Orphan X Read online

  None of it was his.

  56

  The Tenth Commandment

  Evan was enveloped in a deep, satisfying sleep when the buzz of his cell phone pulled him to the surface. He rolled off the floating ledge of his bed and reached for the RoamZone, fresh sutures straining in his stomach.

  Before he could speak, Danika’s voice came at him. “Help me. Evan, please. I know I betrayed you, but I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have a choice.”

  Her words came in bursts, and she was breathing hard, as if she were running.

  “There are always choices,” Evan said.

  “I don’t have anyone else.” Her footsteps grew louder, echoing off tight walls. A stairwell? “They don’t need me anymore. I’m expendable now.”

  “Who’s after you?”

  “The guy above Slatcher, I think. The guy behind everything.”

  The chill of the concrete floor numbed his bare feet, and he realized only now that he was standing.

  “I’m at your place,” she said.

  Slowly, he turned his head to the bedroom door. “My place?”

  The sound of a door slamming shut, and then she was panting in his ear. “The loft.”

  He eased out a breath through clenched teeth.

  “I came looking for you,” she said.

  He moved through the bathroom, into the shower enclosure, through the tiled wall. “They know that location.”

  “I’ve got nowhere else to go.” She was sobbing. “They paid off my loan. They owned me. If I didn’t deliver you, they were gonna—”

  “I know all this.” Evan’s fingers were a flurry across the keyboard, and then the loft surveillance feeds came up.

  There was the woman he still thought of as Katrin, her back to the closed front door, one arm flattened at her side as if she could hold off a battering ram, her other hand pressing what looked like a cheap prepaid phone to her cheek. Her chest surged with breaths, a flush creeping up the ivory skin of her neck.

  “They promised me that every gunshot I heard would be a bullet through one of my daughter’s limbs.” She was crying freely now. “When we were in the motel, I thought they’d started already. I thought that’s what I was hearing. They were going to maim her. She may not want to see me, but she’s my daughter. My daughter. The only good thing I ever did. I fucked up and fucked up being a mom, but I couldn’t let them do it. No matter what, I couldn’t let them hurt my daughter.”

  She moved off the door into the loft. And then, keeping the phone to her ear, she looked directly up into one of the surveillance cameras. An icy fingernail skimmed up Evan’s spine. She’d known about the cameras all along. For the three days he’d observed her, she hadn’t shown a single tell, those thousands of hours at poker tables serving her well.

  “The man after you,” Evan said. “He gave you the passport?”

  “No,” she said. “I never met him. Slatcher took me to pick it up.”

  “Where?”

  “The Federal Building. In Westwood.”

  That fingernail returned, skimming the back of Evan’s neck, tightening his skin.

  The Federal Building confirmed everything.

  The cold of the Vault seeped into Evan’s bones, and he had to fight the urge to shudder.

  “They told me what to do,” Danika said. “They told me everything to do. But now I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  “You know too much,” Evan said. “They will find you as surely as I would.”

  A few silent sobs racked her chest. “Please, Evan. I never made it right with Sammy. I don’t care if I die anymore, but I just want that chance first. I need you. I need your help.”

  The Tenth and most important Commandment looped in his head: Never let an innocent die. She wasn’t innocent, but she was still an innocent. Every instinct in Evan’s body fought him. Decades of habit, muscle memory.

  He had to force the words out. “I can’t help you.”

  She was staring at the lens as if she could see him through it, though of course she could not. “Can’t or won’t?”

  He stopped fighting the cold and let himself shiver. “Yes,” he said.

  She stepped closer to the camera embedded in the hanging kitchen cabinets, peering up dolefully. “You’re gonna just leave me to them?”

  Milk-white skin.

  The curve of her hip.

  Those plush, bloodred lips against his.

  “I would’ve helped you,” he said. “If you’d trusted me, I would’ve fixed everything.”

  “I know. I know that now.” Tracks glittered on her cheeks. “But they got me first.”

  Over the line he heard a screech of tires, and then her gaze shot over to the giant glass wall.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “He’s here now. He’s pulling up. Evan, what do I do?”

  Terror emanated off her.

  Emotion welled in his throat. “I’m sorry, Danika.”

  “Evan, tell me what to do. What do I do?” She ran across to the window, straining on her tiptoes to look down. Then she darted to the front door. She opened it, shrieked, slammed it closed again. “He’s in the hall, Evan!” She scrambled to the middle of the loft, craning her neck to look up, seemingly into his eyes. “Please. Goddamn it, Evan—help me, please!”

  Never

  let

  an

  innocent—

  The front door rocketed open, a suppressed report sounded, and her head snapped to the side. She collapsed to a hip, her hands catching the floor, her stiff arms sliding her down gracefully, and then she lay on her side, expired.

  A broad form eased into the room, shutting the door quietly behind him, shoulders turned to the main surveillance feeds. A few splinters cactused out where the dead bolt had torn through the inner frame. Though both locks were shot, the door could still close. From the hall nobody would notice anything amiss. Keeping his head lowered, the man walked over and put another suppressed round into Danika’s chest, her torso bucking. The pistol spun, clipping up into a tension-hold underarm holster, and then the man crouched to pick up Danika’s still-live prepaid phone.

  As he stood, Charles Van Sciver lifted the phone to his face, looked into the main surveillance camera, and smiled.

  “Hello, Evan,” he said.

  57

  Another Lit Window

  A few more pounds on the frame, his cheeks even fuller, the ruddy complexion more pronounced.

  Evan’s words came out hoarse. “Hello, Charles.”

  Van Sciver strolled leisurely around the loft. “There are 367,159 people in the United States alone who share your given name,” he said. “That’s one in every 854 Americans.” The words came across the line on a slight delay, unhitched from the movements of Charles’s mouth, lending the conversation an otherworldly effect. “Of course, you lost that clunky last name of yours years ago. Well before Oslo. So it’s been a challenge.”

  “I’m glad I’m not named Ignatius.”

  Charles smirked. He stopped before Danika and looked down at her corpse. The dark puddle beneath her head slowly expanded. “They’re so helpless, and you’re so strong,” he said. “That’s your weak spot, Evan, always has been. Your soft, soft heart.”

  Evan thought about that authentic fake passport properly issued through the State Department. About being tracked through those fifteen telephone-switch destinations around the world. About why Slatcher never bothered to swap out the Scion—because no authorities were tracking him.

  “You’re not freelance,” Evan said. “You’re government-sanctioned.”

  “At least as much as we ever were,” Charles said. “But yes, I’m still inside, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Who’s running you?”

  “Who’s running me?” Again Charles gave that cocky grin, the one that brought Evan back to cracked asphalt basketball courts, mac-and-cheese dinners, the overpopulated bedrooms of the Pride House Group Home. “No one runs me. It’s mine.”

  �
�What’s yours?”

  “Everything.”

  The realization struck Evan, roiling his insides. Lies stacked on top of lies until the tatters of his past avalanched down on him. “The Orphan Program. It was never discontinued.”

  “Its purpose has shifted. But I’m the top dog.”

  “How many of us are left?”

  “Enough,” Charles said.

  “How’d you get on my trail?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t imagine how hard it was to track down the Nowhere Man. We designed a data-mining program to parse crime-scene reports. It hit on William Chambers’s murder. We got onto Morena Aguilar from there.”

  “What tipped you?”

  “The target raised a red flag. Dirty cop, lotta allegations—right in your wheelhouse. Then the forensics. The rifling showed he’d been shot with a 1911, your preferred pistol for years, though the ammo threw us off at first. You generally use hollow points, but you were throwing 230-grain hardball that night. Then I realized—the crowded neighborhood, you wanted to go subsonic so the bullet wouldn’t have a sound signature. But what really gave it away was the money left behind to pay the girl’s rent. What’s a broke Salvadoran girl doing with hundred-dollar bills?”

  Careless, Evan thought.

  “We wanted to keep her in the dark in case we needed to use her later,” Charles said. “We just never expected her to toss a real client into the mix so fast.”

  “Because that interfered with the fake client you set up.”

  Charles toed Danika’s body. “That’s right.”

  “You wanted to position somebody close to get an inside line on my location.”

  “You know how it is with someone like you. We needed to control your position so we could execute a coordinated attack in a well-scouted location.”

  “Like at the motel.”

  “That’s right. And even so, look how that went. That’s why we switched it up, grabbed a pawn so we could move you around the board.” His eyes flicked again to the body at his feet. “We needed plenty of notice for mission planning. We were hoping you’d spend the night at the loft, but you’re like a shark. Always moving.”

  “Where’d you find Danika?”

  “Oh, we had an eye on a number of candidates, but we were waiting until we got a bead on you. We’d been watching Danika for some time. She seemed the best fit.”

  It took a moment for Evan to process that one. “So that’s why you’re after me?” he finally asked. “My pro bono work?”

  “Of course not.” Charles pinched his eyes, a show of frustration. “We are after you because of the information in your head. You’re not a safe asset to have out there in circulation.”

  “Neither are you.”

  “I’m not out there in circulation.”

  “I was told you turned.”

  Charles looked genuinely taken aback. “I never turned.”

  “The summer after Oslo, I was assigned to kill you. I refused.”

  “Two of us were assigned to kill you that summer. It was the first time they ever let Orphans work together. Your handler lied to you. You were always the target. We just couldn’t find you. Until now.”

  “Then why…?”

  It struck Evan there in the dim glow of the monitors. Jack had sent Evan the picture of Charles knowing that he’d recognize him, knowing that he would go underground before he’d kill a fellow Orphan. The Smoke Contingency.

  Jack had given him the fake assignment to warn him and get him off the grid. If Evan had known the truth, he would have gone up against the Orphans and the whole goddamned government. He would’ve gotten himself killed.

  Realization flickered across Charles’s face, and then that smile sprang back into place. Phone to his ear, he paced around Danika’s corpse. “Oh, that’s rich. You didn’t know. Why did you think Jack Johns went down? For trying to protect you.”

  Evan reached behind him for the chair, lowered himself into it. He thought of Jack at the dinner table, twirling linguine around his fork. The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human. His tense voice before their fateful meet beneath the Jefferson Memorial. There may have been a leak on this end. I don’t want to be drawn out. I’m watching my movements.

  Jack had broken countless protocols to protect Evan. He’d known the risk he was taking. And he’d taken it.

  Evan’s grief over Jack’s death had never left; it remained, woven through his core. It shifted now, fissuring the foundations, stealing the breath from his chest. His mouth opened, but no words came out.

  The only glimmer of gratitude he could find was that Charles could not see his reaction. But Charles sensed it. He turned neatly on his heel, eyeing the hidden camera in the hanging cabinets.

  Evan forced out the words. “Why did they want to kill me?”

  “You don’t get it, Evan. It wasn’t personal. The drones changed everything. Anytime the State Department wants, they can click a button and a truckload of extremists explodes halfway around the world. Why deal with human error and all the diplomatic risks that come with a program like ours? They don’t need us anymore. They haven’t for years. They started wrapping us up.”

  “You mean letting us wrap one another up,” Evan said.

  “That’s right. And they still are. Having us eliminate the ones who are high-risk.”

  “We’re all high-risk, Charles. That’s what we are.”

  “Right,” Charles said. “But some personality profiles predicted higher likelihood of defiance.”

  “Like mine.”

  “Like yours.”

  “So if I were the type who’d agree to kill you and if you were the type who’d refuse to kill me, we’d be on opposite sides of this camera right now.”

  “Well, you can’t argue they got it wrong, can you?”

  “The new purpose of the Orphan Program is assassinating Orphans? Can’t you see where it’s headed, Charles? They’ll have us keep killing one another—”

  “Until there’s one left,” Charles said.

  “Doesn’t that concern you?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because”—Charles stepped closer yet to the camera—“I’ll be the one.”

  “Then what?” Evan asked.

  For once Van Sciver had no reply.

  Evan waited, and sure enough Van Sciver took another step toward the camera. Evan willed him to take one more, but Charles remained there, glaring resolutely into the lens.

  “No matter how long it takes,” Charles said, “I will find you.”

  “Good-bye, Charles,” Evan said.

  Charles’s face changed, and he flinched an instant before Evan clicked the mouse, detonating the charge hidden in the camera.

  The screen went to static, the entire circuit of hidden cameras fried by the explosion. For a long time, Evan sat and watched the snow as if it were a code he was meant to decipher.

  He thought about Charles’s distance from the small charge and wondered if the kill radius had been sufficient.

  When at last he stood, his legs felt weak. He urged them to carry him into the kitchen, where he shook two jiggers of Jean-Marc XO until his hands stuck to the aluminum shaker. He poured the vodka into a glass, dropped in a stick of manzanilla olives, and drifted across to the balcony facing Downtown.

  The questions—and possibilities—were endless. Evan shared a secret most-wanted list neither with armed robbers nor men who wore turbans and beards, but with individuals who had training and skills given to them by the very government now seeking to eradicate them. Which meant he might have allies in addition to foes. Who else was on that hit list, and who else was behind it?

  Charles had claimed that the Orphan Program lived on under him in some new form, downsized but deadly. That much Evan believed. Right now it was devoted to terminating former Orphans considered to present a risk. Evan believed that as well. But what other uses Charles might have for the program once he was sitting be
hind the controls, that was anyone’s guess.

  Sipping his vodka, Evan leaned against the railing, peering across Los Angeles. Evan’s hunters were out there somewhere among those glittering lights, and he was here, and they couldn’t find him. Not tonight.

  Tonight he was just another lit window among millions.

  58

  Parting Gift

  It had been just two days since her mother’s body was found in Griffith Park in a wooded creek behind the old-fashioned carousel, and though Samantha White had expected a variation of that middle-of-the-night phone call for years, a part of her was still in shock. And a part of her had finally accepted defeat. Of her own path in life. It was as if her mother had cleared the way for Sam to step up and take the miserable spot she’d left behind.

  With a stack of student-loan late notices in hand, Sam legged across campus to the financial-aid office. Her adviser had left her three messages, and the fact that she was willing to come in on this of all days to meet Sam meant that something was truly amiss.

  She passed a crew of frat boys in Bruins-wear, still abuzz from last weekend’s football game. The premed students scurried out of Boyer Hall with their color-coded notebooks and stacks of textbooks. Who was she kidding anyway? She’d never belonged here. She’d always been an impostor—a loser from a loser past. And finally it was time to give in and accept her loser future.

  She had a friend who worked as a banker at the Hustler Casino in Gardena. It was sleazy, sure, but the girl made decent cash, enough to cover rent on her place and lease a Civic. Maybe Sam could score a job there, start paying down the UCLA loans from the semesters she’d managed to get in. Eventually she could make her way to Vegas for bigger money. Like her mom. Ouch, she thought. There’s the rub.

  After an upbringing that saw Sam sleeping in station wagons outside Indian casinos and all-night diners, she’d craved the straight and narrow. Her mom had always been in and out, more trouble than help, but she’d made gestures when she could. A gift card here. Some gas money there. Until it had gone the other way.