Into the Fire Read online

  ME: HOW’D HE DIE?

  DAD: GUESS HE WAS SHOT. PROB’LY ONE OF THE BAD GUYS HE HAD UNDER THE MAGNIFYING GLASS. A DAMN SHAME. ALWAYS THE GOOD ONES WHO GO YOUNG.

  Pocketing the phone, Max started to climb out of his truck, but then he looked up and halted on all fours on the passenger seat. Up on the second floor of his building, the perennially unshaven and surnameless Mr. Omar had just emerged from his apartment to head to Max’s place next door. He shuffled through the jaundiced beams thrown from the outdoor hallway’s overhead lights. When he reached Max’s door, he knocked with considerable force.

  “Max, Max, Max. You’re late again. Max? I can hear you in there. Don’t make me keep being a bother, my friend. I have more important matters to handle, believe me.”

  Mr. Omar rapped a few more times, sighed audibly, and returned to his apartment. Through the big front window, Max watched him settle back into his Barcalounger, bathed in the aquarium light of his television.

  Tomorrow’s shift would put Max over the top for this month’s rent—he’d beeline straight from work to Mr. Omar and settle up then.

  Crawling from the truck, he closed the door as quietly as he could manage. Rather than risk the stairs and walk past Mr. Omar’s window, he headed for the telephone pole at the edge of the building. Convenient U-shaped steps studded the pole.

  Up he went, getting one foot on the convenient gutter ledge, and then in through the bathroom window he kept unlocked for moments like this.

  He stepped down off the closed toilet lid and reached for the door when he heard it in the bedroom.

  A tearing sound.

  Shush shush shush.

  He paused, not trusting his ears.

  There it was again, a trio of unsettling rasps.

  His lips felt suddenly dry. When he reached for the doorknob, his hand trembled ever so slightly.

  He turned the doorknob slowly. The hinges were mercifully silent. The apartment lights were turned off, but a two-inch strip of pale yellow from the outside hall fell across his eye when he put it to the crack.

  A man.

  In his bedroom.

  Working in the dark.

  Wife-beater T-shirt. Prominent arm muscles oiled with sweat and marked with something else: Tattoos? Henna ink? Scars? One of them at the triceps was swirled like a pinwheel. The man’s back was turned, his shoulders rippling, his hands set to some unseen task. The smell of him hung heavily in the unvented air, a pungent musk like meat on the verge of turning.

  Max’s drawers had been emptied, his few possessions strewn across the floor, the bureau tipped away from the wall. The TV was upended, holes punched in the drywall.

  The man straightened up and armed his brow, his fist coming clear, clenched around a combat knife with a serrated edge.

  Letters on his forearm resolved from the shadows sufficiently for Max to piece them together: THE TERROR. Visible past the man’s thighs, beneath the stripped-aside sheets, the mattress had been sawed open at intervals, the ticking bulged out intestinally.

  The man spun the knife in his hand with a skilled proficiency, bent over the mattress once more, and punched the blade into a virgin spot. It made a thwack as if puncturing flesh.

  And then the nightmare grating came once again: shush shush shush.

  A thought blinked through Max’s brain. If he hadn’t walked back to the homeless guy at the trail, he would’ve been three minutes earlier, which meant he wouldn’t have seen Mr. Omar, which meant he would have strolled right through his front door into the teeth of this nightmare.

  The rising burn in his chest demanded he ease out a breath. Painstakingly, he inched the door back into the frame and rotated the doorknob to its resting place. The click when he released it might as well have been a clap of thunder.

  He backed to the toilet, crinkling his eyes as the blistered linoleum compressed with a click. One room over he heard a throat-muffled grunt, another thwack, and then the shush shush shush of the blade.

  Max couldn’t help but imagine the knife working its way through sinew and tendons. His vision speckled, and a wave of light-headedness swept through him. He firmed his legs, blinked himself back from the edge.

  Move, he told himself. Quick and quiet. You can do this.

  He patted blindly behind the toilet tank, tore free the canary-yellow envelope, and wormed back out through the window.

  3

  Ordinary

  On the twenty-first floor of the high-end but somewhat dated Castle Heights Residential Tower, there is a door.

  It looks like an ordinary door, but it is not.

  The thin wood façade, which resembles every other residential door in the building, disguises a steel interior, which in turn houses an elaborate network of security bars. The core is filled with water, a new measure designed to disperse heat from a battering ram. A ram will buckle before it will breach.

  On the other side of the door is a penthouse.

  It looks like an ordinary penthouse, but it is not.

  If you wander the seven thousand square feet of gunmetal-gray floor, you will see a variety of workout pods, from heavy bags to racked kettlebells. You will see a freestanding fireplace, a few rarely used couches, a spiral staircase winding up to a reading loft. The open design gives you a clear view into the kitchen with its poured-concrete countertops and brushed-nickel fixtures. You will encounter a living wall from which sprout mint, chamomile, and a potpourri of other culinary herbs. What you won’t notice is that the panoramic glass walls that gaze east to downtown Los Angeles and south to Century City are composed of bullet-resistant polycarbonate thermoplastic resin. Or that the retractable sunscreens, shaded an innocuous periwinkle, are made of an exotic titanium composite woven tightly enough to stop any sniper rounds that might penetrate the bullet-resistant panes.

  At the back of the clean, minimalist space, you can walk down the sole hall. You might enter a master bedroom suite. To the right is a bathroom.

  It looks like an ordinary bathroom, but it is not.

  If you nudge the frosted-glass shower door, it will roll back silently on barn-hanger carbon-steel wheels. The hot-water lever hides invisible sensors, keyed to the palm print of one person only. Concealed expertly in the tile pattern is a secret door.

  The bedroom is as sparse spotless as the rest of the house—bureau, floor, bed.

  It looks like an ordinary bed, but it is not.

  At second glance you might notice it is floating in the air. The mattress sits on a slab that is repelled from the floor by neodymium rare-earth magnets strong enough to anchor a small ship. Steel cables hold the slab suspended two feet off the floor. Were they severed, the slab would fly up, smash through the ceiling, and go airborne above the Wilshire Corridor.

  A man sits on the bed, legs crossed, spine straight, so still that he might be carved from marble. He lives by a set of Commandments, and this act of meditating embodies the Second: How you do anything is how you do everything. His eyes are closed, but not all the way. His open hands rest on his thighs. He is nowhere, but precisely here. He is nothing more than his breath. He is doing one thing and one thing only. This is the opposite of multitasking.

  He looks like an ordinary man.

  He is not.

  * * *

  Within the top echelon of intel circles in nations of influence and instability, Evan Smoak was known as Orphan X.

  At the age of twelve, he’d been pulled out of a foster home in East Baltimore and raised in a full black covert operation buried so deep inside the U.S. government that virtually no one knew it existed. His upbringing consisted of relentless physical, emotional, cultural, and psychological training, a grinding wheel that honed him into a razor-sharp implement. His handler, Jack Johns, raised him not merely to be a top-tier assassin but also a human being—two reactive elements that, if put under enough pressure, might combust.

  And then Jack had taught him to integrate those pieces. To balance on the tightrope dividing yin from yang. To no
t combust.

  It was a lifelong challenge.

  When Evan had gone rogue from the Orphan Program, he’d kept his other alias—the Nowhere Man—and devoted himself to helping people in dire circumstances who had no one to turn to. His clients reached him by calling a little-known number that had become the stuff of urban legend: 1-855-2-NOWHERE. Each digitized call traveled over the Internet through a maze of encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels, circling the planet before reaching Evan’s RoamZone phone.

  He answered the same way every time: Do you need my help?

  And then he stepped in to protect the innocent because no one else would, to shield them from those who would do them harm. To hunt a monster, the shopworn proverb went, you must become one. But to Evan’s ear the saying had always rung hollow.

  He had been monstrous once, a weapon sharpened to a singular point. His role as the Nowhere Man was an undoing of that. Every time he helped someone, he regained some tiny part of his soul.

  And when he was done, he asked his clients to pass the favor along. To empower themselves by finding someone else in untenable circumstances.

  Evan had last helped a young man with a gentle demeanor and a special brain, who had been terrorized by an entire criminal enterprise. Like every client before him, Trevon Gaines had his assignment—to find Evan the next person in desperate need. To give the Nowhere Man’s phone number to that person. And Evan would be waiting once more on the other end of the line, ready to pick up and do it all over again.

  “Redemption” was an imperfect word for what he was seeking. Confronting the world with his own code, illuminating the darkness with the guttering light of his own morality—that was a process of becoming.

  Becoming less sharp. More human.

  The more life he let in, the more he could sense the dawn of a different existence shimmering miragelike in the distance. He’d been on a single trajectory since the age of twelve, launched from a slingshot into all the menace mankind had to offer. As the Nowhere Man, he’d shifted his bearings, sure, but not his fundamental direction.

  In the past year, he’d resected the cancer of his past. He’d vanquished the corrupt Orphans pursuing him. And the man at whose direction they’d been acting—the president of the United States. The plan to wipe out the innocent Orphans had been stopped and the survivors scattered to the wind.

  Now that Evan was no longer running from something, he’d started to wonder where he was running to. Lately he felt worn down, bone-tired. More and more, questions were arising from some deep-buried place.

  How much atonement was enough?

  How much longer could he forge through the refuse-choked alleys of cities, staring down eyes as black as the abyss, souls clouded with sick intentions?

  Would he just keep going until he was holding down a slab at the morgue?

  At some point had he earned enough of himself back to deserve something better?

  He didn’t know. But he’d decided nonetheless.

  The next adventure would be his last.

  One more ring of the durable black phone that he kept on his person at all times. One more time he’d shatter through into the underworld and—if he could make it back alive—carry someone out of damnation. One more time sacrificing a pound of his flesh to win a piece of his soul.

  One last mission and he was out.

  4

  A Healthy Touch of Paranoia

  Parked in an alley behind a grocery store in West L.A., Max took a deep breath and tore open the cheery yellow envelope Grant had given him.

  It contained a folded piece of Grant’s letterhead with a name and phone number scrawled on it. Lorraine Lennox, who Max took to be the reporter at the Los Angeles Times who Grant told him he could trust. As he unfolded the bottom flap of the letter, a smaller yellow envelope tumbled into his lap. Three words written boldly across the front: “DO NOT OPEN.” It had some heft to it, as if it contained a silver dollar.

  Max tossed the smaller envelope onto the passenger seat. Stared at the number on the letter.

  “If anything ever happens to me, call the number inside.”

  Max wasn’t worth much, but he was worth his word.

  He dialed.

  Four rings to voice mail. Lorraine Lennox, asking him to leave a message, sounded trustworthy enough. At the beep he said, “Yeah, hi, it’s … uh, Max Merriweather. I need … I really need to talk to you as soon as possible. So call me back. Like now.” He heard the intensity rising in his voice and took a breath. “I’m sorry if that sounds all stalkery. It’s just— Look, I’m in a super weird situation—dangerous, even—and I need to … Uh, you’re the only person I’m supposed to talk to. Because I promised, and…” He rubbed at his bleary eyes, unsure how to explain. “Please call me back. Okay. Thanks.”

  He rattled off his phone number and hung up.

  He blew out a shaky breath and reminded himself that a whole lotta folks do better with worse, that he could be in Aleppo or Fallujah right now.

  That he wasn’t absolutely fucking terrified.

  He was down to a quarter tank of gas, and he had no clothes, no money, no clue what to do next. He debated for the fifth time or the fiftieth whether he should go to the cops, but Grant had told him to trust nobody except Lorraine Lennox. Max had given his word, and now Grant’s request had upgraded itself into a dying wish. Plus, encountering a bowie knife–wielding psychopath nicknamed “The Terror” had inspired a healthy touch of paranoia.

  The air coming in through the vents carried the sickly-sweet smell of rotting produce, which didn’t help the acid roiling in his gut.

  He put his hands on the steering wheel as if he were going somewhere, but he had nowhere to go. He cursed Grant, himself, the whole untenable situation, and then he lost an internal struggle and reached for the phone once again.

  This time a prerecorded message announced Ms. Lennox’s office mailbox as full.

  He hung up and glared over at the DO NOT OPEN envelope.

  It glared back.

  He reached for it and then withdrew his hand.

  Grant inspired a kind of compliance. The oldest of the cousins, he’d always been the patriarch of this generation of Merriweathers. For his fiftieth birthday last March, he’d rented a yacht and hosted a champagne-and-starlight party on the marina. Max had heard all about it from his old man—crab claws and Perrier-Jouët, a string quartet and iPad party favors, each luxury recounted with a kind of accusation.

  Max had entered the world a disappointment to his father. His mother had died from complications giving birth to him, a cardiorespiratory arrest from an amniotic-fluid embolism, big words he’d learned very young. His father, from a close-knit family of five brothers, had raised him stoically, pretending not to resent the fact that his only kid had robbed him of his shot at the future he’d imagined. Terry had seen through his paternal duties with joyless competence, providing the basics and little more.

  The best defense, Max had quickly figured out, was to keep his head down, to be unseen, the squeakless wheel. After all, he already had enough to apologize for. Not wanting to intrude on his father, he’d GED’d his way out of Culver City High and gone to work. As long as he had his freedom, he was content to be the least robust apple on the family tree.

  Until Violet.

  The summer of his twenty-sixth birthday, he’d met her after a George Thorogood concert at the Morongo Casino near Palm Springs. His buddy scored tickets, and Max bought the overpriced beers, and they’d spilled out onto the casino floor afterward with “Bad to the Bone” ringing in their ears and an unearned sense of optimism for what the night could hold.

  He’d spotted her in front of a quarter slot machine, twisting a strand of silken black hair around her finger, a near-empty bucket of quarters in her lap. She’d left her sandals on the floor, one bare foot propped on the base of the empty stool beside her. Dark eyes and red lips against pale-as-milk skin. She looked like an artist’s sketch, alluring and complicated, deep w
aters moving beneath that tranquil façade.

  Max’s friend was lost to a roulette wheel, so Max had rushed over to change in a fiver, casting glances over his shoulder all the while, worried she was a vision that might vanish. For the first time since junior high, he had to work up his nerve to approach a member of the opposite sex.

  “Can I sit here?” he asked, jingling his bucket.

  “I’m having an unlucky run,” she said, not looking up. “If you’re smart, you’ll get as far away from me as possible.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not that smart.”

  At this she favored him with a wry smile.

  And right on cue his first pull of the one-armed bandit hit triple cherries, coins sheeting clamorously from the chute. Two hundred twenty bucks paid out in quarters felt like a million.

  Along with a half dozen onlookers, she’d congratulated him. He’d gathered up his money and his courage and said, “I’d really like to buy you dinner.”

  They were close enough then that he could breathe in her perfume, orange blossom and vanilla. He didn’t know much about fragrances, but it smelled expensive.

  She regarded him with a dark gaze. “So you got a bunch of money and now you want to ask me out?”

  “In fairness,” he said, “I wanted to ask you out before I got a bunch of money. But now I can afford to.” He shrugged. “I was just looking for an excuse to sit next to you.”

  She bunched her lips and studied him, but he could see the amused grooves at the edges of her eyes, and that optimism he’d felt earlier swelled in his chest.

  “Okay,” she said, “but we’re splitting the bill.”

  She came from money, a lot of money, her parents owning a thousand or so housing units in less savory neighborhoods around Greater Los Angeles. They had used the purse strings to control her for so long that, she confessed reluctantly over surf ’n’ turf, she’d thought that was just how families worked.