Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  “Okay,” Evan said. “So what’s the best way for us to do that?”

  She paused long enough to flick a smile his way. “Someone who knows where he is—”

  “—and a hammer,” Evan said. He stood up. “Seriously, Joey. Can we break into somewhere that has these capabilities and run the data?”

  “No. This kind of processing takes time. Days even.”

  “What equipment do we need?” he said.

  “A pile of hardware,” she said. Mutual exasperation had given the discussion the tenor of an argument. “And like, say, a shit-ton of common graphics-processing unit chips. The mathematics involved in machine learning take advantage of the massive parallelism of the thousands of cores in those things. We’d need giant-ass GPU arrays, computer towers stuffed full of graphics cards, linked together with a high-speed InfiniBand network, running at eighty gigabits and—.” She stopped, looked at him. “More stuff I’d explain to you if I thought you could understand.”

  “So how do we do that? Right now?”

  “Raid the computer-graphics lab building at Pixar.” She studied his expression. “Joking.”

  Frustration mounting, he drifted over and leaned against the couch. The cushions and pillows had been rearranged for her to sleep there, a T-shirt balled up for a pillow.

  He stared across at an old-school photograph of David Smith on the screen. He wore a dated bowl cut and a collared three-button shirt with a frayed shoulder. Lank blond hair with a cowlick parting his bangs, hazel eyes, pleasingly even features. His gaze was lifted from the camera, as if the photographer’s last directive had caught him off guard. He looked lost. They always did.

  “I’m not gonna let Van Sciver get to that kid,” Evan said. “So give me an answer for how to find you what you need to figure this out.”

  “It’s complex shit, X,” she said. “It’s not like we can just drive through a Best Buy. Your average person doesn’t have—”

  She stopped, mouth slightly ajar. She bowed her head, pinched her eyes at the bridge of her nose.

  “Joey?”

  “Don’t talk.”

  “Joey—”

  She held up a hand. He silenced. She stayed that way for thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is longer than it sounds.

  And then, with her face still buried in her hand, she said, “Bitcoin mining.”

  “What?”

  “You do bitcoin mining.” She lowered her hand, and her face held something more than joy. It held triumph. “No government regulation, no oversight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means you have a 2U rackmount computer bay.”

  “Two of them.”

  Her eyes were shining. “I could kiss you. Figuratively. Each rack has sixteen graphics cards. At four chips per card and 2,048 cores per chip, that gives us 8,192 graphics cores per card. We have thirty-two cards, which makes”—she closed her eyes again, her lips twitching—“262,144 graphics cores.” She looked up. “That’s a lotta horsepower.”

  “So I can just use my bitcoin-mining setup?”

  “No.” Her irritation flared again. “Everything has to be reconfigured.”

  Evan looked at the Snickers wrapper on the kitchen counter, the T-shirt pillow on the couch. “Pack up your stuff,” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  “I just came up with a new Commandment.”

  At this her eyebrows rose. “A new Commandment? What is it?”

  “‘Don’t fall in love with Plan A.’”

  42

  Undone by Target

  Joey stood in the great room of Evan’s penthouse in Castle Heights, staring at the tall ceiling, her mouth gaping. After the places she’d lived, it probably seemed like the Serengeti to her.

  Watching her, Evan felt discomfort beneath his skin, an awareness of his posture, how he was holding his arms. He could count on his fingers the number of people who had been inside 21A, and not one of them had known Evan’s real identity.

  “By bringing you here, I am giving you my absolute trust,” he said. “Trust I have given no one before. Ever.”

  Joey was taking a pass through the kitchen, trickling a finger across the countertops, the island, the Sub-Zero, like a housewife at an open house. But at his words she paused and looked over at him. The weight of the moment was potent enough that it quieted the air between them.

  “What if I don’t deserve it?” she said.

  “If you didn’t deserve it, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

  “This place,” she said. “It’s like something made up.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Judging by your taste in motels and your lovely safe-house decor, I thought you lived in … I don’t know, a shoe.”

  “A shoe.”

  “Yeah. But this? This is like a Louboutin.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A fancy shoe they talk about on TV.”

  “Oh.”

  “Where do I stay?” She looked around. “I guess I could sleep on the dumbbell rack.”

  He hadn’t thought about it. “There’s a couch in the reading loft.”

  “The reading loft. Of course.”

  He pointed at the steel spiral staircase. “Full bathroom, too.”

  She gestured tentatively. “May I?”

  “Yes.”

  She twisted up the stairs and disappeared.

  Another human. Out of sight. Inside his place. Doing whatever humans did.

  He looked over at the vertical garden. It looked back. He wondered if the plants were as uncomfortable as he was.

  “This might be a very bad idea,” he told them.

  He thought again of David Smith in his frayed school shirt and swallowed his own discomfort.

  After a moment Joey came back downstairs, running a hand along the curved handrail as if she wasn’t sure it was real.

  “Is it okay?” he asked.

  “It is,” she said, “more than okay.”

  “Let’s get to work.”

  “Okay. Quick question: Where are the extra sheets? And pillows?”

  He looked at her.

  “Like for guests,” she said.

  “Guests,” Evan repeated. He gave a nod. “We’ll figure that out later.”

  Joey turned to the east-facing windows, gawking at downtown in the distance. The discreet armor sunshades were raised, the glass tinted. She took a step closer. The entire wall was transparent. At least in one direction.

  She said, “You can see into so many apartments from here.”

  Evan said, “Yes.”

  She set her palms against the Lexan pane. He made a note to wipe off the smudges later.

  “Did Jack teach you about the Mangoday?” she asked.

  “Genghis Khan’s cavalrymen.”

  “Yeah.” She laughed, her breath clouding the glass. “He said they were the first elite special-operations force. They fought without fear, beyond the limits of the human body. Know how Khan trained those warriors?”

  “Built a regimen based on starving wolves.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “The hungrier a wolf is, the braver and more ferocious he gets.”

  “You’re saying that’s what we are.”

  “Yes. That’s what we are. And this place? This place looks like the home of someone who’s always hungry.”

  “For what?”

  She looked back at him, her hair flicking over one shoulder. Her hands remained on the window. “For everything out there.”

  Evan broke off her stare, heading down the hall to the master suite. “Let’s get to work,” he said again.

  He could hear Joey jogging to catch up. He opened the door and stepped into his bedroom. She crossed the threshold and halted.

  “Um,” she said. “Your bed is floating.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a bed,” she said. “That floats.”

  “We’ve covered that.”

  “Why?”

  Evan blinked at her. “Can we pl
ease just get to work?”

  She looked around. “Where?”

  * * *

  When they stepped through the hidden door into the Vault, Joey actually gasped. She circled the cramped space, checking the equipment, noting the monitors. “Is this…? Am I in…? This is heaven.”

  She picked up Vera II in her glass bowl. “Cute.”

  “Put her down.”

  “Her?”

  Before he could respond, Joey spotted the 2U rackmount computer bays and beelined over to them. “Good. Good. This is good.” She checked the setup. “You already have an InfiniBand cable, so you’re not entirely useless, but we have to pick up some basic Cat 6 cables.”

  “This is a state-of-the-art system. Why do we need Ethernet cables?”

  “What we’re building? It’s basically a bunch of graphics cores tied together. We need to hook up the machines, and the best way to do that is using plain old GigEthernet.” She studied his blank expression. “People today. You know how to work everything, but you don’t know how anything works.”

  She breezed past him, heading out. “Come on. Let’s go to Target.”

  “Target?”

  “Yeah, we can grab the cables there. Plus, I need stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  She faced him, filling the doorway. “There’s no soap. Or shampoo. Or conditioner. Or sheets. Or pillows. And I need some other stuff.”

  “I can get it for you.”

  “Girl stuff.”

  Oh.

  “Target it is,” he said.

  * * *

  Red signs blared 50-percent-off discounts. A kid stutter-stepped past, trying on a pair of sneakers still connected by a plastic loop while his mom shouted, “How’s the toe? Is your heel slipping?” A cluster of girls modeled sunglasses, checking themselves out using their iPhones as mirrors. A stern-looking father was saying, “Read the ingredients. There’s no food in food anymore.” A husband and wife were having a heated debate over detergent. “No, the lavender scent is the one that gives you the rash!”

  Evan stood frozen in the wide aisle of the second floor next to Joey.

  She did a double take at his stunned expression. “You okay?”

  A worker wheeled a pallet piled with jumbo diaper packs, nearly clipping Evan’s knee.

  He swallowed. “I’ll wait outside,” he said.

  * * *

  Evan stood in the parking structure just past Target’s sliding glass doors, breathing the night air, catching his breath. Brimming shopping carts rattled past concrete security posts, shoved by flustered parents in sweatpants. Evan kept his hand near his hidden pistol and his eyes on the circuslike surroundings. Parking disputes proliferated. Car horns blared. Remote-controlled minivan doors wheeled open. By the shopping-cart rack, kids fought over coin-operated kiddie rides.

  Exclamations crowded in on him.

  “—not gonna buy you a toy every single time we go to the—”

  “—I was already backing up! I saw the reverse lights before I was past the—”

  “—not the kind your mom uses, thank God, or the powder room would smell like the potpourri Olympics—”

  And then, mercifully, Joey was there. A few bags dangled from either arm. She was regarding his face with what seemed to be amusement.

  “Let’s go,” Evan said.

  “Aw. You’re all uncomfortable like. That’s so cute.”

  “Joey.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “You got the cable.”

  She smacked her forehead with her palm. “Shoot. I knew I forgot something.”

  He felt himself blanch. “Really?”

  “No.” She smiled that luminous smile. “Of course I have it. Let’s get you away from the big, scary discount retailer.”

  He gritted his teeth and turned for his truck.

  That’s when he saw Mia and Peter climbing out of Mia’s Acura.

  He stiffened. Turned back to Joey. Her face grew serious. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing. Someone I can’t see here. Now. With you. Go there. Pretend you’re … I don’t know, playing on the ride.”

  Joey took in the coin-operated kiddie rides. “The choo-choo train?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t know much about kids, do you?”

  He put a hand on her side, hustled her toward the front of the store.

  “Lemme help you out,” Joey said. “I’ll just pretend I’m playing on my phone.”

  “Okay. Fine. Good.”

  From behind him he heard Peter’s raspy voice: “Evan Smoak!”

  He turned as Mia and Peter approached.

  Mia said, “Evan?”

  “Hi.”

  “Wait. I didn’t think you knew where Target was. Lemme guess—there’s a sale on vodka?”

  “Just needed some … things.”

  “Is that girl with you?”

  “Who?” Evan said. “No.”

  Joey remained immersed in her phone. For all their collective tradecraft, the ruse was paper thin.

  “Yes,” Evan said.

  Joey looked up, gave a flat smile.

  Mia’s head cocked. Her gaze narrowed—the district-attorney gaze.

  “She’s sort of … my niece.” Evan said. “Staying with me awhile. She needed some…” He winced. “Girl things.”

  “I thought you didn’t have any family.”

  “She’s the closest to it, I guess. Kind of a … a second cousin’s kid. Through a marriage. But then her parents died. Sort of thing.”

  He took a deep breath, let it burn in his lungs. All his impeccable training, living his cover, becoming his legend. Never a skip, a stutter, a false move. And here he was.

  Undone by Target.

  “It’s a weird situation,” he conceded.

  “Indeed.” Mia’s glare softened only when she looked over at Joey. “Hi, honey. I’m Mia.”

  Joey came over and shook her hand. “Joey.”

  “Super-cool girl name,” Peter said.

  Mia’s ringtone sounded—the theme to Jaws, which signaled a call from her office. She said, “Gimme a sec,” and stepped away to answer.

  Peter blinked up at Joey and Evan. “I was in class today? And Zachary had an egg-salad sandwich? And he took it out right before lunch, and it totally smelled like someone farted, and it was on my side of the classroom, so everyone was looking at me, and what am I gonna say? Like, ‘I didn’t fart’? I mean, who believes that?”

  Joey looked over at Evan. “Does it have an off button?”

  Standing a few paces away, Mia paused from her call to glance across at Evan, her displeasure clear.

  Was she mad at him for having a sort-of niece? For being at Target? For not introducing her to Joey right away?

  Peter had cornered Joey against the choo-choo ride. “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Matte black,” Joey said.

  “What do you like to play?”

  “I don’t.”

  “What do you like to play with?”

  “The entrails of children.”

  “What’s an entrails?”

  “Guts.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Peter processed this behind his charcoal eyes. “Really they’re the guts, or really that’s what you like to play with?”

  Evan cleared his throat. “Time we get going.”

  Mia wrapped up her phone call and stepped back over, ruffling Peter’s hair.

  “Mom,” Peter said, “Evan Smoak’s niece person is awesome.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Mia said. “It was nice to meet you, sweetheart.”

  She shot Evan a look that seemed to code for murderous rage, put her arm around Peter’s shoulders, and disappeared through the automated glass doors.

  Evan exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

  “Well played,” Joey said. “Orphan X.”<
br />
  Evan started for his truck, not caring if she kept up.

  43

  Grown-Man Problems

  Evan crouched gargoyle-still at the edge of the crack-house roof, peering through the shattered stained-glass window into the church next door.

  Freeway sat on the carpeted steps leading to the altar, a king on his throne. A series of kids entered, each slinging a giant zippered bag at his feet. They looked no older than Evan had been when he was taken from the Pride House Group Home.

  Indoctrination—best started early.

  The boys entered the church with swagger, but all signs of confidence evaporated by the time they reached the altar. They kept their heads lowered, afraid to meet Freeway’s stare.

  It was a hard stare to meet.

  He cast his solid black eyes over his spoils, giving a faint nod to dismiss each child in turn.

  Evan scanned the other gang members clustered in groups around the tipped-over pews, searching for Benito’s son. But just like this morning, there was no sign of Xavier. Evan had left Joey in the Vault, hard at work reassembling his hardware. The thought of her in his sanctuary unattended, pulling cords and handling his possessions, caused a discomfort that was physical, insects running beneath his skin. He couldn’t think about it right now and keep his focus.

  And given that he was surveilling the deadliest gang in the world, he needed to keep his focus.

  A commotion at the front door drew his attention. A group of women were corralled into the vestibule. Bright makeup, torn stockings, stiff hair. One was missing the heel on one of her red pumps.

  Evan was surprised to see that the men who had brought them were not yet visibly tattooed. Lowly initiates, given the lowly task of gathering the street girls.

  As the newcomers shuffled through the sporadic falls of light from the overheads, Evan caught a glimpse of a young man in the back. Xavier. He helped herd the women through the nave toward the altar. He wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off, the gym-toned muscles of his shoulders rippling.

  The women rotated before Freeway, handing over wads of crumpled cash that he eyed and then handed to one of his lieutenants. None of the women met Freeway’s eyes. Several seemed to hold their breath until they scurried away to gather by the bags of stolen goods.

  The last woman in the group, the one with the broken heel, stepped forward and offered up a few tattered bills. Freeway examined them, clearly unimpressed, then let them fall to the floor.