Orphan X Read online

  He pictured himself climbing out of the car at the motel. Anyone sitting in a parked vehicle in the front lot? No. Any tourists out and about, snapping photos? No, just a mom and two kids waiting on the sidewalk while the father paid the meter. When he’d first checked in, had the receptionist logged his license-plate number? No. There had been a security camera behind the front desk, at a lazy angle across the front counter. Katrin had been with Evan when he’d booked the rooms. Most security footage these days was stored on an online server.

  So.

  If Evan were the one hunting Katrin, what would he have done? Assuming that his target would want to regroup after the sniper near miss, he’d look at every low- to midlevel motel within a thirty-mile radius of the dim sum restaurant. He’d eliminate those without ready freeway access and those that were part of big chains with fixed check-in procedures. Then he’d tap into the security cameras in the remaining lobbies and run facial-recognition software on the resultant feeds. This would require enormous resources and know-how, not to mention a huge amount of luck. Implausible? Highly. But—depending on whom Vegas had hired and how expert they were—not impossible.

  If he was going that far, why not consider whether satellite footage had been retrieved from the blocks surrounding the restaurant in the wake of the shooting? His Chrysler would have been lost from imagery in the alley, but it could have been picked up pulling out onto Hill Street. A few blocks later, he’d screeched over into the liquor-store parking lot to wand down Katrin. Had he stayed close enough to the umbra thrown by the building to hide their outlines?

  He caught himself, reining his thoughts back to reality. If a mission that grand had been in place, there would’ve been a full tactical team raiding Lotus Dim Sum, not a sniper in an apartment window across the street. These scenarios were beyond the pale even of his well-cultivated paranoia.

  Wasn’t it a lot more likely that Katrin had tipped them off?

  And yet why would she tip off the people who were trying to kill her?

  She faced away in the passenger seat, her feet tucked beneath her, chewing a thumbnail, her forehead pressed to the window. He thought, What aren’t you telling me?

  The blood had dried on her cheek, the glass fragment still glistening in the wound. He’d clean her up when they got to wherever they were going.

  He finally decided on his Downtown location, a loft perched five stories above Flower Street with a partial view of the Staples Center. Like all his safe houses, this one was end-stopped, easy to burn in the event something went wrong. The mortgage and all affiliated payments were drawn from a bank fed by a wire from an account owned by a shell corp. His pursuers could monkey up that pole, but they’d find nothing at the top.

  Because it was a single room, the loft was the best wired of Evan’s places, security cameras capturing the space in its entirety. He needed to watch Katrin when he wasn’t with her.

  He couldn’t trust her.

  She didn’t speak for the entire drive, not even when he exited Downtown. Pulling in to the subterranean parking level, he felt the cramp of his hands squeezing the steering wheel. He shot a glance across at Katrin, still turned away. No one in the world could connect him to this building. Until now. Every twist of this mission cut closer to his core, knifing deeper into his comfort zone.

  The parking rows were crammed—narrow lanes, tight turns, SUVs muscling across the painted lines. Dangling overheads threw dim flares of light. Bicycles plugged into a wall-length metal rack, Kryptonite locks floating in the few empty spots, cinched around front wheels where the frames had been stolen. It was a nice building, but not too nice. Evan found a spot in the back.

  When he got out of the car, Katrin still didn’t move, so he circled behind and opened the door for her. She emerged languidly, her movements slowed by shock.

  Or she was faking it well.

  Though the parking level was empty, he adjusted her scarf headband so it crowded her face, hiding the blood-crusted cheek. She stared through him. After grabbing a blocky Hardigg Storm Case from the trunk, he took her up a rear stairwell, and they made it to the fifth floor and into his loft without crossing paths with anyone.

  The loft featured only the bare essentials—futon on wooden frame, a few dishes and pans, a set of folded towels on the bathroom sink.

  She scanned the room. “What is this place?”

  Evan set down the Storm Case on the floorboards, clicked the latches, and lifted the weatherproof lid. Various tools and weapons were nestled in the foam lining. He assembled the nonlinear junction detector.

  She crossed her arms, flicked her head at the black wand. “Really? You’re gonna scan me again? You still don’t trust me?”

  He stood, the detector at his side. “I don’t know.”

  She scraped some of the dried blood off the side of her chin with her fingernail. “You think I’m … what? Wired? Wearing a bug? Implanted with a chip?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Too exhausted to be angry, she heel-stepped on one shoe, kicked it aside. Then the other. She let her scarf headband flutter to the floor, then tugged her shirt off over her head, careful to pull the collar wide so it wouldn’t rub against the cut in her cheek. She reached behind her back, unclasped her bra, let it fall. “Let’s get this over with,” she said. “For once and for all. I have nothing to hide. No card up my sleeve.” Her hands were at her belt, and then she was stepping out of her jeans, flicking them aside. With her pixie-hipster trappings shed, she was unexpectedly full-figured. She spread her arms. “I have nothing to hide. Scan me.”

  Evan looked at her, doing his best to keep his gaze from her lush form. The cut in her cheek was little more than a nick, though it had bled nicely, as faces did.

  She was breathing hard, her ribs rising and falling, her face flushed. But her eye contact remained unflinching. “Well?”

  He stepped forward and scanned her. The swells of her calves. The curve from hip to waist. The slope of her breasts. The twin strokes of her clavicles. The blunt edge of her hair at her nape.

  Then he flattened her clothes on the floor and scanned every seam, every wrinkle. There were new technologies every week—he used plenty of them himself—and he didn’t want to miss the faintest wire thread or speck of metal.

  The wand emitted nothing more than its customary buzz.

  He straightened up from his crouch, and she gestured at her clothes. “May I?”

  He nodded, turning slightly away while she dressed. The day had blended into evening, the lights of the city blinking on beyond the tall tinted window that constituted the south-facing wall.

  When she was done, she came around in front of him, held out her hand. “My turn.”

  Though her gaze was intense, her full lips stayed slightly pursed, the first sign of amusement she’d shown since her father was killed. He debated protesting, thought better of it, and handed her the wand.

  She scanned him bottom to top, standing on her tiptoes to reach his face. As she passed the circular head of the wand across his temple, he could feel her breath, feather-soft against his neck. She finished and offered up the wand, standing close still, her eyes uptilted.

  “Now what?” she said.

  “Sit up here on the counter.” He gestured to a spot under one of the recessed ceiling lights, and she hopped up. He retrieved a washcloth and a first-aid kit from the bathroom and returned. After wetting the cloth with warm water from the kitchen tap, he stood in front of her. With her up on the counter and him standing, their faces were about level. She looked from him to the washcloth, then back at him. She parted her knees so he could lean in and work on the cut.

  It was superficial, as he’d thought, the glass fragment tiny. With the washcloth he dabbed at the side of her chin, the blood coming off in flakes. As he worked his way up to the cut itself, her wincing grew more pronounced. Her eyes darted nervously to the tweezers, visible in the clear pouch of the first-aid kit.

  “Close your eyes,�
� he said. “Focus on the pain. What does it feel like?”

  The dried blood around the glass was stubborn but gave way under his ministrations. Her closed eyelids flickered. She swallowed hard. “Like there’s a piece of glass embedded in my fucking face.”

  “That’s a start. Is it hot?”

  “Yeah. Hot.”

  “Does it have a color?”

  “Orange,” she said. “Orange and yellow.”

  “Is it changing?”

  “Yeah. It throbs. And then dies down.”

  “Pick a part of your body that doesn’t hurt.”

  “My hand,” she said.

  Her hand was resting on his shoulder.

  “Okay,” he said, reaching slowly for the tweezers. “Your hand. Focus on that. What’s it feel like?”

  “It’s cool,” she said. “Steady as a rock.”

  “What color is your hand?”

  “Cobalt blue.”

  “You feel every finger distinctly?”

  He felt her hand ripple ever so slightly on his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.” And then—“You’re gonna use the tweezers now, aren’t you?”

  “I already did.”

  She opened her eyes. He gave the piece of glass a jeweler’s tilt in the tweezers, and it winked back a star of light.

  “That,” she said, “is magic.”

  The cabinet next to the refrigerator held a few basics, and he boiled pasta and heated some sauce. She watched him work at the stovetop.

  “This is the most fucked-up date I’ve ever been on,” she said, and he smirked.

  He served her at the counter. She’d slung her purse up beside her, and it yawned open, showing an overstuffed wallet, a zippered makeup bag, the blue fold of a passport.

  While she ate, he walked behind her, squatted above the Storm Case, and started putting away the nonlinear junction detector.

  “Can I get something to drink?”

  Right on schedule.

  The raised lid of the case hid his hand from view as he plucked a tiny glass vial from the foam lining.

  “There’s a machine in the lobby,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  He headed out, took the elevator down, fed a couple of bills into the Coke machine, and chose the darkest shade of Powerade—fruit punch. He took the stairs back up, pausing on an empty landing, and lifted the tiny vial to the light. Inside, a thin layer of what looked like fine black sand shifted as he angled the vial. They were microchips—silicon with trace amounts of copper and magnesium. The technology, developed by the biopharmaceutical industry, had been pirated from a Phase II drug designed to regulate diabetes. Once ingested, the sensors massed, generating a slight voltage when digestive juices were stimulated. This voltage sent a signal to the patient’s skin, where a patch relayed the blood-sugar readings to the cell phone of the treating physician. The variation Evan had acquired conveyed instead the GPS bearings of its carrier. If not replenished, it broke down in the body and passed from the system within several days.

  Evan poured the particles into the plastic bottle and swished them around, dispersing them until they were lost to the dark red liquid. He continued upstairs.

  When he entered the loft, Katrin was behind the counter, cleaning up her dishes. He twisted the cap, pretending to break the seal for her, and offered the bottle.

  She shook her head. “Don’t drink that stuff.”

  “Stress burns electrolytes,” he said. “Drink.”

  She studied him for a moment, then took the bottle, gulped it halfway down, and left the rest on the counter. Stifling a yawn, she trudged toward the futon. “I feel like I haven’t slept in a month,” she said.

  Fully clothed, she burrowed beneath the fluffy white comforter. He put the bottle in the fridge and walked over to her. “I’ll leave a stack of cash on the counter,” he said. “Same rules as the hotel with regard to ordering food, going out, everything. I will be back sometime tomorrow.”

  “Okay, got it,” she said, her voice slurred with exhaustion. She lay on her side, facing away at the tinted window. Across a river of headlights, the Staples Center glowed Lakers purple.

  From the inside of the vial’s cap, he peeled off a skin-colored patch the size of a dot and readied it on his knuckle so the sticky edge hung halfway off. He crossed to the futon and tucked her in, letting his hand nudge just behind her ear, the patch transferring to her skin beside the three tattooed stars. It was waterproof, thinner than Saran Wrap and just as transparent. It disappeared beautifully.

  As he pulled away, she squeezed his wrist and rolled over sleepily. “I don’t know how I’ll ever thank you,” she said.

  He gave a little nod and adjusted the sheets over her. She rocked back onto her side and let her eyes close.

  On the way out, he lifted her passport from her purse.

  25

  Business of a Certain Type

  It was full dark by the time Evan reached Northridge, the moon a bullet hole through the black dome of the sky. Maneuvering a grid of streets on the flat floor of the Valley, he arrived at the industrial park just off Parthenia. The layout had a movie-studio vibe, blocky buildings scattered like sound stages.

  The Taurus’s tires crackled across the asphalt between businesses, all of them shuttered for the night. Except one.

  A single point of light glowed above the entrance to the last building in the complex. It was a Victorian streetlamp, rising like a prop from a bed of begonias. In place of a light, the streetlamp held a backlit sign that in turn featured a streetlamp illustration, beneath which was written “CraftFirst Poster Restoration” in old-timey letters. The Magritte-meta conceit was an appropriate one, as the brick façade housed a business behind a business.

  He parked and rang a buzzer on a call box. A moment later the door clicked open and he entered, passing through a brief foyer with periwinkle walls exhibiting Italian noir posters from the forties. Another door, another buzzer, and then he was through into the vast workspace.

  Industrial shelving units lined the perimeter, crammed with all order of supplies. Jars of paints, rubber-cement thinner, fine-tipped brushes with tape-padded handles, palette knives, and X-Acto blades. Rolls of army duck canvas, Mylar, and fine-texture poster backing. Jumbles of corner brackets and frame stretcher bars. The space resembled a factory floor, with various conservators bent over giant square plywood worktables, restoring vintage posters and prints. The rolling tables, positioned haphazardly wherever elbow room was afforded, rose only to the workers’ thighs, allowing them ready access to their tasks.

  Most of the painters were plugged into iPods, big clamp headphones hugging their skulls. Every last one wore eyeglasses; this kind of work strained the vision. A shiny-haired man adjusted a crinkled British three-sheet of The Day of the Jackal between blotter sheets and slipped it into a nineteenth-century cast-iron screw press. Next to him at a wet table, a worker sprayed an olive German M poster with a retrofitted insecticide atomizer while his partner sponged at a stained spot gently with Orvus soap, a pure, fragrance-free surfactant used for livestock and posters. It made water wetter, the better to penetrate paper fibers. The two men quickly whisked the poster onto a suction table, which roared to life, a vacuum wicking the moisture from below before it could spread out.

  “Evan! Over here! You have to see this.”

  Melinda Truong, a lithe woman with a curtain of black hair reaching her lower back, popped up from a cluster of men around a workstation and waved him across the floor. As he wove his way to her, a mounted TV blared the ten-o’clock news. Evan glanced up to see if it was carrying the story of the motel shooting, but it was a feature about some assemblyman gone missing.

  The ring of workers parted deferentially as he approached. Melinda took his face in both of her hands and kissed him on either cheek close to the edge of his lips. She wore a fitted sweater, yoga pants, and bright orange sneakers of elaborate design. Tucked behin
d her ear was a 000 paintbrush—the finest make—with its handle wrapped in pink tape. At her waist, slung in an actual holster, was an Olympos double-action airbrush, which looked like a 1970s take on a ray gun. Its grip was also padded with pink tape. The only woman in the operation, she color-coded her tools to keep her men from borrowing them.

  She tugged his hand, turning him toward the table around which the little group had gathered. “This poor girl was stripped from a cinema display case in Paris. She lay in a dank warehouse for years after the war, then was shoved into a trunk until last June. She came to us in intensive care.”

  He stared down at the object of her affection, a Ginger Rogers insert from Lady in the Dark, sandwiched between Mylar sheets. It had multiple tears, pinholes, and fold wear. “She looks tattered,” he said.

  “You should’ve seen her before we got our hands on her. She had to be demounted, washed, the tape adhesive residue removed with Bestine. We’re patching her with vintage paper now. She’ll be worth six figures when we’re done—her owner’ll be thrilled. Of course, we’re only billing him at one twenty-five an hour.” The long lashes of one eye dipped in a graceful wink. “Not like for our special services.”

  She seemed to notice the workers around her for the first time. “Well?” she said sharply in her native tongue. “What are you waiting for? Back to work!”

  As they scurried into motion, Evan nodded at a poster of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man pinned on the neighboring table. “How about that one?”

  “This guy?” She grinned, showing perfect rows of pearl-white teeth. “He’s good-looking, right? Been damaged and restored a few times, like most good men.” She freed a corner of the poster, showed off the back side. “Got all these collector stamps to establish provenance. But.”

  She barked another order across the room, and a moment later the lights in the building went out with a series of clanks. A black-light wand clicked on in her hand, the greens and whites of the poster suddenly luminescent. “Fake, see? The glow gives it away. They made an ink-jet printout, glued it onto vintage backing, and intentionally distressed it.” The lights came back on, and she whisked the poster off the table, Frankenstein disappearing into the wide drawer of a flat file cabinet. She smirked. “I know a good forgery when I see one.”