Zero Sum Game

Chapter 16

As we drove, Tresting directed Finch to dial his superiors on the burner phone and put them on speaker. “I’ll do the talking,” the PI instructed, in a tone that brooked no argument.

The voice that emanated from the mobile was a calm, charismatic basso, and I recognized it immediately as Finch’s boss from the sack of Courtney’s place. “May I ask with whom I am speaking?” the voice inquired.

“No, you may not,” said Tresting, and he went on to give detailed directions to a picnic area in Griffith Park.

“It may take me some time to get there,” the man warned.

“Shame,” said Tresting, “seeing as we’ll only wait half an hour. See you soon.” He nodded at me, and I reached over and hit the button to end the call. We were turning onto the streets adjacent to the park by then, and Tresting pulled off and swung into a parking area. “Let’s walk from here.”

He led the way up a winding road into the park. Cheerful hikers and joggers passed us frequently, half of them with energetic dogs and most of them in the dreadfully fashionable athletic gear that seemed to be the uniform of choice for active Southern Californians. Our current state got a few double-takes, particularly Finch’s obvious nosebleed, but like true Angelenos, they all decided to mind their own business.

We reached a large picnic area with red stone tables, sparsely populated with only the odd family fighting over snacks and sandwiches. Tresting led the way to a table a ways away from anyone else and gestured for us to sit. Finch sat on the bench; I perched on the table to face the opposite way as Tresting and look out over their heads to scan the wooded area behind the picnic area, my hand under my jacket. The icepick in my head hadn’t gone away, but I forcefully ignored it.

About twenty minutes after we arrived, Finch cleared his throat. “There he is.”

I tried to keep my gaze as wide as possible while I turned to catch the guy in my peripheral vision. I wouldn’t have recognized him right away from my glimpse at Polk’s house—he had dressed casually in jeans and a sweatshirt this time, and didn’t seem at all out of place in the park. Combined with his appearance as a fifty-ish clean-cut white guy, in good shape but not attractive enough to turn anyone’s head, he was in all ways most emphatically someone who would go entirely unnoticed.

He kept his hands out of his pockets and slightly away from his body as he approached. Smart man. Tresting stood up as he reached the table.

“Mr. Tresting,” the man said in greeting.

I glanced sharply at Tresting, but he was already nodding to concede the name. “Thought you wouldn’t have trouble with that.”

“Your identity was easy enough to deduce. Your associate, however…” He extended a hand to me. “May I ask whom I have the pleasure of addressing?”

I snorted. “You can ask. And who are you?”

“Call me Steve.”

At least he was obvious about it being an alias. I jerked my head toward Tresting. “So, Steve. Now that you know who he is, are you going to make trouble for Arthur here?”

“Well, I suppose that depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether the two of you are determined to make trouble for me.” He sat, laying his hands against the top of the picnic table deliberately—and over-dramatically, in my opinion. “Let me be frank. I could not care less about any police trouble in which you two have ensnared yourselves. It would frankly be a waste of my time to become bogged down with aiding local law enforcement in their Gordian investigative practices; that is quite beneath my interest. I do, however, very much care about any involvement you may have with the organization known as Pithica.”

“Why?” said Tresting.

“Before I can answer that question, I must know how deeply you are involved with their agents.”

Tresting narrowed his eyes. “All right,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I got a niggly feeling you’re going to know all of this within the hour anyway, so I might as well tell you. I got hired by Dr. Leena Kingsley to look into her husband’s death. Fell down the rabbit hole, and here I am.”

Steve turned to me. “And you?”

“I’m helping him,” I said.

“I’m afraid that’s not good enough.”

“She’s the one who said she would call Dawna Polk,” said Finch; through his bloody nose her name sounded more like “dodda po.” “She used her to threaten me, Boss. She knows.”

Knows what?

“I did glean something of the sort from your message,” Steve said to Finch. He turned to fix his attention on me in a way that made me want to turn and run. After shooting him first. “So. Either you are one of Pithica’s agents, or you truly have no idea what you are dealing with.”

I felt Tresting’s eyes shift to me. “I’m not working for Pithica,” I said, more for Tresting’s benefit than for our agency friends. “As a matter of fact, they tried to kill me.”

“Yet you somehow not only know the woman calling herself Dawna Polk, but know that she is dangerous—a combination of knowledge that makes you very, very…special.”

“Why?”

The man calling himself Steve hesitated very deliberately. I was starting to think that he practiced being deliberate in front of a mirror. “Because people who speak with Dawna Polk see only what she wishes them to.”

“Yeah, well, clearly I’m not the only one who figured it out. You and your little band seem to know exactly what her deal is.”

“Because I have not spoken to her.”

The light breeze in the park suddenly felt very cold.

“Neither has Mr. Finch,” Steve continued. “Neither, I pray to God, has anyone else who works with us, because if they have, we are already lost.”

“You don’t trust your own people?” I asked, my mouth dry.

“It is not a matter of trust,” he said. “Dawna Polk is…for lack of a better word, she is what one might call a telepath.”

There was a moment of silence. Then I snorted out a laugh. “You’re putting me on.”

“I assure you I am not.”

“That’s ridiculous. Telepathy doesn’t exist,” I informed him.

“Please explain,” said Tresting.

Steve opened his mouth, and the pounding in my head resurged—this time along with a visceral, shriveling dread. More than anything else in the world, I wanted him not to explain. I wanted to mock him and call him an idiot, because what he was saying didn’t make sense; it couldn’t make sense—my body tensed. I had to keep myself from launching over the table and knocking him flat before he could speak, or, failing that, putting my hands over my ears and humming very loudly, because I didn’t want to know—

“Some people are born into this world with certain talents,” said Steve, his baritone as calm and deliberate as ever. “People who are…one might call them emotional geniuses. Charismatic brilliance on the furthest edge of the bell curve. Under normal circumstances, some of them become the most successful of businessmen. Others are con artists. Others movie stars or cult leaders or the greatest politicians of their time. Believe me when I say that only a handful of people in a generation have this capacity on the level of which I am speaking.”

No. I wasn’t going to take this seriously. I didn’t care how emotionally adept someone was; she was still human. To assign her supernatural mental powers was an impossible fancy—

“Enter the wonders of technology,” Steve continued. “Someone, somewhere, found a way of refining this ability and sharpening it. We don’t know how. Before, a person like Dawna Polk might have had the potential to lead nations and inspire millions. Instead, she has been altered. Enhanced. She can observe the slightest movement of your face, take in the smallest quickening of your breath, phrase a question in exactly the right way, and whether she reads it from the twitch of your eyebrow or you voluntarily tell her yourself, she will know exactly what you are thinking. More than that, whatever ideas she plants in your brain, you will walk confidently into the world determined that they are your own. She is, for all intents and purposes, a telepath, capable of taking any information you know and molding you to her will in whatever ways she desires, and as far as we know, her abilities are absolute and have no defense.”

Absurd, I told myself, trying to ignore the cold trickle of sweat on the back of my neck. This was absurd. I took in a breath to deny his story categorically, to announce my complete disbelief in anything so fantastical—but then something in the back of my brain clicked, so suddenly it jarred me, and the world shifted, maybe flipping upside down or maybe clarifying instantly to an impossible sharpness…

I had no idea what I knew or why, but some spark deep in my memory, perhaps in the subconscious web of interrelated knowledge we call instinct, had connected and fit together and God help me but I believed him. More than believed him: I knew with freezing certainty that he was right.

Dawna Polk was a fucking psychic.

Fuck.

“That is Pithica,” our narrator concluded. “They employ other agents as well, of course, who have been so indoctrinated by those with these mental powers that they are the most fanatical of followers, but people like Dawna Polk are at the heart of what they do. Our organization opposes them. I tell you this because you need some basic understanding of our dilemma here.”

“What dilemma?” said Tresting.

Steve spread his fingers, pressing against the stone table top. “The only reason we are able to exist is that Pithica does not know that we do. They cannot know. We have only managed as much as we have against them by taking swift and thorough measures against anyone who might reveal us to them.”

Oh, shit. I straightened where I sat, every nerve ending firing to alert status.

“You, either as targets of Pithica or as people who have…interacted…with them—” Steve’s mouth twisted on that word—“are an obvious liability to us, now that you know of our existence.”

His calm tone hadn’t changed. In fact, he spoke like someone who did not care one whit that we had chosen this meeting and this location, someone who didn’t even care if we walked away from the park today, because no matter where we went, dispensing with the danger we posed would be as trivial as flicking an annoying fly from his arm.

My hand tightened on my weapon beneath my coat, and Tresting shifted beside me, rebalancing himself on the grass. If it came to a fight here and now, I would win, but killing Steve would mean nothing. Who else from their organization was here? How far could they reach?

“However,” Steve continued, turning to focus on me alone, “It is also of utmost interest to us how you managed to walk away from Dawna Polk with the knowledge that she was something other than what she presented. That is…astounding, in a word. Almost unbelievable. It would be a great asset to our task if we could discover how you were capable of such a thing.” He leaned forward on his elbows, pressing his fingers together and addressing me over them. “If you will agree to cooperate with us fully, in all ways, we will help you, along with Mr. Tresting and anyone else who has been involved in this with you, to disappear and start a new life elsewhere.”

“Strong-arming our intel, then? No quid pro quo?” I spoke more lightly than I felt. “What if we don’t want to enter your demented witness protection program?”

“Please believe me when I say that if either of you sees Dawna Polk again, you will give us away to her. Knowing that, what would you have us do?” He spread his hands, as if to say, sorry, but there you go. “The offer to help you disappear is an exceedingly generous one. You will have to be removed entirely from civilization, and be overseen by some of our own people on a constant basis to ensure you will never attempt to contact Pithica on some embedded suggestion from them. It will be an unspeakable consumption of our resources, and is not generally an opportunity we extend. I strongly suggest you take it.”

“You usually just kill people, huh,” said Tresting. He sounded offhand about it, but the words crackled at the edges, and I was getting to know him well enough to hear the outrage under his casual tone.

“We do not take it lightly. Ever.” Steve’s face tightened, his jaw bunching. “We exist in subterfuge and obscurity. We only act when our hand is forced.”

“Real gentlemen,” said Tresting.

Steve folded his hands on the table. “You will tell us what you know about Pithica, and you will disappear,” he informed us, his calm, charismatic tone as ominous as a death knell. “Whether you do either of those things voluntarily or not is your decision, but they both will happen, one way or the other.”

“Wow,” I said. “You and Pithica deserve each other.” I hadn’t moved yet, but the adrenaline was slamming into my brain, shutting away the revelations about Dawna Polk to deal with later and focusing on how to escape our current situation alive. The smartest thing to do might’ve been to accept their offer and play along, discover what we could, and then escape from the imprisonment they were calling protection. But I was a terrible liar—and besides, I didn’t feel good about our chances once we entered their custody.

The next obvious solution was to take out both men and run. But the minute I did, we couldn’t stop running. We’d have to dodge this organization’s crosshairs for the rest of our lives. Could we take Finch and his boss hostage instead, use them to negotiate for getting ourselves off the target list? Unfortunately, I had the distinct feeling their employers had a broad definition of “acceptable losses,” even when it came to their own.

My jaw clenched, and the metal of the Smith & Wesson dug into my palm. There had to be a better option.

Tresting had his head cocked to the side, still seemingly casual. “I’m thinking you’re an international group,” he said to Steve. “Banding together to protect the global power dynamic from Pithica’s influence, or something. Off the grid, not even answerable to the people who set you on this crusade of yours. Am I right?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more about us,” said Steve, still far too calm, “regardless of whether you take our offer. The less you know, the less you would be able to give away. Now, I must have an answer.”

“Well, you see, that’s a problem,” said Tresting, and I felt a surge of good will toward him. Did he have a plan? Maybe this working together thing wouldn’t turn out to be so bad after all.

The man called Steve sighed. “Please don’t make this difficult, Mr. Tresting. Not to be callous, but it’s not even your decision.”

“Oh, I have a problem, too,” I said immediately. “Right here. Problem. You look up ‘problem’ in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of me putting a gun to your head, which is what I’m considering doing in about three seconds.”

“Did I not make myself clear? If you don’t—”

“Oh, you were perfectly clear,” said Tresting. “Perfectly. Only, see, this here’s the problem. Just a little one, but—I got a guy on the outside, who knows everything we know, including about running into Mr. Finch here. If he doesn’t hear from us, bam, it all goes public. Everything, including you gents.”

Steve twitched. “You’re bluffing.”

“Willing to take that chance?” said Tresting.

“If you begin throwing Dawna Polk’s name and face around openly, we will be the least of your problems.” The ominous edge in Steve’s voice had turned darker, more deadly. “Besides, Mr. Finch has been with you since you discovered our involvement. You never had the opportunity—”

“He did make a phone call, Boss,” interrupted Finch with a wince. “And she ID’d me from Courtney Polk’s house. It’s possible they made us there.”

His boss gave Finch a look that promised repercussions would come later and took a deep, steadying breath before moderating his tone. “I told you our offer extends to the people with whom you’ve been working. Believe me, whoever this is, we can find him, too, and he can disappear along with you both—in whichever manner you choose.”

I ignored the very real fear settling in the bottom of my stomach, and decided to follow my other gut feeling, which was telling me to get out of here now. “Points for creepy,” I told the guy whose name wasn’t Steve, pleased with how unconcerned I managed to sound. “We’ll think about helping you, but it’s sure as hell not going to be on those terms. We have your phone number already—don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that,” I mused. “Bye now.”

I glanced at Arthur, but for once we seemed to be in complete agreement. I hopped off the picnic table and we backed slowly away. Finch and his boss watched us go, not moving from the table. Their tranquility was unnerving. It meant they didn’t have to be worried.

We headed onto the winding road. I saw a thick, knobbly stick by the side of the pavement and picked it up, twirling it experimentally. I looked back. Perfect. The picnic area was almost out of sight. Nobody on the path here would find someone tossing a branch that odd, and nobody back there would connect me with it. I twirled it one more time to build up the exact right centripetal acceleration and let it fly. Way back in the picnic area, barely visible now, the butt end of the branch smacked into Finch’s temple and bounced off at just the right angle to whack his boss across the ear. They both collapsed. “Might buy us some time,” I said to Arthur, who was starting to get the freaked out my-window-had-bars-on-it look on his face again.

His eyes went down to my chest, and widened. “Or not.”

I looked down to see the bright pinpoint of a red laser sight dancing there.

Oh, hell.