Out of the Dark

by Gregg Hurwitz

  In the en suite bathroom, a nudge of his knuckle sent the wide glass shower door rolling aside on its barn-door track, and then he stepped inside and gripped the hot-water lever.

  An embedded digital sensor read the print of his curled palm and allowed him to twist the lever through the point of resistance. A hidden door, disguised seamlessly in the wall tiles of the shower, swung inward, and he entered the concealed four hundred square feet he mentally referred to as the Vault.

  Part command center, part armory, the Vault was where Evan did the majority of his operational planning. The underbelly of the public stairs to the roof crowded the space in the rear, where weapon lockers stood aligned. In the center of the room, an L-shaped sheet-metal desk supported a proliferation of computer hardware.

  Right now there were no monitors in sight.

  With a finger, he clicked the mouse and three of the four walls—a horseshoe wrapping the desk—shimmered to life. Over the past few weeks, he’d tiled those walls with OLED screens, made of glass embedded with mesh so fine it was undetectable to the bare eye. When not engaged, the screens shut off, transforming into invisible panes.

  With everything up and running now, the Vault came alive with color and movement. One screen rotated through pirated feeds of Castle Heights’ surveillance cameras, showing angles of hallways, the lobby, and surrounding streets.

  The other mounted screens hosted a profusion of evidence pertaining to Evan’s 1997 mission. Operational details, archived newspapers from the era and region, maps detailing every location he’d visited as a nineteen-year-old formulating his first hit. There were compiled records on the targeted foreign minister, his wife, the generals who had occupied the vehicle with him that day. The round man who’d supplied the steel shell casing with the fingerprint, the Estonian arms dealer, the heroin addict tucked in the shabby office of the abandoned textile factory who had overdosed in early 1998—each had a painstakingly assembled dossier as well.

  Evan had resurrected every last thread of evidence as he conducted his own postmortem, but nothing he turned up showed the assassination to be anything but a standard kill.

  Not one piece of intelligence had produced a worthwhile lead.

  A flowchart of Jonathan Bennett’s career through 1997 dominated the right wall—every known post, every documented trip and meeting, every on-the-record colleague and contact.

  All dead ends.

  Evan still had no idea why his first mission was so important to Bennett and why it was so threatening that Evan had to be neutralized for the role he’d played in it.

  What—all these years later—was he still not seeing?

  If the right wall was an attempt to diagnose the past, the left wall diagrammed the future. It was a living tableau, aggregating data that would aid in the assassination of the president.

  Evan immediately noticed a number of changes on the left wall since his latest excursion to D.C.

  The White House’s Web site had taken the president’s public schedule offline. No information available at this time.

  Evan looked down at the pinecone-shaped aloe vera plant nestled in a glass bowl filled with cobalt glass pebbles. “Okay, lady,” he told her. “It’s all up to you and me now.”

  Aside from the living wall, Vera II was the only other living organism of note in the penthouse. He watered her by slipping an ice cube between her serrated spikes once a week, which was all the caretaking she required and all the caretaking he was capable of.

  He returned his focus to the screens. Mentions of the president’s movements from other credible Web sites showed his agenda in sudden motion, fund-raising events sliding around, speeches put on hold, ceremonial events delayed until further notice. Bennett wasn’t holing up, but the Secret Service was smart enough to obscure his comings and goings so as to give little advance notice of his itinerary to Orphan X.

  The president had no unavoidable, predetermined appearances scheduled in the upcoming months, such as an address to the UN or a G8 summit. The State of the Union, another palatable opportunity, wasn’t until January.

  A media feed showed the usual screaming headlines—an arms deal with Syrian rebels gone to shit, Bennett resisting pressure to testify before Congress, gerrymandering resolutions sneaking their way onto ballots before the midterms.

  Evan sank into his chair and took another sip of the Fog Point. Definitely a trace of honeysuckle.

  He refocused on the task before him.

  The Stingray he’d used to such fine effect last night now rested on the sheet-metal desk, downloading data and encryption keys into an out-of-the-package Boeing Black smartphone he planned to use as a mirror for the one belonging to Special Agent in Charge Naomi Templeton.

  He’d already transferred the data onto his hard drive and spread it around the OLED screens facing the desk. A GPS dot showed a nice, strong signal from her apartment.

  He remotely activated the microphone on her smartphone, picking up the noise in the room.

  A doorbell.

  A barking dog.

  And then Naomi’s voice. “Hush, Fenway. Hush.”

  There was some rustling, perhaps as she moved away. Then her words came again, less clearly. “Hey, thanks for stopping by. I wanted to see, you know … any chemistry.” Sounds of movement, and then she said, “He likes you.”

  The next exchange was obscured. When Evan could again hear Naomi’s voice, she was saying, “—so it’s forty bucks to walk him, fifty-five to drive him over to visit my dad during the day, and a hundred for a hike and a grooming, yeah?”

  A low-pitched man’s voice murmured something Evan couldn’t make out. He switched his focus to Naomi’s calendar, notes, and e-mails, also up on display. An algorithmic software program scrolled through her information, grabbing data indicative of future movements.

  Lots of meetings at headquarters, interagency consultations, countless visits to her father’s facility. No social plans. No documentation of specific movements with or regarding the president.

  Any information concerning Bennett was wisely kept off a phone that could be misplaced or stolen.

  “Okay,” Naomi’s voice cut in again. “So he needs a walk every day? I don’t know all this stuff yet. He’s my dad’s dog, and I’m … I’m sorta still catching up to all this.” More masculine mumbling, and then Naomi said, sharply, “No, I don’t want to get rid of the dog. My dad likes seeing him. Christ, Fenway’s the only thing that makes him happy.”

  On the screens Evan brought forward another window. Before he’d left for dinner, he’d deployed Hashkiller’s 131-billion-password dictionary on every last piece of encryption on Naomi’s phone, hoping to grind through a portal and bust onto the Secret Service’s private secure network.

  On the activated microphone, he heard a door close, and then Naomi said, “Maybe I should give you away, you mongrel.” A scrabbling of paws answered her. “How am I supposed to take care of you in the middle of all this?” More footsteps, more scrabbling paws. “Dad would know exactly how to help me, but he’s not really Dad anymore, you know?”

  Evan heard the puff of a deflating cushion—Naomi had plopped onto a couch?—and then another, louder plop as the dog presumably landed beside her.

  Naomi sighed. “Looks like it’s up to you and me, Fenway.”

  Evan glanced at Vera II and pictured Naomi a dozen states away conferring with her own loyal adviser, plotting to catch Evan just as he was plotting to evade her.

  On the mounted screen, Hashkiller continued to make superb progress on Naomi’s applications and log-ins, but Evan watched with rising pessimism as gateway after gateway led nowhere he wanted to be. Despite all his machinations, he’d hit a hard roadblock and had to figure out how to get around it to the useful data, the data hiding safely on the Secret Service’s secured network. Those databases would hold a treasure trove of information on everything from Bennett’s contingency motorcade routes to which company supplied chemicals to the White House dry cleaner.
>
  Unfortunately, the network—and all the computers on it—looked to be air-gapped, unhooked from the Internet and any external devices.

  Evan’s middling hacker skills couldn’t get him in.

  He knew only one person good enough for the job.

  Perhaps it was time to pay her a visit.

  He’d just started researching tickets to Milan-Malpensa Airport when his line rang. Not the RoamZone. His home line.

  He’d forgotten what it sounded like.

  He jogged out of the Vault and all the way to the kitchen, picking up on the fifth ring.

  It was Mia.

  She was screaming.

  19

  Bad Men

  Trevon didn’t know how long he’d been walking. The whole day was like Swiss cheese with big holes in it.

  He remembered Muscley One and Raw One throwing him out of the truck.

  He remembered his shoulder hitting the ground hard and the sound of the truck driving away.

  He remembered when he clawed the garbage bag off his head it was that bluish light of early morning and he was in a alley behind a Dumpster and his eyeglasses were bent at the arm really bad.

  He remembered stumbling out of the alley holding his shoulder and thinking, Ow, ow.

  He remembered there wasn’t a street but a big empty parking lot that glittered with broken glass, and the only person in sight was a hobo with a long scraggly beard who smiled a toothless smile at him and said, “Right on, man. I been there.”

  He remembered thinking to find a street sign, because he knew every street in all of Los Angeles and could list them in order and that made him special.

  He remembered finding a street sign, and now the arm part had snapped off his eyeglasses at the hinge and so he had to hold them in place so they didn’t get tilty when he read the sign.

  He remembered realizing that he was near downtown and that if he walked long enough, he could find a bus stop.

  He remembered finding a bus stop and waiting forever and finally getting on a bus and making a connection and then another to get home.

  He remembered trying to keep the Scaredy Bugs down, but then on the third bus they filled him up, starting with his feet and then his legs and then his stomach and then—Oh God, oh God.

  And now he was walking again because the bus driver had throwed him off the bus, but it was so far to walk still since he had to cross South Central Avenue and Griffith Avenue and Stanford Avenue and South San Pedro Street and Trinity Street and—

  All of a sudden it was dark and cold and he was sitting beneath a freeway underpass and some guys were huddled around a fire in a trash can warming their hands and he wanted to warm his hands so bad, too, but they looked like Bad Influences and Mama told him to steer clear of Bad Influences, because who you surround yourself with makes up part of who you are, and so he kept walking even though his feet were so sore.

  Mama.

  He had the little towel he’d used to wipe off his pukey mouth still crammed in his pocket, and he thought he should probably throw it out, but it was like Blankie when he was a kid and it was all he had in the world now and what if he puked and needed it again?

  A guy was selling flowers by the on-ramp and Trevon walked by and the guy said, “Fuck you, ése. I got this corner,” and Trevon said, “Excuse me, sir. I’m sorry,” and had to take the long way to get across the 110, holding his shoulder even though it didn’t help stop the pain any.

  He could see the moon overhead like a eye staring down at him, and he felt as alone as anyone had ever been in the world, because they were all dead, Uncle Joe-Joe and Gran’mama and Leo and everyone except Kiara, ’cuz she was gone in Guatemala helping folks and out of touch and he had no one to call in the whole entire universe.

  He stopped at the side of the road, and cars were whizzing by, and he stared up at the Moon Eye and the Moon Eye stared back at him and the Scaredy Bugs went crazy in his chest and he thought his heart was gonna stop and he couldn’t breathe and he knew he was gonna die and he thought maybe that was okay ’cuz it would be better than living now.

  The sidewalk zoomed up and hit his cheek, and then he curled up on his side and drew his knees up to his chest with no one but Moon Eye even noticing him and the Scaredy Bugs danced in front of his eyes and he was trying to find air to breathe, and then he heard a screech of brake pads and footsteps coming up, and then a hand rested on his shoulder and a voice said, “Hola. Hello? Hello, my friend? My friend, are you okay?”

  And Trevon said, “Uh-uh.”

  “Did someone hurt you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  Trevon could hear the cars whizzing by still and felt the cold of the nighttime pavement against his cheek, and he fought the Scaredy Bugs as hard as he could, because we don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself, and the man kept his hand on his shoulder, and that helped because it was another person touching him but not in a Stranger Danger way, and right now that meant he wasn’t so alone.

  Trevon sat up.

  “That’s right, amigo. Just take a deep breath. And then another.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now he could see the man’s face, crinkled and kind, and the dark hair with some white mixed in like Uncle Joe-Joe’s.

  Trevon said, “What’s your name? ’Cuz I’m not allowed to talk to strangers, but if I know your name then you’re not a stranger.”

  The man made a smile, but it wasn’t a happy smile, just the shape of one. “Benito Orellana.” The smile shape faded. “What happened to you?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Joven, what happened to you?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Joven—”

  “Go away!”

  Mr. Orellana drew back, and then Trevon felt guilty ’cuz it wasn’t respectful to raise your voice at nobody, and so he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Mr. Orellana said, “That’s okay.”

  Trevon cleared his throat. “They said I can’t tell anyone.”

  Mr. Orellana sat down on the pavement next to Trevon. He stayed like that for a full minute and then another. His car was double-parked at the curb, and another car honked as it passed, all rude-like.

  At a hundred and thirty-seven seconds, Mr. Orellana said, “You know my name, so that means we’re not strangers, right?”

  “Right.”

  “We’re sort of friends, even.”

  Trevon gave a reluctant nod. His shoulder hurt and his cheek hurt and his heart hurt.

  “I was in big trouble once,” Mr. Orellana said. “With my son. And I needed a friend. A friend I could trust.”

  “They said I can’t talk to anyone.”

  “Who did?”

  “Bad Men.” Trevon bit his lip ’cuz it was wobbling and he wasn’t gonna cry or feel sorry for himself ’cuz that would be disrespecting Mama’s memory.

  Mama.

  Trevon said, “They hurt my family, and I can’t tell anyone or they’ll make it my fault.”

  Mr. Orellana made a noise in his chest like the Bad Men had done it to him instead of to Trevon.

  “See?” Trevon said. “You can’t help me. No one can help me. Ever again.”

  Mr. Orellana got up and dusted off his pants. He crouched over Trevon and rested both hands on his shuddering shoulders.

  He said, “Can you remember a phone number?”

  20

  Yes, Please

  Evan flew down nine flights of stairs and spilled onto the twelfth-floor hall. At the end, the door to Mia’s condo stood open. He ran up the corridor and into 12B.

  Mia stood facing the couch, shifting her weight from foot to foot as if she wanted to break into a sprint. Peter was whimpering. Evan couldn’t see him over the back of the couch except for the swirl of blond hair sticking up above the cushions.

  Heeling the door closed, Evan went to Mia’s side. “How’d it happen?”

  She said, “He dove of
f the counter playing Batman and hit the coffee table.”

  Peter looked tiny on the couch. He was wearing only tighty-whities and a torn bedsheet knotted around his throat. The low-rent cape had been swept aside to reveal the dislocated shoulder. His right arm hung lower, pulled down out of the socket. In place of the deltoid was a divot deep enough to be shadowed. Peter glanced down at the scoop of hollowed skin, crunched up his features, and turned away again. His face looked hot, humid with smeared tears.

  Evan said, “Batman doesn’t fly.”

  Peter stopped sniffling. “He can glide,” he whimpered.

  “Gliding’s trickier than it looks,” Evan said.

  “Evidently,” Mia said. “Now I need to move him to the car, but he won’t get up and I can’t carry him—”

  Peter broke in. “It hurts too much to move.”

  “—and I’ve gotta get him to the hospital.”

  “No hospital!”

  “Okay.” Evan held up his hands. “He doesn’t have to go to the hospital. I’ll do it.”

  “You know how to fix a dislocated shoulder?” Mia asked. “Wait—of course you do. Why would I even…” She shook her head in exasperation. “Okay. How do you do it?”

  “There are about two dozen ways,” Evan said. “I prefer the one that’s the least painful. How ’bout you, Bruce Wayne?”

  Peter nodded.

  “Okay, I’m gonna sit down next to you on the couch. But I’m not gonna touch you at all yet. Okay?”

  Another nod.

  Evan eased onto the cushion on Peter’s right side. “What would you say the pain’s at on a scale of one to ten?”

  Peter blinked through his tears. “What’s one? Like a paper cut?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what’s ten? Like someone rips your face off and then sets it on fire?”

  “Sure,” Evan said. “But maybe they set it on fire first, because once your face is ripped off, you don’t really care if it’s lit on fire after that.”