Evan rubbed his thumb across his finger pads, only now noticing the faintest trace of blue ink among the whorls. Another violation.
“We looked at the registration of your 4Runner,” René continued. “The vehicle is owned by a shell corp in Barbados. We kicked over that rock and found that shell corp held by another in Luxembourg. I have a feeling that the more rocks we kick over, the more rocks we’re going to find.”
Evan picked up the bamboo napkin ring, peered through it like it was a telescope. It was about two inches long, which was long enough.
“I think I understand,” René was saying, “this thing you’re playing at.” He circled a hand at Evan.
Evan slipped the bamboo ring over his forefinger and middle finger. The hollow stem fit snugly, locking the knuckles.
Turning the fingers into a weapon.
“I’m not playing,” Evan said.
He leapt to his feet and drove his sheathed fingers through Chuy’s eye, straight into his brain. Blood spurted over the white linen. As Chuy tumbled back, quivering in his death throes, René recoiled in horror.
Two dogs, four guards, and counting.
The remaining pair of narcos had their AKs raised, but Evan knew damn well they hadn’t gone to all this hassle to gun him down on an overpriced bedspread. Hurling the cart aside, he lunged forward. Dex looped an arm around René’s midsection, spinning him out into the hall.
Before Evan could close the distance, he heard a hissing behind him. He wheeled around, sourcing the noise to the heating vent, only now grasping that it was—
10
The Strange Language of Intimacy
Blood on his neck, swollen cheek, wrists still scraped raw from handcuffs. Evan’s small for a twelve-year-old, scrawny, and can’t remember the last time he had a full belly.
He has undergone a daunting set of initiation rites to land here, in this passenger seat of this dark sedan, heading God knows where. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know what he will be used for. He doesn’t know anything aside from the name of the man driving.
Jack Johns.
Maybe this time everything will be different, and—
Evan stops the thought. Hope is dangerous. In his brief life, he’s done his best to eradicate it.
Jack clears his throat. “You no longer exist,” he tells Evan. “You went away for a felony and disappeared into the system.”
“’Kay,” Evan says.
Jack bobs his bulldog head.
An hour later they cross the murky green water of the Potomac and forge west into Arlington, Virginia. The commercial district gives way to tree-lined streets, and then there are more trees and fewer streets. Finally they turn off between twin stone pillars onto a dirt road and wend their way back to a two-story farmhouse.
The silence has grown oppressively thick in the car, and it feels risky to break it. Evan waits until they’ve pulled in to the circular driveway and gotten out by the old-fashioned porch. Then he asks, “Where are we?” and Jack says, “Home.”
The house smells damp but pleasant, redolent of burned wood. Evan regards the foyer and the family room with suspicion. He doesn’t trust the maroon carpet runner up the stairs, the plush brown corduroy couches, the pots hanging from a brass rack in the kitchen. The spectacle of undeniable domesticity leaves him humming with distrust.
“Would you like to go upstairs, see your room?” Jack asks.
“No.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to know what I’m here for.”
“Later.”
Evan gathers his courage, does his best to summon Van Sciver. “After everything I did to get here, I think I’ve earned some respect.”
Jack regards him calmly. “If you have to ask for respect, you’re not gonna get it.”
Evan does his best to digest this. The words feel less like a slap than a solid wall dropped before him from a lofty height.
Jack says, “Someone smarter than either of us once said, ‘If you want a quality, act like you already have it.’”
Evan stares at Jack, and Jack stares right back at him.
Evan blinks first. “’Kay,” he says.
They head up the flight of stairs to a dormer room with a wooden bed. On the mattress the sheets are folded crisply, ironed into neat squares.
Jack’s voice floats over his shoulder. “I get paid for this. To have you here. It’s a job. The money is not why I took you or want you here. I don’t want you to find out later, for it to be a surprise.”
“Who’s paying you?”
“Later.”
Jack walks to the desk, lifts the blotter, and uses a fresh handkerchief to wipe away an invisible speck on the polished wood surface. He folds the handkerchief neatly and inserts it back into his rear pocket. “Make your bed.”
Jack leaves Evan alone in the room. Evan struggles with the sheets. He pulls and tugs but cannot get them on properly, let alone taut and wrinkle-free.
He goes downstairs and pokes around until he finds Jack in the garage, meticulously cleaning a handgun. Evan stiffens at the sight of the weapon, then swallows down his fear.
“The sheets aren’t right,” Evan says.
Jack keeps his gaze on the skinny brush, poking it in and out of the bore. “The sheets aren’t the problem. I’ve used them to make up that bed many times.”
Evan takes a breath. “Okay,” he says. “I can’t make the bed right.”
Jack’s eyes tick up above the top of the barrel. “And?”
It takes a moment for Evan to understand what Jack is waiting for him to say. He finds the words: “Can you help me?”
Jack lays aside the gun. “Be happy to.”
Back upstairs, Jack regards the sloppy bed as Evan squirms. Jack walks over, inverts the edge of the fitted sheet over his hand, and shows Evan how to flop it neatly over the corner of the mattress. Jack continues straightening the sheets, keeping his body out of the way so Evan can watch and learn.
“I’ll never be able to do it that good,” Evan says.
“You don’t have to. You just have to make it better than you did last time.” Jack snaps the top sheet into place, and it responds like something scared into competence. “Next time. That’s all that matters.” He finishes and pulls himself upright beside the pristine bed. He passes Evan on his way out. “Would you like to go for a walk?”
Outside, Jack gives a whistle, and a moment later a big dog bounds around the corner of the porch and joins them, keeping a few feet off Jack’s right thigh. The dog is at least a hundred pounds, with a honey-gold coat and what looks like a racing stripe of reversed fur on his spine.
Evan says, “Can I pet him?”
“Strider can be touchy. Let him get used to you.”
Their shoes crunch pleasingly in the tall grass. They make their way up a slight hill, and the view is all leafy canopy and fields.
“What are we doing?” Evan asks.
“Walking.”
“You know what I mean.”
“We’re deciding if we’re gonna like each other or not.”
Evan’s training begins the next day, a test of will that puts the previous ones to shame. At knifepoint in a dark barn, he learns his destiny. His future is illuminated, each revelation like a burst of fireworks.
To the world and even to his own instructors, he will be known only as Orphan X.
As his handler, Jack accompanies him to every session. There is breaching and shooting and hand-to-hand, psyops and spycraft and espionage technology. Evan generally returns home exhausted and bloodied. Their days are regimented.
In the evenings they set up in the study, just them and a framed photo of a woman, which rests alone on a side table. She has waist-long hair, a slender neck, and thick-framed eyeglasses from another decade. Evan sneaks glances at her now and then when Jack’s not looking. They read a lot, mostly biographies and history books. Evan finds them boring until Jack talks about them, and then the stories come to life. T
hey listen to classical-music records, too. One night an opera is playing in the background as Evan tries to decipher a chapter about Thomas Jefferson.
Jack’s voice interrupts the music. “Do you hear that?”
When Evan looks up, he sees that Jack’s eyes are closed. The opera singer wails ever louder.
“Nine high C’s. When Pavarotti sang this aria at the Met on February seventeenth, 1972, he had seventeen curtain calls. Seventeen.”
Evan does not know what an aria is, or the Met, or a curtain call. So he asks, “Were you there?”
“No.”
Evan hesitates. “Where were you?”
Jack closes the book around his thumb. The textured skin around his eyes shifts a bit as he seems to decide whether or not to answer. “Laos,” he says.
With this response Evan senses they have broken through onto new terrain, and this is at once exciting and perilous. He ponders a reply, but even rehearsed in his head the words sound clumsy.
He dares to gesture toward the tarnished silver frame. “How’d she die? Your wife?”
Jack says, “An embassy bombing. In Kuwait.”
“Was she a spy?”
“She was a secretary.”
“Oh.” Evan waits until Jack’s attention returns to his book. He hesitates, unsure how to proceed in this foreign tongue, the strange language of intimacy. Then he says, “Her eyes are friendly.”
Jack’s gaze stays fixed on the book. “Thank you, Evan,” he says, in a voice even more gravelly than usual.
The alarm goes off early the next morning. Strider is curled on the rug in the dormer room, where he now sleeps. Evan scratches behind the dog’s ears, then makes the bed. Pausing, he realizes that the sheets are tight enough to bounce a dumbbell on.
Next time, he thinks. The two best words in the English language.
When he gets downstairs, he expects to find Jack at the stove, readying the omelet pan, but instead he has his keys in hand and is ready to go. They drive to a Veterans Day parade in town. Evan stands at Jack’s side, and they watch the open-topped cars drive by. There are fire engines and fried dough and soldiers with empty sleeves pinned up at the elbows. There are crying moms and old men with watery eyes, their hands over their hearts. There are babies in strollers and young wives with firm tanned skin and lush curls and golden sunlight falling across them, turning the tiny hairs of their arms white. Evan feels an odd sense at his core, a blurring of himself into something greater, all these people joined in common emotion, and the fine, fine flags snap overhead, and he breathes the powdered sugar and the scent of sunscreen and feels the pulse of all these hearts beating inside his own chest. That night when he slides into bed and gazes at the slanted ceiling, he feels the pulse still moving through his body, an almost sexual ache in his cells like the swell of an orchestra on Jack’s old record player, the sound track of desire, of belonging.
He thinks of Jack sleeping downstairs and how that makes him feel safe. Jack has cracked the world open like a geode, laying its glittering treasures bare. As long as Evan has Jack at his side, he can do anything. A sensation rolls through his body, unfamiliar and warm, and at last he is able to name it.
It is the feeling of being given a place in the world.
11
No Longer the Same Place
Evan came to lying flat on his chest, his mouth open against the floorboards. He shoved himself up and leaned back against the sleigh bed, letting the ache between his temples subside.
The cart was gone. Damp spot on the floorboards where they’d been scrubbed. No sign of Chuy’s body.
Serious room service.
Two fingertips of his left hand were crusted. He went into the bathroom and washed his hands. Then he went to the hearth and pretended to warm himself. His busted RoamZone had fallen through the log grate. Careful to keep his back to the hidden surveillance cameras, he managed to poke beneath the flames to knock the phone into reach. The rubber casing was scorched. Smashed-to-shit bits of Gorilla Glass turned the screen into a mosaic. Holding the phone low against his belly, he thumbed it on. Miraculously, the lights flickered as it powered up. The Gorilla Glass had protected the phone from the worst of the stomping and the fire, but he could see bits of the circuit board through the cracks. The smart screen seemed unresponsive to touch.
There’d be no dialing out.
He examined the damage, his excitement quickly fading. He was adroit with electronics, but fixing the phone was beyond his capabilities. When he was sixteen, he’d been taught by a hacker around the same age who could’ve figured something like this out in a Red Bull–fueled minute, but that’s why she’d been the teacher and he the student.
Keeping the phone hidden, he went back to the bed and surreptitiously shoved it between the mattress and box spring.
On the unmade sheets, the croissant waited, cold. His stomach announced itself. He took big bites, chewed thoughtfully, his mouth dry from the sleeping gas. In the course of his training, Evan had endured halothane vapor and methoxypropane, but given the roaring fire he guessed René had gone with something less flammable, probably a halogenated ether. He rubbed his eyes, trying to clear his head, then crossed to the window and noted the sun’s position high in the sky. He’d been unconscious for a while. Despite the midday blaze, he knew not to be fooled; it was well-digger-ass cold out there.
Movement caught his eye below, three men jogging past the barn, disappearing into the tree line. Evan hadn’t seen them before.
Two dogs, seven guards, and Dex.
His thoughts were scrambled, fragments of plans jabbing him from all angles, opposing directives warring in his mind.
Well, then. As Jack had encoded in the Fifth Commandment, If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.
Evan went back to the bed and sat cross-legged on the unmade sheets. Closing his eyes, he took a few deep breaths. He slowed each exhalation, counting to four, letting the alpha brain waves kick in and drop him into a meditative state.
After five minutes, or twenty, he opened his eyes and slid off the mattress. Then he made the bed carefully. He stretched and did push-ups, sit-ups, and a quick core workout, favoring his bruised rib. His muscles felt creaky from the days he’d spent unconscious. He kept all thoughts at bay, focused only on breaking a good sweat. Then he showered and changed and returned to the spot by the window. Standing in the same place with a clearer mind meant it was no longer the same place. He reviewed what little he knew.
He now had a grasp on the time: midday.
He’d gleaned the date: October 18.
The next priority was figuring out where he was.
His gaze swept the walls low, just above the baseboards. Nothing. He moved to the built-in mahogany desk. The backing floated an inch or so off the wall, no doubt to leave room for appliance plugs. He put one eye to the dark sliver but could make out only darkness. Then he crawled into the space where a chair should be and flattened his cheek to the wall. The power outlet floated a few inches away in the gap between desk and wall.
It had only two holes, designed to fit round pins.
Clearly not built to receive an American plug.
Evan popped to his feet and headed briskly into the bathroom. After scanning the walls, he dropped onto a knee and found a wet-room outlet tucked beneath the floating granite slab housing the sinks. This one took a three-pin plug—two round, one grounding.
That was helpful, too.
He searched the bathroom for a hidden surveillance camera but found none. With the stark stone and tile, there were scant hiding places. He had to assume that the mirror was a one-way and that a pinhole camera was positioned inside the ceiling vent as in the bedroom, but he couldn’t be certain. That still left him a blind spot beneath the sink and in the corner by the toilet.
He needed to create a blind zone in the bedroom as well. Pausing in the doorway, he searched the crack in the frame, careful not to be obvious. There it was, a pencil eraser–size circle of metal nestled back
in the wood like a dug-in pinworm. He walked over to the hearth and ran his fingertips across the caulking between the travertine tiles but felt nothing. The vent camera he’d spotted earlier and the bathroom doorframe unit gave them eyes on three-fourths of the bedroom. He looked for a spot that would pick up the remaining quarter.
The corner above the closet where the walls met the ceiling. He flicked a gaze quickly in that direction, noting that the point of blackness there was slightly more pronounced than in the other corners.
Solid tradecraft.
What was the best way to play this?
Evan put himself in René’s shoes and thought for a time before settling on the next step. It was a gamble, but everything was a gamble.
Back in the bathroom, he thumbed the remaining paste off the rubber toothbrush where it had been squirted between the bristles. He added a drop of water and worked it between his thumb and forefinger until it gummed up into a gooey mortar.
He smeared it over the crack in the frame outside the bathroom. That knocked out their view of half the bed and the sliding glass door. Then he worked up more paste and went to the corner of the room by the closet. Bracing his bare foot against the closet hinges, he put his back to the wall and squirmed his way up off the ground like a rock climber until he could reach the ceiling. He put his face big in the hidden camera, went for a smug smirk. A few swipes and he’d obscured the tiny lens, eliminating René’s visuals on the fireplace.
He dropped back to the floor and wiped his hands on his jeans, acting satisfied with himself. He’d left them the most essential camera, the one in the heating vent that captured half the room, including the door to the hallway. The one they’d need to discern his position before they entered the room. The one that was filming him right now, acting as though he’d just put one over on them.
If René was smart, he’d hit Evan with sleeping gas again and reposition the cameras he’d knocked out. But if he was really smart, he’d concede the ostensible defeat, let Evan believe he was surveillance-free in the room, and use the remaining camera to observe what Evan got up to when he thought no one was looking.
The Nowhere Man--An Orphan X Novel Page 5