We drive back to Los Angeles, just one of thousands of cars on the highway. I get a little paranoid about satellite surveillance. I don’t seriously believe Preston’s influence goes that high. But if it does, we’re already screwed, because there’s nothing we can do about it.
We make it back to Tidhar’s safe house without being hit by a drone strike, so I assume we’re in the clear.
In the morning, I watch coverage of the explosion on CNN. Tidhar brought us a TV and hooked it up to a cable feed. It’s fairly kind of him, considering he’s going to have to break down this whole place after we leave. You never use a safe house twice. They’re not meant to be permanent installations or hotels for spies. They’re a temporary refuge at best.
Someone recorded the explosion on his phone—because someone always does. The smoke pours from the office tower on continuous repeat while the talking heads find a hundred different ways to say they don’t know anything.
OmniVore’s PR crew is surprisingly tight-lipped. Usually they have an answer for everything, but today, it’s a simple statement about cooperating with the authorities.
“Luckily, no one was hurt,” the reporter says.
“Yeah. Lucky,” Kelsey says, watching from the bed next to me. She’s been wound a little tighter since we left San Jose. I’ve been trying not to peer into her head, like she’s asked, but sometimes she thinks pretty loud.
I don’t reply to her. Her irritation grows. “‘Luckily, no one was hurt,’” she says, more sharply this time.
“That was always the plan,” I say.
“Remind me, how many things have gone according to plan so far?”
I can see where she’s going with this. It’s like a highway closing down to only one lane. But I don’t see a lot of choice.
“This was your idea, remember?”
“Don’t. Don’t pretend you’re doing all this for me. I didn’t ask you to blow up a building.”
“I didn’t start this fight. Preston did. And like you keep saying: nobody got hurt.”
“Would it have made a difference to you?”
I’m starting to get a headache. I want this to stop. “Can you do me a favor?” I ask. “Can you just say out loud what’s really going through your mind? I already know what you’re thinking. I know why you’re angry.”
“Don’t be too sure about that,” she says.
This is an argument I can’t win, so I settle for the truth.
“Of course I do,” I snap back, angrier than I intended. “I know exactly what is going through your mind. You’re frightened, you’re pissed, and you’re worried that you’re going to get some blood on your Jimmy Choos. I can’t control that. Not any of it.”
She surprises me, once more, with how calm she is in the face of my outburst. “Wow, that must save a lot of time. Having both sides of a conversation.”
“It’s what you were thinking.”
“Do you mind if I talk now? Or can you do all of this by yourself?”
I nod. Whatever.
“You have this gift. You could do almost anything with it. You could be so much more. And this is what you choose. This is what you want to be. Remember when we were talking about other jobs you could do? You could find other ways to survive. A lot of them would be safer, and some of them would even pay better. But none of them would give you a chance to hurt people.”
I consider that for a second. “So now you’re psychic too?”
“I don’t have to read minds to see that you were badly damaged, and you’re angry. Maybe that’s inevitable, for someone who has your abilities. But that’s why you do this. Someone’s got to pay for what’s been done to you. You do this because you need someone to punish.”
That sounds like her Psych 101 credit from college to me. I struggle for patience as I reply. “You’re right: I don’t care that much about other people being hurt. I care about you, and more importantly, I care about me. Right now those are my priorities.”
She looks at me for the longest time. Her thoughts don’t make it to the level of words. There’s just a raw feeling, something that’s hard for me to name.
“You need to be careful,” she says. “I know you want to think you’re not human. That you’ve crossed some line, or that you were born different. I don’t buy it. You’re still one of us. But if you work really hard at it, you might get what you wish for, John.”
I’ve got five or six smart-ass replies I could make to that, but even I’m not stupid enough to say them out loud.
She’s done talking to me anyway. She turns away and starts singing in her head again, a greatest-hits medley designed to shut me out. <we built this city on rock and roll> <fun, fun, think about fun> <believe in life after love> <who let the dogs out> <and you’re gonna hear me ROAR>
Jesus God. Where does she get these songs?
I step into the corridor, close the door, and call Preston. If I’m looking for someone to punish, then he’s a pretty good candidate.
PRESTON SURPRISES ME. There’s no abuse, no foaming at the mouth, no screaming. He doesn’t even raise his voice when I call him.
“What the hell,” he says. “We’ve been meaning to redecorate anyway.”
I assume he’s trying to trace the call. Good luck. Thanks to Tidhar, I’m piggybacking on Mossad tech, my cheap mobile riding a signal that’s bounced all over the world through an anonymizing VoIP network. That won’t stall him forever, but it should give us enough time to talk. Preston’s CIA backers could probably identify the source of the call, if they worked at it. But I suspect Preston isn’t running to them with his problems right now. I bet the Agency is asking him a lot of questions he’s reluctant to answer.
Maybe that’s why he sounds so reasonable.
“You’re taking this awfully well,” I say.
“I’ve been doing some Zen sitting with a Buddhist monk lately. Trying to understand my karma, you know. That sort of thing.” Then he laughs. “Ah, you don’t believe that for a second, do you? Of course I’m pissed. But there comes a time when you’ve got to cut your losses and stop chasing a losing strategy. We can still negotiate.”
“Glad to hear that. You know the terms: call off the hit on me and Kelsey. Restore our property. Throw in two million for my trouble, and you get the hard drive.”
Slight pause. “You said it would be one million before.”
“Did I? I meant three million.”
“Hey, wait a second—”
“And now it’s four.”
He makes a noise, almost like a growl. “You know, John, I’m not a complete idiot. I mean, you seem to have this idea that I’m a fraud, that I can’t write my own code. But you must know better. You were in my head, or so you keep telling me. You must know I can rewrite everything we lost. Sure, that’s a pain in the ass—I am not exactly nostalgic for those twenty-hour coding sessions wired up on Red Bull and Adderall. That’s why I became a CEO, so I wouldn’t have to do that crap anymore. But I can do it. I’m the guy who wrote it in the first place and you’re trying to sell me something I already know how to make. That’s fine. I’m willing to pay for that convenience. Still, there’s something you should keep in mind: I don’t need Cutter to keep a price on your head. You’ve proven you can hurt me. Great. You’re very impressive, I get that now. But I can hurt you much worse. Right now I’m being a grown-up. You keep pissing me off, I might just kick over the game board completely.”
I wait. He doesn’t say anything else. I assume he’s had his badass moment, so I ask him the question.
“How long do you think you can stall them, Eli?”
“What? Stall who?”
“All of them. Your clients. The Agency. All of the people you’re supposed to be monitoring and protecting and analyzing. I bet you’ll get a little slack, because, after all, you just had your offices blown to bits on national television. But sooner or later, they’re going to expect to see your mojo working again. Do you think you’ll be able to rebuild Cutter before they notice you’re completely fucked? You can’t even tell your best programmers, because if they knew how bad it was, they’d run screaming to the competition. So I bet you’re pretending it’s business as usual while you try to re-create everything, all by yourself. How’s that going for you?”
Silence. I’d swear he’s pouting.
“I could be wrong, of course. What did your friends at the Agency say? How’d they take it when they found out you’ve lost all the secrets they wanted to steal?”
He swallows loud enough for me to hear it over the line.
“You said three million, right?”
“Four.”
A bitter laugh. “Right. Four. What was I thinking? So where do you want to meet, John?”
I give him the details for a public meeting. This could turn into a fairly profitable job after all.