Devil's Bargain (23 page)

He fixed those mild blue eyes on Borden, who had risen to his feet, and nodded. Borden returned the gesture and settled back on the very edge of his chair…and then Simms turned his attention to Jazz.

It was like having all the air sucked out of the room. Like being in the center of the brightest spotlight in the universe, a beam so bright that she felt one instant away from combusting, so bright that there was no hiding in any corner because there were no shadows left, anywhere.

Simms blinked, mild as milk, and settled into a plastic chair that a deputy thumped down on concrete for him on the other side of the glass. He rested his elbows on the table and flicked on the old-fashioned intercom on his side of the barrier.

Borden reached over to turn on the one on their side of the glass.

“Mr. Simms,” Borden said. “Thank you for seeing us, sir. How are you?”

Simms nodded slightly, still staring at Jazz. She no longer felt that appalling rush of—of what? Focus? Intensity?—but she could feel herself shaking from the aftermath. “It’s good to see you again, James,” he said. He had a pleasant, quiet voice, nothing remarkable. A little deeper than she’d expected. “I see you brought Ms. Callender with you.”

“Had to,” Borden said. “There was a letter—”

“Yes, I know,” Simms said. “May I see it? Just flatten it against the glass, if you don’t mind.”

She fumbled it out of the envelope in her pocket, unfolded it and slapped it against the barrier for him to read. He had fussy little reading glasses that he fished out of his jumpsuit pocket and placed far down on his nose. His pale blue eyes moved in short jerks down the page.

“Ah,” he murmured, and removed the glasses as he sat back. “That’s interesting, don’t you think?”

“The part about me getting killed? Yeah. I think it’s pretty damn fascinating,” she said, and folded the letter back into the envelope. “Thanks for agreeing with me.”

He smiled. It looked like a nice, kindly sort of expression. “I like you,” he said. “Why do you think I had them hire you?”

“I don’t understand how a guy who’s behind bars for killing five people has the right to hire me to do anything,” she said. “And furthermore, you don’t pay me, so far as I know.”

“I set up the Cross Society,” Simms said, eyebrows raised. “Where did you imagine that money might have come from? Investments I made, with my own funds. So in a way, you continue to be paid by me, but you’re quite right in legal terms. I haven’t hired you. I have no assets, no rights, no existence beyond these walls, Jasmine. I rely on the friendship and goodwill of others.”

He sounded like the worst kind of con artist, the religious kind, the one bilking Ma and Pa Kettle out of their farm money while diddling little Ellie May out behind the barn. “You don’t get to call me
Jasmine,
” she snapped, “and I’ve got no friendship and no goodwill for you, so let’s cut to the chase. It was a long drive out here, I’m tired, and I got myself pretty well beat up today, so if you don’t mind—”

Simms looked up sharply, and the image she’d been forming of him dissolved under the force of that gaze again. What the hell
was
that? It was like a storm in her head, a white-hot merciless laser boring right through everything she thought, everything she was….

“Do you understand what an eidolon is?” Simms asked, and didn’t wait for her answer, as if he already knew it. “It’s the essence of a thing put into another form. The Greeks thought it a god made flesh, but it doesn’t have to be a god, it can be anything that
acts
as a god. An avatar of power.”

“Eidolon Corporation,” she said. “You named it that.”

“I did,” he admitted. “I hired incredibly smart people to do research. To put some scientific framework around what I already knew to be true. I set the agenda, I directed the research, and I created a monster. A monster which turned on me, as you might have guessed.”

“Fascinating,” she said. “What does that have to do with me?”

He blinked at her. “You mean nobody’s told you?”

“Told me what?”

Simms’s blue eyes took on a liquid shine, something eerie and strange.

“That you are one of the two people that I believe will bring down the beast. Bring down Eidolon, before it’s too late.”

She cocked her head, shot a look from him to Borden and back. “Too late for what?” She was sure she was going to be sorry she’d asked.

She wasn’t wrong.

“Too late to stop the end of life as we know it,” Simms said, as if that made all the sense in the world.

Crazy. This was crazy talk, and she felt trapped in this tiny airless room with Borden and this crazy man across from them. She ached all over and wanted to go home, crawl into bed and forget all of this. Give back the damn money, call it a day—

“How?” she asked.

“Does it matter?” Simms shrugged. “It’s the sort of thing you can’t prove, Jasmine. If it happens, then there are no witnesses to testify. If it doesn’t, well, no one can ever be certain I wasn’t crazy.”

Crazy. Even he had the word in his head—or maybe he’d picked it up out of hers. Maybe he really was some sideshow freak mind reader. “Humor me,” she said.

“Very well.” Simms leaned his elbows on the table on his side of the glass, and the light slid over his pale, thin skin. She could see the cold pulse of blue veins underneath. “I suppose you expect me to say something very movie-of-the-week, the new hot disaster terror in all the tabloids. Ebola, or some such. In fact, it’s much more prosaic than that. War.”

“War won’t destroy life as we know it. It might kill a large number of people, but—”

“Forgive me for my inexact description,” Simms interrupted her, “but I meant the destruction of human civilization. The world, of course, will continue. Damaged, fragile, but certainly not shattered beyond repair. But humans? It will take thousands of years to recover. Or, if there is another catastrophe, never.”

“War,” Jazz repeated flatly. “That’s it? Just war?”

“You forget, Jasmine, we live in a time when killing has become a matter of engineering as much as brute force. We are only a few years from the implementation of machines capable of slaughter on a scale undreamed of fifty years ago, which was a quantum leap forward from the slaughter of fifty years before that. We live in an age of rapid acceleration.” He shrugged again. “I told you, it doesn’t matter. Either it will happen or it won’t, but in any case, it won’t matter to the course of this conversation.”

Borden, next to her, was still and quiet and steady, as if he’d already heard all this. Maybe he had.

“Okay, then,” Jazz said. “Tell me something concrete. Tell me why Lowell Santoro had to take one for your team. That’s what it was, right? The Cross Society decided he was expendable. That’s why Borden had to get me to help.”

“Mr. Santoro’s role is a bit complicated to explain, but I’ll try. In six months, he will be instrumental in the making of a motion picture that changes the course of political campaigns in certain key states. That means that there will be increased funding in those key states to the military suppliers. Those suppliers will develop the weapons that I’m speaking of. And so on.”

Jazz leaned back in her chair, staring at him. “You’re willing to kill a guy over a movie? Why not just kill the movie?”

“I understand the concept of Actors and Leads has been explained to you?”

“For all that I believe in it, yeah.”

“The movie itself cannot be stopped. In every permutation of timeline that I have examined—and I have examined a vast number of them—the movie exists. What changes is the credibility of the movie. The people associated with it. And Santoro is the key to forming that group.” Simms leaned even closer to the glass. His eyes looked almost transparent now, at close range. “Understand me, Jasmine, I would have done it differently if I could have. We researched this for years, growing more and more desperate. Nothing changed. Santoro couldn’t be separated from this project, nor it from him, with anything but lethal force.”

Jazz opened her mouth, but Borden beat her to it. “So you got the opposition to do it for you,” he said. “You manipulated them into killing him.”

Simms didn’t reply. He didn’t even look at Borden, whose voice was low and tight with anger. He seemed fascinated by Jazz’s stare.

“I manipulate everyone, my dear counselor,” he said. “It’s all I have, you know. The power of suggestion, and responsibility. So yes, I did manipulate them. If you’d left well enough alone, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but…” Simms smiled, and there wasn’t anything really kindly about it at all. “But I thought you might do something like this. The odds were low, but definitely present. The others didn’t see it, but I did. And that’s a great pity, you know, because now Jasmine will pay the price. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

He leaned back, eyelids lowering to hood his stare.

“You’re saying—” Borden began.

“I’m saying that you’ve ruined years of work,” Simms said, “and I’m not pleased, James, not pleased. There are ways it can be fixed, but they’ll cost me. I’m not at all looking forward to the work.”

Jazz stared at him for a few seconds of silence, then reached up and pressed the red button. Somewhere, a buzzer went off. She stood up, banging her chair into Borden’s knees, bringing him upright with her.

“What are you doing?” he blurted, frowning. Simms merely looked at her, placid and unmoving, on the other side of the glass.

“Getting the hell out of here,” she said. “I’m sorry, but this is bullshit. This guy is talking about
seeing the future.
Are you getting that, or does he have you so brainwashed you believe everything he says? Because frankly,
Counselor,
you seemed like a smarter guy than that to me.”

She slapped the red button again, impatiently. The buzzer continued to rattle somewhere outside.

Simms said, very quietly, “Don’t be foolish. I knew where to find you, Jasmine. I knew where you would be when you didn’t know you were going there. I know things about you that even your closest friends don’t know. I can recite them to you, but I doubt you’d want Counselor Borden to be privy to—”

She slapped the button again, rounded on him and leaned on the table to put her face close enough to the glass to fog it with her breath. “Save it, asshole, I’m not buying your sideshow crap. You had somebody follow me to the bar. Hell, for all I know, you had somebody switch envelopes on me just now at the police station. It’s all crap, all right? And you’re not going to convince me otherwise—”

“At precisely ten-oh-two tonight,” Simms said, “Flight eight-oh-two, the plane you will be flying back to Kansas City, will suffer an engine failure. There will be two possible outcomes. One, the plane will rapidly lose altitude and crash into a row of suburban tract homes just short of the runway. There will be two survivors, a blond woman named Kelley Walters and a businessman, Lamar Qualls. Kelley will be traveling to visit her sister in Kansas City. Lamar will be visiting the city on business, to sign a contract for a grocery-store supply chain.”

She froze, staring at him. His eyes looked pellucidly clear. Sky blue. If he was lying, he was the best liar she’d ever seen in her life. “Bullshit,” she said. But she wondered if it was. It was too specific, too definite. Liars liked to talk in generalities, not specifics that could be checked and disproved.

“Two,” Simms continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “the pilot will be able to compensate for the loss of the engine and land the plane safely, without incident. There is an eighty-two percent chance that will be the case. I hope you find that comforting.”

“So you’re giving me a doom-and-gloom prediction that won’t come true,” she said. “How convenient for you.”

“I’d say it’s more convenient for you, actually,” he said, “considering that if I’m wrong, you won’t be one of the two survivors being carried out of the wreckage.” He shrugged. “I’m not a fortune-teller. When I tell you these things, I’m simply relaying what I know to be true based on my survey of possible futures. You can act on them, or not act. But altering the future is a delicate thing. If I send someone right now to the airport, for instance, and remove a certain mechanic from duty who is about to forget to tighten a bolt, then the engine problem doesn’t occur at all. However, that sends events down another path, and I can’t always see the consequences clearly from where I stand. Sometimes changing things makes them worse.”

“What’s worse than a plane crash?” she asked.

“I assure you, you don’t want to know,” he answered, and craned his neck. “Weren’t you leaving?”

The buzzer shut down abruptly outside, and she felt a change in pressure and cool air on her back as a deputy yanked open the door behind her. It would be the easiest thing in the world to stalk out of here, leave Borden twisting in the wind.

“Don’t you know what I’ll do?” she asked him.

Simms smiled. “There are a very few people in this world who are blank slates to me,” he said. “Those people bring random action to the game. You are one, or rather, you are one now. I predicted your actions somewhat accurately up until the night Laskins sent Borden to you with the offer, but unfortunately, you have grown more opaque since then. Your decisions drive events, Jazz. Yours, and Lucia’s. That’s why we call you Leads.”

“Why?” she flung at him. “Why us? We’re not important, are we? We’re just—”

“Pawns?” Simms’s mouth stretched in a wider smile. A much more unpleasant one, to Jazz’s revulsion. “Pawns win games, you know. And I’d call you…knights. Perhaps one of you might even prove to be a queen, before this game is over.”

She balled up her fists on the cold, cracked Formica of the counter. “If you’re playing a game, who are you playing? Why can’t you stay ahead?”

“It should be obvious to you by now that I have an opponent,” he said. His eyes flicked to focus behind her. “I believe Officer Sanchez is waiting on you.”

Behind her, the deputy said, “Yeah, I am. In or out, miss. I’ve got things to do.”

She allowed herself to relax back into the chair, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ll stay. For a while.”