Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  Van Sciver drew in a lungful of aviation fuel and rotting flesh, a reek so strong he could taste it. They shouldered through a tangle of underbrush, and there it was. The downed fuselage rested on its side, nudged up against an enormous boulder like a dog trying to scratch its back. A tired seventies army-transport chopper repurposed for private charters, sold and resold a dozen times over, now being slowly devoured by the jungle.

  The pilot had been thrown through the windscreen. His body, held together by the flight suit, was cradled tenderly upside down in the embrace of a strangler vine twenty feet off the ground. His flesh seemed to be alive, crawling with movement.

  Fire ants.

  A rustling came from the fuselage, and then a desiccated voice: “Is someone there? God, please say someone’s there.”

  Van Sciver and Thornhill drew close. Van Sciver had to crouch to see inside.

  The NSA agent hung lifeless from the sideways seat, his arms dangling awkwardly, a roller-coaster rider in the twist of a corkscrew. The shoulder harness bit into a charcoal suit jacket and—given the heat—seemed to be making some headway through the underlying flesh as well.

  The agent’s fellow passenger had managed to pop his own seat belt. He’d landed with his legs bent all wrong. A shiv of bone jutted up through his pants at the shin. The skin around it was puffy and red.

  Tears glistened on his cheeks. “I thought I was gonna die here. I’ve been alone with … in the middle of…” His sobs deteriorated into dry heaves.

  Van Sciver looked past him at the dead agent and felt a spark of hope flare inside his chest. The body looked reasonably well preserved hanging there. Van Sciver forced his excitement back into the tiny dark place in his chest that he reserved for Orphan X. He’d been close so many times, only to have his fingertips slip off the ledge.

  “The harness kept him off the ground,” Van Sciver said to Thornhill. “Away from the elements. We might have a shot.”

  The passenger reached toward Van Sciver. “Water,” he said. “I need water.”

  Thornhill darted inside, hopping gracefully through the wreckage until he stood beneath the agent, practically eye to eye.

  “He’s fairly intact,” Thornhill said. “Not gonna place at the Miss America pageant, but still. We got us a good-looking corpse.”

  The passenger gave with a dry, hacking cough. “Water,” he whispered.

  “Let’s get the body out,” Van Sciver said.

  “I’ll unclip the harness,” Thornhill said, “and you ease him down. The last thing we need is his festering ass disintegrating all over the fuselage.”

  “Please.” The passenger clutched the cuff of Van Sciver’s pants. “Please at least look at me.”

  Van Sciver removed the pistol from his underarm tension holster and shot the passenger through the head. Taking hold of the passenger’s loafers, he dragged the man clear of the fuselage. Then he returned to the downed helo, and he and Thornhill gently guided the agent down. It involved some unpleasant grappling. The stench was terrible, but Van Sciver was accustomed to terrible things.

  They carried the corpse gingerly out into the midday blaze and laid it on a flat stretch of ground. Thornhill’s eyes were red. Choking noises escaped his throat. They took a break, walking off a few paces to find fresh air. When they got back to civilization, Van Sciver realized, their clothes would have to be burned.

  By unspoken accord they reconvened over the body. They stared down at it. Then Van Sciver flicked out a folding knife and cut the clothes off.

  The bloated body lay there, emitting gases.

  Thornhill was ordinary-looking by design, as were most of the Orphans, chosen so they could blend in, but his smile was unreasonably handsome. He flashed it now.

  “This shit right here? We are livin’ the dream.”

  Van Sciver reached into his cargo pocket, removed two sets of head-mounted watch-repair binoculars, and handed one to Thornhill.

  “Any idea where it would be?” Thornhill asked.

  “Fingernails, toenails, hair.”

  They tied their shirts over their mouths and noses like bandidos, got down on all fours, and began their gruesome exploration.

  The first hour passed like a kidney stone.

  The second was even worse.

  By the third, winged insects clustered, clogging the air around them. Shadows stretched like living things. Soon it would be nightfall, and they could not afford to wait another day.

  Thornhill was working the agent’s hair, picking through strand by strand. Finally he sat back on his heels, gulped a few quick breaths, and spit a wad of cottony saliva to the side. “Are we sure it’s on him?”

  Van Sciver paused, holding one of the agent’s jaundiced hands delicately. It was goosenecked at the wrist, ready to receive a manicure. The skin shifted unsettlingly around the bone.

  Sweat trickled down into Van Sciver’s eyes, and he armed it off. He could still see through his right eye, but after so much meticulous concentration the blown pupil and bruised retina gave him trouble focusing. He could feel the muscles straining. He did his best to blink free the moisture.

  Then he froze, seized by a notion.

  Leaning forward, he parted the dead man’s eye. Its pretty blue iris had already filmed over. He thumbed at an upper lid, splaying the lashes. Nothing. He checked the lower lid next.

  And there it was.

  A lash hidden among others. It was glossier and more robust, with a touch of swelling at the insertion point.

  It was a hair, all right. Just not the agent’s.

  With a pair of tweezers, Van Sciver plucked out the transplant and examined it more closely.

  The lash was synthetic.

  This was not the future of data storage. It was the original data storage. For billions of years, DNA has existed as an information repository. Instead of the ones and zeros that computers use to render digital information, DNA utilizes its four base codes to lay down data complex enough to compose all living matter. Not only had this staggeringly efficient mechanism remained stable for millennia, it required no power supply and was temperature-resistant. Van Sciver had reviewed the research and its big claims—that one day a teaspoon of synthetic DNA could contain the entirety of the world’s data. But despite all the outlandish talk of exabytes and zettabytes, the tech remained nascent and the costs staggering. In fact, the price of encoding a single megabyte with digital information was just shy of twenty grand.

  But the information on this single eyelash was worth more than that.

  To Van Sciver it was worth everything.

  It contained nothing directly related to Orphan X—Evan was too adept at covering his trail—but compared to the expansive data Van Sciver had been sifting through, it held a treasure trove of specifics.

  Holding the lash up against the orange globe of the descending sun, Van Sciver realized that he had forgotten to breathe.

  He also realized something else.

  For the first time he could recall, he was smiling.

  3

  Everything He Held Dear

  Venice was a beautiful city. But like many beauties, she was temperamental.

  Furious weather kept the tourists inside. Rain hammered the canals, wore at the ancient stone, bit the cheeks of the few brave enough to venture out. The storm washed the color from everything, turning the Floating City into a medley of dull grays.

  Nearing the Ponte di Rialto, Jim Harville spotted the man tailing him. A black man in a raincoat, bent into the punishing wind a ways back. He was skilled—were it not for the weather-thinned foot traffic, Harville never would have picked him up. It had been several years since he’d operated, and his skills were rusty. But habits like these were never entirely forgotten.

  Harville hiked up the broad stone steps of the bridge, the Grand Canal surging furiously below. He reached the portico at the top and cast a glance back.

  Across the distance the men locked eyes.

  A gust of wind howled through
the ancient mazework of alleys, ruffling the shop canopies, making Harville stagger.

  When he regained his footing and looked back up, the man was sprinting at him.

  It was a strange thing so many years later to witness aggression this naked.

  Instinct put a charge into Harville, and he ran. Vanishing up a tight street, he took a hairpin left between two abandoned palazzos and shot across a cobblestone square. He had no weapon. The man pursuing him was younger and fitter. Harville’s only advantage was that he knew the city’s complex topography as well as he knew the contours of his wife’s back, the olive skin he traced lovingly each night as she drifted off to sleep.

  He shouldered through a boutique door, overturned a display table of carnival masks, barged through a rear door into an alley. Already he felt a burning in his legs. Giovanna liked to joke that she kept him young for fifty, but even so, retirement had left him soft.

  He careened out onto a calle at the water’s edge. Across the canal a good distance north, his pursuer appeared, skidding out from between two buildings.

  The man saw him. He flung his arms back, and his jacket slid off gracefully, as if tugged by invisible strings. Rain matted his white T-shirt to his torso, his dark skin showing through, the grooved muscles visible even at this distance.

  The man’s eyes dropped to the choppy water. And then he bounded across, Froggering from pier to trash barge and onward, leaving two moored gondolas rocking in his wake.

  Dread struck Harville’s stomach like a swallowed stone. He registered a single thought.

  Orphan.

  The man was on Harville’s side of the canal now, but propitiously, a wide intersecting waterway provided a barrier between them. As Harville began his retreat, the man vaulted over an embankment, rolled across a boat prow, and sprang up the side of a building, finding hand-and footholds on downspouts and window shutters. Even as he went vertical, his momentum barely slowed.

  That particular brand of obstacle-course discipline—parkouring—had come into popularity after Harville’s training, and he couldn’t help but watch with a touch of awe now.

  The man hauled himself through a third-story window, scaring a chinless woman smoking a cigarette back onto her heels. An instant later the man flew out of a neighboring window on Harville’s side of the waterway.

  Harville had lost precious seconds.

  He reversed, splashing through a puddle, and bolted. The narrow passages and alleys unfolded endlessly, a match for the thoughts racing in his head—Giovanna’s openmouthed laugh, their freestanding bathtub on the cracked marble floor, bedside candles mapping yellow light onto the walls of their humble apartment. Without a conscious thought, he was running away from home, leading his pursuer farther from everything he held dear.

  He sensed footfalls quickening behind him. Columns flickered past, lending the rain a strobe effect as he raced along the arcade bordering Piazza San Marco. The piazza was flooded, the angry Adriatic surging up the drains, blanketing the stones with two feet of water.

  Quite a sight to see the great square empty.

  Harville was winded.

  He stumbled out into the piazza, sloshing through floodwater. St. Mark’s Basilica tilted back and forth with each jarring step. The mighty clock tower rose to the north, the two bronze figures, one old, one young, standing their sentinels’ watch on either side of the massive bell, waiting to memorialize the passing of another hour.

  Harville wouldn’t make it across the square into the warren of alleys across. He was bracing himself to turn and face when the round punched through his shoulder blade and spit specks of lung through the exit wound as it cleared his chest.

  He went down onto his knees, his hands vanishing to the elbows in water. He stared dumbly at his fingers below, rippling like fish.

  The voice from behind him was as easygoing as a voice could be. “Orphan J. A pleasure.”

  Harville coughed blood, crimson flecks riding the froth.

  “Jack Johns,” the man said. “He was your handler. Way back when.”

  “I don’t know that name.” Harville was surprised that he could still form words.

  “Oh. You mistook me. That wasn’t a question. We haven’t gotten to the questions yet.” The man’s tone was conversational. Good-natured even.

  Harville’s arms trembled. He stared down at the eddies, the stone, his hands. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep his face out of the water.

  At some point it had stopped raining. The air had a stunned stillness, holding its breath in case the storm decided to come back.

  The man asked, “What are your current protocols when you contact Jack Johns?”

  Harville wheezed with each breath. “I don’t know that name.”

  The man crouched beside him. In his hand was a creased photograph. It showed Adelina nestled in Giovanna’s arms, feeding. She was still wearing her pink knit cap from the hospital.

  Harville felt air leaking through the hole in his chest.

  He told the man what he wanted to know.

  The man rose and stood behind him.

  The water stirred around Harville. He closed his eyes.

  He said, “I had a dream that I was normal.”

  The man said, “And it cost you everything.”

  The pistol’s report lifted a flight of pigeons off the giant domes of the basilica.

  As the man pocketed his pistol and forged his way through the floodwater, the hour sounded. High on the clock tower, the two bronze forms, one old, one young, struck the bell they’d been ringing across these worn stones for five centuries and counting.

  Back to the Present

  4

  Are You Ready?

  Evan was still sitting in the kitchen, the Sub-Zero numbing his bare back, the glass of vodka resting on his knee. The phone remained at his face. He felt not so much paralyzed as unwilling to move. Movement would prove that time was passing, and right now time passing meant that bad things would happen.

  He reminded himself to breathe. Two-second inhale, four-second exhale.

  He reached for the Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.

  Jack had taught him the Commandments and would want—no, demand—that Evan honor them now.

  The Fourth wasn’t working, so he dug for the Fifth: If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.

  There was no situation that could not be made worse.

  The vodka glass perspired in Evan’s hand.

  The phone connection was as silent as the grave.

  Van Sciver said, “Did you hear me?”

  Evan said, “No.”

  He wanted more time, though for what, he wasn’t sure.

  “I said, ‘Go fetch your digital contact lenses. I have something you want to see.’”

  Two-second inhale, four-second exhale.

  “Let me be perfectly clear,” Evan said. “If you do this, nothing will ever stop me from getting to you.”

  “But, X,” Van Sciver said pleasantly, “you don’t even know what I have planned.”

  The line cut out.

  Two-second inhale, four-second exhale.

  Evan rose.

  He set the glass down on the poured-concrete island. He walked out of the kitchen and past the living wall, a vertical garden of herbs and vegetables. The rise of greenery gave the penthouse its sole splash of color and life, the air fragranced with chamomile and mint.

  He headed across the open plain of the condo, past the heavy bag and the pull-up bar, past the freestanding central fireplace, past a cluster of couches he couldn’t remember ever having sat on. He walked down a brief hall with two empty brackets where a katana sword had once hung. He entered his bedroom with its floating Maglev bed, propelled two feet off the floor by ridiculously powerful rare-earth magnets. Only cable tethers kept it from flying up and smashing into the ceiling. Like Evan, it was designed for maximum functionality—slab, mattress, no legs, no headboard, no footboard.

  He entered his bathroom
, nudged the frosted-glass shower door aside on its tracks. It rolled soundlessly. Stepping into the shower, he curled his hand around the hot-water lever. Hidden sensors in the metal read his palm imprint. He turned it the wrong way, pushing through a slight resistance, and a hidden door broke free from the tile pattern of the stall and swung inward.

  Evan stepped into the Vault, the nerve center of his operations as the Nowhere Man.

  Four hundred square feet of exposed beams and rough concrete walls, crowded from above by the underbelly of the public stairs leading to the roof. An armory and a workbench occupied one side. A central sheet-metal desk shaped like an L held an impeccably ordered array of computer towers, servers, and antennae. Monitors filled an entire wall, showing various hacked security feeds of Castle Heights. From here Evan could also access the majority of law-enforcement databases without leaving a footprint.

  The door to the massive gun safe hung ajar. Beneath a row of untraceable, aluminum-forged, custom-machined ARES 1911 pistols, a slender silver case the size of a checkbook rested on a shelf.

  Evan opened it.

  Ten radio-frequency identification-tagged fingernails and a high-def contact lens waited inside.

  The device, which Evan had taken from the dead body of one of Van Sciver’s Orphans, served as a double-blind means of communication between Evan and his nemesis.

  Evan applied the nails to his fingertips and inserted the lens. A virtual cursor floated several feet from his head.

  He moved his fingers in the space before him, typing in thin air: HERE.

  A moment later Van Sciver’s reply appeared: EXCELLENT. ARE YOU READY?

  Evan took a deep breath, wanting to hold on to these last precious seconds before his world flew apart.

  He typed: YES.

  * * *

  Jack finally decided enough was enough and pulled his truck over onto a broad dirt fire road that split an endless field of cotton. Dust from the tires ghosted its way down the deserted strip of road. He couldn’t see the chopper in the darkness, but he heard it circling high overhead. He threw the truck into park, kept his eyes pegged on the rearview, and waited, his breath fogging in the winter chill.