Orphan X Read online

  Evan listens intently, his hand dipping below the counter from time to time so Strider can lap turkey from his palm. Jack pretends not to notice. The only permitted variation in discipline comes where the dog is concerned.

  “Are you supposed to be telling me this?” Evan asks.

  “No.”

  The Sixth Commandment: Question orders.

  The following morning Evan returns from a run to find in the driveway a red Acura Integra with a bobblehead Jesus adhered to the dash.

  Puzzled, he enters the house. A trace of jasmine perfume lingers in the air, as anomalous in the wood-paneled front hall as a feather boa on a marine.

  Jack waits in the study, Maria Callas belting “Suicidio!” from the record player. When Evan’s shadow falls into the room, Jack looks up. “You can’t lose your mind over women, over sex. And that means you need to acclimate to it. She is a professional, she is clean, and you are to treat her with courtesy and appreciation. Do you understand?”

  Evan nods.

  Jack goes back to the third volume of Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

  Upstairs, Evan’s bedroom door is slightly ajar, enough to reveal a slice of bedding. The fabric shifts. A woman’s bare form rolls into view. He glimpses a thatch of shadow between ivory white legs and feels his blood jump.

  The next day Evan does pull-ups on the rusted bar by the log pile, his biceps screaming. Jack sips coffee, his breath visible in the night air.

  “Respect for women is essential,” Jack tells him. “Women’s rights and economic development within a country are highly correlated. Treating women properly is not just a moral position—which it is—or an American value—which it is. It’s a strategic imperative, and you will always, always lead by example in this regard.”

  Evan makes a grunt of consent and drops from the bar. When he goes upstairs, there are two women waiting in his bed.

  His education in and out of the sheets intensifies. By the time he turns eighteen, he is five-eleven, 175 pounds of lean, ridged muscle. He is neither too tall nor too big nor too evidently strong. He can vanish in a crowd. Half the men in a given bar might think they could best him in a brawl. This is ideal.

  Jack decides to call wind for Evan on the sniper range one crisp fall morning. It’s been a long while since it was just the two of them with no instructor.

  Evan dials the elevation into his scope, correcting for the ballistic arc.

  At his side Jack presses binoculars to his face. “She says you shoot almost as well as Orphan Zero now.”

  “I thought we were only letters.”

  “Zero’s a nickname for Orphan O.”

  Evan exhales through pursed lips, applies steady pressure to the trigger. The stock kicks into his shoulder, and a hole appears centered in the red bull’s-eye six hundred meters downslope.

  “Who’s Orphan O?” Evan asks, fitting his eye again to the cup of the scope.

  “An active Orphan. Some say the best. Until you.”

  Evan fires again.

  Jack lets his binoculars drop into the brittle leaves, annoyed. “Focus, Evan. You missed the whole damn target.”

  “Look closer,” Evan says.

  Jack lifts the binocs again. There it is, the eclipselike bulge where the second bullet nudged the perforation outward on the left side.

  Two bullets, one hole.

  Jack bobs that bulldog head, makes a noise deep in his throat. As Evan looks over, some heretofore undetectable filter falls away and Evan sees that Jack has aged since that first meeting when he pulled up to the rest stop where Evan was left seven years ago. His flesh seems heavier, tugging at that broad jawline, and his gaze is more human somehow. The glimpse of this Jack, a man nearing sixty with more traveled road behind him than open road ahead, strikes a vulnerability inside Evan that he didn’t know he had.

  “When Clara died,” Jack says, keeping his eyes downrange, “I couldn’t see anything. Only the spaces she used to occupy.” He rolls his lips, swallows. “Until you.”

  His mouth firms, and once more he is a baseball catcher, square and armored, impervious to collision. He rises, his boots crunching mulch as he turns back to the truck, his face holding the faintest note of dread.

  “You’re ready,” he says.

  * * *

  Evan’s eyes opened in the soft morning light of his bedroom. He lay on his floating bed, stared at the ceiling, Jack’s words still echoing in his head.

  He’d been ready for a long time. Briefly, he wondered what all that readiness had cost him.

  And then he rose.

  It was time for him and Katrin to make contact.

  19

  Advertising Cost

  “I’m scared.”

  Sitting at the edge of the motel-room bed, Katrin shoved her clenched hands into the already stretched hem of the woefully oversize T-shirt Evan had brought her. Her hair, still wet from the shower, fell at blunt angles into a bob. Her irises, a crystalline sea green, looked even clearer given the absence of eyeliner. She took in his face in darting glances, her knees nutcrackering the union of her fists again and again.

  Evan pulled a chair around to face her. “It’ll be okay.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “It always has been before.”

  The air, still humid in the aftermath of her shower, felt oppressively heavy and carried the hospital-hygienic scent of bad motel soap. He’d arrived minutes ago to find her pacing around the cramped space, chewing a dark-painted thumbnail to the quick. Now she rammed her hands again into the belly of the ill-fitting shirt, the V-neck tugging down, showing the top swell of her breasts. Nerves firing, limbs jumping—her anxiety fighting the confines of her body.

  His black briefcase rested on the bureau beside the TV, knocking out any surveillance devices that might be in the area. He punched a code into the lock, turning off the wideband high-power jammer.

  It was time to make a phone call.

  Sensing this, Katrin picked up the burner phone from the mattress beside her. She pressed it to her lips, closed her eyes as if praying.

  Evan removed his RoamZone. “We’ll use mine,” he said. “Untraceable.”

  She gave a quick nod. “Hang on. Just hang on.” She took a few breaths. Opened those wide eyes, brimming with fear. “Okay.”

  He dialed. Hit speaker. Set the phone on the corner of the mattress, between him and Katrin.

  As it rang, Katrin squeezed one hand in the other.

  A man picked up. “Who’s this?”

  “Do you have Sam?” Evan asked.

  “Looking at him.”

  Katrin muffled a cry in her throat.

  “Proof of life,” Evan said. “Then we discuss terms.”

  A shuffling sound, and then came a ragged masculine voice. “Hello? Katrin?”

  “Dad?” Katrin blinked, and tears slid down her ivory cheeks. “I’m here.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  “Have they hurt you?”

  “I’m all right.”

  She wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to them better. I’m sorry I went to someone for help.”

  “Honey, I want you to know … I want you to know I don’t fault you for any of this. For anything that happened. Whoever you’re with, I hope he protects you. I hope he—”

  A clamor of grappling as the phone was ripped away. Then the first man’s voice again. “You didn’t adhere to our instructions.”

  “That’s my fault,” Evan said. “But I’m prepared to negotiate Sam’s release. I have money, and I have—”

  “We don’t care about money. Not anymore. Our directions were not obeyed.”

  “Wait!” Katrin said. “We can fix it. We can make it okay again.”

  “This is our advertising cost,” the man said. “For the next time.”

  A single pop of a gunshot.

  The thump of deadweight hitting floor.

  Evan came up off the chair, almost knocking the phone from
its perch. He stared at the speaker holes in disbelief.

  As if from a distance, he was aware of Katrin sobbing. “Sam! Dad? No. No. No!”

  The voice came again, slicing through the shock static filling Evan’s head. “The bitch is next. Then you.”

  The line cut off.

  The static thickened until it drowned out everything. He’d made an operational miscalculation, his first in eight years. That night came back to him as a swarm of sensations—the choppy slate of the Potomac, cherry blossoms wadding underfoot, a hot coppery scent piercing the sawdust-filled air of the dank garage.

  Katrin’s sobs rang in his ears, drawing him back into his shell-shocked body. Her father’s blood was on his hands as sure as if he’d fired the shot himself.

  As Evan reached for the dead phone, he realized that his hand was shaking for the first time in as long as he could remember. The room gave a vertiginous tilt, the Fourth Commandment falling by the wayside.

  It was personal.

  20

  Red Hands

  He stayed with her all day as she wept but did not presume to hold her. At nightfall she pulled him onto the bed and curled into his chest like a child. Those three tattooed stars peeked out from behind her earlobe. Her fingers, resting on his chest, were laden with rings, and bracelets circled her thin wrist, rippling snakelike when she shifted her hand. Her breaths were broken, irregular from all the crying. He rested his hand on her side over the fragile cage of her ribs. When her arm brushed his knuckles, her skin felt soft as cream.

  “They’re gonna find me next,” she said. “And they’re gonna kill me.”

  “No.” Evan stared at the popcorn stucco of the ceiling. “They won’t.”

  “Why should I believe you now?” Her voice held no note of malice.

  “Because they’re not gonna be around much longer.”

  He stroked her hair gently until she fell asleep. Then he slipped out. He’d already told her that he needed to run down a few angles and would be back in the morning.

  He drove once again to Chinatown. Thirty-six hours later, the apartment complex was still an active crime scene, too populated for him to penetrate. He was eager to investigate the sniper’s perch, eager to stand where the sniper had stood, to breathe the same air and see what it told him.

  The pop of that gunshot kept returning to Evan, cycling in his mind. Sam White, with that sun-toughened skin, the crinkles at the temples. His final words to his daughter: Whoever you’re with, I hope he protects you. Evan filled in the blanks, painting the scene from the other end of the phone. The recoil of the pistol, the snap of the head, the concise black dot of an entry hole. And then that distinctive crumpling of a body once life has left it, the herky-jerky cascade of limbs, the limp neck, the chalk-outline sprawl on the floor.

  Once home and in the elevator, he found himself standing beside Mrs. Rosenbaum, who clutched her tiny snap purse to her belly with both hands as if to ward off snatchers. “Two more days,” she said, holding up a pair of pruney fingers in case he required a visual. “Two more days until my son visits with my grandchildren. He’ll fix my doorframe, no doubt about it. Then I can tell that useless manager…”

  That voice from the phone looped in Evan’s head, drowning her out: We don’t care about money. Not anymore.

  The elevator groaned upward. Evan sensed Ida’s gaze as she craned to look up at him.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He managed a nod.

  “You’re just standing there breathing,” she said. “Not even the usual ‘yes, ma’am, no, ma’am’ nonsense. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “At least there’s that now.”

  “I believe this is your floor.”

  “Oh. Well.”

  For the rest of the ride up, he relished the silence. Entering his place, he beelined for the freezer, then shook himself an U’Luvka martini for so long that his palms adhered to the stainless steel. He poured the vodka over even more ice in a tumbler, craving the antiseptic chill, wanting his teeth to ache as much as his red hands.

  Pop of a gunshot.

  Thump of deadweight.

  Dad? No. No. No!

  The tumbler was at his lips. He could breathe the sharp fumes, taste them even at the back of his tongue.

  Sending a high-level kill team in on a $2.1-million marker seemed overzealous, but Vegas was clearly willing to go to extremes to teach a lesson to the next big-ticket loser.

  This is our advertising cost. For the next time.

  Before he knew what he’d done, he’d hurled the glass across the counter at the back of the sink. It exploded pyrotechnically, shards and ice catching light, throwing rainbow prisms on the muted, blue-tinged paint of the ceiling. The crash sounded unreasonably loud off the tile and metal and concrete.

  It’ll be okay, he’d told her. It always has been before.

  An image slotted back into place in his mind: Sam’s DMV picture, taken on an ordinary day in an ordinary life. A denim shirt collar poking up into view. Tousled gray-white hair.

  Dad taught me pretty much everything.

  Evan’s legs moved him down the hall, past the row of Japanese woodblock prints and the nineteenth-century katana mounted on the wall. He cleared the doorway, and the master suite sprawled before him.

  Pop of a gunshot.

  He found himself on his knees before the bureau, tugging open the bottom drawer, sweeping aside his boxer briefs to reveal that carved crescent catch.

  Thump of deadweight.

  His fingernail caught, and the false bottom of the drawer lifted. He removed the thin veneered particleboard and dropped it onto the floor beside him. On his knees he stared down into the newly revealed depths of the drawer, his breath tight in his throat.

  Inside rested a torn blue flannel shirt, stiff with blood that had gone black with age.

  A relic.

  21

  Dead Drop

  Armed with only the training he has amassed over the past seven years, Evan finds himself navigating a treacherous new reality in treacherous new lands. There are no faces he recognizes, no safe havens, no conversations in his native tongue. He learns when to drift, when to anchor, when to project a potency beyond his nineteen years. Together in the comforting flicker of a birch fire in the farmhouse, he and Jack had built an operational alias that Evan wears now like a well-loved overcoat. It is composed of more truths than lies, the easier for Evan to align himself with it. Jack taught him the difference between acting his cover and living his cover. Evan does not act. He believes, laying down genuine emotion over the false foundation.

  Missions follow, too many to count. Evan and Jack communicate by typing inside the same message saved in the drafts folder of Evan’s e-mail account. That way not a word is actually transmitted over the Internet, where it could be detected or captured. From various countries on various continents, Evan gets photographs, addresses, instructions. He reads, replies, saves, or deletes.

  For a dormant account, [email protected] has an extremely active drafts folder.

  Evan dispatches an Egyptian operative in a treetop lodge in Kenya, a drug lord in a São Paulo bathhouse, a Syrian rebel in the storage room of a lampshade shop in Gaza. In a dreary Lebanese slum, Evan modifies orders by removing a car bomb after his target proves to drive only with his children in the backseat. He winds up infiltrating an armed compound and shooting the man in bed, a dangerous improvisation that draws a rare censure from Jack.

  Then 9/11 brings a tidal-wave surge in activity, Evan conducting more denied-area operations than ever and also moving unseen through Spain, France, Italy, lending a little uninvited help to friends. At some point—though it is not a distinct moment—his alias becomes known by three-initial agencies in certain territories. The ever-powerful databases have identified patterns of activity that are ascribed to him. The Nowhere Man: executioner and terrorist, wanted for a variety of offenses by a variety of nations,
including the United States of America. But this doesn’t concern him, as he doesn’t technically exist. No clear photograph of him can be found in any file the world over. As his legend grows within particular shadowy circles, quite a few missions are misattributed to him. Raids are conducted to capture him, often in the wrong hemisphere. At least twice a suitable candidate is killed and the Nowhere Man taken off the rolls until another covert action demonstrates his apparent immortality.

  Only Jack knows. He remains Evan’s sole link to legitimacy. To the rest of the world and his own government, Evan is a wanted man. Jack takes his orders from people at the highest level, and there they perch, breathing the rarefied air, enjoying the ultimate protection. Evan is plausible deniability personified. He is an enemy of the very state he protects and serves. Ball bearings within ball bearings.

  He nearly forgets that there are others like him until one winter morning in his twenty-ninth year. At a dead drop in Copenhagen, he receives the message.

  “I am one of you. Would like to meet. The Ice Bar, Oslo.” A date and time are given.

  It is signed “Orphan Y.”

  He stands for a time, note in hand. Snowflakes land on the paper but do not melt. He already knows two things—that he will go and that he will not tell Jack.

  He arrives well before the appointed hour, surveilling the block, the bar, exits and entrances, stairwells and tables. The bar features a long glass-walled encasement running the length of the north wall, kept as cold as a freezer. Near the door of the encasement, fur coats hang, donned by men and women alike before they enter. Inside, slate ledges display innumerable bottles of vodka and aquavit. A bartender serves each chosen spirit in a shot glass made of ice.

  The rest of the bar is stark and modern. Waitresses distribute pickled herring and reindeer satay on wooden paddles. Evan chooses a corner booth within leaping distance of the kitchen’s swinging doors and sets a revolver on the cushioned bench beside him, the length of the barrel pressing into his thigh, aiming out.