Killfile

by Christopher Farnsworth

  I get a percentage back, as always, but I’m ready for it. It only makes me breathe a little harder. It’s a neat trick. I’d pull it more often, but an army cardiologist once told me it does bad things to my EKG. I don’t want to drop dead of a real heart attack while giving someone else a fake one.

  While they’re down, I need to get out of this room. But first, I want to know why this went pear-shaped in less than five seconds.

  I reach for the third laptop, the one with the message. My fingers are on the edge of the screen when Preston’s hand comes up and slams it closed.

  He’s looking at me with pure terror etched on his face, but he still wants to protect that information. Something on that computer scares him more than I do.

  So I get scarier. I reach under my shirt and take the Walther P99 from my waistband. The people at the check-in were so concerned about our phones they didn’t think about weapons.

  I aim the gun at Preston’s face. I have time for one question: “Why? Is this because you stole from Sloan?”

  He just stares. I didn’t expect a verbal answer. I want the involuntary response, the reason delivered bright and clean from his head.

  Then his closest bodyguard shakes off his fear faster than I thought possible—stupid of me, guy’s been in a war zone, of course he does—and tackles me.

  He’s still not 100 percent, so I keep him from getting a decent grip anywhere, but he won’t let go.

  Preston watches while we struggle, a stream of thoughts pissing out of his brain and splashing all over, none of it making much sense. I download it from him as fast as I can, and hope I get a chance to sort it out later.

  I’m out of time. I’ve got maybe twenty more seconds before the others regroup. Worse, they’re all between me and the door.

  But there is a window behind the desk.

  I plant my feet, bend my knees, lift, and throw—and send the bodyguard flying right through the glass.

  It’s only in the movies that the hero crashes through a window without major blood loss. Double-paned glass cuts deeper than knives. The guy gets chopped up bad. I feel the shards slice cleanly through skin and muscle, all the way to the bone.

  But thanks to him clearing a path, I’m able to dive through with only a few scratches.

  I hit the porch outside and roll and come up running.

  Behind me, I hear Preston shout, “Shoot him! Kill that son of a bitch!” He’s not being careful now. He doesn’t care who hears him.

  Neither do the guards.

  There’s almost no pause between the order and the shot. A bullet splits the wood of the lodge’s outer wall a couple of feet from my head.

  Rather than run toward the parking lot, where we left the car, I sprint into the woods. It only looks like I don’t know what I’m doing. Even as I’m running I am thinking hard, putting it together as fast as I can. Out of that tangled, crazy mess of thoughts behind Preston’s eyes, I was able to get two things clearly.

  First, he wants me dead, and he’s got men who will carry out his orders. There are a lot of sociopaths in corporate America, but even if they want to, they can’t kill everyone who annoys them. Your average CEO usually doesn’t have trained soldiers on his payroll.

  Preston does. Worse, he went from zero to murder in nothing flat. As soon as he got that message on his screen, he made the decision to kill me without hesitation.

  And not just me.

  That’s the second thing I picked up: he’s going to kill Kelsey too. Because she’s the only witness who can connect us.

  Whatever is going on here, Preston is hiding much bigger secrets than stealing an algorithm.

  I seriously underestimated this guy.

  Now I have to make sure that Kelsey doesn’t pay the price for that.

  IT’S EASY ENOUGH to avoid the OmniVore people as I search for Kelsey. Their minds wail like sirens in the distance, broadcasting excitement and fear and greed. Whenever they get close, I step behind a tree and wait as they huff and puff away.

  Kelsey is a little harder to track than I expected. Her mind is quieter. She’s actually stalking the others out here, her attention focused, her guard up. She’s a lot better at this than I would have thought.

  I catch up to her on the edge of a clearing in the woods. Bright sunlight with deep shadow on either side. The clearing is exposed, but the way around it could hide any number of people.

  So Kelsey heads out into the open, moving as fast as she can across the ground. She’d rather force someone to take a shot at her from cover than stumble across them in the woods. She’s minimizing her risk. Pretty smart.

  The problem is, I’m not the only one tracking her, and she’s running right into an ambush.

  Two guys wait for her on the other side of the clearing. One I recognize from the office. He pulled the gun and took the shot at me. Long hair, wearing Oakley sunglasses now that he’s out in the sun. The other is new to me. He’s wearing the same OmniVore polo and khaki combo, like he’s out for a round of golf. But the polo doesn’t quite cover the ugly tattoo creeping up his neck.

  He had to have gotten that after he was discharged. No way they would have allowed something that distinctive on someone in covert ops.

  They’re maybe thirty feet from my position, partially obscured by all the leaves and branches. Then they move deeper into the brush, disappearing from sight. They’re both carrying Mossbergs, like everyone else in the woods. But theirs have live ammo.

  Their plan is right up in the forefront of their minds. Sneak up on Kelsey and me, unload their rounds, and then split and wait for someone else to find the bodies. The aftermath handles itself: a tragic accident, a mix-up with the shotgun shells. With the blame spread out over a hundred suspects, no one would ever expect this to be solved.

  They’re going to wait until Kelsey is right in front of them, and then they’ll start shooting. Even if she does shoot back, her shells are nonlethal. They think they’re safe.

  Unfortunately for them, they’re not the only ones with real bullets.

  I feel their thoughts ping back from the trees. I close my eyes and focus like I’m getting an image from radar.

  Then I fire.

  Three-shot burst.

  A sudden flare of pain, an instant before a scream. The first one is down.

  Second man running now. Neck Tattoo emerges from the trees. Determined to close the gap between him and Kelsey, get on top of her, finish the job.

  I don’t need my talent this time. Just fire. Three-shot burst.

  Neck Tattoo pitches forward from the brush and lands facedown, right in front of Kelsey.

  I emerge from the tree line a dozen feet away. She’s frozen in place, her mouth open.

  I cross the distance between us quickly. “You all right?” I ask.

  She doesn’t reply, just gapes at the gun in my hand. Then she looks down at the guy with the neck tattoo, on the ground, unmoving. His polo shirt is open enough to see the details of the ink work on his skin. It’s an old-fashioned Vietnam tat, something from way before his time. A snake winding from the mouth of a skull wearing a green beret. Snake Eater. He must have had a relative in Special Forces way back when. Or he likes old movies.

  I’m getting a screech of panic from her. She doesn’t know that these men were carrying live rounds. She thinks I just killed an OmniVore employee in cold blood.

  She stands there, staring at me in shock and horror.

  “No, wait—” I say.

  Then the long-haired guy emerges from the woods, Oakleys gone. I see three holes in his polo shirt, and deformed Kevlar underneath. He shines with pain like a spotlight. I cracked a couple of ribs, but the vest saved his life.

  I knew both of the guys were wearing body armor. I could feel it chafe. So I aimed for center mass to put them down without killing them. I just didn’t think either of them would recover this fast.

  He raises his shotgun.

  I aim past Kelsey, at him. She turns and sees, and my mental
download of information hits her.

  It’s mostly just images and feelings, but it gets the point across:

  She lifts her shotgun. We fire almost simultaneously.

  Her shot catches him in the chest. Mine takes him in the neck.

  He doesn’t get up this time.

  Kelsey drops her gun. I can see the realization begin to blossom in her mind. People are trying to kill her. That’s a good reason for anyone to curl into a nice little ball of panic.

  But Snake Eater is still breathing, and I don’t want to be around if any more of Preston’s goons find us.

  So I grab her and pull her along until we’re both running as fast as we can on the uneven ground.

  We’ve got to get out of here.

  [6]

  There’s always been a fundamental divide in military thinking. One side believes that wars are won by the army with better soldiers. The other side believes wars are decided with better weapons.

  The better-weapons side has been winning the argument for the past hundred years or so. In World War I, the Germans had the best-trained soldiers in the world, the product of years of tradition and schooling, thousands of young men raised for nothing but combat. And they were wiped out, wave after wave, by machine guns and poison gas, as if they were mere mortals like anyone else. After that, World War II showed that you could erase whole cities with one bomb. Soldiers, to these people, have been reduced to the meat left on the battlefield as a way of keeping score. They believe our defense budget is best spent on cruise missiles, drone strikes, and orbital lasers.

  But the better-soldiers side points to conflicts like Vietnam, where it didn’t matter how many tons of bombs and napalm we dropped on the enemy. They put their money on Special Forces, and turncoats buried deep in the enemy’s headquarters, and highly trained covert operatives. They believe that the right man in the right place can change the course of a war.

  That group is the reason, more or less, that I exist. Along with a man named Wolf Messing.

  Messing was a Russian psychic and showman who lived in Moscow in the 1950s. There are a lot of people who will tell you now that he was a fraud. Maybe he was. But if that’s the case, he was a fraud who managed to fool Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, the Gestapo, and most important, Josef Stalin.

  Stalin, for you illiterates who can’t remember anything before Kim met Kanye, was the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union and one of the great butchers of the twentieth century. His body count has been estimated as high as ten million, and that’s not including the people who died in famines or in the massive prison system he created during his rule. People whispered his name, as if he would appear like Satan and drag them off to the gulags personally. He could not have been more terrifying if he slept on a bed of skulls and drank blood for breakfast.

  And even he was scared shitless of Wolf Messing.

  Messing was performing every night for the Russian elite then, and Stalin had heard stories about his psychic abilities: how he’d escaped the Nazis in Berlin by convincing his jailers to open the cell door and lock themselves inside; how, as part of his act, he walked into the state bank of Moscow and convinced the manager to hand over 100,000 rubles, no questions asked; how he knew your deepest, darkest secret the moment he met you.

  Stalin decided to test Messing. A couple of men in dark suits from the KGB showed up at Messing’s theater one night and told him that the glorious leader wanted to see him at 1:00 P.M. the next day. The only catch: Messing had to get past the guards first. He was ordered to use his abilities to try to get into the Kremlin without the proper authorization. No big deal: just walk into one of the most heavily guarded buildings on the planet without papers or an escort.

  To make it even more interesting, Stalin gave his men photos of Messing and ordered them to shoot any intruder on sight. If Messing failed the test, he’d be dead.

  But the next day, at 1:00 P.M. sharp, Stalin looked up from his desk—and Messing was standing there. Close enough to touch Stalin—or put a bullet into him, if he wanted.

  Stalin demanded to know how Messing pulled it off. Messing said he projected the words “I am Beria” into the minds of everyone who saw him. When they looked at him, walking past the guards, down the halls, they didn’t see the unassuming little Jewish man. Instead, they believed they were seeing the head of the Russian secret police, possibly the only man in Russia more frightening than Stalin.

  Stalin never let Messing get that close again. But he began pouring a lot of money into psychic research. The Soviets reportedly came up with agents who could make themselves invisible, who could implant ideas into the minds of other people, who could pinpoint the positions of America’s top-secret missile silos just by looking at a map. They had one woman, Nina Kulagina, who was supposed to be able to move small objects, coins and dice, with the power of her mind alone. That doesn’t sound like much, until you think about all the tiny, vital things inside the human body—like, say, a blood vessel inside the brain, being squeezed like a balloon until it pops.

  Once the CIA and the army heard about Messing and the other Soviet psychics, they panicked. This was back when the Soviet Union was still something to be feared. There was only one satellite in the sky then, and it had a red star painted on its side. American kids hid under their desks during H-bomb drills, ready for atomic war to break out at any moment. The best and brightest in the government were not about to let the United States fall behind in any race with the Russians. In 1953, Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, told a group at Princeton that “mind warfare is the great battlefield of the Cold War, and we must do whatever it takes to win.”

  So, in the grand tradition of the CIA, they began throwing millions of dollars at the problem. They sent recruiters out to séances and carnivals all over America, looking for psychics who could match the ones at the Soviets’ Brain Research Institute. They started Project MK-ULTRA, which dosed unwilling subjects with LSD in an attempt to control their minds or awaken paranormal abilities. They created Project Star Gate, which was supposed to use remote viewers to pinpoint hidden Soviet military installations through ESP.

  None of it worked. At least, as far as the public ever knew.

  There’s a reason you hear only about the CIA’s failures. By definition, if a covert operation is successful, no one will ever know about it. But for decades, we’ve learned in painful detail all the ways the CIA has stepped on its own dick: the failed Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs; attempts to kill Castro with exploding cigars; smuggling cocaine to pay for weapons for anticommunist rebels in South America; “slam-dunk” intel on Iraq’s WMDs.

  And things like Star Gate and Project Jedi and the First Earth Battalion. High-ranking officers were told they could walk through walls if they concentrated properly. Special Forces soldiers were told to focus their inner chi until they could kill a goat by staring at it. Others sat in a run-down building on the grounds of Fort Meade, racking their brains for visions of Russian submarines. They didn’t even have the budget for coffee; they had to bring their own.

  Things like this make the CIA look like Chris Farley in an old SNL rerun, stumbling through the living room and smashing all the furniture; a bumbling, barely functional, mostly harmless clown.

  Nobody sees the men and women behind the dictator who has a fatal heart attack, or the coup right before the crucial election, or the bigmouthed union leader who vanishes from his bed in the middle of the night. Nobody suspects the clown.

  John Wayne Gacy used the same trick, until they found all the bodies in his basement.

  There’s the cover, and then there’s the real work. In my case, Star Gate was the cover, the exploding cigar designed to make a lot of noise and smoke.

  My group did the real work.

  I THINK IT must have surprised them, when my test results showed up. Maybe it had been so long since they’d found someone like me through the exams that they had to get orders from higher up in the chain of comma
nd. It certainly took them long enough to come find me.

  Or maybe they only went back and looked at my tests after what happened with my drill sergeant.

  SERGEANT LEARY WAS a throwback, a draftee during Vietnam who opted to become a lifer. He was something prehistoric compared to the kids who’d seen the towers fall and then signed up for revenge and college tuition. There he was, quietly grinding out his time at Fort Benning, and then, suddenly, he was expected to teach a bunch of children raised on Nintendo how to fight in the real world.

  I did my best to avoid him. I was arrogant, but I wasn’t completely stupid. I knew that the army wasn’t the place to test authority. It wasn’t high school anymore. So I wrapped my usual attitude tight and kept my head down. I was determined not to be noticed. I wanted a fresh start, without my talent separating me from everyone else. I wanted to be human.

  It didn’t matter.

  Leary made me the squad’s official scapegoat. If we had to do extra miles on a run, it was because I was dogging it. If we failed inspection, it was because I was sloppy. Or I looked at him the wrong way during lineup. That sort of thing. At first I told myself it wasn’t personal. Get a group of humans together and basic primate politics take over: someone will be the class clown, someone else will be the teacher’s pet. I got to be the designated punching bag. A big silverback gorilla like Leary would shove people into these roles if nobody took them. It’s a quick and dirty way to get a bunch of strangers to think of themselves as a unit. Even I knew that.

  Then it turned into something uglier. For me, Leary tapped into a reservoir of cruelty that probably surprised even him.