Something pings my radar, and I look around. It’s not another threat to Nikolai. It doesn’t feel like anger or hostile intent. Someone in the club recognizes me. Her focus on me raises thoughts out of the background noise.
I pick her out of the crowd a second later as she makes her way over to me.
Kira Sadeghi.
A little over a year ago, Kira’s father, Armin, hired me to rescue her when she was kidnapped by a couple of amateurs. It was a forty-minute job. I got her home unharmed and alive. The kidnappers didn’t do as well.
She’d been drugged out of her skull, and her father packed her off to rehab.
In the time since, Kira has joined the cast of Tehrangeles, currently the top-rated reality-TV show on basic cable. It follows the lives of a group of young, spoiled children of Iranian immigrants who fled the revolution and came to America. There are about eight hundred thousand of them in Los Angeles now, the largest community of Iranians anywhere in the world outside of Tehran. The show’s named for the section between Westwood and Beverly Hills, where a big part of the community lives. They sometimes prefer to be called Persian, since Americans aren’t great at nuance, and they still take a lot of abuse from people who think that they must be Arabic Muslim terrorist ragheads.
Tehrangeles, admittedly, doesn’t do a lot to clear up these misconceptions. Armin sent out a proud-father email when it premiered, and I set my DVR to record a few episodes. The show opened with a muezzin set against Arabian electronic dance music. I lasted about twenty minutes before it became too aggressively stupid.
But the actual background of the people doesn’t matter, really. The show is all about who’s sleeping with whom, who got fake tits, who got drunk and went home with a stranger after the clubs. The answer, almost every time: Kira.
It’s made her the indisputable star of the show, as well as the lead villain. She manages to shove her way to the center of every scene she’s in, and if the camera leaves her for a moment, she’s liable to throw a drink or a tantrum to get it back. Even when she’s not on-screen, the other cast members can’t help but talk about her.
(All right. Maybe I watched more than twenty minutes.)
Now she’s hated by millions of people who have never met her, and they’ve made her rich and famous. She’s become This Year’s Girl, with her photo in Us Weekly and on GoFugYourself.com every week.
She reaches me through the crowd. “Hi,” she says. “Remember me?”
She’s nervous, but you’d never know to look at her. A born actress.
I decide to be professional. I smile. “Of course, Ms. Sadeghi.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” she says. “I mean, I was a complete mess the last time I saw you.”
I feel a jolt of embarrassment from her as the memory hits. I hauled her out of a Skid Row hotel room and loaded her into my car. She lolled around on the seat, barely conscious.
Now her eyes shine and her skin is clear. Her time in rehab took. Which is good. It usually doesn’t. People tend to stick to their habits. Just look at me.
“Congratulations on the show,” I say. “Your father is very proud.”
“Oh, Daddy,” she says. “He’s just happy I’ve got a job.” She makes a face, but a little burst of pride, like a sudden ray of sunlight, comes through.
A small entourage trails behind her: friends, hangers-on, and a single bodyguard who’s mostly there for decoration. Only eight people—not really A-list size, but respectable, all things considered. They’re all trying to look bored, but they all want to know why Kira is talking to someone who’s clearly hired help.
Now she’s hesitating. She knows what she wants to say next. She’s talked to her father about me. He’s said some things to her, and she’s asked around. I have a reputation. That’s how I get work. So now she wants to know. Everyone who hears about me wants to know.
She moves in closer. “So. I have to know. Is it true?”
Kira makes a good living off being a sideshow, so I don’t blame her for asking the question. But there are times when I feel like the geek at the county fair who bites the heads off chickens for a nickel apiece.
At this moment, right now, I don’t want to be that guy.
“Is what true?”
She leans back and pouts. It’s cuter in person than on TV. “Come on,” she says. “You know. If it’s true, you already know what I’m asking.”
I just look at her.
She immediately remembers some of the other things she’s heard her father say. And what happened to the guys who kidnapped her.
“Oh no, I’ve offended you,” she says, pulling up contrition and sincerity from her library of facial expressions. She’s good. She’ll be a hell of an actress someday, if she can scramble out of the sink of reality TV.
Then I notice Nik getting up, his arms around both of the women. Having lost him once already tonight, I don’t feel like doing it again. I smile at Kira and nod. “Good to see you, Ms. Sadeghi.”
She gives me a certain look, half smiling. “Yeah,” she says. “You too.”
We go back to The Standard on Sunset and I park Nik and his guests in his room. He is fully recovered from his earlier shock, thanks to the vodka. Now he can’t stop singing my praises.
“That was off the fucking chain, bro,” he says, over and over again, as he grabs me around the shoulders in a big, awkward man-hug. “Whatever we are paying you, it is not enough.”
I resist the urge to tell him to pass that along to his dad. Instead I just remind him of the usual protocol. Don’t open the door to anyone but me. I’ll be around to collect him in the morning.
“Better make it afternoon,” he says.
He turns his head and glances at the women, who have already taken off their clothes as they explore the inside of his suite. Looks like he’s getting his Christmas wish tonight after all.
“Late afternoon,” he says. “I’ll call you.” He slams the door in my face. I wait and listen to him engage the security bolt.
Then I step across the hall to my own room. This is where I live.
I checked in to The Standard when I came back to L.A. I haven’t gotten around to finding anything more permanent yet, and I get a discount for putting clients like Nik in the suite. The couches and chairs all look like something out of the Jetsons’ apartment and there’s a model who sits all day in a glass box behind the front desk, a piece of living decoration.
It works for me. I never have to do dishes or laundry, and because The Standard caters to the young and rich and beautiful, I never have to deal with too much pain or worry leaking in around the edges from the other guests’ thoughts. A hotel actually spends most of its time empty, except when people come back at night for sex or sleep. I can handle that. And if someone is scared or angry or lonely on the other side of the wall, they’re never my neighbor for long.
It’s as close as I can get to living in the home of the future I saw in comic books when I was a kid, with robots doing all the domestic work, beeping quietly to themselves without complaint.
I open my door and find Kira waiting, sitting in one of the low-slung chairs.
I knew she was there, of course. I could feel her mischievous grin from out in the hall. I saw the plan hatching in her head when I left the club and she sent one of the minions in her entourage to follow me.
“You know, this is the first time I’ve ever actually used my fame to get into a guy’s room,” she says by way of greeting. “It was really surprisingly easy. I just told them you’re my boyfriend and they gave me a key. You should probably talk to them about it.”
Complain about the beautiful twenty-one-year-old
delivering herself like room service? Sure. “I’ll get right on that,” I tell her. “What can I do for you, Ms. Sadeghi?”
She won’t let it go, though. “I mean, aren’t you in security? Doesn’t it bother you on, like, a professional level?”
“If you were a threat, I never would have opened the door.”
She nods. “Right,” she says. “Because you’re psychic.”
I’m tired. And she already knows. So what the hell.
“Yeah. I am.”
She’s surprised I’ve admitted it. She expected she’d have to wear me down. “You can read minds?”
I nod.
She’s not sure if she should believe me now, despite all she’s heard and seen. I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t believe it either if I hadn’t been living with other people’s monkey-chatter echoing in my brain my entire life.
She leans closer, and asks the question everyone asks, once they get past the initial disbelief: “What’s it like?”
I can see it in her head. She thinks it would be cool, knowing everyone’s secrets. She thinks it might even be fun.
I never tell anyone the truth. I work in a field where people try to kill me on a semiregular basis, so I don’t go around advertising my weak spots.
But if I were honest, I’d say that I get a little of everyone’s thoughts, just by being close to them. I get a percentage of their frustration, their anger, their loneliness, their fear, and most of all their pain. I can feel their hangovers, their backaches, their arthritis, their tumors. I pick up a dose of their bad memories, their childhood traumas, their lingering nightmares. I feel their heartbreak and their anxiety and their need.
And I can’t turn it off.
Imagine sensing all the vermin in the walls of every building you set foot inside. Hearing every mouse as it scurries along, the rats as they squeeze out their droppings, every cockroach and silverfish filling every crack and crevice, every beetle and ant behind the drywall. Knowing you’re surrounded all the time. You can almost feel all those tiny little lives crawling over your skin at every moment. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
That’s what it’s like.
But I never tell people this. Instead I just say, “It’s not as much fun as you think.”
Kira frowns. Boredom and frustration flit across her mind. But she’s not done yet. She asks the second question, the other thing people always want to know. Because I am polite, I let her ask the question out loud before I answer.
“So, can you make people—you know, do stuff?”
“Control minds, you mean?”
“Right.”
I call that the Vegas act. Everyone wants to know if I can pull the same cheap stunts as a lounge-room hypnotist. Make someone bark like a dog or cluck like a chicken or talk in a funny voice. Or even—it’s almost always the men who ask this one, usually with a creepy smile—make women take off their clothes on command.
“No. I can’t.”
She’s disappointed and relieved at the same time. “Why not?” she asks.
I smile a little at that. God knows my life would be easier if I could.
I give her the short version of the same speech I always give my clients.
“Think of it this way: If your brain is a computer, I can hack into it. I can read your email and your files, even run some of the programs or rewrite some of the basic code. But I can’t reprogram the whole thing from the command line up. People do what they want. I can push, I can shove, I can shout my thoughts as loud as possible into their heads—and they will still do what they want. People are stubborn. People are messy. And most of all, people do not change. It took you a whole lifetime to become who you are. I can’t rewrite all that in the few moments it takes to peek inside your brain.”
“You seemed to do okay with those guys who kidnapped me.”
She’s a little scared as she says this. I get a flash of some of the things she’s overheard from her father. And she saw the news reports. Both of the men who took her ended up dead on the downtown pavement.
“That was different,” I tell her.
“How?”
“That’s the flip side of my talent. Being able to read someone else’s mind also means I can plant some things there too.”
That’s putting it mildly, but she doesn’t need to know the full menu of options. I can trigger painful memories, dodge punches before they’re thrown, and hide in the cognitive blind spots that lurk inside everyone’s brains.
These are all tricks I picked up after I left high school and went into the army, where a Special Ops unit found me. My instructors helped me turn my talent into a weapon in the War on Terror. Eventually, I walked away from duty and country and went into business for myself, helping the One Percent clean up their messes and protect their secrets. The pay is a lot better than government work. My special skills mean I can charge more than your average security consultant.
I also don’t tell Kira what my ability does to me. I get back a percentage of everything I inflict on another person. I will feel a piece of everything I did tonight, on top of the usual headache of all those other people’s thoughts in my skull. I can put it off for a while with concentration and focus—and usually pills and whiskey—but it’s just a matter of time before the bill comes due.
So I am not at all sure I want Kira here much longer. It sounds idiotic—kicking a ridiculously hot woman out of my hotel room—but I would really like to get into my Scotch and my Vicodin before the pain becomes more than I can choke back.
And, if I am completely honest, there’s more to it than that. She makes me feel old. Maybe it’s all the time I’ve spent playing big brother to Nikolai lately, but I’ve got barely a decade on Kira, and I still feel used up. Most of my life has been spent doing bad things for people who don’t deserve their good fortune.
Kira’s mind has no shadows, despite her time in rehab and the incident with the kidnappers. She is one of those people whose thoughts are clear and undimmed by any of the usual grime and squalor that I ordinarily see. She’s had a good life, on balance. She sees no reason why it won’t stay that way. That kind of optimism is a constant mystery to me.
I admit it: I am envious of her peace of mind.
So I stand up and say, “Thank you for stopping by, Ms. Sadeghi.”
She makes no move to get up. Instead she smirks at me from the chair. “You can call me Kira, you know.”
“Thank you for stopping by, Kira. Please give my regards to your father.”
She finally stands, still smirking, and moves closer to me.
“You know,” she says, “I never thanked you properly for coming to my rescue.”
“Don’t worry about it. They don’t really make a card for that sort of thing,” I say. She is short, even in her heels. She stands right under my chin. I catch the scent of her perfume. It’s becoming difficult to focus on the Scotch or the pills.
“I should still say thank you.”
“Not necessary.”
“I think it is,” she says. “Now tell me what else I’m thinking.”
Then she imagines something so incredibly detailed and specific it might even make the porn stars blush.
She sees the look on my face, delighted that the trick worked. “So. Still want me to go?”
As an answer, I open my arms to her and lean down, and she places her mouth on mine.
What the hell. Nik won’t be up until late afternoon anyway.
Somewhere around 3:00 a.m. it hits. The panic. The feeling like an iron band clamped around my chest, the hammering of my pulse behind my ears. I am instantly drenched in sweat. I think I can actually feel my heart slamming itself against the walls of my rib cage. And each beat I am totally convinced will be its last.
This is the payback. This is what I get—a tiny percentage of the misery I inflicted on Vasily earlier this evening. Everything I do, every one of my little Jedi mind tricks, has a price. This is it.
I feel like I am going to die.
I gasp for air and thrash out of the covers.
Kira wakes. I feel the irritation rise off her as she’s jolted out of sleep. I prepare to deal with a barrage of curses—she’s got them loaded and ready to go—when she notices what’s happening to me.
“What is it?” she asks, suddenly frightened.
I can’t swallow enough oxygen to speak. I just hold up a hand, trying to tell her that it will pass in a moment.
And it will. I’ve done this before.
All I have to do is endure a few minutes of absolute certainty that I am going to die.
I concentrate and try to focus. To ride out the storm, as I have done before.
Then I feel something unexpected.
Kira’s hand on my back, warm and soft.
“Easy,” she says. “Easy. Try to breathe.”
She pulls me in close to her, and holds me as tight as she can.
“You’re safe,” she says. “You’re safe.”
My pulse stops racing. The pain in my chest subsides, then vanishes completely. I feel light-headed and weak and small.
But she keeps holding me.
“You’re all right,” she says. “Nothing can hurt you. You’re all right now.”
And that’s how we fall asleep again. Her arms around me, me listening to each beat of my heart, waiting every time it pauses, not entirely sure it will start again.
Nik’s phone call wakes me sometime before noon. The porn stars are hungry, so would I please get my ass out of bed and fetch some goddamn breakfast?
Kira is gone. There is not a trace of her in the room.
Two weeks later, I get the invitation to her wedding.
3
Even TMZ Wouldn’t Follow Him Around
The hotel where Kira is getting married looks like a Cape Cod beach house plunked down right at the edge of the beach in Santa Monica.
The wedding is being held by the pool, which perfectly frames the Pacific Ocean in the background. There are a couple hundred people seated on the lower patio, which faces the water. A railing circles the entire space, setting it off from the rest of the pool area. Hotel guests watch from their lounge chairs and the hotel’s upper balconies. I didn’t think I’d be able to show for this, but Nik got on a plane back to Moscow at LAX a week ago, having spent all of his allowance. He was exhausted, sore, and, overall, happy to be going home. At the airport, I felt nothing but relief from him:
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