Killfile (17 page)

The phone rings for
a while before someone picks up. “Cactus Bar and Grill.”

I rack my brain, trying to remember the proper countersign. “What time is happy hour?”

The guy on the other end sounds bored. “Happy hour is all day, every day.”

“24-7,” I say. “And is it still ladies' night every night?”

That should be the call-and-response to let the operator know I'm legit, even if it is a couple of years out of date.

“That's right,” he says. “Anything else I can do for you?”

“Is Nick there?”

Long pause. “Who wants to know?

“I need to leave a message for Nick.”

Another long pause. “Nobody by that name here.”

I've been out of the loop for a while, but I can't believe Cantrell would shut down all his old listening posts. He might not be officially CIA anymore, but he's still plugged in deep.

“He was a regular there. I need to get in touch with him. Can you take my number, at least? Just in case he comes in.”

“I told you. There's no Nick here. Sorry.”

“If Nick comes in, let him know I called.”

“Whatever, man.”

He hangs up, and I get the impression I annoyed a perfectly normal bartender for no good reason.

I wait for five minutes, then another ten. Then another ten. Kelsey waits, not sure what I'm doing, but not willing to disturb me.

I'm just about to give up and call some other old numbers when the phone rings.

I hesitate a moment. Then I curse myself for waiting. If you've decided to do something, even if it's hard, you do it. Waiting around doesn't make the choice any easier.

I pick up the phone and hear the voice of the man who taught me that.

“You must be desperate,” Cantrell says. “Nobody's called the Cactus in a long time.”

“Well, you didn't send me a new decoder ring this year.”

He laughs. “That's what happens when you quit the official Captain Midnight club, kid. You gotta pay the dues if you want to remain a junior birdman. How's things going?”

I suspect he already knows what's going on, but I give him a brief, edited version anyway. The job, getting burned, and now being tracked with a kill order on my head.

“Sounds like you got a problem,” Cantrell says.

“Who's looking out for Preston? As soon as my name came up, they told him to terminate me. What the hell is he into?”

Cantrell laughs again. “You asking me?”

“You always had all the answers.”

“So what makes you think I'm going to give them to you? We already covered this. You quit.”

“Fine,” I say. “Nice talking to you. I'll see you around.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there. No need to go sulk in your room yet, princess. I might be able to help you out.”

“I'll survive on my own. I'm pretty good at that, remember?”

“I'm not so sure anymore,” Cantrell says. He drops the down-home glaze, and his voice becomes clinical and cold. “You've got no money, no weapons, no base of operations, and no way to get any of that back without exposure. You're dragging a civilian around. Even with your talents and training, this story only ends with you on an autopsy table. You've fucked the dog pretty good here, John. Honestly, I trained you better than this.”

That stings. I'm surprised—and annoyed—by how much I still want Cantrell to think well of me.

“Why do I get the feeling you knew all this before I ever picked up the phone?”

I can hear the smile in Cantrell's voice when he answers. At least I redeemed myself a little bit with that question.

“Well, I thought you might get in touch. Preston asked his friends to check you out. I might not be on the official payroll anymore, but they still come to me when one of my kids is out there causing trouble.”

That makes sense. Anyone who wanted information on me would go straight to Cantrell. Which means he's had plenty of time to think about my problems.

“See, your mistake was underestimating your target. You thought your bullshit cover story would hold up. But you weren't expecting someone with real muscle to start looking at it. People with access to classified files. Like your personnel records.”

That narrows it down. There are a couple of black-ops agencies with that kind of clearance. But only one that would have the information available that quickly, just sitting on the other end of a search query.

“You're telling me Preston is working for the CIA?”

Cantrell laughs at the tone in my voice. “Not like it's an exclusive club. They hired you, didn't they? Anyway, when those people found out who you were, they immediately gave him the order to drop you because they don't want you peeking inside his head. Too many secrets in there. Lots of stuff they don't want out in the world.”

“Like what?”

“Come on, son. That's classified.”

“They didn't tell you, did they?”

He laughs. “That's not considered part of my operational area these days. But let me run a little hypothetical past you. You know the CIA has its own venture capital arm, right? Investing in high-tech companies for the good of the nation and all that?”

“Sure.” Everyone who reads
Forbes
knows that. It's called In-Q-Tel.

“Right. The guys you're up against, they're like the quiet version of that. The one that doesn't put out press releases. They're the ones backing Preston and OmniVore.”

“Yeah, but everybody knows the CIA invests in these kind of companies. It's not a secret. Why would they suddenly start dropping kill orders?”

Cantrell makes a tsking noise, like this should be obvious. “Well, John, why do you think? You've already seen what data mining can do if it's turned against you. Preston's got access to every fact in the public record about you. He had your bank account numbers, your address, your mortgage, your passwords, everything, in just a couple hours. What does that tell you?”

I feel like I'm back in training. But I answer anyway. “That he's inside every one of OmniVore's clients. He built backdoors into all of their data.”

“Pretty good guess,” Cantrell says. “Now, do you think the CIA might have some interest in the hidden data of every major
corporation that's hired OmniVore? You think they might have some use for searching through every financial transaction a bank makes? Every stock sale that goes through a major brokerage? Being able to trace every credit-card purchase of any customer they want, anywhere they go, anytime? Searching through the flight records of every major airline to find a particular passenger? Every email you've ever written, every dick pic you sent your girlfriend, every drug you've ever been prescribed—”

“I get it, I get it,” I say. I'm not a complete amateur, the last twenty-four hours notwithstanding. “The CIA can finally compete with the NSA, using America's most trusted brand names to do the spying for them.”

“Right,” he says, and to my shame, I feel like I just got an A from the teacher. “So you can see how they might be a little leery about having someone like you—a free agent, nobody watching you anymore, totally outside the chain of command—knowing all the same secrets that Preston knows. You can probably imagine the shitstorm that the Agency would have to endure if any of this got out. People are already paranoid enough about their privacy settings on Facebook. Imagine how the Fortune 500 would feel if they discovered that the company they hired to protect their data was actually sluicing everything over to the CIA? The blood would be knee-deep in the streets in Washington. Hell, someone might even have to quit and go get a high-paying job as a lobbyist. Much easier to have him kill you. Which is one reason they've got a squad of heavy hitters following that boy everywhere he goes.”

“But they didn't tell him everything about me,” I say. “Preston's men had no idea what they were up against.”

“Maybe they thought he didn't need to know. You're still considered a pretty big national secret yourself.”

“Not as valuable as Preston, apparently.”

“I wouldn't say that,” Cantrell says, and lets it hang there.

And here it is. Cantrell is not on the line with me out of charity. There's always a motive. Nothing's free.

“Something tells me you're going to offer me a solution here.”

“Really? You must be psychic.”

God, I am getting tired of that joke. “I've heard you pitch before. I know the rhythms.”

“You're right. I can make all your problems go away.”

“How?”

“Come back in.”

I'm actually stunned into silence. Times like this, I wish my talent worked over the phone.

“You want me to work for you again?”

“And America. Motherhood. Apple pie. The USA and Chevrolet. Truth and Justice. All the good stuff. We invested a lot into you, John. As much as it pains me to say it, you were one of our best. We'd take you back.”

“And my problems with Preston?”

“Disappear,” Cantrell says.

“You have got to be kidding. You just told me the Agency wants me dead.”

“There are wheels within wheels, John, and my father's house has many rooms,” Cantrell says. “There are always a shitload of competing agendas. You know that. Someone panicked. Made a bad decision. But we can rectify that now. After all, you'll be on the right side again. Nobody would worry about you running around with their secrets once you're back inside the fence.”

He sounds serious. For a moment, it's tempting. There's a lot to be said for having the government on your side. It's like having a
big brother to beat up all the bullies in your neighborhood—except he's armed with nuclear weapons and billions of dollars. It's certainly working out pretty well for Preston right now.

There's only one bit of sand in the gears. Kelsey.

“What about the civilian?” I ask.

“What about her?”

“Can you guarantee her safety?”

Kelsey's been listening to my half of the conversation the whole time, but now her attention sharpens on me like a needle.

“She must be a looker.”

I wait.

“Negotiable,” he finally says.

“Not good enough.”

“Whoa, a looker and good in bed too. If she cooks, marry her.”

“I'm serious.”

“What do you want from me? You're talking about some big secrets here. And she's not part of the family. I'm telling you she's got a better chance of surviving if you're inside the tent than if you're outside pissing in. That's the best you're going to get.”

I suspect he's right. Cantrell never lied to me—depending on how you define a lie, of course. This seems like the best deal I'm likely to get.

Not so great for Kelsey, admittedly.

“Son, you're up shit creek and I'm driving the honey wagon,” Cantrell says when I don't answer. “You going to jump aboard or not?”

Kelsey is still looking at me. Cantrell waits.

For a long moment, I don't have an answer for either of them.

“Let me get back to you,” I say.

“You and your goddamn conscience. This is a limited-time offer. You know that.”

“I know. Twenty-four hours. I'll call back at this number.”

Cantrell sighs. “If that's what your pride requires. Don't wait too long.”

An ugly little suspicion occurs to me. Before I can stop myself, I open my mouth and let it out.

“You know, I have to wonder. All of this seems almost designed to get me out of the private sector and back into government work. My client flakes out on me, Preston steals everything I own and puts a price on my head. It's like someone's cutting off all my alternatives. Then I call you, and you magically have a job offer waiting.”

A long pause. “You got a question for me, John?”

“These people you talk about behind Preston—any of them happen to sit in your chair? Did you set me up, Cantrell?”

That brings another laugh. It even sounds genuine. “No,” he says. “You give me too much credit. No way I could have planned this. I'm just improvising here, trying to find the silver lining in this clusterfuck for all of us.”

Then he pauses.

“But, son, even if I did, do you think I'd ever be stupid enough to admit it?”

He's still chuckling when he hangs up.

Like I said, there are times I wish my talent worked over the phone. Then again, sometimes, it's probably better that it doesn't.

There are some things I don't really want to know.

We leave the mall
via a fire exit—unsurprisingly, the alarm is old and doesn't work—around 6:00
A.M.
, long before the first shift arrives.

I tell Kelsey about Cantrell's offer when we're in the Escalade. She has a right to know just how deep this all goes.

She takes it better than I thought possible when I tell her that the most powerful covert operations agency in the world is after us.

“Eli's working with the CIA? Really?”

I nod. She looks thoughtful, not scared.

“That's weird,” she says. “I thought he stopped doing that a long time ago.”

Proving that you can, in fact, surprise a psychic. That stops me short. “He did what?”

“He used to do some contract work for them.”

“For the CIA? Seriously?”

She nods, like this is obvious. “With their tech division. Signals intelligence. Decrypting communications, creating viral attacks. That kind of thing. You must know the Agency uses a lot of programmers now, right?”

I did, but I had no idea Preston was one of them. “Sloan said he recruited him out of Harvard.”

Kelsey shakes her head. “No. I mean, yes, Eli dropped out. But Everett heard about him through an old contact at the NSA. He hired him from the government. He does that a lot. He says it's good training for the kind of people he needs. It's not something Eli puts on his official résumé, but it was a big point in his career. There's a lot of bleeding-edge programming work being done in the intelligence community these days—”

“And you're just telling me this
now
?”

“It was in the packet I gave you,” she snaps back. “The one you said you didn't need.”

“Hey. Does this seem like an I-told-you-so moment to you?”

She looks away, annoyed.

It occurs to me, not for the first time, that she's handling this differently from most people who've been shot at. Until now, I haven't had the time to examine it. But most people don't respond with anger. Most people go into a mild kind of shock after someone tries to kill them. If they believe the threat is still out there, their top priority is to hide. This is usually followed by at least a month of flinching at loud noises, along with occasional flashes of

.

Not Kelsey, though. She's just pissed. Which means there's something in her life that let her jump past the usual first stages of trauma and get right to the anger.

“Where did you say Sloan hired you from?”

She stops short. “I didn't,” she says, but it jumps into her head. A big building in Maryland. Black-mirror windows, like wraparound sunglasses.

“The NSA?” I say. Christ, is there anyone involved in this who hasn't been a spook?

“I wasn't clandestine operations. I was administrative support.”

There's a

attached to that statement. More than she's telling me. “But it wasn't for lack of trying, was it?”

She shrugs. “I applied for the CIA. I didn't make the cut.”

There's a warning there, like razor wire around her thoughts. She doesn't want to discuss it, and she doesn't want me prying either.

So she starts singing to herself again.

I almost laugh. That's pretty damn smart. And a really effective way to keep me out of her head. I hate that song.

I do my best to block it out for a few more miles. Then she speaks up again.

“This is where you say it's time for me to go home, isn't it?” she says.

I must look surprised, because she laughs. “Doesn't take a mind reader,” she says. “Let me explain why that's a terrible idea.”

I can see her lining up arguments like PowerPoint slides, as if she's about to make a presentation in some midrange hotel conference room.

I try to cut her off before she gets going. “I can still get you back to Sloan,” I say. “This can end right here for you.”

She makes a face.

“You don't really believe that. I cracked your code when you were talking to that guy on the phone, you know. If I go back to my apartment, to my life, how much time do you think I have before they send someone for me?”

She's right. An impressive mind in there. But it doesn't matter. I choose my words carefully. “I believe it's safer than staying with me.”

“Because you're going after Eli now,” she says. “You're not going to take the deal.”

It's better for her if she doesn't know too many details. It will give her a good legal defense if everything goes wrong on my end, and
someone tries to make her pay for what I'm planning to do to Preston. “What makes you say that?”

“I think I know you a little by now. And anyway, I wouldn't, if I were you.”

That makes me smile. “Oh really?”

There's a little A-bomb cloud that goes off when she hears the tone in my voice. “Yeah,” she says flatly. “Really. I close deals for Sloan all the time. And I'd never take an offer like this. You'd be helpless, totally at their mercy. You hand yourself over, and what guarantee do you have they won't just box you up and put you away? None at all. It's like a cow walking into a slaughterhouse, pretending it's still got a choice.”

“I don't have a lot of other options.”

“You really think the same people who want us both dead right now will just take you back, and all is forgiven? What makes you think they won't kill you as soon as you show up for your first day on the job?”

“Because I've worked for them,” I snap back at her. “At the end of the day, the CIA is just another bureaucracy. Nobody gets promoted for holding a grudge. They could give a crap about me. They care about Preston and his secrets. That's all. Remove Preston from the equation, and they no longer have any reason to care what I do.”

She smiles, like I've just fallen into her trap.

“And that's what you're going to do, right?” she says. “You think you've got to go after him, hurt him, or even kill him. That's the only way to end the threat. You think it's all a zero-sum game. Preston pushed you, so you've got to go find him and push him back. Show him you're scarier. That you won't back down. And then he won't back down either. And it just keeps going, back and forth, until one of you gets a bullet in the head. Am I right?”

Sad to say, that was pretty much my plan. I don't confirm or deny it, but she doesn't care. She keeps going.

“That's stupid,” she says. “That's what he expects. He knows how you were trained. He won't even have to send anyone looking for you. He knows you'll go rushing after him, dick first and guns blazing. And as soon as you show up, he's going to have a bunch of guys waiting to shoot you dead.”

I take a little offense at that. “I've beaten worse odds,” I tell her. “You've seen me do it.”

“Stupid,” she says again. “All it takes is one lucky shot. But sure, let's say you do get past all of them. You get to Eli. Then what—you kill him? What good does that do? What do you win?”

“It will be over. And I'll be alive.”

“Alive, but broke, and looking over your shoulder for years, waiting to be arrested for the murder of a Silicon Valley billionaire. Sounds like a real victory party to me,” she says. She lets that sink in for a moment. “Or you could get your life back, and even come out ahead on this job.”

She's got a point. And an idea she's been working on, in the back of her head. But I know this world better than she does.

“There is no job,” I remind her. “Your boss burned me. I've got no client.”

She makes a face, like she can't believe I'm this slow. “So go to work for yourself.”

And it starts to unfold, behind her eyes. I can see almost all of it. But I want to hear it out loud. “Tell me what you mean.”

“Do your job. Don't kick down Eli's door. Be smarter than him. Take the one thing that really matters to him.”

I get it now. “The algorithm.”

“Right,” she says. “Steal it back, just like you were hired to do. And then hold it for ransom.”

“I told you, he didn't steal it from Sloan.”

“Who cares? No matter where he got it, Eli used that source code as the basis for everything he's built. It's the lifeblood of his company. He needs it to find patterns in all the data out there. The algorithm is what makes Cutter work. And without Cutter, he's not valuable anymore. No more clients. No more backing from the CIA. He'd sell his own mother to get it back. Guaranteed.”

I have to admit: I like the idea. It beats the hell out of going directly up against a group of ex–special ops killers.

“You should listen to me,” Kelsey says when she sees me wavering. “This is what I do for a living. I analyze problems and come up with the best solutions. And I'm pretty good at it.”

“So this is what you'd do, even if I wasn't around?” I ask her.

Another face. “Don't be an idiot. I don't stand a chance. But you do. You have the skills and the talent. And I'm going to do everything I can to make sure you win. That means you're stuck with me.”

It could work. But it's still dangerous. She would still be safer hiding out somewhere—maybe in that office Sloan keeps in South Dakota.

Being a gentleman, I give her one more chance to back out.

“You can still go home. Stay safe. You're still breathing.”

“How long do you think that's going to last?” she snaps. “You're not the only one at risk here. I'd appreciate it if you stopped thinking like you are. This is my life too. I'm not about to stand around, chewing my cud, waiting for the bolt to the head.”

For a brief moment, I worry my talent has been working overtime, gently nudging her into making this decision.

And then I shove the thought aside, because as much as I hate to admit it, I'm not sure I can do this alone. With Kelsey's help, the odds move up from “no way in hell” to “better than impossible.”

She's tough and she's smart and her plan's good. I'm not likely to find a better partner.

Even so, the smart money says we both end up dead. But I'll take what I can get. I'm not ready to go quietly into the slaughterhouse either.

“All right,” I say. “We'll do it. Any ideas on how we get the algorithm?”

She knew she was going to persuade me. She never had a doubt. Her smile is brilliant. “I can't do all the work. I mean, you're pretty, but you've got to bring something to the table, Smith.”

I laugh. Then I ask her, “Jesus, how did the Agency ever let you slip away?”

It was meant as a joke. But it brings up the memories she was trying to guard. She starts singing
really loud
in her mind—

—but it's too late.

I see the whole thing, even if it's all in fragments: A man—a senior Agency recruiter—takes Kelsey into a small white room. There's a big-screen monitor on one wall and a desk with two chairs.

I know what happened.

The CIA should have loved her. She's smart. She's attractive and ambitious, and thanks to her father, despite his other failings, she knows how to handle a gun. (They stopped going on those father-daughter hunting trips not long after she found out he'd been cheating on her mom. She told him, “I don't think you and I should be alone in the woods with guns anymore, Dad.”)

But the CIA needs one other thing in its field operatives. It requires a certain flexibility. An ability to look the other way, every now and then, for the greater good. The Agency has been doing its job for a while. It knows that not everyone will be able to stomach some of
the moral compromises necessary for truth, justice, and the American way. It's had its share of whistle-blowers and public scandals, too many books written by people who turned out to be more concerned with their ethics than with secrecy.

The people behind the Agency aren't complete idiots. They learn from their mistakes eventually.

So now the CIA weeds those people out before they get too far inside, before they're exposed to any really damaging intel.

It's come up with a pretty simple test for this: A senior CIA agent takes a recruit and leads her into a dark room with a chair and a desk. Then he hooks her up to a polygraph and asks her if she'd be willing to torture someone.

And then he asks her again while a big-screen TV shows close-up, graphic images—photos and video—of people actually being tortured.

That's what they did to Kelsey. They showed her the movies nobody will admit exist. They showed her the photos that were never released from Abu Ghraib, from grimy cells in Egypt, and black sites in Eastern Europe.

Polygraphs are funny things. Speaking as someone who always knows when another person is lying, I find them crude and flawed. But they're great at measuring when someone is uncomfortable. They detect the increase in perspiration, heart rate, breathing. They detect anxiety. They know when someone cannot tolerate the actual torture and abuse of other human beings.

Even someone who thinks she'd be just fine with torture, on a purely intellectual level, if it was done for the right reasons. If it meant finding a dirty bomb hidden somewhere in an American city, or learning the name of a traitor who planned to assassinate the president.

What Kelsey learned that day, in that tiny room, was that it's almost never for big stakes like that. It's long, ugly, brutal sessions for
the smallest facts, like a prisoner's real name, or an address, or a phone number.

I see it clearly in her memories: Kelsey sat there, watching the images, answering the questions. She knew the polygraph was ticking away. She did her best to be calm. But she couldn't fool it, any more than she could fool herself.