The Secret

"Can I follow anyone?" asked Theo.

"I think you've proven the concept," said her dad. "If you can follow me, then I assume you can follow anyone you have a good fix on. Would you like to meet the President or a movie star? I think you can drop in on them if you want. Of course, you might get arrested shortly thereafter."

They were sitting on their respective beds at the Seaside Inn. It was early afternoon, but it felt like morning. Theo was awake, dressed and coffeed. They were ready to travel again.

"Here's what I don't understand," she said. "If I could follow you to India, then I must have had the ability to do it all along. I think of all those times when I waited for your weekend visit and you never showed. Instead of waiting, I could have hunted you down. Why didn't you tell me this earlier? Why did you keep this from me?"

"Well, I wasn't sure you could do it. I only suspected it. I didn't bring it up because I didn't want you to grow up too fast. I wanted you to have a normal childhood, and there's no way that couldn't have happened if you could follow me and see all the shit I was dealing with."

"What kind of shit?"

"Terrible shit. I had to go through my own painful development to learn how to deal with it? Now, I feel I have a handle on it, but that wasn't always true."

"But what kind of shit exactly?"

"Imagine that you can see everyone's worse suffering a few minutes in advance. Think about the implications. Imagine you can see how people will die, and imagine you have the power to save many of them. Think about how that's going to fuck up your life."

"Yeah, I guess that's big. You have to decide who to save."

"In the beginning, I tried to save everyone. Every maiden in distress. I would be sitting in traffic on the way to work, and I could see that a deadly accident was about to happen on a nearby road, so I would change course, flag people down and try to prevent the accident in the few minutes of warning that I had. In most cases, I couldn't change anything at all: The accident still happened. In some cases, I only succeeded in making things worse, turning a three-car accident into a five-car accident. In the few instances where I actually prevented the accident, nothing happened at all. People were like, 'Get out of the road, you idiot!' The same people who would have been maimed or killed were giving me the finger."

"So what do you do now? Nothing?"

"Yeah, for the most part nothing. I just let things happen. I build a wall around it. As much as I can, I block most of it out."

"Wow! I guess you have to do that."

"Instead of burning myself out trying to saving everyone, I look for special circumstances where I can do a lot of good with very little effort. I call them 'force multipliers'. I try to make precision surgical strikes, looking for places where changing one little thing causes ripple effects through an entire system. It's not easy. Sometimes I get it wrong and make things worse, but it's still a lot easier working at a systemic level rather than trying to save individual lives."

"So how do you make those little changes?"

"I go someplace where no one else can, where no one is expecting me. I can take something away. I can leave something behind. I can change the state of things while I'm there. I can kill if I need to."

"What?" said Theo, startled by the word. "You kill?"

"Murder, assassinate, terminate life. Yeah, I kill. Sometimes it's the most efficient way."

"Kill who?"

"I killed a dictator in Uganda once. I shot him in the head with his own gun as he slept. By doing so, I prevented a civil war. I saved hundreds of thousands from rape, torture, starvation and genocide. It was one of my proudest success stories. And it was really easy. Once I had a plan, it took no more than two minutes to carry it out."

Theo shook her head, still stunned. "No, no, no!" she said. "I don't like this. I don't want to kill. I don't want to be any part of killing."

"I'm not asking you to. I'm just telling you how I operate. I have a lot of tools in my arsenal. Murder is just one of them."

"Oh my God!" said Theo. "I knew you thought yourself above the law, but I never thought of you as a killer. I'm stunned!"

"Killing is a part of life. If you are not killing people directly, then you are doing it by omission, by the products you buy, by the suffering you fail to prevent. You can't go to war with evil without being prepared to kill it. Imagine sending soldiers into battle without giving them guns. Would the good side have won World War II without killing anyone? Once you see all the suffering and death of the world, happening every day as a matter of course, it's not so hard to sacrifice one life to save others."

"How does it feel when you kill?"

"It feels like nothing. It's just a job. Once you've done it enough, you can do it without feeling or remorse. The only thing that matters is that the calculus adds up and you have a good chance of improving the world by the action."

"And how many times have you killed?"

"I don't have that statistic. I don't keep track. I've done it enough to be professional about it."

"My father, the professional assassin."

"That's me! For what it's worth, I'm a humane killer. I don't make people suffer any more than necessary. That guy in Uganda never knew what hit him. He died in his sleep."

Theo lay down on the bed and buried her face in the pillows.

"I'm sorry you have to learn about this," said her Dad. "I wouldn't have told you if you were younger. Now, I think you have a right to know."

Theo was facing away from her father. "I always thought of you as a hero," she said. "I thought you were someone who goes around saving people. Now, it turns out you go around killing people."

"I save people indirectly, and I end up saving a lot more of them than I ever could by being a hero. Heroism is overrated. Sometimes, a cowardly surgical strike can be many times more effective in the long run."

"I just don't know how to process this."

"It takes time, but you will. It took me years to figure it out. Hopefully, you can avoid some of my mistakes and learn it faster."

"I don't think I want to learn it. I can't see the future and I don't want to."

"That's not essential. You can still go places no one else can. The operation in Uganda had nothing to do with seeing the future. It was just a matter of adding up the evidence, understanding the system and realizing, 'Okay, this is a plan that will work.' The assassination took a couple of minutes, but I spent months researching the situation. I had to have reasonable confidence that this intervention would improve the outcome for the country and not make it worse. Turns out, it succeeded even better than I hoped."

Suddenly, Theo turned over and sat up on the bed. "That's enough," she said. "Lesson over. My brain cells are broken."

"Fair enough," he said. "Where do you want to go?"

"As far away from this subject as possible."

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