Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  “To speed up the conversation.”

  The man still couldn’t talk, but he waved his hand for Evan to continue.

  “MS-13,” Evan said. At this the man’s eyes darted up to find Evan’s. “I need to know where their headquarters are here.”

  “I can’t tell you that, man.”

  Evan took a step forward, and the man scrambled back, crabwalking on hands and heels until his shoulders struck the top flange of an I-beam. Evan shadowed his movement.

  “Wai-wai-wait. Okay. Okay. I’ll tell you.”

  He cowered against the steel, Evan standing above him.

  He kept one hand clamped over his throat, the other raised defensively. “Just lemme catch my breath first.”

  39

  Visions of the Occult

  A reinforced steel door gave the first indication that the abandoned church was not what it seemed. The half dozen men on guard outside, smoking and bickering, were a more obvious second. Their heads were shaved, their faces and skulls covered with tattoos. Devil horns on foreheads. The numbers 1 and 3 written in roman numerals rouging each cheek. Dots in a triangle at the corner of the eye, showing the three destinations for Mara Salvatrucha members after they’re recruited—hospital, prison, or grave.

  To a one, the men wore Nike Cortez sneakers, blue and white for the flag of their home country. One shirtless bruiser had the monkeys of lore inked across his torso—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

  Evan walked past on the far side of the street, then cut around the block and took his bearings. The church was north of Pico along the 110 Freeway, surrounded by buildings in steep decline. A textile plant. A bodega with plywood replacing the glass of one front window. Graffiti everywhere, covering Dumpsters, parked cars, walls. On the corner a shrine of flower wreaths and sanctuary candles remembered a young boy who peered out of a framed school picture with bright, eager-to-please eyes.

  A street vendor hawked knockoff Nikes on a ratty bedspread, the swooshes positioned suspiciously low. They, too, were blue-and-white Cortezes, fan paraphernalia for residents who wanted to be seen rooting for the home team.

  Evan headed up an alley and scaled a fire-escape ladder to the roof of a crack house. He walked across the rotting shingles toward the spire rising from the neighboring building and crouched by the rusted rain gutter, peering through a shattered stained-glass window into the church below.

  The pews had been shoved aside, gang members congregating in the nave. A pistol on every hip, submachine guns leaning in the corners, at the ready. They weren’t a gang.

  They were an army.

  The men exchanged rolls of cash, sorted baggies of white powder, collected from street-worn hookers. Electronic scales topped table after table like sewing machines in a sweatshop. Pallets of boxed electronics lined the far wall, fronted with heaps of stolen designer clothes. A hive, buzzing with enterprise.

  Evan searched the milling crowd for Xavier. The tattoos were overwhelming. Pentagrams and names of the dear departed. Crossbones, grenades, dice, daggers, machetes. And words—words in place of eyebrows, blue letters staining lips, nicknames rendered across throats in Old English letters. Other tattoos coded for crimes the men had committed—rape, murder, kidnapping.

  Their rap sheets, inked right on their faces.

  Xavier was nowhere to be seen.

  A broad-chested man descended from the sanctuary, and the body language of the others changed. Everyone quieted down, their focus drawn. The man had MS in a Gothic font on his forehead, showing him to be a high-ranking member; it was an honor to display the gang’s initials above the shoulders. But that wasn’t what drew Evan’s attention first.

  It was his eyes.

  They were solid black.

  For the first time in a long time, leaning over the eaves of the crack house, Evan felt a chill. It took a moment for him to recalibrate, to pull himself out of visions of the occult.

  The man had tattooed the whites of his eyes.

  He had a lean, lupine face, a crucifix running down the bridge of his nose, unfolding its wings across his cheeks. Twinned rows of metal studs decorated his cheeks, and his lower lip bore shark bites, double-hoop piercings on either side. Block letters spelling FREEWAY banded his chin like a drooled spill of blood.

  Freeway hugged one of his lieutenants, a hand clasp to shoulder bump, and headed out. The army parted for him.

  Benito’s words came back to Evan—They are the people you would least want to anger in the entire world—and he shivered against the wind.

  Walking along the edge of the roof, Evan watched Freeway clang out through the steel door. The guards quieted instantly and stepped aside. Evan mirrored Freeway’s movement from above, walking along the rim of the roof as Freeway turned the corner.

  A few men threw heavy-metal devil’s-head signs at him from the alleys, their fingers forming an inverted M for the gang name. Freeway did not return the signs.

  When passersby saw him coming, they averted their eyes and stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter to let him pass.

  Still no sign of Xavier.

  Freeway entered the bodega. Through the remaining window, Evan saw the store owner stiffen. He scurried over and turned the sign on the front door to CLOSED.

  Freeway walked through the aisles, grabbing items off shelves, and disappeared into a back courtyard without paying. The owner waited a few moments, catching his breath, and then followed.

  Evan’s RoamZone rang, the piercing sound startling him. He hadn’t noticed how tense he’d grown while watching the gang leader.

  The burner cell’s number registered in the RoamZone’s caller ID.

  Evan answered, “Go.”

  Joey said, “I cracked it.”

  Evan took in a breath of crisp rooftop air.

  “You’d better get over here,” she said. “It’s worse than we thought.”

  40

  Enhanced Interrogation

  Candy pulled the Audi through the side gate, released Tim Draker from the trunk, and marched him in through the rear door. She stayed five feet behind him, pistol aimed at the back of his head. She’d zip-tied his hands at the small of his back, but you couldn’t be too cautious. Not with an Orphan.

  Draker stepped into the living room, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Mattresses covered the windows and walls, soundproofing the space. An array of implements were spread out on a drop cloth. Across the room stood Charles Van Sciver, his log-thick arms crossed.

  Candy couldn’t help but smirk a bit when she saw Draker sag at the sight of him, as if someone had put slack in the line.

  Van Sciver stared over the ledge of his arms, one eye sharp and focused, the other dilated, a dark orb. “Let me tell you what we know,” he said. “Jack Johns has long been aware of the directive from above to neutralize washouts, dissenters, Orphans who tested high-risk for defiance. But the shadow file? He knew of its existence before I did. And he knew it was only a matter of time before I got my hands on it. So he reached out to anyone he could and hid those people any way he knew how. He got to a few before we got to him. You were one of them. After you left the Program, he helped you hide. He also took care of the asset you’d recruited for me. David Smith. Twelve years old. Now thirteen.”

  Van Sciver paused, but Orphan L gave no reaction.

  At the mention of the boy, Candy felt cool air across the back of her neck. An uncomfortable sensation, like when she thought about that alley outside Sevastopol, Halya Bardakçi with her baby-giraffe legs and that almond-shaped face. East Slavic through and through, beautiful and alluring, cheaply had and cheaply dispatched. After she’d been stabbed in the neck and dumped in the back of the car, she was still alive. Rattling against the hatch as she bled out.

  Van Sciver took a step toward Draker. “We know Jack hid the boy here in Richmond. We know that you helped him before you went to ground. I want to know where the boy is.”

  Draker said, “Even if I did know anything about this,
why would you want the boy? You think he can lead you to X?”

  “No,” Van Sciver said. “I think he can bring X to me.”

  Draker said, “I don’t know anything about this.”

  “Is that so,” Van Sciver said.

  The men regarded each other solemnly.

  Then Van Sciver took a step back and tapped on the wall lightly with his knuckles.

  A moment later Thornhill entered from the next room. He was holding the turkey baster. He walked a casual arc in front of Van Sciver.

  “Enhanced interrogation,” Thornhill said, with that broad, easygoing grin. “It’s such a well-considered term. Gotta hand it to the Agency. They do know their marketing.” He gazed into the middle distance, tapping the baster in his palm. “You know another one I like? Rectal rehydration. It sounds so … therapeutic.” His stare lowered. “When your intestines are all swollen up with fluid and you get a steel-toed boot in the gut, do you have any idea how much it hurts?”

  Draker said, “I do.”

  “That’s just the start,” Van Sciver said. “Have a look around.”

  Keeping her gun raised, Candy watched Draker take in the items arrayed on the floor.

  There were padlocks and plywood.

  Nylon ropes and boards of various lengths.

  A decline bench and jugs of water.

  Mattresses and drop cloths.

  Duct tape and a folding metal chair.

  A sheen of perspiration covered his face now, and it was no longer a fake-addict sweat. He lifted his head again. Set his jaw.

  He said, “Let’s get to it, then.”

  41

  Borrowed Time

  Joey chewed her thumbnail, leaning over Evan’s shoulder as he sat before the Dell laptop, staring at a list.

  Five names.

  One of them was Joey Morales.

  Morales. All this time he didn’t know her last name. He’d been unable even to get her full first name out of her.

  The hillside crowded the back windows of the safe house, shadows making the interior dismal. That ever-present moisture had taken hold in the trapped air, turning the place dank. It smelled of microwaved food and girl’s deodorant. Evan ran his eyes across the screen once again.

  “So much encryption,” Evan said, “for five names.”

  She paused from chewing her thumbnail. “Not just five names. It’s a list of people in the Program who were associated with Jack in some way. Look.” She shouldered him aside, taking over the keyboard. When she hovered the cursor above the top name, a hidden file appeared. She clicked it, and a host of images proliferated. “This guy? Jim Harville? He was Orphan J. One of the original guys. Jack was his handler way back when. It says it was Jack’s first Program assignment.”

  Evan scanned the files. “How the hell did Van Sciver get his hands on this? This is intel that isn’t supposed to exist.” He scrolled down the page. “And it’s from channels outside the Orphan Program. Look here. See, this is NSA/CSS coding.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means someone else in the government is watching Van Sciver and the Program—keeping tabs. Van Sciver didn’t oversee this intel collection, and he doesn’t control it.”

  “Well,” Joey said, “till he got control of it.”

  Dread crept into Evan’s stomach, digging in its nails. Van Sciver’s cryptic comments looped through his head once again: You have no idea, do you? How high it goes? You still think it’s about me and you.

  Evan said, “What happened to Orphan J?”

  “They caught up to him in Venice.” She brought up a crime-scene photo of a man lying in a flooded piazza, the back of his head blown off. Another red spot bloomed below one of his shoulder blades. Blood ribboned the water around him. The picture had been taken moments after he was shot, a cell-phone snap.

  Evan noted the time stamp on the photo. “Van Sciver’s updating the initial files, building on the intel pieces he got his hands on. He’s taken these five names and turned them into active hit missions.”

  “That’s right. Like Orphan C.” She brought up a picture of an older man, half in shadow, moving through the concourse of a shopping mall in Homewood, Alabama. He was dressed shabbily, toes showing through one of his sneakers. “Now look at this.” She’d dug up an article about an unidentified homeless man murdered beneath a freeway ramp in Birmingham. A picture from a local shelter accompanied the article, showing the man at a soup kitchen.

  Evan sank back in the chair. “That’s why Jack was in Alabama. He knew this was coming, that this file could leak.”

  “And that’s why he found me,” Joey said. “Why he moved me to Oregon and hid me.”

  Evan stared at the name, bare on the screen: Joey Morales.

  “It’s beyond creepy.” Joey slid the cursor over her own name, and a surveillance grab from a 7-Eleven security camera popped up, showing her walking through the aisles, baseball hat pulled low. But the angle was sufficient to capture her face. It was dated nearly a year ago, an address listed in Albuquerque. Same faded NSA/CSS stamp at the bottom of the page.

  “This is from a week after I took off from Van Sciver,” Joey said. “But it was enough to get them on my trail. And lead them here.”

  She tapped another link, and zoom-lens surveillance photos of the Hillsboro apartment populated the screen. Joey through a rear window, brushing her teeth. Joey shadowboxing, no more than a silhouette in the unlit apartment. Joey in the open doorway, casting a wary eye as she paid for a take-out order. She minimized the windows, exposing a report beneath that listed sixty-three nodal points of facial recognition and the same Oregon address that Jack had scrawled on his truck window right before he’d been forced aboard that Black Hawk and lifted sixteen thousand feet in the air.

  “You were right,” Joey said. “They had someone sitting on me. Waiting for you.”

  Evan looked at the remaining two names.

  “Tim Draker,” he said. “Jack told me about him. Orphan L. He was one of Van Sciver’s guys until they fell out about a year ago. Is he dead, too?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  Evan put his finger on the trackpad, targeted Draker’s name. A streetlight camera had caught him exiting an anonymous drug-rehab center in Baltimore ten months ago. The imagery featured the NSA/CSS stamp.

  A newer surveillance photo caught Draker smoking outside a facility in Bethesda, Maryland. It was dated November 28, two days ago, the time stamp showing 8:37 P.M. Minutes before Evan had blasted through the door of the pest-control shop, killed everyone inside, and taken the laptop. Van Sciver’s update must have just come in. This second photo had no stamp or coding of any kind.

  “The NSA intel put Van Sciver on the trail of drug-treatment places,” Joey said. “From there it was only a matter of time.”

  Evan stared at the date on that surveillance photo and knew in his gut that Draker was lost.

  “Which means that we’re down to one little Indian,” Joey said.

  Evan stared at the last name: David Smith. Moved his fingertip a few inches. The ghost file opened.

  A photo of a twelve-year-old boy. A birth certificate. A file painting a familiar story, various foster homes in various poverty-stricken counties. And then it showed a recruitment report from two years ago, listing Tim Draker as David’s handler.

  Evan looked for more information, but there wasn’t any to be had. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Won’t Van Sciver have found him by now?”

  “There are 33,637 people named David Smith in the country,” Joey said. “And believe me, with how well Jack’s been stashing people? The kid ain’t using that name anymore.” She jabbed a finger at the screen. “These people are hidden as well as it is possible to hide someone. Everything I know—hell, everything you know about being invisible? We learned from Jack. So I think Van Sciver’s still searching for this kid. I think he’s chasing him down now. And if we don’t find him first, he’s gonna
kill the kid like he killed everyone else.”

  Evan stood up. Laced his hands at the back of his neck and breathed. “All this…”

  Joey completed the thought. “All this is because of you.”

  He looked at her.

  “Van Sciver’s killing his way to you right now,” she said. “All of us—these five names and however many more Van Sciver doesn’t have yet? We’re all on borrowed time.”

  “How do we help that kid?” Evan said.

  “We find him.”

  “We can’t compete with Van Sciver’s resources. I have access to databases, but he’s at a whole other level.”

  “You’re right.” Joey was chewing her thumb again, drifting behind the table, her eyes intense. “When it comes to David Smith we have an absence of data.”

  “Right,” Evan said. “How do you look for an absence of data?”

  “Deep-learning software,” she said. “Believe me, that’s what Van Sciver’s using.”

  She looked over at Evan, saw that he wasn’t following.

  “It’s machine learning using advanced mathematics,” she said.

  “That doesn’t help.”

  She leaned over the table, peering at him from above the laptop screen. “It finds patterns you don’t even know you’re looking for.” She took another turn around the table, passing behind Evan. “Between the name David Smith, potential fake names befitting a thirteen-year-old white kid, facial characteristics, his birth-certificate information, physical developmental changes, purchase patterns for foster kids fitting his analytics, past locations, receipts, meds, and thousands of other factors we’re not aware of but can be extrapolated from on the basis of that thin file”—she jabbed a finger at the screen—“let’s say that there are five billion combinations of data. Being conservative.”

  “Conservative.”

  “Yes. Without a machine learning system, it would be impossible to correlate all that data, let alone zero in on David Smith under his new name in his new hiding place.”