Screaming children and exhausted parents wander around us. Hipsters with multiple piercings sneer at the chain restaurant and the rides, trying hard to kill whatever childlike wonder they’ve got left inside them. There’s a polyglottal soup of languages and accents in the air as tourists compare what’s in front of their eyes with what they’ve seen on TV. Homeless people sift through the trash cans and beg spare change, their hunger and exhaustion numbed a little by drugs. And from all sides, all around me, there’s pressure, like the water in the deep end of the pool, a heavier atmosphere pressing on me, the weight of a few thousand minds, all gathered in one spot, all of them filled with need and want.
This is where we agreed to meet: the Santa Monica Pier at noon. Broad daylight, big crowds, hundreds of potential witnesses.
Ordinarily you’d never get me within a thousand yards of a place like this. It’s up there with Disneyland in my nightmares. But this should keep both sides honest.
Preston agreed a little too fast, with a minimum of bitching. That makes me think either I made a mistake or he really has given up. From my perspective, it’s about as safe here as possible. There’s no good sniper position within a half mile, and too many police and civilians for an ambush. Even if he could get a guy on a roof somewhere, the fixed attention on me would instantly set off my alarm bells. Anyone in the crowd who targets me should wake me up to immediate danger as well.
I have to have faith in my talent. All the mental noise around me is worth what I’m gaining in safety. This is about as good as I can get.
The pier starts with a long bridge sloping down from the street to the structure. There are two concrete walkways on either side for pedestrians—never enough room for all of them—and a two-lane road for the cars that are early enough to get a space on the pier’s parking lot.
I put Kelsey at a spot on the walkway, well above the place where I’m meeting Preston’s men. She can watch the crowd and watch my back from here.
“Almost done,” I tell her. “Just this last bit, and then it’s over.”
“Then what happens?” she asks.
“You can’t be serious. You want to talk about our relationship now?”
She smiles. “Guys always get so scared when it’s time to talk commitment,” she says. “Don’t be a jerk. When this is over, I’m going to run away from you as fast and as far as I can. No offense.”
“Some taken.”
“Well, if you ever get that island, I might come visit. If you think you could use a friend.”
I look at her. “Might be nice,” I admit.
I check my watch as an excuse to look away. Almost time for the meet. Now comes the tricky part. I’ve done this only a few times, and it’s never easy.
I look at her. “Do you trust me?”
She gives me a look back. <what a stupid question>
She’s right. She’s already trusted me more than anyone should.
I lean close and touch my forehead to hers.
This isn’t necessary, but it makes things easier. Physical proximity always makes my talent work better. I’m sure there’s a whole theory behind that, but I’ve never been interested in the process much. Just the results.
I look inside her head. Really look. I push past the surface thoughts and her memories and her buzz of anxiety. I submerge myself inside her physical responses, the sound of the pier and the ocean, the brightness of the sun through her closed eyelids, the slight breeze carrying the scents of fried food and salt water. I’m hearing what she hears. Seeing what she sees.
It’s as intimate as being in bed together, but out in public, in broad daylight. She shakes, just a little bit, and grips my arms as if to maintain her balance.
I swim back to the surface and pull out. But I leave a chunk of myself behind.
When I open my eyes, I have to split-screen my consciousness. On the one side, everything that I see: Kelsey, standing there in the sun, with people streaming around her as they head down for fun and frolic.
And on the other side, I see myself through her eyes. I look worried. And older than I remember.
She can feel it, that piece of myself still inside her head. Without my talent, she can’t see it the same way. All she can feel is her end of the link, like a telephone connection left open after one person hangs up. She doesn’t get the visuals or the words or the inside of my mind. But she knows I’m there.
She could break the link if she wanted. I could claw hard and try to hang on, but there’s really nothing I can do to keep her from shaking me out of her head when she’s had enough. That’s why this requires trust.
“Oh man,” she says. “That’s weird.”
“Just take it easy. I’m right here.”
She nods. She turns her head, and my perspective shifts. The world tilts on one side of the split screen. She looks down and sees the meeting spot, the tables outside the carousel on the pier.
On my side of the screen, I’m still looking at her. Her perspective jumps around while she checks the crowd.
I have to fight the urge to try to direct her vision. That just leads to migraines. She looks where she looks. I’m a passive rider. It’s like wearing 3-D glasses or talking on the phone while driving. It takes a little getting used to at first.
Kelsey is smarter than I am, and tougher than I thought possible, but she’s still basically a civilian. She doesn’t have my training. She doesn’t know what to look for or how to pick an enemy out of the crowd. So I’m going to have to do a ride-along. With her up here, I can look for anyone else working for Preston through her eyes. I can watch my back at the same time she does.
It might also have occurred to me that this is also the best way to keep her away from Preston’s men and still be with her.
Before I pull away, I kiss her.
Again, not necessary, but we need all the luck we can get right now.
I check my watch. Time to go.
Half of my mind is filled with the picture of me walking away from her.
THE CAROUSEL IS just to the left of where the road levels out and meets the pier. There’s a deck outside the entrance with metal tables.
Preston’s men are there, as arranged, holding down a position at one of the tables. Three of them. Wearing baggy shorts and T-shirts, scowls on their faces as if daring any happy families to try to take their seats. People give them a lot of space. Ice cream melts, uneaten, in little paper cups in front of them.
Never trust a man who doesn’t like ice cream. If that’s not a saying, it should be.
On the other side of the split screen, Kelsey watches the crowd as they stream past her, on their way up and down the bridge to the pier. <kids going past with balloons> <baby crying> <teenage boy and girl holding hands, she looks like a model, he can barely grow a mustache> <brown-haired man, muscular, yellow polo shirt buttoned at the neck> <toddler surrounded by cheap stuffed animals from the games, fast asleep in his stroller> <tourists speaking German get way too close before detouring around her, sunburned, weird European sandals on their feet>
Nobody looks hostile. I’m not getting that telltale prickle on the back of my neck that tells me someone is lining up a shot. I’m not a target. We’re good.
I sit down at the table.
“Join you?”
“Free country,” the lead guy—Adkins, his name is Adkins—says.
“Nice day, huh?”
“If you like seventy degrees and sunshine,” Adkins says.
“Beats the hell out of a hundred and twenty in the shade in Fallujah.” I’m trying to be nice. Two vets, talking about the war. What better way to bond?
“Fuck you. Let’s just get this over with.”
So much for bonding.
<baby still crying like a car alarm> <bodybuilder in a muscle T and a parrot on each shoulder, smiling at everyone who stares> <jingling chimes as a Mexican ice man wheels his cart down the ramp>
I feel Kelsey’s anxiety growing. Something wrong, out at the periphery of her senses. Nothing conscious. But enough to make her nervous.
Meanwhile, Iggy and the stooges are already screwing up the deal with me.
“All right. Nice doing business with you,” I say. I try to take the duffel.
Adkins won’t give it up. He puts his foot down on the bag. Hard.
“No way,” he says. “Not until you give us the drive.”
“That’s not how this is supposed to work,” I say quietly.
He smirks. “I’m telling you how it works.”
<minivan rumbling down the ramp, stressed-out dad behind the wheel, carful of kids bouncing around behind him> <Parrot guy standing in the middle of the road, won’t get out of the way>
He’s improvising. He actually thinks it’s a good idea. Showing initiative as a way to impress both Preston and the people behind him.
“Adkins,” I tell him, “the people who hired you are most impressed by men who can follow orders.”
<how did he know my name?> <they said this guy was serious> <take him down, bring in a scalp, prove I can do better stuff than this> <I can do this> <I can!>
“Adkins,” I say again, as patiently as I can, “this is not the time for you to show me your dick. Follow the rules, we’ll all go home happy.”
He gets defensive. I’m embarrassing him in front of the other two. Their names pop up as well: <Wylie> and <Gill>.
I can feel the weapons they’re carrying, under their baggy shirts, snug against their hips.
“All right,” I say, trying to project <calm> and <reasonable> into their atrophied little frontal lobes. “Let me look inside the bag. See if Preston fulfilled his end of the bargain. Then we can talk about where you can get the drive.”
“No. You tell us now.”
Jesus. Even the five-year-olds waiting in line for ice cream display more patience than this guy. I’d have better luck negotiating with them. Why did Preston send the B-team for this meet?
<the dad lays on the horn, trying to get the Parrot Man to move> <the Parrot Man talks to two young girls, can’t be more than fourteen> <pervert> <enjoying their attention> <Parrot Man turns and scowls> <Dad hits the horn again, a long pissed-off blare>
I’m starting to get a headache keeping it all separate.
<Parrot Man is pounding on the window of the minivan now, taunting Dad> <Dad looks terrified, he reaches for his phone> <the birds are squawking loudly>
Wait a second. Who was that?
I close my eyes and try to focus.
<Parrot Man hits the window so hard the safety glass cracks and stars> <Dad has the phone to his ear, yelling into it now> <kids crying in the backseat> <bystanders begin to get involved, tell Parrot Man to calm down> <birds are trying to fly away, tethered by straps to Parrot Man’s arms>
At the edge of Kelsey’s peripheral vision. <brown-haired man> She’s not completely conscious of having seen him, that’s why this is hard. She knows him, even if she’s only aware of it as a nagging feeling of unease.
“Hey,” Adkins snaps. “You taking a nap on me?”
Oh right, this asshole. “Let me open the bag. Please.”
Focus. At the edge of the crowd. Dammit, Kelsey, turn your head. <brown-haired man, muscular>
“Not until you tell us where you’ve stashed the hard drive.”
<yellow polo shirt buttoned to the neck>
Oh no.
I get up from the table so fast that Wylie and Gill both twitch for their weapons. Adkins nearly jumps up with me. “Hey, man, what the hell are you—”
I’m up and sprinting away from him, toward Kelsey, screaming inside my head.
<Kelsey> <RUN> <RUN> <RUN>
Because of our link, she hears me.
<Why?> comes back at me. But she starts moving. Slowly, but she moves. I try to kick her legs into gear.
She’s not used to it, not used to trusting the voices in her head. That’s a sign of schizophrenia in the world where she usually lives, but she has to move.
I push as hard as I can, because I know his body language, even if Kelsey doesn’t. I know the threat.
In her memory, at the edges of her vision, there he was. <yellow polo shirt buttoned to the neck>
<God DAMMIT, Kelsey, will you just RUN?>
She trusts me. She takes a step, prepares to run.
And finally sees him again. About six feet away from her.
<brown-haired man> <muscular> <yellow polo shirt buttoned to the neck> <still not high enough to keep the edges of his tattoo from peeking out>
Snake Eater.
He’s broken away from the crowd. Everyone is fixated on the Parrot Man reaching through the broken window of the minivan. Cars are stacked up behind, honking. The birds are flapping their wings madly, as if they’re trying to pull their owner into the sky with them.
He sees Kelsey. That’s why I never felt anyone targeting me. I wasn’t the target.
She was.
She turns, and starts to run in the other direction.
Too late.
He’s already made his decision. He pulls the gun and fires.
The fastest a human being has ever run is about twenty-seven miles per hour. A 9mm bullet fired from a gun moves at just under seven hundred miles per hour. It doesn’t matter how much of a head start she has. The bullet catches up to her in a split second.
Entangled with her as I am, I feel it hit the same instant she does.
It breaks her shoulder blade, tears a hole through the top of her lung. She falls.
I stumble, and trip, and fall down with her.
Not real, I remind myself. Not real. It only feels like I am coughing up blood. It only feels like I am dying.
It’s only real for Kelsey. She’s in pain. She needs help. She’s dying, every second I waste.
Get up. Ignore the signals. Get up.
I limp, and then stagger, and then run.
She can barely lift her head. She can feel her shirt, suddenly heavy and wet. <so much blood> Everything she sees is surrounded by a black mist, darkness pushing in around the edges. She can’t feel her legs now.
Mine threaten to go numb too, but I tell myself it’s not real, and I keep on moving.
I round the corner, and this is what I see, from her perspective and mine.
Some people are running. Others stand around, looking almost bored. Everyone heard the shot, but no one saw it. Gunfire isn’t enough to get a crowd running, not just one shot, not in L.A. They’ll still hang around to get pics on their phones.
Parrot Man is covered in bird shit, his parrots clawing and scratching at him as they try to escape. The doors of the minivan are open, and the father is shielding his children with his body. Other people lie flat on the asphalt, covering their heads.
The police are already at the top of the ramp.
Snake Eater walks right past them, looking straight ahead. Like about half the people in the crowd, he has his phone out.
From Kelsey’s rapidly dimming vision, I see him pressing buttons.
Then the explosion hits.
Down by the carousel, and I feel Adkins, Wylie, and Gill wink out of existence. They never saw it coming. They weren’t allowed to look inside the bag either.
Now I know why Preston sent the B-team to the meeting.
Now there is true panic, a collective scream going up from everyone at once. People in Los Angeles might be bored by gunfire, but a bomb definitely gets their attention. My brain rings with deeper, more primal fears, and ghosts that go all the way back to the cave and the forest and the creatures at the edge of the firelight possess everyone, and reduce them to animals fleeing a predator. People run in every direction, leaping from the pier to the beach and even into the ocean.
I knock down everyone in my path, but it still seems to take forever to move a dozen yards.
I’m praying to a god I never believed in by the time I reach Kelsey. I’ve got my hand on the wound and I’m screaming for help when her half of the split screen finally goes dark.
GAINES, TO HIS credit, shows up at the hospital. He must have used the corporate jet.
I’ve been sitting in the visitor area for about twelve hours, exuding a steady stream of don’t-fuck-with-me vibes. Even the paparazzi and the local TV crews won’t bother me, despite the compelling visual of a man sitting with dried blood coloring half his shirt.
The police have accepted my initial story that I was just one of the many bystanders, that I happened to reach Kelsey first.
Gaines finds me in my chair. He’s scared shitless, but he still walks up to me. I should give him points for that, but I’m not feeling generous.
“They say she’s going to make it,” he says.
“I know.”
There was an ambulance already scrambled to the pier because of the dad in the minivan’s panicked 911 call. I carried her straight to it, my hand plugging the entry wound. I rode with Kelsey the twenty blocks to St. John’s. Some of the finest trauma center surgeons in the world work in Los Angeles. The medics back in Iraq used to do their training here, since there are few other places that offer so much experience with such a wide variety of gunshot wounds.
In some ways, you could say she was lucky.
I haven’t paid much attention to the TV bolted to the ceiling in the corner, but I’ve seen enough of the news to know that nobody died, aside from Preston’s men. Wounded and maimed, probably. But nobody died.
I suppose they were lucky too.
Gaines looks for the right words. “Mr. Sloan is on his way back from Geneva now. He told me to spare no expense looking after Kelsey.”
“How big of him.”
We sit in silence for a long moment. Then I sense the real reason he approached me, growing like a mushroom. As always, he’s on an errand from his boss.
“Mr. Sloan also wanted me to ask you—”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“—he wanted to know if you, in fact, were able to recover the algorithm from Mr. Preston.”
I have to smile at that. Amazing what seems funny when you’ve been awake long enough. “Seriously? You canceled the contract, remember?”
“It seems, perhaps, I was premature in that.”
“You said you were going to call the FBI.”
“It seems that the people I spoke with may not have actually been federal agents.”
“Yeah. No shit. Maybe if you had anything other than real-estate law and bad TV stuffed into your head, you’d have figured that out sooner.”
Gaines chokes back some more bile. “I acted without Mr. Sloan’s authority in this matter. I overstepped my bounds. Mr. Sloan instructed me to apologize to you as well.”
“You’re doing a hell of a job so far, Lawrence.”
<fuck you, you bastard> “I am sorry. As I said, I was premature and reckless. But you shouldn’t use my mistakes as a reason to hold any animosity against Mr. Sloan.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t. Good to know.”
There’s a long pause before Gaines speaks again.
“So, were you able to do the job? Mr. Sloan would still be prepared to pay you if you were able to recover his intellectual property. And we can hopefully get past all of this unpleasantness.”
“What about Kelsey? How’s she supposed to get past it?”
“We will see that she gets the very best of care. She is still our employee. Any legal problems she might face because of her involvement will, of course, be handled by our attorneys—”
I cut him off. “—a little something extra in the Christmas bonus, maybe a twenty-dollar gift card at Starbucks . . .”
Some semblance of pride rears up in him. “Hey. I didn’t get her involved in this.”
“No. You were just the guy who abandoned her.”
His anger overrides his fear. “And you were the one who let her get shot.”
I turn and face him. He shrinks back from whatever he sees there.
“I’m sorry,” he says quickly.
I can think of five or six ways to punish him, but I’m too tired. Besides, he’s not wrong.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say.
He waits a whole thirty seconds before asking, “Can I tell Mr. Sloan you have what he wants?”
God. What a little corporate weasel. Of course, I took Sloan’s money, too. So what does that make me?
It doesn’t matter. We left professional in the rearview a long time ago. Now this is as personal as it gets.
I ignore the question. “They’re going to try for her again,” I say. “You need to get the police here. That should be enough to discourage them. And then, when she can move, you need to have some professional security ready. I mean professional. Not like those two idiots you had in the office before.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
I stand up. “You’d better.”
“Wait. Where are you going?”
“Don’t worry about that,” I tell him. “Worry about what happens when I come back.”
I walk away from him and head out the door.
I tried being civilized with Preston. Now we do it the other way.
Now I burn it all down.