Killfile (2 page)

I can't read what's going through his head over the phone, but the relief in his voice sounds genuine. Parental bonds are tough to break, or so I'm told.

I hear sirens. The police will be here to collect the bodies soon. My bet is that they'll call it a murder-suicide, a couple of small-time scumbags settling a business dispute.

I wonder if I did this on purpose. If I was just so offended by their arrogance and their casual cruelty that I pressed their buttons and boxed them into this ending.

But it doesn't work like that. My life would be a lot easier if it did. They could have just walked away when I told them. I can push, I can nudge, I can mess with their heads, but despite all my tricks, people still find a way to do what they want. Their endings were written a long time before I ever showed up.

Or maybe that's just what I tell myself.

I get my car and head toward the hotel.

Three hours in a
private jet turns out to be the perfect antidote for the migraine clawing at the inside of my skull. If I could afford it, I'd do this every time someone tried to kill me.

Ordinarily I would take a little longer between jobs to shake off the hangover that always comes from being too close to a violent death—a kind of feedback that echoes around my brain for at least a day.

But this client was particularly insistent and sent a check for my time, along with a Gulfstream to LAX to pick me up. That overcomes my reluctance pretty fast.

The entire flight is blissfully silent. The plane's interior is polished walnut and butter-soft leather, like a set designer's vision of an English library from some BBC period drama. After getting me a drink, the gorgeous flight attendant retreats to the back of the jet and her thoughts vanish into the celebrity mag she brought with her. The pilot's mind is filled with the white noise of altitude and heading and airspeed. The next closest human being is forty-two thousand feet below.

So I drink my drink and stare out the window and try to keep my head as empty as possible. The meeting is with the client's personal attorney, a man named Lawrence Gaines. The client himself wants to remain anonymous. That's not unusual. I did a preliminary check on
Gaines to make certain I wasn't being set up, but didn't go any deeper. I can live with the mystery for now.

And not to brag, but it's not like it can remain a secret once Gaines and I are in the same room.

I am a little surprised by the relative quiet once we hit the tarmac. Airports are ugly enough for most people, but they're side trips into hell for me. Anxiety and anger and exhaustion and pain and loneliness and boredom, all in one convenient location. Most of the time, my teeth start grinding from a mile away.

Here, the usual jangle is muted. When the Gulfstream's door opens, I find out why. This is the smallest, quietest airport I've ever seen. It looks like a toy play set from the 1950s brought to life.

“Welcome to Sioux Falls,” the flight attendant says as she hands me my jacket. I get a brief glimmer of interest from her, mixed with cool appraisal. I've worn a gray Armani two-button over a gleaming white broadcloth shirt and solid blue tie for this meeting. But it's only camouflage. I'll be the first to admit I don't look like I belong in this tax bracket.

She's wondering if I'll be staying at the same hotel she and the pilot use. Now I'm wondering too. I thank her for the drink.

Then I go down the stairs and meet my ride: a driver waiting outside a black town car, parked right on the runway. He's a head taller and maybe seventy pounds heavier than I am.

“You Smith?” he asks, as if he didn't see me get off the plane specifically chartered to bring me here.

I catch a wave of animosity coming off him right away. He's not happy I'm here. I wish I'd brought more luggage just so I could make him carry it. I nod.

“Keith,” he grunts, and points his chin at the back door of the car. He gets behind the wheel without waiting for me.

I know Keith, even though I've never seen him before. We'd both say we work in the private security field, but that's just being polite. One of the side effects of spending the last dozen years at war is that it produces a surplus of guys trained in the latest government-approved methods of hurting people. Most of them find a way back into normal life, but there are plenty of opportunities for those who don't. There are fourteen major private military companies in the U.S. alone, and that doesn't include all the corporations in other fields that have decided their options should include lethal response.

The result is guys like Keith: basically a hired thug in a suit.

The same can be said of me, of course, but I like to think I'm a little more specialized. And I wear better suits.

I try to sort out his hostility from the backseat, but it's too wound up in a bunch of other irritations: the mushy handling of the town car, the amount of time it takes for the automatic gate to open, the incompetence of every other driver on the road. Anger is Keith's default setting.

He soothes himself with images and lines from a half dozen action movies. I get flashes of him fighting bad guys, complete with a voice-over reading catchphrases:

His internal soundtrack is like something from a video game.

I screen it out as best I can and look out the window for the rest of the ride. There really is not a lot to see in South Dakota. Miles and miles of empty space.

I like it.

T
HE ATTORNEY,
G
AINES,
aims me at a chair after the briefest of handshakes. He's much younger than I expected, about my age, but with
fresh-scrubbed pale skin and blond hair that makes him look like he just got out of law school. He's gym-toned and decked out in the usual douchebag tuxedo: sport coat over $500 jeans.

Keith brought me into the building down a hallway lined with offices for firms named
WILSON TRUST CO., DALTON FAMILY TRUST
, and
CARSON GENERATIONAL FUND
. Most of the windows were dark. Gaines's office looks part-time, too. The decor includes bull horns on the walls and brands burned into the leather of the chairs. Cowboy rich.

“You like this place?” Gaines asks. “Corporate ghost town. South Dakota state law offers a perpetual trust that exempts money from the estate tax, but you have to have a physical presence here. So you get a bunch of billionaires sheltering their money in empty suites. One other benefit: it also gives us a quiet little spot to meet.”

Keith takes up a position by the door, next to another chunk of hired meat who doesn't give his name or speak.

Only mild curiosity from him. Keith, however, is still on edge, spoiling for a fight.

All I get from Gaines is caution and suspicion. Nothing I haven't felt before.

“John Smith,” he says. “Never actually met anyone named that before.”

That's what the state tagged me with. I was put in a group home before I was one. I had a blank spot on my records instead of a name. “It could have been worse,” I say. “It could have been John Doe.”

“Well, Tom Eckert speaks highly of you. He's very grateful for the work you did.”

“I'm afraid I can't confirm or deny I've worked for anyone with that name,” I say. Client confidentiality is one of the promises I take seriously.

“Oh, don't worry. Tom and my boss go way back. But I appreciate
your discretion. We don't want rumors spreading. Like I bet you don't want to talk about that business in downtown L.A. yesterday.”

He's waiting for a reaction. I stay neutral. At this level, people spend a lot of money checking me out. I expect nothing less. It means they're willing to invest even more in me.

“I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Right,” he says, with a smile that is absolutely fake. “So. You're a psychic.”

Here we go. He doesn't believe I can do what I do. It's not the first time I've encountered this, obviously.

“Actually, most people who call themselves psychics are half-bright con artists using hundred-year-old magic tricks to convince people of things they already know.”

“But that's not you.” The sarcasm drips from his voice.

“For starters, what I do is real.”

“Really. You read minds.”

I relax and go into my pitch. I've had a lot of practice.

“You like to think you've got one guy behind your eyes, driving your body like a giant robot, making all the decisions. It's actually more like a whole crowd in there, dealing with a few dozen things at once. What we call the mind is actually a metaphor for all the different processes—memories, physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, and reflexes—bouncing around inside three pounds of tofu in our skulls. Most of the time, we're running what we'd call subroutines—things we don't even think about, like breathing or walking or eating. But we also use our minds to direct our activities, to form thoughts and actions, usually before we're aware that we're doing it. My talent is picking up on all those disparate elements as they happen in someone else's brain, and then translating them into a coherent narrative that I can understand, and even influence to some extent.”

“Well, here's the million-dollar question: How do you do it?”

“I wish I could tell you. I've always had a talent. Then I went into the military. There was a program that helped me develop it further.”

“Right.” He picks up a tablet and taps at the screen. I can't see what pops up. “I've been looking at your history,” he says. “You enlisted right after 9/11—good for you, by the way. You weren't even eighteen yet.”

“You can sign up at seventeen with a parent or guardian's consent. My foster parents agreed.” They were glad to see me go. We'd settled into an uneasy détente by then, but I still frightened them.

“Three tours in Special Forces. Iraq and Afghanistan. Impressive.” He's not impressed. He's just being polite. The world is shifting already. The wars are old news to anyone who wasn't directly involved in them. Pretty soon, they're going to seem as distant and irrelevant as Vietnam was to me.

“Says here you were discharged,” Gaines continues. “Then there's a blank spot for seven years.”

“I was with the CIA. First as an employee, then as a contractor.”

“Doing what?”

“That's classified.”

“Of course it is. And—if you can do what you say—why did they ever let you go?”

“That's also classified.”

He waits for more. I don't offer anything. Like I said: I do take some promises seriously.

Gaines taps the screen again and moves on. “So now you're a private consultant. A very well-paid one.”

Even if I couldn't read what he's thinking, I'd hear the tone in his voice.

“I'm worth it.”

“Are you?”

“I have a specialized set of skills, in addition to my talent. I was trained to handle problems. And I've learned that some people, particularly those who have more money than most state governments, have bigger problems. There are times they cannot use the standard remedies available to regular citizens. They require specialized solutions. I saw a niche in the market, and I filled it.”

“You'll forgive me if I'm still a little skeptical. Can you make me bark like a dog, cluck like a chicken, anything like that?”

I restrain a sigh. Everyone wants the Vegas act.

“Unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated than that. I don't like to use this terminology, but it's as close as I can come: if your mind is a computer, I can hack into it, read your emails, trigger some processes, and even overwrite some files. What you're asking, though, would be like reprogramming the entire operating system from the command line. A person's mind is far too complex for that. You've spent your whole life becoming who you are. I can't change all that in a few minutes, or even a few days. People always return to who they are.”

“Now it sounds like you're making excuses. Like most psychics. The energy has to be right. Or you need the right subject. Or the planets are out of alignment. Whatever.”

“I'm just being honest. I can't control someone else's mind. Not the way you're thinking.”

Gaines laughs. “Honest. Yeah. That's a good one.”

“What's your problem?” I can see it in his head, but I want him to say it out loud.

“Well, since we're all being honest: I think you're ten pounds of bullshit in a five-pound bag, Mr. Smith.”

“You brought me a long way and paid me a lot of money to say that. A phone call would have been cheaper.”

“My employer wanted to see you. He thinks there might actually be something to you. Unfortunately for you, I don't. And nobody gets to him without going through me first. I think you are a con artist. I think you've convinced some rich old men and women that you have superpowers, and you've gotten by on luck and—what did you say?—‘hundred-year-old magic tricks' until now. But I see no reason why I should allow you to waste my boss's time, or even get in the same room with him.”

His self-satisfaction is practically gleaming through that perfect skin of his.

“You want a demonstration?” I ask. “I could tell you that you've got just over sixty-three thousand dollars and change in your checking account, at least as far as you can remember. I can tell you that you forgot to call your wife before I showed up, and now you're thinking you won't get another chance until after lunch. You're still worried about the appraisal on a piece of property in Wyoming that you're considering for a mini mall. And you've got a Glock nine-millimeter in the right-hand drawer of that desk.”

The gleam dims a little. He struggles to get it back.

“That doesn't prove anything. I've heard that you guys can read stuff from body language, that you hire private detectives to do your research. You might even have a camera in this room, for all I know.”

“All true,” I admit. “There are people who do that. But I'm not one of them.”

“Fine. Tell me something you couldn't learn from a twenty-dollar Internet credit report. Tell me my boss's name.”

It's right there in the front of his head, but I deliberately ignore it. “You asked for your employer's name to remain confidential. I'm going to honor that.”

He beams with triumph. “You mean you don't know. You couldn't get that info before the meeting.”

“We're done,” I say. I stand and button my jacket. “There's nothing else I can do that will convince you.”

“That's not exactly true,” Gaines says.