Orphan X Page 12

  He spots the man the moment he enters, the bearing instantly recognizable even seventeen years later.

  Same ginger hair, same ruddy complexion.

  He winds through the crowd, peels off his winter coat, stands opposite Evan. They stare at each other. Fine hairs bristle on Charles Van Sciver’s arms. Across from them, in the freezer, a group of drunken young people, bearlike in their furs, throw back drinks, hurl their ice shot glasses against the glass wall, and high-five.

  “Evan. Holy shit, huh?” Van Sciver says. He slides into a chair, takes in the upscale decor. “We’re a long way from the Pride House Group Home, aren’t we?”

  “How did you find that dead drop to contact me?”

  “We’re well trained.” A half smile. “I do appreciate your coming.”

  “Why Oslo?”

  “I’m here for a mission.” He hails the waitress, orders two glasses of aquavit, then returns his attention to Evan. “I wanted to see someone else who doesn’t exist. Nice to have a reminder now and then that we’re really here.”

  The drinks arrive, and Van Sciver lifts his in a toast. They clink.

  “I heard about you now and then during training,” Van Sciver says. “Passing references. They used your code name, of course, but I knew. Orphan Zero and you, best of the best.”

  The notion of Evan’s reputation spreading through the Orphan Program seems to him bizarre. Almost as bizarre as sitting across from someone with shared experiences. And a shared history as well. For most of his life, Evan has operated without a present, let alone a past.

  “You had a handler,” Evan asks. “And a house?”

  “Oh, yeah, the whole nine. My dad, he was great. Laid out the Edicts, a way of life. He put me in the world.”

  Curiosity burns inside Evan, fanned by every tantalizing detail, and he tells himself to dial it back, to remain on guard despite this sudden, unexpected, hard-to-define connection—if not camaraderie, then at least an uneasy rapport. He sips, the Norwegian aquavit smokier than its Danish counterpart.

  They talk for a time, being careful but not too careful, nibbling at the edges of things. Mission stories stripped of proper nouns. Training incidents. Operational mishaps.

  The glass-walled freezer opposite them fills up, more men and women in fur coats crowding together in the tight space, raucous cheers, shattering ice glasses, but Evan barely registers the annoyance. His and Van Sciver’s dimly lit table seems a haven from the noise and revelry, a quiet place in the world.

  Van Sciver gulps his sixth shot, though he seems unaffected by the alcohol. “What I like best?” he says. “The glorious simplicity. There are orders and nothing else.”

  A discomfort bubbles up from the base of Evan’s skull, though he can’t put a name to it. “‘Nothing else’?”

  Van Sciver shakes his head. “Just getting it done. I was in and out of the Sandbox for a time, playing some offense. This one day I was tucked into the hillside behind a mansion, got a high-value target in the scope through a kitchen window. Tough shot—two hundred and change, wind factor, narrow vantage. But I had it. Problem was his kid, right? Maybe six years old, sitting in his lap. And there are security patrols working the mountain, so I have to roll in and out of the brush at intervals. I couldn’t get the target clean in the scope without that kid. And my window’s closing. Dusk coming on.” He wets his lips. “So I zero in on the kid’s eye socket, right? One less skull wall for refraction. I lined it up. Then I thought about it.” His big hand closes around the delicate cordial glass. He sips.

  Evan has been there himself, on his very first mission, hiding in a fetid Eastern Bloc sewer, sniper rifle aimed through a curb drainage grate, his scope zeroed in on the eye of an innocent. He leans forward. “What’d you do?”

  “I took the shot.” Van Sciver’s thumb and forefinger twist the stem of the glass back and forth. “Edict Twelve: Any means necessary.”

  Evan’s head feels slightly numb from the booze and Van Sciver’s revelation, but through it he also feels a swell of affection for Jack. He wonders just how different Jack’s rules are from those of the other handlers.

  He hears himself ask, “Did it work?”

  “The round didn’t kill him, but the bone frags did.” Van Sciver picks up his drink, seems to think better of it, puts it back down. “I turned a six-year-old’s skull into a weapon,” he says, with some measure of dark pride. “I had to get it done. And I did. We don’t question. We take our marching orders. And we march.”

  There is a flat shine to Charles’s eyes, the certainty of a True Believer, and Evan feels an unexpected stab of envy. What an easier line to walk. With the envy comes a degree of fascination.

  “Do you ever wonder…?”

  “What?” Charles prompts.

  Evan rotates his glass in its condensation ring, strives to reframe the question more specifically. “How do you know he was a terrorist?”

  “Because I shot him.”

  Evan does his best to keep his reaction from his face, but Van Sciver must read something in him anyway, because he adds, “That’s how the game’s played. You don’t like the rules, play a different game.” He tosses back the remainder of his shot and rises, tugging on his coat. “It is what it is, and that’s all that it is.”

  Evan remains sitting. They stare at each other for a moment, and then Evan gives a little nod. “See you somewhere or somewhere else.”

  He knows there will be no closing pleasantries, but even so, the abruptness with which Van Sciver turns on his heel and walks away catches him by surprise. In the freezer the revelers pound shots and send their ice glasses crashing to the floor. Van Sciver threads through the tables and slips into the freezer, enveloped in the press of bodies.

  Through the big glass wall, Evan watches him loop an arm around one drunken man’s neck and peel him slightly away from the others, who are toasting raucously with their next round. Booze trickles down their wrists onto the cuffs of their fur coats. They shoot the vodka. Wearing a loose grin, Van Sciver whispers in the ear of the drunken man, who is nodding in flush-faced agreement—the instant bonding of the inebriated. As the next volley of ice glasses shatter against the concrete, the man jerks in Van Sciver’s grasp. High fives are thrown all around them. Someone climbs up on the bar, nearly slipping. Van Sciver leans the drunken man against the glass wall and guides him down so he’s sitting on the floor. His back leaves a dark smudge on the pane. His head tips forward, chin to chest, and he is still. Van Sciver lifts a hat from one of the other partiers and sets it on the man’s drooping head, tilted over his face. Just another passed-out fool. His friends point at him, laugh, and keep drinking.

  As Van Sciver glides out of the freezer room, his ruddy face finds Evan for a split second. He shoots a wink and is gone in the crowd.

  He’d said it himself: He was here for a mission. Evan has to admire the cold-blooded efficiency. Two birds. One stone.

  He throws down a wad of kroner and takes his leave.

  Over the following months, the meeting with Van Sciver weighs on him. Snatches of their conversation return at inconvenient moments. Any means necessary.… We don’t question.… Because I shot him.… A moral blurriness has been introduced to the equation that Evan cannot, no matter how hard he tries, pull into focus.

  And the missions keep pinging into the drafts folder of the.nowhere.man@gmail.com. The summer finds him in Yemen, on the trail of a financier to radical imams. On an afternoon baked into lethargy by a gravy-heavy heat, he finally catches up to the man on an outing at a park. Hours pass as Evan waits for the man to separate from his young wife. Finally he heads into the filthy public bathroom, where Evan garrotes him beside the stall. A messy, up-close business. The man fights, kicking hard enough to break one of the porcelain urinals. After, Evan’s shirt is little more than a torn rag of sweat and blood.

  When he gets cleaned up and back to his hotel, the local stations are lit up with news of a dead human-rights activist whose face happens to
match that of the man Evan has just dispatched. He feels a dull thudding in his stomach, the beat of paranoia. Or is it doubt? Doubt is one thing he cannot afford.

  He requests phone contact with Jack, and two hours later, it is granted. He reaches Jack per the new standard protocol—burner cell phone to burner cell phone—and Jack immediately jumps into housekeeping. “I moved another eight-figure sum through the Isle of Man. It’ll octopus out to your second-tier accounts, and then—”

  “Stop,” Evan says.

  Jack does.

  “He wasn’t a financier,” Evan says. “I saw on TV he was a human-rights activist.”

  “It says news, not truth.”

  “Let’s skip the maxims this time out,” Evan says. “This is starting to feel arbitrary.”

  Jack sighs across the receiver. Then he says, “I had to put Strider down this morning. Stopped eating. Belly full of tumors.”

  Evan feels the loss in his gut, his throat. “I’m sorry.”

  He hears the clink of ice in a glass. He imagines the handsome dog’s creep beneath the dinner table, the feel of the muzzle slurping a secreted handful of turkey from his cupped palm. The closest thing to a brother he ever had.

  Jack interrupts his thoughts. “What are you telling me?”

  The feeling of grief still enfolds Evan. He is unaccustomed to it. It takes him a beat to reorient himself. “Maybe I need a break.”

  “You’re saying you want to come in?”

  “I’m saying I need a break.”

  “You can’t have one. Not right now.”

  “Next mission is set?”

  “In your folder already.”

  Evan is sitting cross-legged on a bed on the top floor of a crumbling hotel. The room is so small he can reach across and pull his laptop from the wobbly wooden desk. Pinching the phone between his shoulder and cheek, he logs in to his account. The sash window is crookedly open, overlooking blocky beige buildings, strings of drying laundry. The air hangs hot and still in the room.

  “Hold on,” he says. “I’m there.”

  He clicks on the drafts folder. He opens the sole e-mail-in-progress. The beach ball spins as the photo loads.

  He sees the face, and the breath leaves his lungs. The sounds of traffic fade. There is nothing but a white-noise rush at his ears. He blinks hard around his thumb and forefinger, pinching the bridge of his nose, but when he looks back up, the pixelated photo is the same.

  Charles Van Sciver.

  Jack reads something in the silence as only he can. “You recognize him.”

  “Yes.”

  “From the home.”

  “Yes. And.”

  “And what?”

  Evan stands up, goes to the window, trying to find fresh air. But the air is all the same here—in this room, outside, in the whole bone-dry country. “We met once. I know. Who he is now.”

  “You met? That’s an unfortunate irregularity.”

  “Call it what you like. If he’s an Orphan like me, why is he landing in my e-mail account?”

  “He’s been compromised. A couple of our guys…”

  Evan could hear the pain in Jack’s voice. “What?” he pressed.

  “They went to the other side.”

  “Do you have any more information than that?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, if you want me to hunt down an Orphan, you’d better unfuck Washington and get me a specific answer as to why.”

  “There are no answers. You know this.”

  “That doesn’t mean there aren’t questions. The Sixth Commandment—or did you forget?”

  Evan looks across at the open laptop. He sees Van Sciver staring out, but he also sees the young Van Sciver, circling them up on the blacktopped basketball courts in the shadow of the high-rise Lafayette Courts projects, a huddle of young thugs with nothing but time and nothing better to do.

  “I won’t do it,” Evan says. “I won’t kill my own. He came up with me.”

  “He’s dead anyways,” Jack says. “It’ll be you or someone else.”

  “That strikes me,” Evan says, “as a faulty moral argument.”

  A silence. Then Jack says, “Fair enough. Head back to Frankfurt. They’ll send someone to clean up behind you there.”

  “They always do.”

  Evan hangs up.

  He initiates another call three days later, dialing the number of the next burner cell phone on the list he has memorized. Jack answers in the kitchen; Evan can hear the tail end of the coffee’s percolating.

  “I need to see you,” he says.

  “No way. You are taking a lot of heat for the Bulgaria job—you could be wrapped in surveillance right now.”

  “I’m not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because. You trained me.”

  A beat.

  Then Jack says, “This is an irregular contact.”

  For Jack there is no word more damning than “irregular.”

  “It’s an irregular life. I need to see you. Now.”

  “No. Stay in Germany. Get off the radar. You’ll never make it into the country right now.”

  “I’m calling you from L Street and Connecticut Ave.”

  The ensuing silence is protracted.

  Jack says, “There may have been a leak on this end. I don’t want to be drawn out. I’m watching my movements.”

  The Bulgaria job. A leak. Uncharacteristic excuses from a man who does not make any.

  Jack says nothing. Evan doesn’t either.

  At last Jack caves. “There’s an underground parking lot on Ohio Drive directly south of the Jefferson Memorial. It’s closed for construction. I’ll be at P3 at midnight. For five minutes.”

  He leaves Evan with a dial tone.

  After nightfall Evan walks along the choppy slate of the Potomac, hands shoved in his pockets. The cherry trees are in bloom, and he is surprised, as always, at how little fragrance they give off. The fallen blossoms wad underfoot.

  He finds the structure and does a few walk-bys before approaching, threading through orange cones and hazard tape. A makeshift plywood sheet has been nailed too often over the door to the north stairwell, and it unseats readily with a gentle prying. He walks each level, moving between the slumbering cement mixers and construction trucks loaded with equipment. He descends to P3, surveils the perimeter of the dark floor, and tucks in behind a concrete pillar to wait. For over two hours, he makes not a single move, as inanimate as the gear and vehicles surrounding him.

  At midnight on the dot, Jack materializes from the far end of P3, where, to Evan’s knowledge, there is no stairwell. Then again, it’s a magic trick befitting a onetime station chief. Ball bearings within ball bearings.

  His footsteps tick-tock across the open. A glowing red elevator sign casts him in severe light, stretching his shadow across the oil-stained floor. He stops in the open, looking directly at the patch of darkness hiding Evan.

  “Well?” he says.

  Evan emerges. They embrace. Jack holds him for an extra beat. It has been twenty-six months since the last time they saw each other—a fifteen-minute meet in a coffee shop in Cartagena. The years have made Jack slightly more jowly, though he still looks fit, no extra padding. The sleeves of his blue flannel shirt are cuffed up past his forearms, which are as muscular as ever. Baseball-catcher arms.

  When they pull apart, Evan scans the parking level. Clears his throat. “I’m out,” he says.

  Jack takes his measure. “You’re never out. You know this. Without me you’re just—”

  “A war criminal. I know. But I’m going underground. The Smoke Contingency.”

  The designation, a joking play on his name, had become a shorthand between them.

  “We cannot be having this conversation,” Jack says. “Not here, not now. Do you understand me? I know you think you’re alone out there. But there are protections I afford you. The well-placed phone call. The friend at the passport checkpoint. I am the only person who�
�”

  Emotion crowds Evan’s chest—a smothering black claustrophobia. “I can’t do it anymore!”

  The sharp words ring off the concrete pillars and walls. He cannot recall the last time he’s allowed emotion to color his voice. He wipes his mouth, looks away.

  Jack blinks. He is looking at Evan in a way he never has before, a parent noticing for the first time that his child is no longer a child. His eyes are moist, his lips firm. He is not at risk of crying, and yet his expression seems a precursor to the act.

  “I wanted you to see more than black and white. I wanted you to remain … human. In this, perhaps, I failed you.” He blinks again, twice, his big square head canted, pointed at the tips of Evan’s shoes. “I’m sorry, son.”

  Too late, Evan feels the rumble of a moving vehicle through the soles of his shoes. He tenses. An engine roars, and headlights sweep the north wall like a prison watchtower light. At the far end of the parking level, a black SUV careens down the circular ramp from P2, bottoming out, riding a cascade of sparks.

  Already two guns are firing through the windshield, flares of light through spiderwebbing glass. Jack hooks Evan’s arms and tugs him behind a pillar, rounds powdering the concrete inches from their faces. Evan has his Wilson drawn, and he rolls across the back of the pillar and out the other side, holding a Weaver shooting stance, his bladed body presenting a narrower target. As the SUV barrels toward them, he fires into the shattered maw of the windshield.

  A bullet rifles by, close enough that he can feel the heat at the side of his neck, but his hands stay steady, his aim sure. He cannot see through the windshield, not yet, but he places rounds through both front seats and whoever occupies them. The SUV’s roar diminishes, the tires slow. Evan dumps a mag, loads another, keeps firing even after the cabin is decimated, even as the vehicle slows, slows, the broad hood nearing, the front bumper kissing his thighs as it finally stops.

  The red elevator light illuminates the interior, two riddled bodies splayed forward against the dashboard. Hair and bone.

  From behind him he hears a gurgle. Jack, slumped against the pillar, his blue flannel shirt sopped at the shoulder. The blood is bright, arterial. Jack’s hand, gripping the wound, is so uniformly coated that it seems as though he has slipped on a crimson glove.