Killfile (9 page)

It's enough to stand up to whatever Preston can throw in twenty minutes. I don't think he's going to look at me too closely, because he wants to believe that Sloan would come to him for help. It's a chance for him to be smarter than his old boss, to show that he was always the bigger brain.

I'm counting on that. I want Preston to treat me like any other prospective client. The full sales pitch, complete with a tour of his operation and expense-account dinners. That should be plenty of time for me to figure out a way inside his computers and his head.

In the meantime, I get a drink from the lodge's bar—which is finally empty of brogrammers and the math club—and then go out to the porch to watch the games begin.

The air is already filled with flat, hollow booming and shouts of surprise and pain; the music of idiots with shotguns.

Most of the OmniVore employees have scurried into the forest like overfed squirrels, but there are still a few stragglers. There's a rack of guns, mostly empty now, next to a big table of boxed beanbag ammo. Some of the employees are still struggling to load their weapons, which makes them easy targets for the guys who figured it out first.

One tech in a classic Atari T-shirt fumbles with his shells, spilling them all over the ground. Another guy wearing a Doom shirt comes up behind him and aims from about ten feet away.

“Ah come on, man,” Atari Man shouts. “No fair! No camping!”

Doom Boy pulls the trigger anyway. The recoil catches him by surprise, and his first shot goes wide. The beanbag round knocks a bunch of boxes off the table. Atari still can't get his gun loaded. Doom Boy walks about five steps closer, aims more carefully, then fires again.

Atari starts running, but he gets hit anyway. He screams in pain, then starts cursing Doom Boy.

Doom Boy sees me on the porch and considers raising his shotgun.

“I'm not playing,” I tell him.

He smiles as if that's a joke. “Everyone's playing, dude,” he says, and starts to aim.

I don't even put my drink down. I give him a hard stare, with a small sense of some of the things I've seen behind it.

“Don't make me tell you again,” I say.

He blanches, not sure why he's suddenly got a picture of a sucking chest wound and the screams of wounded men stuck in his brain. He lowers the gun and shudders, backing away from me slowly. Then he jogs into the woods surrounding the lodge, looking for easier targets.

Behind me, I sense Preston's bodyguard before the man politely clears his throat.

“Mr. Preston will see you now,” he says. I turn to follow.

Meanwhile, Atari hauls himself to his feet and limps to the medical tent, which Preston thoughtfully set up on one side of the lodge. I hope he brought lots of paramedics. Somebody's going to get hurt.

I'm glad I'm going inside, where it's safe.

T
HE SECURITY GUY
walks in front of me, his mind stuck in neutral.

He opens the door for me, and I get a jumble of impressions. The office is decorated the same way as the lodge, only with photos of dead animals instead of their actual corpses. Which is fortunate, or there wouldn't be enough room for Preston and the five large men inside.

The bodyguards have a kind of relaxed vigilance. They're not expecting any problems from me, but their training won't let them slack off completely. They run through the motions. One is behind me, next to the door, and my escort takes a position opposite him. Two more on either side of me and one guy behind Preston at the desk. They check my posture and my attitude and box me in neatly without being obvious about it.

Preston doesn't look at me. He's got three different laptops up and running. I can't see any of the screens, but through his eyes, I see my profile picture and my fake LinkedIn page on the first computer. He's got queries running on the other two.

He says, “Have a seat,” and points to the empty chair in front of the desk.

It's upholstered in zebra. I wonder if I can remain standing without seeming rude. He finally turns and stares at me, waiting. I sit down.

“So, do you know what we do at OmniVore?” he asks.

Ah. So this is where he proves how smart he is. “Data mining.”

A snort of contempt. “Yeah. But what does that mean?”

When I hesitate, he smirks.

“Let me explain
it to you, then. We've got a proprietary algorithm—” He pauses when he sees the blank look on my face. “That means we have a piece of software called Cutter. Does that make it easier for you?”

I nod.

Preston thinks, and then continues. “What Cutter does is search through any big collection of data and find the patterns. Like, let's take you for example. John Smith.”

He punches a few more keys on one of the laptops. “Very common name. But by cross-referencing that with what we already know, your age, your occupation, we can get more detail. We can find your address. We can find how much you owe on your mortgage.”

He's typing faster now. This is where we see how well the cover ID holds up.

“We can even take your biometric information—that's the photo we snapped of you earlier, hope you don't mind—and run it through law enforcement databases, in case you're using a false name. We can learn stuff about you that even you don't know. I can tell if you had a bad piece of fish by checking your restaurant bills against your purchases of Imodium and toilet paper—”

He stops again. Then there's a sudden, tectonic shift in his mental landscape.

A window just popped open on his third laptop. He scans the information—I can't get all of it, because
damn
he reads fast—but suddenly he's on high alert, adrenaline spiking through his veins.

He leaps up from his chair so quickly he knocks it over. The bodyguards are confused, but they snap to attention.

“Get him the fuck away from me! Get him out of here! Now!” The smirk is gone. He's genuinely afraid of me. His mind is jumping all over the place. He's on the verge of panic.

I'm caught flat-footed, trying to sort through his racing thoughts.

I get only a glimpse of what he saw on the screen before it vanishes in the rush: TWEP TWEP TWEP.

It's a phrase I recognize from my CIA days: Terminate With Extreme Prejudice.

And Preston knows it too. I can see the thought form, without hesitation.

He's going to have them kill me.

The bodyguards move in on me, all at once.

C
ONFESSION TIME:
I'
M
not a great fighter. This isn't false modesty. My instructors in hand-to-hand combat would have given me a B-minus on my best day.

These guys have had the same training, and they're better than me. They know how to use their muscle. They know to get close and throw quick, devastating blows. They will aim for nerve clusters, masses of blood vessels, the fragile edges of bones, the tender spots in the neck and gut and face.

Their minds suddenly sharpen, and deadly intent forms. I'm a threat now, and they're going to remove me. They're not out to win. They're out to disable.

Fortunately for me, it's almost impossible to hit a guy who can see a punch when it's still just a bad idea. I know every move an opponent is going to make before the nerve impulse reaches his muscles.

The guy on my right is closest and steps forward. My escort moves away from the door to back him up. The guy on my left pulls a pistol from a concealed-carry holster under his polo shirt.

This might seem like an odd time for a fashion note, but I wear a Baume & Mercier Capeland on a steel band around my wrist. A lot of guys in my profession prefer something made of black impact-resistant
plastic because they think it looks cooler. They like the dials and timers and pulse counters and pedometers or whatever else can be crammed under the Nike logo. I did too, when I first joined the service. Then I noticed that Cantrell and all the other old-school operators wore something high-dollar and metal around their wrists, usually a Rolex. I asked him why.

That was the first time I ever made him proud. I could feel it. It was the right question.

“First place,” he told me, “it looks better.”

Then he got into the other reasons.

Like Cantrell's Rolex, my Baume & Mercier is powered by the movement of my wrist, so there's no battery to go dead. It has luminous hands, rather than an LED that lights up at the accidental press of a button, so it will never reveal my position in the dark and make me a target. And it's worth money. You can pawn it if you're out of cash, use it as a bribe, or trade it if you don't have any of the local currency.

But best of all, it weighs about a third of a pound, which is the same as the head of a hammer. With practice, I've learned to pop the clasp and let the watch drop around my fingers one-handed.

I turn into the guy on my right and swing as hard as I can with my left fist, which now has the watch wrapped around it like a set of brass knuckles.

He runs right into the punch. His head snaps back, his eyes roll up into his head, and his knees buckle.

The crystal on my watch doesn't even break. Swiss engineering at its finest.

I duck the arm of my escort as he tries to grab me around the neck, then fire a kick into his midsection that bends him double and knocks the wind right out of him. His body becomes an obstacle for the other two on that side of the room.

The guy on the left has his gun out now. I send him a message, as hard as I can:

He's a professional, so some part of him knows he didn't do anything that stupid. But his eyes dart down by reflex, just to make sure.

The instant he looks, I get my foot under the zebra-skin chair and kick it at him. It hits him dead center, tangles with his legs, and he goes down.

With the gun off me, I've got enough time to focus my thoughts, which is bad news for everybody else in the room.

I don't have to touch my forehead or gesture dramatically like psychics or magicians. I just have to think hard.

No time for anything cute, so I light up the amygdala region of their brains, which, among other things, regulates fear and emotion.

And suddenly everyone except me is on their knees or their backs, gasping for air. It's like a needle of adrenaline, plunged right into the carotid artery. You choke on your own breath. Your blood pressure shoots so high you can hear your own pulse behind your ears. Your arms and legs turn to jelly. Your gut clenches and you taste stomach acid at the back of your throat. Your skin feels like it's on fire. You're drowning in your own sweat, and for a few moments, all you know is that you are going to die.

I get a percentage back, as always, but I'm ready for it. It only makes me breathe a little harder. It's a neat trick. I'd pull it more often, but an army cardiologist once told me it does bad things to my EKG. I don't want to drop dead of a real heart attack while giving someone else a fake one.

While they're down, I need to get out of this room. But first, I want to know why this went pear-shaped in less than five seconds.

I reach for the third laptop, the one with the message. My fingers are on the edge of the screen when Preston's hand comes up and slams it closed.

He's looking at me with pure terror etched on his face, but he still wants to protect that information. Something on that computer scares him more than I do.

So I get scarier. I reach under my shirt and take the Walther P99 from my waistband. The people at the check-in were so concerned about our phones they didn't think about weapons.

I aim the gun at Preston's face. I have time for one question: “Why? Is this because you stole from Sloan?”

He just stares. I didn't expect a verbal answer. I want the involuntary response, the reason delivered bright and clean from his head.

Then his closest bodyguard shakes off his fear faster than I thought possible—stupid of me, guy's been in a war zone, of course he does—and tackles me.

He's still not 100 percent, so I keep him from getting a decent grip anywhere, but he won't let go.

Preston watches while we struggle, a stream of thoughts pissing out of his brain and splashing all over, none of it making much sense. I download it from him as fast as I can, and hope I get a chance to sort it out later.

I'm out of time. I've got maybe twenty more seconds before the others regroup. Worse, they're all between me and the door.

But there is a window behind the desk.

I plant my feet, bend my knees, lift, and throw—and send the bodyguard flying right through the glass.

It's only in the movies that the hero crashes through a window without major blood loss. Double-paned glass cuts deeper than knives.
The guy gets chopped up bad. I feel the shards slice cleanly through skin and muscle, all the way to the bone.

But thanks to him clearing a path, I'm able to dive through with only a few scratches.

I hit the porch outside and roll and come up running.

Behind me, I hear Preston shout, “Shoot him! Kill that son of a bitch!” He's not being careful now. He doesn't care who hears him.

Neither do the guards.

There's almost no pause between the order and the shot. A bullet splits the wood of the lodge's outer wall a couple of feet from my head.

Rather than run toward the parking lot, where we left the car, I sprint into the woods. It only looks like I don't know what I'm doing. Even as I'm running I am thinking hard, putting it together as fast as I can. Out of that tangled, crazy mess of thoughts behind Preston's eyes, I was able to get two things clearly.

First, he wants me dead, and he's got men who will carry out his orders. There are a lot of sociopaths in corporate America, but even if they want to, they can't kill everyone who annoys them. Your average CEO usually doesn't have trained soldiers on his payroll.