Orphan X Read online

  His meet with Katrin had been scheduled for high noon. The move to Chinatown had taken them to twelve-thirty, the L.A. sun near its apex.

  If Evan had arrived at the restaurant at any other time of day, he wouldn’t have caught that reflected glint. He took a moment to consider this fragment of good luck, then exhaled and refocused on the room.

  At last he positioned himself behind the spot where the tripod had been set down. The sole picture of Danny Slatcher had shown him carrying a Pelican case in his right hand, so Evan lined up behind the imaginary rifle in a right-handed shooter’s orientation, peering through a pretend scope.

  What he saw confirmed his worst fear, and he felt his jaw clench until it throbbed.

  The view through the circle cut into the sliding glass door gave him a perfect angle down at the restaurant. Based on where he’d been sitting at the table, his critical mass would have blocked any shot of Katrin.

  Slatcher hadn’t been aiming at her.

  He’d been aiming at Evan.

  28

  Unholy Union

  Evan walked the L.A. River to clear his head. The unlikeliest-looking waterway in the county, it was a polluted trickle through a wide concrete channel. Shrubs dotted the water’s edge, and graffiti embellished the sloped sides of the basin. The slumbering homeless lay like sacks of grain, dead or drunk or just goddamned exhausted. Downtown was overhead and all around, and yet down here, sunk in a trough beneath the city, it felt like a desolate underworld, isolated from man and God.

  The December air whipped at Evan’s neck as he sidestepped overturned shopping carts, loose tires from semis, the occasional mossy hull of a wrecked car left behind by some musclehead who’d tried to play drag-racing Danny Zuko when the water dried up.

  Traffic hummed all around, invisible save the lightsaber headlights scanning the darkness above and the soothing white noise that thrummed the basin walls, a primordial murmur of blood rushing through veins. Evan had come to the stretch flowing beneath the East Los Angeles Interchange, the unholy union of Highway 101, Route 60, and Interstates 5 and 10. He’d read somewhere that this was the busiest highway exchange in the world, daily spinning half a million vehicles through its confusion of cloverleafs.

  He realized now why he’d come to this place to make the phone call he was about to make: It was a comforting reminder of his anonymity in this great stacked sprawl of a city.

  The bullets fired into Lotus Dim Sum had been meant for him. Someone had set Danny Slatcher on his tail, put him in the crosshairs. And Katrin wasn’t the bait. Couldn’t be the bait. Because Evan knew how to read people. Jack had taught him that, as had eight different psyops experts over years of training and countless under-the-gun interactions since then. Her tears had been real—as was her fear. Which meant that he’d dragged her into this. Devastated her life. Gotten her father killed.

  Of the myriad questions scratching at the walls of his skull, one rose above the din: Who had hired Danny Slatcher to kill him?

  Evan had certainly cultivated plenty of enemies. As a covert operator, he’d put countless notches into his gun belt, and he’d added quite a few more as a freelancer. His would-be murderer could be anyone from a foreign insurgent leader to a vengeance-bent relative of someone Evan had dispatched. Whoever it was had been working a long, smart play. They’d waited and watched, reading patterns and collecting clues, just as Evan himself had been trained to do.

  He reached a patch of darker shadow beneath an overpass, the area cleared of homeless encampments, prostitutes, and druggies. A spot of privacy in the beating heart of the city. The water rustled past, its dank scent coating his lungs. He raised his tough rubber phone and dialed the number of the man who’d murdered Sam White.

  It rang. And again.

  There was a click, but no one spoke.

  Evan said, “Which one are you?”

  A silence. And then a familiar voice said, “What?”

  “Which. Orphan. Are. You?”

  Somewhere from another dimension came a screech of tires, the blare of a horn. The moon lay rippling on the muddied surface of the slow-moving water. A few bats flurried beneath the overpass, then settled peacefully back into the gloom.

  At last the voice sounded in Evan’s ear. “Some say the best. Until you. Now there seems to be some debate on that point, doesn’t there…” A brief, savored pause. “… Orphan X?”

  Hearing his alias spoken aloud for the first time in nearly a decade left his head humming. He’d been identified. Named. The moment he’d been dreading for two-thirds of a lifetime.

  He pulled the phone away from his mouth, cleared his throat, then brought the receiver back to his lips and returned the favor. “Orphan Zero,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  Who better to hire to go after the Nowhere Man than a former Orphan? The person who wanted Evan dead had made inquiries in the right circles, had hired the best. And the best happened to be not only one of Evan’s own but one of the few who could connect the dotted trail between the Nowhere Man and Orphan X. Danny Slatcher likely didn’t know Evan’s actual name, but he understood the shadowy contours of Evan’s identity as Evan understood his.

  Evan thought of Slatcher’s redacted file. He thought of a dismantled Orphan Program, all those trained assaulters out of work, unmoored from purpose and oversight, left to find meaning—and jobs—on their own. He thought of Katrin’s face when she’d heard the pop of the gunshot through the phone, the deadweight thump of her father’s body hitting the floor.

  Evan felt his hand grow tight around the phone. Never make it personal. Never make it personal. Never …

  Blackness pooled in his chest, drowning out thought and reason, drowning out the hum of cars all around, Jack’s voice in his head, the Commandments themselves.

  He said, “You shouldn’t have killed Sam White.”

  He hung up and started back for his car.

  * * *

  Danny Slatcher set down his phone and eased his considerable frame back against the headboard, the box spring groaning beneath him. Candy came out of the bathroom, naked save the threadbare motel towel twisting up her hair, to shoot him an inquisitive glance. He did not look over at her.

  She took in his expression and retreated into the bathroom.

  Slatcher’s arm span was such that he could reach the round wooden breakfast table from the bed with barely a lean. He plucked up the slender metal box and set it in his lap.

  Inside, ten press-on, peel-off fingernails and the high-def contact lens display rested in the molded rubber interior like some relic from the future.

  He appareled himself with an ease that he found mildly distasteful.

  The virtual cursor blinked in space a few feet from his right eyeball as he waited for Top Dog to accept his request. At last the cursor shifted from red to green.

  Slatcher elevated his hands like a pensive concert pianist, then typed: WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM.

  29

  There and Gone

  “Wait,” Katrin said. “Just wait.” She circled the tiny loft, running her hand across the tinted glass that made up the west-facing wall. Her fingertips squeaked unpleasantly across the window. “You’re the target?”

  As he’d recounted his discovery in Chinatown, she’d grown tenser and tenser, until he could see the muscles tightening in her neck. Even now she was still trying to sort through the ramifications.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Now we have two sets of people after us. My bad guys and your bad guys.”

  “I don’t think that’s the case,” Evan said. “I believe my bad guys took over from your bad guys. Paid them off to clear them out of the way.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because it’s what I would do.”

  “But how would the guys after you even know about me?”

  “They must have gotten on your tail somehow when they realized you were going to make contact with me.”

  “How?”r />
  “I don’t know yet. Maybe from Morena. Maybe from an intercepted call, though I don’t know how—”

  “Then what?”

  “They sussed out your situation, determined that you owed the wrong kind of money to the wrong kind of people.”

  “They could find that out?”

  “As well as I could. Yes.”

  She stared at him a moment, then shook her head in disgust or disbelief and resumed her pacing. While she faced away, he pulled her passport from his pocket and slid it into her purse on the counter. His self-loathing materialized as a bitterness at the back of his throat.

  She whirled on Evan just as he withdrew his hand. “Paid two-point-one million dollars.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just for a shot at you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you worth that much? Who are you?” She threw her hands up. “Right. Evan. That’s who you are. The Nowhere Man.”

  He stood behind the kitchen island, facing her across the loft.

  She lifted a hand, pressed it to the side of her head. The cut on her face had all but vanished, the tiniest blemish on the curve of her cheekbone. “Why do they want to kill you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But they bought my marker to draw you in. They bought my dad. They’re the ones who … who killed my dad?”

  The word came like broken glass. “Yes.”

  There were tracks on her cheeks, glittering in the winking lights of the city.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She wiped at her face. “And your bad guys? They’re even more dangerous?”

  He nodded.

  “More dangerous than Vegas hit men?”

  He nodded again.

  “And I know too much now—what they did to my dad, at the motel, that they’re after you. So I can’t even run. I’m at greater risk now. Because of you.”

  Evan put his palms on the Caesarstone counter, dotted with sleek black take-out containers from the robata restaurant next door; she’d been eating when he’d arrived. Mustard portobello caps, tiger prawns with yuzu pesto, filet bites with sea urchin butter—the rich smells made his stomach churn. Nestled in the puffed-up lining of the trash can to his side was the discarded Powerade bottle. At the sight of it, he felt his guilt ride its way up his throat, flushing his face. As if on cue, his cell phone gave a sonar ping.

  The GPS signal, now active, transmitted from Katrin’s digestive tract to the hidden patch behind her ear to Evan’s pocket.

  The submarine alert sounded again, and Evan silenced his phone.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Nothing that matters now.”

  Mercifully, she’d moved on to another agitated rotation around the loft. “Jesus Christ, aren’t you supposed to help me? Wasn’t that the deal? The magic phone number. ‘Do you need my help?’ ‘I have never lost anyone.’ You were supposed to protect me—”

  “And I will.” He took a beat to calm his tone. “If you give me your trust, I will protect you. No matter what. That’s all we have. Do you understand?”

  She turned, backlit against the window from the distant purple-and-red glow of the Staples Center. From the club across the street rose a cover band going at a Mumford & Sons song, the words blurred but the banjo rising clear and true—will wait, I will wait for you. Katrin wore a loose-fitting T-shirt that had fallen off one shoulder, exposing a strap of black bra, and her sleek hair was mussed. The dim light had turned her lipstick dark, dark red, the color of venous blood, and her green eyes shone in a stripe of light thrown from a streetlamp below.

  “So it’s just me and you now,” she said. “In the whole big world.” Her glossy lips caught the sheen of city lights through the window, and for a moment they were ruby again. A new tear carved down the perfect skin of her cheek. She turned away. “I forgive you,” she said.

  He wet his lips. “I don’t.”

  She was looking out the window. “Come here.”

  He came. When he was close, she reached behind her, made a fist in the fabric of his shirt. Pulled him so he pressed up against her from behind. The pressure was insistent. He breathed the smell of her hair, felt a sudden shift, his focus veering off the rails. She wiggled her hips, the jeans sliding down and down, and then his were, too. Her pants, her socks were puddled at her ankles, and she kicked one leg free so she could step to the side. Her shirt was pushed up, her back smooth and pale. He placed his hands on her hips and she tilted just so and there was a divine slickness and her elbows and palms were up against the glass and their rhythm seemed to find resonance in the neon pulse of the city below. Her short breaths fogged the glass, there and gone, there and gone.

  After, they lay on the low mattress facing the city, Evan running a finger along the cello silhouette of her body, tracing the slope of her hip. Her left shoulder blade sported a kanji symbol for passion, though the third horizontal stroke was too short. They watched the headlights strobe by on the Harbor Freeway.

  “All those cars out there,” she said. “I look at all those people and I think, why me? Why not them? It’s shitty to say, I know, but I can’t help thinking it since this whole thing started. I just want to give up. But there’s no choice, really, with a nightmare like this. When people talk about being tough, maybe that’s all it means—when you’ve got no choices left. You just have to keep going until it’s over.”

  He stroked her side until she drifted off, and then he gently slid off the futon so as not to wake her. It struck him that he’d more or less shattered the Third Commandment by now. Another violation of an inviolable list. It was becoming a habit.

  He crossed to the kitchen area, pulled a bottled water from the fridge. He heard a faint buzz from across the room.

  His RoamZone, vibrating in the pocket of his kicked-off jeans.

  He stood frozen in the loft. The floorboards were cool against his bare feet, but that had nothing to do with the chill he felt sweeping across his skin.

  The Seventh Commandment decreed that there was to be one mission at a time. He’d told Morena in no uncertain terms: Only give my number to one person. Understand? Only one. Then forget that number forever.

  The phone buzzed again. He crept across, tugged it from the pocket. A caller ID he did not recognize. A few feet before him, Katrin breathed slow and steady, out cold. He retreated to the kitchen, turned on the sink for white noise, pressed to pick up.

  His voice was dry and cracked, and he had to start again. “Do you need my help?”

  “I do.” A man’s desperate voice. “Dios mío, I do more than anything. It is true? It is true that you can help me?”

  Evan lifted his gaze to Katrin’s sleeping form. The tattooed kanji strokes on the bare skin of her shoulder. “Where did you get this number?”

  “The girl. She give it to me.”

  Evan felt a pulse beating low in his stomach—suspicion morphing into something harder-edged. “What’s her name?”

  “Morena Aguilar.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “The skinny teenage girl! She have a burn on her arm. She say you help her. She say you save her little sister from the bad man. She say you help me, too.”

  The night air seeped through Evan’s pores, an instant chill, making his hair prickle. Every aspect of the past four days was thrown suddenly, violently into question.

  He thought about how quickly Katrin’s call had come, just a few days after he’d asked Morena to locate the next client for him. How her seat in Lotus Dim Sum had in fact been safely back from the sniper’s vantage, blocked by Evan himself. How easily she had been tracked, first to the restaurant, then to the motel. Then he considered the man on the other end of the phone.

  Which was the impostor?

  If it was Katrin, Evan had to clear out of the loft—and quickly—before Slatcher and his team closed in.

  He moved swiftly across the room. The door opened silently on well-greased hinges. He looked up and down t
he hall but saw no one. Yet.

  His thoughts jumped immediately to Morena Aguilar, living with her aunt and her little sister in Vegas. Both Katrin and this man had referred to her by name and description. Morena had been the point of entry; she was how Slatcher and the people behind him had gotten onto Evan’s trail. They’d connected Evan to her somehow, located her, and woven her into their plant’s cover story. Which meant she was at serious risk. If not already dead.

  Evan had to get to Vegas and find her.

  Keeping an eye on the hall through the cracked door, he fought his focus back to the phone call. “What’s your name?”

  “Guillermo Vasquez—Memo. Memo Vasquez. I am in very bad trouble. I don’t have my green card—I cannot go to policía. My Isa—my daughter—she is at risk, too.”

  “When do you want to meet?”

  “Right away. Por favor, right away.”

  “Where do you live?” Evan asked.

  Vasquez gave an address in Elysium Park, a gang-intensive working-class neighborhood in the shadow of Dodger Stadium.

  “Wednesday morning,” Evan said. “Ten A.M.”

  “It might be too late for us by then,” Vasquez said. “That is two and a half days away!”

  Evan would need two and a half days. At least.

  “Please,” Vasquez said.

  He was rushing the meet. Which was either suspicious or—given the circumstances under which people usually called Evan—completely normal.

  The hall, still empty. The elevator, visible past the neighboring loft, whirred into action, but the car passed his floor without stopping. Evan shot a glance over his shoulder at Katrin’s sleeping form. “It’ll have to do,” he said, and hung up.