After severing the connection, he’d stared at the phone in his hand, a box of silicon chips, amplifiers, and microprocessors that had conveyed the feminine voice across two continents.
It was an effective little ploy, sinking a hook into the soft part of his heart, jabbing a vulnerability he didn’t even know he had. An uncomfortable sensation, like he’d been ensnared by a strand of a much bigger web. The feeling had proved hard to shake.
He wasn’t sure why.
He’d dealt with his share of psychopaths and tyrants. This was just another variation on the theme; the woman was either delusional or conniving.
Or perhaps both.
Refocusing his thoughts, he arrived at his residential high-rise, Castle Heights, and left his truck in its spot between two concrete pillars on the subterranean parking level.
In the lobby he detoured to the bank of mailboxes and confirmed that his was empty; one of the great benefits of not existing was receiving no junk mail.
He crossed the marble floor, clearing his throat to awaken Joaquin, who’d dozed off in his chair behind the reception console.
Joaquin snapped to, smoothing down the front of his guard uniform. “Mr. Smoak. I was just resting my eyes.”
“Good technique to lure the bad guys into a false sense of security.”
Joaquin smiled sheepishly and thumbed the button to summon the elevator. “Fun night, huh?”
“Took some clients out to dinner.” Here at Castle Heights, Evan was known as a bland importer of industrial cleaning supplies.
“Late dinner.”
“They wanted to go clubbing. What adults want to go clubbing?”
Joaquin said, “You’d be surprised.”
“I was.”
The elevator arrived with a ding, and Evan stepped aboard. The PENTHOUSE button was already lit, and he rode up, enjoying the silence.
His condo, seven thousand square feet of concrete and glass, was sparse and spotless. The workout stations were buffed to a high sheen, unmarred by fingerprints. The brushed-nickel kitchen appliances gave a catalog-clean sparkle, even in the semidarkness. Behind a freestanding fireplace, a spiral staircase wound its way up to a reading loft where he’d actually found time these past few weeks to lounge. There was a black suede couch he’d sat on maybe a dozen times in the years since he’d moved in, most of those times in the past month.
Several evenings ago he’d even raised the retractable flat-screen TV from its slit in the floor and watched a Buster Keaton movie.
That was him now. Mr. Ordinary.
Especially if you overlooked the bullet-resistant laminated polycarbonate thermoplastic resin composing the windows, the discreet armor sunscreens made of a rare titanium variant, the motion-and shatter-detection sensors rigged in the frames, the base-jumping parachute stowed behind the inset panel of the planter strategically positioned on the south-facing balcony.
He stood in the stillness of the gunmetal-gray plain of the great room. The penthouse was unlit and lifeless. A heavy bag dangled from its chain like a suicidal ghost. The dumbbells slumbered on their rack, turned precisely so the weight labels were aligned north. Ambient city light glowed through the lowered sunscreens, throwing a sheet of pale gold across the poured-concrete kitchen island, illuminating neither crumb nor smudge.
He stretched luxuriously, felt his spine crack at the base. Then he crossed to the open kitchen, passing between the Sub-Zero and the island to the newest addition to his penthouse. A glass-walled mini-room, the back seated against one of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Century City. He tugged at the door, freezer mist swirling out as he entered. Rows of shelves, also glass, held bottles of the finest vodka the world had to offer. They were positioned equidistant from one another, three inches of clearance on either side. A small stand-alone bar in the center held accoutrements—a variety of crystal glasses, steel martini picks, a trio of shakers.
Another indulgence of retirement. The time to build, to spend, to direct his restless focus on pleasure. It struck him now that freezer rooms and late-night trysts had their limits. They helped broaden the hours but didn’t add much depth to the days and nights.
The chill air put a burn in his lungs. His nightly drink was a ritual of sorts, the purest alcohol, the coldest air, a calming anesthesia to wash away the filth of his past. Did he deserve this? The wealth? The calm? A carved-out sanctuary in which he could seek to dispel his sins?
He reached for the slender bottle of Ao. Distilled from rice and clarified through bamboo filtration on Kyushu island in the shadow of an active volcano, it took its name from the Japanese word for “blue.” He popped an ice sphere from its silicone mold, dropped it into an old-fashioned glass, poured two fingers of vodka across the top, and exited into the warm embrace of the kitchen proper.
Vegetation fluttered on the living wall, a vertical drip-fed garden at the kitchen’s edge. Evan plucked off a mint leaf, floated it on the clear liquid, and gave the glass a swirl. The mint would enhance the sweet undertaste of coconut and banana leaves.
Padding across the great room toward his bedroom, he took a sip, closing his eyes, letting the freezing warmth wash across his palate. The melody of flavors harmonized into the faintest note of rice pudding on the finish.
Delightful.
His bedroom was as bare as the rest of the condo.
Bureau. Nightstand. Window.
Even the bed was minimalist, a mattress resting on a floating slab of metal. The metal was at once propelled into the air by steroidally powerful neodymium rare-earth magnets and tethered to the floor by steel cables, a ceaseless push-pull that mirrored Evan’s own vacillation between chaos and order.
That missed call had tipped him out of alignment.
Evan. It’s your mother.
Were he inclined to sneer, he would have now.
He stripped to his boxer briefs, knocked back his vodka, and set the glass down on the nightstand.
Then he lifted it and looked at the faint condensation ring. He wiped the ring off with the hem of his shirt, then wiped the bottom of the sweating glass and set it back down. He checked again.
Another ring of moisture, albeit fainter.
Cursing physics, he wiped off the nightstand again and then set the glass on the floor just to have some peace and quiet.
He sat on the bed crossed-legged, straightening his back, making microadjustments, stacking vertebra on vertebra. He veiled his eyes, letting the lids grow heavy until the room blurred into a play of light and shadow. Focusing on the precise point that each inhalation began, he breathed until breathing was all he was doing, until it was all that he was.
A few minutes into the meditation, he became aware of his bones, his muscles and ligaments, his skin wrapping him into an embodied whole. The boundary between him and the room blurred until he felt a part of the space around him, the air itself, until he—
The RoamZone vibrated on the bed beside him.
Aggravated, he rolled off the bed onto his bare feet and picked it up. He’d upgraded the screen recently from Gorilla Glass to an organic polyether-thiourea that was able to self-repair when cracked.
He was tempted to shatter it himself now when he saw the caller ID.
Same number. Same Argentina area code.
Glaring at the digits, he felt an uncharacteristic rise in body temperature. He argued with himself.
Looked away from the screen.
Looked back.
Clenching his jaw, he thumbed the green virtual button and answered.
Chapter 7
Cookie-Cutter Psyops
Normally as the Nowhere Man, Evan would ask, Do you need my help?
But now he just breathed.
He could hear her breathing on the other end.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I told you.”
Her voice was regal and touched with age, a slight huskiness that put her in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. She spoke with no accent and enunciated wel
l, as if she’d had training in theater.
“No,” he said. “No.”
“I heard you help people.”
“I’m retired.” Curiosity flared, a fuse burning down. “How did you hear that?”
“I know someone who needs your help.”
“Who are you?”
The call, routed through fifteen encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels on both hemispheres, crackled in the silence. The pause felt dramatic. She was thinking. He was, too.
“I left you with Rusty and Joan Krauss,” she finally said. “A stalwart couple. Or so I thought. Joan was medically compromised, though I didn’t know it at the time.”
He felt a drop of sweat trickle down his temple. “Who are you?”
“I’d driven through the night,” she said. “Across the border from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”
“You could have looked any of this up,” he said.
“I know your middle name.”
“Well, I don’t,” he said. “So that doesn’t help us any.”
“After … after I left you, I got two blocks away from the Krausses’ house and I pulled over. And wept.”
He swallowed.
“I didn’t want to leave you there, but it was a different time. It wasn’t easy being an independent-minded young woman. I don’t mean to imply hardship, but you take my meaning. It’s just important to me…”
His legs felt numb, his bare feet insensate against the cold concrete. If this was a gambit, it was a superb one, playing all the right notes on the bars of his ribs, coaxing an emotional response into resonance.
He heard himself say, “…what?”
His voice sounded different than it had in decades. Smaller.
She said, “It’s important you know that you were wanted.”
He cut the connection, threw the phone onto the bed, and stared at it, breathing hard, his shoulders heaving.
It hadn’t occurred to him to want to be wanted.
The phone gazed up blankly, the screen dark. He wasn’t sure if he hoped she’d call back.
He reached for the fourth of the Ten Commandments that Jack had handed down to him: Never make it personal.
“It’s bullshit,” he told the phone, the room, himself. “Cookie-cutter psyops. Clear your head. You know better than that.”
No answer save the gentle whisper of the vent overhead.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “You’re being played.”
He snatched up his glass and the phone and walked into the bathroom. He nudged the shower door hanging on its barn-door track, the frosted-glass pane vanishing into the wall. Stepping inside the stall, he gripped the hot-water lever. An embedded digital sensor read the print of his palm, allowing him to twist the lever in the wrong direction. An inset door, seamlessly camouflaged by the tile pattern, swung inward, and he stepped through into a hidden space.
The Vault.
An armory, a workbench, and an L-shaped sheet-metal desk crammed into an irregular four hundred square feet of walled-off storage space. The public stairs to the roof zigzagged the ceiling overhead, an optical illusion that made the room appear to be shrinking.
He circled to the desk, sank into his chair, and flicked the mouse on its pad. The three walls horseshoeing the desk illuminated. A mosaic of heretofore invisible OLED screens, each less than three millimeters thick, awakened to cloak the rough concrete walls.
Right now the front wall displayed pirated feeds from the Castle Heights surveillance system, the same footage Joaquin would be watching at his security station downstairs right now if he were managing to stay awake. The north wall was plugged into a variety of state and federal databases, Evan’s own personal hijacked portal into the computing power of the agencies. And the south wall displayed the call log of his RoamZone.
He’d already captured the caller’s IMEI and pegged the location using advanced forward-link trilateration, which forced the network to automatically and continually report the woman’s phone’s position between cell towers. Based on the phone’s movements and resting times, it seemed she was staying in the affluent Recoleta neighborhood on the northeast slant of the city. He’d been to Buenos Aires only twice, once to garrote a visiting Venezuelan dignitary on the D line of the underground, the other to sit surveillance on a cartel leader whom he’d eventually dispatched in the parking lot of El Gigante de Alberdi, a fútbol stadium in Córdoba seven hundred kilometers to the interior.
When he’d tried to backtrack the user identity on the SIM card earlier, he’d run into a dead end. It was a prepaid Movistar, available at pretty much any kiosk, supermarket, or pharmacy. This was suspicious, but not as suspicious as it might be in the U.S., especially if the woman was traveling.
He stared at the blinking GPS dot just off the Plaza Francia, watching her in real time.
He drummed his fingers, an uncharacteristic fidget. Then he looked down at the pinecone-shaped aloe vera plant resting on the desk in a glass bowl beside his mouse pad. His sole companion was named Vera II, since he’d killed her predecessor with neglect, a sad statement as she required nothing more than an ice cube dropped in her dish once a week. The edges of her serrated spikes were browning now, and she was glaring up at him from her bed of cobalt glass pebbles, clearly displeased.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to move on. It’s not you. It’s me.”
She was unmoved.
He fished the diminished ice sphere from the old-fashioned glass and rested it atop her spikes just to shut her up. The trace of vodka wouldn’t hurt either.
He sensed movement on the front wall of monitors. Mia Hall entering the building from the parking level, struggling under the weight of her nine-year-old son, Peter, who was slumped in her arms, comatose. Small for his age, he wore a Mickey Mouse–ear hat cocked to the side, his cheek smudged pink and blue from some sugary indulgence. They’d just come through a traumatic stretch, and Mia had vowed to spend more time with him, which evidently included hooky days at Disneyland.
Evan wondered what Disneyland was like. And pink-and-blue candy. He’d never indulged in either. But he’d carried Peter asleep a time or two as Mia carried him now, and Evan and recalled the warmth of the boy’s cheek against his shoulder, his sweat-sticky blond hair against his chin. Those few episodes when his life had stitched together with Mia’s and Peter’s lives represented his closest brush with what normal might feel like. If she weren’t a district attorney sworn to uphold the law and he hadn’t been raised an assassin sworn to break it, perhaps the road ahead might have felt like a solid possibility rather than a tiptoe across land mines. Mia didn’t fully know what Evan did, but she knew enough to know that he—and their affiliation—was less than safe.
Evan switched his focus back to the south wall, concentrating on the blinking GPS dot of a phone in Argentina.
Vera II stared at him.
“There’s no way,” he told her. “It’s impossible. She can’t be.”
Vera II stared at him.
“What are the odds? And how the hell would she have found me? Found me?”
Vera II stared at him.
He leaned back and crossed his arms. It was the longest of long shots. But still. He needed to know.
On the front wall, Mia bundled Peter across the lobby and waited for the elevator. The overheads caught her spill of wavy brown hair, highlighting gold and chestnut. Her bare arms flexed under the weight of her son. Her lips were moving. She was murmuring a lullaby.
He tore his eyes from the lobby feed, refocusing on the beacon of the prepaid cell phone.
He couldn’t operate as the Nowhere Man anymore. Not without jeopardizing his informal presidential pardon. One move deemed insufficiently discreet and he’d have the full force of the United States government back on his tail. Which would mean no more leisurely evenings at the Polo Lounge. No more sipping Japanese vodka for the sheer joy of it rather than to take the edge off the operational wear and tear on his body and mind. No
more nights with oil painters from the Royal College of Art. And no more hope of maybe, just maybe, having a shot at nights more meaningful than that.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noted the elevator doors open downstairs. Mia and Peter stepped inside, vanishing from view.
There was so much to recommend normalcy.
And yet.
He thought about the drive home from Jeanette-Marie’s. The taste of adrenaline at the back of his throat. The sharpness of the night air against his skin. All five senses alive, and maybe even a sixth.
“I don’t miss it,” he told Vera II. “I really don’t.”
Already his hand was moving the mouse, bringing up an incognito search engine.
“I’m not breaking the agreement,” he said, keying the number of one of his forged passports into the airline website. “It’s not a mission. It’s just a trip.”
He risked another glance at Vera II, but she’d already made her position clear. She assimilated carbon dioxide disapprovingly.
He clicked purchase.
Chapter 8
Sucker
The next day at noon, the dark sedan is back, and so is the Mystery Man, both in the same place. Evan rounds the handball wall and stops, holds his fists up as he’s seen boxers do on TV, a technique the boys mimic in street fights to questionable results. His ribs ache from Van Sciver, and beneath his shirt his back hosts a collection of scarlet abrasions from the belt that look like half-formed question marks. But he is here and he is ready. The Mystery Man throws his hands wide and does something wholly unexpected. He smiles.
“Good. That’s a good stance.” He starts toward Evan. “Look, kid. Sorry about yesterday. Sometimes I can be a little overzealous. I mean, what the hell was I thinking? A grown man—”
He sucker-punches Evan again. Too late, Evan realizes he’s been disarmed, that he’s let his arms drift south. The fist connects with his cheek, grinding flesh into bone. Not a hard punch, but perfectly placed, and again Evan goes down, and this time he stays down, crouching on one knee, trying to breathe.
The Mystery Man leans over him, hands on his thighs. The cigarette is still there, jutting from between two fingers; he didn’t even bother to put it out before swinging. “Look at you,” he says. “Do you honestly think you have what it takes?”
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