Orphan X

by Gregg Hurwitz

  A blip of missing time and then Evan is on his knees, pulling off Jack’s flannel. The crimson stripe claims the white undershirt, angled like a sash, expanding through the cotton even now. Jack’s hand shifts, and a straw-thin spray squirts between his fingers.

  Jack is saying something. Evan has to tell his brain to take in the sounds, to shape them into words, to ascribe meaning to the words.

  “I’m already dead,” Jack says. “It caught the brachial.”

  “You don’t know that. You don’t—”

  “I know that.” He lifts a callused hand, lays it against Evan’s cheek perhaps for the first time ever.

  Wafting down the shafts and the curved ramp, the sound of police sirens. A hot-copper scent cuts through the sweet smell of sawdust.

  “I’m going to die,” Jack says. “Don’t blow cover. Listen to me.” A paroxysm of pain racks his body, but he fights out the words. “This is not your fault. I made the decision to meet you. I did. Go. Leave me. Go.”

  Evan thinks he is choking, but then he feels the wet on his cheeks and realizes what is happening to his face. The sirens are closer now, a chorus of warbling screams. “No,” he says. “I won’t go. I won’t—”

  Jack’s good hand drops to his belt, and there is a clank, and then his service pistol is up between them. He aims it at Evan. “Go.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  Jack’s gaze is steady, focused. “Have I ever lied to you?”

  Evan stands up, stumbles back a step. He thinks about the warnings Jack gave him. Heat from the Bulgaria job. A potential leak. I don’t want to be drawn out.

  And yet Evan had done precisely that.

  He throws a panicked look over at the smoking SUV, the mystery bodies slumped forward, faceless. Back to Jack, each breath wheezing out of him. Evan wants there to be more time, but there is no more time. It dawns on him that Jack’s flannel shirt is still mopped around his hand. His fist tightens around it, moisture spreading between his fingers. Somewhere above them tires screech. Boots on concrete.

  “Son,” Jack says gently. “It’s time to go.” He rotates the barrel beneath his own chin.

  Backing up, Evan arms the tears from his face. He takes another step back, and another, and then finally he turns.

  Running away, he hears the gunshot.

  22

  Pieces of His True Self

  Evan came back to himself kneeling on his bedroom floor before the open dresser drawer, the bloodstained collar of Jack’s flannel looped around his hand like a rosary. The gunshot seemed to echo through the doorways of his condo, a ghost sound that filled the air all around and yet had no source. That noise had sent him into a new life. He’d slipped out of that underground parking structure beneath the Jefferson Memorial and into a different existence.

  The first weeks after Jack’s death he’d spent in a rented cabin in the Alleghenies, alone with the smell of pine mulch and the rustle of leaves. In his entire life, he’d known only one genuine human connection, and the loss of it had left a hole clean through his center. In his bones, his chest, beneath the vault of his ribs, he ached as if the damage were physical. In a way he supposed it was.

  Either he’d drawn Jack into the open or he had been followed himself. Two marked men in the same location, a public meet that Evan had insisted on.

  This is not your fault. I made the decision to meet you.

  No matter Jack’s intent, his words conveyed the opposite. Evan replayed them, hearing them as he’d heard Jack’s whiskey voice reading him Shakespeare by the light of the fire when he was a kid: And Brutus is an honorable man.

  In that drafty cabin, Evan hibernated, grief bleeding him of energy. At the month mark, he started to emerge from the etherlike stupor, grasping that Jack’s murder had ramifications beyond the emotional. Evan’s only tie to legitimacy had also bled out on the concrete floor of P3.

  He had no handler, no contacts inside the government, no nation that wasn’t actively hunting him, even the one he served. He was, in a word, untethered.

  Jack’s voice cut through the haze. Get over yourself, son. There is no emotion more useless than self-pity.

  Evan rose that morning, walked into the crisp autumn breeze, and gazed across the slopes. They were stubbled with red spruce, the Christmas-tree smell sharpening the air. Needles stabbed his bare feet. The wind blew clear through him, and he had a sense of a wider world and his place within it.

  He had a virtually limitless bank account, a particular skill set, and nothing to do. He was untethered, yes, but that also meant he was free.

  He moved to Los Angeles, the farthest he could get from D.C. without tumbling off the edge of the country. And he rebuilt. A third life, in the open as well as in the shadows. An operational alias built with pieces of his true self. A cover that let him hide in plain sight. He stayed mission-ready. Kept fit and trained up. He never knew who would come looking, what fist might knock on his door.

  Several years passed.

  He stayed alert, vigilant, kept his ear to the ground to listen for underworld tremors. Word filtered back to him through various sources that the Orphan Program had been dismantled, the operators scattered to the four winds. He never learned the fate of those Orphans who turned, but he imagined that the others now sold their specialized services to the highest bidder or had retired to a beach in a quiet corner of the world. Neither option appealed to him.

  And so he decided to put his training to personal use. A pro bono freelancer, helping others who could not help themselves. Either way he had a calling, aligned with the heading of his own moral compass. Five years, a dozen successful missions.

  And now he had failed.

  Pop of a gunshot.

  Thump of deadweight.

  The blue flannel shirt stained with Jack’s blood seemed an indictment and a testament of the day’s loss, his own Shroud of Turin.

  Dad? No. No. No.

  Evan laid the stiff fabric gently in the false bottom of the drawer, lowered the concealing particleboard over it, and rearranged his clothes. The drawer closed with the faintest click.

  He couldn’t save his own dad. He didn’t save Katrin’s.

  All he could offer her now was vengeance.

  He passed the floating Maglev bed on his way out, padded down the cold hall with the Japanese woodblock prints and the mounted sword.

  Shards of the tumbler lay scattered across the counter, in the sink. A sharp alcohol waft reached him, the antiseptic fragrance of overpriced vodka. He swept up the bits of glass. Wet a hand towel and wiped down the counter, the backsplash. One of the reflective subway tiles had sustained a tiny chip. He worked the flaw with his fingernail, as if he could sand it back to perfection.

  It remained.

  * * *

  He’d just sat down, exhaled deeply, and prepared to meditate when a vehement shrill jarred him from his peaceful pose on the Turkish rug. He didn’t place the sound right away. It returned, strident enough to make his teeth hurt. Not an alarm but his rarely used house phone, installed only because a local number was required for the HOA Resident Directory.

  He’d just picked up when Mia’s voice came at him. “Drain cleaner in water bottles? What were you thinking?”

  Evan exhaled quietly.

  “Look, I know you were joking. He told me it was a joke. But if he repeats that to a teacher? It would be considered a terroristic threat. You don’t understand how insane schools are these days.”

  Evan rolled his lips over his teeth. Bit down. Told the muscles of his neck to relax. “You’re right.”

  “You know what? This isn’t your fault. It’s my fault. I should’ve … I don’t know—”

  “I get it,” Evan said.

  “Okay.” A brief pause. “Um. Good-bye, then.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Well, that was that. Good. No complications. No distractions. He’d made a brief, uncharacteristic foray into a sticky domestic situation, and now he could retreat into dealing with
his work and the considerable danger facing him and Katrin.

  The bitch is next. Then you.

  In the morning he’d regroup with Katrin. He’d run down the people behind the murder of her father. And he’d eliminate them before they could pose a further threat.

  Forgoing his meditation, he walked down the hall, the concrete cool beneath his bare feet. He took a hot shower, the steam burning his lungs, then toweled off. The floating platform that held his mattress wobbled ever so slightly as he slipped into bed. He cleared a space inside his mind, a park of his own, and populated it with the oak trees of his childhood, the ones visible from the window of his dormer room in Jack’s house. He’d always envisioned bounding across the burnt orange canopy, forty feet off the ground. He counted down slowly from ten, part of a self-hypnotic technique for falling asleep.

  He’d just hit zero and drifted off when the perimeter alarm sounded. A staccato series of beeps—external intruder, windows or balconies.

  He flipped off the bed, landing in a four-point feet-and-hands sprawl on the floor. Two shoulder rolls took him through the door into the bathroom. He gripped the hot-water lever, shoving through into the Vault.

  His eyes swept the monitors. Nothing, nothing—there. Bumping against his bedroom window, a foreign object.

  He exhaled with annoyance when he realized what it was.

  After silencing the alarm, he walked back into his room and raised the armored sunscreen. Floating outside his window, a balloon.

  With the logo of a children’s shoe store on it.

  Each upper-story window of Castle Heights tilted open only two feet at the top before a locked hinge stopped it for safety. Evan had disabled the hinge on his bedroom in case he needed to exit the building quickly in the event of a frontal assault on the penthouse. Letting the pane yawn wide now, he tugged the balloon inside. Knotted around the mouth was a kite string that tailed down the side of the building to—he assumed—the twelfth floor. A folded note was Scotch-taped on the balloon’s side. Evan raised the flap of paper and read.

  “I’m sorry I told Mom yor joke. Do you fergive me? Chek Yes or No. Your frend, Peter.”

  Taped beside the note on the balloon, a stubby pencil and a sewing needle.

  The grinding of Evan’s teeth vibrated his skull. He had a team of professional assassins tracking him and the woman he’d sworn to protect. Her father, murdered. Two Commandments and counting already out the window. The last thing he needed was an eight-year-old kid invading his condo and his sleep with schoolroom notes.

  Evan closed the window hard on the kite string and went back to his bed. He pulled the sheets up and floated there in the darkness on his levitating mattress, detached from the world. He counted down from ten, but sleep didn’t come. He kept his eyes closed, focused on his body, the weight of his bones, his own quiet breathing. From time to time, he could hear the balloon squeaking faintly against the ceiling.

  Exasperated, he threw back the sheets and crossed to the balloon. He pulled off the pencil, made an X in the “Yes” box, and popped the balloon with the conveniently supplied needle. He opened the window and threw the deflated sack to the wind. He started to cinch the window closed again, then hesitated. He stuck his head out in time to see the white string being taken up through a window nine stories below by two tiny hands.

  23

  Reading the Chessboard

  “What are you doing?” Katrin asked. She’d risen from the desk chair to face him imploringly across the drab motel room. More precisely, to face his back.

  Evan kept moving, focused not on her but on the room—in fact, on all three adjoining rooms, 9 through 11. They shared an identical layout: blocky furniture, front door, one big window in the front and one in the rear. He’d laid wide the adjoining doors so that standing in Katrin’s room—Room 10—gave him decent sight lines through the space. Now he wanted to obscure those sight lines to his advantage.

  “They found us before,” he said. “We don’t know how. Which means we don’t know when they will again.” He adjusted the angle of the connecting door to the east so he could see between the hinges to the neighboring rear window. The sheer curtains granted a shadowy view of the industrial trash barrels in the alley beyond and the thin, bobbing branches of a dying white birch. He’d left his businessman-gray Ford Taurus slotted neatly between other sedans in an apartment carport off the alley. After the shooting in Chinatown, he’d kicked his usual precautions into overdrive, retrieving the stashed car from a long-term parking lot adjacent to the Burbank Airport.

  Closing one eye for perspective, he swung the door a half inch farther, then another half inch. There.

  “Every time one of us leaves this room,” he said, “it increases the risk that they’ll find us. Every time we’re together, it increases the risk that they’ll find us.”

  “Can’t we just go on the run?” Katrin asked. “I have my passport in my purse. I’ve kept it on me ever since this started, and some cash. It’s not a lot, but—”

  “You can’t run from a problem like this,” Evan said, brushing past her. He played with the adjoining door to Room 11 on the other side until it gave him a similar angle through that space as well. Taking the chair Katrin had just vacated, he situated it precisely in the middle of Room 10 so when he sat there he’d maximize the slender vantages he’d created through the hinges of the doors on either side.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “It’ll catch up to you.” Moving swiftly, he rolled one of the circular nightstands over to the front window. Retrieving his briefcase from the bed, he set it on the nightstand, input the code, and lifted the lid so its inset pinhole lens faced the sliver of a break in the front curtains. “This team is very good at what they do. We need to bed down, figure out a counterattack, not get drawn out.” On his RoamZone cell, he called up the video feed from the lens and repositioned the briefcase until his phone screen showed a full capture of the parking lot in front.

  Then he sat in the chair with his back to the briefcase and propped his RoamZone against the TV in front of him, establishing a more-or-less 360-degree view through the three adjoining rooms and the outside space around them. For the first time since arriving, he looked fully at her.

  Her petiteness struck him. She had the finely made build of a dancer—slender arms that still held muscle, delicate wrists, shoulders-back posture. She wore a scarf headband under which her short bangs stuck out jaggedly. Her lashes held mascara—heavy and yet not overdone, and her eyes looked weary, edged with pink. A flush still showed at her throat and the rim of her nose, the tinge pronounced given her milk-white skin. Clearly there’d been a lot of crying and very little sleep, though she’d held it together since he’d arrived.

  “You’re right,” she said. “What do I care anymore? They already killed my dad.” Her voice was laced with undeniable grief. “If we stay…” Her eyes welled. “Will you get them for what they did?” She crouched before him, curled her hands over his, looked up at him with those vibrant emerald eyes.

  “Yes.”

  She stood, blinking to hold in the tears. “I always come out on the wrong end. Relationships, cards, finances. I know it’s my own goddamned fault. But I never get it right. I always lose. And when it mattered the most, with Sam…” When she spoke again, her voice was hoarse. “I wanted so bad for this time to be different. And it wasn’t.” She seemed to come back to the present, regarding him there in the chair with his odd surveillance setup. “What do I even call you? ‘The Nowhere Man’ is a little stilted, right?” She gave a dying laugh. “Watch out for that sniper behind you, Nowhere Man. Hey, Nowhere Man, can you pass the salt?”

  “Evan,” he said.

  “Is that your real name?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Evan,” she said, trying it on. “Evan.”

  In the video feed on his phone’s screen, a rusty pickup pulled in to the parking lot. An old guy with a wispy white mustache climbed out and legged his way t
o reception.

  “We’re going to break apart every aspect of what happened,” Evan said, “and figure out how they tracked us down in the restaurant. But first we need to figure out some protocols. You should keep to the room as much as possible. When I’m not with you, you need to be extremely cautious. Keep your head on a swivel.”

  “For what?”

  “Anyone who stands out.”

  “How am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to do anything if they’re as good as you say they are?”

  The rumble of an engine came audible through the rear wall. Evan tracked the car’s shadow as it flickered past the sheer curtains of the three motel rooms, one after the other. Once the sound faded, he returned his focus to Katrin. “You play poker.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me how you read your opponents.”

  “That’s not the same—”

  “Tell me.”

  She took a deep breath. Held it. Then: “Perfectionists are easy to pick up. Always polishing their glasses. Clipped nails. They stack their chips just so. They tend to be gun-shy, easier to bluff. When they’re close to the felt, they play tight.” She sank onto the bed, curled her feet beneath her.

  On the video feed, Evan watched the guy with the white mustache exit reception, twirling a key around his finger. He stepped out of frame, and a moment later Evan sensed the shudder of a door opening and closing far up the row of rooms.

  “The eyes are a tell, which is why the pros wear sunglasses and baseball caps,” Katrin was saying. “The pupils constrict at a bad hand, though it’s hard to catch if the lighting’s bad. Guys’ll stare longer at a good hand before flopping. There’s some bullshit about liars looking away, breaking eye contact, blinking more, but that’s not true with practiced liars. They’ll stare a hole right through you. And you have to listen to them, too. Their speech is more fluid when they’re confident.”