Orphan X

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Evan focused as much on Vasquez’s delivery as on his words. Cover stories tended to sound rehearsed—too smooth, with no hesitations. Vasquez seemed genuine, full of pauses and broken sentences. And he didn’t appear to be stalling either, drawing out the story to give his handlers time to plot an approach.

  “How many men were there?” Evan asked.

  “Three.”

  “And el jefe—the boss. Where was he standing? To your right or to your left?”

  “To my left.”

  “And Isa? She was to your left also?”

  “Yes. He was near her.”

  “What did the man look like next to the boss?”

  “He was large. With the big muscles. Like a boxer.”

  “And the fourth man? What did he look like?”

  “There was no fourth man. Only three men.”

  “The third man?”

  “He was big, too. Tall. But skinny.”

  “Skinny like the boss?”

  “El jefe was not skinny. He had muscles like rope knots.”

  “And he was standing to your right—”

  “My left. He was over here. Here. With my Isa.” Memo lifted his shirt collar and used it to wipe his forehead. “You try to trick me. You do not believe. You do not believe.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Evan said.

  Memo stared at him from the couch but made no move to rise. It occurred to Evan that he did not feel he was free to move, and right now that was fine by Evan.

  “What happened next?” Evan asked.

  “When they leave that night, I am closing up and I see that la policía, they are coming door-to-door through el distrito. They are close. I take the packages and I throw them in the trash can outside the back door and I run. I run with my Isa. I hide and wait for la policía to go away. And then I go back. But when I go back”—his breath caught at the memory—“the packages, they are no there. They are no there.”

  Somewhere up the street, the singsong music of the ice-cream truck played, and Evan heard a chorus of children’s voices, clamoring in two languages for their orders.

  Vasquez was breathing hard, trying to hold back tears. “The next night these men come again. I explain to el jefe what happen. He say this is my fault. That I owe him this money. Five thousand dollars.” Vasquez lowered his head and shook it slowly. Drops of sweat clung to the tips of his hair but did not fall. “This is more money than I have ever seen. They say if I do not bring it to them soon, they will come. They will come for my Isa.”

  “Why do they want her?”

  At last Memo looked up, and his dark eyes burned. “They will sell her organs.”

  He sobbed a few times, hoarsely. Standing by the window, Evan felt the familiar fury rise in him. The ice-cream truck was on the move again, coasting slowly down the hill toward the house.

  Memo said, “They say this, too, is their business. They say that her heart is no good because she is a special girl. And her eyes—she have the cataracts.” His lips parted in something like a snarl. “But for the black market, they will take her liver. Her kidneys. Her lungs.” Memo’s voice continued to rise. “Her bone. Skin. Veins. Tendons.” Tears ran down his cheeks. “They will take their profit from her body.”

  “Where is Isa now?”

  He choked out the words. “She is at her school. They have the learning program for her.”

  Through the gap in the plywood, Evan shot a final look down the long road. Then he walked over to Guillermo. He looked into his face. Believed him.

  Memo said, “I am running out of time. I cannot get this money, and when they see that, they will take my special girl.”

  Evan crouched and set his hands on Memo’s knees. “I will help you,” he said.

  Outside, the ice-cream truck’s music rose louder, and then came a whoosh of tires as the truck passed. Its headlights swept the living-room wall, bringing up a glint in the cracked plasterboard.

  Evan’s eyes snapped over, locking on the spot. He rose and looked down at Vasquez. “Do not move. Not a finger. Comprende?”

  Vasquez nodded, the furrows returning to his forehead.

  Walking over to the wall, Evan dug his finger into the crack, plaster crumbling around it. His finger struck something smooth and hard. He hooked it, yanked it out.

  A pinhole lens, identical to the one he used outside his condo.

  After laying all this exceptional groundwork, they’d sunk a camera blatantly into the middle of a wall? Why?

  Slatcher, he knew, was staring at him right now.

  In a rage, Evan tore the lens free, the wire ripping through the drywall, powdering the air. Memo watched from the couch, mouth gaping in fear.

  Evan shook the surveillance wire tangled around his clenched hand in Vasquez’s face. “What is this?”

  “I never see that before in my life. I swear, I—”

  The RoamZone phone vibrated in Evan’s pocket. His other hand shot down to the phone, pressed it to his cheek. Before he could speak, he heard the shouting.

  “Evan? Evan, it’s me!”

  Katrin. Her voice wrenched high with panic.

  “People are here—the ones from the motel. They pulled up in front in that Scion we saw. I just watched them run inside. Oh, my God! Where are you, Evan? Where are you?”

  He felt a heat at the back of his neck, the warm breath of dread. “Look through the peephole. Can you get to the stairs?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  “Check. Now.”

  Memo rose partway on the couch, hands raised placatingly, fingers spread. “Listen to me, amigo. I swear on my Isa’s eyes, I never—”

  Evan’s blow knocked him straight onto his belly on the floor. Pinching the phone with his shoulder, Evan put a knee between Vasquez’s shoulder blades, wrenched back his arms, and flex-tied his wrists. Then he secured his ankles.

  A sharp intake of breath came through the phone. “They’re in the hall already, Evan. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Dead-bolt the door,” Evan said. “Get to the bathroom. There’s a—”

  A thunderous boom came through the receiver, the sound of a battering ram meeting a lock assembly. Katrin’s scream was so loud that Evan jerked the phone a few inches from his head.

  “Stay on the phone, Katrin. No matter what happens, stay on the—”

  He heard the sound of a slap, then Katrin’s phone skittering across the floor. An instant later there was a rustling and the line cut out.

  Leaving Memo bound on the floor, Evan sprinted for the door. He understood now why Slatcher didn’t care if the pinhole lens was obvious. The aim of the subterfuge wasn’t to lure Evan here to kill him.

  The aim was to draw him away from Katrin.

  37

  Sooner or Later

  Evan hurtled recklessly across Downtown, running reds, slicing between cars, veering two tires up onto a sidewalk to squeak past a Volvo. He called up the GPS screen linked to the microchips in Katrin’s system, but no signal showed. A half block from his loft, he screeched into a bus zone and leapt from the Taurus, sprinting for the building with his hand riding the still-holstered Wilson Combat 1911.

  He drew the pistol as he crashed through the glass front doors, scattering a middle-aged couple and their two kids as he bolted for the stairs. Running up, he halted at the fifth-floor landing, cracking the door and peering through. The door to his loft was a few inches ajar, the wood crumpled slightly around the dead bolt.

  Easing into the hall, pistol raised, he crept along the carpet. He spread his hand on the splintered wood and swung the door silently inward. Leading with the gun barrel, he inched inside, taking in the open space with a sweeping glance.

  One of the barstools knocked on its side. The burner cell phone smashed to pieces. He crouched over the electronic entrails, touching the few dark spots on the floor next to them. When he lifted his hand, crimson filmed his fingertips.

  The drops were not excessive—maybe a bloodied nos
e from the slap? He knew that Katrin was alive. They didn’t want her.

  Since the loft was burned, he wasted no time leaving, reclaiming the Taurus up the street, and racing back to the Elysium Park house he’d just left. He replayed Vasquez’s cover story in his head. The elaborate tale—humble illegal alien with no one to turn to, evil drug lords, the Down-syndrome daughter to be parted out for organs—now seemed implausible, hitting all the right marks to tug at Evan’s insides. The photo of “Isa” had even been planted in Memo’s wallet in place of a driver’s license, the first place Evan would check.

  Slatcher had done his research, building a simulation of a Nowhere Man mission with just the right veneer of desperation and helplessness.

  A few minutes later, Evan stood in the dusty interior of the ramshackle house, surveying the scene. A pocketknife on its side, blade pried up. Two sets of severed nylon flex-ties on the floorboards. And no sign of Memo Vasquez.

  Disgusted with himself and not at all surprised, Evan started for the Burbank parking lot to swap out vehicles. A question smoldered in him: How had Slatcher located the loft? Evan’s mind spun, cycling through various possibilities.

  Midway to Burbank, an impulse seized him, and he screeched off the freeway and pulled in to an alley behind a strip mall. Arid heat blew through the back vent of a dry cleaner, bagged and hung garments cycling on the track inside like disembodied souls.

  From the trunk he yanked out the Hardigg Storm Case and put together the nonlinear junction detector. He wanded the Taurus meticulously, lingering over every spoke and panel, even sliding beneath the car on the rough blacktop to check the undercarriage. He ran the circular head over the inside upholstery, decapitated the headrests, yanked every item from the glove box. Tearing out the floor mats, he scanned them as if wet-vaccing the fabric.

  The detector gave out only its customary crackle of static.

  A few people exiting the dry cleaner offered him curious stares, but he ignored them, focused on his task, his sweat-heavy shirt clinging to him. He tugged out the spare tire and checked it, then disemboweled the first-aid kit, scattering its pieces across the ground. The tire iron was clean, as was the carpeted trunk mat, which he ripped out and exposed inch by inch. He shredded the black foam inside the Hardigg Storm Case, strewing it like wads of cotton across the alley.

  Sitting among the wreckage of the car, he breathed hard, catching his breath, at a loss.

  His stare pulled to the wand itself. A terrible suspicion pulsed to life in his chest.

  Rising, he picked up the detector. Then he hurled it against the asphalt, shattering it to pieces. Stomping with his heel, he fractured the plastic handle.

  Inside was a tiny digital transmitter.

  Crouching, he plucked up the pea-size tracker, held it between his thumb and forefinger, and glared at it.

  Hiding a transmitter within the very wand designed to detect it was an unrivaled piece of tradecraft.

  He walked over to the dry cleaner’s delivery van parked beside him, unscrewed the gas cap, and dropped the transmitter inside the tank. That should keep Slatcher and his team running circles around the city for a while.

  In the ravaged car, Evan drove to the airport-adjacent parking lot and picked up his truck. He drove home, trying to piece together when Slatcher’s team could have bugged the wand.

  The first time Evan had used the Taurus was just before Slatcher’s assault on Katrin’s motel room. The car had been clean then—there was simply no way they could have known about it before. And once Evan and Katrin had fled the motel through the back window, he’d watched Slatcher with his own two eyes. Slatcher had no tracking intel—he was waiting on comms from his field team in the room, and then he’d turned to study the street. No, there had been no transmitter hidden within the car when Evan had first taken Katrin to the loft.

  Which meant that Slatcher had planted it when Evan returned to Chinatown to sneak into the sniper’s nest. The scene of the attempted shooting was the most logical place to stake out. Slatcher would have known that Evan would return there eventually.

  That burned every location Evan had driven to after Chinatown.

  He ran through them in his head. He’d gone to the loft later that night when he and Katrin had sex, though he’d left precipitously after getting the call from Memo Vasquez, likely before Slatcher could scramble his team and set up for the kill. Next Evan had taken the Taurus to Vegas, putting Slatcher back on Morena’s trail at the aunt’s house. Though Slatcher had followed Morena to the Bellagio Casino, he’d been aware that Evan was somewhere on the premises, which is why he’d put Candy McClure into play on the casino floor.

  Evan had visited Tommy Stojack as well, but Tommy demanded that his clients park miles away and bus to see him, so his workshop was safe. On the way back from Vegas, Evan had stopped by Memo Vasquez’s house, giving Slatcher notice that Evan had taken the bait on the fake caller. Because Evan had switched vehicles in Burbank before coming home, Castle Heights was still presumably clear.

  When he’d returned to the Elysium Park house this morning, Slatcher had probably tracked him by the transmitter the whole way there, then waited to get real-time visual confirmation from the not-so-hidden pinhole camera that it really was Evan. That location put Evan too far away to get to Katrin in time, so Slatcher knew he was clear to crash the loft and take her.

  It was pretty goddamned obvious why Orphan Zero was considered the best.

  Once home, Evan went immediately to his loft and checked to see if Katrin’s GPS signal had magically reappeared despite the fact that he’d received no alert. It had not.

  Until she ate and her digestive juices charged the microchips in her tract, the signal would be dormant. This carried with it a silver lining: If Slatcher wanded her down for a signal—and Evan had little doubt he would—nothing would show up unless he happened to scan her immediately after a meal. Something told Evan that feeding Katrin was low on Slatcher’s list of priorities. But there was a deadline on the signal as well. Katrin likely had one more day, maybe two, before the minuscule sensors passed through her system.

  Then she’d be lost for good.

  Next he called up the surveillance footage from the loft. He watched Katrin pacing around the kitchen island as she was prone to do. A creeping unease found its way beneath Evan’s skin, the slow-burn horror of observing a person unaware that something terrible was about to happen to her.

  Katrin moved to the tinted wall of glass, and then her body stiffened with terror. She scrambled for the cell phone, half slipping on the slick floor.

  Evan watched her dial with trembling fingers. Watched her mouth move frantically, the conversation branded in his memory. The sound, fuzzy yet audible: People are here—the ones from the motel.

  She listened to him, ran to the door, glanced through the peephole. Her hands were fumbling at the dead bolt when the door flew in violently, knocking her back. She staggered but managed to keep her feet.

  Slatcher flashed inside, backhanding her. Though his blow seemed almost an afterthought, Katrin’s head snapped around as if her neck were a well-greased swivel. The phone skittered away.

  The woman, Candy McClure, was at Slatcher’s heels, a battering ram swinging playfully at her thigh. With a casual, hip-swaying gait, she crossed to the phone and smashed it with one of her chunky heeled boots. Slatcher gathered Katrin up. She lolled in his grip. Candy went to her other side, flipping Katrin’s arm so it slung drunkenly over Candy’s shoulders, and they sailed out the door.

  The entire intrusion took eleven seconds.

  Evan watched it through again. And again.

  Oh, my God! Where are you, Evan? Where are you?

  He rewound. Hit play.

  Where are you, Evan?

  Rewound.

  Where are you, Evan?

  He listened to Katrin’s plea until it became a mantra of rage, firing his insides.

  His thumb punched in the remembered number. It rang and rang, but Slatcher
did not pick up.

  He was likely trying to backtrace the number and would return the call only once he’d made some headway. As a former Orphan, Slatcher would have considerable skills and resources to run down Voice over IP protocols and digitized switchboards. It would be interesting to see how far along the trail he could get.

  Keeping the lights off, Evan walked the perimeter of his dark penthouse, RoamZone in hand. His shoulder scraped along the walls as if marking the boundaries of his fortress, delineating safe ground. The sunshine charcoaled by degrees, and then a postcard orange bled through the sky, and soon enough only man-made lights prevailed, pinpricks in the black sea of the city.

  As expected, the phone rang. Evan clicked TALK, put it to his ear. “Orphan O,” he said.

  “Orphan X.”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “Of course,” Slatcher said.

  A moment later Katrin came on the line, her voice husky from crying. “I’m sorry, Evan. I’m so sorry I dragged you into this.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I couldn’t get the dead bolt locked. I couldn’t get to the bathroom.”

  “There are two things I need you to remember. None of this is your fault. And I will find you. Repeat them to me.”

  She jerked in a few breaths. Then she said, “None of this is my fault. And you will find me.” She stifled a cry. “Promise me?”

  “I promise. Now, hand the phone back to the man.”

  Slatcher came on the line again.

  Evan said, “You’re happy to let us talk, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  Evan paced along the hall, letting his fingers trickle across the space where the mounted katana once hung. “Because you’re tracing this call. Right now.”

  “Trying to.”

  “Good luck,” Evan said, not insincerely.

  “Nice diversion with the dry-cleaning van,” Slatcher said.

  “Thank you,” Evan said. “Beautiful move planting the digital transmitter in the wand. You put it there in Chinatown?”

  “I did,” Slatcher said. “While you were in the apartment getting onto my trail, I was in the trunk of your car getting onto yours.”