Most presidents didn’t require this level of detail.
Most presidents didn’t cut their teeth in the DoD.
Most presidents hadn’t been hunted by Orphan X.
It would have been easier in a dozen different ways to receive the brief from Templeton in the Oval, but he’d insisted on the excursion to Georgetown over her strenuous objections. He needed to make a point. The bottle on the table had waited more than 150 years for him to consume it—three times the span of his own life. Time waited on him, acquiesced to his desires, bowed before him.
Not vice versa.
He leaned back, taking in the storied walls of the tavern. The entryway featured another Victorian flourish, beveled leaded-glass windows announcing the restaurant. He stared at the tavern’s name sandblasted into the black flashed glass, thinking of everything that had come before him and everything that would come after.
For the first time, he truly entertained the notion that Orphan X could succeed. Victoria Donahue-Carr would assume the Resolute desk. The media would rejoice. The sun would rise on another day.
And he would be nothing more than another brass placard screwed into another table here in Martin’s Tavern, like Nixon but remembered less fondly.
He found himself staring out the window, considering the passing cars, the facing windows, the pedestrians across the street.
Everything a threat.
The heat of the gravy wafted up to him, heavy with the scent of organ meat. For the first time he could remember, he’d lost focus.
Abruptly, he directed his attention back at Templeton. “How many agents are here?”
He’d cut her off, a rare show of impulsivity.
She was taken aback, her head slightly withdrawn. “Seventy-five. We have G-rides circling the area as well. Are you concerned?”
He said, “No.”
He could sense her eyes on his face, studying him.
“Was it really worth it?” she said. “To eat here?”
“Yes.” He pushed his plate aside. “To show I’m not afraid.”
He reacted instantly at the bang—a startling percussion from deep in the restaurant. The agents by the entryway swung around, their SIGs clearing leather. Templeton was already halfway over the table, one hand grabbing his arm, forcing him down.
He’d ducked beneath the windowsill, flattening against the weathered wood of the booth. Crimson dripped down past his face, and for a moment he thought it was his own blood, that he was staring at what had an instant before rushed through his veins and arteries.
The smell of bordeaux reached his nostrils.
And then the sound worked its way from the stem of his brain to the white matter, allowing him to process it as a metallic clang from the kitchen.
A dropped pan.
He pulled himself upright as the last of the Lafite dribbled from the knocked-over bottle, pattering onto his thighs.
He righted the bottle, thumping it down on the table again.
He said, “I’m ready to head back.”
46
Comprehensively Impossible
Unimpressed, Tommy Stojack stared down at the cracked half-moon plaque from the White House gift shop. “Does it explode?”
Evan stared at him across the armorer’s workbench, littered with firing pins and stray rounds. “No.”
At the edge of the counter, coffee gurgled in a cauldron of a pot, strong enough to be considered weaponized. A welder’s mask rode the top of Tommy’s head like a shoved-back Halloween mask. He worked a wedge of tobacco dip from one side of his gumline to the other, his biker mustache rippling from the effort. A Camel Wide spiked out from between his fingers. When he held it to his lips, the cherry crackled and lurched a good half inch, dangerously close to the tip of his battered nose.
Tommy waved the butt at the plaque, scattering ash across its face. “It’s constructed out of an undetectable contact poison?”
“No.”
“It’s hiding a shiv and a Beretta Nano?”
“No.”
“Then that raises the inevitable question. Which is this: What the motherfuck? I mean, a decorative tchotchke? It’s to … what? Prettify your fucking powder room? Hang it above the decorative antique butter churn in the corner? Or, no—wait—use it as a backdrop to spruce up your Hummel collection?”
“Tommy … It’s just … it’s for a friend.” Evan held up his hands. “It’s got a brass patina, and I figured you’d know how to solder it.”
“Oh, yeah. This ain’t below my pay grade or nothing. You want I should cut you a spare set of house keys while I’m at it?”
Tommy specialized in procurement and R&D for specified government-sanctioned black groups. He was the finest armorer Evan had ever met, able to machine up a ghost pistol or produce a next-gen sniper scope at a moment’s notice. They knew little about each other’s background or current extracurriculars, but Evan had learned enough to know that he could trust Tommy absolutely and that their moral bearings were aligned.
To acquire specialty gear, Evan visited Tommy’s shop on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The exterior looked like just another auto shop, but inside, it was a dungeon, its oil-spotted floor buried under mills and lathes, RPGs and munitions crates, cutting torches and test-firing tubes. If few people knew of the lair hidden by the banal exterior, fewer yet were afforded the respect of having the surveillance cameras unplugged before they arrived. But Tommy honored Evan’s request that they meet only under full-black protocols.
On the drive to Vegas, Evan had kept the mirror Boeing Black resting on the passenger seat in speaker mode. Again he’d activated the mike on Naomi Templeton’s phone, allowing him to listen in on her lunchtime conversation with the president. By the time he’d arrived at Tommy’s shop, he—like the president—had received her full security brief.
Right now Evan breathed in the scent of gun oil and steroidal coffee and tried to refocus his friend. “Like I said, I’m happy to—”
Tommy snapped down the welder’s mask and fired up a butane microtorch. Sparks flew up against the dark rectangle banding his eyes. He made slow but meticulous progress, smoothing out the lines until the plaque had been restored to its previous glory.
The mask snapped back up. “Now can we please get to some real fucking work? Or do you need me to sew knee patches onto your corduroys?”
Evan said, “I need you to design and field-test a weapon for me. By Thursday.”
“What is it?”
Evan told him.
Tommy’s bird’s-nest eyebrows hoisted up to touch the forehead band of the welder’s mask. He whistled. “That’s a whole other Oprah,” he said. “You sure you don’t want something more straightforward? Mosey on up to the bad guys and spit out copious amounts of brass and lead?”
“Straightforward’s not an option.”
Evan removed a folded sheet from his pocket that contained the calculations of his chosen perch and slid it across the workbench. Tommy scowled down at the paper before donning a pair of rectangular reading glasses better suited to a librarian. He read everything over again.
“Look,” he said. “I know I’m your RKI, but I gotta say—”
“RKI?”
“Reasonably Knowledgeable Individual.” Tommy smiled his gap-toothed grin. “But this?” He shook the paper. “By Thursday? Is asking a lot.”
“I also need it to meet me in D.C.,” Evan said. “I can’t travel with it.”
“Oh, well. Of fucking course. You sure you don’t prefer Dubai? I could airlift it in, set it down on top of the Burj Khalifa.”
“Some supporting weaponry also. Explosives. Oh, and I need less lethal options. Make sure the wrong people don’t get hurt. There’s a list of specialized gear on the back of the page—”
Tommy held up both hands, closed his eyes against the apparent strain of it all. “Can you pretend you’re not comprehensively impossible? Just for, like, a minute? Lie to me? Whisper sweet nothings? Tell me my ass don’t look fat
in these cargo pants?”
“I’m prepared to pay heavy.”
“Well, that’s fortunate, ’cuz it’s gonna cost you heavy. I mean, fixed location, single shot, no adjustments. It’ll have to be more perfect than perfect.” His basset-hound eyes peered down at the data through the ridiculously tiny eyeglass lenses. He looked like Santa Claus if Santa Claus were a qualified marksman. “This survey of site better be dead-on.”
“It is.”
“I gotta duplicate the elevation precisely. It’s not like I can wander out into the desert and find a dune at the same height. Nah, I’ll have to rent a scaffolding platform lift and drive it out to a remote location so I can range-test a whole goddamned bunch.”
“Whatever you need to do.”
Eyes on the paper, Tommy flicked a hand at the coffeepot. “Pour me a cup of shut-the-fuck-up, would ya?”
Evan found Tommy’s sticky mug beside the salvaged ship’s porthole he used as an ashtray and coaxed a stream of sludge from the pot.
He handed it off to Tommy, who was already muttering to himself under his breath: “… looking at two hundred sixty-six meters to impact area, which means time of flight has to be…”
He shifted the cigarette to the side of his mouth, sipped coffee across a lip still pouched with Skoal Wintergreen. His hand patted his shirt until it came up with a well-chewed pencil, and he started jotting equations down next to the numbers Evan had supplied—overpressure calculations, projectile angle and velocity, speed of the moving target. His forefinger had been blown off at the knuckle, one of countless injuries, but he gripped the pencil between the stub and his thumb.
He was a hard man to slow down once he got going.
“Tommy?” Evan said.
Tommy did not look up. “I only got three days. Why are you still here talking at me?”
Evan stood another moment watching Tommy work and then withdrew. He threaded through the shadowy shop to the door, escorted out by just the echo of his own footsteps.
47
Roused Beast
Driving home, Evan watched the sun bury itself in the horizon. Its dying glow washed the hills in gold, the sepia-toned filter of another era. The sky, too, was hyper-real, the kind of soft lavender reserved for children’s sketches of sunsets. Soon enough darkness prevailed, headlights and freeway overheads spot-bleaching the endless black strip of the 10.
As Evan neared downtown, the vehicles proliferated like prairie mammals. In short order the freeway grew constipated even by L.A. traffic standards, so he looped south on the 710 and cut west across Slauson Avenue. Given the streetlights, it would probably take him just as long to get home, but there was a pleasure in keeping the Ford pickup on the move, a sense of hard-won progress.
Huntington Park was three square miles of densely packed Hispanic working-class folks living mostly above the poverty line. It felt dreary and vibrant at the same time, nightclubs and health centers, shops and run-down apartments. When Mexico beat Croatia in the World Cup a few years back, the whole neighborhood had taken to the streets, prompting LAPD to dispatch mounted officers in riot gear to ensure that the celebration didn’t tip into lawlessness.
Evan almost didn’t notice the sign as he drove past.
In hindsight he wished he hadn’t.
Waiting for the light to change, he read the reversed words in the reflection off his windshield, a neon-pink glare: NNI ROTOM REGAYOV.
Then he turned and stared at the seedy motel.
Mia’s words came back to him: Like he’s an international mogul instead of a strung-out reprobate renting a by-the-day room at the Voyager Motor Inn in Huntington Park.
“Goddamn it,” Evan said.
The light changed. The car behind him honked, the window cranking down, an upturned hand helping convey a stream of profane Spanish in his direction.
He coasted through the light and then pulled to the curb. His eyes gazed back at him from the rearview, issuing a clear warning.
This was stupid.
Mia had told him not to get involved.
It was none of his business.
It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough to worry about.
But he thought about the taste of the sun-kissed skin at her shoulder. Her bottom lip between his teeth. The light freckles across her nose, visible only at close quarters. Then he remembered how her expression had changed when she’d answered the phone. I won’t let that piece of shit scare me. What had the man told her? That he was going to rape her. Kidnap her and keep her in a cellar. That when he was done, she’d beg to be put out of her misery.
Mia was right. It wasn’t Evan’s business. He wasn’t going to get involved.
Already he was out of the truck, walking up the sidewalk, head lowered.
The door of the lobby clanged against a mounted bell, the cheery ring adding a discordant note to the decidedly uncheery interior. Stuffing protruded from a gut-slashed love seat. The floorboards had rotted away in an amoeba by the front desk, releasing the sweet smell of mold. An obese receptionist rested her head on a propped fist, her jowls dimpled into concentric folds above her knuckles. She was watching The Silence of the Lambs on a television no bigger than a toaster. Hannibal Lecter bragged about eating the census taker’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti, then rabbit-sucked his teeth with epicurean relish.
As Evan approached, the woman slid her eyes over to him but didn’t otherwise move.
“Is Oscar Esposito staying here?” Evan asked.
“Why?”
“He’s a friend.”
“Then I don’t much want to help you.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s a culo.”
Evan supposed that a man whose four-year-old daughter answered to “Idiot” generally didn’t make a winning impression on women.
He said, “Then I’m an enemy.”
At this she moved, shifting her considerable weight on her chair. “What do you want to do to him?”
“Just have a talk.”
“A talk.”
“Yes.”
“That might not be the worst thing.” She fanned her fingers, considered. “Too bad, though. You just missed him. He flew out of here.”
“Drunk?”
“No. Like, with a purpose, you know?”
A ripple of heat moved across Evan’s shoulders. “Do you know where he was heading?”
The woman shrugged. “Course not.”
“Does he have a car?”
“Not that I know of. Cara de mierda takes the bus.”
Mounted on the wall behind her, a plywood board housed columns of hooks, some of which held room keys.
Evan said, “You can’t tell me what room he’s staying in, right?”
“That’s right.”
Evan stared at her.
She stared back.
And then she stretched, a great expansive gesture, her sweater swooping beneath her capacious arms like a set of wings. She finished with a finger landing on an empty gold hook, her pretty dark eyes peering pointedly at Evan from beneath elaborate fake lashes.
The keys on either side dangled from cheap plastic key chains labeled with blue Magic Marker—13 and 15.
Evan said, “If you’ll excuse me, I need to use the restroom.”
She gave a Vanna White flip of her hand. “Right down that hall, sir.”
He hustled up the corridor. Room 14 was conveniently unlocked, saving the half minute it would have taken him to pick the crappy dead bolt.
Given the prison-small space, it took Evan all of fifteen seconds to rifle through Oscar Esposito’s few belongings. He paused, scanning the room, his gaze coming to rest on a beige telephone propped on an old-fashioned radiator.
He picked up the handset, hit REDIAL.
A woman answered, her voice hoarse. “Look, O, I give up, okay? I give up. I told you where we at. Just come get us. I’ll come home with you. Just don’t hurt Aurora no more.” Her sobs came over the line. “I give up. I give
up.”
Reseating the handset, Evan eyed the number on the cracked caller-display screen. On his RoamZone he accessed a classified reverse telephone directory and thumbed in the number.
NEW HAVEN WOMEN AND CHILDREN TRANSITIONAL HOUSING.
An address 2.4 miles away.
That was a short bus ride.
* * *
Oscar Esposito was on tilt, all lean muscle and bone flying up the sidewalk, face thrust forward, leading the charge with his scowl. He wore black 501s tugged low enough to reveal a good six inches of Tommy Hilfiger boxer briefs and the grip of a nickel-plated .22. His leather jacket fluttered behind him as he cut between two parking meters and charged for the front door of the shelter.
Nearing the steps, he reached behind him and tugged the gun free.
That was when his momentum stopped.
It was puzzling at first, his foot raised before him, frozen above the sidewalk, ready to set down. The tightening pressure around his chest. His arms pinned at his sides.
He squinted down at the band of paracord lassoed around his torso.
It tightened some more.
And then he was whisked off his feet, flying backward into the alley next to the shelter.
He hit the ground hard, the wind knocked out of him, his gun skittering off. His mouth gaped, but nothing came out. And no air came in.
The alley walls were feathered with torn-off corners of flyers. A breeze rushed across his sweat-washed face, making the triangles of paper flap on their tabs of tape like the wings of injured butterflies. Through the gap between rooftops, a few stars shone through a bleary sky.
And then they were blotted out by a man-shaped form.
A boot lowered to Oscar’s chest, compressing his ribs, and at last his lungs released with a shudder. He gasped and then gasped again.
The voice came down at him as if from the heavens.
“Listen to me closely. When you regain consciousness, the cops will find you hog-tied on the doorstep of the shelter, in violation of your restraining order. Resting beside your cheek will be that gun, which I assume is unlicensed. It will be unloaded, not that you’ll be able to reach for it.”
Out of the Dark Page 25