Mind Reader

By Hilbert Haar

When Andy Anderson asks the wrong question of a fellow passenger on a flight to Madrid he becomes the target of professional killers and a presidential candidate. His uncanny ability to read people, the visions he gets of the nearby future and his martial arts skills keep him out of trouble several times. But for how long. His predicament turns into a race with only one possible outcome: death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilbert Haar
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215701164

Hilbert Haar

Hilbert Haar (1950) started working as a journalist in the Netherlands in 1969. He has worked for newspaper and magazine publishers and also worked as an independent writer with his own company V.o.f. De Stijl. He spent seven years in Greece on the island of Crete, and lived also briefly in Utah and California. He worked as the Editor-in-Chief at Today, a muckraking English-language newspaper published in Philipsburg, St. Maarten - Dutch West Indies, for ten-plus years, until the paper closed down after Hurricane Irma in 2017. He is currently traveling with his wife Myriam in Asia.He finished his first full-length thriller - The Ultimate God Conspiracy in 2018, and published a second thriller - Diary of a Psychopath (Dutch title: Dagboek van een Psychopaat) in 2021.Het luchthartige zelf-help boek Achttien Tips Voor een Gelukkig Leven verscheen eveneens in 2021.

Book preview

Mind Reader

Hilbert Haar

Published by Hilbert Haar at Smashwords

Copyright 2023 Hilbert Haar

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

About the author

From the same author

Contact

Extra: Masonic Madness

Prologue

I don’t have many talents but the one I do have has caused me a lot of trouble.

I can read people.

That’s right: I take one look and I know what you have been up to and I also know what you are going to do. Later on, I got visions too: they made me see the future.

Sounds interesting? Magic?

It is a fucking disaster, mainly because my curiosity beats common sense every time.

I have not always been like this. I was a normal kid. I got into a lot of fights and I never saw those blows coming. My dad called me a sissy. My mom thought I was stupid. Why was I always the one who got beaten up?

To say that my early school days were, literally, a bloody disaster, sums it up nicely. I still remember the day everything changed.

The previous day Jason Earl had beaten me senseless and I spent the night with a monumental headache. Then Earl wanted to have another go at me. This should have been another disaster for me, but it wasn’t.

I remember looking up at the sky, like there was any chance of help coming from above. Then I looked at Earl, my school’s number one bully.

It was like getting a vision. Suddenly I just knew what Earl was going to do. I actually saw what was going to happen. Before it happened.

Earl’s fist was racing towards my chin that was still sore from the beating he had given me the previous day. Somehow, yesterday’s fear was gone. I stepped back in the nick of time and Earl found himself hammering air.

I laughed and that made him raving mad. He started swinging like a madman and he never managed to touch me. In the end, he just gave up and never bothered me again. Going home that day, I tried to understand what the hell had just happened.

I knew on a certain level that I had seen Earl’s moves before he made them. But how was that even possible? I thought for a while that I must have been hallucinating.

Some time later I was watching a ballgame with my dad when it happened again. The Lakers were down by twenty and it never looked like they would be able to get the better of the Nuggets. At half time things looked hopeless but somehow I knew better.

The Lakers are going to beat them by one, I told my dad. Buzzer beater by Lebron.

For god’s sake Andy, my father grumbled. How the fuck would you know? Shut the hell up or I’ll give you one.

I knew that I was right; I just knew it. But I did not want to anger dad, a lifelong Lakers-fan, unnecessary so I patiently waited for reality to catch up with me.

The Lakers played a brilliant fourth quarter, but they were still down by two with just half a second left on the clock. But they had possession. The inbound pass went to Lebron who turned away from his defender and hit the winning three-pointer.

Well I’ll be damned, dad shouted while he bear-hugged me. Of all the lucky guesses in the world, this one beats them all.

I did not say that it was not a lucky guess. Dad would never understand. He’d probably think I’d gone mad and have me institutionalized. Or he would tie me to a pole for the rest of my life and have me play the lotto for him.

So I just smiled and shrugged my shoulders. Very lucky indeed dad. I guess I wanted our team to win really bad.

That explains it, dad said and we never spoke about my seemingly outrageous prediction again.

But the whole thing got me thinking. What if I could really predict the future? What if I could, like a character from Back to the Future, make a fortune by playing lotteries because I would know the winning numbers before the draw? I started carefully, playing small lotteries and I soon discovered one thing: my numbers always won. I moved up to Power Ball state lotteries in different states, careful to make intentional mistakes to prevent me from winning the top prizes. That would have drawn too much attention. Nevertheless, the money kept pouring in and by the time I was twenty I was financially independent. I would never have to work a boring 9 to 5 job. If I ever ran out of money I would simply play another lottery.

During the next couple of years I managed to keep my visions, as I had come to think of them, to myself. I did not feel the need to draw attention to my person. I also feared that people would start calling me a freak if I opened my mouth.

In my early twenties I got a girlfriend. Her name was Kirsten and she looked like the twin of the Irish singer