Page 52 of Devil's Bargain

“I just got off a plane,” Lucia said. “Mind if I change clothes first?”

“Actually, I do,” he said. “There’s a car waiting.”

“What?” For the first time, Jazz actually saw Lucia thrown off her stride. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Borden didn’t answer. Jazz, after a few unmoving seconds, answered for him.

“They knew,” she said. “They had to know all of this before it happened. Why else would they have a car here, now?”

“That’s insane,” Lucia said flatly.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Like hiring two people who don’t know each other. Like paying them to set up a detective agency and carry out assignments that don’t have any purpose. That’s insane, too. Remember?”

Lucia stared at her, a frown grooved over her eyebrows, a light in her eyes that Jazz hadn’t seen before. Wary. Mistrustful.

“It’s crazy,” she repeated slowly.

“Yeah,” Jazz agreed. “My point exactly.” She turned to Borden. “Let’s go see the wizard, Tin Man.”

It wasn’t just a car downstairs, it was a limousine. A big, black stretch limo, with tinted windows and a uniformed chauffeur who looked vaguely familiar. Jazz blinked at the sight of him—it was odd, seeing a stretch limo and a liveried driver on the streets of Kansas City—but it was Lucia who said, “We’ve met you before.”

The driver doffed his cap and nodded with military precision. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and Jazz remembered. Same driver from New York City, from the visit to the Gabriel, Pike & Laskins offices, only more formally dressed and captaining a bigger land yacht. He opened the back door and handed Lucia inside, then reached for Jazz, who avoided him and climbed in on her own.

Milo Laskins, Borden’s boss, was the sole occupant of the car. He was dressed in another natty suit, this one charcoal-gray, with a navy tie and a diamond stickpin.

“Ms. Garza. Ms. Callender.” Laskins offered them a gentlemanly nod. “I understand you have questions. That’s perfectly reasonable. I’m authorized to answer them.”

Jazz had been prepared to argue, but his easy, courteous manner threw her off stride. Not so Lucia, who stepped in to say, “Fine. Who are you?”

“That’s simpler than you might think,” Laskins said, and raised thick eyebrows. “I’m just like you. I’m an Actor.”

Jazz heard the capitalA.Didn’t understand what it meant, but she heard the emphasis.

He tapped the thick, tinted divider behind him. The limo pulled into traffic, smooth as silk. Jazz fisted her hands. She felt helpless, moving out of control.

“Which means what, exactly?” Lucia asked. “Conspiracy theory dinner theater on the weekends?”

“I will give you a very simple overview of what we—or, more properly, the Cross Society—now know about the world, Ms. Garza. There are two kinds of people in it.”

“Only two?” Lucia murmured, sounding amused.

“For our purposes, yes. There are Actors and Chorus. At any given time on this planet, out of the billions of human lives being lived, only a handful—about ten thousand, all together—are doing anything that really matters on a larger scale. These are people we term Actors. Everyone else …” Laskins made a languid, elegant motion with one hand. “Chorus. Extras, if you will. It isn’t thesameten thousand from moment to moment, understand. Almost every life on Earth will experience at least one decision, one event in their life that has large ripples of consequence—almost everyone moves from Chorus to Actor once in their lives. But it turns out, rather unexpectedly, that once you begin to analyze the world in this manner you find that it doesn’t look as random as you would expect.”

“I don’t understand,” Lucia said. She did sound interested, though Jazz had ceased to have any investment somewhere around the Actor/Chorus explanation, which was a load of horseshit; she was waiting for Laskins to stop spinning fairy tales and get to the point.

Unexpectedly, Laskins focused his gaze on her.

“Do you?”

“Afraid not,” she said, and shrugged. He sighed.

“Have you ever heard the old adage, nothing succeeds like success? Or, it takes money to make money? They share a common theme. The more you have of one thing, the natural tendency is that similar things attract.”

“I have no idea what the hell you’re saying,” Jazz said. “Can we move on to the part where you tell me why you had me let a womandielast night? Because that’s the part I’m really fascinated about.”

Laskins’s smile vanished. He looked tired and old and, suddenly, unhappy. “I wish I could explain it to you in a way that made sense. I can’t, not really, but I’ll try.

“Certain people are never Chorus in this life, Jasmine. They are, quite simply, always Actors. Everything they do ripples and has consequences, even the smallest thing. They are rare, these … Leads. We have identified perhaps a hundred of them. The woman that you were asked to follow was a Lead, and you were there to counter a move by the opposition. It was the right move, but it simply failed.”

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