Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  He tore himself away and headed to his truck.

  6

  The Brink of Visibility

  His tasks for the day completed, Evan sat at his kitchen island before a plate of steaming mahimahi, seasoned with thyme from his living wall. The plate was centered precisely between knife and fork. Offset symmetrically beyond the plate were two bowls, one filled with fresh pomegranate seeds, the other with cherry tomatoes, also plucked from the vertical rise of vegetation. His vodka tonight, shaken until bruised and served up, was 666 Pure Tasmanian, fermented in barley, single-batch-distilled in copper pots, and filtered through highest-grade activated charcoal. Ice crystals glassed the top.

  He’d prepared the meal with focus.

  And he didn’t want any of it.

  He wondered what Mia and Peter were eating in their condo nine floors below. Their colorful home with action figures on the floor, dishes in the sink, messy crayon drawings magneted to the refrigerator. When he’d first visited them, the disorder had made him uncomfortable. But he’d learned to understand it differently, as an affirmation of lives being fully lived.

  He forced a bite. The flavor was good and told his body it was hungry. He reminded himself that no matter what emotions were cycling through him, he was a machine bent to a single purpose and machines required fuel.

  He ate.

  When he was done, he scrubbed the plate, dried it, put it away atop a stack of others. It struck him that only the top plate ever got used.

  He took the vodka over to the big windows stretching along the north wall and stared out at the Los Angeles night. He could see clearly into the building across from his, like peering into a dollhouse. A man emerged from an elevator, scrubbing furiously at his collar with a handkerchief. The fabric came away lipstick red. He folded the handkerchief into his pocket, walked down the hall. Evan watched his wife react happily to the door’s opening. They embraced. Three floors up, a family quartet lay on their stomachs on the living-room carpet, playing a board game. Next door to them, a woman sobbed alone in a dark bedroom. An older couple on the top floor practiced ballroom dancing. The woman had a flower in her steel-gray hair. They both smiled the entire time.

  All that humanity in motion. Like observing the inside of an intricate clock, gears and cogs and hidden machinations. Evan could tell the time, but he would never fully grasp the inner workings.

  His gaze returned to the woman crying in the dark. As he watched her, he felt something inside him twist free, a fresh shoot of grief rising up to match hers. He’d never lacked sympathy—no, that he’d always had in spades. But he’d protected himself from empathy, had withdrawn here to his Fortress of Solitude and taken up the drawbridge.

  He watched the woman sob and envied her ability to release so powerfully and so well.

  His release would be paid for in blood.

  He took a sip of his drink, let it slide across his tongue, cleanse his throat. Hint of dark chocolate, touch of black-pepper heat.

  He dumped out the remaining vodka, then crossed to the Turkish rug near the fireplace, sat crossed-legged, and rested his hands gently on his knees. He straightened his vertebrae and veiled his eyes so they were neither open nor closed.

  He dropped beneath the surface of his skin and focused on his breath, how it moved through him, how it left his body and what it took with it.

  He felt the grief and fury inside him, a red-hot mass pulsing in his gut. He observed it, how it crept up his throat, seeking egress. He breathed through it, even as it raged and fought. He breathed until it dissipated, until he dissipated, until he was no longer Orphan X, no longer the Nowhere Man, no longer Evan Smoak.

  When he opened his eyes sometime later, he felt purified.

  He set aside his grief. He set aside his fury.

  It was time to get operational.

  * * *

  The high-def contact lenses had their own data storage and as such could be rewound and replayed. Evan watched the footage dispassionately, a bomb investigator searching a blast site for clues.

  The POV blinked on, a shuddering view of the Black Hawk’s interior. Evan ignored the handcuffed man it was pointed at. Instead he watched one of the captors slide open the cabin doors to reveal paired slices of night air.

  It was too dark to pick up any surface bearings. Evan could not determine how high the helo was, though one of the captors had mentioned sixteen thousand feet. As the wind whipped through and ruffled the hostage’s hair, the moon jogged into sight in the corner of the open door. If Evan had a team of NASA astronomers at his disposal, perhaps he could determine the chopper’s location based on star position.

  But all he had in the Vault was himself and an aloe vera plant bedded down in a dish filled with cobalt-blue glass pebbles. She was named Vera II, and while she made for excellent company, she lacked the computing power of a team of NASA physicists.

  He’d already done an extensive news search online and had not been surprised to find that there was no report of a Black Hawk’s crashing anywhere in the world last night. Van Sciver’s non-fingerprints were all over it. If Evan wanted to pick up the trail, he’d have to shine a light in the shadows.

  He focused on the footage as the freelancers in flight suits positioned themselves around the Black Hawk’s cabin.

  Someone off-screen shouted, “Look into the camera!”

  The hostage obeyed.

  Evan searched the captors for identifying tattoos, insignias, but they were geared up from their boots to their necks, only their faces showing. These freelancers loved their apparel. Evan studied their comportment, their builds, their postures. The men not in motion stood like they had two spines. Their boots were straight-laced, the preferred style of hipsters and ex-military.

  Evan presumed they were not hipsters.

  Van Sciver liked to use spec-ops washouts as his guns-for-hire, dishonorably discharged men who had all the training but were too brutal or unruly to stay in the service.

  A voice came from off camera: “What are your current protocols for contacting Orphan X?”

  The hostage kept his feet wide for balance and talked to the lens.

  As the back-and-forth continued, Evan’s eyes picked across the scene for any telling details—a Sharpied nickname on a rucksack, a serial number on a gun, a map with a cartoon red X on it. No such luck. They’d done a superb job of sterilizing the visual field.

  The hostage squared to the lens, gave his line: “And you’re dumb enough to think that puts you at an advantage.”

  The ensuing commotion, if viewed with detachment, bordered on comedic. The calmness of the hostage, such a contrast to the terror of his captors.

  As the digital camera flew around the cabin, Evan worked his RFID-covered fingernails, bringing up virtual settings that shifted the footage to slow-motion. In the chaos perhaps something would be revealed.

  He watched the scene through five, six times to no avail.

  Then he changed his focus to a later segment of the footage, when the camera sailed free of the failing helo. He put on a night-vision filter, hoping to identify something on the ground, but it was whipping by too fast. Even when he moved to frame-by-frame, all the flying lens caught were blurs of occasional lights, tracts of what looked like farmland.

  He was about to give up when he caught a glimpse of a bigger earthbound splotch, less illuminated than the other lights. He reversed and freeze-framed. It was darker because it wasn’t in fact a light. The night-vision wash had picked it up, lightening it to the brink of visibility.

  He rotated forward one frame. Back one frame. That was about all the space he had. He returned to the middle frame, squinted, instinctively leaned forward. Of course, the virtual image moved with his head, holding the same projected distance.

  Fortunately, Vera II didn’t judge.

  Evan grabbed the splotch, enlarged it, squinted some more.

  A water tower.

  With a hatchet cut into it? It looked like an apple.

 
; No—a peach.

  A peach water tower.

  There was one of those, all right. He’d seen it on a postcard once.

  He was already scrambling to free himself of the contact lenses. Off with the new tech and in with the old.

  A Google search brought up the Peachoid, a one-million-gallon water tower in Gaffney, South Carolina. It was located just off Interstate 85 between exits 90 and 92 on the ingeniously named Peachoid Road.

  It wasn’t a big red X on a map.

  But it was pretty damn close.

  7

  Two Graves

  Evan’s Woolrich shirt sported fake buttons hiding magnets that held the front together. The magnets gave way easily in case he needed to go for the holster clipped to the waistband of his tactical-discreet cargo pants. Right now the holster was empty. He wore lightweight Original S.W.A.T. boots that with his pant legs down looked like boring walking shoes. The boots would be a pain to unlace at airport security.

  In his back pocket, he had one of many passports gorgeously manufactured by a gorgeous counterfeiter, Melinda Truong.

  The matter was too urgent to wait for a cross-country drive.

  It was oh-dark-hundred, and the elevator was empty this early—thank heaven for small mercies. As the doors zippered shut behind Evan, he smelled a trace of lemongrass. On the floor was a pea of balled-up tinfoil, the Ghost of a Hershey’s Kiss Past.

  Or maybe he was the ghost, drifting invisibly among the living, following in their wake.

  The ride down was quiet. He enjoyed it.

  * * *

  Evan carved through the whipping desert wind and ducked into the armorer’s workshop. Lit like a dungeon, it was off the Vegas Strip and off the beaten path. Evan checked the surveillance camera at the door, verified that it had been unplugged before his arrival, as was the standing arrangement.

  He smelled gun grease and coffee, cigarette smoke and spent powder. He peered through the stacks of weapon crates, across the machines and workbenches that were arrayed according to some logic he’d never been able to decipher.

  “Tommy?”

  The sound of rolling wheels on concrete presaged the nine-fingered armorer’s appearance. And then there he was, sliding in from stage left in a cocked-back Aeron chair, welder’s goggles turning him into some kind of steampunk nightmare. Beneath the biker’s mustache, a Camel Wide crackled, sucked down to within a millimeter of the filter. Tommy Stojack plucked out the cigarette and dropped it into a water-filled red Solo cup, where it sizzled out among countless dead compatriots. Given the ordnance in evidence, a misplaced butt would turn the shop into a Fourth of July display.

  Tommy slid the goggles up and regarded Evan. “Fifteen minutes prior to fifteen minutes prior. I could set my watch by you.”

  “You have it?”

  “Of course I have it. What’s with the ASAP?”

  “I’m on something. It’s highly personal.”

  “Personal.” Tommy plucked out his lower lip and dropped in a wedge of Skoal Wintergreen. “Didn’t know that word was in your lexicon. You threw in an adverb and everything.”

  Evan could count the people he trusted on the fingers of Tommy’s mutilated hand, with digits to spare. Since the Black Hawk’s disintegration, Tommy was one of the few remaining. Even so, Evan and Tommy knew nothing of each other’s personal lives. In fact, they knew little of their respective professional lives either. From the occasional dropped tidbit, Evan had put together that Tommy was a world-class sniper and that he did contract training and weapons R&D for government-sanctioned black-ops groups that were not as dark a shade of black as the Orphan Program.

  Tommy supplied Evan with his firepower, too, and made each of Evan’s pistols from scratch, machining out a solid-aluminum forging of a pistol frame that had never been stamped with a serial number—a ghost gun. Then he simply fitted a fire-control group and loaded up the pistol with high-profile Straight Eight sights, an extended barrel threaded to receive a suppressor, and an ambidextrous thumb safety, since Evan preferred to shoot southpaw. He ordered all his pistols in matte black so they could vanish into shadows as readily as he did.

  As Evan entered the heart of the lair, Tommy used a boot to shove himself away from a crate of rocket-propelled grenades, conveying himself over to a workbench where he at last creakily found his feet.

  Laid out on a grease-stained silicone cloth were a laptop and a narrow pistol that looked like one of Evan’s 1911s that had gone on a diet.

  “I skinny-minnied this little lady up for you,” Tommy said. “What do you think?”

  Evan picked it up. It fit oddly in his grip. His usual pistol, sliced in half. It was barely wider than the 230-grain Speer Gold Dot hollow points it fired. He turned it over in his hand and then back. “The weight’ll take some adjusting to.”

  “That’s your way of saying, ‘Thank you, brother. You’re PFM. Pure Fucking Magic.’”

  Evan eyed the sights. “That, too.”

  Tommy slung an altered holster across the workbench. “And here’s a special-sauce high-guard Kydex to fit it.”

  Evan hefted the weapon a few more times. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure how you’d pull it off.”

  “Pull it off?” Tommy’s head drew back haughtily. “Boy, I’ve been calibrating a laser gun for the navy that can knock drones out of the sky. I’ve been field-testing self-guided fifty-cal sniper rounds for DARPA that change direction in midair. Fine-tuned a smart scope that doesn’t let you shoot a friendly target.” He crossed his arms. “I think I can handle smuggling a handgun past a few mouth-breathing TSA agents.” He snapped his fingers, pointed to a sticky coffeepot gurgling behind Evan. “Fetch.”

  Evan poured a mug for Tommy, had to wipe his hands on the gun-cleaning cloth. Tommy slurped the coffee across his packed lower lip. Then he lit up another Camel. Evan figured the only reason Tommy didn’t smoke them two at a time was that it hadn’t occurred to him yet.

  Tommy pulled three Wilson eight-rounders from his bulging shirt pocket and offered them up. “Test-drive it.”

  Evan slotted in the first mag, put on eye and ear pro, and walked to the test-firing tube. He ran through all twenty-four rounds without a hitch. Then gave a faint nod.

  He came back over to the workbench. “How’s the A-fib coming?”

  Tommy waved him off. “I’m getting extra beats in between my extra beats. I figure I speed shit up enough, I’ll go full-tilt Iron Man.” He jabbed the stub of his missing finger at the arrayed items. “Let me break it down Barney style. Same everything you’re used to but skinnier. ‘Why skinnier, Chief Stojack?’ you may ask.” The finger stub circled. “Witness.”

  Tommy took the skinny gun and slid it into the laptop’s hard-drive slot where some hidden mechanism received it. “All they’ll see on the X-ray is the solid block of the hard drive. I had to go thirteen-inch screen on the laptop to make the specs fit, so they might make you take it out, power it up, all that security Kabuki-theater bullshit, but you’ll be GTG. Obviously you gotta clean the piece so there’s no residues that’ll ring the cherries in a puff test. As for the laptop, I filled it with bullshit spreadsheets, generic documents, a few stock photos.” He picked up the laptop, showed off its slender profile. “High speed, low drag.” He made a production of handing it off to Evan, a waiter displaying the Bordeaux. “Go forth and conquer.” He gave his gap-toothed smile. “Fair winds and following seas.”

  Evan took the laptop and started for the door.

  “Hey.”

  Evan turned back.

  “You’re not exactly a barrel of belly laughs generally, but you seem decidedly more somber. This ‘highly personal’? It’s actually highly personal?”

  “Yes.”

  Tommy studied him, tugging at one end of his horseshoe mustache. The crinkles around his eyes deepened with concern. “You get in a jam, send up a smoke signal. I’m not too old to cover your six, you know.”

  “I know. But it’s something I have to handle alone.”r />
  Tommy nodded slowly, his gaze not leaving Evan’s face. “Remember what Confucius say: ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’”

  “Oh,” Evan said, “I’m gonna dig a lot more than that.”

  8

  Serve with Gladness

  It had all been for shit.

  Evan stood in front of his rented Impala on the side of Peachoid Road, staring at the street’s namesake, which he had grown to despise. He held the giant fruit monstrosity personally responsible for the stagnation of his pursuit.

  He didn’t know precisely what he was looking for, but some indication that Jack and a ten-ton Black Hawk helicopter had struck the earth in this vicinity would have been a start.

  Van Sciver’s Orphans were a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. Not just at killing—they were good at killing, very good, but humans had been killing one another for a very long time. No, this is what they did best—erased any trace of their actions from the official world everyone else lived in. Nothing for the media, local PD, FBI, even CIA to grab hold of. They moved with the fury of a hurricane and didn’t leave a dewdrop in their wake.

  Evan had driven the frontage and access roads, carved through the checkerboard plots of farmland, housing, and forest surrounding the novelty landmark, searching for that dewdrop to no avail. There was no wreckage, no scorched earth, no Jack’s truck abandoned at the side of a road.

  The flight from Las Vegas, with a layover in Houston, had taken seven hours and seven minutes. Driving fifty-three miles from Charlotte Douglas International had tacked on another hour and twenty. A long way to come for a whole lot of nothing.

  They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, but Evan preferred to serve it piping hot.

  He took in a deep breath and a lungful of car exhaust.

  The Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.

  He repeated it over and over in his head until he almost believed it.