He sees Kelsey. That’s why I never felt anyone targeting me. I wasn’t the target.
She was.
She turns, and starts to run in the other direction.
Too late.
He’s already made his decision. He pulls the gun and fires.
The fastest a human being has ever run is about twenty-seven miles per hour. A 9mm bullet fired from a gun moves at just under seven hundred miles per hour. It doesn’t matter how much of a head start she has. The bullet catches up to her in a split second.
Entangled with her as I am, I feel it hit the same instant she does.
It breaks her shoulder blade, tears a hole through the top of her lung. She falls.
I stumble, and trip, and fall down with her.
Not real, I remind myself. Not real. It only feels like I am coughing up blood. It only feels like I am dying.
It’s only real for Kelsey. She’s in pain. She needs help. She’s dying, every second I waste.
Get up. Ignore the signals. Get up.
I limp, and then stagger, and then run.
She can barely lift her head. She can feel her shirt, suddenly heavy and wet.
Mine threaten to go numb too, but I tell myself it’s not real, and I keep on moving.
I round the corner, and this is what I see, from her perspective and mine.
Some people are running. Others stand around, looking almost bored. Everyone heard the shot, but no one saw it. Gunfire isn’t enough to get a crowd running, not just one shot, not in L.A. They’ll still hang around to get pics on their phones.
Parrot Man is covered in bird shit, his parrots clawing and scratching at him as they try to escape. The doors of the minivan are open, and the father is shielding his children with his body. Other people lie flat on the asphalt, covering their heads.
The police are already at the top of the ramp.
Snake Eater walks right past them, looking straight ahead. Like about half the people in the crowd, he has his phone out.
From Kelsey’s rapidly dimming vision, I see him pressing buttons.
Then the explosion hits.
Down by the carousel, and I feel Adkins, Wylie, and Gill wink out of existence. They never saw it coming. They weren’t allowed to look inside the bag either.
Now I know why Preston sent the B-team to the meeting.
Now there is true panic, a collective scream going up from everyone at once. People in Los Angeles might be bored by gunfire, but a bomb definitely gets their attention. My brain rings with deeper, more primal fears, and ghosts that go all the way back to the cave and the forest and the creatures at the edge of the firelight possess everyone, and reduce them to animals fleeing a predator. People run in every direction, leaping from the pier to the beach and even into the ocean.
I knock down everyone in my path, but it still seems to take forever to move a dozen yards.
I’m praying to a god I never believed in by the time I reach Kelsey. I’ve got my hand on the wound and I’m screaming for help when her half of the split screen finally goes dark.
GAINES, TO HIS credit, shows up at the hospital. He must have used the corporate jet.
I’ve been sitting in the visitor area for about twelve hours, exuding a steady stream of don’t-fuck-with-me vibes. Even the paparazzi and the local TV crews won’t bother me, despite the compelling visual of a man sitting with dried blood coloring half his shirt.
The police have accepted my initial story that I was just one of the many bystanders, that I happened to reach Kelsey first.
Gaines finds me in my chair. He’s scared shitless, but he still walks up to me. I should give him points for that, but I’m not feeling generous.
“They say she’s going to make it,” he says.
“I know.”
There was an ambulance already scrambled to the pier because of the dad in the minivan’s panicked 911 call. I carried her straight to it, my hand plugging the entry wound. I rode with Kelsey the twenty blocks to St. John’s. Some of the finest trauma center surgeons in the world work in Los Angeles. The medics back in Iraq used to do their training here, since there are few other places that offer so much experience with such a wide variety of gunshot wounds.
In some ways, you could say she was lucky.
I haven’t paid much attention to the TV bolted to the ceiling in the corner, but I’ve seen enough of the news to know that nobody died, aside from Preston’s men. Wounded and maimed, probably. But nobody died.
I suppose they were lucky too.
Gaines looks for the right words. “Mr. Sloan is on his way back from Geneva now. He told me to spare no expense looking after Kelsey.”
“How big of him.”
We sit in silence for a long moment. Then I sense the real reason he approached me, growing like a mushroom. As always, he’s on an errand from his boss.
“Mr. Sloan also wanted me to ask you—”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“—he wanted to know if you, in fact, were able to recover the algorithm from Mr. Preston.”
I have to smile at that. Amazing what seems funny when you’ve been awake long enough. “Seriously? You canceled the contract, remember?”
“It seems, perhaps, I was premature in that.”
“You said you were going to call the FBI.”
“It seems that the people I spoke with may not have actually been federal agents.”
“Yeah. No shit. Maybe if you had anything other than real-estate law and bad TV stuffed into your head, you’d have figured that out sooner.”
Gaines chokes back some more bile. “I acted without Mr. Sloan’s authority in this matter. I overstepped my bounds. Mr. Sloan instructed me to apologize to you as well.”
“You’re doing a hell of a job so far, Lawrence.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t. Good to know.”
There’s a long pause before Gaines speaks again.
“So, were you able to do the job? Mr. Sloan would still be prepared to pay you if you were able to recover his intellectual property. And we can hopefully get past all of this unpleasantness.”
“What about Kelsey? How’s she supposed to get past it?”
“We will see that she gets the very best of care. She is still our employee. Any legal problems she might face because of her involvement will, of course, be handled by our attorneys—”
I cut him off. “—a little something extra in the Christmas bonus, maybe a twenty-dollar gift card at Starbucks . . .”
Some semblance of pride rears up in him. “Hey. I didn’t get her involved in this.”
“No. You were just the guy who abandoned her.”
His anger overrides his fear. “And you were the one who let her get shot.”
I turn and face him. He shrinks back from whatever he sees there.
“I’m sorry,” he says quickly.
I can think of five or six ways to punish him, but I’m too tired. Besides, he’s not wrong.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say.
He waits a whole thirty seconds before asking, “Can I tell Mr. Sloan you have what he wants?”
God. What a little corporate weasel. Of course, I took Sloan’s money, too. So what does that make me?
It doesn’t matter. We left professional in the rearview a long time ago. Now this is as personal as it gets.
I ignore the question. “They’re going to try for her again,” I say. “You need to get the police here. That should be enough to discourage them. And then, when she can move, you need to have some professional security ready. I mean professional. Not like those two idiots you had in the office before.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
&nb
sp; I stand up. “You’d better.”
“Wait. Where are you going?”
“Don’t worry about that,” I tell him. “Worry about what happens when I come back.”
I walk away from him and head out the door.
I tried being civilized with Preston. Now we do it the other way.
Now I burn it all down.
[23]
I take a bus from Los Angeles to El Paso. Bus stations don’t have the kind of customers that OmniVore wants to track. If you can’t afford a car or a plane ticket, you’re too far down the food chain to matter. So there are none of the mechanisms Preston could use to find me. No credit cards, no free Wi-Fi, not even that many surveillance cameras. People still pay cash in bus stations, still get their lunches out of a vending machine.
I’m dressed in clothes I got at a Goodwill. Ordinarily, I’d be thinking about who wore them before me, and who died in this seat.
But something has happened. Somewhere along the line, I slipped into mission-mind. It happened all the time back in Iraq. Somehow the distractions—like the hangover of the alcoholic across the aisle, the one who doesn’t realize that pain in his gut is the impending collapse of his liver’s ability to function—recede far into the distance. It’s not like meditation or the intense focus that comes with actual combat. It’s more like the opposite: a kind of enforced dullness where I’m simply observing everything. Asleep on my feet, but ready for the alarm that will wake me up again and turn me loose.
I stay in this zone as I trudge in line across the Stanton Street Bridge into Juárez. There’s no requirement to show a passport or a visa to enter Mexico from this side, so there won’t be any record of me leaving the country.
On every side of me are people. Their thoughts and babble barely register today.
Once I’m on the other side of the bridge, I know I’ve dropped off OmniVore’s radar entirely. Juárez is too poor, too racked with violence and murder, for Preston’s tools to follow me around. Even the CIA would have some trouble finding me here if I chose to disappear.
Preston might even think I’m dead. He’s that kind of optimist, the kind who assumes it will always work out for him, just because it always has. It’s a reflex more than an actual philosophy. Even though there’s no body, no confirmed kill, I’m willing to bet he’s written me off the books already because that’s the reality he prefers.
The smart play would be to let him go on thinking that.
There’s a guy selling cheap phones from a kiosk on the other side of the bridge. I hand over a few dollars and pick up an old iPhone. The screen is cracked, and there’s a picture of someone else’s kids as the wallpaper, but it works. I make the call.
He picks up, because a guy like him cannot let a phone or email go unanswered.
“Hello, Eli,” I say.
There’s a pause, almost a hiccup, as he draws a sharp breath.
“Well,” he says when he finally recovers. “Didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“I won’t keep you long.”
“No, we should talk,” he says. “Things have gotten a little out of hand. I want you to know, I didn’t authorize that. That was a rogue employee, and obviously, he’s already had to pay for his mistake—”
There’s furious tapping on a keyboard in the background. I imagine he’s trying to trace the call, round up the troops. It doesn’t matter.
“Oh, at least try to be a man, Eli. Admit it. It was your idea. You thought you were being bold. You saw yourself as Alexander with the Gordian Knot, didn’t you?”
He could go on denying, but he can’t resist. He wants to take credit. I was in his head. I know him.
He snickers, just a little. “Lateral thinking. Admit it, you never saw it coming. How often does that happen to a psychic?”
“Maybe you should ask Kelsey for a gold star.”
“Hey, that’s what happens when you want to play with the big boys. Sometimes there’s collateral damage. I was told to snip the loose ends, and she was one of them. It’s the cost of doing business.”
For an instant, my vision goes dark around the edges. I bite down hard and shift topics. I don’t want him to think he can get to me.
“You still haven’t told your friends in the CIA.”
“What?” That throws him. “What makes you think that?”
“Because your plan was idiotic. You brought civilians into a private business dispute and put the entire country on terrorist alert. They would have slapped you down instantly if they knew you were going to blow a hole in a nationally known landmark.”
“You used bombs first,” he says, voice sullen.
God. What a toddler. “You didn’t tell them because they still don’t know you lost everything.”
Silence. I can imagine how hard he’s working. Years of work, lost in an instant, no backups. I doubt he’s slept much.
“Have you still got the hard drive?” I hear a tiny hint of hope in his voice. “We could still make a deal.”
“Negotiations are over,” I tell him. “You’ve got nothing I want.”
“Oh, that’s a load. You must want something. Otherwise, why did you call? You have to want something. Come on. Tell me. We can make a deal. Just tell me what you want. What do you want?”
There it is. The edge of panic in his voice.
“I want you to be afraid,” I say. “See you around, Eli.”
I hang up and toss the phone into a nearby trash can.
THE STACK OF bills from the meth dealer has gotten thin, so I have to settle for a chain hotel near the U.S. consulate. It looks like the setting of a crime-scene photo, but the phone works, and that’s all I really need.
I call the contact number of an old client and give my information. I begin with my terrible Spanish, but the person on the other end answers in barely accented English. Then I sit on the bedspread and stare at the stain on the wall.
I don’t have to wait long. Within two hours, two men—both younger than me—show up at my door and ask me to come with them. They’re both extraordinarily polite. They don’t even show me their guns.
They take me to a waiting black Mercedes, and from there, to the airport. We board a small private jet, where I’m installed in a plush leather seat. One of the young men asks if I want anything to eat or drink. I decline.
They take the seats opposite me and spend most of the short flight looking through magazines or checking their phones. Occasionally, one or the other will look over, just to check on me. He will usually smile, eyebrows raised, silently asking if I need anything. I’ll smile back and shake my head. And he’ll go back to his magazine or his phone.
Their minds are remarkably clean and untroubled for hired killers. The ghosts of all the victims trailing them barely make a sound.
WE LAND IN Cancún. The airport is filled with college kids on vacation. They all think they’re on MTV, and they all believe everyone is watching. It’s like I’ve traveled to a different planet, a happy little biosphere populated entirely by healthy young mammals in the prime of mating season.
But this isn’t just a tourist trap. It’s also disputed territory in the drug war. The Zetas used to hold the entire area, but over the last couple of years, two other cartels have united to try to kick them out. At least the Mexican army isn’t involved here, like they are in Juárez and the poorer areas. The government understands that decapitated co-eds are not exactly a boost for the tourist industry, and so do the cartels. That keeps the war simmering offstage, where it doesn’t interfere with the gringos getting sunburns and STDs. The blood only boils over into public view occasionally.
My client, Juan-Gómez Olivarez, is the Zetas’ top man here. To the outside world, he’s one of the chief lieutenants in the cartel, a ruthless drug lord, and a leading candidate to assume control over the whole operation since the arrest of the Zetas’ former leader, Miguel Ángel Trevino Morales.
He’s also a deep-cover DEA plant. His real name is Nathan Giles, and he was born to
immigrant parents in Tucson, Arizona. He joined Special Forces after high school, which is where we met: he was on a team that backstopped a couple of my jobs in Afghanistan.
After Nathan got out of the army, he joined the DEA and was sent to infiltrate the Zetas. I think even he was surprised how fast he rose in the leadership, but there’s nothing like a bloody war to advance your career prospects when you’re a soldier. Everyone ahead of you for promotion keeps dying.
His rapid ascent earned him more than a few enemies. Some of his people began to suspect him of being a traitor as his rivals and competitors were busted one too many times. Not long after he was given responsibility for Cancún by no less than Morales himself, Olivarez thought his cover was blown. He heard a corrupt official on the U.S. side of the border might have leaked his true identity.
He was alone. He was afraid. He didn’t have anyone on either side of the law to turn to. But he did have a stupidly huge pile of money. So he hired me to find out who else was keeping his secrets.
I went to Mexico for a week, pretending to be just another soldier for hire looking for work. I met with his men and scanned their minds. Three of them knew who Olivarez really was, and they were all holding on to the secret, waiting for the right time to reveal it and take his place. Cartel politics. I gave their names to Olivarez and went back to L.A.
A few days after that, I saw an item on the Web about a dozen Zetas turning up on the steps of the Juárez courthouse. Their heads had been severed and placed neatly in front of their bodies. The picture that accompanied the article was grainy, and the faces on the heads had been through some serious abuse, but I recognized three of them.
So I have no compunctions about calling in this debt.
THE BODYGUARDS ESCORT me to a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. The Gulf is painfully blue through the patio doors. I barely see it. I fall on the bed and sleep like the dead until there’s a restrained knock on the door.
When I open my eyes, it’s night. The bodyguards are waiting. They escort me downstairs, back into the car. We drive through the streets, out to the edge of the hotel zone, where we turn into a small driveway almost hidden by twenty-foot walls topped with razor wire.
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