Killfile (21 page)

He steps inside, and we follow him. The walls are stacked with crates and boxes, all unmarked.

It makes no difference to Tidhar. He knows exactly what he wants. He hauls one of the crates away from the wall, seemingly at random, and a blast of cool air hits us.

Inside, carved out of several other storage spaces by knocking down the walls, is a small apartment. It has a bed, a kitchenette, and a toilet and shower shoved together in one corner.

There are a few more crates. He heads straight for the box he wants and lifts the lid. He beckons me over.

Inside is an Uzi submachine gun, packed in foam. “I know you prefer those German toys,” he says. “But you'll have to get over that fetish sooner or later.”

This is more than I expected. Much more. I was hoping to get a little intel, maybe a loan or a place to stay for a couple of nights. I had no idea he was still this deep.

Looking at the gun, I wonder how many felonies can fit in a space this small. Enough to get Tidhar deported, at least. Maybe enough to get him killed, if my presence here screws up whatever he's got going.

“Look,” I tell him. “You know you don't have to do this. You don't owe me this much.”

Tidhar stops digging in the crate and turns to look at me. His face is stony.

He's suddenly, volcanically, angry. I can feel it rolling from him, washing over me. He tamps it down fast, so I'm not quite sure why. But it's sprung up from a place as deep as if I just insulted his mother.

Then, just as abruptly, he turns to Kelsey. “He tell you how we know each other?”

She shakes her head. She can tell he's pissed too. You don't have to read minds to notice the shift in the room. I'm on guard, because Tidhar is no one you want to mess with, even by accident.

His tight self-control falters a little as he searches for the right words, how much he can safely tell a civilian.

“My son Adi was an interpreter. Not a spy, not a soldier, even though he was military. He was going to do his service and get out. And I was glad. He didn't want the same life I had, and I didn't want it for him. He was loaned to a group of U.S. Special Forces soldiers, because he spoke a dialect they needed in Afghanistan. There were never enough translators. He was smart. Had a gift for languages. He would have been an excellent teacher.”

He pauses for a moment, and then nods his head in my direction.

“Your friend here, he was in the unit that my son was loaned to. They were sent out to the Afghan border, near Pakistan. I wasn't told many of the details, and even with my contacts, it was difficult to get many answers. But I understood it was supposed to be a routine prisoner transfer. A tribal warlord had captured one of the Afghani militants, then traded him to the Pakistani ISI, who were then supposed to hand him over to the CIA for questioning. Routine. Happened all the time. But something went wrong. Again, I wasn't given many details. But I was later told that the warlord switched sides again. Or perhaps it was the ISI who switched. Nobody could really say. Your friend here, he was no help when he told me about it. He wasn't there, at the border.”

He's right. I wasn't. At that point, Cantrell had curtailed my duties in the field considerably. I was too important by that point, and I'd already had one too many close calls. He didn't want anyone to put a bullet in my valuable brain. I still might have gone on the mission anyway. It was supposed to be routine, just like Tidhar says, and I could use my talent to piece together enough of what the militants were saying even without knowing their exact dialects. I'd done it plenty of times.

But I didn't have to, because they found Adi Tidhar, and sent him with my unit instead.

Now his father tells Kelsey what happened next.

“The people who were supposed to hand over the prisoners to the Americans turned against them instead,” Tidhar says. “They probably got a better offer from the Taliban. Whatever the reason. The Americans, and my son, found themselves outnumbered and ambushed. Six men were shot before they could escape.”

He goes quiet again.

“Adi was the only one who died.”

The agony is still fresh. I don't get any words. Just a pulse of raw loss coming from him, centered on the image of a coffin under an Israeli flag.

Then, abruptly, Tidhar shuts it down and resumes his story. “I'm not a spy anymore, but for a while I hit up every connection I ever had. I wanted them to get me out there, to Afghanistan. That should tell you I wasn't in my right mind. Fat, retired guy like me, taking his guns out of the safe, booking a flight to the Middle East. My old friends, my wife, they finally talked me out of it. They said it wouldn't do Adi's memory any good for his father to go and get himself killed either. Besides, no one could find the Afghans and the Pakistanis. They'd vanished. The Afghans went back into the mountains, the Pakistanis disappeared into the ISI.”

Tidhar is giving Kelsey the censored version here. For one thing, if he was really retired, he would have been back overseas as soon as he heard about his son, and I don't doubt he was capable of finding a good number of the Afghans and Pakistanis on his own. But the Mossad told him what was really going on. It was an embarrassment to all involved, and the U.S. wanted it forgotten. Relations were tense between the ISI and the CIA at the time. The Pakistani government's spies covered for all manner of crimes by the Taliban and its assorted groupies. They hid Osama from us for years, among many other things. So everyone was encouraged to let it drop, for fear of cutting off the steady stream of intel we were getting from Pakistan. Adi Tidhar was just one of the unfortunate victims caught in the cross fire.

“Then, one day, I'm told that four men in the ISI are dead. But before they died, one of them gave up the location of the warlord. And within a week, a drone strike wiped him from the face of the earth.
I'm ashamed to tell you how happy that made me. I am ashamed to tell you I smiled.”

Kelsey is staring at Tidhar with wide eyes now. She's not exactly enjoying this story, but then, it's not for her benefit. Or even mine. I know how it all went, after all. Tidhar simply wants to say some things out loud.

“I asked my friends, how did this happen? And they told me that one man made it possible. One man was able to squeeze the truth from the ISI agents. He would not let it go. Even though it caused considerable discomfort to his bosses. He avenged my son. I don't know how, but he made it possible. I never thought I'd be able to thank him. Then your friend shows up and introduces himself to me, and says he knew my son. And do you know what he did? He apologized to me. He apologized because he wasn't there. He didn't tell me the rest, of course. He left that to me to find out on my own. I had to run his name to learn who it was that questioned the ISI agents.”

Tidhar's thoughts are complex and muddled and not easy to read. He says he is grateful, sure. But I remember the look on his face. How can you ever really forgive the man who tells you how your son died? Even if he wasn't there?
Especially
when he wasn't there?

He and Kelsey both seem to be waiting for me to pick up the story. I don't know what to tell them.

“He deserved better,” I say. “I felt like he deserved better. That's all.”

“Yes,” Tidhar says. “He did.”

His rage, which had subsided, is back. He looks at me again. “So fuck you very much.”

“What?”

“Fuck you and your apology,” Tidhar says. “Fuck you, I don't
owe you. I will decide who and what I owe. That is not your decision. It is mine. And I will decide when I am done owing you. But you haven't reached the end of your credit with me yet.”

He turns and takes a moment to get himself under control. Then, when he turns back, his mind is as clear as the sky after a storm.

“Right,” he says. “You'll need ammunition.”

He starts rummaging again. I look around the room, taking inventory. You could outfit a good-size platoon with what's in here. Then I see a box marked with a familiar brand name.

It's perfect. “Actually,” I say, “we don't need guns.”

He scowls. “Right, I keep forgetting, you are a living weapon, you have the power to cloud men's minds. You make your bullets out of bad attitude now too?”

I shake my head. “No. I'm already outgunned. I was thinking about something else,” I say, and point at the box. “That ought to level the playing field.”

Tidhar looks over his shoulder, sees the box, and smiles. “Oh, it can level a lot more than that.”

Kelsey looks at the box. She doesn't know what it is. She's getting impatient.

“So you've got a plan?” she says.

It's more of a half-assed idea than a plan at this point. But it's coming together. Now I'm starting to see a way I can make it work.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “I've got a plan.”

OmniVore Tech's main offices
are not where you'd expect to find them. Offices are where your father worked. Tech companies are supposed to be on campuses like Facebook and Google, little pockets of the future plunked down in the present.

But those companies don't have the CIA as their primary backer, which does not want its secrets splashing out all over the place, burdening the public with too much knowledge. A single location is easier to secure than a group of buildings spread out over several acres.

So OmniVore is stuck in an office tower in downtown San Jose.

I watch the exterior of the building from a safe distance for several days. Never too close, and always wearing a ball cap and sunglasses against the surveillance cameras mounted above the doors, or in case anyone remembers me from the corporate retreat.

I don't have to get closer than a hundred yards to see that there is serious security protecting the place. We're talking state-of-the-art everything: alarms, cameras, keypad locks, doors with palm-print ID and retinal recognition, pressure-sensitive floor panels, motion detectors, thermal scanners, and, of course, big guys with guns.

Ordinarily, this is what you'd need to get past all that:

You would have to hire at least four subcontractors, experienced
people who'd done hard and soft entry before. They would approach the offices in a variety of disguises: FedEx courier, temp secretary, bicycle messenger, homeless man. They'd spend a couple of weeks taking discreet pictures on their phones, exploring fire stairs and exits, measuring security's response time. Then you'd get the building's blueprints from the city or county and check the design against any remodeling that had been done since the building went up. Once you'd made and memorized a detailed map of the premises, you'd have your whole team take positions on the day of the actual breach. You'd have your homeless guy start a fire or something outside the lobby, create a nice distracting layer of chaos, the kind that brings firefighters and EMTs running in response. You'd have your FedEx guy and your bike messenger and your secretary waiting inside with their gear. They'd hit the fire alarms, and everyone in OmniVore's offices would run like hell to avoid being gassed to death by the Halon fire-suppressant system that automatically triggers to protect the computers. Then they would switch into helmets and fire coats and oxygen masks, and race up the fire stairs and smash-and-grab as many computers they could find before the real firefighters and the cops showed up.

Even if you did all this perfectly, with the best operators you could find, it would take two months, minimum, and maybe a hundred grand in up-front costs. And you'd still have only a fifty-fifty chance of actually pulling it off.

Fortunately, I'm not a mere mortal like you. For me, it starts with finding just one guy.

A
FEW DECADES
ago, Max Renfrow would have led a very lonely life. He would have been a math geek and the president of the chess club,
and nobody would have understood his references to Monty Python and Doctor Who.

But that's all changed, thanks to the Internet. It's created a world where his talents are valued and people can Google his jokes if necessary. Tonight, Max is filled with the confidence of a high school quarterback as he enters the trendy little craft-cocktail bar in downtown San Jose. He knows the secret language of machines and he's got a six-figure salary with stock options. He views every woman in the bar as his property; they just haven't realized it yet.

So when he sees the insanely hot woman sitting alone, he immediately heads over to her.

He smiles and takes the seat next to her. He orders a drink for himself—“and another one of whatever she's having,” he tells the bartender.

he tells himself.

Kelsey smiles at him and says thanks. I'm a few seats away, but to Max, I might as well be invisible.

He doesn't know it, but he's exactly the guy we've been waiting for.

I
PLUCKED
M
AX
from the mess of OmniVore programmers, purple IDs on lanyards around their necks, dribbling out of the building in irregular spurts for lunch and dinner. Most of them went right back to the office with a Subway bag in hand, ready for another twelve hours of work. It's still considered bad form to put in anything less than a sixteen-hour day in Silicon Valley. Even stepping out for a sandwich is a tiny form of rebellion, a way of saying they value fresh air and sunlight more than the free snacks in the break room.

A brief, surface read of their thoughts showed that most of them didn't have room in their lives for anything but data analysis or
network access. And those who did were usually new hires, lacking the kind of seniority I needed.

But there were a few who were secure enough to risk going out after work. They put on fresh T-shirts and jeans and headed out to the bars, ready to prove their alpha-male status and bring home a mate.

Out of those few, I chose Max.

Max is a senior programmer, positioned just right in the org chart to have access to what I need to know, but not so high that he belongs to Preston's inner circles. Looking into his head, I saw his identity, his self-image, wrapped protectively around his job, that purple ID card like a badge of honor on his chest.

I scooped his weekly routine from his brain and stationed Kelsey at his favorite after-work spot.

“Get him to talk about his work,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes. “Ask me for something hard.”

“I'm serious. I mean specifics. Get him to drill down into his job as much as possible.”

“I got it.”

“Are you sure?”

Lens flare of irritation, which I'm starting to see whenever she thinks I underestimate her. “I talk to people like this for a living,” she reminded me. “All they do is talk about their work. Believe me. I got it.”

F
OR A MOMENT,
I'm worried.

Max has read a lot of advice about women on the Internet, none of it good. He's filled with strategies and methods, all of which are supposed to guarantee that women will melt into puddles of submissive goo at his feet.

Case in point: his opening line. “Your boyfriend teach you to drink that stuff?” he asks, pointing to Kelsey's whiskey. This is supposed to put her on the defensive, make her crave his approval, and get the conversation started.

She stares at him for a long moment. He waits for her reply. And waits. And waits.

He loses his nerve after about ten seconds of silence. “Uh, I mean, you know, women usually, like. Drink white wine. Or something fruity.”

“Maybe you need to meet more women,” Kelsey says.

There's a feeling that ripples through him. It's hard to put into words. It sort of sounds like a sad trombone.

I'm afraid this means we're going to get nothing but bad pickup lines from him. Kelsey, however, reads him as well as I do, and she doesn't even have any superpowers. She finds just the right key to wind him up.

“So what do you do?” she asks, and he lights up. (Literally. His brain suddenly switches into high gear, all kinds of neural activity waking up, and I can see all of it.)

“I'm in development at OmniVore Tech,” he says, with the right combination of humility and pride.

Most people around here have heard of the company. Even if a woman is interested in him only because he might be rich, she'll know the name. Most people also automatically assume he's doing something incredibly cool and cutting edge from the seat of his Aeron chair. This is where he usually shines, where he gets to tell people how he's making the future right in front of them.

Kelsey restrains a yawn. “Oh yeah. I know those guys.”

He's stunned. It's like a small car wreck happened in his brain. He can see she's not some ditz who doesn't realize there are companies
behind Twitter and Google. But she's not impressed. He doesn't know what to say next. He charges ahead with his usual next line, even though she didn't ask.

“Uh, yeah, I'm in charge of interfacing over different network architectures,” he says. (This is a small lie. He's not in charge—there are five people in his section alone who tell him what to do—but he's high enough, which is why I picked him.) “See, what we do is—”

Kelsey scans the crowd over his shoulder. “Oh, I know what you do. I'm in finance. I sat through your CEO's presentation when he was looking for his last round of funding.”

He smiles. “How much did you end up giving him?”

Kelsey smiles back, her teeth much sharper than his. “Nothing. We passed.”

“Oh,” he says. That stops him short. His company is supposed to be the Next Big Thing. It was on Re/code and everything. He's got stock options. Everything he knows about the company says that it will make him rich when OmniVore's IPO finally hits. But Kelsey doesn't seem impressed. This worries him. “Did you say you passed?”

Kelsey nods. “No offense, but we decided OmniVore isn't really equipped to be the market leader.”

Now I'm sure she's gone too far.

“Oh come on,” he says, his pride rearing up and thumping its chest. “Who else out there even comes close to us?”

Kelsey starts reciting a list: “Axciom, UpDog, Palantir—”

“We are so far ahead of those guys—”

“And of course, eventually Google is just going to start grabbing everything that comes through its search portal, analyze it in real time, and stomp the market flat for the rest of you.”

“Google? Let me tell you why we laugh at Google. Are you ready for this?”

And he's off. Max's eyes are bright, he's slurping his drink instead of sipping it, and the facts of his job are rolling through his head like bowling balls down the lane. When Kelsey casually mentions the words “passwords” and “security” and “access,” those sections of his mind open up and I'm free to root around in his best-kept secrets.

An hour later, Kelsey glances over Max's shoulder again, and I nod. I've got everything I need.

She thanks Max for the drinks and stands up. She's even kind to him when she turns him down. He's a much more interesting guy when he's geeking out than when he's playing Buddy Love. He's given me everything we need, and more.

I'm sorry I ever doubted her.