The Nowhere Man--An Orphan X Novel

by Gregg Hurwitz

  They banked high above the valley, and Evan peered down at the dollhouse of the chalet, spirals of smoke still rising from the blown-out wall.

  Jack: “I don’t care how hard it is. You don’t get me someone in time, I will land this helo on your skull. Understand?”

  Movement below caught Evan’s eye. A caravan of black SUVs blazed up the gravel road, sweeping onto the cobblestone driveway, doors flying open, men spilling out.

  Breaking from the tree line, two dots sprinted to meet them.

  Evan felt himself going out, and he blinked hard, fighting to stay conscious.

  A figure broke from the pack of men, waiting to receive Candy McClure and Orphan M. The man was dressed differently from the others, wearing some kind of cloak. He paused, turning skyward to glare at the Black Hawk as it hung overhead. His hood was raised, his face shadowed, but Evan knew right away who it was.

  Van Sciver.

  The Black Hawk banked again, the view swept away, replaced by the endless scroll of the sky.

  Evan shut his eyes, and this time they didn’t open.

  57

  A Very Persuasive Call

  Pain.

  Horizontal.

  Drifting along as if in a canoe.

  Evan’s throat—sandpaper and rust.

  His hand cramped around the RoamZone.

  Needle jammed in his arm, saline bag clutched in Jack’s blocky fist.

  Fluorescent lights floated overhead.

  An empty corridor led to another empty corridor.

  Doors.

  A warehouse interior.

  Arranged in the middle of the blank space, lit like a movie set, a full operating theater.

  Bizarre.

  As out of place as René’s basement lab.

  The afterlife was weird.

  A doctor in blue scrubs ran over. “Who is he?”

  Jack’s disembodied voice, gruffer than usual. “John Doe.”

  “Who are you?”

  “John Doe Sr.”

  Thumb on eyelid.

  Flare of penlight.

  Latex fingers on the side of his neck.

  A nurse called over, “Can someone please tell me what the saline is doing in the freezer?”

  Jack waved her off.

  Trauma shears zippering open the coat.

  Fabric peeling wetly back from Evan’s wound.

  “Jesus,” the doctor said. “Um…”

  Jack: “Speak.”

  “Look, I got a very persuasive call from the 202 area code telling me to get to this location. I want to help, believe me, but I’m an anesthesiologist—”

  “An anesthesiologist? For the love of Mary.”

  “He needs a vein graft into the damaged subclavian vein. That requires a trauma surgeon.”

  “I asked for a trauma surgeon.”

  “Guess how many of those there are in Piscataquis County? Your guys, they finally tracked one down, but … um, the weather, the roads—she’s still two hours out. I’m just a placeholder till she gets here. But…”

  “Get the words to come out faster.”

  “Look. I’m sorry. He’s not gonna make it that long. He’s not gonna make it.”

  Jack’s face bunched up.

  Evan tried to make a noise, but nothing happened.

  The lights wobbled in and out.

  “Okay.” Jack tilted his forehead into the span of his palm. When he looked up, his eyes were different.

  “Kill him,” Jack said.

  58

  Cold

  Cold.

  59

  Reborn

  Lights fuzzed into existence.

  Cabin. Soft bed. Jack sitting bedside.

  “You have been,” Jack said theatrically, “reborn.”

  “You look old,” Evan said, and drifted into the beckoning darkness.

  60

  The Only Person Worse Than Us

  Fade in on a new day.

  Evan’s shoulder pulsed beneath the bandages. Jack remained in that bedside chair, same clothes, more scruff. The cabin smelled of wet cedar and coffee.

  Seemed like a sorry-ass excuse for the Elysian Fields.

  Was it real?

  “Quit whining and get your ass up,” Jack said. “We got work to do.”

  Yeah, Evan thought. It’s real.

  “What’s … date?” Evan’s throat clutched, sending him into a coughing fit.

  Jack said, “October twenty-seventh.”

  Three days. That gave Evan three days to get to Alison Siegler before she got to Jacksonville.

  He was still coughing. Jack handed him a glass of water. Evan took a sip, felt the coolness glide all the way down his parched throat into his stomach.

  The cabin was one big room. Worn leather books lined a bookshelf, ordered by descending height. A water-filled heavy bag hung from one of the ceiling beams. A kettle perched on a stovetop, centered on the heating coil. Not a crumb, not a speck of dust in sight. Jack lived here, all right.

  Evan set the glass down. Grimacing, he reached out with his left hand and poked Jack’s chest. Solid.

  “You’re supposed to be dead,” he said.

  “Later,” Jack said.

  “I thought it was a dying vision. A deus ex machina in the form of a Black Hawk. My trusted mentor at the helm.” Evan had put more bite into “trusted mentor” than he’d intended.

  “We wouldn’t have seen you if you hadn’t broken out onto that open patch of the mountain.”

  “How’d you get my vicinity?”

  “We got there after the explosion at the chalet, did a sweep below the outside brink of the valley. We were scanning the mountainsides with a parabolic mike, picked up the audio signature of your murmuring. You were…”

  “What?”

  “You were apologizing.”

  … sorry. I’m sorry …

  The boy had saved Evan’s life, then, not vice versa.

  Evan would repay the favor soon enough.

  If the kid hadn’t called, if Evan hadn’t answered, Jack’s crew wouldn’t have zeroed in on him. If he hadn’t broken tree cover to stagger for the summit, he wouldn’t have been spotted. The last ounce of what he had to give was the ounce that had saved his life.

  A burning intensified on Evan’s leg. He flipped back the sheets. A red scar seamed the inside of his calf. They’d harvested a saphenous vein?

  He said, “How am I…?”

  “We took you offline,” Jack said. “Suspended animation.”

  Evan waited.

  “The doc induced hypothermia. Drained your blood, flushed your system with cold saline.”

  “My veins?”

  “Internal organs, heart, brain—everything. We took you down to fifty degrees. The colder the cells are, the less oxygen they need. We had to slow down your chemical reactions, keep your brain from realizing it wasn’t getting any oxygen.”

  “You making this up?”

  “Nah. They been playing with it behind the fence for years now. They call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.”

  “It’s been tested?”

  “On pigs.” At this, Jack allowed a gleam of amusement to cross his eyes.

  “Survivability rate?”

  “Seven percent.”

  Evan swallowed.

  “Oh, come on,” Jack said. “Best odds you’ve had your whole damn life.” He looked away quickly, but not before Evan saw his blue eyes moisten. “You were dead for two hours and thirteen minutes. The trauma surgeon finally showed up.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “After taking my head off? She performed the graft. Then we packed you in hot-water bladders to bring you back to body temperature, rapid-infused you with warmed blood products, kick-started you with a defib. You’re Frankenstein’s monster. ‘The fallen angel.’”

  “Where’s my phone?”

  Jack looked concerned at that; he must have read the emotion on Evan’s face. Sliding open the nightstand drawer, he pulled out the
beat-up RoamZone and tossed it onto the sheets. “You okay?”

  “Do I fucking look okay, Jack?”

  “I know we have a lot to talk about.”

  “You think?”

  Jack glanced away, his jaw shifting.

  “I can’t believe it’s Thursday.” Evan tried to sit up, with mixed results. His vision spotted, and then the spots bled together. He lay back down. “I’ve never been out four days.”

  “You’ve never been dead before.”

  “Right. Unlike you.”

  Snowflakes plastered the window.

  “Where am I?”

  “Alleghenies.”

  “Am I free to leave?”

  “What?” Color came up beneath Jack’s cheeks. “Of course you’re free to leave. What do you think this is?”

  “I don’t know. What is this?”

  “This is me saving your ass.”

  “Well, you haven’t exactly been forthcoming these past eight years. So forgive me if the issue of trust is in question.”

  Jack let that one ring off the walls for a moment. He templed his fingers, looked down at them. “I have a fake driver’s license for you, cash, all that. You’re free to leave as soon as you’re rested up. I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

  “Where’s the nearest road?”

  “Four-point-three klicks downslope.” He rasped a hand across his chin. “You gonna hitchhike out of here, Evan? In the shape you’re in? That’d show me, all right.”

  Evan bit his lip hard, let his thoughts boil. His head throbbed, but he pretended he didn’t notice. “How’d you get onto me?” he finally asked.

  “I didn’t. Van Sciver locked on after the money wire. I keep an eye on Van Sciver. Once word went out wide on the auction—”

  “You’re watching him?”

  “Mostly unsuccessfully. For years now. As he tries to watch me. Shadow games.”

  “You’re not sanctioned.”

  “Nope. I’m as dead and gone as you are.” That half smirk. “But I’ve still got friends in low places.”

  “Have you seen Van Sciver face-to-face?”

  “No. This is the closest we’ve come.” Jack reached into the drawer, came out with a time-stamped satellite image zoomed in on the chalet.

  Evan stared at it incredulously. “You still have access to birds?”

  “Depends who you ask.”

  The grainy photo captured Van Sciver’s face pointed up at the sky, nothing more than a dark oval beneath the raised hood of the cloak—the precise moment Evan remembered before blacking out. SUVs spotted the driveway around Van Sciver, a frenzy of beetles.

  Evan stared at the blurry form. “The hell’s he wearing?”

  “A Faraday-cage cloak. The metallized fabric blocks RF signals, X-rays, thermal imaging—even blocks him from drones.”

  “He looks like Gandalf.”

  “You know how he is. Trinkets and paranoia—they’re like catnip to him. He’s the only person worse than us.”

  Evan’s head suddenly felt quite heavy. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “Later, Evan.”

  Evan was too weak to argue. “What did you get on René?”

  “René?”

  “The guy who took me. Who held the auction.”

  “Everyone dispersed after your rescue—”

  “It was an escape.”

  Jack showed his palms. “Okay. After your escape they didn’t find much at the chalet. Auto-erase features were remote-initiated on the hard drives, so all those surveillance cams? They proved worthless.”

  “How are you getting this intel if you’re off the grid?”

  “Three decades in the shadow service, I still got plenty of baited lines on the inside.”

  Evan shifted on the bed, and his right shoulder let him know about it. “What about the stuff he left behind? There was a lot of shit in that chalet.”

  “I talked to one of my hooks at the Bureau. The investigation is young, but he said everything in that chalet was pretty well end-stopped. Rare paintings, weird medical crap, advanced weaponry—there’s plenty to run down, but it’ll take time. Black market, dubious provenance, cash payments, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure something’ll yield, but you know how it is backtracing through the black markets. Like digging a hole with your face.”

  Evan pictured René waving around that clear cylindrical bottle, misting the DNA privacy spray over every surface he touched. The empty drawers in the study. What is mine is hidden away down a rabbit hole.

  “How’d he pay for the place?” Evan asked.

  ‘The money trail looks like a spiderweb. Ball bearings—”

  “—within ball bearings,” Evan said with him.

  Jack seemed amused. Evan was not. His neck was having trouble supporting his head.

  “Every payment wired in from a different shell corp,” Jack said. “He’s got elaborate encryptions for movement between entities—”

  “Van Sciver cracked his encryption.” The words came drowsily. Evan wondered what kinds of painkillers were in his system. There were too many questions spinning through his head for him to grab hold of.

  Three days to get to Alison Siegler. Right now the Horizon Express would be doglegging around the eastern tip of Cuba, turning back for the mainland. And God only knew where the boy was.

  Jack spoke, pulling Evan from his thoughts: “With the resources Van Sciver has at his disposal, he can crack anything.”

  “Not anything,” Evan said. “He got through René’s wire encryptions. But never mine.”

  “The point is—this wack-job René? The guy’s Teflon.” Jack shook his head. “We have no idea who he is. He’s a ghost.”

  Evan moved his right arm, felt the muscle scream.

  “Don’t,” Jack said. “What are you doing?”

  Evan’s fingertips found the tape plastered to the inside of his left arm. Weakly, he peeled it free. His skin tugged up, a thousand tiny pinches. He held the length of tape to the light.

  Trapped inside, René’s fingerprint.

  Jack peeled it from the pad of Evan’s thumb.

  At last Evan let his head tilt back onto the pillow. It felt like drifting into a cloud. “You’re welcome,” he mumbled, and fell asleep.

  61

  To Do Harm

  Evan woke up sometime in the night. Darkness crowded the windows, making the cabin feel small and inconsequential, a box drifting through outer space. At the square of the kitchen table, Jack slumped in a chair, breathing heavily, his sleeping face uplit with the dancing glow of a screen saver.

  As quietly as he could, Evan slipped from the sheets. His shoulder ached with each movement, but the pain was surprisingly manageable. He walked silently across the floorboards. His muscles felt tight, his lower back complaining about the bedridden hours.

  Easing into the bathroom, he tugged the pull-chain light. His unshaven face glowered back at him from the mirror. He’d seen more attractive sights.

  It took some doing to reach the string at the back of the hospital gown, but he managed, letting the fabric rustle forward off his arms and puddle on the floor. Biting his lip, he loosed the adhesive dressing taped across his shoulder, letting it hinge open. A gnarled patch of flesh capped the deltoid. A horizontal scar ran above the clavicle, an accent mark Mohawked with sutures. The bone looked passable, probably restraightened with the help of a metal rod.

  His vision spotted, and he leaned against the sink to regain his balance. Another week or so and he’d be well enough to leave. But he didn’t have a week.

  He had to get to the boy, as promised.

  To Alison Siegler.

  And then to René.

  Evan’s hair was knotted, gummed with sap. His face had been wiped clean, but streaks of dried blood still marked the side of his neck, the edge of his temple. He smelled of sweat and dirt.

  Lowering himself into the empty tub, he let the water trickle warm. A fresh razor rested on the cake of soap. He shaved c
arefully in the semidarkness, then used a washcloth to bathe himself. The lather filled the tiny bathroom with familiar scents, bergamot and saddle soap, lemon and musk—the smell of Jack. It brought Evan back to the two-story farmhouse of his childhood. His dormer bedroom looking across a blanket of oak trees. Strider, their Rhodesian ridgeback, lapping table scraps from Evan’s twelve-year-old hand beneath the table. The hard part is keeping you human. Jack’s foot ticking along to La Fille du Régiment. Nine high C’s. Towering bookshelves and mallard green walls. Photograph of Jack’s long-dead wife in its tarnished silver frame. Parking Level 3. Blue flannel. The tang of iron and cherry blossoms. Have I ever lied to you?

  Have I ever lied to you?

  Yes.

  You have.

  Evan shut off the faucet. With effort he hoisted himself up, stepped free of the bathtub, and managed to towel himself mostly dry. Leaving the dirty hospital gown, he exited the bathroom, crept across the room, and sat on the bed.

  The cabinet of the nightstand held medical supplies. He spread them on the sheets. Tugged out a fresh square of gauze and tore the package with his teeth. The medical tape gave him trouble.

  Behind him at the table, Jack was awake. Evan didn’t know how he knew. He just did.

  Jack’s voice ghosted over his shoulder. “Can I help you?”

  “No,” Evan said.

  * * *

  Evan awakened the next morning to an empty cabin. He felt less groggy. After dressing in some of Jack’s clothes that he found in the closet, he went over to the stretch of counter that passed for a kitchen and made himself oatmeal. He was still stirring the bowl when Jack stepped in from outside, snapping down the stubby antenna of a satphone.

  “René Peter Cassaroy,” Jack said.

  “That’s quite a name.”

  Jack flicked his head at a stack of printouts on the kitchen table. “He’s got quite a lineage.” He ducked out of his scarf, slung it on the coatrack. “He’s in the wind.”

  Evan crossed to the table, flipped through the reports, all of them stamped CLASSIFIED. Most were from the FBI, which looked to be running point on the investigation. Evan suspected that the IRS docs would prove most valuable. A few scanned crime-scene photos had been printed out as well. The barn. The basement lab. The erupted ballroom. It seemed from another lifetime.