Killfile

by Christopher Farnsworth

  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.

  THE ATTORNEY, GAINES, 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 forg
ive 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.

  I feel Keith behind me, suddenly interested, an attack dog straining at his leash. David, the other security guy, is on alert too, but without the bloodlust. They step away from their posts at the door.

  “I’ve asked Keith and David to beat you stupid and dump you off the highway,” Gaines says.

  Keith’s mind is suddenly all sunshine and rainbows. David limbers up, not exactly happy, but willing to follow orders.

  Gaines smiles again. “So all you have to do, Mr. Smith, is keep them from crippling you right here on the carpet. Then I’ll be convinced.”

  Keith rushes me first. Waves of glee dance all around him. He’s been looking for an excuse to punch someone in the head all day.

  He doesn’t care that I haven’t turned to face him. Fighting fair doesn’t get a lot of emphasis in combat training.

  David is a step behind. He’s still more ambivalent, but I can see the moves he’s planning. He’s a good, efficient brawler.

  Keith’s fist comes up to clobber me. I see the back of my head through his eyes.

 

  All right, then. Here’s the Vegas act.

  I hit Keith with the physical memory of double-port chemo nausea from a late-stage cancer patient. His equilibrium shorts out, and his knees buckle. He’s suddenly folded in half on the cowskin rug, retching up the power-protein smoothie he had for breakfast.

  I’ll pay for that later, but it’s worth it.

  David wasn’t nearly as anxious to slaughter me, so I go a little easier on him. I only blank the visual input from his eyes to his occipital lobes. He’s effectively blind in an instant. He screams as I step aside, and he runs into the wall hard enough to bounce.

  They’re both out of the game. I turn back to Gaines. I feel a stab of fear inside his mind.

  “Now you’re trying to remember the last time you fired that Glock at the range,” I tell him. “And how many bullets are still loaded. And you’re especially curious to find out if you can get it out of the drawer before I do anything else.”

  I take a step forward. He flinches back in his chair.

  “I admit, I’m a little curious myself.”

  A side door to the office opens. An older man stands there in a white shirt and khakis. I knew he was there. He was listening to my audition the entire time.

  “That’s enough, Mr. Smith,” he says. “I believe Lawrence is convinced now.”

  I’m looking at Gaines’s boss. Who also happens to be the thirteenth richest man in America.

  “I’m sorry for the trouble,” Everett Sloan says. “By way of apology, I hope you’ll allow me to take you to lunch.”

  MY STEAK IS big enough to fall over the lip of the plate. Which is actually fine by me. Vegetarians can have their clean arteries. Humans are smart because a bunch of primates on the African savannah developed a taste for raw flesh, and the amino acids in their bellies went straight to their heads and built bigger brains. Two million years later, there’s me, reading minds and downing megaloads of protein to refuel. Evolution in action.

  Sloan sits across from me at the table, drinking coffee. We have an acre of space in the back of the restaurant, all to ourselves. I’m not sure if this is because Sloan wants it this way, or if this is just the standard lunch hour in South Dakota.

  Even so, I pick up the angst as the waitress follows an argument between two friends on Facebook, the boredom of the manager, the stoic acceptance of the cook in the back as he adds another burn to the layers of scar tissue on his right hand.

  Keith was still dry-heaving when we left, so Sloan drove us here himself. His hands were steady on the wheel. I know he’s in his seventies, but he looks at least a couple of decades younger and stands straight and tall. One of the benefits of having a billion dollars is that time doesn’t leave the same marks on you as it does other people.

  When I decided to go private, I memorized the names and faces of all the people on the Forbes 500. Future clients, I hoped. Sloan stood out. He’s not the richest man on the list, but he might well be the smartest. And yes, I’m including Gates. Forget the software geeks who have gotten rich off stock options because they came up with a new way for teenagers to take nude selfies. Sloan is an actual, honest-to-God genius. He was still a college student at Stanford when he was recruited by the NSA to break Soviet codes in the Cold War. He went to grad school after that, supplementing his meager salary as a teaching assistant by playing poker in backroom card games. Then he found that some of his equations could actually predict the movements of the stock market. He took his paycheck to Vegas and
won a poker tournament. He used the prize money to start his own investment firm. Within a year, he was a multimillionaire.

  Now he manages about $20 billion in assets, and there are people who’d sell their own daughters for the chance to give him their money.

  I’ve never encountered a mind like his before. Even this close, I couldn’t tell you what he’s thinking. He’s running calculations and modeling outcomes way ahead of anything I can fathom, much faster than I’ve ever experienced. It’s like a wall of ice—cold, flawless, and perfectly smooth. Most of my attempts to read him just slide right off.

  “I hope you’ll forgive Lawrence,” he says. “He tends to be overprotective.”

  I saw that clearly in the office when Sloan appeared. Gaines’s fear wasn’t for himself. It was for the old man. He didn’t really believe in my talent, but he wanted to protect Sloan just in case he was wrong.

  When Sloan and I left, his fear was a bright spark in his head, because now he believes. But Sloan ordered him to stay, so he stayed.

  “I’ve had worse job interviews,” I say.

  “It didn’t appear to be very pleasant for Keith or David either.”

  “I didn’t tell them to attack me.”

  “No, no, I don’t blame you for defending yourself. I’m mainly curious how you were able to do that.”

  “Have you ever heard of the Kadaitcha?”

  He shakes his head. I finish another chunk of steak, then continue. “In some Australian aboriginal tribes, they have a guy who is sort of a cross between a witch doctor and a hit man. That’s the Kadaitcha. He’s responsible for the tribe’s magic, and for enforcing the tribe’s laws. There are only a few things a member of the tribe can do to be sentenced to death, but if that happens, then the Kadaitcha carries out the sentence.”

  Sloan waits patiently for me to get to the point.

  “Here’s the thing. He doesn’t use anything like what we’d consider a weapon. Instead, he carries a sharpened bone. Sometimes from an animal. Usually from a human. A little longer than a pencil. And he points it at the offender. According to the tribe’s beliefs, the Kadaitcha sends a spirit out of the pointing bone—like a spear of thought—into the other person. A couple of days later, a week at the most, the offender drops dead. He believes so completely in the spirit and the power of the bone that he actually loses the will to live. He convinces himself that he’s dying. What I do, it’s a lot like that.”