The door creaked open.
A stout Hispanic woman wearing teal scrubs. “Jes?”
“Is he home?”
“Jes, of course.”
She gestured down an unlit hall to her right. Near the end a door lay open, freeing a triangle of light from a room. Just outside, a wheelchair waited. In its seat rested a medical-waste bucket, the kind used to dispose of needles. Evan focused on two shapes in the shadows beyond that looked like antitank missiles stood on end.
Oxygen tanks.
And then he understood.
“I’m his nephew,” Evan said. “Haven’t seen him in years. I heard from my mom, and … well, I flew in from Tallahassee to surprise him and, you know, pay my last respects.”
She nodded solemnly. “I have some errands to run. You can be with him for one hour until I get back?”
“That will be fine.”
“Any problems, my phone number is on the clipboard.”
She walked past him, leaving the door ajar.
Evan entered, eased the door shut behind him, and stood breathing the scented air. The interior was 1990’s idea of modern, marble floors and prints in gleaming black frames. A spray of calla lilies rose from a vase in the foyer, no doubt sent by some well-wisher and arranged by the home-care nurse he’d just met.
How odd to find flowers here. Or vases. Or well-wishers.
A textured bamboo wallpaper darkened the hall, the house growing cooler as Evan moved back toward the lit room.
From the doorway he saw only a pair of feet bumped up beneath a woven blanket.
He eased inside.
The Mystery Man lay in a double-railed hospital bed that took up a good measure of the room. His hair had grown thin and wispy, receded to a severe widow’s peak. An oxygen tube ran beneath his nose, and a wide-bore needle was sunk to the hilt into the back of one thick-veined hand. His clavicles were pronounced, as was the bump of the ulna at his wrist, the gold watch dangling loosely around the bone.
An imposing wooden desk remained at one end of the converted study, flanked by file cabinets, but the rest of the space had been transformed into a makeshift hospice suite. Glass-fronted mini-refrigerators stored bags of saline and various vials. There were IV poles and washcloths, cups holding ice chips, backup sheets crisply folded and stuffed onto bookshelves.
It had been twenty-seven years since Evan had laid eyes on the man.
He had a name, of course, which Joey had unearthed, but the name didn’t match the memory Evan had been living with for all this time.
When Evan was twelve, the Mystery Man had appeared like the boogeyman, running his fingers along the chain-link across the street from the Pride House Group Home, his ever-present cigarette exhaling a thin banner of smoke. From a scared distance, the boys had jockeyed for the right to be taken, to be exploited, to get the fuck out of East Baltimore. None of them could have known that he was a recruiter for the Program. Evan had gotten over the grueling hurdles, one after another, and his prize had been Jack Johns and a two-story farmhouse in the woods outside Arlington. It had been a dormer bedroom, three meals a day, and a sniper rifle. It had been a mission following his nineteenth birthday, the first of countless.
After Evan had gone rogue, the Mystery Man had served the Program’s purposes for many more years, even as it grew increasingly twisted and brutal. He had played a role in corrupting countless foster kids. And in hurting Joey.
Evan had been waiting a long time to kill him.
The Mystery Man’s breathing was irregular, rapid deep inhalations interspersed with shallow panting.
Evan walked over and stood at the foot of the bed.
The Ray-Bans rested on the nightstand. The Mystery Man stared up at Evan. His lazy left eye wandered to the opposite wall, but the other was alert, its intensity undulled.
“I’ve been hoping you’d come,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. He seemed short of breath, as if he couldn’t quite get enough oxygen to relax the muscles of his face. “I never wanted you, you know,” he said.
Evan said, “I know.”
“But you proved me wrong. You were the best. You were always the best.”
Evan said, “There is an advantage to being underestimated.”
“I suppose so.”
Evan circled to the nightstand and opened the drawer. There lay the gleaming handgun he knew all too well, its image having been branded onto his twelve-year-old brain. In the intervening years, he’d been able to retrospectively identify the weapon, a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .357. He lifted it from its place beside a box of tissues.
The Mystery Man looked up at him, helpless to intervene. His etched skin was crepe-paper thin, mottled with bluish patches, shiny with sweat. A gurgle accompanied his exhalation, rising in volume until Evan was worried that he’d die here and now before giving up any answers.
But he coughed a few times, partially clearing his throat.
“They call it the death rattle,” he said. “Fluid buildup in the lungs.”
“The cigarettes?” Evan asked.
“Yeah. But it was worth it. My one true love.” He smiled weakly. “Now it’s metastasized in my brain. You’re lucky you got here in time to kill me. A week or two later, you’d’ve missed your chance.”
“I’m here for something else, too.”
“I figured as much.” His finger rose a half inch, pointed at the television bracketed to the wall. “I watch the news. It’s about all I do anymore.”
“Bennett came to see you twice. Last October and last month. What about?”
“About 1997.”
Evan hadn’t expected him to arrive so directly on the point, but maybe dying made a man less circuitous. Evan’s relief was quickly undercut by gnawing dread for what was to come. “My first mission.”
“Yes. I was involved. As was Orphan A. Bennett needed to know that we were airtight, every last loose end severed.” His chest rattled up and down, the good eye fixing on Evan pointedly. “Of course, one remains.”
“I killed a lot of people,” Evan said. “Unsanctioned kills, cutout jobs, no U.S. footprint. Each mission is a live grenade, top-level classified. What makes ’97 so threatening?”
“I’ve spent most of the days of my life with information in my head that I can’t unknow. I don’t have anything to care about anymore. Not my life, not protecting the past, certainly not Jonathan Bennett. But I can protect you, especially after I cost you so much.” He gazed up at Evan, and Evan could smell his breath, sour and sickly, the smell of death itself. “You know what you did. But you don’t want to know what you really did.”
“Tell me.”
The Mystery Man lay there, his lips pouched.
Evan hefted the revolver in his palm. “I know you’re in pain. But there can always be more pain.”
“You’re the best there is, X, but you got nothing on cancer.”
The Mystery Man breathed for a time, and Evan let him.
“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was an undersecretary of defense. He was an ambitious soul with designs on the throne. But he was also greedy. Not for money but for power. He understood that the more of the former he accrued for the right people, the more of the latter he’d inherit.”
“Who are ‘the right people’?” Evan asked.
“Think, boy. I’ve been watching the news. Have you?”
Evan turned his head to the television screen, though it was dark. “The congressional subpoena,” he said. “A multibillion-dollar investigation into Bennett’s relationships with defense contractors.”
“Relationships that date back to his early days at the DoD.”
“I understand,” Evan said. “But so what? We both know that’s how the game’s played. Influence, money, and war have always gone hand in hand. So the administration’s moves a few decades ago benefited the military-industrial complex and vice versa. That kind of quid pro quo can always be covered up and spun, buried beneath half-truth
s and fake news. Any moves Bennett made would have been conducted behind a haze of full deniability. Illegal and immoral, sure. But why does it constitute a clear and present danger now?”
“What if we’re not talking about illegal and immoral?” the Mystery Man said. “But about treason?”
“Treason?” Evan eased back a step and slid the gun into his waistband. “How do you get to treason? The powers that be wanted a hawkish foreign minister dispatched—”
“The foreign minister you assassinated was publicly hawkish, yes. Beating the drums about nukes. Lots of carefully cultivated sound bites to the media. That’s how he rose to power. But in private? He was willing to accede to our demands.”
“He was under U.S. influence?”
“Yes. And he also happened to be very close to Milošević. In fact, he was plotting his execution. With our help, no less.”
“But the president decided to change course?”
“No. The undersecretary of defense did.”
Evan’s skin tightened against the cool of the room. “You’re telling me that as undersecretary of defense, Jonathan Bennett ordered a political assassination in violation of the wishes and policy directives of the sitting U.S. president?”
“I am telling you precisely that.”
“And no one found out?”
The Mystery Man’s hand pulsed around a wandlike control, releasing another hit of morphine. He sighed, relief mixed with pleasure. “That’s the point of black programs,” he said. “No one can see them.”
Evan pictured the minister’s wife in her billowing aubergine dress, her mouth stretched wide, a scream of primal grief. He forced down a swallow. “Bennett would take that risk just to line the pockets of his defense-contractor cronies so they’d … what? Put him in the Oval Office one day? How much financial gain can be had from the murder of one foreign minister?”
The Mystery Man’s cracked lips stretched in a smile. “All the gain in the world,” he said. “Thanks to you, Slobodan Milošević was not killed. We lost our opportunity—and our window. Weeks after you dispatched the foreign minister, Milošević expanded his title from president of Serbia to president of Yugoslavia. And we know where that led. You see, Bennett and his backers didn’t want an ally in the foreign minister. They required an enemy in Milošević.”
“Why?”
“Had the Butcher of Belgrade been killed in 1997, that would have precluded the need for the bombings in Serbia a year and a half later.”
“They can’t have known that,” Evan said. “No one could have predicted that.”
“Not that specifically. But if you were a warmonger with chips to bet in 1997? You would’ve put every last one on a madman despot in the Balkans.” A smile moved the cracked lips. “Do you recall that bombing campaign?”
Evan wiped his mouth. “NATO ran thousands of air strikes. Almost every single town was targeted. Combat aircraft fired four hundred twenty thousand missiles and dropped almost forty thousand cluster bombs. They used graphite bombs to take down the power system.”
He paused to regain his composure. When it came to ordnance and war campaigns, Jack had drilled into him an aptitude for specifics. His head swam with them now: 25,000 housing units damaged or destroyed, 500 kilometers of roads, 600 kilometers of railways, 14 airports, 19 hospitals, 20 health centers, 44 bridges, 87 schools.
He found his voice again. “More than four thousand dead, thirteen thousand injured, half of them civilians, children. A billion dollars of damage to the infrastructure.”
“Ah,” the Mystery Man said. “But it made much more than that.”
Evan’s face slackened with disgust.
“Not just the bombs and the planes, the armored vehicles and the artillery,” the Mystery Man continued. “But you have to understand, you can’t buy a testing ground like that. Our defense firms finally got to flex their muscles, haul all that gear out of R&D and see what it could do. Ordnance and explosives testing in a real theater at zero cost. And that was just the start. You remember what was politically noteworthy about the bombing campaign, don’t you?”
The answer spun just out of reach, like a flicked coin. And then it settled, and Evan saw the face of it. “It was the first time NATO ever used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council.”
“Correct. Which allowed the Pentagon, on the heels of that attack, to seize a thousand acres of land in Kosovo. They built a colossal U.S. military base there, one of the biggest in the world.”
“Camp Bondsteel.”
“We’re talking seven thousand troops, fifty-two helipads, twenty-some Black Hawks, a few dozen tanks. The contracts that were awarded then?” The Mystery Man gave a weak whistle. “More commas than a Russian novel. And the thing is? We don’t even need it. We never did. It’s not an air base. It’s not connected to the sea. It doesn’t hold a strategic position. Truth is, we should’ve mothballed it years ago. And yet we’ve been paying to supply it for nearly two decades.”
The recycled air with its whiff of rubbing alcohol and iodine was making Evan feel sick.
“So let’s return to your question,” the Mystery Man said. “How much financial gain can be had from the murder of one foreign minister?” He tried to lift his head again, but it just rustled dryly against the pillowcase. “A kingdom’s worth.”
Evan took an unsteady step back and sat on the sill of the box window.
The Mystery Man read his face. “You were a nineteen-year-old kid.”
“I pulled the trigger.”
The relentless hiss of the oxygen kept on, a backdrop for Evan’s mounting dismay. A single bullet had opened the floodgates. A war crime. Treason. A nation destroyed, four thousand dead, and a new chapter in American imperialism. The weight of it threatened to crush him.
Remorse spread through him, heated and seething. He tried to get his arms around it, wrestle it down, reshape it into something sharp and unforgiving, something he could weaponize.
The Mystery Man adjusted the tube beneath his nose. “You ensured that this was all pinned on an anonymous Chechen shooter. If you were to say now that you were behind the scope, it would point to America. And if it points to us, it’ll point to Bennett. Now you understand why he has to have you killed.” He shook his head, the tufts of hair sparse and thin. “The wolves are massing at the White House gates. You can bet he hears them howling every night when he goes to sleep.” He closed his eyes, the lids translucent and veined. “I hear them myself sometimes.”
Evan stood again. The light from the window streamed over his shoulders, his shadow falling across the Mystery Man. Evan waited for him to open his eyes again.
Then he asked, “Why are you still alive? Why did Bennett let you live?”
“Is that what you call this? Living?” The Mystery Man grinned flatly. “Because clearly I don’t represent a threat. At least for many more days. Plus, I had an insurance policy.”
He lifted a hand and pointed past the desk, a shawl of loose skin draped around the bone of his forearm. “Left file cabinet. Bottom drawer.”
Evan circled the desk, crouched, and slid the drawer open. It held a number of hanging files. He thumbed through them. Redacted operation reports, redacted intelligence briefings, redacted after-action reviews.
Evan looked from the blacked-out papers across the room to the Mystery Man. “These are useless.”
The answer came as a wheeze. “Behind the drawer.”
Evan pulled the drawer out all the way and then wiggled it free of its tracks. Lying flat on the floor, he peered into the empty slot.
A hatch had been cut into the metal rear of the cabinet.
Aligned with a jagged mouth of drywall.
Inside the wall rested a single manila file.
Mashing his cheek to the cabinet, Evan strained to reach it. With his fingertips he managed to slide it out.
The file held yellowed logistics reports from 1997, brittle with age, the corners flaking. A transcript from a call to
the round man. A report on the acquisition of the 7.62 × 54mmR round with its damning fingerprint. Surveillance photos of the foreign minister, an assembled schedule of his movements.
Evan lost himself in the file so thoroughly that he’d forgotten that the Mystery Man was in the room until he heard the strained voice from behind him. “You can go public now.”
Evan turned to face him. “Not my style. I prefer to take care of things myself.”
“Be careful. Orphan A is a very dangerous man. And he’s had his sights on you for a long time.”
Evan started for the bed. “Once I neutralize Bennett, Orphan A will be irrelevant.”
“No. Killing you, it’s personal for him.”
Evan halted. “Why?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Well,” Evan said. “I’m going to find out.”
“When?”
“Now.”
Evan pulled the .357 from his waistband.
The Mystery Man’s voice was weak, but his stare was not. “You’ll never pull it off. Bennett. It’s impossible.”
Evan said, “He’s already dead.”
He thumbed the lever to open the well-greased wheel and spun it, watching the six brass heads roll. With a snap of his wrist, he reseated the cylinder.
It would do.
The Mystery Man settled back on the bed. Then he nodded. “I suppose we should get to the next part now.” He let his eyes draw shut for the last time, that death rattle sounding in his chest.
A few seconds passed and then a few more, but still the rattle persisted, reminding him that he continued to draw breath.
When at last he opened his eyes, the room was empty.
61
A Knot Tightening
A flyer flapping beneath the knocker on the front door announced that the house was in probate.
Even worse, it was in disrepair.
Rusting gutters heaped with leaves. Wood panels warped up off the nails. One of the address numbers had fallen from its perch, leaving a 7 of fresh paint floating on the weather-bleached post. A bundle of heavy-duty rattraps, no doubt left on the porch swing by the probate Realtor, answered the question of what had chewed through the underbelly of the porch. Most of the screens had fallen from the panes.
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