what could Iran do? Back Hezbollah? Blow up another Argentine synagogue? Yeah, one thing the Israelis had going for them was clarity. Their enemies couldn't hate them more than they already did. Ben wished the U.S. could be equally clear-eyed. What did Caligula say? Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate us, so long as they fear us.
    He went back to waiting in his room. He didn't go out much. There were periods in his life where he would go days without even speaking, where his whole world would shrink to no more than the dimensions of the walls around him. Sometimes he withdrew so thoroughly, the only thing that would bring him out of it was the buzz of his pager.
    He thought about hate. America was hated overseas, true, but was pretty well understood, too. In fact, he thought foreigners understood Americans better than Americans understood themselves. Americans thought of themselves as a benevolent, peace-loving people. But benevolent, peace-loving peoples don't cross oceans to new continents, exterminate the natives, expel the other foreign powers, conquer sovereign territory, win world wars, and less than two centuries from their birth stand astride the planet. The benevolent peace lovers were the ones all that shit happened to.
    It was the combination of the gentle self-image and the brutal truth that made Americans so dangerous. Because if you aggressed against such a people, who could see themselves only as innocent, the embodiment of all that was good in the world, they would react not just with anger but with Old Testament-style moral wrath. Anyone depraved enough to attack such angels forfeited claims to adjudication, proportionality, even elemental mercy itself.
    Yeah, foreigners hated that American hypocrisy. That was okay, as long as they also feared it. Oderint dum