Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  It wasn’t Stoli Elit, but at four in the morning in a less-than-tony neighborhood adjacent to St. Louis International, he’d take what he could get.

  He flipped through the red notebook he’d recovered from the microwave in the Richmond house. The pages were blank.

  Baffling.

  Joey looked over at his glass. “Can I have some?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, I can help steal a shotgun from a cop car, fly on a fake ID, kidnap a kid from a safe house, but God forbid I drink alcohol.”

  Evan considered this a moment. He handed her his glass. The room was small enough that he barely had to lean to reach her.

  She took a sip.

  The taste hit, and she screwed up her face. “This is awful. You actually like this?”

  “I tried to warn you.”

  She shoved the glass back at him.

  “It always reminds me of my foster home,” she said. “The smell of alcohol. And hair spray. Menthol cigarettes.”

  Evan set down his glass. He thought about how Jack used to leave silences for Evan to fill, room for him to figure out if he wanted to talk and what he would say if he did. He remembered Mia’s advice: At the end of the day, all they really want to hear? You’re okay. You’re gonna be fine. You’re worth it.

  “She always smoked them,” Joey said after a pause. “The ‘foster mom.’” The words came with teeth in them. “We all called her Nemma. I don’t know if that was her real name, but that’s what everyone called her.”

  Evan cast his mind back to Papa Z sunk in his armchair, as snug as a hermit crab in a shell, one fist clamped around a Coors, the other commanding a remote with lightsaber efficiency as the boys swirled around him, fighting and shoving and laughing. Van Sciver always reigned supreme, the king of the jungle, while Evan slunk mouselike around the periphery, trying to get by unseen. It was a lifetime ago, and yet he felt as if he were standing in that living room now.

  Joey kept her gaze on her laptop screen. “She was a beast of a woman. Housedresses. Caked-on blush. And her favorite phrase.”

  Evan said, “Which was?”

  “This is gonna hurt you more than it hurts me.” She laughed, but there was no music in it. “God, was she awful. Breath like an ashtray. Big floppy breasts. She had a lot of girls under her roof. She always had boyfriends rotating through. That’s how she kept them.”

  She paused, wet her lips, worked the lower one between her teeth.

  Evan remained very still.

  “I don’t remember much about them,” she said. “Just the faces.” The glow of the screen turned her eyes flat, reflective. “There were a lot of faces.”

  For a moment she looked lost in it, her shoulders raised in an instinctive hunch against the memories. Then she came out of it, snapped the laptop shut. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Evan said, “Okay.”

  She wouldn’t look over at him.

  He got up with his glass and the bottle with its elegant clear stopper. He dumped his drink in the bathroom sink and poured out the rest, the vodka glug-glugging down the drain. He dropped the empty bottle in the trash can, came back to his bed, and returned to leafing through the red notebook.

  He sensed her stare on the side of his face.

  “That’s why I’m all fucked up,” she said.

  “You’re not any more fucked up than everyone else.”

  “I’m angry,” she whispered. “All the time.”

  He risked a glance over at her, and she didn’t look away.

  “Those are the skills you learned to survive,” he said. “They’re what got you through.”

  She didn’t reply. The thin sheets were bunched up beneath her knees, the folds like spread butter.

  He said, “But you also have a choice.”

  She swallowed. “Which is?”

  “To ask yourself, do they still serve you? You can keep them and be angry. Or let them go and have a real life.”

  “You can’t,” she said. “Let go and have a real life.”

  “Not so far,” he agreed.

  “I feel like I’m stuck,” she said. “I hate the Program, and I hate that I wasn’t good enough for it. And then I wonder—is that the only reason I hate it? Because I wasn’t good enough?”

  “You were good enough to get out,” he said. “You know how many people have done that and are alive?”

  She shook her head.

  “For all we know, we’re the only two.”

  She blinked a few times.

  “You did that,” he said. “On your own.”

  “Yeah, well, you never know what kind of strength you have until you have to have it.” She reached over, clicked off her light, and slid down onto her pillow.

  “Good night,” Evan said.

  He turned his light off as well. The blackout curtains left the room as dark as a crypt. He heard her shifting, burrowing into the sheets. And then a silence so pure that it hummed.

  “Good night,” she said.

  * * *

  Evan’s RoamZone vibrated in his pocket. He drew it out and stared at caller ID, which sourced to a mobile with an area code in downtown L.A. He stood and took a few steps away from the final passengers waiting to get on the connecting flight in Phoenix. The flight attendant had just announced the last boarding group, so Evan waved for Joey to go ahead. He’d catch up in a second.

  He clicked to answer. “Do you need my help?”

  Breath fuzzed the connection.

  “Yes,” Xavier Orellana said. “I want out. I want out of the gang.”

  Evan said, “I’m coming.”

  He hung up and got on the plane.

  60

  Not Good

  “Know any good your-mama jokes?” Peter peered up at Evan and Joey as the elevator doors clanked shut.

  His charcoal eyes were dead earnest, as if he were asking for a physician referral.

  Evan and Joey had pulled in to Castle Heights right behind Mia in her Acura, returning from picking up Peter at school. Peter had practically run circles around the two of them across the lobby and onto the elevator.

  Standing beside his mom, Peter yanked the straps of his oversize backpack. It looked like it was loaded with bricks. How many textbooks could a nine-year-old possibly require?

  Joey said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Like: Your mama’s so fat she jumped in the Red Sea and said, ‘Take that, Moses.’”

  Mia said, “Your public-education tax dollars at work.”

  Peter kept on, undeterred. “Your mama’s so ugly she made a blind kid cry.”

  Mia said, “I like that one because it’s offensive in two distinct ways.”

  “Your mama’s so fat she can’t even fit in the chat room.”

  Joey looked away to hide her grin.

  They reached the twelfth floor, and Peter shot out, holding the elevator open with one skinny arm.

  “See you for dinner tonight, right, Evan Smoak?”

  Evan’s face failed to conceal the fact that he’d forgotten.

  Contacting Xavier upon touching down in Ontario, Evan had laid out a plan that required him to be in Pico-Union by ten o’clock. Dinner at seven put him clear by eight-thirty, which gave him time to get across town. As he ran this quick calculation, he felt the heat of Mia’s gaze. The elevator door bumped impatiently against Peter’s arm, retracting with an angry clank.

  “Yes,” Evan said.

  Peter smiled and let the door go.

  * * *

  Evan pounded the heavy bag, the blows echoing off the floor-to-ceiling glass. He reached his count and stopped, drenched with sweat, breath heaving through him. He’d just started back to the shower when he heard Joey call his name with urgency.

  He jogged across the empty expanse and up the winding staircase to the loft.

  She was sitting on the couch, the open laptop discarded on the cushion beside her. She peered at him over the red notebook he had pulled from the microwave in
Richmond.

  “Pilot FriXion pens,” she said.

  He waited.

  “Know how erasable ink works?” she asked.

  “You use the eraser.”

  “Funny,” she said, sans smile. “The ink they use is made of different chemical compounds. When you use the eraser, you create friction, friction creates heat, heat makes one compound activate an acid compound, which neutralizes the dye.”

  “The microwave.”

  “Right. They figured out how to use heat to make the ink disappear without friction. You can wipe out all your mission notes with a quick zap in the microwave.”

  “But that would leave behind—”

  “Impressions,” she said. “Unfortunately, it looks like the notebook pages are treated to, like, replump with heat to prevent that.”

  “Is ‘replump’ a word?”

  She ignored him. “Know how they feel a little stiffer, like higher stock?”

  By way of display, she rubbed a page between thumb and forefinger.

  “So everything’s wiped out?” he said.

  “Almost. One page in the middle didn’t quite get there. Like, you know the cold spot in the center of a frozen burrito?”

  “No.”

  “Never mind. C’mere.” She fanned the pages at him, and he could see that she’d shaded every single one with a pencil all the way to the margins. They were uniform charcoal except for one of the innermost pages, on which a snippet of writing had been brought into negative relief.

  “6-1414 Dark Road 32.”

  It reminded him of Jack’s last message, the one he’d written invisibly on the driver’s window of his truck.

  “A partial address?” Evan asked.

  “Would you believe there isn’t a single address that includes ‘6-1414 Dark Road 32’ in America?”

  “How about not in America?”

  “There isn’t one in any English-speaking country. I checked translations, too. No, it’s gotta be a code. Which got me thinking about what kinds of codes Van Sciver might be using with his men. Remember how Delmonico and Shea’s files had top-secret classification?”

  “‘Had’? Past tense?”

  “Check it out.” She tapped her laptop screen, and Evan was surprised and not surprised to be looking at several documents emblazoned with the highest classified designation. “They were former marines, all right. That’s why you got that read on them. But after they left the Corps? They became Secret Service agents.”

  Staring at the eagle-and-flag security stamp, Evan felt a weightless rise in his gut, the moment before a roller-coaster plummet. Van Sciver’s taunt over the phone came back to him once more: You have no idea, do you? How high it goes?

  Evan had once found himself hugging a cliff edge in the Hindu Kush in the dead of night, waiting for an enemy convoy to pass on the narrow road above. One of his boots had slipped from a thumb-size lip in the sheer face, sending a cascade of stones tumbling. He’d managed to cling to the wall and, looking down, he’d watched the stones vanish into darkness. It was a rare windless night, the mountain air chilled into silence, and yet he’d never heard them hit bottom.

  He had the same sense now—holding on for his life with no sense of the greater terrain.

  “What does that mean?” Joey asked. “That they used to be Secret Service, too?”

  “I don’t know for certain,” Evan said. “But it’s not good.”

  61

  Unacceptable

  Charles Van Sciver stood on his Alabama porch as the remaining freelancers loaded out of the plantation house behind him, hauling Hardigg Storm Cases filled with gear and ammo. Their work on this coast was done. It was time to reposition the pawns on the chessboard and stake out key positions so they’d be fast-strike-ready the instant Orphan X reared his head.

  Van Sciver had his phone out, the number cued up, but was reluctant to press the button.

  He gathered his will.

  And he pressed.

  * * *

  Jonathan Bennett had a number of remarkable skills as you would expect from a man of the Office. The most valuable one the public saw almost every day without even noticing.

  Impeccable body control.

  He’d once slogged through a Louisiana heat wave for a four-day swing—twenty-seven stops from stump speeches to union rallies in humidity so high it felt like wading through a swamp. He’d flipped the state as promised, and never once had he broken a sweat. Not beneath the hot light of the campaign trail, not during the nine debates, not in the situation room contemplating an aerial bombardment to unfuck the rugged north of Iraq.

  That’s what had killed Nixon. The sweating.

  But Bennett was different.

  He was the un-Nixon.

  Before law school in his early days as a special agent for the Department of Defense, he’d learned to exert control over functions of his body he’d previously thought uncontrollable. This skill had served him well, then and now. He’d never been photographed with a sheen across his forehead or sweat stains darkening a dress shirt. He didn’t stammer or make quick, darting movements with his eyes.

  Most telling, his hands never shook.

  The American people required that in this day and age. A leader with a steady hand. A leader who knew how to sell image, his and theirs. They never noticed the minutiae that projected this competence, at least not consciously, but they registered it somewhere deep in their lizard brains.

  That’s what you appealed to. What you targeted. What you ruled.

  The lizard brains.

  Instinct. Survival. Fear.

  He studied his staff through the wire-frame eyeglasses he’d selected to convey authority and a certain remoteness. Right now his people were at odds over a housing bill that was threatening to blow up in the Senate and, more importantly, on CNN. For the last five minutes, he’d listened with predatory repose, but now it was time to strike.

  He cleared his throat pointedly.

  The debate ceased.

  Before he could render his judgment, one of three heavy black phones rang on his desk. When he noted which one, he rose from the couch, crossed the rug featuring his seal in monochromatic sculpting, and picked up the receiver with his notably steady hand.

  He put his back to the room, a signal, and the murmured discussion resumed behind him.

  “Is it done?” he asked.

  Orphan Y replied, “No.”

  Bennett waited two seconds before replying. Two seconds was a long time in the life of a conversation, particularly when one half of that conversation was emanating from the Oval Office.

  Bennett was out of earshot of the others, but he lowered his voice anyway. “This cannot get to NSA, CIA, or State. That’s why I assigned you my own personally vetted men. It gets out of your hands, it could get out of mine. And that is unacceptable.”

  Van Sciver said, “I completely—”

  Bennett took off his eyeglasses and set them on the blotter. “When I ran the DoD, we had a saying. ‘It takes wet work to do a clean job.’ I need this to be watertight. I cannot have him out there. He may not know why, but he’s the only remaining connective tissue. Someone can connect the dots, and those dots lead through X. Without him they’re just dots.” Bennett allowed another two-second pause. “Clean out the connective tissue or I’ll consider you part of it.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Bennett set the receiver down gently on the cradle that sat on the weighty Resolute desk. A quick internal inventory showed his pulse to be normal, his breathing as calm as ever.

  He turned around to face his staff. “Now, where were we?”

  62

  Not Easy

  Still cool from the shower, Evan stood before his dresser in his boxer briefs. He opened the top drawer. Identical dark Levi’s 501s on one side and on the other, tactical-discreet cargo pants. They were sharply folded, stacked so neatly they looked machine-cut. He pulled on a pair of cargo pants and snugged the Kydex high-guard holster
on the waistband, relieved to be wearing a normal-size pistol again. Then he slid two backup magazines into the streamlined inner pockets. They gave no bulge.

  The next drawer down housed ten unworn gray V-neck T-shirts. He put one on, tucked it behind his hip holster. In the closet he grabbed the top shoe box from a tiered tower in the corner. He changed out his Original S.W.A.T. boots regularly, ensuring that he couldn’t be tracked by microfibers or soil residue trapped in the tread. Nine Woolrich shirts hung in parallel, magnetic buttons clamped. They were straight from the shipping package, though he’d cut off the price tags and ironed out the wrinkles before hanging them. As he donned the nearest shirt and snapped the buttons shut, he thought about what he was planning to do just a few hours from now.

  He was going to walk into the den of the world’s most dangerous gang.

  Innumerable variables, a risk level too high to assess. That was why he needed every other facet to be locked down, predictable, second-nature. He knew each contour, thread, and operation spec of his gear. Every magazine had been painstakingly validated on a desert range, tested to ensure that it dropped from the well without the slightest hitch.

  A passel of fresh Victorinox watch fobs waited in a hinged wooden box. He’d just clipped one to the first belt loop on the left side when it occurred to him that he’d dressed for the mission and not for the preceding dinner at Mia’s. He was due downstairs in twenty-three minutes.

  Showing up to a DA’s condo with illegally concealed firearms didn’t strike him as the most prudent idea.

  He went back into the bedroom, took off the hip holster, and then removed the magazines from his hidden pockets. The Victorinox fob seemed vaguely militaristic, so he unclipped it and set it aside. The cargo pants and S.W.A.T. boots were low-profile enough, but a wary eye might find them aggressive. He kicked them off, stood there in his boxer briefs and Woolrich button-up.

  Now he was questioning the shirt. Tactical magnetic buttons—Mia couldn’t possibly notice those. Could she?

  He took the shirt off. Then the one under that.

  Down to boxer briefs.

  This wasn’t going well.

  There was a knock on his door. Joey called through, “Wanna try that meditating stuff before you go?”