In 2008 one of René’s attorneys had taken receipt of a quarterly distribution from a now-extinct umbrella corporation at a condo address in Zagreb. The building, a mere two-hour drive east of the port.
Evan crossed the Vault and spun the dial on his floor safe. Lifting the steel hatch, he reached inside for one of his passports.
70
The Slightest Misstep
It had been hell.
Not just weathering Van Sciver’s quiet rage. But being stuck with Ben Jaggers. And stuck with him Candy was, until the job was done.
As if she needed another motivation to reduce Orphan X to ash.
She sat in the driver’s seat of a Passat wagon that had been advertised as “family-size.” She mostly liked it for its trunk space.
To avoid Jaggers’s stink, she breathed through her mouth, but then she got worried about all that funk getting into her lungs, and so she went back to breathing through her nose and suffering silently.
Croatia was amazing. More specifically, Croatian men were amazing. Tall and broad, full heads of lush dark hair, light eyes and golden skin—like Olympic athletes, the whole lot of them. And they proclaimed their love so readily. On the first night, on the first meeting. Of course, Candy got that a lot, but she got it more in Croatia.
When she wasn’t stuck with Ben Jaggers.
Watching a luxury condo complex on a city-center street crowded with exhaust-belching buses.
In a fucking Passat.
Van Sciver—or, more precisely, Van Sciver’s room of supercomputers—had unearthed René’s location fairly quickly after the chalet combustion. A hub of five major freeways, Zagreb is a confusion of bypasses and congestion. An ideal location for René to slip in and out of. Plenty of avenues for escape. But also plenty of stakeout spots like the one Candy and Jaggers had pinned down for the past week, parked off a major artery among a crowded lineup of other vehicles.
Why couldn’t it have been Split with its view of the sparkling Adriatic or Dubrovnik with stone city walls and hills of lavender? But no, here she was in the Detroit of Croatia, stuck in a Volkswagen with that yellow bastard.
A group of Croatian men dressed in soccer uniforms hopped off a bus ahead of them, joking and shoving one another. Forked triceps and cleft chins. She felt taunted, a cat in an aquarium.
“Are you watching the building?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Candy said, flicking her eyes back across the four lanes of traffic to the high-security condo complex. She resumed watching people trickle through the front gate.
Fat woman with stroller. Silver-haired captain of industry. Three schoolgirls in fetching plaid skirts.
René had already had his daily morning outing, a trip to a bakery for a croissant and juice and to the drugstore for God knew what. Dex never left his side, his remaining hand shoved in his trench-coat pocket, a lumbering gumshoe with a thyroid condition.
Now they were back in the condo, a baited trap, and Candy had nothing to do but ogle soccer players, endure Jaggers, and wait for Evan to show up.
Under cover of night, Jaggers had managed to get several hidden surveillance cameras up around the building’s perimeter, streaming into the laptop that rested on the console between them. It was available for close-ups and replays, but over the past days they’d seen few customers worth a second look.
Her phone sounded, Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.” She’d chosen the new ringtone mostly to annoy Jaggers, though he seemed annoyingly unannoyable.
He just sat in the passenger seat, as still as a frozen rat, an elaborate GPS unit resting across his stick-thin thighs.
She picked up.
“STATUS upDATE?”
“In clear view of restaurant. Still no sign of the expected party.”
“LIGHTNING BUG is ON StandBY. AwaitING coordinates.”
For obvious reasons Van Sciver had to keep the drone out of the air for as long as possible. Which meant no sky surveillance. Once Candy and M confirmed Orphan X’s precise location, they’d input it into the handheld GPS unit, an unmanned armed aerial vehicle would flash above the thick clouds, and Zeus would hurl a thunderbolt from the heavens. There’d be no collateral damage. No noncollateral damage either, if you thought about it.
If you killed the Nowhere Man, did anyone really die?
The targeted zap would get blamed on Hamas or Israel or some shit—that was up to Van Sciver to figure out. He was delighted to have a shot off U.S. soil and wasn’t going to miss his chance. One of the joys of operating OCONUS was that there was no hue and cry over ROEs and constitutional rights and court precedents. There was a guy one moment and a crater the next and then everyone standing around with their hands in their pockets, shrugging.
The GPS unit in Orphan M’s lap mapped the street and the surrounding buildings, drilling down coordinates using not degrees but minutes and seconds, which were accurate to 1/3600 of a degree, precise enough to guide a missile through a doughnut. The thing even accounted for minute tectonic crustal movement, Jaggers had informed her fetishistically. She’d told him that that sounded like a medical condition.
Candy focused again on her call with Van Sciver. “I was still hoping to have a more leisurely meal with the diner,” she said.
They’d been over this.
“The COORDINATES,” the collection of anonymous voices said. “And then DESSERT.”
The line cut out.
* * *
Evan sat in the bay window of the boutique hotel overlooking the crowded Zagreb city center, an open laptop resting on the cushion beside him. He had a clean sight line to the third floor of the condo building across the street where René Cassaroy was bedded down. Dex was there as well, in a connecting condo. Evan was still recovering full use of his right arm, but Dex was missing a hand, so he figured that put them no more uneven than they’d been before. At least Evan still had two opposable thumbs. He hoped to put them to good use.
He’d have to be extremely cautious in his approach to ensure that no communication went out to the men watching Despi. The slightest misstep could trigger a text or a call, and she’d be dispensed of as proficiently as her parents and sister had been.
Evan could understand why René had chosen to hide here. Several prominent businessmen and ministers lived in the complex, which was riddled with security cameras.
Logging on to the Internet, Evan accessed an untraceable account at Hashkiller and set its 131-billion-password dictionary to work. Within minutes he was on the luxury condo building’s network. He found the security camera system next, matching the name to the decals on the building’s main fence. Hashkiller made short work of that, and then a hundred-plus internal and external camera feeds appeared.
He picked the lenses along the route he was planning to take and then opened up the camera-control links. First he slewed the pan-tilt zoom lens above the front gate to face the sun. The image turned a uniform white. The neighboring ones he aimed directly at streetlights to the same effect.
The cameras in the interior east stairwell didn’t have the same operability, so he turned off their auto-irising and then directed them to stop down. The pictures went black.
In case René had hacked into the security cameras on his own floor, a likely precaution, Evan took a single frame of valid video from each one, duplicated it 50 million times, and injected the gapless IP feed back into the video storage server. This created a spoof of each camera’s normal scene, showing forever-empty corridors. Snapping the laptop shut, he stood, stretched out his shoulder, and headed for the door.
It was time.
71
Vaporized
Candy cracked her window to get a little fresh air and leaned away, not wanting to get sucked into the black hole of Jaggers’s charisma void. He sat motionless in the passenger seat, his hands on the GPS unit as if about to embark on a game of Super Mario.
She monitored the residents and visitors entering the condo building’s front gate.
Old woman with a
purse dog. Hipster with sleeve tattoos and a slouch beanie cap. Ladies who lunched in pink pantsuits and glittering pearls.
“Halya Bardakçi,” she murmured.
Though she stared straight ahead, she sensed Orphan M’s head dart over. “What?”
“That was her name. The girl you killed in the alley outside Sevastopol.”
He picked up the laptop and reviewed footage. “How do you know?”
Candy kept her eyes on the luxury complex.
Elderly couple. Teenage girl with bad eye shadow. A diplomat’s wife who resembled a drag queen.
“I read the news story,” Candy said. “She was just a down-on-her-luck kid.”
Bushy-mustached businessman. Swarthy janitor. Strapping college girl.
“Why does that matter?” Jaggers asked.
“Because, you dickless fuck,” Candy said, “she could’ve been us.”
Jaggers jolted in his seat, and for an instant she thought he might strike her. But his eyes remained glued to the laptop. He’d screen-captured the image of the hipster who’d entered the building earlier and zoomed in on the face, barely visible beneath the beanie cap.
“Fuck,” Candy said.
“Make sure that he’s inside René’s condo,” Jaggers said. “And ascertain which room. I’ll ready the coordinates. The last thing we need is him getting away singed.”
Candy grabbed her phone and hopped out of the car.
Jaggers called after her, “And V?”
She leaned back in.
“If you worried more about surveillance and less about a dead Crimean whore, we could’ve sizzled him at the front gate.”
She slammed the door harder than necessary and jogged for the building.
* * *
The Need raged and gnashed inside him. Without his infusions of young blood, René could already chart his deterioration. Achy joints, flagging energy, and that chalky residue always in his mouth. The taste of aging.
As soon as they coaxed the Nowhere Man out of hiding, Dex would put an end to him and they could set about rebuilding a new medical lab and acquiring new product.
Rising from his midday nap, René shuffled from the king-size bed toward the makeup counter of the bathroom suite. The windows were Lexan, of course, but to deter surveillance he kept the curtains drawn and the lights off. Just across the tile floor of the interior hall, the connecting door to Dex’s condo was in clear view. It was closed for privacy, though given all the cameras they’d installed throughout the rooms, privacy was hardly an issue. When Dex wasn’t at René’s side, he kept watch on every inch of René’s quarters from a collection of monitors next door, ready to alert their Greek freelancers at the first sign of anything out of the ordinary. It would take the tap of an iPad, no more, and hired knives would close in on Despi and carve her to pieces.
Dex had plans for Evan after that. He’d made multiple contingencies for how to eliminate him once he appeared. Disguised gunports in the common walls. Autolocking double-cylinder dead bolts on the solid-core front door to block egress. Vents wired up for gas just as in the chalet.
René braced himself for a look in the mirror. Despite the low light conditions, he winced at the sight. It was getting harder and harder to produce his confected self. Thinning hair swirled up from his pate. The bags under his eyes had grown bags beneath them, a landslide of bruise-colored flesh. His jowls held the weight of the world.
He began the process of putting himself together.
Cover-up filling in the crow’s-feet. Concealer and color corrector. Fish oil and zinc, calcium and vitamin E. No need for Cialis, not holed up here, but he’d upped his Lexapro in an attempt to filter out some of the gray from the Zagreb pollution. He was just reaching for his Rogaine when his hand brushed across a heap of silken fabric on the dim counter.
A scarf?
He lifted it. Two slender pieces that came apart. Each was a skin-colored tube of fabric covered with elaborate patterns.
Fake sleeve tattoos.
He let them slip to the shag carpeting. His eyes lifted to the mirror.
Barely visible in the dimness at the back of the room was the outline of a face.
A man sitting on the upholstered settee, swallowed by the shadows.
René forced a smile. “Evan,” he said, loud enough for the surveillance equipment to pick up. “I knew you’d find me.”
René let his eyes tick over to that connecting door across the tile, checking to see if any movement interrupted the seam of light across the bottom. He pictured Dex readying the halogenated ether. The Greek henchmen moving on Despi. The door opening and Dex filling the frame. Given that Dex was down to one hand, it would take him so much longer to do to Evan what needed to be done.
The outline of the face stared back at him, a featureless mask. René stayed upright in his chair, staring at the reflection in the mirror.
“The thing is,” René said, listening for the hiss to come through the vents, “this situation is more complicated than you’ve accounted for.”
Something crashed into the mirror, leaving a red streak, and landed with a slap on the counter. Pill bottles skittered across the surface, bouncing on the floor.
René shrieked.
He stared down at the enormous hand resting on top of the jumble of knocked-over beauty products.
Tattooed across it, an eerie, too-wide smile.
His rolling eyes found the connecting door. For a moment he felt an irrational stab of hope—there were Dex’s size-eighteen boots shadowing the gap beneath. Then the darkness spread and spread, seeping beneath the door, creeping across the tile.
He felt his insides wither, his heart drop down the bottomless pit of his stomach.
Still, it seemed, the Nowhere Man had not moved.
René’s throat seized up, too dry to speak. He croaked out the words. “You can have your money back.”
“I don’t want my money back,” the voice said.
“What do you want?”
“Someone once told me, if you control time, you control everything.”
The dark form rose and approached.
Too terrified to turn around, René stayed locked in his chair facing the mirror.
A hand drifted forward into a fall of light. It clutched a syringe filled with a viscous clear fluid.
René’s mouth wobbled open as the needle slid into his neck.
Still the face remained lost to darkness.
René’s last thought before the thumb depressed the plunger was of the double-cylinder dead bolts on the front door, trapping him in.
And then time stopped moving, sealing him inside it like a bug in amber.
* * *
Her cell phone held at the ready, Candy leaned against the door to René’s condo, straining to listen for movement inside. A single text to Orphan M and Van Sciver would make it rain.
The neighboring door creaked open. Just as she realized that it might belong to a connected condo, a streak of movement flew at her. She braced herself for a strike, but it didn’t come. Instead she was wrapped up, her arms locked to her sides, and then unfurled, a swing dancer who’d lost her lead.
A face blurred by as he spun her. She recognized his eyes. For an instant she let him lead.
Not that she had a choice.
And then she was free, tumbling across the threshold of the adjacent condo, the door slamming shut behind her.
She slipped on something slick, slammed onto the floor, and came up sticky.
She knew that smell.
She lunged for the door but knew all too well what she’d find. The double-cylinder dead bolts had autolocked. And she didn’t have a key.
Her cell phone was missing, plucked cleanly from her hand. She thought of Orphan M below, waiting for her texted command.
There was little she could do now but brace for the drone missile.
* * *
Orphan M held his cell phone in one hand, the GPS unit in the other, staring from screen to screen. He
did not allow his knee to bounce with impatience.
At last a text arrived.
HE’S LOOSE. I HAVE HIM PINNED ON GROUND FLOOR. JAM LOCK ON FRONT GATE + I’LL HERD HIM THERE.
Orphan M input the front-gate coordinates for the drone and then tossed the GPS unit on the seat, leapt from the Volkswagen, and Froggered across four lanes to the complex, dodging grilles and blaring horns.
He reached the tall metal gate, readying his pick set. He slid a slender diamond pick into the keyhole and snapped it off.
There’d be no getting through that gate now.
He sprinted back through traffic, nearly getting pancaked by a bus, and flung himself into the Passat before the next barrage of traffic swept by.
The GPS handheld unit rested on the dashboard, not where he’d left it on the seat. Puzzled, he picked it up, turned it over. The battery lid was slightly loose, one of the screws lifted a few millimeters from the plastic.
He stared at it uncomprehendingly even as the reality dawned on him.
The batteries had been taken out and put back in.
Which erased the previous coordinates.
And reset the unit to its own position.
His body went cold, and he realized that it wasn’t cold he was experiencing—it was a full-body panic sweat. His head lifted.
Standing motionless in the sea of movement on the sidewalk across the street was Orphan X. He touched the imaginary brim of his beanie cap, gave a little nod.
M had time only to lift his eyes to the roof of the car before the Volkswagen vaporized.
72
The Old Stories
Despi stepped out onto the balcony of her family apartment to water the tomato plants vining through the rails. Wherever her sister lived, she’d always insisted on growing her own tomatoes just like their mother did. Now only Despi was left to maintain the family tradition.
Sunset was heartbreaking here and lately even more so. Violets and oranges shimmering off the sparkling Mediterranean, another day finding its ultimate beauty as it was extinguished. Only a slice of the sea was visible between the surrounding apartments, but her father had always said that a slice was enough to feel blessed, to feel assured of your place in the world.
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