Kelsey’s hand is clenched around my forearm tight enough to hurt.
“This is never going to work,” she whispers at me.
We are both in the best suits we could buy at Ross Dress for Less. We showered and changed at a Motel 6, and we’ve got two cheap wheeled suitcases behind us as we walk from long-term parking to the entrance of Philadelphia International Airport. We look like a couple of ordinary professionals on their way to a conference or a sales meeting.
We get all the way to the doors of the terminal before Kelsey freezes up.
“Just relax,” I tell her. “Just breathe.”
She sucks in a deep lungful of jet-fuel-scented air, but she still gives me a look. <this is never going to work> “Maybe we need to reconsider this.”
“This is where you start to question me? After everything you’ve seen me do?”
“This isn’t some backwoods meth head, or a bunch of guys with guns. I know you can handle that,” she says. “This is an airport, for Christ’s sake. They don’t even let you bring a water bottle on the plane.”
“You’re right,” I tell her. And she is. This should be absolutely impossible.
Everyone is supposed to be on full alert these days, if not for terrorists, then for the random lunatics who decide that the airport is the place to work out their issues against the government and the IRS.
But in reality, 9/11 was a long time ago, and human beings are wired to think short term. Passengers care more about getting to their flight than they do about terrorism. The security guards, in turn, just want to get everyone through the line with a minimum of pissing and moaning and threats of litigation. So everyone in the airport is already distracted, preoccupied. They want routine. They want order. They want everything to go as expected. And their brains will work overtime to make sure that illusion becomes a reality.
They’re going to do most of the work for me. I’ll only have to give them the smallest push.
Preston’s machines—and through him, the CIA—are the real problem. He’s got his software looking for me and Kelsey in every digital form possible. His programs know our purchasing patterns, our travel history, our seat preferences. Even if we use new credit cards, his algorithms will identify us by matching us to habits we don’t even realize we have. If we try to avoid credit cards and use cash, we’ll automatically be flagged as drug dealers, and that will raise our profile as well. If we use fake photo IDs, our pictures will still be on them, and the facial-recognition software will pick us out of the crowd better than most humans.
So I decided to bypass all that. We’re not going to show any ID. We’re not even going to buy tickets.
We’re going to just walk past the TSA and get on the plane. I’m even going to bring my gun with me. And nobody will say a word or stop me.
At least, that’s the plan.
WE’RE BLOCKING THE doors. Other travelers move around us with barely restrained sighs and curses. We’re being noticed. That’s not what I want. I gently lever my arm out of Kelsey’s grip: we’re not playing husband and wife here. “Let’s go,” I say.
I pick up my carry-on and start walking confidently toward the security checkpoint.
At least I’m confident. This is where Kelsey is closest to freaking out. She’s almost humming with anxiety, like a high-tension wire. She hesitates and then crosses the threshold into the airport, like she’s just stepped onto a minefield.
I think she was less worried when people were actually shooting at us. But she was raised in a polite family. Her respect for the rules goes deep. To her, this is like stealing, cutting in line, and cheating on a test, all rolled into one.
It’s understandable. Completely annoying, but understandable.
<Will you fucking relax?> I send to her as we walk.
She has to relax. If she doesn’t, she’ll draw additional attention to us, and that could be a problem.
“I’m fine.” <this will never work> <this will never work>
“Yes, it will,” I whisper.
We stop for a moment so I can scan everyone in uniform. Quickly, I sift through all their thoughts. I don’t want the good agents. I don’t want the alert and conscientious employees, the ones who take their jobs seriously. I want the guy at the end of his shift, the one who drank too much coffee on his last break and now really has to go to the bathroom.
And there he is. I steer Kelsey over to the line that’s the longest. When we reach the TSA agent checking boarding passes, he looks up at us.
He’s irritable and tired. He fought with his son this morning, and his mind is still back there. <so don’t take the scholarship, don’t even go to college, but just make a decision> <I said I’ll pay for school and I will, I’ll find the money somewhere> <but why pay if he doesn’t want to go?>
Then he sees Kelsey.
I didn’t need to worry about her. When the moment hits, she’s perfect. Her anxiety vanishes. She’s calm and confident. She gives him a heart-stopping smile.
The agent straightens up a little, wonders if she notices his receding hairline. <nice tits> <nice smile>
I hand over two perfectly blank pieces of paper to the agent. At the same time, I push a message into his head, as hard as I can. I actually picture myself taking it in one hand and hurling it at his brain like a fastball at the strike zone.
<air marshals> <don’t make a scene> <special assignment> <let us pass>
He looks hard at the paper, then looks at me, his face suddenly grave.
For a long instant, I worry I’m losing my touch.
Then he nods, scribbles something on the blank paper, and immediately stands up and gestures for us to follow him. “Right this way,” he says.
He whispers something to the other agents on duty. They’re so busy checking for water bottles and shoes that they don’t see us. Not really.
He escorts us past the X-ray machine with a respectful nod. And then he goes back to his post, counting down the last fifteen minutes until he’s off the clock, back to worrying about his kid and his bank account and everything else. He won’t even remember us.
From the playbook of Wolf Messing, ladies and gentlemen. This is how you deal with the mind of someone in authority: you give them a higher authority to obey.
We go to the gate. I selected the flight by checking passenger loads on the Net. It’s underbooked, one of a dozen planes that travel daily to Los Angeles. Plenty of open seats, which is bad for business, but like a vacation to the gate crew. They’re relaxed, easygoing, and easily distracted. They open the flight to all seats, all rows for boarding, and then go back to gossiping and laughing behind the counter.
We walk up to the employee taking boarding passes. I hand over my blank sheets of paper and send a new message.
<airline execs> <quality-control check> <don’t make a scene>
We get seated in an exit row and free drinks from the flight attendants.
I think Kelsey might be more impressed by that than anything else I’ve done.
WE ARRIVE AT LAX, even though Preston has wiped out my savings and stolen my home.
I’m not so arrogant as to think I can hide from Preston’s machines. Believe me, I’m convinced by his demonstrations so far. Anything we do can be traced as long as it goes through the Internet somewhere.
I’m certain that any time I show up in the electronic ether, a siren and flashing lights will go off at OmniVore headquarters, followed shortly by a hit squad heading out the door.
So, whenever possible, I’ve stayed out of the digital age. That means Kelsey and I have had to dig up phone books and use maps instead of letting our phones give us information and directions. I’ve been surprised how hard it is to work without the net. It turns out my map-reading skills were mainly good for figuring out how many klicks between checkpoints. We got lost a lot driving to the Philadelphia airport. I have no idea how the Amish survive.
Now we need a car again, and I can’t use my license or a credit card. The Internet ride services, like Uber or Lyft, would be even worse; I might as well call Preston and tell him where to find us. No taxicab will drive us all over town for cash, no matter how much we offer. And while other airports have off-the-books drivers hanging out around the terminals, LAX was never a good market for those guys. Everyone here owns a car.
Except me, thanks to Preston. The moment I try to buy anything, I’m screwed. Preston’s smart little programs have cracked the code of my life. They can predict where I’ll go by looking at what I’ve done in the time I’ve lived here. It’s like Preston has a watcher at my favorite hotels in the city, my usual restaurants, the places where I shop.
If I was trying to hide, this should be the last place I would show up. There are a hundred other places where I could go and vanish, simply disappear into the mass of humanity. I hear Omaha is nice.
But I’m not hiding. This is my city. It’s as close to home as any place I’ve ever known, and I have resources here that don’t show up on any Internet search.
For starters, I have a line of credit in the favor bank with a lot of people. Low tech, but untraceable.
Time to make a few withdrawals.
I NEED TO make a call, but not on my gas-station smartphone. I want a landline, something that still uses cords and copper wires.
It takes me ten minutes to find a working pay phone in the terminal at LAX. It takes Armin Sadeghi only twenty to arrive with a freshly washed, almost-new Audi.
I asked him for an inconspicuous ride. For Sadeghi, I guess this qualifies.
One of his many businesses is a small chain of car lots. And my rescue of his daughter is still fresh enough that he doesn’t ask questions when I tell him I need untraceable transportation.
He shows up himself, along with a couple of his security people riding along in his car, an honest-to-God Rolls-Royce. He’s spent most of his life here, but he’s still very Persian in this: he takes the payment of debts seriously. It’s meant to be done face-to-face.
He greets both me and Kelsey with a brief embrace. Then he puts the keys into my hand and closes my fingers around them.
“Thank you,” I tell him. “I’ll try to get it back to you in one piece.”
He waves this away. “As long as you need it. Anything else, you only have to ask.”
“How is Kira?”
I see it in his head: a fairly epic tantrum, right before she was sent to Passages in Malibu to get clean.
“She will be fine. Thanks to you.”
He excuses himself quickly. He’s a busy man. He plans to say the Audi was totaled on a test drive, then write it off as a business loss at the end of the year. He honestly never expects to see me again.
I hope he’s wrong.
AILON TIDHAR SMILES when he sees us, even though I show up unannounced.
He lives in a small, Spanish-style two-bedroom in Beverly Hills. It was built in the 1920s. I’ve been here before. He’s very proud of the stucco archways. “They don’t even know how to make these anymore,” he told me the first time I visited. In any other city, they would have torn this house down years ago. In L.A., it’s worth nearly $2 million.
Tidhar himself is a big guy with only a little gray in his hair, even though he’s got to be in his sixties by now. Depending on how he wants you to think of him, he either speaks English flawlessly, with an almost British reserve, or with a thick layer of Hebrew over every word. He could be like any Israeli immigrant in his neighborhood; a businessman, an investor, a restaurateur. And sure, he dabbles in all of that.
He just happens to be a spy as well.
We met after some unpleasant business involving his son. Ailon is deep-cover in the U.S. these days. He might even be retired, for all I know. I’m reluctant to get him involved in this. But he’s far enough back in my history that I don’t think Preston’s algorithms are going to be able to track him.
And he is a spy, after all. He’s going to have what I need.
HE FEEDS US and gets us drinks, moving his bulk around the tiny yellow kitchen. His wife isn’t here—she’s out with the grandkids, helping out their daughter-in-law. I’m grateful. I still don’t think she will ever forgive me for the last time I showed up.
He’s telling Kelsey about the original tile on the countertops. “Covered in dirt an inch thick when we bought the place,” he says. “Now look at that. Looks brand-new. Have you ever seen that shade of green before?”
Eventually, when he’s done playing host, I tell him why we’re here. I give him as much information as I think he needs. Hopefully not enough to compromise him too much if Preston—or worse, the Agency—does track us here.
He’s silent for a moment when I finish. I worry that I’ve asked for too much. I begin apologizing.
“I’m sorry to come here, to you, but we need help. If you can’t—”
He turns, and I see that he’s been considering how to respond. He’s a little annoyed. I shouldn’t have rushed him.
“John,” he says. “Please. Who do you think you’re talking to here?”
HE DRIVES HIS own car and we follow. He takes us to a small collection of storage units not far off the 10. It’s not one of the big national chains, and it’s half-hidden by an off-ramp and an overpass.
He has a key and an electronic token that gets him past the gates and the doors.
“You own this place?” Kelsey asks.
Tidhar and I both give her a look.
“Sorry,” she says. “Just making conversation.”
Tidhar takes us down a series of corridors. The air is hot and stale. Then he finds the unit he’s looking for. He inserts the key into a hole on the wall, and the door rolls up with a mechanical noise, but smoothly, easily.
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.”