Killfile (30 page)
Authors: Christopher Farnsworth
The boat is late.
I can see it cutting across the waters from the beach. I've been here for a bit, drinking my coffee, watching the sun burn through the morning clouds.
No Vicodin. No Oxy. Because no migraines. I don't even have any whiskey in the coffee.
The house is everything Sloan promised and more. There are moments, when I stand here on the beach and watch the waves and the sun, when I wonder if this is what it's like to be content.
I'm not an idiot, of course. I know this is not permanent. And even if I didn't, I got a call last week to remind me.
Cantrell's accent was thick. He was in a good mood. “Nice to see you can still perform when your back's against the wall, son,” he said.
I didn't bother asking how he got my new number.
He wanted me to know that behind the scenes, the CIA had withdrawn its support completely from OmniVore. Government contracts were canceled, and the entire investment written off as a loss.
“So do I need to look over my shoulder?” I asked.
“I thought you never needed to look over your shoulder,” he said.
“Figure of speech.”
“Nah,” Cantrell said. “That Preston kid is still gibbering in a rest
home. He's done. No point in coming after you now. Nothing valuable left to protect.”
“That's what I thought,” I said. “Bureaucracies don't really hold grudges.”
“Oh, but they do have long memories, John,” Cantrell said. “You might want to keep that in mind. After all of this, I wonder if maybe you'd be safer back on the inside. You know. With a responsible adult looking after you.”
“I'm taking a long vacation,” I told him. “I've got a pretty large cushion in the bank right now. Maybe I'm even retired.”
Cantrell laughed. “That's a good one, John. You always did crack me up.”
Then he hung up.
Aside from that call, it's mostly been blessed silence for a month.
The one exception is when the boat comes out on Friday mornings with the groceries and the housekeepers. A nice couple. Very quiet, inside and out. I barely even have to avoid them. The wife cleans the house, the husband brings his gardening tools and keeps the forest from swallowing the place completely. Last week, we repaired the pump that feeds the sprinkler system from a century-old freshwater cistern. We hardly spoke, just handed tools back and forth and worked.
I was almost sorry to see them go.
Today, there's someone else with them when they pull up to the dock. I felt the new presence long before they got close enough to cast the line.
She hops off the boat before I finish tying it up.
Kelsey has lost some weight, and she's pale. Hospital food and a lack of sun. But very little pain. She's healing.
“How's it going, Gilligan?” she asks.
“I like to think of myself more as Robinson Crusoe.”
“You don't have the beard for it. Maybe the Professor, on a good day.”
My face hurts. Unfamiliar muscles moving. I'm smiling. I try to wipe it off my face.
“Sloan send you?”
He didn't, but I can at least pretend to have a conversation.
“No. I'm still on vacation. Getting used to it, actually.”
“Me too.”
She looks around. “Yeah. Seems like you have everything you need.”
“Pretty much,” I say.
An awkward pause follows. “So what are you doing here? We don't get many tourists.”
She looks in my eyes and says, “I thought you might need a friend.”
Something happens. For the first time in years, I see blue, all around her. And I feel at peace.
“Yeah,” I say. “Why don't you stay for a while.”
Many thanks are due:
As always, my brilliant agent, Alexandra Machinist; my peerless editor, Rachel Kahan; Alexander Maldutis, who explained algorithmic trading and quantitative analysis in terms so simple that even I understood them; Laura Hiler, who served as my long-distance tour guide to Dubai; Jonathan Sander, strategy officer at STEALTHBits, who helped me figure out how to steal data from a secure server network; Dan Chmielewski, who continues to teach me about security, as well as friendship; the legendary Beau Smith, my personal armaments consultant; Phil Roosevelt, who served as a first reader and gave valuable feedback; Levi Preston (no relation), who gave me information on the military as well as notes on the story; Britt McCombs, who gave me great advice and ideas for Kelsey Foster.
And to Jean and Caroline and Daphne, for being the reason why.
The quote from Allen Dulles about mind warfare is from Jon Ronson's brilliant and invaluable
The Men Who Stare at Goats,
about the American military's and the CIA's real-life efforts to harness psychic powers. I also relied on my friends John Whalen and Jonathan Vankin's massive and massively useful
The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
. (Again. It's a really great book.) I used Will Storr's ridiculously smart
The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
as a reference for all the ways our brains work and the ways they don't. The stories about Wolf Messing originated from several sourcesâI first read about him in my junior high library, in a book I have never been able to track down since. But you can learn more about him in the biography
Wolf Messing: The True Story of Russia's Greatest Psychic
by Tatiana Lungin. I also quoted reporting from Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele's article on American cash in Iraq (“Billions over Baghdad,”
Vanity Fair
, October 2007).
Any mistakes are mine, despite the best efforts of everyone listed here.
A former journalist and screenwriter,
CHRISTOPHER FARNSWORTH
is the author of the Nathaniel Cade/President's Vampire series of novels, which was optioned for film and TV and has been published in nine languages. Born and raised in Idaho, he now lives in Los Angeles with his family.
chrisfarnsworth.com
/AuthorChrisFarnsworth
@chrisfarnsworth
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This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.
KILLFILE.
Copyright © 2016 by Christopher Farnsworth. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-241640-7
EPub Edition August 2016 ISBN 9780062416421
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