“I like my scars,” he said. “They remind me of who I am.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“You don’t need to,” Evan said. “Why am I here? I assume not just to discuss your grooming habits?”
“Do you have somewhere you need to be?”
Evan thought of the Horizon Express, steaming onward. And the boy’s voice coming through the wrecked RoamZone: Will you help me? Will you? Promise me.
“Yes,” he said.
René said, “Two more days and you can be on your way.”
“Assuming I send the wire.”
“You haven’t resigned yourself to the outcome?”
“Why give up when I’m winning the war?”
Behind him Evan heard Manny curse at him in Spanish.
“About that.” René lifted one dripping foot from the tank and then the other. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
Pulling on a heavy robe, he knotted the sash. Then he leaned over and sprayed down the zero gravity chair with mist from the clear cylindrical bottle.
“What is that?” Evan asked.
“Privacy spray. It removes ninety-nine-point-five percent of DNA from surfaces. And obscures the remaining point-five percent by layering it over with a blend of genetic material.” René stomped his feet into a waiting pair of moon boots. “You’re not the only one who can make himself disappear. When I decide I don’t want to be found, no one ever finds me.”
For now Evan let that go.
Manny and Nando got Evan moving back through the gauntlet of steam rooms and up various hallways, René keeping well ahead of them. At last the giant chandelier of the foyer bloomed overhead.
Tightening his thick bathrobe, René stepped out onto the porch, then turned and faced them across the expanse of the foyer. Wind fluttered his hair. Snow had fallen last night. Standing there in the doorway, he was silhouetted against the vivid white backdrop.
He curled a finger. Come.
Manny and Nando prompted Evan, and he walked across the frigid marble floor. Already he could feel the bite of the outside air. The minute he stepped out, the air assailed him. His boxers provided scant cover. Manny and Nando put him on the opposite side of the porch, safely away from René, who stood waiting in his cozy robe and moon boots.
Evan tucked the bag of chips into the waistband of his boxers so he could blow into his hands. His cheeks and lips felt raw. He wasn’t sure how long he would be made to stand out here.
Before he saw anything, he heard the faint drone of an engine reverberating around the walls of the valley. Then a plume of exhaust came visible, thin as a straw, way up the gravel road at the horizon. Soon he made out the dot of a black vehicle. It resolved as one of the Mercedes Geländewagens.
The autumn chill burrowed beneath his flesh, firing the nerves inside his scrapes and bruises. Muscle throbbed over aching bones. He thought he might freeze solid before the vehicle—and whatever it was carrying—arrived.
He bounced on his bare feet, doing his best to keep warm. He could no longer feel his face. On the far side of the porch, René whistled a chipper tune.
It took an eternity, but at last the G-Wagon pulled in to the circular driveway, the tires clicking over the cobblestones. It stopped. The tinted windows threw back Evan’s reflection. His skin was tinged blue.
The driver’s door opened first, and Dex unloaded himself from behind the steering wheel. Then the other three doors and tailgate opened in concert.
New narco guards emerged from the G-Wagon, one after another, a clown-car stunt carried off with military precision. Ten of them. They formed a neat line in front of the vehicle, awaiting orders from René.
“Good,” Evan said. “You brought me more people to kill.”
But René just turned to him, his moon boots scraping on the porch, and smiled.
“No limits,” he said.
29
Your Bad Self
According to the intel Candy and Jaggers had gathered over the past day and a half, Setyeyiva was planning to leave his office between six and six-fifteen this evening. They shivered through another faux photo shoot down on the boardwalk, Candy looking fetching as ever in her leather pants and bustier getup, Jaggers zooming in over her head at the converted cannery. Soon enough only Refat Setyeyiva remained at the office once again, toiling away.
Jaggers checked his watch. “It’s time.”
They hustled back to their rental, a Škoda Fabia Combi, which, with low standards and some squinting, could be considered a car. As Jaggers pulled out of the parking space he’d shoehorned into, Candy bought a berry Popsicle from a vendor.
They zipped up the hill in the hatchback supermini. She hopped out behind the building in the alley that ran between TeleFon Star and the parking structure. Jaggers backed up, killed the headlights. Someone had spray-painted the three monkeys on the wall—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The paint had dripped before it dried, lending the simian faces a demonic cast.
Dusk eased down the dial on the day. A few lights blinked on in buildings farther up the hill.
Candy propped herself against the wall by the rear door of the old cannery. She peeled back the wrapping on her SuperFun CrazeyBerryz Icestik!
She could make a spectacle of herself with a Popsicle.
Setting one foot flat against the wall behind her, she arched her back away from the wall and twirled the ruby-red tip between her lips. She knew precisely what she looked like.
It was good to be her.
5:53. No cars. No pedestrians.
That whisper returned: Can you still pull this off, Candy? After X left his stamp on you, are you sure you’re the same? Or are you damaged goods?
Yes, she was sure. No, she wasn’t damaged goods.
She was a traffic stopper. A Hall & Oates maneater. The kind of calendar girl that made you want to freeze the month. She used to be all those things with her clothes on or off. So what if, thanks to Orphan X, her naked superpowers had dimmed? She was still irresistible.
5:57. No vehicles. No foot traffic.
The wind shifted, producing a whiff of fish from the walls of the old cannery. The berry ice inexplicably tasted like peach. Somewhere in the distance, someone was blaring a Salt-N-Pepa–Led Zeppelin mash-up. These post-Soviet states were so gloriously ass backward.
She licked her berry-peach ice and waited. Refat Setyeyiva, come on with your bad self and your fucked-up name.
The door creaked open.
At first he didn’t see her. His scruffy face stayed bent down as he fumbled a file into a soft briefcase. He got two steps into the alley when she cleared her throat.
A soft, feminine melody.
He glanced over.
That stopped him.
He wasn’t bearlike as so many former throwers were. His massive body was still shaped the right way, mass up top, tapered through the waist. She wondered if he’d given up the steroids entirely or if they made him look too damn good to quit.
He was staring at her, no doubt wondering some things of his own.
She was a mirage. He seemed afraid to blink lest she disappear.
She parted her mouth. Let the ice pop inch further past her orange lips. Let her tongue squirm into sight on the side.
He didn’t notice the Škoda Fabia Combi rev to life behind him.
How could he?
His gaze stayed locked on her even as the car bore down, headlights dimmed. She tilted toward him and plucked the soft briefcase from his hand. At the last moment, Setyeyiva seemed to come back into his body. He whirled around as the car smashed into him, the brakes already chirping.
He flew. Landed. A bark of air left his lungs on impact.
He stared at her with uncomprehending eyes.
She licked up the Popsicle’s shaft. Might as well give him a little morphine on his way out.
Jaggers rolled forward, crushing the big man. The car bounced up and down and up and down and then was in front of him,
perfectly positioned to load the body. Jaggers popped the trunk and climbed out.
Candy dropped the ice pop and walked over, the briefcase swinging at her side.
She smirked at that whisper that had been haunting her of late. Damaged goods her ass.
The Škoda Fabia Combi had few advantages, but two of them happened to be generous hatch space and a loading sill a mere 611 millimeters off the ground. The roomy hatch was lined with plastic tarp, taped expertly around the sides.
Candy took the ankles, Jaggers the armpits. They huffed and they puffed and they swung the man in. The car had no sooner creaked down on its chassis than they heard a clacking of high heels behind them.
They turned to see one of the boardwalk girls teetering up the alley toward them, her baby giraffe legs constrained by a micromini banding her thighs together. She had a sweet almond-shaped face framed with straight raven-black hair. She might’ve been eighteen or a precocious fifteen—you never knew with these East Slavic types. She looked very concerned in a wholesome oh-my-gosh way that seemed at odds with her getup.
She said something in what sounded like Turkish—probably Crimean Tatar. Noting their expressions, she switched to Russian. “Are you all right? Was there an accident?”
“Yes,” Candy replied in Russian. “But we’re okay.” She reached over quickly to shut the hatch, but Jaggers stopped her.
Candy looked at him. His button eyes peered back at her, showing no depth.
“No,” Candy said to him under her breath.
Jaggers said nothing but kept his hand on the underside of the hatch lid, holding it open.
The girl drew nearer. “You’re sure you’re not hurt? Do you need me to call someone?”
“No, no, we’re fine,” Candy said. “Thank you, though, sweetheart.”
The girl stopped. They were alone in the alley, just the three of them cast in the slanting glow thrown from a window above. At some point in the past few minutes, night had come on in full.
“We could use a hand with the trunk,” Jaggers said. “I think it got warped in the crash. We can’t get it closed.”
The girl looked confused. But she gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Okay.”
As she started toward them, Candy tried again to yank the rear door closed, but Jaggers held it firm.
And then it was too late.
The girl looked down, saw the tangled body held by the plastic lining, and opened her mouth. Jaggers sealed in her scream with a jaundiced hand, his fist jabbing twice at her neck. He dumped her into the cargo space on top of Setyeyiva’s body and slammed the hatch lid.
Only now did Candy see the slim silver pen clenched in Jaggers’s bloody hand.
The girl rattled against the closed hatch. Wet thrashing. A screech of breath.
The words hissed through Candy’s teeth, cold with rage. “She’s still alive.”
“Not for long.”
Jaggers squatted, dropped the pen down a sewer drain, and rose wiping his hand on the thigh of his slacks. The rattling grew fainter and then stopped.
Candy punched him, a quick jab that snapped his head back on his stick neck. The pain seemed to have no effect. He dodged her cross, countering with a gut shot that doubled her over. Then he laid her low with a leg sweep. As she curled on the ground, sucking for air, he pressed himself on top of her, his slender fingers cinched not too tightly around her neck.
“She saw us.” Though he kept his voice low, he wore a grimace, and through his clenched teeth wafted the stink of his breath, stomach acid and rot.
She brought a knee up between his legs hard enough to jolt him a foot forward. But he didn’t so much as grunt. He only rolled off her, climbed into the driver’s seat, and waited. Candy rose and stood for a time in the dark alley, giving her breath time to even out. Then she walked around and got in.
They drove several blocks in silence. Jaggers pulled over by the body shop they had scouted the night before. Leaving the car running, he picked the padlock and slid the gate open. He drove through and into the garage.
Another benefit of Škoda Fabias: Crimea was lousy with them, like cockroaches, and every shop worth its salt was stocked with spare parts. As Jaggers pulled off the crumpled bumper, Candy took from Setyeyiva’s briefcase his laptop as well as a hardware token cryptocard that generated a new randomized log-in code every sixty seconds. Sitting on a workbench with the laptop resting across her knees, she waited for the token numbers to flip, then punched in the code.
She and Jaggers slogged away quietly and in concert, Candy clicking on the keyboard while he mounted a new bumper and grille and hammered out creases in the hood. He worked with the quick, efficient movements of a rodent. They were making good headway, and the night was young, but they still had to deal with the bodies in the trunk.
She accessed the databases, finally locating what looked like the right one. Then she ran a search for 1-855-2-NOWHERE and waited for the data to load. The information came up.
“Goddamn it,” she said. “Goddamn it.”
Jaggers looked up from his crouch at the bumper, where he was wielding a spray-paint gun. In the dim light, his dark eyes were holes in his face. A surgeon-like paint mask covered his nose and mouth, so his voice seemed to issue from the air itself.
“What?” it asked.
“Orphan X never parked the phone number here. It was a misdirect. He paid them a fee to open a dummy account.”
“Orphan Y can follow the money.”
Candy sneered. She’d been at this longer than Jaggers. “Orphan X set up that account for us to find, you idiot. Which means there will be no following the money. Not by Van Sciver, his übersoftware, or anyone or anything else.”
Jaggers returned to his work, misting a fine layer of silver across the crease in the hood. The news seemed to carry no weight for him. She wondered if he cared about anything.
“You killed that girl for nothing,” she said.
He didn’t shift focus from his work. “We killed Refat Setyeyiva for nothing.”
“Yeah, but that was the job.”
A line of silver paint settled across the hood, effacing the final flaw. “How interesting that you see a distinction.”
He set down the spray gun and appraised the car, which looked as good as new. Then he retrieved his carry-on bag from the backseat and began to strip. He kicked off his shoes and tugged down his pants. He wore no underwear.
What she saw startled her.
Rather what she didn’t see.
She’d heard of it before, of course. But it seemed like one of those bizarre conditions consigned to medical case studies and dusty journals. Not something that belonged out here in the real world.
He piled his bloody clothes on the concrete floor, spilled some oil on them, and lit them on fire. Then he looked up, naked, unashamed, and expressionless. “I suggest you do the same.”
Her leather pants were clean, but her bustier sported a few smears from moving Setyeyiva. As Jaggers dressed in fresh clothes, she stripped off her shirt and threw it onto the small pyre.
She grabbed her encrypted satphone and walked outside, already dialing.
Standing beneath the firmament, she waited as it rang and rang. A click announced Van Sciver’s presence on the line.
“HOW was your MEAL?”
“No nutritional content,” she said.
There was a slight delay as their conversation ping-ponged between various virtual telephone-switch destinations. “Are there any inGREDients we might use to prepare a future meal?”
“No.”
She waited until it became clear that this was not a delay but a silence.
She’d visited Orphan Y at his undisclosed location only once, choppering in with a hood over her head. She pictured him there in his great room, lost in the flickering lights of the monitors, his very flesh seeming to crawl with the numbers pouring across the screens. It was as if he’d achieved singularity, given up his human form to become one with the data.
&nb
sp; “Y?” she said. “You there?”
“I WILL identify HIS NEXT RESERVATION. And I WILL SEND you two to DINE with HIM.”
The air soothed her bare, burn-ravaged back. She drew in a cool breath, tilted her face to the smog-smeared stars. Somewhere pots clanged and a car backfired and drunken young men yelled in the night.
She thought of a girl with raven hair bent over the open hatch of the car. Her almond-shaped face, sweet and simple. The blood spurting from her carotid.
“The man you stuck me with,” Candy said. “My fellow diner. The guy’s a psychopath.”
“YES,” came back the multitude of voices. “But he’s MY PSYCHOPATH.”
30
Someone’s Idea of a Library
Two dogs, thirteen guards, two snipers, one doctor, and Dex.
In his room late that night, Evan considered his next move. He’d been building a mental blueprint of the facility, biding his time for the right moment to escape. Now that René had brought in more men, Evan wanted to know more. Not just about the men but about René. This inexhaustible supply of guards raised further questions. What was René really up to here? Had some of the potential escape routes been compromised?
Evan looked at the fireplace. Made up his mind. Crossing the room, he eased the sliding door open. Knocking out two of the security cameras meant he could move unseen by the balcony, fireplace, and desk.
From the balcony he gazed across at the barn. The big door was rolled back. Inside, two of the narcos practiced hand-to-hand on a wrestling mat laid down in front of the vehicles. They were skilled fighters, acquainted with martial arts. Throws and kicks and deflections. Several others rimmed the periphery, pounding the mat and shouting encouragement. This time around René had wisely hired not just gunmen but fighters familiar with the down-and-dirty.
Shivering against the cold, Evan stepped back into the bedroom but left the sliding glass door wide open. Climbing into bed, he pretended to toss and turn, landing himself just offscreen. Then he shoved a pillow under the covers at the periphery of the hidden camera’s view where his shoulder might be. A chilly current kicked up, the open slider pulling a stream of air into the room.
The Nowhere Man--An Orphan X Novel Page 13