The Protectors (10 page)

CHAPTER 15

W
hen you’re desperate to feed and water a dehydrated woman in a quiet, semiprivate locale, few places in the world are as accommodating as the United Kingdom. If blindfolded, spun in a circle, and ordered to throw a rock in Scotland, you’ve got about a 75 percent chance of hitting a pub. We found one nearby called Ryries, and settled near the back, surrounded by dark wood and the smell of char-grilled burgers. Lyla downed three glasses of water and inhaled a plate of smoked salmon before she bothered to ask any questions.

She quizzed me about the sleep deprivation first, then the account of how we wound up in Edinburgh. She nodded in the right places, asked the expected follow-ups, but I could tell it was all preamble. What really intrigued Lyla had nothing to do with her.

“So you can read minds?” Her bemused expression stared over the lip of her fourth glass of mineral water.

“Yup.”

“And this is something you felt unnecessary to discuss at St. Moritz?”

“Before I knew you weren’t bat-shit crazy? Yeah, probably safer to keep that stuff to myself.”

“Does the CIA know?”

“Nope. But they were awfully interested to see if I’d ‘evolved.’ Apparently Blaster’s got them all in an uproar.”

She leaned back and shook her head as she stirred the lemon to the bottom of her glass. I felt like I was on the wrong end of an inside joke.

“What?”

“Diego. He always loved the attention,” she said.

“Can he really turn himself into energy?”

She nodded. “He can now be an ass at the speed of light.”

“They told me he was ‘off-world’—made him sound like some sort of galactic voyager.”

“Hardly. He just says that so the Agency won’t bother to look for him. I doubt he’d have much use for space travel.”

“Why?”

“There are no preening nineteen-year-old girls in deep space,” she said with a wry smile.

For a moment I mistook disappointment for jealousy. “You and Diego weren’t . . .”

“Good Lord, no. I’d sooner date the general. It’s just . . . after you left, he was the only person I could talk to. But Carsten . . . his death affected Diego even more than me. He grew cold. Arrogant.”

I raised a single eyebrow.

She laughed. “More arrogant.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t talk him into joining you on your CIA jailbreak. Diego never had much love for being cooped up and told what to do.”

“True, but subtlety has never been one of Diego’s strong points, and my activities require a certain amount of discretion. Mister Sturm-und-Drang can’t sit still long enough to listen to my plans, let alone assist with them.”

“So he still works for the Department of Defense, all by himself ?”

“When he sees fit.”

“I know Diego—he probably thinks you abandoned him like I did,” I said. Felt nice to have some company on Sparky’s hate list.

Lyla shook her head. “Sorry, but only one of us at this table has Diego’s undying contempt, and it’s not me. I check in with him every week, see how he’s doing. We’re the closest thing to . . .” She paused, searching for the right word. “. . . family . . . either of us has.” Her eyes drifted, then refocused on me. “But enough about Diego. You’re stalling. Tell me how you came to read people’s thoughts.”

I ate the last chunk of my burger and made her wait while I chewed.
Exasperated, she flopped against the wooden back of the booth, motioning for me to hurry.

“No dramatic awakening,” I said when I finished. “Wasn’t like the clouds opened and a ray of light shone down.”

Lyla pouted. “Disappointing.”

“It started with a woman in a diner. A sad woman I noticed in another booth. She was complaining about insomnia to her husband. Made me think about the nature of what I do . . . are some people’s consciousness buttons harder to press? Can they get stuck?”

“Interesting. I’ve never considered it.”

“After months of rabid insomnia, I’d imagine that’s
all
you could think about. Anyway, I reached out to her mental button . . . not to press it, just to look. To examine up close. The longer I looked, the closer I got. Eventually, I just popped through to the other side.”

“And you could see what she was thinking?”

“More like hear. Almost impossible to detect at first, but I got better over time. Practice, perfect, you know the drill.”

The waitress brought me a refill and we paused. When the woman walked away, Lyla leaned over the table and spoke in a hush. “Read her mind. What is she thinking?”

“What am I, a Vegas act? I don’t ask you to embrace her and make our meal free, do I? Besides, it’s not like dropping someone. Entering a person’s mind causes pain.”

“To you?”

I nodded. “A lot. Enough that I don’t do it unless I have no alternative.”

“I’m sorry. I did not realize. That must be frustrating.”

The pain wasn’t frustrating. Hell, I was thankful for it. The fact that mind reading required total concentration and personal sacrifice meant the power wasn’t
casual.
I could choose when to use it, and it wouldn’t overwhelm me. Think about it—how much do you really want to know what people think of you? And an even bigger question—would anyone else want to be around you once they knew what you could do?

Lyla’s eyes were full of wonder at the novelty of my ability. But that’s the trick about novelty: it wears off. If she didn’t know about the eye-
splitting pain, eventually she’d be worried I was scanning her brain all the time. Within days, she’d want to be anywhere in the world
but
next to me. And while I looked at her across the booth—the smile, the eyes focused on mine—I was very interested in keeping Lyla next to me.

When the waitress collected my plate and left the bill, I got a small jolt of panic.

Lyla noticed. “What’s wrong?”

“I might actually need you to embrace her for the meal.”

“Are you serious?”

I leafed through the last of my emergency cash. “Not really, but we are dangerously short. I’ve got enough for the bill and maybe a change of clothes for you.”

“This is one of my favorites. You don’t approve?”

“Oh yes, I approve. Not exactly practical, though. I don’t suppose you’ve hidden cash anywhere on your person?”

“I rarely pay for things.”

“Nice,” I said, although my tone wasn’t. “You realize you’ve probably gotten hundreds of people fired by doing that? No, we pay our own way from now on.”

“Since you mentioned ‘from now on,’ what exactly is the plan?”

“We talk to the CIA and get them to call off the dogs.”

“And if they choose not to?”

“We need to be prepared to run. For that, we need real money. Cash. Credit cards are like sending up emergency flares every time we use them.” I scooped up the bill. “Let’s get you some non-goddess clothing, then work on finding a more substantial source of money.”

“Pray tell, where will we find such a thing?”

I winked. “Oh, I know just the place.”

CHAPTER 16

I
don’t have a gambling problem.

Fear of commitment, problems with authority, trust issues, chronic pessimism—those I have tons of. But gambling? No way. The tough part is it took me seven trips to Vegas and about fifty thousand dollars to figure out I didn’t have a problem with gambling. My issue is that you can’t call what goes on in most casinos “gambling.”

Gamble
implies a certain amount of, well, uncertainty—but also fairness. You don’t know what’s going to happen, so you bet against another guy who also doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Wagering on the Super Bowl, playing poker, filling out an NCAA basketball bracket: all examples of the noble practice of gambling.

But when you walk in the door of an establishment with bright lights, no clocks, and an army of slot machines, my friend, you are no longer operating in the realm of uncertainty. The pit boss with the alligator grin knows exactly what I mean. He smiles because every game in the place is rigged. He smiles because he understands human nature. Most of all, he smiles because of the powerful ace he’s got tucked up his sleeve—a little thing called “math”—and math is one mean motherfucker. You might land one or two decent punches, but going toe-to-toe with the odds is a fifteen-round fight, and math never gets tired. Bottom line: the longer you play, the more money you lose.

Which is really what they should call it: “losing.” I have a hunch the marketing people might object:
Hey, honey, let’s grab dinner at the casino and go losing!
But what it lacks in pizzazz, it makes up for in accuracy.

I don’t have a problem with gambling. Legalized losing, however? Pisses me off.

And even though Lyla might look at me like I’m a petulant child when I suggest it, I don’t suffer a big moral dilemma about stealing from a casino.

We barely made it out of the cab before the eye rolling began. “I should have expected this,” Lyla said.

“Don’t start. We need money, and casinos have it. It’s not my fault this is the easiest way to get a few thousand dollars
without
ending anyone’s career.”

We stared across Rutland Street at a beautiful seventeenth-century stone church, steeple piercing blue sky above intricate restored stained-glass windows. A former place of worship, now occupying a spot several rungs lower on the moral ladder.

“Besides, anybody who converts a church into a casino is begging for a karmic enema,” I told her.

I reached down and took her hand in mine, a simple gesture made complex by our history. A sideways glance and raised eyebrow were her only responses.

“What?” I said. “We need to look like tourists, not like we’re doing surveillance on the place.”

Might have been my imagination, but I could have sworn she squeezed a little tighter. For my part, weird as it sounds, just the act of holding her hand made my pulse race and sent a tingle up my vertebrae. Standing on a street corner, praying she enjoyed holding hands as much as I did, hoping she wouldn’t be the first to break the bond—God, I was an overthinking eighth-grader again.

Not to be outdone, my inner cynical bastard ran right over to beat the crap out of the junior-high romantic fantasy—whispering “Kill them all” in Lyla’s voice with every mental punch.

“Not too big, can’t have very much in the way of security personnel,” I said, staring at the Livingston Carmel Casino. “Not like in the States.”

“How do we want to do this? Embrace a dealer, get them to give me some chips?”

I shook my head. “I think it’s probably better you sit this one out.”

“Why, pray tell?”

“How long have you been in the United Kingdom now?”

“I’m not sure, more than a week, perhaps two.”

“If MI5’s been stalking you that long, I’m sure they’ve circulated your file around the country. Most casinos have facial pattern recognition software—analyzes every single person who walks in the door, then runs the file against a red-flag database. Known felons, cheaters, card counters—if any patron comes back as a match, the software forwards an alert to security.”

She scoffed. “The United States government is scared to death of me. I think I can handle a casino security force.”

“I have no doubt. But in this case, your file gets a little more priority than a guy cheating at blackjack. The alert would probably bypass the casino staff entirely—MI5 gets a direct feed and in ten minutes, guys with those goddamn sonic things will be all over the place.”

I felt her hand quake as she shuddered at the memory.

“But I doubt they’ve had time to spread the word on me. They’d have to contact the CIA first, ask for my file. With me on the hunt for you, I doubt Tucker and his boys would have any desire to respond quickly.”

“Tucker?”

“Yeah. New guy. Met him in Colorado. Douchebag.”

“I hate that word.”

“Colorado?”

She squeezed my hand for real. “Very funny.”

I winced. “Yeah, well, withhold judgment until you meet him.”

The side doors of the church now served as the casino’s main entrance, and they banged open while we were talking. A young couple staggered out onto the sidewalk—three sheets to the wind before two in the afternoon. His pale, bald head shone in the rare Scottish sunshine. Even from across the street I could see the large gap between his two front teeth in the center of a drunken smile. With his soccer jersey and ripped jeans, he looked like a stereotypical soccer hooligan, ready to start a drunken brawl at the tiniest offense. The only potential problem with brawling would be his size—he was five foot six on his tiptoes,
and scrappy only gets you so far when you weigh a buck-fifty. His companion was a pretty brunette, with a too-tight shirt and too-short skirt, both garments competing to see which could reveal more skin. The inebriated couple stumbled to the cab stand in front of the casino.

“Then I suppose it is up to you,” Lyla said. “Drop the entire place once you’re through the doors?”

“Nah. Only thing I’d be able to do is grab chips from the tables. Actual cash is locked behind cashier windows. Can’t shut everybody down unless I have keys to the back room or know the passcodes, if they’ve got digital locks on everything. And I really don’t want to be frisking unconscious security guards for twenty minutes, waiting for the police or MI5 to show up. No, we have to be more subtle than that . . .”

A black cab with fat fenders and suicide doors pulled up to the taxi stand, looking like it was driven right out of the 1940s. The couple commenced drunken negotiations with the driver, but only managed to send the cab speeding away without them, the hooligan yelling “Fuck you, ponce!” in its wake.

“Such a gentleman,” Lyla noted.

“You’re jealous of her. I understand.”

The brunette yanked on her companion’s arm, pulling him back onto the curb. “It’s your fault, Nathan! You’re pissed . . . ,” she started, and before she could finish, the hooligan backhanded her straight across the face, hard enough for me to hear the smack from the other side of the street.

“Fuck off, Charlotte! Don’t talk back!” He screamed the words as she recoiled from the blow, cradling her face in her hands. He cocked his other arm to hit her again, and even as my own anger overwhelmed the shock of casual violence, Lyla dropped my hand and launched off the curb.

She stalked directly toward the couple, intent on ending the assault her way. I knew that Nathan had a very real chance of finishing the day in a hospital bed, with self-inflicted wounds. And that’s if he was lucky, because Lyla could do worse.

I caught up to her only a few feet before she reached them. The hooligan hadn’t followed through on the second punch, but he looked
angry enough to launch another strike at any moment. For the second time in as many days, I grabbed Lyla by the crook of her elbow and spun her away.

“Waitwaitwait . . . just a second. Don’t do anything yet,” I begged her. An idea ricocheted around in my brain, formed halfway along my panicked street crossing.

Her eyes were on fire and she spat the words. “That man is going to
pay
!”

“I know, I know! I couldn’t agree more . . . but we can
use
him. I’ve got an idea.”

Her body faced me, but her head twisted back toward the couple—burning death rays at the hooligan. He shoved the brunette and returned to the cab stand, fuming.

“Do you remember the UN party at Ellis Island? When we wanted privacy?”

If she heard my words, she gave no indication. She was much more intent on the brawling couple, and probably imagining what manner of horrors she could inflict upon Nathan.

“Lyla!”
I shook her by the shoulders. “Do you remember Ellis Island? When we needed a distraction?”

She turned back and her face lost the scowl. The memory came to her, and it took only seconds for the smile to start, but it was her scary smile—the one Godzilla gives right before he descends on Tokyo like a fat guy at a dinner buffet.

“Rocky Balboa?” she said.

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” I replied.