“All right,” I tell her. “If I take the job, we’ll do it your way.”
She nods. “Damn right you will,” she says, but she’s smiling now. She knew I’d say yes. Because she has faith.
We’ll see how far that takes us both.
///13
I’ve Thought About You
We land back at the heliport. I’m supposed to go to my hotel so I can think over Stack’s offer. Sara is still not sure if she can trust me, or work with me. I’m not particularly offended. I have the same concerns about her.
We walk from the landing pad to the office, a tiny building that fronts the parking lot, at the middle of the concrete apron on the edge facing the bay. The wash from the rotors is still drowning out everything else around us as we step inside.
We walk straight through the small building—it smells of gourmet coffee and kerosene—and then step out the front door into the fenced parking lot. Sara turns from me toward her executive SUV. She’s a little relieved to be parting ways. It’s not much fun to have to watch what you’re thinking every second. I’m planning to find the nearest McDonalds’s and order everything off the Extra Value Meal Menu; being around Stack and his constant hunger has left me absolutely starving.
That’s when I pick up the thoughts of the woman waiting to kill us.
She’s hidden behind a truck about a dozen yards away, and she rushes out, firing from an Ingram MAC-10. There was almost no hesitation between seeing us and the action. I barely get a glimpse of a woman in gym clothes, ponytail bobbing up and down. She could be a jogger out for a run, on her way to her Pilates class, except for the converted automatic weapon in her hands. She’s trying her best to get to us before we can react.
Even with my advance warning, I barely have a few seconds to lift Sara up and take her down behind the SUV.
Sara has a momentary burst of surprise
As soon as I release her, Sara doesn’t waste any more time on shock. She just accepts it and smothers any fear with a practiced calm. She pulls out both of her guns, then waits for the other woman’s barrage to stop. She plans to pop up and lay down covering fire, giving me enough time to get inside the SUV. Then she plans to follow, and drive us right out of here, to safety.
Good plan. She’s done it before, lots of times. It’s the safest, smartest move.
But I don’t feel much like retreating right now.
I find the shooter’s mind above the stuttering sound of her weapon. Surprising. You don’t get many female assassins, whatever the movies tell you. But she handles the MAC-10 like a pro. It feels familiar in her hands. Hours and hours of practice. From her mind, I get a quick download, flash impressions.
She’s walking—grit crunching under the soles of her fashion sneakers— coming around on our right. I can feel her thoughts moving, like a blip on radar. The MAC-10 grows lighter in her hand as she keeps spraying bullets. She’s got to reload—there.
She pops the empty clip, not as smooth as she’d like, brings up a fresh one.
Sara opens her mouth to tell me to get into the SUV.
But I’m already moving toward the shooter by then, sprinting from behind the vehicle as fast as I can. As I cross the asphalt between us, I pick something nice and debilitating from the menu. Let’s see how she likes the sensation of a compound fracture in her lower right ulna.
Not much at all, as it turns out. Her right arm jerks, her fingers splay out, and she drops the gun. I see—and feel—the pain etched on her face under her designer sunglasses. She turns to face me, shocked as I close the gap.
I get close enough to put the heel of my hand into her face. Not terribly gentlemanly, I know, but then it’s not very ladylike to open fire without a proper introduction either. I see the blackness interrupting her vision like a too-long blink. There’s a burst of frustration from behind me.
But she holds her fire. I follow the punch with an elbow strike to the shooter’s head. She’s already on her way down, but I am taking no chances. I help her by sweeping her legs out and shoving her to the ground.
She’s on her back, dazed and confused, bleeding freely from the nose and mouth. But she still manages to shoot her leg up in a kick aimed at my knee. I step back in time, because I saw it coming, but just barely. She’s very quick. And very angry.
So maybe I’m a little rougher than necessary when I put my foot on her throat.
Sara is at my side in a moment, gun pointed at the shooter’s head. The fight goes out of her in an instant. I see it mirrored in her mind—an absolute recognition that Sara is not screwing around, that she will pull the trigger. She recognizes that she’s caught, and she’s got no desire to catch a bullet in the face.
I step off her neck and then lean down. I relieve her of the knife she’s got under the spandex and the backup piece in her belt pouch.
“I didn’t even see her,” Sara says. She’s breathing heavily, the adrenaline still running through her. But the gun doesn’t waver a millimeter.
“Neither did I.”
“You are both dead,” the shooter snuffles out through her damaged nose. It would probably be scarier if she didn’t sound like she had a bad cold.
“Oh, shut up, Jezebel,” I tell her. Jezebel Todd. Perfect name for a Bond girl or a hit woman. Her parents practically aimed her down this career path.
She looks surprised. So does Sara.
“Did you find her ID?” Sara asks.
I give her a look. And she remembers.
“Yeah,” I say. “Not just a fun trick at parties.”
Sara turns her attention back to our would-be killer. Points the Glock right at her nose. “Who sent you?”
Jezebel has her clever retort—
“She doesn’t know,” I tell her. “Cutout hire. Email, encrypted cash transfer. She does it all the time.” Jezebel Todd. Twenty-nine years old. An honest-to-God, old-fashioned contract killer. Reasonable rates, 15K to 35K, depending on the job. Nobody sees her coming. Nobody expects their killer to be an attractive young woman with an open smile and a perfectly matched outfit. I get a glimpse of some of her previous work. People all over the place, living too long by someone else’s measurement. A businessman in Tacoma, walking into his hotel room. The owner of a restaurant in San Diego, two in the back of the head by the Dumpsters. A woman, a Realtor, taking Jezebel on a tour of a two-bedroom, strangled. Family photos in the Realtor’s purse, as Jezebel stole her cash and credit cards afterward.
I’m hit with blinding rage, out of nowhere. I lift the MAC-10 from the ground. I’ve got it resting on her forehead almost before I know what I’m doing. “You piece of shit, she had kids.”
Jezebel’s arrogance and anger vanishes. She gapes at me, terror streaming off her thoughts.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Sara shouts.
I hesitate. I’m looking right into Jezebel. I’ve barely scratched the surface of her memories, but now all she can think about is dying. And she has the nerve to be surprised. After all she’s done, she never really thought it would happen to her.
The moment stretches, impossibly long. I can hear sirens in the background. Someone has called the cops. I am mostly just curious what it will do to me
, at this range. The pain and the shock and the sudden absence of life. It always drags me down, a little, into the sudden vacuum where a life used to be. It’s like looking into darkness, and sometimes I fear I will not come back.
But this time, I’m tempted to take the chance.
Then, as if from a great distance, I hear something else.
Jezebel’s phone, ringing in her belt pouch.
It’s enough to wake me up.
I remove the gun from her head and take her phone out of the pouch.
“One sec,” I say to her. “Gotta take this.”
I stand up and leave Jezebel at the end of Sara’s gun. I check the caller. It’s listed as downvote with an all-zero number.
I spend a second weighing the pros and cons of answering, and then figure what the hell.
“I’m afraid the person you are trying to reach cannot come to the phone right now,” I say. “But if you’d like to leave your name and number, I’ll be sure to deliver a message.”
“That’s funny,” a smooth male voice replies. It sounds like something out of a commercial for a luxury car. No hesitation. Not a hint of stress. Very cool. Very Blofeld. “Not hilarious. But pretty funny, all things considered.”
“Mr. Godwin, I presume,” I say.
“You can call me that if you want.”
“I could also call you Dipshit. Does Dipshit work better for you? It has such a nice ring to it.”
A slight pause. “You’re not going to make me angry, John.”
It’s true. He doesn’t sound angry. I could probably work on that, but the sirens are getting louder, and Sara is beaming distress and confusion and, most of all, impatience at me. I’ve got maybe a couple more minutes.
So I should probably get to the point.
“Fine. You’re Godwin. You’re behind Downvote. Which means you’re responsible for what happened to Kira Sadeghi. And that means I am coming for you—”
He interrupts me. His tone is not quite angry. More like aggressively bored. “Oh, can we just not do this, please? We don’t have a lot of time here, so can we just cut the shit? I know all about how scary you are, Mr. Smith. I’ve heard all about the man, the myth, the legend. You’ve got quite the reputation. But I am asking you to be smart. To stop for a moment and think. You’ve spoken to Stack. To the feds. I know this. Doesn’t that tell you something? Doesn’t it say that I am watching for contingencies, even ones like you?”
Something bothers me about the voice, and suddenly I realize what it is: all Godwin’s words are being filtered through a voice-masking program— and not through one of those cheap voice-synthesizer jobs that makes the caller sound like a gangster in witness protection either. Rather, all the idiosyncrasies, all the human parts of speech—not just the tone, but the pauses, the cadence, the ums and ahs and pauses that make up a person’s style of speaking—are all gone, sanded down by some very intelligent piece of software. It’s like talking to a machine doing a very good imitation of a human being.
“I’m offering you the chance to walk away,” he says. “I don’t want to get into a pissing match with you. There’s no profit in it for either of us. You and I can both have long and happy lives. Just walk away now. Do whatever it is you do for fun. I really do not care. Just move on. Be smart.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me? People have tried. Recently, in fact.”
The filtering software masks what might have been a laugh. Instead, it comes out as a burst of static, an electronic cough. “You mean the woman you probably just shot? Please. I only hired her so you’d pick up this call. She barely counts as a warning. You’ve never met anyone quite like me before. I don’t believe anyone else has really taken you seriously before, John. Nobody really believes in what you can do. Nobody knows what you really are.”
I laugh a little at that. The adrenaline is still surging through me, and I’m feeling pretty invincible. “And you do?”
“Well, to be fair, I’m a lot smarter than the other people you’ve met. And I’ve thought about you.”
“Oh, stop. You’re going to make me blush.”
The electronic voice suddenly goes cold and distant, as if it bounced off Mars before coming through the phone.
“You don’t really give a damn about Kira Sadeghi, John,” Godwin says. “I know that. You’re just looking for an excuse. A way to prove you’re human. Because, in the simplest possible terms, you are not one of us. Sure, you look like us. You even try to act like us—your jokes, your attitude, your obsession with things like good clothes and good food—but those are only things you’ve seen on TV. Read in magazines. Protective morphology, they call it. You know the truth. There is something missing inside of you. You’ve never had a friend. You’ve never had a woman in your life who looks at you with anything like love.”
“You’re wrong,” I snap. It gets out before I can stop it.
“No. I told you. I know what you are,” Godwin says. “And so do you. You’ve never felt like one of us because, deep down, where it counts, you’re nothing close to human. Our private moments, our hidden thoughts and desires and hurts—that’s what makes us who we are. And you strip them away without even trying. You know our secrets just by walking into the same room as us. You meddle in our deepest places, and then you walk right out again, as if nothing has happened. You are an existential threat, John. Honestly, if people stopped to think about it—I mean, really think about it—they’d have you executed on the spot. They would end your life before you damage us any further.”
The synthesized voice gives this the sound of an official pronouncement—a verdict on my fitness to be among humans, and it’s clear that I have been found wanting.
“That’s why you’re so hung up on avenging that Z-list slut. You want to pretend you actually care about people.”
Sara snaps to get my attention. “Smith,” she says, and points. There is a patrol car, followed closely by an ambulance, approaching.
Almost out of time. I need to get something from Godwin while I still can. “Listen—”
“No,” Godwin says. “You listen. This is your only chance. Or you get to learn what humanity is really capable of.”
He hangs up before I can come up with a snappy comeback to that. I’m not quite sure what I would have said to him anyway.
Suddenly none of this seems very funny anymore.
*
The police do their best, considering we’re not much help at all. Sara tells them the barest minimum possible. We arrived, she started shooting. The end. The officers decide that Jezebel Todd—who, as it turns out, has her own wanted poster and an FBI alert tagged to her—must have thought I was Stack, and was out to either shoot him or kidnap him. A hired gun, looking for a rich target. Makes sense. More or less. I help push the idea into their brains as much as I can. I tell them I’m a security consultant, and that I was meeting with Stack for just this reason.
It seems a hell of a lot simpler than the truth. I keep Jezebel’s phone in my pocket, and neither Sara nor I mention the call. There’s no way that involving the cops in Downvote will make any of our lives easier. Vincent might disagree, but screw him, he’s in L.A. and I’m here.
Still, it takes hours to untangle ourselves from the crime scene. Jezebel is taken away long before the police finish with us. She’s regained some of her composure and attitude by the time they put her in a patrol car. She even winks and grins at me through the blood around her mouth. I’d be able to see it on her face even if I couldn’t read it in her mind.
Then they slam the door on her and drive away. I make a mental note to find out if she makes bail. I might even pay it myself, just to be waiting on the street.
It’s almost evening b
y the time we sign our statements and the cops go away. They impound the bullet-riddled SUV as evidence.
We’re finally alone, sitting in the heliport’s small office, drinking the coffee that was left in the pot. It smelled a lot better than it tastes.
Sara takes a deep breath, blanking her mind, releasing the tension. Then she snaps back, all business.
“All right,” she says. “What was that call about?”
“Just a second,” I say. I use my talent to scan around us. The heliport’s manager is outside, smoking a cigarette. He’s thinking hard about quitting and moving to Iowa.
“Godwin,” I tell her. And then I give her the highlights: walk away now, terrible vengeance, face my wrath, and so on.
“How did he find you? Did you bring him to us? Was he following you?”
There is a blare of alarm all through her nervous system, a feeling like a parent’s fear for the safety of a child. She’s worried about Stack again.
“Actually,” I say, “he followed you.”
That stops her short. But it’s what I got from Jezebel Todd’s memories. She’d been told not to follow me. Which was smart on Godwin’s part, because I would feel it as soon as someone started focusing on me. Instead, she followed Sara. She put a tracking device on the SUV, saw it park at the heliport, and then just waited for us to come back from the yacht.
Sara scowls. She doesn’t like hearing it.
But it really wasn’t her fault. It’s hard to imagine an enemy around every corner. It’s exhausting to be on continual alert, always looking for an attack. To always be on guard. Nobody can do that every minute of the day. At some point, you have to let your defenses down.
Unless you’re me, of course. I’ve got my wired-in proximity alarms, the radar in my head that tells me whenever someone even thinks about doing me harm.
Hunt You Down Page 13