I arrive a little after 5:00 A.M. local time at Dubai International.
My plane lands with the other cargo flights. I wake up with a jolt as we hit the tarmac. The heat is already pressing down through the steel skin of the aircraft. I undo my straps and finally get out of the battered little seat where I’ve spent most of the last eighteen hours. It’s not exactly business class. The seat is airline surplus, salvaged from a junk heap and bolted down as an afterthought behind the cockpit for the crew on the flight. I exit the plane with the pilots, wearing a coverall. No one looks at me as they start to unload the cargo.
In fact, no one wants to pay much attention to this particular flight at all.
An airport employee waves me over to an electric cart, then drives me to the main terminal.
The last time I was at LAX, there was a TSA agent napping on a stool at the security line, an overflowing toilet in the men’s room, and a garden hose coming down through a hole in the ceiling for no apparent reason.
In Dubai, it’s like walking into a high-end luxury hotel. There are overstuffed couches. Every surface in the terminal gleams. A flock of women, wearing hijabs and carrying Coach bags, passes me on the right. In the shops, you can pick up a $10,000 bottle of Cheval Blanc, a Cartier Tank watch, or a solid gold bar to take home to the kids.
It’s the same almost everywhere here. Dubai makes Vegas look like a trailer park. They both started as patches of desert. But in 1966, Dubai struck oil. The man who owned the country, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, knew the oil wasn’t limitless. He decided to try to create something that would last after the sands ran dry. So he, and later his sons, poured their wealth into creating a center for high-dollar tourism and finance. Their idea was, if you build it, preferably with lots of chrome and marble and tax incentives and underpaid foreign workers, the rest of the world will come.
I’ve got no idea if it will last, but right now it’s Disneyland for billionaires. The country’s economy stalled badly during the global financial crash, but now it’s humming along again as if the meltdown never happened. Everything is larger than life, all beginning with the words “the biggest,” “the best,” or “the most expensive.” There’s an underwater hotel out in the Persian Gulf, right next to the custom-built islands. The airport just passed Heathrow as the busiest on the planet. They’re putting up five hundred new skyscrapers to keep pace with the demand for office space, and construction just started on an entire indoor city, complete with replica versions of New York, London, and Paris. The conference where Preston is speaking will take place in the Burj Khalifa, the tallest skyscraper on earth. Even the police drive Ferraris and Bentleys.
And even though Dubai sits at the edge of four or five different war zones, violent crime is almost unheard of, at least in public. Islamic jihad checks its suicide vests at the border. The current ruler of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the previous sheikh’s son, goes out in public without bodyguards and drives his own Mercedes G-class everywhere.
All of which proves, once again, my golden rule: Nobody screws with serious money. Nobody wants to upset the cash flow. It’s like the entire country is a VIP lounge and the bouncer at the velvet rope keeps out anything unpleasant.
There’s a rumor that half the world’s arms sales go through Dubai airport, but nobody would think of bringing a gun off one of those planes. That’s why Olivarez wouldn’t let me bring my gun with me, even though he put me in a cargo flight stuffed with illegal drugs. I’m okay with that. It means that Preston’s bodyguards won’t be carrying either. I’m walking onto a level playing field.
I can see why Preston thinks he’s safe here.
He’s wrong, but it’s an easy mistake to make.
I DON’T BOTHER with customs. Instead, I find one of the travelers’ lounges. The man at the door makes a face at my coveralls, but I pay the fee with the black card, which eases his mind considerably.
My changing room includes a full-size shower and bath. The coveralls go into a trash bin. I open my bag and get to work. Twenty minutes later, I emerge freshly showered and shaved, wearing an Armani suit. Then I exit the terminal into the 120-degree heat.
I spot my contact immediately. It would be hard to miss her. She’s over six feet tall in her heels, with masses of blond hair. She looks even better than her picture from the website.
She goes by Katya, but that’s not her name. She’s a prostitute.
Dubai is Islamic, but unlike, say, Saudi Arabia, it’s not medieval. There are thousands of unattached men here, from the foreign workers actually building all the new construction to the first-class passengers and tourists looking for temporary companionship. Most of them are willing to pay, and the authorities are willing to look the other way on all manner of sins—including the kind that Olivarez is importing. That means in the tourist and expat zones, anything goes.
Within reason, of course. I suspect not even Allah would help you if you tried to form a labor union or started bad-mouthing the sheikh. Report a rape to the police and you could be the one who ends up in jail, or, at best, on the next plane back home. And failure to pay your debts can still get you thrown in prison here. Again, it’s all about keeping the money flowing, and anyone who might disrupt that is ejected from the country so fast they leave vapor trails.
That’s why I’m keeping as low a profile as possible. I know that Preston will have people looking for me. I might have crippled his operations in the States, but I’m sure he still has all kinds of clever programs watching for my name or picture on a passport or a hotel registry.
So I figured out a way to sidestep the whole process. I went on the Net, Googled “Dubai escorts,” and found someone willing to offer me a full package—tour guide, girlfriend, transportation, and, included in her fee, her apartment near the Burj Khalifa.
Katya is one of a small army of professionals—mostly Russian—who live in Dubai and service the high-end clients. She linked to a page full of reviews that described her as professional, reliable, and discreet. Among many other, more colorful terms.
I tell myself I’m not interested in her other talents as long as she provides cover and a place to stay. Then she greets me like a boyfriend gone for too long, with both arms wrapped around me and a long, lingering kiss.
There’s disapproval from some of the men and women nearby, envy from others.
Screw them. I’m a rich foreigner, and this is how I blend in.
I let her guide me to her car. We have trouble finding it at first. Only in Dubai would a Mercedes SLK be as generic as a Toyota Corolla. Katya presses the button on her keys until one of the cars finally beeps and flashes its lights. I throw my bag in the trunk, and we blast off for a week of impossibly expensive decadence.
I’m only partially faking it when I grin like an idiot.
WE GET TO Katya’s apartment, and she handles the exchange of cash like everything else: professionally and elegantly. The envelope I hand her disappears in an instant.
That’s the only moment I get any anxiety from her. She had to clear her schedule for a week to accommodate me, and there’s always a chance that a john will try to rip her off, or worse. She has been lucky so far—she’s twenty-three—and she’s smart. But lurking in her mind, always, are the possibilities of what could happen to her, what she has seen happen to other women in her line of work. Her smile never wavers, but her mind turns hard as stone. It’s impressive. I’ve had people shoot at me, cut me, and try to beat me to death, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to imagine what it takes to be a woman forced to trust a man.
Once that’s over, however, she’s back on familiar ground. She shows me around the apartment—beautiful, tasteful, and impersonal, as devoid of any real identifying touches as a catalog photo. It pops into my head that she doesn’t actually live here. This is just for work, and she splits the rent with another couple of escorts. Her real life is safely contained in a much smaller place a little farther from the tourist zone.
There’s a computer, with high-speed Net access. Katya takes my bag and offers to unpack once she sees me zero in on the machine.
I sit down before the screen and go to the conference’s official site. The main page comes up: FUTURETECH DUBAI—THE SILICON DESERT.
Someone in the sheikh’s brain trust, or the sheikh himself, must have decided that Dubai needed its own version of Silicon Valley, and this is their attempt to jump-start a digital economy. Aside from the speeches, Preston and the other up-and-coming CEOs will judge entries from hopeful start-ups. If they give their approval, it could mean millions of dollars in venture funding.
According to the schedule, Preston is supposed to give his big talk on Wednesday, two days from now. He’s staying at the Burj Al Arab, away from the conference. But he’ll have to make a few appearances in public, for photo ops. I can’t imagine the conference would let him get away with ordering room service and watching pay-per-view.
I need to get over to the Burj and do recon. But first I need sleep. Jet lag has landed on me like a sack of dry cement.
Katya is rubbing my shoulders. I must be tired. I didn’t even hear her, let alone sense her thoughts. She’s had a lot of practice at being unobtrusive, fading into her surroundings until she’s ready to be noticed. It’s a survival skill.
“So what brings you to the conference?” she asks.
“You don’t really want to know.”
She laughs. “You’re right.”
She really doesn’t. It’s almost refreshing, after all the fear and anxiety, after all the caring and concern. I don’t use those emotions much, and now they feel like atrophied muscles, sore from a sad, middle-aged return to the gym.
“I should sleep,” I tell her. I turn off the computer. She keeps kneading my back, then her lips are at my ear.
“You’re not just paying for the room, you know,” she says. She doesn’t care about me. I know it for a fact. This is her job. Her calm, professional indifference is like standing in front of an open refrigerator on a hot summer day.
I can’t help but think of Kelsey, who’s still in a hospital bed right now.
It doesn’t stop me.
CAMOUFLAGE.
After sixteen hours of sleep—with some exercise in between—I’m ready to hit the conference. Which means looking the part.
I unroll a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from my bag. They’re brand-new, but the kind of expensive that looks cheap from a distance. Frayed and faded. Wearing them, I’m indistinguishable from every other brogrammer here for his shot at greatness.
Katya’s seated at the breakfast nook in a robe, drinking a cup of black coffee so slowly that it seems she’s absorbing it by osmosis. She flares her nostrils in an elegant display of distaste when she sees me.
“I’m trying to fit in,” I say.
“You succeed,” she says, and shifts her attention away. I think I’ve disappointed her.
I leave the condo and catch a ride to the conference in a hired car. In this part of the city, it looks like the future showed up a century too soon. Everything shines like polished chrome. Even the cement looks vacuumed. There’s not a single person walking—just a steady stream of gleaming cars moving in clockwork precision.
When I get out of the car, the death-ray heat of the sun is cut by a strong wind. This is not a good sign. There was a warning earlier in the conference weather report about a shamal—a sandstorm with winds as high as fifty miles per hour.
I remember a shamal from Iraq. Air traffic was completely shut down. Being outside was like walking into a sandblaster. All you could do was sit tight and let it blow over. When it was gone, you discovered sand in crevices you didn’t know you had.
But the relentlessly optimistic conference website assured me the winds will probably blow right past the tip of Dubai, out into the Gulf, so no one will be inconvenienced by a high-speed sandstorm.
I don’t have any of the proper badges or cards to get me into FutureTech Dubai. Fortunately, the Burj Khalifa is also a tourist attraction—tallest building in the world, remember—and my prepaid ticket to the observation deck gets me past the red-scarfed security guards. Once I’m inside, it’s fairly easy to wander away from the tour group and join a group of tech nerds clustered together. The elevator takes me a half mile into the sky, and the doors open into the conference center.
This is where the illusion of the future breaks down. Despite the water of the Persian Gulf visible through the windows, this could be an insurance convention in Reno. The space is filled with row after row of stalls, fronted by booth babes—models for hire wearing company logos on tight T-shirts. They draw in the men wearing dishdasha. Then the nerds get up from behind the tables and do their best to convince the Arabs that Bazoomercom or TwitWit will completely revolutionize cloud-based social-media integration. Or something.
Ordinarily, I’d find clients in a place like this. Dollar signs are dancing in the eyes of everyone here, and anyone willing to drop a few million on a tech start-up is usually my target demographic.
Instead, I blend into the background again. No one sees me. One guy walks into me and bounces off. He looks a little confused and annoyed, as if he tripped over a power cord. But he never says a word, just keeps going, with barely a pause.
I cruise the exhibition hall for almost an hour before a buzz of excitement rises. I feel the shift in the mood as everyone turns and looks at a group that’s just arrived at the main entrance.
<judges> <look sharp> <judges are here> <who’s that?> <Preston> <OmniVore> <guess they couldn’t get Zuckerberg> <doesn’t look that smart to me>
I head over to see for myself.
Preston and the other judges are at the center of a cluster of people. They cruise down the aisles, checking out the competitors. This isn’t the actual judging; according to the schedule, that’s not until tomorrow. I have no doubt this is a mandatory public appearance, a requirement made by the conference organizers for the judges to go out and see the sights.
The other judges at least pretend to enjoy it. Preston can’t even manage that.
He’s forgotten to bring one of his novelty toys with him, so there are no fart noises or funny catchphrases. He has aged half a decade since I last saw him. His face is tight with stress, and his grin looks like a dentist’s experimental treatment gone wrong. His clothes look slept in, and his hair doesn’t have the usual application of product. He flinches if someone comes in too close for a selfie or a handshake.
More important, he’s got three bodyguards with him.
This is considered tacky, if not actually rude. As I said, Dubai is supposed to be completely safe.
But Preston is scared. I made sure of that. He’s not going anywhere without protection.
The judges trail an entourage of reporters and cameramen and fans with phones held up high. I slip in and follow them all the way down to the lobby.
A QUICK SHUTTLE-BUS ride and then we’re all herded inside the Mall of the Emirates, the largest mall in the Middle East. We’re here for a photo op. The sponsors and organizers want the world to know that Dubai is the Next Big Thing in the tech world, and they’re going to get photographic proof. Specifically, they’re going to get shots of Preston and his fellow billionaires acting cool.
So they take the whole entourage to Ski Dubai. It’s the perfect symbol of what unlimited money can do: an indoor ski hill in the middle of the desert. Manufactured snow covers a giant ramp in a room the size of three football fields. A small chair lift takes skiers and boarders to the top of the room, where they have their choice of five runs. There’s even a penguin habitat and a sledding hill for the kids.
Outside, workers regularly collapse from heatstroke as they struggle to complete the latest new building in triple-degree heat. Inside, a kid in a snowsuit and mittens just ran past me with an idiot grin and pure joy radiating from his mind. It’s obscene and a miracle at the same time.
And in the middle of all this impossibility, Preston is finally starting to enjoy himself. He’s a pretty good boarder, at least in his own mind, and this fits his self-image. He’s still young enough to be extreme. He’s looking forward to showing off in front of the other rich guys.
The entourage is kept outside, on the other side of big glass windows that contain a view of the entire slope.
I walk inside with Preston, the judges, his bodyguards, and their escorts. Again, nobody really sees me. Their eyes skate over me in the crowd. It takes work to stay this hard in the background, and I’m starting to feel the strain.
Still, nobody notices when I take a suit from the rack, pick up a snowboard, and get on the ski lift with the others.
Preston goes down, bodyguard on each side, about three people ahead of me. It’s not a long slope—even with Dubai money, you can do only so much—so I’ve got to be quick if I want a chance at him. Fortunately, he’s hotdogging, pulling tricks, half-assed jumps, cutting wide swaths back and forth across the powdered ice.
Two of the bodyguards are on skis, and they grimace as they keep up, looking like impatient parents chasing a rebellious tween.
I push ahead in line, and by stepping out of the scenery, I give up my invisibility. I hear it several times—<hey, who’s that?> <dude, uncool> <who’s that guy?>—before someone finally says it out loud: “Hey, who the hell is that?”
By then, I’m cutting a straight line toward Preston. His bodyguard at the top of the run shouts something. It’s hard to hear over the blast-force air-conditioning.
The other bodyguards see me headed for Preston. He’s too far away from them.
I slice straight through the snow toward him. I’m not a great boarder, but this is a bunny slope, and all I have to do is pick up speed.
“Preston!” one of the guards finally screams. “Look out!”
Preston turns, sees me barreling toward him, and just manages to skid to a halt.
I hit him as I race past, knocking him flat on his ass.
It only hurts a little. But it’s incredibly humiliating. Everyone starts laughing.
Everyone except Preston and his guards. Preston recognizes me. He thinks he just dodged an assassination attempt.
“Get that son of a bitch!” he screams.
And here they come.
I’m already at the bottom of the hill, kicking off the board and the boots, pulling off the ski suit, and running as fast as I can.
I burst through the doors and into the mall. I get a few strange looks, but no one stops me or says anything.
Preston’s bodyguards come out of Ski Dubai, two of them still in their stifling ski outfits.
I stay where they can see me for just long enough, then I turn into a service corridor, and effectively vanish.
I paint myself right out of their perceptions, covering their minds’ images of me with scenes from the background again.
Several times, they scan right over me, then continue searching, getting more and more agitated. Their faces are locked into the usual action-hero expression of grim certainty, but I sense their panic and confusion. They’ve lost me. They’re nervous. They’ve talked about me. They know the rumors. They’ve got to split up, and for a long moment, they’re afraid.
I can’t help grinning. That little jolt of fear is better than cocaine.
But they’re soldiers, so they get over it. I can feel the adrenaline surge. It tastes like metal at the back of their throats. I get a glimpse of the reward that Preston is offering to whoever brings in my scalp: <ten million>. They repeat it to themselves, like a chant, like a prayer, over and over: <ten million, ten million, ten million>. <Ten million dollars!> Images flit around their heads of fast cars, new houses, nearly naked women on pristine white beaches.
That’s when they find the nerve. They each take a different direction, and each one is determined to kill me, whatever it takes.
I don’t care about the other two in their snow gear. Sure, they’re far more dangerous than they appear right now, clomping around in their ski boots. But they’ve never gotten close enough to me to do any damage. I don’t owe them anything.
I let them stomp away.
Then I follow the other guy.
He jogs forward, looking for me.
<Right behind you, genius> I send, like flinging a dart at the back of his head.
He turns around.
I would know him by his stance, by the unique tang of his thoughts and the echo of his feelings. I’d recognize him anywhere, even if I couldn’t see the edge of the tattoo.
Snake Eater. The man who shot Kelsey.
I sprint for the doors of the shopping center. He follows.
I’ve gone from 105 degrees to climate-controlled 68 to below zero in the ski hill, all in less than an hour. So for a moment, when I hit the open air, I wonder if my sense of temperature has been completely screwed.
Then I look up, and I realize what’s happened.
Snake Eater exits the mall a few steps behind me, and he stops dead as well. For a moment, we both look at the sky.
A great gray wall appears, blotting out the sun, dwarfing even the sky-high tower of the Burj.
It looks like a biblical plague. It’s impossible not to feel a little awe.
The shamal will not miss us. It hits the center of Dubai, and it hits hard.
There’s rain at first, fat drops that evaporate as soon as they hit the parched cement.
Then the wind comes tearing down the concrete and glass canyons, howling like a motherless child.
Those people still dumb or unlucky enough to be outside rush for the nearest shelter. Their movement breaks me out of my daze, and I begin sprinting away again.
Snake Eater races after me.
I run around the corner and find a construction scaffolding that leads to the roof, temporarily abandoned by its crew in the storm.
Then I make what looks like a rookie mistake. I go up the ladder.
Snake Eater follows me. He’s thinking <dumb fuck> because he knows there’s no escape up there. He’s already spending that $10 million.
I reach the top of the scaffolding, then pull myself onto the roof and wait. This section overlooks the plaza below, but I can’t see any of it from where I stand. The shamal is growing worse. It carries whole sand dunes from the desert and all the dust from Dubai’s never-ending construction along with it. Visibility is maybe a dozen yards at best. The rest of Dubai is huddled inside their homes and offices, waiting for the storm to pass. It’s possible to feel like the last man on earth up here.
But I don’t have to wait long.
Snake Eater lifts his head over the edge of the roof in achingly slow increments, waiting for an ambush or even a bullet.
But I let him make the climb. He gets on the roof safely. I let him stand up and get his balance.
He waits for a moment, alert, on guard, and then he sees me.
I want him to see this coming. I want him to know.
I knew Preston would bring Snake Eater with him. It’s not easy finding employees who are both willing to kill and halfway competent at the job. I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad one for the future of the human race. But when you find a guy who’s proven he can blow up three men and put a bullet into an unarmed woman, no questions asked, you tend to keep that guy around.
Especially if you think you’ve got a pissed-off black-ops veteran coming after you. You want some reliable backup, preferably someone who’s already got blood on his hands.
Preston thought he was my target. He was wrong.
Oh, I intend to get around to him. Eventually. But this is the main event.
Even in the sand and grit, I see Snake Eater smile. He’s actually stupid enough to be happy to find me. He thinks this is going to end well for him.
I’m going to enjoy proving him wrong.
THE WIND KICKS up again. The shamal fills the air with more sand and dust. It’s like walking into a fog made of ground glass. Snake Eater stands less than a dozen feet away from me, but he’s a just blurry outline now.
That works for me. I can use my talent like radar, zeroing in on his thoughts. He’ll stumble around with grit in his eyes, the wind howling in his ears, deaf and blind, while I cut him to pieces with elegant kicks and punches, then dance away before he can touch me. I’m not sure if I’ll beat him to death or only cripple him. I should win without raising too much of a sweat.
I’ve already got a little mind game planned for him—quadriplegic paralysis. I’m going to convince his brain that his body has lost its ability to move below the neck. He should be helpless. It means my own legs and arms will go numb for a while, but I figure it will be worth the cost.
At least, that’s the plan.
But just before the shamal kicks into high gear—just before the entire rooftop goes dark as the dust blots out all but the most feeble sunlight—Snake Eater stops thinking like a conscious human being and turns into a creature of pure rage.
He remembers being shot back in Pennsylvania, and remembers seeing me behind the gun. He remembers, with humiliation, how I froze him in a nightmare in the hotel lobby. And he remembers how I simply walked away from him both times, as if he was nothing, no threat at all.
He has not felt that helpless since he was a child, and every time he remembers it, his shame has only grown, until he has created a tank of pure hatred for me, down deep in the center of himself. It’s why he volunteered when Preston asked for someone willing to go after me. It’s why he had no hesitation about shooting Kelsey or triggering the explosion he thought would kill me.
I scared him. I stole the only thing he’s ever been able to rely on—himself—and he hates me for it.
It takes him only a split second to tap into that fuel. He’s operating on instinct, so I don’t get an inkling of his plan before it happens.
He leaps forward and tackles me. I try to twist out of his path, but he still gets an arm around me. He takes me down on the roof. Before I can use my talent, he shifts position, punching me in the face with one fist while simultaneously pressing down on my throat with his forearm.
That’s when I realize: Snake Eater is a grappler.
I hate grapplers.
My talent is close to useless once they get a grip on me. They use Brazilian jujitsu and judo holds, and keep everything right in their hands, so I can’t fool their eyes. They’ve got lots of experience at handling pain, so I can light up their brains with all kinds of terrible memories and they just take it. I can see what they’ve got planned, but slipping out of a choke hold is a lot tougher than dodging a punch.
All of my advantages just vanished. It’s hard to focus and cast my thoughts when someone is pummeling my face over and over. At least I won’t have any trouble finding him. He’s right at the other end of the arm that he’s using to crush my windpipe.
I try to flip him off me, but he rolls with it and comes up on top. So I do it again. We end up tumbling along the roof, neither of us willing to slow down or give up an advantage.
Suddenly the roof ends. I open my eyes and get a good look down into the swirling wind and sand. I twist with everything I have, feel something pop in my back, and nearly shrug Snake Eater right over my head and over the edge.
But he doesn’t go. He must have figured out where I was headed when I slammed on the brakes, so he suddenly shifts his weight and hauls back. His grip loosens on my neck enough for me to break his hold and scramble sideways, palms shredding on the gravel. I choke on the dirt as it clots inside my nose and mouth. He’s slapping at me, trying to find a handhold, to keep me close.
I’m almost free, halfway to my feet, when one of his hands clamps on my ankle like a vise. I spin and kick, but he dodges it. Then he yanks my leg out from under me, and I hit the roof on my back.
He leaps into the air, ready to come down on me with his full weight.
But this time, some dimly remembered move comes back to me from my training, and I get my feet up to block him. He grunts, and I know I’ve just kicked him hard in the solar plexus.
It doesn’t slow him down much. He drives downward, hands still scrabbling for a grip. Then he finds one—around my throat.
He starts choking me, going for the kill.
I punch him twice in the head. It’s like hitting a cast-iron skillet. I try to fill his brain with spiders, but he shakes it off. He knows it’s not real. I feel the glow of triumph start to build from him. He figures he can take whatever I dish out until he crushes my throat.
So I decide, finally, to fight him on his own terms.
I slide my right hand between his arms and find the edge of his collar. I get the left in there as well, and I cross my arms and start pulling.
I’ve just turned the collar of his jacket into a noose.
We are no more than arm’s length from each other, the shamal blasting us both. He’s got gravity on his side, pressing me down, but I’ve got the better grip. He’s choking the life out of me at the same time as I’m strangling him. Now it just comes down to who can last. Who can live.
While we’re waiting to find out, his mind and memories open and spill into mine.
Snake Eater’s real name is Eric Schaffer. He’s thirty-two. He grew up in a small house in Kansas City. <Not that one. The one that’s actually in Kansas.> He joined Special Forces like his uncle Ken, his dad’s older brother, who came back home from Vietnam and showed him the cool tattoo under his sleeve. When he got out of the army, he got the same one done on his neck. It took a long time to find a guy who could do it just right, who knew the history.
He increases the pressure. I do the same. I can hear him grunt, feel the collar cut into the skin of his neck. His thumbs slide around, trying for my carotid.
The ceiling of his bedroom was painted blue. He had a dog named Barkley. Some kind of Lab mix. One day the dog ran off and never came back. He cried so hard he thought something would break.
I jerk my head back, keep him from getting his thumbs in. Jam my elbow into his, trying to break his grip. Twist the collar harder. His face is going deep red now.
He took a girl named Christy to prom and had sex for the very first time in a hotel room he and his friends rented together.
I keep applying pressure, pulling as hard as I can with both hands. His hands are greasy with sweat. They slip. I get a little slack and I make the most of it, ratchet my noose even tighter.
He spent the morning after his thirtieth birthday hungover, looking at the number for his parents on his phone, wondering if he should call them back.
He’s fading out, but his grip is still tight. He won’t let go.
He spent the night of his thirtieth birthday in a bar where he beat a guy half to death over an insult he can’t remember now. He never called his parents back.
His throat is burning red and spots are dancing in front of his eyes now.
<God damn, there was this one song, what was it?> He can’t remember. <Christy really liked it. She had it on repeat on the CD player the whole time.>
His face is purple and blue.
It occurs to him that he’s really thirsty. He’d really like a cold drink of water right now.
I see a blood vessel burst in his eye. I pull harder.
<Man, that water sure would taste good.>
It’s the last thing he wants.
His hands only unclench a second after he dies.
It takes me a long moment to disentangle myself from him. Mentally and physically.
I shove his body aside and spend a few minutes panting for air. It feels like sucking down hot mud. None of my limbs are working right.
But it’s worse inside my skull. His whole life is right there. Right next to the knowledge that I ended it. When I’m that close to someone at the end, it all gets badly mixed together. He still sent his mom flowers on Mother’s Day and once dragged a friend from a flaming Humvee in Iraq.
And here comes his death. That all-too-familiar black hole filling my head with darkness thicker than quicksand, threatening to drag me down with him.
Nobody’s ever the villain in his own story. Aside from trying to kill me for money, Schaffer wasn’t such a bad guy. And at these moments, it becomes incredibly hard for me to justify why I’m the one still breathing and the other guy’s a corpse.
All he did was take a job. Not so different from me. Up close and personal, there is no way to lie about it, especially to myself.
I am almost ready to let the blackness suck me down. To give up, and give in, and stop breathing. It seems so easy.
But as always, I find a straw to grasp.
There’s the knowledge, tucked in the middle of all of Schaffer’s memories, of Kelsey, and how he was ready to kill her. How he put the crosshairs of a target on her and pulled the trigger.
In his memory, there is a tiny sliver of disappointment at how she turned at the last moment so he could not see her face. He really wanted to see her face.
There’s the difference, slim as it seems, but it’s enough. I never would have done that. I have done shameful things and hurt people, but I never would have done that. Sloan and Cantrell may not be right about me. I might not have a conscience. But I have limits.
Schaffer didn’t. That’s enough for me to drag myself back from the abyss where I sent him.
A moment later, when I can feel my arms and legs again, I get up. I tear Schaffer’s suit off his corpse and dress in it. I dig through his pockets and find what I need. The storm has passed, and I know where I’m going.
Along with his memories, his clothing, and his keys, I stole one other thing from the last few moments of Eric Schaffer’s life.
I know where to find Eli Preston now.
ORDINARILY, THE STAFF at the Burj Al Arab would never allow someone looking like me into the lobby. It’s supposed to be the only seven-star resort in the world. It sits on its own man-made island, connected to the city by a private causeway. It’s the only hotel in Dubai with a reputation for serious security, which is why Preston chose it.
I’m wearing a suit, but I’m literally trailing grit and dirt. The horrified concierge snaps his fingers, and a young woman rushes out with a broom and dustpan. She follows along behind me, sweeping up the sand, right at my heels with every step.
It should take all my Jedi mind tricks to get to the elevators looking like this, and unfortunately, I am exhausted. But everyone knows about the shamal. And I have a room card.
This makes me an honored guest. As soon as I bring out the hotel key, the concierge is all grace and solicitude, asking if I’m all right, expressing sorrow at my misfortune at being caught outside. He emphasizes that a storm like that is very rare.
I thank him for his concern and walk past security to the elevators.
I swipe Schaffer’s card, and I’m on my way to Preston’s suite.
ONE OF THE remaining bodyguards is at the door. I don’t really remember which one. Or care. I am utterly out of patience.
He sees me coming, wearing the dead man’s suit, and for a second, he sees Schaffer. Then his brain catches up, and he opens his mouth to shout something.
I don’t let him. I send a mind strike right to the Broca’s area of his brain. Instead of what he meant to say, he blurts, “Flanges! Turnips and antifreeze!”
He’s so shocked at what comes out of his own mouth he drops his guard completely. While he struggles to figure out if he’s having a stroke, I hit him hard enough to bounce his skull off the frame of the door. His eyes roll up into his head, and he sags to the floor.
I pause at the door and scan the room, stretching my talent, listening for stray thoughts.
I sense two people inside.
One man is off in a side room, his brain deep in the regular delta-wave rhythms of sleep. That’s got to be the bodyguard. Makes sense. Three men to cover a single person, twenty-four-hour day, eight-hour shifts. One of them has to sleep sometime.
There’s nothing there for me to read. He’s completely unconscious. Nothing short of a gunshot is going to get him up now.
Then there’s the other mind in the suite, very much awake, scurrying like a rat in a maze, running down possibilities, discarding what doesn’t work, streams and streams of data flowing all around it.
Preston.
Schaffer’s key card opens the door. I walk into the main room.
The suite is half the size of a football field. There are floor-to-ceiling windows framing the sky and the Gulf, and the moon. The view is utterly magnificent.
Preston has his back to it, his entire focus riveted on the screen of the laptop on his desk. There are pill bottles and empty cans and coffee cups. He is typing furiously. I can see him racking his brain, trying to dredge up memories of code he wrote two years ago.
It’s not going well.
He barely glances at me. Like the guard at the door, he’s fooled by the suit. He puts a can of Rockstar to his lips, finds it empty, and flings it across the room. It bounces off the wood paneling.
“Get me another one of those,” he snaps. “Is it done? Did you get him?”
“No, Preston,” I say. “He didn’t.”
It takes him a moment to disengage from the virtual world and come back to this one. He looks up, and his eyes shift their focus from the screen. Then he sees me standing there.
“Holy shit,” he says. Not exactly eloquent, but a pretty accurate read on the situation.
He leaps up, knocking over his chair, and fills his lungs to scream for help.
With resources I didn’t know I still had, I cross the room at a fast run and put my fist in his stomach.
He folds in half, unable to breathe. I grab his right hand, twist it back in a two-finger grip, and put him in an armlock. He drops to his knees and I pull his arm above his head. He’s not going anywhere.
“Please,” he gasps. “I’ll pay whatever you want.”
“I told you already,” I remind him. “Negotiations are over.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” he demands. Even cornered, even trapped, he wants to deal. “Looking into your past. I found something. Something I can give you. All you have to do is let me go. Just let me go, and I’ll tell you.”
I’m mildly curious now. “Tell me what?”
“I know the names of your real parents.”
He says it with a little smile of triumph. If I weren’t so sick of him, I’d want to laugh. He thinks he’s dug up a secret that I have to know. It’s what he does, after all. But I made my peace with this issue years ago. There were times, I admit, when I went to bed wondering who they were, and I might have even fallen asleep with tears and snot on my face from crying about how they didn’t love me. But that was a long time ago. I left that baggage in junior high. I’ve had far worse traumas than my mommy and daddy issues to keep me busy since then.
“Eli,” I say. “What makes you think I could possibly give a damn?”
He’s speechless for a moment. He thought he had a way out. When I shut it down without discussion, his mind ignites with desperation.
“Money. Stock options. You could be a millionaire—no, a billionaire,” he says. “You know how much I’m going to be worth. All you have to do is let it happen. You could own a piece of the future.”
I hesitate. Because I’m not an idiot. Sloan’s offering an island. A billion dollars would buy a whole chain of islands. Or maybe even a small country.
But Preston cannot ever quit while he’s ahead. Even if he could shut his mouth, he can’t keep his brain quiet.
“And I swear, nothing will ever happen to Kelsey in the future. I promise.”
I see it then, in his mind. He’s got the location of the private clinic where Sloan has moved Kelsey from the hospital. He has performed some of his usual hacker bullshit to find her, and he’s got people he can call who could be there before morning. He hasn’t carried out any of these plans yet—he’s been too busy trying to save his own ass—but he’s got them ready. Just in case.
“You promise?” I ask.
He nods so hard I think his head will shake off. “She’ll be safe. I swear. She’ll never have to worry about me.”
He says it in the same tone a magician would say “abracadabra” and reveal the girl whole and unharmed despite all the swords he has rammed through the box.
But as I keep saying, this is not a Vegas act. This is real.
And he will never put her in danger again.
I tighten my grip.
“You’re right,” I tell him. “She won’t.”
He sees the look on my face and closes his eyes. He’s braced for a bullet to the brain, or worse. But he still finds the air to beg. “Please don’t kill me.”
“I’m not here to kill you, Preston,” I say.
He opens one eye again. For a moment, hope sparks inside him.
“I’m here to take everything from you,” I say. Then I concentrate. I don’t really remember how I wiped out my drill sergeant’s mind. But I’ve figured out a way so it doesn’t matter. Just like the computer virus I planted in OmniVore’s servers, deleting memory by overwriting it, I’m going to give Preston a few new things to think about.
“What’s the name of your company?”
“What?” He’s baffled. He knows I know the name. But I don’t want the answer. I want him to think of the answer.
There it is, lighting up that corner of his mind. The part that thinks about OmniVore, and all his cool little apps and his software.
As soon as I see it, I send him an explicit memory from a soldier in Iraq who saw his right leg go flying off into the distance, along with the shrapnel from an IED.
Preston screams in shock and horror. He clutches his own leg, as if he can’t believe that it’s still there.
“OmniVore,” I say. “It eats everything. You thought that was clever.”
“What?” he says again. But his pride is wired deeper than that. He goes right back to those memories. Adapting the algorithm. Watching it peel apart data, finding the hidden secrets, the stuff people didn’t even know they were revealing. I see strings of code in his mind, lined up in neat and orderly rows.
I send him another memory. This is what it feels like when your foster father stops using the belt and starts hitting you with a bottle.
He ducks like he’s feeling the blows himself, curling inward from both the betrayal and the hurt.
“OmniVore,” I say again.
He thinks of his company, his computers, his programs.
This is what it feels like when a four-inch piece of jagged metal from a mortar blast buries itself in your abdomen.
He hisses in pain and wets his pants.
“OmniVore.”
This is what it feels like when someone holds your head down in four inches of water and your lungs fill and you pray to God he’ll let go, but he doesn’t let go.
Preston’s eyes go wide and he goes deathly pale and he gasps for breath.
“OmniVore.”
This is what it feels like to have someone choke you to death with the lapels of your own jacket.
He begins crying.
I release him and he collapses onto the deep-pile carpet. He’s got no fight left in him.
I decide to test my work.
“OmniVore,” I say.
Preston’s mind explodes with pain. He yells out, and he shakes like he’s in the grip of an epileptic seizure.
It won’t last forever. But he’s going to have a hell of a time ever touching a computer again without PTSD.
Then, just out of curiosity, I probe around, looking for the answer to the one question that’s still nagging me. It’s not in his memories of Sloan, which is why I had such a hard time finding it before.
And there it is. It seems so obvious in hindsight. Once I dig it out, everything else falls into place.
Now I know what started this whole mess.
I’m almost finished here. But I’ve got one last thing to tell him before I go.
I kneel down next to him and say a single word, loud enough to be heard over his crying:
“Kelsey.”
And at the same time, I let him know what it feels like to have a 9mm slug of copper-jacketed lead tear through your chest, your lung, and your shoulder.
Just like she felt.
He begins screaming, and he doesn’t stop. I’m glad the walls are thick.
“Don’t even think about her. Ever again,” I tell him.
That’s where I leave him.