“Close the door,” Holt said.
“There’s more of us,” Wade said. “Cousins.”
He lifted his upper lip, part wolf, part rabbit, and sliced a whistle through his front teeth.
Five more men, slightly diminished versions of Sound and Fury, entered. Slightly diminished still put them at six-four, 230 each.
The last man in heeled the door shut, and then they crossed their arms in unison.
Orphan A took in the display. “You can cut the choreography,” he said. “This isn’t synchronized swimming.”
Wade said, “How ’bout you tell us exactly who the fuck you are and what you think we’re gonna do for you?”
Holt appraised their outfits. “We can’t exactly make you inconspicuous, but I’ll need you to dress like human fucking beings. Shave your beard, long sleeves to cover the arm tats, see about some cover-up for the Iron Crosses on the sides of your necks.”
Ricky sidled forward, Sound to Wade’s Fury. “I don’t think you heard the man.”
Holt looked him dead in the eye. “Lemme be clear. If you take one step closer, I’ll crush your windpipe and turn your head a hundred and twenty degrees on your neck before you hit the ground. You and your brother are outta your cages because of me. The instant I’m unhappy, the secret-handshake men’ll swarm your lives and put you back in your boxes to serve out the rest of your consecutive life sentences. So what do you say we cut the shit and get to work?”
The men locked eyes. Holt could smell the tang coming off Ricky, soured body chemistry and mental illness. He knew that he could make good on his promise, but the other Collins kin would extinguish him afterward. He wasn’t sure which way the situation would go. He wasn’t sure he particularly cared.
But then he thought of Orphan X and realized that he did.
What did it say that the only life-affirming glow that warmed his insides was the promise of revenge?
Ricky stepped back. “What’s the work?”
“Hunting,” Holt said.
This elicited grins from the cousins but nothing from the twin towers.
“We’re going after someone who’s going after the president,” Holt added.
“The president of what?” Wade said.
Holt gave him a dead stare until recognition dawned behind the grit and facial hair. “I have access to SFI. Serious Fucking Intel. All the eyes inside all the devices.”
“How?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
Ricky said, “Why aren’t the cops or whoever handling it?”
“Because it can’t be handled the way cops handle it,” Holt said.
Wade scratched at his beard again. Evidently the Abe Lincoln look came at a cost to personal comfort. “So we’re supposed to kill this guy?”
Holt said, “I didn’t have you released from prison for your dinner-party etiquette.”
“What if we get busted?”
“You still don’t get it.” Holt lifted a steel-tipped boot and laid open the top of the nearest Pelican case, revealing the gleaming ordnance beneath. “We’re the good guys now.”
28
A Touch to the Outside
Baseball cap pulled low, Evan sat in his rental car across from 6071 I Street, a pricey condo complex with a conveniently windowed lobby that showed off pods of leather couches, a few phallic cacti, and a wall of smoked mirror that would have been considered tacky a few years ago but now was retro cool. He wondered how Doug Wetzel afforded to live here on a deputy chief of staff’s salary.
It was nearing 10:00 A.M. on Saturday, the D.C. streets clogged with tourists. A souvenir shop just past his parking meter received a steady influx of customers, clouding his car in a hurricane swirl of activity. He would have been jet-lagged had he bothered to notice, but he was busy sitting surveillance, waiting for Wetzel to show his bearded face.
Removing superglue from the backpack on the passenger seat, Evan applied another sheen to his fingertips, further obscuring his prints.
The familiar action tripped his memory, taking him back to 1997, riding a bus out of that gray Eastern European city to see a man about a copper-washed shell from a sniper round. He closed his eyes, pictured the little plastic bag, the Cyrillic lettering spelling out EYES ONLY. He’d reassembled that mission like a puzzle but was still missing a crucial piece that, to President Bennett, represented an existential threat.
Given that Wetzel was Bennett’s go-to guy for dirty work, Evan wanted to search his condo in hopes he could find something to point at the puzzle piece that had landed him on the bull’s-eye.
He blew on his fingers, waiting for the superglue to dry. In the backpack he had fingerprint adhesives as well, impressionable silicon composite films that were fifty microns thin, or half the width of a piece of hair. He’d acquired the DARPA-developed commodity at great expense and preferred to use the films sparingly. So, for now, superglue it was.
He pulled out his RoamZone and logged in to [email protected]. He’d left a query for Joey inside the Drafts folder: “Are we into Secret Service private secure network yet?”
Her reply was where it should be, typed inside the same unsent message: “no, mr. patience.”
Frowning, he thumbed: “Keep me posted.”
An instant later the draft updated: “ya think?”
Amused, he deleted the draft, killing it in its cradle. Another sense memory hit him—sitting on a ratty bed in a foreign hotel communicating with Jack inside a shared e-mail draft just like this. And now time had lurched forward and landed Evan in an iteration of his past, two lost souls communicating across the black expanse of the Atlantic.
His mind tugged to when Joey had caught him off guard with a hug and the epiphany that had followed—that she owned a small piece of him.
How had she gotten in?
Surely Jack was to blame. In cultivating not just Evan’s lethality but his humanity, Jack had embedded a vulnerability in him as sure as every air-gapped system had a leak. What had Joey called it? A touch to the outside.
Evan’s touch to the outside left him exposed, open to attack.
But it also left him open to the world and all the awesome, awful responsibility that came from living in it.
He thought about Mia and Peter, a single mother and a fatherless boy, and how if he were a better man with a better past, his missing pieces might fit with theirs.
Across the street the lobby of Wetzel’s building remained empty. Through a break in foot traffic, Evan caught a glimpse of his own rental car cast back from the smoky mirror. In the space where he should be, the reflection showed nothing but the tinted glass of the driver’s window.
He looked across at the souvenir shop with its red blaring sign: WE SELL ITEMS STRAIGHT FROM THE WHITE HOUSE GIFT SHOP!
Shouldering his backpack and its mission-essential valuables, he climbed out. Keeping an eye on the condo building, he perused the shop’s offerings. He picked out a sleek half-moon plaque, custom-cast with a brass patina.
As he paid in cash, the shop owner asked, “Want me to wrap it?”
Evan said, “Yes.”
After the shop owner finished, Evan took the package, the size of a halved Frisbee, and shoved it into his backpack. When he looked up and across the street, he caught Wetzel emerging from the elevator into the lobby. He was dressed in a sharp suit, the tips of his mustache rising with speakeasy gusto.
Evan moved swiftly out from under the awning of the shop, keeping Wetzel in view. Evan expected him to cut through the back door into the parking garage, but instead Wetzel paused beside an industrial aluminum trash can near the tea-and-coffee counter.
Wetzel glanced around the lobby, making sure that no one was near. Then he put his hand on the trash can’s metal swing lid, flipped it upside down, and checked beneath.
A dead drop.
Presumably he didn’t find what he was looking for. Letting the lid fall back into place, he vanished through the rear door. Moments later he emerged from the pa
rking gate behind the wheel of a Tesla S.
As Wetzel zoomed off, Evan decided not to search his place but to watch the dead drop instead.
He got back into his rented Nissan Altima, once again safe behind tinted glass.
Twenty minutes passed. Forty.
Near the hour mark, a man across the street caught Evan’s attention. It wasn’t his appearance but his sense of purpose, the way he cut through pedestrians, head lowered, his movements conveying latent power. Reddish brown hair cut short, receding but thick where it remained, clung to his skull like an ivy leaf laid over the crown. He was on the short side—maybe a whiff over five-eight—with a welterweight’s build, wiry and dense at the same time.
Everything about him screamed Orphan.
Evan tracked him through the crowd but couldn’t get a clear look at his face.
Still turned away, the man slowed at the entrance of Wetzel’s building. Outside the lobby door, he tapped in a code, one arm raised, the sinewy forearm like knotted rope. Slipping inside, he tugged up his shirt and retrieved a buff clasp envelope tucked against the small of his back.
Through the window Evan watched the man beeline to the trash can. Barely slowing his pace, he flipped the swing lid, slapped the folder into place beneath, and continued up the brief hall toward the garage.
He banged through the rear door and was gone before the trash-can lid had stopped swaying.
Evan sat in the car for a few minutes. He remembered hearing whispers of Bennett’s reliance on one of the Orphans—the first Orphan—back in his early DoD days. Evan had even uncovered a photo once, a decades-old surveillance shot taken in a bustling souk in Amman. It had captured a partial reflection of Orphan A’s face in the side mirror of a parked car.
Evan hadn’t caught a clear enough look at the features of the man now to compare. But the guy’s age, somewhere in the mid-fifties, put him into consideration.
Evan waited a time longer, staring through the stream of pedestrians at that trash can and whatever had been hidden for Doug Wetzel beneath the lid.
Then he got out of the Altima.
Seating his backpack on his shoulders, he crossed the street and walked the same course as the likely Orphan had before him. He paused a few yards from the door and pretended to answer a cell-phone call.
A few moments later, an elderly woman with a rat-size dog trudged from the elevator to the front door. Evan caught it on the backswing and slipped into the cool lobby.
He moved swiftly to the trash can, flipped the lip upside down, and tore free the taped envelope beneath. He pinched the clasp, raised the flap, and slid out a high-res eight-by-ten photo of a woman who looked to have been battered to death with a blunt object.
Interesting.
It seemed the president’s deputy chief of staff had been checking the dead drop for confirmation of an ordered kill.
Staring at the woman’s sprawled form, the unhuman arrangement of the plates of her skull, Evan felt a bone-deep weariness overtake him. His life guaranteed that he saw ugliness in all its varied and gruesome forms. But that touch to the outside meant that he felt it, too.
Using the camera of his RoamZone, Evan sized up the frame and took a picture. Then he flipped the photograph over. On the back an address, a date, and a time had been rendered in meticulous block letters.
He took a picture of that, too, and then slid the photo home, reseated the clasp, and rotated the swing lid so he could seat the envelope back on its underside where he’d found it.
He sensed a shadow at the lobby entrance and glanced up, one hand grasping the envelope in plain view, the other holding the trash-can lid.
He found himself staring through the window at Agent Naomi Templeton, standing before her Cherokee on the sidewalk.
She was staring right back at him.
29
The Second-Oldest Profession
Naomi was frozen in place, as was Evan, the air between them like spun glass—one move and everything would shatter.
He noticed a sudden awareness tighten her focus.
He was, after all, standing in the lobby of the deputy chief of staff’s building, his hand in the cookie jar of an evident dead drop.
Not a pose that screamed innocence.
He couldn’t hear her through the thick window, but he watched her mouth the words, Don’t move!
He stuffed the envelope into his front waistband, took a step back toward the door to the garage.
He barely had time to wonder how she’d react before her SIG Sauer cleared leather.
That was a lot of bullets to dodge.
He dove behind the nearest couch as the window blew inward, pebbled glass raining down on the tile. Sprawled on his back, the double pip of the shots still echoing in his head, he watched the rounds embed in the throwback cottage-cheese ceiling.
She’d fired not at him but up through the pane.
Which meant she was clearing the glass to take the quickest route from the sidewalk into the lobby.
He popped to his feet and sprinted for the rear door to the garage, backpack bobbing violently up and down on his shoulders.
Behind him she hurdled the window frame and landed with a grunt, her shoes crunching glass. “Stop! Hands—hands!”
As he barreled into the garage, he heard her shouting for backup into her Boeing Black phone.
He skidded on an oil slick on the shiny floor, his boots giving him just enough traction to hold course. The obvious way out was the gated vehicle exit to the right, which led back onto I Street. But there was a service door to his left.
He spun in that direction, slammed through the service door into a back hall that reeked of cleaning solvent. Dodging mop buckets, he sprinted up its length and cut the corner hard away from the lobby. He battered through a side door into an alley.
Behind him a dead end.
Ahead I Street.
He ran forward onto the main street.
Twenty yards distant, Naomi stood on the sidewalk, facing away from him, aiming at the garage gate.
He took off in the other direction, knocking through the crowd.
Naomi’s voice cut through the din. “Stop!” And then, “Suspect heading west on I Street!”
He pulled up a mental map of the surrounding blocks. As the Second Commandment mandated, he’d memorized every alley, doorway, and building. With alarm he noted that Secret Service headquarters was three and a half blocks away.
And that he was running toward it.
He hit the intersection with 7th to find a wall of cruisers bearing down from the convention center. At his appearance they amped into high gear, predators sighting prey. A multitude of sirens emitted overlapping screams. Light bars strobed the buildings, disco-balling windows all around.
Evan bolted south.
Whether by design or shitty luck, he was being herded to the doorstep of the Secret Service.
He moved between street and sidewalk, eluding cars, slicing through pedestrians. People were now gawking at him and at the vanguard of cruisers, a block back and closing.
So many units had been on standby.
For him.
He knocked over a guy handing out flyers, juked right just in time to avoid smashing into a baby stroller. The Smithsonian American Art Museum watched him fly past, its seen-it-all Greek Revival façade unimpressed, its colonnades like bared teeth.
About fifty yards behind him, Naomi blazed through the crowd, shouting for people to clear the way.
Most civilian vehicles had pulled over now, leaving the road open. Drawn by the commotion, onlookers spilled out of stores and restaurants, clotting the sidewalks, narrowing Evan’s path to a high-wire sprint.
The screech of the sirens reached an earsplitting pitch. The cop cars would be on him in seconds.
He had to get to F Street, still gummed up with traffic. He barreled into a surge of tourists, the summer-fun smell of Coppertone and ice cream enveloping him. He bucked free of the press of bodies, emerging mere yar
ds from the intersection.
Directly ahead of him, an officer stepped out of a Mexican joint, wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin, radio barking on his shoulder.
The officer sighted Evan, dropped his napkin, and drew his pistol.
Without breaking stride Evan threw his right arm free of the backpack strap, letting centrifugal force fling the heavy bag up the trajectory of his left arm. He caught the left strap as it flew by, whipped the backpack around like a softball pitcher winding up, and slammed the cop’s pistol on the rise just as he fired into Evan’s face.
The bullet trailed heat across the top of Evan’s head, riffling his hair.
He slammed into the officer, shoulder to sternum, sending him airborne right back into the Mexican restaurant.
He let the backpack continue its rotation, threading the straps with one arm after another, and then he was wearing it again, still in a dead sprint.
The sirens were so loud it seemed they were inside his head.
Jackknifing past a parking meter, he cut up F Street. Behind him came a squeal of brakes and a crumple of fenders as the lead cars failed to make the turn. Already they were working their way free, tires spinning in reverse, horns blaring.
The sign for 8th Street flew by overhead. Casting a look back, he caught a flash of blond hair as Naomi tumbled around the corner, plunging into the crowd on the sidewalk. Office buildings and museums were emptying out all along the block, people hustling onto the sidewalks to find out what was going on.
He kept on, the next intersection coming up fast. Shooting a glance along 9th, he saw a half dozen G-rides screaming toward him, hot from Secret Service headquarters. From the south, two new Metro Police units accelerated at him.
He reversed course, plunging into the throng surging from storefronts.
Back at 7th, the cruisers had almost untangled themselves. He couldn’t see Naomi for the moment.
He had three seconds, maybe five, before they picked him up again.
And nowhere to go.
Tightening his backpack straps, he wheeled around. The crowd pressed in on him, fear and excitement coming off bodies like an electric charge.
Out of the Dark Page 16
