He stepped through his bedroom into the bathroom and tapped the frosted-glass shower door, which recessed into the wall on silent tracks. Turning the water up as hot as he could stand, he ducked into the stream. He scrubbed. The water ran dark, a crimson swirl circling the drain.
It took a wire brush and some effort to get his fingernails clean.
After drying off he headed into the bedroom and dressed in the same outfit he’d worn before. Dark jeans, gray V-necked T-shirt. Before turning away from the dresser, he hesitated over the bottom drawer.
Emotion came up under his skin, a flush of heat.
He tugged the drawer open and used his thumbnail to lift the false bottom.
Beneath, a blue flannel shirt, blackened with old blood.
Jack’s blood.
There wasn’t a night in the past eight years that Evan didn’t turn off the light, close his eyes, and watch Jack bleed out in his arms.
Evan shut the drawer and rose, trying to dissipate the tightness in his chest. He sat on his bed, a Maglev that literally floated two feet off the floor, the slab held airborne by neodymium rare-earth magnets. Closing his eyes, suspended between floor and ceiling, he focused on his breathing. Dropped inside his body, felt the weight of his bones inside his flesh. It usually helped him find tranquility.
But not tonight.
Images strobed through the darkness behind his eyelids. Hector Contrell’s shoulders jerking back as if yanked by strings. Ink pooling in the hollow of his neck, a punctuation mark for the FUCK YOU tattoo. Those mighty legs collapsing, a slow-motion avalanche crumble. The mess on the floor upstairs around the mattress—residue-stained Styrofoam ramen bowls, empty burrito wrappers, crumpled protein packets. The rib cage of the house, bare studs scrolling by as Evan crept inside. The hall telescoping out like some Kubrickian horror, each empty doorframe replaced by another and another.
Evan’s eyes flew open.
No doors. Which meant no door handles. That was what had been nagging at him. The house was open to the world, fluttering tarps in place of walls.
No locked area for the kidnapped girls.
The logistics of moving them around the world were complicated. There had to be a holding area somewhere off premises.
Which meant the possibility existed that another young woman remained in it.
Evan hopped off the bed and moved back into the bathroom, stepping into the shower. He squeezed the lever handle for the hot water, and a moment later came a faint click. The lever, keyed to his palm print, doubled as a concealed doorknob. He turned it the wrong way, and a door, disguised by the tile pattern of the shower wall, swung inward.
He stepped into the Vault.
Four hundred asymmetrical square feet crowded by the underbelly of the public stairs to the roof, the walled-off storage space served as Evan’s armory and ops center. From the weapon lockers to the sheet-metal desk burdened with monitors, servers, and cables, it contained all the tools of his trade. The screens displayed pirated security feeds of Castle Heights. Every hallway, every stairwell, every access door.
He breathed in the smell of damp concrete, dropped into his chair, and rolled to the L-shaped desk to access the law-enforcement databases. All the major criminal and civil records, forensic files, and ballistics registers—anything that the local police could dig up on the Panasonic Toughbook laptops wired into their patrol cars—Evan could access.
His training had consisted of learning a little bit about everything from people who knew everything about something. He was hardly an expert hacker, but he’d broken into a few cruisers and uploaded a piece of reverse SSH code into their laptops—a back door for him to get into the system anytime he beckoned.
He beckoned now, searching Contrell’s known associates, past residences, former cellmates. Nothing raised a red flag. A few hours later, the watered-down vodka sat forgotten beside the mouse pad, pepper grinds floating like ash.
Through the DMV site, Evan grabbed the license-plate number of Contrell’s Buick Enclave. Another series of backstage maneuvers got him into the vehicle’s GPS records. He printed out the data captures—longitudes and latitudes listed in an endless scroll.
As the LaserJet spit out page after page, he started breaking down the pauses between the Enclave’s movements.
Contrell’s destinations.
Evan’s work was not done.
The Tenth Commandment: Never let an innocent die.
Chapter 5:
The Eyes of the Data-Mining Beast
The room could have been anywhere. Midway up a high-rise. At the distal end of a mansion’s wing. Underground, even.
It was big.
The size of a movie theater, but without the rows of chairs. There wasn’t a screen.
There were hundreds of them.
Lining three walls, stacked top to bottom, the most elaborate display of computing power this side of DARPA. Each monitor scrolled an endless stream of code. The screens were the eyes of the data-mining beast; the banks of servers bunkered behind the bomb-resistant fourth wall were the brain.
Guttering light from the monitors strobed across the dim room, living camouflage. It was hard to see anything aside from the screens. Everything melted together—the rugs, the consoles, the sparse furniture. Even the few visitors with clearance to enter—usually a not-fully-read-in engineer making tech adjustments—seemed to disappear, a fish blending into rippling water.
Charles Van Sciver liked it in here. Liked it for the darkness, through which he could drift alone and unseen.
There were no windows. No mirrors either, not even in the adjoining bathroom. He’d covered them up. The occasional visitor was made to stand at a distance so Van Sciver could stay bathed in the protective anonymity of the flickering lights.
It was safe and contained in here. Just him and his algorithms.
It wasn’t fair to say that all the computing power was directed at locating Orphan X.
Only 75 percent.
Or 76.385, to be precise.
After all, as the head of the Program, Van Sciver did have other mission responsibilities.
But none as important as this.
For better than a decade, Evan had been the top asset in the entire Orphan Program. He didn’t merely know where the bodies were buried. He had buried most of them.
Though the naked eye couldn’t process a sliver of the information whipping across the monitors, Van Sciver liked to watch the large-scale data processing in real time. Though he knew the buzzwords—“cluster analysis,” “anomaly detection,” “predictive analytics”—he couldn’t even comprehend what was before him. But he could grasp the output reports, which he checked meticulously on the hour, searching for filaments in the ocean of cyberspace. These threads of the Nowhere Man had to be delicately backtraced. If Van Sciver allowed the slightest quiver showing that he had something on the hook, the line would snap.
Lately his team of engineers had been focused on data warehousing, piecing together bits of information from offshore bank accounts, trying to reconstruct enough of the mosaic to point them the right direction. They had leads on Evan, of course. A few floating strands on the water. But every time they tugged slack out of the line, they came up with more slack, a money transfer zigzagging off into the depths, a shell corp vanishing behind a mailbox corporation, another trail ending at a disused P.O. box off some dusty Third World dirt road.
Van Sciver paced the perimeter of the room, his ever-paler skin drinking in the antiseptic blue glow of the screens. The lack of human contact ensured that he would never be deterred from his goal. Ultimately it would come down to discipline and abstinence, and so he had cleared out any distracting clutter from his existence. His willingness to deny all pleasure and warmth was why he would win. That was why he would beat his nemesis. Victory would be pleasure enough.
Van Sciver halted. Facing the horseshoe of the rippling walls, he basked in the power represented before him. Time was meaningless in here. The present w
as spent reconstructing the past and extrapolating the future, a dragon ever swallowing its tail, an infinity of numbers that summed to zero.
But one day they would add up to everything.
One day they would search out the right thread of ones and zeros that would lead to Orphan X.
It was only a matter of time.
Chapter 6:
Struck Oil
Evan noticed everything when he drove. Especially gray Ford Transit Connect vans with no side windows and dealer plates. Like the one that had been hovering in his rearview mirror for the past few blocks.
He threw on his right-hand turn signal. The van did not. Either it wasn’t following him or it was driven by a pro unwilling to take the bait. Evan drove straight past the entrance of the Norwalk FedEx office, and the van kept right on behind him. Evan muted the signal, keeping his head down but his eyes nailed to the rearview. He waited a few beats and then abruptly veered off onto a side street. The van coasted by, not even slowing.
He could never be too careful.
He’d spent the morning completing a circuit of the safe houses he kept in the Greater Los Angeles Area, testing his load-out gear, checking the oil on his alternate vehicles, changing up the automated lighting. At his Westchester place, a crappy single-story beneath LAX’s flight path, he’d switched out his usual rig for a mud-spattered 4Runner with a scuba flag sticker in the back window.
On the side street now, Evan sat behind the wheel and watched the road for a while. Finally he dropped the transmission back into drive. Backtracking to the FedEx office, he entered, signed a series of customs forms, and left with an elongated cardboard box.
His new katana. This blade had been forged relatively recently, in 1653, by Heike Norihisa, last smith of the five-layered smelt. The katana was decorative, as Evan had intended the last one to be, and he was eager to mount it on the empty hooks in his hall.
But he had another location to check first. He’d spent hour after excruciating hour parsing the data from Contrell’s GPS, checking the man’s frequent stops, looking for the location where he stored the girls before shipping them out. With every passing day, more sand trickled through the hourglass.
Evan drove to Fullerton. A sheaf of papers rested in his lap, much of the data on them already crossed out with red pen.
The next place on the list proved to be a humble residence, semi-isolated behind a stretch of soccer fields gone to dirt. Detached garage, new shingles, fresh paint, curtains drawn. A security gate guarded a concrete front walk hemmed in by flower beds. A Stepford house writ small.
Evan parked several blocks away and doubled back. He vaulted the fence, put his ear to the door, heard nothing. The lock gleamed, a shiny Medeco. He raked it with a triple mountain pick, feeling for the rhythm of the wafers inside as they lifted to different heights. At last he felt the pleasing click of the release.
The well-greased door swung in on silent hinges. He drew his Wilson from his Kydex high-guard hip holster and eased inside. The interior, dim from the drawn curtains, stank of cleaning solution and unventilated air. Though he sensed that the place was empty, he moved silently from room to room. It was cheaply constructed and surprisingly clean. Dishes neatly stacked on a spotless counter. Sparkling linoleum floors. IKEA-looking slipcovered couch and chairs, calming taupes, distressed blues. In the living room, he parted the curtains with a hand.
The windows were nailed shut.
He ran his fingers over the heads of the nails, the metal cool against his prints. His heart rate ticked up with anticipation.
He moved on.
The master bedroom featured two double beds, sheets neatly made. Men’s clothes in the wardrobe. Big men’s clothes. One of the jackets looked like it could cover a deck chair.
Evan stopped, breathed, listened.
Then he started down the tiny hall to the rear room. Three door bolts. On the outside.
Pistol drawn, Evan stood perfectly still outside the room for a full ten minutes. No sounds of breathing within, no creaking of the floorboards.
Finally he threw one bolt. The muted clank of metal against metal might as well have been a clap of thunder.
Standing to the side of the door, he waited.
Nothing happened, and then more nothing.
The next two locks he unbolted in rapid succession. He bladed his body. Let the door creak inward. Leading with the 1911, he nosed around the jamb. A nicely made bed, lavender comforter, brand-new TV on a stand.
A lovely room, aside from the plate of sheet metal drilled over the window. When Evan shouldered the door to step inside, he felt it to be heavier than the others. Solid core.
The holding pen.
No one inside. The room—bare, pristine, equipped with only the basics—seemed like a diorama. In fact, the whole place had a dollhouse feel.
It had been designed with one purpose in mind: comfortable functionality.
Hector Contrell had to ensure that the merchandise wasn’t damaged before delivery.
The bathroom door remained closed. Evan tried the doorknob, but it didn’t budge. Seating the pistol in his holster, he took out his tension wrench again. The cheaper lock required only a hook pick and a few jiggles.
As the door swung inward, the smell hit him first.
A smooth leg, mottled blue-purple, hooked over the brim of the bathtub. A mass of tangled black hair covered the face, leaving only a delicate ivory chin exposed. He put the body as older than most of Contrell’s “eligibles.” Late teens, early twenties. Probably designated for a buyer looking for variety.
Until Contrell’s operation had been blown and his middlemen decided to liquidate the inventory.
She’d been alive when he killed Contrell. She’d been alive when he went home and poured himself a glass of vodka and drank to a job well done.
Evan lowered the pick set.
That was when he heard the footsteps behind him.
Two men, no doubt the inhabitants of the roomy clothes in the wardrobe of the master bedroom. The one nearest Evan gripped a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special and gripped it well. Firmed wrists, locked elbows. A second pistol hung in a cheap nylon holster under his left armpit, semiauto backup in case five bullets weren’t sufficient.
The man behind him carried a healthy gut and a SIG Sauer. His gun was also raised, but he could afford to be less on point given that his buddy had Evan pinned down. Evan couldn’t get a clear look around the front man’s barrel chest. The man seemed to block everything out. It wasn’t just his girth but the way he canted in aerodynamically at Evan. Thrusting chin, ledged brow, chest and biceps tugging him forward on his frame so it seemed that only the balls of his feet were holding him back—a bullet train made incarnate.
“Who’s been sleeping in our beds?” he said.
Evan lowered his hands slightly. The S&W followed the motion, stopped level with his heart.
“Goldilocks?” Evan said. “Really?”
“I gotta agree, Claude,” the man by the door said. “Not your finest work.”
Claude’s features rearranged themselves. His cheeks looked shiny, as if he’d recently shaved, but stubble was already pushing its way through again. His face, the target demographic for five-blade razors.
“I just thought, you know, the whole breaking-and-entering thing,” Claude said. “Us coming home, catching you. Plus the Goldilocks reference, it’s demeaning.”
“Because she’s a girl,” Evan said.
Claude nodded.
Evan held his hands in place. “You know what they say. If you have to explain the joke…”
The man in the back flicked his SIG at Evan. “Gun on the ground.”
Evan complied.
As he squatted, he gauged the distance to the tips of Claude’s shoes. Maybe five feet. Evan could close the space in a single lunge. Easy enough, if he didn’t have two guns aimed at his critical mass.
Rising, he eyed the barrel of the Chief’s Special. Since Claude was muscle-bo
und and right-handed, Evan’s first move would be to juke left, make him swing the gun inward across that barrel chest. The compression of delt and pec might slow his arm, buy Evan a half second.
That would be all he’d need.
His stare dropped to Claude’s second gun, the one slung in the loose-fitting underarm holster. A Browning Hi-Power. It was cocked and locked—hammer back, safety engaged. The safety lever peeked out beneath the retention strap of the nylon holster. Good presentation.
The odor wafted from the bathroom over Evan’s shoulder, precipitating on the taste buds at the back of his tongue. Just past the threshold in the hall, he saw the bright red of a few plastic gasoline jugs; the men had set them down quietly. “You guys cleaning up the operation?”
“Contrell was the CEO,” Claude said. “We’re just workaday guys. Glorified babysitters, really. Sit around, eat pizza, watch the tube. Beats digging ditches.”
Evan flipped the tiny hook pick around his thumb, pinched it again. “Those were the only options, huh? Sell girls or dig ditches?”
Claude smiled with sudden awareness, his magnificent jaw jutting out all the more. “You’re the guy who put us out of work.”
With a flick of his wrist, Evan flipped the hook pick at Claude’s eyes, lunging left just before the gunshot. The bullet cracked past his ear. He dove not so much at Claude as into him, using him as a shield, getting inside the range of the revolver. Evan’s right hand flew at that Browning in the underarm holster, and then he smacked into the big man, pressing chest to chest, a dance move gone wrong.
It happened very fast.
Evan’s thumb shoved the safety lever off as his forefinger curled around the trigger. He rode the gun back in the sling and fired straight through the holster from beneath Claude’s armpit. The man behind them took the shot through the cheek, blood welling like struck oil. The pistol in his fist barked twice as he flew back. Evan felt both impacts ripple Claude’s flesh, friendly-fire smacks to the spine.
Claude dropped fast and lay still.
The other man had wound up sitting next to the bed, slumped forward over his gut, one hand clutching the lavender comforter. A perfect stillness claimed the room.
Buy a Bullet: An Orphan X Story Page 4
