That should have been good news for us. No guilt means no reason to track us down. No reason to keep going with this, if he was just a tech mogul, or even if he was involved in some form of industrial espionage. There are limits to what’s good for the bottom line. Armed hit squads are not only wildly expensive, they’re a huge legal liability.
Attempted murder without a motive is, by definition, psychotic. And as I know from my time inside his head, Preston is not crazy. I explain all this to Kelsey.
“So why is he still coming after us?” Kelsey asks.
“Because he’s got no choice,” I say.
“What does that mean?”
“Someone told him to get rid of me. And you.”
“Who?”
I sigh and close my eyes, just for a second, a long blink. Just long enough to remember the laptop’s monitor, as I saw it through Preston’s eyes.
There, in flashing letters, the instant message: TWEP TWEP TWEP.
It took a little while, but I finally recognized the source of that TWEP order. I’d seen plenty like it while I worked for the government.
It was an encrypted message from a secure server used only by intelligence agencies. Preston ran my name and picture through it. He got a message back, from very high up, telling him who I was, and then telling him to kill me.
There are only a few entities that use that kind of language, that have that kind of secure communications channel, and that can actually expect to get away with murder.
Preston is working with someone in the CIA. And they’d rather see me dead than interfere with whatever he’s doing for them.
[9]
We stop at a strip club not far off the interstate.
“Is this really the best time for a lap dance?” Kelsey asks as we turn into the parking lot behind the building.
I don’t bother to reply, just get out of the car. Nobody’s around. I check the Escalade for a LoJack device; it doesn’t have one. Nobody’s tracking us.
There are two other Escalades in the lot, both with livery registrations as well. That’s why I stopped here. Guys like pulling up to the club in big black SUVs. It makes them feel like Suge Knight. Probably a bachelor party or a group of middle managers inside, out for a little male bonding.
I tear off our Escalade’s livery stickers, then swap out its plates with another one. With any luck, whoever drives the other SUV will be too high on stripper-glitter to notice the change. Meanwhile, if anyone runs these plates, they’ll come back clean.
That buys us a little time to refuel and to pick up the cash I transferred earlier. From the club, it’s a quick ride to a convenience store that has a Western Union terminal. We can get a little breathing space.
At this point, I’m still not too worried. Preston’s got some spooks working for him, but I was trained by the same people who trained them. And I’ve already beaten them twice.
Of course, Preston has his data-mining software. But I can’t see how it helps him. I don’t do social networking. He can’t embarrass me with old status updates from Facebook or any naked pictures from Snapchat. We should be safe as long as I don’t go on Twitter and tell people where we’re eating lunch.
At least, that’s what I think. Then the wheels start to come off.
The clerk behind the gas-station counter tells me several times that my cash transfer was canceled by the sender. I tell him several times that’s impossible, since I was the sender. He shrugs, his indifference thick enough to deflect bullets.
We pay cash to refuel the behemoth and I pick up another burner phone by the counter. This one is a smartphone, with full Internet access. Okay, I admit it, I’m a monkey with a lever like anyone else.
I load it up with prepaid minutes. That brings our money supply down to $500, but my intuition tells me what we need to know is only going to be accessible on the Net.
I turn on the phone. First thing, I check to see what happened to the transfer. I log into my bank’s website and look at my account. It’s gone. I don’t mean the money is gone. I mean the entire account is gone. Emptied out. There’s a notation that says ACCOUNT CLOSED. The entire balance was transferred.
I have a sinking feeling in my gut. I log into my email. I keep a public address for civilian stuff. Filling out forms, a line on the business cards. Things like that.
Most of my inbox is filled with spam, as usual. Offers for Nigerian fortunes and a bigger penis.
But the message at the top of the box is different:
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: I can’t believe you have a gmail account . . .
You know, I thought it would be harder to find you.
Oh, sure, in the real world, you’re still out there. I’m sure they taught you all kinds of tricky shit in spy school. But let me tell you something. You’re not safe. And what you think of as the real world, that doesn’t even matter anymore.
I can touch you without ever laying a hand on you. I don’t need my guys to catch you. I can destroy you from right here.
In case you think this is just me talking big, check your bank accounts. All of them. Even that one at the Royal Bank of the Caribbean in Eleuthera.
I would have expected a big-time superspy like yourself to have a little more in the bank. I mean, $675,233? Total? How the hell were you ever going to retire on that?
Well, you’ve got a bigger problem now. Because it’s all gone. Yeah. I did that. Thanks for contributing to OmniVore’s bottom line. That should just about cover what we spend on snacks.
But wait, there’s more! Your condo in L.A.? Check out this link.
I click on the website, even though I know it could be a virus or some kind of IP address tracker. Because I want to see it for myself.
The link takes me to a real-estate site. With a brand-new listing, “just on the market.” It’s my address. The pictures show a place that’s been professionally cleaned out.
I go back to the email.
See what I did there? Pretty easy, actually, when you’ve got the right tools. Your mortgage holder suddenly found out you owe about a year of payments. Then a brokerage in L.A. got an alert about your foreclosure—you didn’t fight it, which was gracious of you. Your digital signature is all over the surrender documents. Prime condo like that, good location, I’ll bet it’s in escrow before the end of the week.
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point by now.
I was able to erase your life. All of it, and it took me about twenty minutes.
That’s reality now. You’ve got nothing. No money, no home, no credit cards, nothing. Try renting a car or a hotel room or getting on a plane, see how far you get. You don’t even exist anymore.
The rest of you, running around out there, is like a ghost in reverse. You’re just the body. You’re meat. I’ve already taken everything that counts.
But don’t worry. I’m going to get the rest of you pretty soon.
I could put you on the sex offenders registry, or the FBI’s most wanted, or the terrorist no-fly list, and you’d have every cop in America looking for your carcass too.
But frankly, I don’t need the help. I’ll find you.
Right now, I have a bot running your picture against every image connected to the Net in the world. I put Kelsey in there too. If you show up in the crowd in somebody’s selfie, I’m going to know. I’ve got another little monitoring program hidden in the bank networks that’s sifting through every cash-only purchase within a hundred-mile radius of your last known location. I’ve got software agents gathering every phone number you’ve ever used, collecting every address where you’ve ever slept for a night.
You try to hop on a plane, I’ll know. You try to buy a car, I’ll know. You want to run, have a blast. I’ll find you.
You can go to some cheap hourly motel, sleep under stinking unlaundered sheets on a bedbug-infested mattress. You might even think you’re safe.
And then someone wi
ll put a fucking bullet into your brain.
You’re done, Mr. Smith. You took the wrong job. Your life is over. And you’re never even going to know why.
I know that sounds melodramatic. What can I say? It’s not every day I get to be a supervillain. I’m enjoying this. It’s pretty fun to completely obliterate someone’s life and know they’ll never be able to do a goddamned thing about it. I’ve got to admit. I’m having a blast.
Sorry if it’s not as much fun for you.
You really shouldn’t have fucked with me.
Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
PS—If that bitch Kelsey is still with you, tell her I might find a position (or three) for her when this is all over. But only if she asks nicely.
So that’s what data mining can do. Looks like Eli is capable of a few surprises after all.
“What?” Kelsey asks. She must have noticed the look on my face. “What is it?”
“Do me a favor,” I say, handing her the phone. “Check your bank account.”
“Why?”
She’s a little confused at first. She taps her way onto her bank’s site. And then she’s completely bewildered.
Her account is gone too.
“My account is gone,” she says.
“I know.”
“You know? What do you mean? What happened?”
I take the phone back, switch over to the email, and then let her read it.
“Holy God,” she says.
I have to smile. “Yeah. That’s one way to put it.”
“What are we going to do?” she asks.
I don’t answer. I’m suddenly very aware of the security camera watching us from above the pumps.
“Get in the car,” I tell her.
I’m not sure if Preston was bluffing, or if he really can see us through every one of those eyes. I crack open the phone and pull its battery and SIM card. The SIM card goes on the ground and I crush it under my heel. The battery and the phone go into separate pockets.
Maybe I’m being paranoid. But it sure doesn’t feel like paranoia now.
It’s time to start running.
[10]
As soon as I healed from Leary’s assault, I went back for more training. But not with my old unit at Benning. As far as anyone there was concerned, I no longer existed.
I was sent to the compound within the compound at Fort Bragg, where my instructors, like Cantrell, didn’t dress in uniforms with rank. They were special ops. They ignored military regs and were encouraged to grow their beards and skip showers. In the places where they traveled, a clean-shaven man was automatically a target. They went deep in the desert and came back with nightmares and scalps. They tracked high-value targets, negotiated with Taliban warlords and Pakistani secret police, and painted targets with high-powered lasers in order to guide smart bombs.
And they taught me how to do all of that too.
They showed me all the ways to inflict pain on the human body, all the pressure points and weak spots where a man will fold or break. I learned how to kill with a gun, a knife, a garrote, my bare hands, and a half pound of strategically placed C-4.
The closest way to describe it was like med school in reverse. Instead of rotations in saving lives, I had short intensive courses in death and destruction.
They weren’t my only teachers. The rest of the faculty was stranger. They ranged from neuroscientists to guys who acted like Buddhist monks to men who’d clearly spent some time in prison. They taught me, and the other weird recruits selected by Cantrell, how to refine and use our talents. They called us Cantrell’s special-ed class.
We didn’t spend much time together outside of training. For starters, we didn’t like each other much. You’d think that the weird kids, the perpetual outcasts, would be happy to finally find others like themselves. But the opposite was true. We grated on each other. Being near them for too long felt like chewing tinfoil. I mentioned this to Cantrell once, and he laughed. He said it was the same with every group. Some kind of feedback caused by proximity, like a microphone placed too close to an amp.
“I see one of you smiling and getting along with the others, that’s when I know he’s not the real thing.”
We never quite got over it, but we got used to it. We learned calm and focus from our instructors. Though I never met anyone else with a talent as strong as mine, I finally met people who could tell me how to make it work.
I learned how to dig below the surface of people’s thoughts, to burrow down into the places where they kept their secrets. I learned how to separate truth from lies, even when a person might not know the difference himself. I learned to detect hidden weaknesses, to excavate the suppressed memory, the hidden motive, the fear behind the smile.
Most important, I learned how to take pain and give it back.
Cantrell suspected this might be part of my talent after what had happened to Leary. I think that’s why he put me with the most sadistic of the unarmed combat instructors. I took many more beatings—all in the name of training—before I lashed out again.
I can remember the moment clearly. An instructor called Fairchild—not his real name, since secrecy permeated everything we did, and we all used aliases, even within our units—was bending my arm back farther than it was ever designed to go. There was no tapping out in our sparring sessions. You either broke the hold or broke a bone.
I felt my frustration well up inside me, along with the pain. I wanted to hurt him. I was helpless. I could feel something about to give.
And so, like I had done with Leary, I took all my pain—the nerves and tendons and bones all screaming—and wadded it into a ball and hurled it at him.
Fairchild let out a shrill yelp and I felt his grip go slack. I spun and reversed the hold, then spent a few minutes getting payback. But when I let him up, it was clear nothing I’d done hurt him as much as the phantom pain I’d thrown at him. His eyes were full of surprise and he kept rubbing his arm in the exact same spot where mine sang with agony. More than that, I could feel the ache, a dull throbbing echo.
That was when I discovered I could inflict pain as long as I was willing to take a percentage myself.
I described this to Cantrell, after Fairchild told him what happened. Every instructor working with Cantrell’s class was under orders to report anything unusual with us.
Cantrell was giddy with delight. To him, this meant I was making progress.
So as a reward, I got the crap kicked out of me in a whole new variety of ways. Each instructor would take me right to edge of serious injury, until I reached out with my mind and forced it back on them.
My life got marginally better when I learned I could simply absorb the pain of others rather than endure it myself. At that point, I was sent to witness and experience all the worst traumas the military had to offer. Which turned out to be quite a few.
In a base hospital, I sat at the bedside of a 90 percent third-degree-burn case while his life oozed out of him. In rehab clinics, I held the hands of amputees and talked them through the memories of having their limbs torn away by roadside bombs or stray rounds. In VA centers, I got to experience chemotherapy, appendicitis, bedsores, arthritis, paralysis, and heart attacks—all secondhand.
I found I could absorb the little hurts as well as the big ones. The humiliation of a neglected catheter bag exploding with hot piss. The pretty nurse flinching at the scar tissue that used to be the right side of a man’s face. The weakness and helplessness of strong men and women reduced to tears by the simple effort of standing, walking, or feeding themselves.
I filed away every injury, every pain, in a big mental catalog, just as my instructors had taught me. And then, back at the base, I would pull one of these files and share it with someone who rushed me with a knife. If I came away without bleeding, then it was working. If I got cut—well, that was one more pain, one more experience, to go into the files. More practic
e needed.
After months of this with no end in sight, I went back to the barracks to find my duffel already packed and Cantrell waiting for me. He tossed me a new set of BDUs, with no name or rank, in desert camo that matched his own.
“Practice is over, son,” he said. “Time for you to join the majors.”
CANTRELL USED TO keep a stack of Iraqi dinars in his desk with Saddam Hussein’s face on them. When he was feeling especially theatrical, he’d use one to light his cigar. He picked them up after the second invasion; he was there on the ground not long after the bombing started.
“You hear stories about people carting wheelbarrows full of cash to buy bread after the government collapses?” he told me. “Total bullshit. They dumped this stuff in the street. They wouldn’t even use it for toilet paper. When the shooting stops, that’s the first thing everyone wants: real money, something with a little faith and credit behind it.”
This was his way of explaining why we were transporting a metal case packed with cash through a suburb of Baghdad called Sadr City. I didn’t know much about the place at the time. It hadn’t yet made the news as a shooting gallery filled with anti-American Shiite fighters. All I knew was what Cantrell told me. We were going to buy off the support of a local militia, and its leader would only accept American dollars.
So I was in the passenger seat of a Humvee, riding shotgun on a million bucks’ worth of $100 bills.
It was my first time in a war zone. Or anywhere, really. I’d never even been on an overseas flight before, and now I was riding in a Humvee on the other side of the planet. The invasion was over, but the fighting wasn’t. After the first few giddy days, with the statue of Saddam being pulled down and the cheering crowds, things were turning mean again.
There were no lights because there was no electricity. People hid inside their homes. The streets were quiet, but not peaceful.
Cantrell was silent for most of the drive too. Years of working with people like me had given him a lot of practice at shielding his thoughts. There was a standing order among his kids not to read the boss’s mind, but we all made a run at it once or twice. Whenever I’d scan him, I mainly saw bits of sitcoms from the eighties, or clips from porno movies on a loop. That night, I got nothing but the streets and the map in his head as he looked for markers in the bombed-out city to find our rendezvous point. I stopped probing. I figured if he had something to tell me, he’d say it out loud.
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