Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Page 23

  She nodded.

  Evan said, “It’s probably the only thing in the world he has that’s actually his.”

  Her mocha eyes held the weight of all forty lives she’d been charged with. “That’s probably right.”

  “I doubt he’d run away and leave it behind.”

  “What are you saying, Mr. Wayne? The boy broke out. Happens all the time.”

  Evan set the Lego rebel back on the radiator and stepped toward the sash window. It rattled up arthritically. He leaned out, noted the fresh gouge marks in the paint on the sill.

  “They usually break out from the outside?” he said.

  The charge nurse came over and looked at the window, and her hand pressed against her neck. Seeing her expression, he regretted his phrasing.

  “I’ll call the police again,” she said quietly.

  The boys had silenced; even Jorell had sobered up.

  Evan started for the door. “Like you said, it’s in their hands now.”

  As he hustled out, he passed that girl in the hall, forgotten, picking at the hem of her shirt with bloody fingernails. In his mind’s eye, he pictured Joey sitting in her place.

  He blinked away the image, banishing it from his thoughts, and kept on.

  50

  The Best Hat Trick

  Evan sat in the passenger seat of the minivan, the Virginia sun pounding the windshield. Joey had taken the news of David Smith’s kidnapping stoically, though he’d noticed her fists whiten on the steering wheel as he’d filled her in.

  “One hour,” she finally said. “One hour earlier and we could’ve saved him.”

  “We don’t know that he’s dead,” Evan said.

  “Orphan J. Orphan C. Orphan L. All the other names on that file are dead. Except me. If Van Sciver kidnapped David Smith, he already killed him.”

  They stared up the block at the crumbling façade of the McClair Children’s Mental Health Center. It radiated a kind of despair that resonated in Evan’s cells. He thought of the boys he’d grown up with in Pride House. Andre and Danny and Tyrell and Ramón. Every so often Evan checked in on them from the safe remove of the Vault, searching them out in the databases. Danny was serving a dime for armed robbery at the Chesapeake Detention Facility, his third stint. Ramón had overdosed in a by-the-hour motel in Cherry Hill. Tyrell had finally managed to join the army, KIA outside Mosul on his first deployment.

  Any one of their fates should have been shared by Evan. He was them and they were him.

  Until Jack.

  Searching for hope here on this block was hard, but Evan tried. David Smith was owed that much.

  “If Van Sciver wanted him dead, why didn’t they just shoot him in the room?” Evan said.

  “Because that would be a big public thing,” Joey said. “A runaway’s just another story.”

  “When a kid gets killed in a neighborhood like this, it’s not a big public thing. It’s two lines of print below the fold. Everyone would think it was gang retribution. Remember, no one in the world knows who David Smith is.”

  “Except Van Sciver,” Joey said. “And us.”

  Evan felt it then, the first ray of hope, straw-thin and pale, not enough to warm him but enough to lead the way. “The smart move isn’t to kill him. The smart move is to use him for bait.”

  “So what do we do?” Joey asked.

  “Swallow the hook. Let them reel.”

  “And if he’s already dead?”

  Evan stared at the sign above the security gate of the facility’s front door. A number of the letters were smashed or broken.

  He said, “It’s a chance I have to take.”

  “That sounds less than strategic.”

  “The Tenth Commandment.”

  “‘Never let an innocent die,’” she quoted. “So where do we start?”

  Evan took out the Samsung Galaxy cell phone he’d lifted off the dead man in Portland. He called up Signal, the encrypted comms software that led directly to Van Sciver. He was about to press the icon to call when he realized that his emotions around this place and these foster kids were infecting him, making him reckless.

  He thumbed the phone back off.

  “We need to gather more intel before I make contact,” he said. “There’s an ATM at the gas station two blocks that way, facing the street. Maybe we can get the security footage, see what we see.”

  Joey made a sound in her throat. Unimpressed.

  “What?”

  “If they drove that route,” she said. “If we know who we’re looking for.” She was leaning forward, straining the seat belt, seemingly peering up at the telephone wires overhead.

  “You have a better suggestion?” Evan asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” She pointed through the windshield. “See those streetlights?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re not just streetlights.” She reached into the backseat, retrieving her laptop. “Those are Sensity Systems lights. We’re talking thermal, sound, shock, video—they continuously gather information and suck everything into the cloud.” She ran her fingers through her hair, flipped it over so the shaved strip showed above her right ear. “’Member how Van Sciver got onto Orphan L?”

  “A surveillance photo of him smoking.”

  “Taken from a streetlight,” she said. “We’re gonna use Van Sciver’s game against him.”

  Evan stared at the streetlights, but they looked ordinary to him. “You sure those are the kind you’re talking about?”

  She gave him a look, then booted up her computer.

  He said, “How can they afford something like that in a broke neighborhood like this?”

  Her fingers were already working the keys in a fury. “Federal funding. It’s part of the Safe Cities initiative. Detroit got a hundred mil off the government, and if Detroit can get it…” She glanced over. “You don’t keep up on this stuff, do you?”

  “No.”

  “The streetlights are all LED. The whole system gets paid for by the money cities save from the reduction in electricity costs. How ’bout that? A government plan that isn’t a total cluster. Not that it started with the government. The software was developed to track foot traffic at shopping malls, see what stores people go into, what they look at, how they respond to sales announcements, coupons, all that.”

  “Can you hack it?”

  She kept her head lowered, her fingers moving. “I’m gonna pretend you didn’t ask me that.”

  He cast an eye toward the facility’s front door. “The cops are gonna be here soon.”

  “Well,” she said, “then it’s a good thing I’m fast.”

  * * *

  “Turn left up there. No, the next intersection. Good. Now run it straight for a half mile.”

  Evan was driving the minivan, Joey in the passenger seat, directing him through traffic and simultaneously hammering away at the laptop. He felt increasingly like her chauffeur, an observation that, he was chagrinned to note, Mia had once made in regard to Peter.

  Evan was becoming just another suburban dad.

  Joey had what looked like a dozen windows open on the screen. He risked a glance over. On one of them she seemed to be reviewing footage angled on the eastern flank of the McClair Children’s Mental Health Center.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Patience, young Padawan.” The laptop was humming. “Wait. You were supposed to turn left back there. Hang on.” She popped another window to the fore, this one featuring a GPS map. “Go left, left, right.”

  He obeyed. Focusing on the road and the rearview mirrors rather than on Joey’s active laptop screen took some discipline.

  “Okay. Just—pull over here. We’re in range.”

  He looked around. A fenced park. A courthouse. A McDonald’s.

  “In range of what?” he said.

  She ignored the question. “Let’s get you up to speed.” She punched a button, swiveled the laptop on the minivan’s roomy center console. Evan watched the exterio
r of C Hall, the image so steady that save for a few leaves blowing past and the sound of out-of-frame traffic it might have been a photograph.

  At last a pair of shadows darkened the bottom of the screen. Two men approached the window of Room 14. One held a crowbar, the other a pistol lengthened by a suppressor. The guy holding the pistol moved aggressively, sweat glistening on his bald head. The men flattened to either side of the window.

  Evan told his heartbeat to stay slow and steady, and it obeyed.

  He didn’t recognize either man; Van Sciver had sent more freelance muscle. The gunman raised a black-gloved hand, his ridged, shiny skull gleaming as he did a three-finger countdown. The other guy jammed the crowbar beneath the sash window and slid it up. The bald man spun into the open frame, pistol raised, his mouth moving.

  Issuing orders.

  The streetlight sensor was too far away to capture the words, but a moment later David Smith appeared at the sill, holding his hands before him, showing his palms. He looked more shocked than scared. The bald man grabbed the boy’s shirt and ripped him through the window. As he manhandled the kid away from the building, another figure emerged at the edge of the screen, her back to the camera.

  Her face wasn’t visible, but Evan recognized her form.

  Orphan V.

  Candy McClure pointed at the gunman, clearly issuing an admonition, and he lightened his grip on the boy. The freelancers kept David between them, hustling him away. An instant later the frame was as empty and serene as before.

  The snatch-and-go had taken six seconds.

  Evan looked at Joey across the console. “Seems like they want to keep him.”

  “Or kill him off site.”

  “No,” Evan said. “You saw the way Orphan V spoke to that guy. Van Sciver wants the kid unharmed.”

  “Or she does. She might have to duke it out with Van Sciver.”

  “She can be convincing,” Evan said.

  Joey read something in his face and let the point drop. She leaned over, bringing up a freeze-frame of the men standing on both sides of the window before the break-in. Reference points littered their heads, a digital overlay.

  “I go with Panasonic FacePro Facial Recognition,” she said. “It’s the best. Two for two.”

  “Two for two?”

  “Fast and accurate. They use it at SFO.”

  “When do we get the results?”

  “We have them.”

  Another window, another revelation. The two men, identified as Paul Delmonico and Shane Shea. Delmonico was the one who’d jimmied the window and Shea the gunman. Shea had a bony build, his forehead prominent, the grooves of his cranial bones pronounced on his shiny bald skull. Their records had recently been classified top secret, which put their backgrounds and training out of reach for the time being. Evan figured they were dishonorably discharged recon marines, Van Sciver’s favorite source of renewable muscle. For now Evan and Joey had faces and names, and that was all they needed.

  Next Joey pulled up a United Airlines itinerary she had unearthed. “They came in on a flight this morning from Alabama.”

  “Where Van Sciver killed Orphan C.” And where Jack had plowed into the dirt from sixteen thousand feet.

  “Right. And they rented this at the airport.” Click. “A black Suburban. I know, inventive, right? License plate VBK-5976.”

  She paused to check if he was impressed.

  He was.

  “The same credit card was used to get another matching Suburban, license plate TLY-9443. So I’m thinking four men.”

  “Looks like it,” Evan said.

  “You know what ALPR is?” she asked.

  “Automated license-plate recognition,” Evan said, relieved to be back on familiar turf. “Police cruisers have sensors embedded in the light bars that scan the plates of all surrounding vehicles. They can swallow numbers eight lanes across on cars going in either direction up to eighty miles per hour. They process the plates for outstanding warrants in real time and store them for posterity.”

  “Gold star for the old guy,” Joey said. “I already input the licenses into the ALPR system and coded the system to send me and only me an alert when one of the light-bar sensors picks up either Suburban. We’re gonna use Virginia’s Finest to track down these guys for us.” Her grin took on a devious cast. “In more ways than one.”

  Evan followed her gaze up the street to the courthouse. It was a beautiful Colonial Revival building—weathered brick, white columns, hipped roof. A trickle of men and women scurried across the front lawn, some black, some white, some in suits, others in overalls, each of them moving with a sense of purpose. A sign in front read CRIMINAL GENERAL DISTRICT COURT.

  “Oh,” Evan said. “Oh.”

  Already Joey was pulling up the courthouse’s private Wi-Fi network reserved for judges, DAs, and clerks. Hashkiller’s 131-billion-password dictionary required only twenty-seven seconds to get her on. The Records Management System took two and a half minutes. And then there it was before them on the screen, glowing like a holy relic.

  A bench warrant.

  Evan and Joey smiled at each other.

  “First move,” Joey said. “Get the bad guys off the street. Or at least the two we have names for.”

  “You’re kind of a genius.”

  “I agree with everything but the ‘kind of.’” She wiggled her fingers in glee and then typed in a phony case record.

  If the cops brought in the men, red-tape confusion would tangle them up for days.

  “What should we have them arrested for?” Joey asked. “Homegrown terrorism is always good, gets the local constabulary all hot and bothered.”

  “Terrorism?” Evan said. “Delmonico and Shea?”

  “You have a point.”

  “Let’s make them pedophiles,” Evan said.

  She typed, her smile growing broader as she warmed to the idea. “And prison escapees.”

  “Who are also wanted for killing a police officer.”

  “That is so the best hat trick,” she said. “It’s like making a list for Santa.”

  She finished filling out the arrest warrant, issued a statewide BOLO, and fed the forms into the legal and law-enforcement machinery of greater Richmond.

  Then she held up her palm.

  He slapped it.

  51

  Push a Little More

  Candy’s back was on fire, but she granted her skin no concessions when on a mission. She refused to scratch it, even resisted tugging at her shirt so the fabric would rub against the ruinous flesh and soothe the burn. Candy had pulled Van Sciver into the hall of the safe house to talk to him privately.

  Van Sciver was as unyielding a man as she’d ever encountered, but he was still a man, which meant she had a shot at getting what she wanted from him. He’d pulled his pistol out of his underarm tension holster.

  An FNX-45 with a threaded barrel and holographic red-dot sights.

  A lot of firepower for the skull of a thirteen-year-old.

  “The hard part’s over,” Van Sciver said. “We have him now. X knows it or will soon enough. The kid’s served his purpose.”

  Van Sciver’s eyes twitched across the threshold to where David Smith sat on the decline bench, a pillowcase cinched over his head, hands pressed between his knees. He hadn’t made a noise since Delmonico and Shea had delivered him. The two men stood by the rear door, guarding it with M4s in case the skinny thirteen-year-old kid went Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on them. The other pair patrolled the front of the house as if working perimeter duty at a presidential inauguration.

  L’s corpse had been removed, the spillage from his body more or less cleaned up, though the smell of vomit lingered.

  Over in the kitchen, Thornhill stirred something in a pot, humming to himself. It smelled delicious and spicy, and Candy wondered where Thornhill was from, how he’d learned to cook and who for. It brought back a memory from high-altitude SERE training in her seventeenth year. She’d summited a tree-blanketed
rise in the Rockies, nearly stumbling onto a family of four picnicking out of the back of their Range Rover. The mom had laid down a blanket, and there were sliced apples in bowls and cold fried chicken and thermoses of hot cider. The daughter was around Candy’s age. Candy had hidden behind the tree line, staring down at the exotic sight before her, scarcely breathing lest she spook them. She’d remained long after they’d driven off, her boots embedded in a film of snow, trying to loose the tangle of emotions that had knotted up her throat.

  Thornhill lifted the wooden spoon for a taste, smacked his lips at a job well done. In a holster snugged to his hip, he had an FNX-45 that matched Van Sciver’s. He was so disarming that it was easy to forget how lethal he was. With Thornhill it was a pleasant conversation right up until the minute the bullet entered your brain.

  Candy refocused on Van Sciver, keeping her voice low. “I’m saying let’s not have a failure of imagination here.”

  “Which means what, precisely?”

  “L took the kid out of circulation. And Jack kept him off the books after that. David Smith has got no real record—no files, no fingerprints, nothing. Aside from a few kids in a loony ward, no one knows his face.” She paused for dramatic effect. Pursed her distractingly plump lips. “Which means he’s a blank check.”

  Van Sciver’s fair-complected face was mottled from the exertion of the past twenty-four hours, splotches of red creeping up from his shirt collar. That blown pupil was like a void. Candy felt that if she stared long enough, she might fall into it and keep tumbling.

  She thought of the beautiful young woman locked in a car trunk in an alley outside Sevastopol. The rattle of her fists against the metal as she bled out. The scraping of her nails.

  Candy shuddered off the thought, looked away from Van Sciver’s lopsided gaze so he couldn’t read anything in her face. The pillowcase fluttered in the spot where the boy’s mouth was, the fabric pulsing like a heartbeat, surprisingly steady.

  “L acquired him for you initially,” she said. “Now you have your asset back.”

  “What if Jack Johns turned him?”

  “Jack Johns only had him a few months before dumping him at that facility. Not enough to fully indoctrinate him. But the kid did get the benefit of Johns’s training. Johns is good at that. Maybe the best.”