Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Lyle’s breathing must have changed, because Van Sciver said, “What? What is it?”

  Lyle started at the voice; he had forgotten about the phone pressed to his cheek. His mind whirled, assessing the best phrasing of the update. He opened his mouth, but dread prevented any words from exiting.

  The girl rose to leave.

  Orphan X paused by her chair, water glass still in hand.

  Then he drank it down.

  As X followed the girl out of the plaza, Lyle felt his mouth drop open a bit wider. A chime announced the GPS beacon going live on his Samsung.

  Van Sciver said, “What happened?”

  It took Lyle two tries to get the words out. “We just hit the jackpot.”

  * * *

  Samsung in hand, Lyle ran across the plaza to where Pellegrini waited in the idling truck. Lyle jumped in, eyeing the GPS grid, gesturing madly for Pellegrini to turn right.

  “There, there, there! We only have seven minutes left.”

  Pellegrini looked confused by Lyle’s urgency. “We got the girl?”

  Lyle said, “We got Orphan X.”

  Pellegrini’s expression went flat with shock. The tires chirped as he pulled out. Lyle directed him around the block, following the blinking dot on his screen.

  “Do we do this ourselves?” Pellegrini said. “Or wait for backup?”

  Lyle held up the screen. As former Secret Service, they had a clear operational sweet spot, and that encompassed surveillance, prevention, and protection. When they had to be, they were proficient assaulters as well, but that wasn’t where the critical mass of their training had been spent. That had been made all too apparent by the death count of their fellow recruitees.

  “We have Orphan X tagged,” Lyle said. “We can get the drop on him if we move right now.”

  Pellegrini nosed the truck around the corner, and they saw it up ahead, a black Nissan Altima with a spoiler, Orphan X in view behind the wheel, the girl in the passenger seat. Lyle texted the vehicle description and license plate to Van Sciver.

  Van Sciver had access to satellites, and once they locked the car in from above, there was nowhere on God’s green earth it could go that it wouldn’t be found.

  Van Sciver’s text confirmed: BIRDS ONLINE NOW.

  ARE YOU EN ROUTE?

  ALMOST AT THE AIRPORT.

  The Nissan wheeled around the corner. As it turned, Orphan X’s face rotated slightly toward them.

  “Shit,” Pellegrini said. “Did he see us?”

  “I don’t know,” Lyle said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Tell Van Sciver.”

  Lyle texted: MIGHT HAVE BEEN MADE. UNSURE.

  Van Sciver’s reply: PROCEED. BE CAUTIOUS.

  The Nissan kept driving, neither quicker nor slower. They stayed on its tail.

  “Holy shit,” Lyle said. “We’re gonna be the ones. We’re gonna be the ones.”

  “Calm down,” Pellegrini said.

  Up ahead the Nissan pulled into a six-story parking structure.

  Lyle texted Van Sciver: ENTERED PARKING GARAGE.

  The reply: BIRDS ARE UP. WE’LL PICK HIM UP WHEN HE EXITS. FLUSH HIM OUT BUT DO NOT PURSUE.

  Lyle brought up the GPS screen, watched the dot rise and rise. “He’s heading to an upper floor.”

  Pellegrini turned into the parking structure. As he slowed to snatch a ticket from the dispenser, Lyle pointed ahead. The black car, now empty, was parked next to the handicapped spots by the elevators.

  The truck pulled through, and Lyle hopped out and circled the car, confirming it was empty. As he ran back to the truck, he was already keying in his next text to Van Sciver: CAR EMPTY, PARKED BY ELEVATORS ON GROUND FLOOR.

  The last reception bar flickered, but the text sent just before the Samsung lost service. Lyle climbed into the truck. “Go, go, go. He went upstairs.”

  Pellegrini said, “Why?”

  “If he’s switching cars on another level, we have to get there to ID the new vehicle for the satellites. We’ve only got a few minutes before we lose GPS.”

  A circular ramp looped around a hollow core at the center of the parking structure. Pellegrini accelerated into the turn, centrifugal force shoving Lyle against the door as they rode up the spiral to the second level.

  He watched the dot. It was way above them on six.

  Pellegrini made a noise, and Lyle glanced up from the screen.

  A black rope was now dangling down the center column of the parking structure.

  Lyle’s brain couldn’t process the rope’s sudden appearance. He looked back at the screen. The dot was no longer way above them. It was on the fifth level. Now the fourth.

  Pellegrini was slowing the truck, reaching for his handgun.

  Lyle looked back at the thick nylon cord dangling ten feet away from them.

  A rappelling rope.

  As they curved around onto the third floor, Orphan X zippered down the rope, a pistol steady in his gloved hand.

  The driver’s window blew out as he shot Pellegrini through the temple.

  Even after the spatter hit Lyle, he hadn’t caught up to what was happening. Orphan X rappelled down as the unmanned truck banged up the ramp to the third level, their fall and rise coordinated like the two sides of a pulley.

  There was a suspended moment as the two men drew eye level, Lyle catching a perfect view of X’s face over the top of the aligned sights.

  He saw the muzzle flare and nothing else.

  * * *

  Evan hit the ground floor, coming off the fast rope and crouching to break his fall. He threw his gloves off with a flick of his wrists and they dangled from clips connecting them to his sleeves, the full-grain leather steaming with friction heat.

  Seventeen men down.

  Eight left.

  Joey stepped out from the stairwell and ran across to meet Evan at the Nissan Altima. As he tore off the detachable spoiler and ran it over to a Dumpster, she stripped carbon-fiber wrap from the Altima, revealing the car’s original white coat. Evan unscrewed the Arizona license plates, exposing the California plates beneath.

  A few puzzled pedestrians gawked up the ramp at the rappelling rope. Near the third level by the smashed truck, horns blared. There was enough confusion that Evan and Joey went largely unnoticed. They stuffed the Arizona plates and fiber wrap in the trash container near the elevator, climbed into the now-white Nissan, and pulled out into the flow of traffic.

  67

  The Pretty One

  As Orphan X, Evan had left behind a spaghetti snarl of associations, connections, and misery. Every high-value target he neutralized anywhere on the globe was a stress point in a vast web. The Secret Service’s involvement meant that somewhere in his dark past a silken thread trembled, leading back to the heart of the District.

  As he neared the freeway exit, Joey said, “Hang on.”

  Pulled from his thoughts, he glanced over the console at her. “We’ve gotta get back to L.A.”

  “There’s something I want to do first.”

  The set of her face made him nod.

  He followed her directions, winding into an increasingly shabby part of east Phoenix. Joey studied the passing scenery with an expression that Evan knew all too well.

  “They call this area the Rock Block,” she said. “Can’t walk down the sidewalk without tripping over a baggie of crack.”

  Evan kept on until she gestured ahead. “Up here,” she said.

  He got out and stood by the driver’s door, unsure in which direction she wanted to go. She came around the car and brushed against him, crossing the street. He followed.

  Behind a junkyard of a front lawn sat a house that used to be yellow. Most of the cheap vinyl cladding had peeled up, curling at the edges like dried paint. An obese woman filled a reinforced swing on one corner of the front porch.

  Joey stepped through a hinge-challenged knee-high front gate, and Evan kept pace with her through the yard. They passed an armless doll, a rusting baby stroller, a
sodden mattress. Joey stepped up onto the porch, the old planks complaining.

  Despite the cool breeze, sweat beaded the woman’s skin. She wore a Navajo-print dress. Beneath the hem Evan could see that half of one foot had been amputated, the nub swaying above the porch. The other leg looked swollen, marbled with broken blood vessels. Evan could smell the sweet, turbid smell of infection. A tube snaked up from an oxygen tank to the woman’s nose. The swing creaked and creaked.

  The woman didn’t bother to look at them, though they were standing right before her.

  Joey said, “’Member me, Nemma?”

  Fanning herself with a TV Guide, the woman moved her gaze lazily over to take Joey in.

  “Maybe I do,” the woman said. “You were the pretty one. Little bit dykey.”

  Joey said, “I wonder why.”

  Air rattled through the woman’s throat, an elongated process that sounded thick and wet. “There’s nuthin’ you can do to me the diabetes ain’t done already. And that’s just the start. They cut out the upper left lobe of my lung. Five, six times a day, I get the coughs where I can’t even clear my own throat. I have to double over, give myself the Heimlich just so’s to breathe. Bastards took away my foster-care license and everything.”

  Joey eased apart from Evan, putting a decaying wicker coffee table between them. She said, “You want me to feel sorry for you?”

  The woman made a sound like a laugh. “I don’t want anything anymore.”

  Evan noticed that his hip holster felt light. Joey stood with her body bladed to him so he couldn’t see her left side. The woman’s gaze had fixed on something in Joey’s hand. Evan recalled how Joey had brushed against him by the Altima after he’d parked. He didn’t have to move his hand to the holster to know it was empty.

  Joey had positioned herself nicely. The angle over the coffee table was tricky. He wouldn’t get to her in time, not given her reflexes and training.

  The woman gave a resigned nod. “You came to hurt me?”

  Evan sidled back a step, but Joey eased forward, keeping the mass of the table between them. Her eyes never left the woman’s face.

  He stopped, and Joey stopped, too. He still couldn’t see her hand, but her shoulder was tense, her muscles ready.

  The only sound was the sonorous rasp of the woman’s breathing.

  Joey exhaled slowly, the tension leaking from her body. “Nah,” she said. “I’d rather let life take you apart piece by piece. Like you did to all us girls. The difference is, I can put myself back together.”

  The woman didn’t move. Evan didn’t either.

  Joey stepped forward and leaned over her. “You don’t get to live in me anymore. You get to live in yourself.”

  She turned and walked off the porch. As she passed Evan, she handed his pistol back to him.

  They left the woman swaying on the porch.

  68

  Locked-Room Mystery

  Candy stepped up to the police cordon at the Phoenix parking structure. The cops had loosened up the crime scene by degrees, CSI coming and going.

  An officer stopped her. “Are you parked inside, ma’am?”

  “Yeah, I work at the PT office across the plaza, and—Oh my God, what happened?”

  “We can’t disclose that, ma’am. Please claim your vehicle and exit immediately.”

  She nodded nervously and stepped inside, scanning the cars on the ground level. Van Sciver had kept satellite monitoring on the garage all day, and there’d been no sign of a black Nissan Altima exiting.

  The ramp was still blocked off, cops dispersed through the parking structure. Candy strode toward the elevators, taking in the remaining cars. No black Altima.

  The car hadn’t left the building. And it wasn’t in the parking spot where Lyle Green’s last text indicated.

  Which made for the kind of locked-room mystery she wasn’t in the mood for.

  Her gaze pulled to the trash can beside the handicapped spaces. It was stuffed with what looked like black tarp. She drew closer.

  She said, “Fuck.”

  She twisted the lid off the concrete trash container and looked down at the heap of stripped-off carbon-fiber wrap. Digging through the detritus, she pulled out the pieces, checking each one for distinguishing marks. Midway through the stack, she found a tiny copyright logo at the edge of a band of stiff carbon fiber: ©FULL AUTO WRAPATTACK.

  She took a picture with her cell phone and texted the image to Van Sciver. As she shoved the material back into the trash, she noted the ditched license plates in the bottom of the container.

  She exited the structure through a side door, slipped past a break in the cordon, walked across the plaza, and got into the backseat of one of two Chevy Tahoes waiting at metered spots. They were heavily armored, just like the one in Richmond.

  Van Sciver and Thornhill occupied the seats in front of her.

  Thornhill held up his phone with a location pin-dropped on Google Maps. “Full Auto WrapAttack,” he said, “At 1019B South Figueroa. Los Angeles. One shop, they custom-make their own materials on site. What do you think?”

  Van Sciver weighed this a moment. “It’s not a sure thing,” he said. “But it’s the best bet. Let’s move headquarters.”

  Thornhill said, “Good thing we’re mobile.”

  Candy turned to look into the Tahoe parked one spot behind them. Through the tinted rear window, she could barely make out the outlines of the eight freelancers crammed into the bench seats. “Which one’s the pilot?” she asked.

  “Guy in the passenger seat,” Van Sciver said. “I have a Black Hawk on standby. We’ll set up downtown, striking distance to most points in the city. The minute X eats or drinks something, we’ll have ten minutes to scramble to his location and put him and the girl down.”

  “You think the girl’s worth killing?” Candy said.

  “Why take the chance?” Thornhill said.

  Candy said, “You pay him extra to answer for you?”

  Van Sciver met Candy’s stare in the rearview.

  She knew she had overstepped her bounds, and she had no idea what might happen next.

  Van Sciver said, “Step out of the car, Thornhill.”

  Thornhill obeyed.

  Candy could feel the pulse beating in the side of her neck. “Let’s skip the part where you beat your chest and I back down,” she said. “Consider me backed down. Why don’t we think about this. And by ‘we’ I mean you and I—the ones with brains. Thornhill’s a blank space. A good body and a nice set of teeth. There’s nothing there.”

  She pictured Van Sciver wheeling around in the driver’s seat, his hand clamping her larynx, squeezing the air passage shut. But no, he remained where he was, a large immovable force, his eyes drilling her in the mirror.

  “He’s an extension of me,” Van Sciver said. “He’s a scope.”

  “And scopes have their use,” she said. “But we’re talking strategy. It’s a surgical operation. We want clean margins. What is unnecessary brings with it unnecessary complications. We X out Evan, we leave no trace. We kill a sixteen-year-old girl, that makes a bigger ripple in the pond. Which means unforeseen ramifications. Then who do we have to kill to take care of those?”

  That blown pupil in the rearview seemed to pull her in. She found herself leaning back to avoid tumbling down the rabbit hole.

  “I don’t care,” Van Sciver said.

  “But the man in charge might.”

  For the first time, Van Sciver looked away. His trapezius muscles tensed, flanking the neck. She was certain he was going to explode, but instead he gave a little nod. Then he gestured at Thornhill, who was waiting patiently at the curb. Thornhill climbed back in, started up the nav on his phone, and both Tahoes pulled out in unison.

  The two-SUV convoy headed for Los Angeles.

  69

  A Drool Not of Saliva

  By the time they returned to Castle Heights, Evan and Joey were ragged from the drive and the detour to switch vehicles. Evan pulled hi
s trusty Ford pickup into his spot on the subterranean parking level, and they climbed out. He took a moment to stretch his lower back before heading in.

  They heard the voice before they stepped through the door to the lobby.

  “—just saying you should go easy on the carbs at your age. I mean, have you seen you? You could stand to tighten up.”

  As Evan and Joey came around the corner, Lorilee and her boyfriend came into view standing before the bank of mail slots. Her head was lowered, her cat eyes swollen. The boyfriend swept his long hair off his face with a practiced flick of his head and continued flipping through the stack of mail in his hands.

  “And where’s my new credit card?” he continued. “I thought you said you ordered it already.”

  As Evan came up on them, Lorilee wouldn’t meet his gaze. Evan thought about what Joey had just confronted on that porch in Phoenix and how an argument like this would sound to her ears. He felt bone-tired and angry.

  Lorilee’s reply was soft, the voice of a little girl. “I did.”

  “Yeah, well, then is it magic that it’s still not—”

  Evan’s elbow moved before he told it to, knocking the boyfriend’s arm and dumping the sheaf of mail onto the floor.

  “Oops,” Evan said. “Didn’t see you.”

  He crouched down to gather the envelopes, reading the boyfriend’s shadowy reflection on the polished tiles.

  “No worries, man,” the boyfriend said, leaning to help.

  Evan rose abruptly, shattering the guy’s nose with the back of his head.

  The boyfriend reeled back, leaning against the mail slots, hand to his face. Bright red blood streamed down his forearm.

  “Oh, jeez,” Evan said, “I’m so sorry.”

  Behind him Joey coughed into a fist. He saw something in Lorilee’s eyes, something like a smile.

  Evan gave an apologetic nod, patted the guy on the back, and started for the elevator. “Keep pressure on that and send me the bill.”

  * * *

  Inside the Vault, Evan fed Vera II an ice cube. He hadn’t watered her in a while, and the tips of her spikes were browning. Then he crossed to the gun locker, unclipped his holstered ARES from his waistband, and put it away.