Sara lets them get back out into the harbor before she turns on me. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I look at her and the two big guys. “Well, for starters, I need a lot of antibiotics.”
Sara is volcanically pissed by the time we get back to the hotel. We took a slight detour to a small medical clinic that one of her bodyguard buddies knew about—he’d delivered an aging rock star there once after a nearly lethal combination of Viagra and cocaine—and I got patched up properly. The doctor, who seemed barely awake the entire time, ripped open the makeshift dressing on the new knife wound and sealed it again with surgical glue. Then he shot me up with what looked like a horse-size syringe.
“What’s in there?” I asked him.
He just gave me a blank look.
There must have been some painkillers in the mix, though, because despite Sara’s anger, I’m feeling pretty good.
She dismisses her friends. They’ve got to get back to the boy band anyway. And she manages to keep her anger bottled up for the long elevator ride up to my room.
Which really makes no difference to me, of course.
“Hey,” I say. “It wasn’t my idea to get kidnapped.”
She glares at me.
“How could you let this happen?” she begins, and continues from there. I give her my best listening face for a while, but then I head over to the bar and fill a glass.
Sara goes silent as I drink. But her thoughts feel like they could peel the skin off my face.
She takes a deep breath, and then boils it all down to the bottom line. “People are getting hurt and getting killed. Aaric is in federal custody. We are supposed to solve this problem. We do not have time for you to play pirate with your new friends on the boat. You are supposed to be better than that.”
Nobody is ever just one thing at any one time. We’re all struggling with multiple thoughts and emotions that set up competing agendas inside us. Our minds can be like a chaotic session of the United Nations, with delegates arguing loudly against each other as they all try to be heard, to have their concerns addressed first.
Right now Sara has clamped a layer of self-control over her anger, which is sitting on top of her fear and her anxiety and her sense of duty and responsibility. But beneath all that, I can feel a sense of worry. And relief. She was frightened when I disappeared, terrified that I might have been picked off by Godwin, and despite everything, she is glad I am back.
That’s probably what tips me over the edge.
“How do you think this ends?” I ask her.
The question stops her for a moment. “What?”
“When we do get Godwin. We’re going to catch up to him. It’s only a matter of time. What do you think happens when we do?”
“We take him back to the States, we turn him over to the feds—”
“Grow up,” I say, as coldly as I can manage. “He has been killing people for years to protect himself and his business. He will not go quietly. At best, we bring him back in a body bag.”
“No,” she says. “That’s what you want, but it doesn’t have to be like that. You can bring him back alive. I have seen what you can do. I know it.”
“And what if I don’t want to?”
“It matters to me.”
“What does that get you?”
“Two things,” I shoot back. “Money. And revenge.”
“And that’s all you want?”
“That’s enough.”
“You are so full of shit. Why don’t you ever do anything to help people? I look at everything I’ve seen you are capable of—and then I think about everything that I know is out there. The number of people who lie. Cheat. Steal. Kill. And get away with it, because nobody can prove it, or nobody knows about it. Except you. You could do something about it.”
I’ve heard variations on this theme before. From Cantrell. Do your duty. God and country. I stopped buying into it a while ago. Still annoys me, though.
“Like what? You tell me, what should I do?”
“Anything,” she snaps. “Anything at all. Step up. Think of all those psychics that say they can find missing people—”
“Frauds.”
“—but you’re not. You could do that. You could give them answers. Closure.”
“You think it’s that easy?” I shoot back at her, really close to actually losing it now. “You think you have any idea what it’s like?”
“Enlighten me,” she snaps.
I take a second. And then I decide, what the hell, and I give her one small crumb of the truth.
“It’s getting worse,” I say.
That stops her. “What do you mean?”
“The pain. In my head. Everything I pick up from everyone else. It’s all been getting worse. Everything I do to other people has a cost. I get part of it back. And the cost just keeps going up, every time.”
Until this moment, I didn’t really want to admit it, even to myself. But it’s true. The feedback, the cost of using my talent—it’s all been increasing steadily over the past few months, ever since I went back to work. When I was doing black ops, I could shrug off a mission with a good hard drunk and a few hours’ sleep. A couple of years ago, it took a few pills. Now it takes half the damned bottle and I still feel like I’m going to go into seizures after I spend too long slogging through other people’s minds.
“You have no idea what it’s like,” I tell her. “You think people want answers? Bullshit. They want to hang on to their illusions. Because sometimes that’s all they’ve got. And more importantly, do you think I want to wade into that swamp? Do you have any idea what it’s like, feeling that kind of pain? That kind of hopelessness? I do. And it’s enough to make me want to slit my goddamn wrists. I’ve felt other people’s pain my entire life, and it only ever ends one way. That’s the only closure I’ve ever seen.”
That rocks her back—I can feel the shift, like she’s standing on a boat that’s been hit by a wave—but she’s not giving up. Not yet. “Maybe you can change that,” she insists. “Maybe you are the only one who can change that. You are smart and resourceful. You can figure out five different ways to cripple someone, you can damn well find a way to help them.”
“Yeah? What if I’ve decided that you people deserve whatever you choose?”
She stops. Blinks. I just managed to surprise her. “‘You people’?”
“All of you,” I say, my voice much rougher than I expected. “Every one of you. I used to think you just didn’t see it. The times you hurt each other, lied to each other, betrayed each other. Without a second thought. I used to think you just didn’t know. But then it kept happening. I saw it over and over and over.”
I did. I can’t put it all into words, but over the years I saw it all. And not just the shit in the war zones or on the secret missions. This was years before Cantrell and the CIA found me.
I am talking about the stupid, small, everyday crimes I saw before I was eleven. Husbands and wives lying to each other like a second language. The guy at the cash register swiping twenties from the drawer. His boss, shaving hours off his time card every week. Foster parents preying on the children they were paid to raise. Dull-eyed policemen too bored and too lazy to do more than take a report and ignore the facts right in front of them.
“I learned a long time ago,” I tell her. “This is the way you want to be. It’s not that you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s that
you just don’t give a damn.”
“No. You don’t get to say that,” she says. “Not everyone is like that. There are good people out there—genuinely good people.”
I see a list forming. Her grandmother, her mother and father, a few brave cops she’s known, and Aaric Stack. Of course. Her personal saints.
I am tempted to start picking through her head for their flaws. I could tell her some of the thoughts I fished out of Stack’s mind. Just to win the argument.
But some measure of sanity stops me. I am not that big a bastard.
I take a deep breath. “Maybe you’re right,” I say. “Maybe I just haven’t been hanging out with the right crowd my entire life.”
She flares with anger. “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t try to laugh this off. You don’t get to write off the entire world. You’ve got a gift. You can do more than just hurt people.”
I shrug. “What can I say? It’s what I’m good at.”
“You’re wrong,” she says simply. “I refuse to believe that.”
She has such faith. She really is such a good person.
So that’s what I decide to use against her, of course.
“You called yourself a sheepdog before,” I remind her. “That’s how you think of yourself. I know. So tell me: What happens to the sheep after you guard them?”
“What?” Her head is filled with cartoon pictures for a moment. I’ve thrown her off track, and for some reason, it’s caused her to think of those old Looney Tunes episodes where the wolf and the sheepdog work together.
“Sheep get slaughtered,” I remind her. “They get turned into meat and leather and sold.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“We’re all just meat, in the end. We’re only worth what anyone is willing to pay for us.”
She looks at me with something like horror running through her mind.
That is exactly the moment she gives up on me.
She doesn’t say anything out loud, but I catch the blistering exhaust of her frustration as she leaves the room, slamming the door behind her.
I stand there for a moment and finish my drink.
That was harder than I thought it would be.
I walk over to the closet and get my bag. It takes only a few minutes to pack.
I pass by Sara’s room as I leave. I can still feel her anger and frustration, all the way to the elevator.
Twenty stories straight down, and I’m in a taxi to the airport.
23
That’s My Other Superpower
Traveling to Laos from Hong Kong is relatively easy, but hardly luxurious. For starters, I don’t have access to Stack’s chartered Gulfstream anymore. Which means I fly commercial, and I learn firsthand that despite the stereotypical—and probably racist—assumptions people make about the Buddha-like calm of people from the Far East, I can tell you that it’s almost as bad as dealing with an airport full of angry Americans.
I wind up on an ancient but spotlessly clean turboprop out of Luang Prabang after connecting through Bangkok. That’s going to get me as close as possible to my destination.
I check my watch, and figure that Sara has gotten my email by now. Basically, I said thanks for the laughs and I quit. I would have sent a text, but that’s pushing the envelope, even for me. With any luck, she’ll stay in Hong Kong while she figures out her next move.
And I can finish this without putting her in any more danger.
Because I didn’t just swap bad jokes and war stories with my pirate buddies on the boat, as Sara called them. I also took all that time to dredge through their memories to find out how they were hired, and everything they knew about Godwin.
I learned that Nolan has actually seen him face-to-face. He’s been doing jobs for Godwin for a couple of years now, ever since they first met in a hot and damp bar near Godwin’s regular base of operations.
A bar in Laos.
I have to admit: Laos is a pretty genius hideout for someone like him. It’s remote and incredibly poor and wildly corrupt. Any government interest is easily diverted with a few bribes—pocket change for Godwin. There’s also the fact that the U.S. dropped about 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during the Vietnam War—or one bomb load every eight minutes, more than all the explosives dropped in World War II. Those little gifts just keep on giving, with the unexploded leftovers maiming kids who go out in the fields looking for scrap metal. That means Americans aren’t always seen as helpful and friendly visitors, so there’s very little in the way of official cooperation with international law enforcement. And finally, the country borders China, which tends to be fairly protective of its own backyard. As long as Godwin does his business on the other side of the planet, in Europe and the U.S., and doesn’t piss off the Chinese, he’s safe there.
Nolan went back to Godwin’s bar all the time to get paid and beg for more work from Godwin. The directions were practically etched in his memory.
Which led me to one of those moral dilemmas that I am so deeply uncomfortable with. I knew that if I told Sara about Laos and Godwin, she’d want to saddle up and ride after him again, like we’ve been doing all the way across the planet. She is tough and she is smart and she is determined to save her boss’s narrow ass from the federal government by bringing back the bad guy, roped up and thrown over the back of her horse.
I wasn’t exactly comfortable with that, but I had enough faith in her abilities and mine to accept the risk. She’s a professional. I wasn’t about to insult her by saying she’s not up to the job. Even after we started sleeping together, I trusted her to have my back, and to watch her own. Because I’m a gentleman like that.
Then we met Zhang San. And that changed everything.
Zhang—despite his charming smile—is far too dangerous for Sara. Hell, he’s probably too dangerous for me. He’s at least as capable as I am, if not more. He nearly put us both into a Chinese prison just to get us out of the way. If we go up against him again, there is almost no way that Sara doesn’t get hurt.
And when I looked into her mind and saw she was actually concerned about me—that she was worried about me when I went missing—I decided that I couldn’t live with that chance, even if she could.
I had to find a way to get away from Zhang, and from Sara, and make my run at Godwin directly. Just me. Nobody else.
So I did what I do best: I said some cruel and stupid things, and I pushed away someone who was trying to stay close to me.
Aside from reading minds, that’s my other superpower.
The Lao Airlines flight attendant interrupts my wallowing in self-pity. She tells us we’re about to begin our descent. She goes through the entire routine in four different languages and probably makes less per hour than a kid working a paper route back in the States.
Luang Prabang Airport is modern glass and steel surrounded by scrubby green fields and trees. The old airport was replaced a couple of years back, and the new one looks as if it could have been imported in shrink-wrap from any midsize city in the American heartland. There are plastic chairs and digital reader boards and air conditioning.
As soon as I am off the plane, I begin scanning the minds of everyone within a hundred yards. I get nothing but the usual weariness and anxiety and frustration of people on the move as I pay the equivalent of twenty bucks for my entrance visa. But I don’t let down my guard. Even if I think I’ve taken Godwin by surprise coming here, I’ve learned that he’s better at tracking me than I am at hunting him. I stay on full alert, like I am walking through a combat zone.
I stop and put the case with Sara’s laptop into a rental locker at the airport. It has all of Godwin’s secrets, including the backup code for Downvote. I do not want Godwin to get it back if he does manage to get me.
When I leave the chilled air and step into the thick humidity outside, I don’t get so much as a glimmer of suspicion. Nobody is looking at me. The only attention I draw is from people who are happy to see a tourist—any tourist—willing t
o spend money.
It’s not until I get out of my cab at my hotel that I pick up the sniper.
It’s a small hotel on the street near the Dara Market, about as close as this place comes to a bustling city center. People are stacked around me. A group of children crowd in close, several of them with missing limbs: nubs and stubs of arms and legs, souvenirs of their attempts to salvage scrap metal from the unexploded ordnance out there. I feel their need like quicksand around me. What I’ve got in my pockets is more than any of them will see in a year. I am too tired to worry about keeping them in a cycle of dependency or damaging their natural initiative. I hand out all the cash I’ve got, which, of course, only brings more kids.
Then I pick up the telltale prickle on the back of my neck that means someone has locked on to me.
It’s such an amateurish move that I’m almost embarrassed for Godwin. I can sense eyes on me and backtrack all the way into the brain of the person holding the rifle. This is one of the first tricks I ever learned when the CIA helped me weaponize my talent.
I step behind a pillar—the kids follow, of course—and feel the sniper lose the shot. I’m about to hack my way into his mind and plant something that will wreck him with nightmares for years when my phone rings.
I recognize the fake electronic voice immediately. This, at least, is impressive. I ditched my old phone and picked up a new burner at the airport. He got the new number in record time.
“Tell me, how did you know which hotel I’d pick? I didn’t make a reservation.”
“I didn’t,” he says. “I have men at each of the tourist traps. I figured one of them would spot you.”
“You didn’t have to go to all that trouble.”
“No trouble,” he says. “I have plenty of help here. They were looking for something to do. Best to keep them occupied.”
Something finally occurs to me. “How did you know I was coming?”
“I sent Nolan after you. He knows where I am. I assumed you’d know too. I told you, John. I’ve thought about you.”
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