Even in the faint light, Evan recognized the man.
Tigran Sarkisian.
The Great White Sark.
An international private arms dealer.
In Spitak in 2005, operating as Orphan X, Evan had killed Sark’s brothers, his grown son, and six of his cousins.
Sarkisian shrugged off the cold and ambled for the house, accompanied by one of René’s narcos.
The helicopter lifted off. Through the slits in the steel, Evan watched it coast into the endless blackness to the west. As it grew more distant, the sound of its rotors oddly grew louder, amplified off the walls of the mountain range, coming at him in stereo.
Evan’s stomach fell away as he realized that he was no longer listening to the first helicopter.
He swung his head back toward the barn.
There they were, the lights of the next approaching helo. A good distance behind were two more floating dots, one red, one green. And behind that chopper, two more lights, and then two more, and then two more. He let his eyes skim across the incoming flight path, an airborne highway a dozen helicopters deep, each holding someone eager to lay hands on the Nowhere Man.
Alarm cut straight through the fog of the drugs, his mind suddenly alert, his skin prickling.
He remembered the RoamZone on the bed, the live connection, the tendril of a lifeline connecting him to the boy. Running back inside, he snatched up the phone.
“Hello? I’m here. I’m here.”
He stared at the RoamZone, dead in his hand.
The kid had hung up.
48
Some Bizarre Mating Dance
“Our beautiful women were hung naked from crosses, you see, in Der-es-Zor. My mother was child, but she remember. She say they were glorious even in this horror. Proud and naked, long hair blowing like the mermaids.”
The Great White Sark paused to wet his lips. Evan sat on a folding chair inside the Lexan vault in the ballroom. Sark overcrowded a matching chair on the far side of the transparent door. Just two men having a conversation. He looked much worse than when Evan had seen him last, his grizzled stubble the color of frost, pouches hanging beneath his milky eyes. He was an old man now, well into his seventies, but the power contained in his bearlike body was still evident.
“I have reclaimed this atrocity for my own use.” His lips parted, showing pitted yellow teeth. “The crucifixion. So painful you invented a word for it. Your word ‘excruciating,’ it comes from this. ‘Out of crucifying,’ it means.”
In his cold metal chair, Evan listened wearily. He had the gnawing sense of having traded roles, of finding himself in a situation befitting one of the people he’d devoted the past six years of his life to rescuing. Now he was the one captive and defenseless, ready to be sold to the highest bidder, just like Alison Siegler. The Lexan room was his own version of intermodular Container 78653-B812.
He’d received his visitors one after another, a newlywed outside the church, each potential buyer coming in to peruse the merchandise.
At some early-morning hour, Dex had roused him from bed with an electric shock to the neck and marched him downstairs to the ballroom. Dex had spread his left hand across the sensor panel to unlock the Lexan door, giving Evan a good view of the tattooed bloody scowl, a preview of things to come.
Security measures had changed. Dex now wore a handgun strapped to his wide belt. The other narcos had added pistols, too, in addition to their AKs. It was no longer just Evan they had to worry about. René had assembled a collection of the world’s most lethal criminal masterminds, and even if he’d had his men strip-search all the buyers and transport them here blind and disoriented, beanbag shotguns were no longer gonna cut it.
“When I buy you,” Sark continued, bringing Evan back to the claustrophobic present, “I will do this to you. Insert nails here.” He jabbed a too-long fingernail into the underside of his wrist. “A weak spot between bones of forearm. Nail go in nice and smoothly. Your feet also must be nailed to relieve strain on wrists. This will allow you to hang longer from cross. People, they die from…” His hand circled the air, searching out a word. He muttered to himself before snapping his fingers. “Asphyxiation. The arms grow tired. The chest and lungs, they overextend. This is when I will add a footrest to help you.”
Pale light sheeted from the high-set windows, giving the ballroom the aura of a cathedral. Dex stood near the dilapidated piano, arms crossed, his shiny dome catching light, his face shadowed.
Xalbador guarded the room’s entrance, the Kalashnikov slanted back over his shoulder, one thumb hooked behind a shiny gold rodeo belt buckle.
The four remaining narcos had shuttled the buyers back and forth all day, supervising them and giving curt directives, an armed bed-and-breakfast staff. The snipers, Evan figured, were still in the hills, providing just-in-case oversight.
Of the buyers who’d come to threaten him so far, he hadn’t seen the party he dreaded most—Charles Van Sciver or one of his Orphan representatives. Not that the guests Evan was receiving were pleasant.
“I want to savor every drop of your pain,” Sark continued. “No dying of shock, no quick-and-easy heart attack. Sepsis is my preference for you. It takes longest time, provides most agony. I want to keep you for days. My record is five.” He held up a callused hand, fingers spread, in case Evan needed a visual aid. “But you are strong. This I remember.” Standing seemed to take Sark some effort, his joints arthritic. He tapped the Lexan between them almost fondly, his mouth splitting in a grin, showing those pitted teeth once again. “I am hopeful you will do much better.”
* * *
Assim al-Hakeem entered the ballroom, the glare from the windows falling across his shoulders, seemingly adding more weight. He limped toward the provided chair outside the Lexan vault, one shoulder permanently shrugged. He’d suffered nerve damage from all the explosions.
In the summer of 2002, Evan had killed Assim’s twin sister, triggering the car bomb she was transporting to a Fourth of July parade in Virginia Beach. The early detonation had scattered her and her Dodge Neon across Interstate 264.
Sadly, Assim had not been in the passenger seat. He’d been a busy boy that year, sending a natural-gas truck into a synagogue in Tunisia and engineering a bus bombing in Karachi. American-born, he and his sister moved easily between nations, renting themselves out at exorbitantly high rates. Though ostensibly Muslim, they were not ideologues; they were devoted only to their bank balances. It was rumored that they’d even provided services to the CIA in Colombia.
With great relief Assim lowered himself onto the chair. He licked his chapped lips, showing chipped front teeth.
“Hello, Nowhere Man.”
“Assim. You look tired.”
He sighed. “All that traumatic brain injury. It’s like football. After a while you can’t even tell the difference between a hard hit and a concussion. There are lesions in my brain now, they tell me. I don’t have many years left. I’ve got all the money in the world and no time to spend it.” He gave a sheepish laugh, lifted a tremulous finger. “I have one thing to set right before I die. And I am willing to spend every cent I have amassed to that end.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Do you understand what you’ve taken from me?” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, his jittering arms making his shoulders wobble. “Do you understand what you do?”
“Yes. I do what you do. But for better reasons.”
“I don’t think so. Ayisha and I, we were pure. We understood our jobs, our motives. We never wrapped ourselves in dogma or morality or became true believers of one stripe or another. We called it what it was.” He looked weary, so weary. His gaze grew loose, unfocused. “She was beautiful.”
“Yes,” Evan said. “She was.”
“I miss her every day. I was with her from conception. We grew together in the womb, two parts of one whole. It’s like missing a limb—no, like missing half of my body.” His smile showed off the uneven edge of the broken te
eth. “I hope to teach you what that feels like. Missing half of your body and being alive to know it.”
He rose unsteadily.
Xalbador had to assist him on his way out.
* * *
The Widow Lakshminarayanan did not bother to sit on the provided chair. Thin and birdlike, she circled the Lexan vault, taking in Evan from every angle. Her sari, a luscious orange trimmed with gold and money green, swept the floor around her invisible feet. She seemed more an apparition than a human. Wiry gray hair framed her small, wrinkled face; though she was in her forties, she looked like a great-grandmother.
She’d aged preternaturally after Evan had dispatched her husband with a cell phone packed with C4. He’d been a counterfeiter and launderer of epic proportion, an equal-opportunity provider who’d cleaned for everyone from Punjabi cartel leaders to Muslim extremists. Despite being a financial and technological genius, Shankar Lakshminarayanan had been a gentle soul who eschewed violence. He left personnel and business disputes to his wife, who displayed no such reservations.
She was said to prefer straight razors.
In the background now, two of René’s guards arranged folding chairs in rows on the stretch of hardwood before the Lexan vault, opening them and setting them down briskly. Snap. Clang. Snap. Clang.
The widow took another turn around the box, and Evan turned with her, keeping her in view. As she circled, he spun, like they were doing some bizarre mating dance.
The guards continued to set up for the coming auction. Snap. Clang. Snap. Clang. The quality of light had changed in the ballroom, afternoon fading into evening. With the exception of a single midday bathroom break, Evan had been inside these four Lexan walls since waking, breathing his own stale air. René had placed no restrictions on the buyers, and most of them had wanted to take their time with him.
It had been a parade of prior missions, a Dickensian haunting, a This Is Your Life tour of Evan’s past. The Nowhere Man, dragged from the shadows and placed on display inside a transparent box—it was his worst nightmare stretched along an exponential curve that grew steeper with every visitor. He’d seen foes from all around the globe. The daughter of a Serbian war criminal. The Fortune 500 father of a serial rapist he’d erased in an early pro bono mission as the Nowhere Man. A Hong Kongese gangster looking to preempt a future visit.
Everyone, it seemed, but the contingent that Evan feared most. Van Sciver and his happy band of repurposed Orphans.
Evan had stopped pivoting with the widow, but he could feel her predatory stare heating his back now, raising the hairs of his neck. Unease overtook him, and he spun on his heel.
She was clasping the wall behind him in a sort of embrace, scarecrow arms spread, bone-thin fingers clutching the Lexan. Her stare bored a hole right through him. Keeping her eyes locked to his, she licked the glass, leaving a smudge. Then licked it again.
At last she turned and walked out, Xalbador rushing to her side to steer her to her room.
Behind Evan the guards finished placing the last of the chairs. Snap. Clang. Snap. Clang.
He drew in a deep breath, wondering if his day was over at last.
A clopping of footsteps announced René’s entrance. His suit, which looked to be a thick wool blend, bulged at the hip. It seemed even the master of the chalet was bearing a handgun beneath all that fine fabric. David hung on his arm, an ornament on display, with an e-cigarette wedged between his index and middle fingers. Evan wondered if they’d been in the parlor entertaining.
“We done?” Evan hadn’t spoken in hours, and his voice came out husky.
“Not yet,” René said. “We have one final party, and they’re very eager to see you.”
Clasping his hands, he swiveled to the doorway.
Escorted by Xalbador and his AK-47, Candy McClure entered the room wearing a dark green halter dress, the dagger of the deep-cleavage neckline plunging down between her breasts to her belly button.
Orphan V, back from the dead.
Last he’d seen her, he’d locked her in a closet in the spillage of hydrofluoric acid, a little treat she’d intended for him. He’d heard her pounding on the door and screaming but had been massively outnumbered, busy ducking bullets and trying to get to a not-so-fair maiden in distress.
At Candy’s side now was a dead leaf of a man, short and slight, with jaundiced skin and darting flat eyes. No doubt another Orphan.
David vaped off his e-cig, eyeing Candy. “She is spectacular,” he said. “Isn’t she?”
Candy strode across the room on stiletto boots. She confronted Evan through the glass, legs spread, muscular thighs tensed.
She reached for the halter at the base of her neck, untied it, and let the top of the dress fall forward, exposing her torso.
Behind her, David gasped, one hand rising to cover his mouth. At first Evan didn’t understand.
Then she turned.
Whorling scars covered her back and shoulders. Evan stared at the ridges and fissures with disbelief. The seam of disfigurement ran nearly perfectly down her sides; she looked like a doll pressed together from two different molds.
She swung back around, giving him her glorious front.
“Hello, X,” she said. “We’ve been looking for you a long time.”
49
Flicker of Coldness
Candy moved toward Evan, lifting her arms to retie the halter at the base of her neck.
“I didn’t know that happened to you,” Evan said. “Not like that.”
She must have read something in his face, because he saw a flicker in her eyes, a softness shimmering through the gem-hard surface. But only for an instant.
“I’m not gonna waste time telling you what I’m gonna do to you,” she said. “When the time comes, I’m just gonna show you.”
René said, “You’re that confident you’ll win the auction?”
“It’s not a matter of confidence,” Candy said. “It’s a matter of fact. Ain’t that right, M?”
The sullen little man gave no indication that he’d heard her, but Xalbador read the shift in the air and hoisted his Kalashnikov to a low ready position. Dex moved around the perimeter of the ballroom, sidling into Orphan M’s blind spot.
“You see,” Candy said, “we’re the only ones here with unlimited money.”
René laughed. He didn’t realize that she was being literal, that as the head of the Orphan Program, Van Sciver could access money directly off the U.S. Treasury’s printing presses.
“In that case,” René said, “I wish you the best of luck.”
“Oh, we’re not the buyer,” Candy said. “We’re the delivery service. One of your conditions before we boarded your helicopter was that we leave all electronics behind. But one of our conditions is that you provide me a means to contact my buyer.”
“You’re not in a position to set conditions.”
“I am not authorized to bid without providing confirmation for my buyer,” Candy said. “Believe me. You don’t want to leave this much money on the table.”
René pursed his lips. He seemed to be wrestling with himself. “Dex,” he said at last, “please bring Ms. V the encrypted satphone.”
“Because your encryption procedures worked out so well last time,” Evan said.
“They did,” René said. “For me.”
Dex crossed the ballroom and placed a bulky phone in Candy’s hand. She winked at him, then dialed. As it rang, she tapped her boot, a smart-ass show of impatience.
Abruptly, her expression hardened. “Confirmed,” she said.
She listened for a time. Then she moved toward the Lexan door, wiggling the phone at Evan. “Someone wants to say hi.”
One finger adorned with a metallic nail pressed the speaker button, and then a bizarre combination of voices poured forth. “Hello, Evan. it SEEMS you have FINALLY dug YOURself a HOLE TOO deep to CLIMB out OF.”
Evan raised his eyebrows, an unspoken question for Candy. She read his face, gave a nod.
When Evan thought of him, he always pictured the burly kid he’d known back at the Pride House Group Home. Now he felt the flicker of coldness that used to move through his chest when, as the smallest boy in the pack, he caught the ruthless focus of Charles Van Sciver.
Evan cleared his throat. “I’m not buried yet.”
“No. WE will be PAYing for that PRIVILEGE. I believe V WANTS TO take some TIME with you FIRST. That WILL BE my GIFT to her. For HER devoted SERVICE.”
“It didn’t have to go this way,” Evan said.
“IT IS WHAT it IS, and THAT’S ALL that it IS.” Van Sciver’s old standby. And also, judging from the dial tone emanating from the phone, his sign-off.
Candy kept her gaze on Evan but held the phone behind her, raised over one shoulder. Orphan M came forward to claim it. He carried it back across to René.
“You’ll have tonight to consider your finances,” René said. “Bidding will begin in the morning.”
“Yeah,” Candy said, turning on one stiletto prong. “We’re not willing to take that risk.”
René’s laugh was more like a stutter. “You don’t have a choice.”
Dex stiffened. Xalbador readjusted his grip on the AK.
Orphan M neared René and held out the phone. When René reached for it, M snatched David and spun him around, shoving the uncapped tip of a pen into his neck.
Immediately Xalbador’s AK-47 was pressed into Candy’s temple. Dex had his handgun drawn—a .45 auto—and aimed at Orphan M, but the little man was barely visible behind David. From the safety of the Lexan vault, Evan watched the standoff.
Calmly, Candy held up her hands, fluttered her fingers. “Hear me out,” she said. “I will offer you one hundred million dollars right now. We take him and we’re gone.”
René’s smile stretched across his tight face. “Leaving me with a houseful of furious psychopaths.”
David’s head was torqued back, his face flushed high at the cheekbones. “René,” he said, his voice throaty and cramped. “I want to go home now.”
All of his hipster cool had evaporated, and he looked like what he was: a college-age kid in over his head. The e-cigarette spun on the hardwood at his feet, and Evan couldn’t help thinking the kid would never get the chance to graduate to Marlboros.
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