Her lips trembled. She nodded.
“Okay.” He stroked her chin. “Okay.”
“Do you really have cameras in the barn?” she asked.
“No,” René said.
She bit her lower lip. “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“And I will honor that promise,” René said. “Nothing will happen to you. In fact, nothing will happen here at all.”
She closed her eyes, freeing tears that slid down her olive skin.
René turned and started out.
Evan stayed tense.
“However.” René stopped, his back to her. “One of the many benefits of money is that I can commission people anywhere in the world.”
Despi blanched.
Slowly, he turned. “Say, in Rhodes. Athens.” He held out his hand, palm up. One of the narcos placed an iPad on it.
“No.” Despi shook her head. “No, no, no.”
René hummed to himself as he tapped the screen. He held up the device for Despi. Evan couldn’t see what it held, but he saw the glow reflected in Despi’s eyes.
The impact on her was immediate. She took a half step back as if staggered by a punch. Her face shifted, hollowed out beneath the skin, her eyes sunken and glazed.
René swiped a finger across the screen, bringing up the next image.
She strangled a small noise in her throat. Her words came in a hoarse whisper: “No. Not her, too.” She hunched over, her shoulders shuddering. She made sounds befitting war zones and hospital rooms.
Guilt flared up inside Evan, scouring his insides, threatening to consume him.
“Not a hair on your head will be touched. As promised. In fact, you’re free to go.” René rested a hand on Despi’s forearm. “Dex will drop you at an airport of your choice with a full wallet. By helping my guest, you’ve earned your freedom. I hope it was worth it.”
Despi straightened back up. Her face was flushed, streaked with tears, but her gaze was fierce, unbroken.
René said, “I’ll even let you say good-bye to your friend before you depart.” He gestured toward the wrestling mat.
Despi’s stare skewered René. For a moment he even seemed unsettled.
Then she started over to Evan. She looked broken from within, her limbs held at the wrong angles, her gait and carriage different, as if she were learning to walk inside a new body. René indicated for his men to give them some space.
Evan wasn’t sure if she was going to strike him. If she wanted to, he would let her. Instead she embraced him, squeezing him hard, her face mashed to his chest.
He stroked her thick, thick hair. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her. “I tried to warn you.”
He was shocked at the note of anger that had found its way into his voice. Fire crawled across his skin, matting his shirt to his back. Everything felt jumbled together inside him, trespasses past and present. He pictured Jack clutching at the ball of his shoulder, his hand gloved in blood. A little more pressure, a little more time and he might have lived. If Evan hadn’t asked him to meet. If they’d chosen a different day, a different hour, a different parking structure. If Evan had been quicker on the draw. If he hadn’t taken the car jack. If he’d thrown Despi out of his room.
The photographs René had shown Despi of her slain family would live inside her as surely as Evan’s memories of Parking Level 3 lived inside him. He couldn’t undo it for her. Not just her present anguish but the years of pain to come, dividends paid out over the decades.
She looked up at him with the same fierceness she’d shown minutes before. “You think my family would’ve been safe if I hadn’t helped you? Don’t be naïve.”
He hadn’t thought anything could shock him right now, but there it was. “Naïve?”
“You think you’re at the controls just like René. But you couldn’t control this.”
He felt his face loosening with emotion.
She said, “Accepting that you need help like everyone else—it doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. Nothing does.”
He had a hard time swallowing. “Then why do it?”
She kissed him. Her tears, wet against his cheeks. She pulled away, held his face, her breath hot. “I don’t know how to live with this. With what I saw.”
“I know. I know that’s how it feels.”
“How would you kill me? Right now?” Her voice held a note of pleading.
He looked at her brimming eyes. The wisp of hair caught in the corner of her mouth. Felt the warmth of her pressed against him, her fragile, human form.
For the first time, he had no answer.
Dex snapped a black hood over her head and yanked her out of Evan’s arms. He dragged her to the Rolls-Royce, her legs stumbling to keep up. After cinching the hood and knotting it off, he opened the rear door, depositing her inside. He reversed out of the barn, the back of the majestic car kissing a snowbank outside, and drove off.
Evan felt a sting in his palms and unclenched his fists to see that his fingernails had indented the skin. He looked over at René. “At one point the tables will be turned—”
“And … let me guess,” René said. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Worse.”
René must have read something in Evan’s voice, because he blinked a few times. Regained his composure. Forced a smile.
Outside, a band of gold rode the horizon, tinting the caps of the snowbanks blue. René checked his watch. “The markets are almost open. Are you ready to wire the money?”
Evan cleared his throat, spit a gob of blood on the pristine blue mat. “No,” he said.
René gave a little nod and then breezed out, passing two of his men. “Search him and bring him to the lab.”
42
Corners of His Mind
Straps bit into Evan’s chest, stomach, and thighs, adhering him to the gurney. Hard leather restraints bound his ankles and wrists to the side rails. He fought to find a place inside himself that would protect him from what would come. SERE training had taught him to deal with stress, disorientation, torture. To this end he’d been maced, electrocuted, and drownproofed, his reactions observed and critiqued. He’d learned to find corners of his mind to retreat into. It never made the pain go away, but it allowed an extra layer between him and it, let him observe the agony from a slight remove. As with meditation, it was essential not to take his thoughts or sensations literally. He had to find the space around them. In the space there was relief.
From whatever René was readying over by the vault, Evan would be requiring a good deal of relief. Dex stood at René’s side, but facing Evan. He held up his grinning hand, wore it over his mouth.
“I’ve tried to be reasonable,” René said, “but I’ve never come across anyone as stubborn as you.” His back remained turned, his bowed shoulders rippling with some movement of his unseen hands. Daylight and frigid air streamed through the shattered basement window. “I wanted this to be civilized but you refused and refused and refused. And so now.” He turned to face Evan, a syringe in hand. “This.”
In the course of his training, Evan had been injected with sodium pentothal and other “truth serums.” He wondered if that was what René was up to here. A psychoactive medication would make him more pliable, more likely to be manipulated into sending the wire transfer and unleashing whatever came with it. But even as a kid, he’d found the drugs not to live up to their reputations.
Judging by Dex’s tattooed grin and René’s very real one, whatever that syringe held was something much worse.
“I can promise,” René said, as if reading Evan’s mind, “it’s like nothing you’ve ever encountered.”
A fly buzzed over and landed on Evan’s knuckles. He wiggled his fingers to scare it off. “More sadistic research out of Cornell?”
“Out of Oxford, actually. You wouldn’t believe what it cost for me to procure a few tiny vials of this.” Taking his time, René ambled closer to Evan. “Like most experiments, it started with a simple question: What
if you could make prison sentences for heinous crimes last longer?”
Evan’s heart rate ticked up, pulsing in the side of his neck. “Longer?”
“Longer than a lifetime.” René regarded the syringe with something like affection. “There was a couple who kidnapped a four-year-old boy. They kept him in a closet, tortured and starved him for weeks, then beat him to death. Given the UK’s disdain for capital punishment, the husband and wife were given a thirty-year sentence. Which seems woefully inadequate.”
Evan thought of the Horizon Express, plowing along at twenty-three knots, a white furrow in the deep blue sea, and Alison Siegler somewhere aboard in one of thirty-five hundred containers, closing the distance to a fate nobody deserved.
And he thought of the boy’s voice over the phone line: You should see how they keep us here. Like cattle, all lined up.
“Yes,” he said. “It does seem inadequate.”
“What if you could make someone serve a thousand-year sentence in eight hours? Ten lifetimes of purgatory crammed into the span of a single workday?”
The tip of the needle neared. Evan’s fear mounted, threatened to overtake him.
“Can you imagine the horror?” René said, leaning in.
Evan struggled furiously against the straps, but they were designed for precisely this purpose. The needle slid into his arm.
René smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m just going to give you a single dr—”
Evan felt a slight pressure in his vein and then watched René’s mouth continue to open more slowly than seemed conceivably possible, each millimeter taking an hour, two hours, and the end of the spoken word pulled out and out, stretched from a block of steel into a thin metal wire, a sound and a vibration, the endless tunnel of the o like a wormhole through the ages, and over the forever-gaping mouth René started to blink, but the movement of his eyelids was like the rise and fall of a lake’s watermark across the seasons, limitless microseconds crammed between microseconds, the creased skin around his eyes rearranging infinitesimally, a universe of motion contained in a single blink until at last, after a day’s grueling wait, Evan could see the thin blue veins etched in his closed lids and he knew it would be another day for them to open yet again, and the word was not yet completed, the wrinkled lips still closing the o into the p even as another sound overpowered the slow-motion hum of René’s voice, a buzz slowed to its constituent audio parts, and Evan pulled his gaze to the source, but the shifting of his eyeballs felt like altering the course of a freight ship, ligaments and muscles flexing and tugging to recalibrate his view excruciatingly, until at last he fixed upon the bottle flying airborne over René, its hairlike bristles waving sluggishly on its metallic green thorax, its wings flapping so gradually that Evan could see the quality of light alter through the semitransparent wings that were embellished with intricate patterns to put any stained-glass window to shame, and the whole horrifying, unfettered, attenuated time, Evan’s mind raced inside his skull at a real, frantic pace, alive and horror-filled, scrambling like a mouse trapped in a bowl of water, desperate, so desperate to get—
He jerked his head back into the pillow, a breath screeching through his lungs. His muscles had knotted from neck to calves, arching his body against the restraints. He turned his head to the side and vomited, warmth drooling across his cheek onto the sheets.
“I’ll do it,” he said, in a voice so hoarse he didn’t recognize it as his own. “I’ll wire the money.”
43
Unleash Hell
Evan sat before the monitor in the study on the fourth floor, his hands on the keyboard. The computer was brand-new; he’d watched Xalbador remove it from the box. That it was air-gapped, having never been hooked into the Internet, was helpful, but whatever cloaking and encryption software René had in place to hide the wire transfers would not be as impenetrable and untraceable as those Evan used. He’d learned at the elbows of the best technical security specialists in the world.
As had Van Sciver.
Van Sciver had a team of them in his employ now and more data-mining capabilities than René could possibly dream of.
Click a single button and unleash hell.
Maybe unleashing hell was the only shot Evan had left.
The heated vent above breathed warmth down his neck, making him break out in a sweat. Or was it fear, only now worming its way out through his skin? He’d spent so many years safe in obscurity, unseen and unexamined. Now the carefully positioned boulder he’d been hiding beneath was about to be rolled back, his life exposed to a blinding light.
He thought about the infinity he’d spent strapped to the gurney, an infinity that had lasted precisely two flaps of a blowfly’s wings.
He looked over at René, a last-ditch effort. “You don’t want me to do this.”
René smiled, folded his hands. “I don’t?”
“The wrong people will come. You will not be happy.”
“I’ve done this a time or two,” René said. “My procedures are completely secure.”
Evan said, “You don’t have any comprehension of what secure is.”
René snapped his fingers. With extreme caution Dex handed him a syringe. The clear, viscous liquid rippled inside. A single drop had nearly undone Evan. He couldn’t imagine what horrors a full injection would bring.
Taking a deep breath, he keyed a series of pass codes into the Privatbank AG Web site. He paused. “Once I click this button, I can’t control what will happen.”
René jammed the needle into the side of Evan’s neck. He brought his ruddy face close, sweat drops clinging to the points of his hair. He spoke through locked teeth. “I am done negotiating.”
Evan felt the twenty-one-gauge stainless-steel tube embedded in his neck. A half-inch movement of René’s thumb and he’d be trapped in an eternity of suffering.
He felt something leak out of him. The last of what he had.
He closed his eyes. Tapped the mouse. The loading wheel spun, and then a whoosh indicated that the money had gone.
René eased the needle out of Evan’s neck, and Evan allowed himself a quiet exhalation. He stared at the screen. WIRE SENT.
“What’s coming won’t be worth twenty-seven million dollars,” he said.
René turned to Dex. “Put this animal back in its cage.”
Dex seized Evan, yanking him to his feet and shoving him toward the door.
“At last,” Evan said, “we’re calling things what they are.”
44
Celebration
René stood before the picture window of the master bedroom, hands clasped at the small of his back, watching snow flurry against the pane. It occurred to him that it was a pose suited to a Cassaroy. Regal and imposing, spine held straight enough to disguise that two-inch deviation. An artist could come along and paint an oil of him planted here victoriously, an oil that would have been worthy to hang alongside portraits of Cassaroys past that sobered the grand halls of his childhood manor.
And yet.
He had a niggling sense that it wasn’t time to rest on his laurels. He’d prevailed in the battle, sure, but there was a greater war to be won.
He felt a stirring, the sensation he got when he was closing in on a financial trail, readying for the kill. He closed his eyes, sensed the data shifting, so many bits and pieces, a pattern almost discernible just beneath the surface.
Behind him David stirred in the silk sheets, exhausted from the day’s travails. “Are you coming to bed?”
“Our guest is clearly not who I thought he was,” René said, watching the snow shape-shift outside. “But I think he’s something even bigger than I imagined.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” René said, finally turning. The rungs of David’s stomach muscles stood out like something artificial, something poured from a mold. René was surprised by how little the sight aroused him. His office awaited. There were queries to be made, baited hooks to be tossed into the Deep Web. He walked p
ast David, heading for the door. “But I’m going to start digging.”
* * *
The women’s bathroom in Mexico City International Airport smelled of disinfectant and Montezuma’s revenge. Candy wet a wad of paper towels in the sink and retreated behind a stall door. She peeled off her shirt and bra, the fabric clinging to her burn scars, then gingerly patted her weeping back with the damp towels. She allowed herself to grit her teeth but did not make a noise.
Relief was relative.
The pain was so constant that she sometimes forgot it was there. But not after an eighteen-hour flight spent leaning against a scratchy polyester seat cover.
Sitting next to Jaggers had only added to the agony. She hated everything about him. His stink. His jaundiced skin that under the yellow glow of the reading light looked like dried papaya. How he sucked his teeth after eating instead of using a toothpick.
The way he’d killed a beautiful young fawn of a Tatar girl who’d only walked into the alley to see if they needed help.
That the mission had proved to be a dead end only added to Candy’s frustration. They’d laid over in Amsterdam already and would now enter the U.S. from the south, a not-worth-noticing commuter flight from Mexico City to San Diego. She was willing to endure any amount of hellacious travel and the myriad discomforts that came with it as long as the journey held the faintest glimmer of hope for catching Orphan X. She’d forge through fire and brimstone to get a crack at his untarnished flesh.
That’s why she hated return flights. They spelled failure.
She finished patting down her back and let the paper towels drop to the floor. Hanging her head, she eased a breath through her teeth. The air cooled the moist skin, a momentary break from the itching, the burn.
Putting her shirt back on would be unpleasant. Gathering her will, she stared at the bra wrapped around her clenched fist.
All her training, and here she was nearly vanquished by a 34D in a bathroom stall.
A boarding announcement for her flight echoed through the bathroom. She readied herself to finish dressing.
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