The Nowhere Man--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  Head lowered, Evan paced the rustic oak planks, doing his best to construct the chessboard mentally, to anticipate René’s counter and plan several moves ahead.

  A knock came at the door once again.

  He was about to find out how well he was playing the game.

  12

  Magical Machinations

  The entourage entered, René flanked by the same narcos, now brandishing familiar, less-lethal shotguns. Dex loomed after them, a pipe swinging low behind his leg. With some pleasure, Evan noted that there was a new front man. He looked nervous.

  Two dogs, eight guards, and Dex.

  René said, “Shall we try this again?”

  Evan looked at him. “No more croissants?”

  René took a few steps toward the bathroom, the men locked in position around him. They moved effortlessly, maintaining a practiced standoff distance. The movement of the air brought a whiff of expensive-smelling cologne. Dex kept a clear route to the door, ready to whisk René to safety the instant something went down.

  René regarded the caulked-over crack in the frame above the door. His smile spread his lips flat to the sides, his face slightly off kilter on his skull.

  Folding his arms, he drummed his fingers on the fine tweed of his blazer sleeve. “I’ll allow you your temper tantrum,” he said. “After all, it’s not like you’re going anywhere.”

  Evan said, “Are we in Switzerland or Liechtenstein?”

  René blinked and then blinked again. “Why not Romania or Russia?”

  “The outlets,” Evan said. “The C plug behind the desk puts us in Europe and knocks out the UK. But the J in the bathroom is only used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.”

  “Well traveled, are you?”

  Evan stood by the foot of the bed, tense on his feet. “Are we gonna keep answering questions with questions?”

  René turned to Dex. “I like him.”

  Evan waited, his gaze steady. The front man grimaced, showing a mouthful of gold-capped teeth, the grill both ridiculous and menacing at the same time. He had lush curly hair tamped down by a purple Dorados de Chihuahua cap featuring a mustachioed baseball wearing a sombrero.

  At last René pivoted back to face Evan. “Graubünden,” he conceded.

  The easternmost canton of Switzerland.

  Evan hadn’t been here before but had stayed in neighboring Ticino. After he escaped, he would get across the border to Liechtenstein. He had a papers guy in Triesenberg who lived in the cellar of an eighteenth-century parish church. Once Evan was set up with a new passport, he’d hightail it to Vienna, lie low, make his way back to the States. Then he’d intercept the Horizon Express and free Alison Siegler.

  René said, “I hope we can agree that you’re helpless here. You’re outmanned, outgunned, and overpowered to an extent you’re not even aware of yet. Your surrendering to these realities is inevitable.”

  Evan considered. Then he feinted at the group, nothing more than a twitch of his shoulders. The front man jerked away so fast he lost his footing and stumbled. The other two narcos had their shotguns up instantly.

  Evan said, “Nothing is inevitable.”

  The third shotgun rose, trembling, and for a moment Evan thought the front man might just be nervous enough to pull the trigger accidentally. René rested a hand on his shoulder. “Easy, Manny.”

  At this range, aimed at Evan’s head, the less-lethal shotgun might prove to be not so less-lethal.

  René alone remained unshaken. He continued as if there’d been no interruption. “You’re a very difficult man to track.”

  Evan looked past the three shotgun bores at René. Dex stared back from the rear, a head taller than the others, his face as expressionless as ever. Just another casual conversation.

  “Why are you interested in me?” Evan asked.

  “I’m not interested in people. I’m interested in bank accounts.” René peered out from the stretched mask of his face. “Your bank account in particular.”

  Account. Singular.

  Evan said nothing. René was talking, and there was no advantage in stopping him.

  “I know that you hold assets worth twenty-seven million dollars in an account in Zurich.”

  Privatbank AG didn’t house the lion’s share of Evan’s money. When Evan was operating as Orphan X, Jack had stocked accounts for him the world over and taught him how to hide behind financial veils, how to wire money invisibly from offshore account to offshore account. The cash was printed by the Treasury and shipped directly to areas of nonreporting. It was as untraceable as Evan himself—at least he’d thought it was. Both he and his bank account seemed to have suffered a sudden bout of visibility.

  “We managed to persuade one of the managers there to turn over account information,” René said. “Your client profile—or lack of one—caught our interest. You seem like someone whom no one will miss.”

  René’s eyes gleamed. Clearly he enjoyed this part of the dance. His nose was ruddy, spider veins clutching the edges of his nostrils. It looked as though he’d dabbed cover-up over them. A vain man.

  “As you’d probably guess,” he continued, “there aren’t a lot of people you can steal twenty-seven million dollars from without anyone else caring. But you happen to be one of those people.”

  “You assume you have a handle on who you’re dealing with,” Evan said.

  “A drug or arms dealer,” René said. “Everything about you fits the profile. No footprint, digital or otherwise. Conversant in violence. Familiar with detention.”

  He waited for Evan to confirm or deny.

  When it became clear he would get no response, he continued, “So you worked your illicit trade and made a fortune, if a small one—fortunes not being what they used to be. And then what? You started atoning for your sins? Wiping out the likes of Hector Contrell. Is that what you’re interested in now, Evan? Atonement?”

  “Actually, lately it’s been flower arranging.”

  René pretended to smile. “I’m always curious about the ways people fool themselves. In fact I admire it. I wish everything weren’t so bare to me. I’m a straightforward man. I like money. More money than one can make honestly. So when my coffers needed replenishing, the question I asked myself was, why deal with drugs or weapons and all the danger that goes with them? Why not go right to the source? So that’s what I did. I looked for a bank account like yours, built up over years of sweat and toil but not linked to anything respectable.” His skin quivered, the smile finding its footing. “Ripe for the taking.”

  He seemed to want Evan to compliment him on this ingenious ploy.

  Instead Evan asked, “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t easy. Cooperative bank managers are hard to find in Switzerland, but I have a gift for creating … leverage.” He tasted the word and liked it. “Then came the persistence to even attempt to follow your wires. Most of them zigzagged off into the World Wide Web, ping-ponging around the globe, and then—poof. We were about to give up when we had a stroke of luck. A data-mining program matched the precise amount of a particular wire made from your account to an online purchase registered by an auction house halfway around the world that same day.”

  “The katana.”

  “Yes. Your samurai sword. An odd choice of toy. Do you know how many other transactions of $235,887.41 were conducted on September seventeenth?”

  “None.”

  “Five, actually. But the other four were easily eliminated from consideration. Because we had the starting and ending points of your payment, all your magical machinations in the middle were for naught.”

  The smug set of René’s face brought to mind a Jack saying: Someone who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room rarely is.

  Evan made a note to attune his payment procedures by adding a few cents to each transaction in the future.

  He pictured that gray Ford Transit van springing up in his rearview mirror as he’d neared the Norfolk FedEx office. The same FedEx to which
the Seki auction house had shipped the sword. The van hadn’t been tracking him, not yet; it must have been patrolling the block, waiting for a signal from inside that the package had been claimed.

  René seemed pleased by the specifics he held in his plump palm, but everything attached to that wire was cut-bait ready. Evan’s bank account was as end-stopped as the 4Runner, registered under a false identity nestled inside a confusion of front companies. He just had to keep his head level, follow his training protocols, choose his moment.

  Manny must have sensed a shift in Evan’s emotions, because he firmed the shotgun to his right shoulder. He was closest to Evan, the barrel no more than four feet away. After the fate of his predecessor, he’d earned the right to be jittery. In the back, Dex remained alertly forward on the balls of his feet, his massive body idling, a Mustang waiting for the light to change. He lifted a pawlike hand to scratch his face, and again Evan caught a glimpse of something on the skin. Red and black Magic Marker? A tattoo? A stitched wound?

  Evan looked at René. “What next?”

  “Your money in the account is denominated in various currencies, some fairly exotic. Our cooperative bank manager has instigated the necessary transactions to convert your holdings into Swiss francs, my preferred brand. Three full business days are required for the trades to settle. First thing Friday morning, you will type your codes, send the wire transfer, and go on your merry way.”

  Friday would still give Evan nine days to intercept Alison Siegler. Nine days was plenty of time. If he had any faith that René was in fact planning to let him go on his merry way.

  René couldn’t release Evan. Not after he knew what Evan was capable of. Not after he’d taken $27 mil from him. Not after Evan had seen René’s face.

  “Until then,” René continued, “your life can be as pleasant as you choose to make it.”

  “And if I opt for unpleasant?” Evan asked.

  “I’ve never sparked to torture,” René said. “Not like these fellows.” He rested a hand on the shoulder of the narco to his left and gave an affectionate squeeze.

  Evan let his posture deflate, a show of defeat.

  “Then we have an agreement?” René asked.

  Evan extended a hand as if to shake.

  The cartel men shouted in Spanish. Manny reared up, readying to fire. Feigning puzzlement, his arm still extended, Evan took a half step forward.

  Then he whipped his hand up, knocking the shotgun back over Manny’s shoulder. It discharged at point-blank range into the face of the narco behind him, putting a hockey-puck-size dent in his forehead. The recoil kicked the shotgun from Manny’s grip. The third narco fired recklessly in front of Manny’s face. The round skimmed across Evan’s back, trailing friction heat.

  Disoriented, Manny swung at Evan. His punch glanced off Evan’s chin and struck him square in the shoulder, and Evan spun with the impact, letting himself drop to the floor. He threw a leg sweep that caught the other narco behind the Achilles, launching his feet out from under him. The guy hit the floor flat on his back, his breath leaving him in a seal-like bark an instant before Evan hammered the heel of his foot into the man’s throat, crushing his windpipe.

  Two dogs, six guards, and Dex.

  Through Manny’s legs Evan could see the first narco seizing on the floorboards, saliva webbing from the corner of his mouth. Dex’s pillar legs were visible, too, rotating powerfully to the doorway, René clamped beneath his arm in a rag-doll dangle, his high-ticket loafers skimming the floor.

  Manny kicked Evan in the stomach, knocking a clump of air from his lungs. Evan fought through the pain and clenched around the boot. Somehow he held on, Manny toppling over, his mouth stretched wide in a grimace, gold teeth flashing. Before Evan could get to him, the room seemed to darken.

  Dex, blocking out the light, one massive arm drawn back. As he swung the pipe down, Evan rolled to the side. The metal end splintered the plank next to his cheek. Flipping over, he grabbed the pipe.

  Too late he realized it was a cattle prod.

  Everything turned a brilliant shade of white. He felt a vague sensation of sliding several feet, the uneven floor sandpapering his ass, his shoulders, the back of his head. The inside of his mouth prickled. His face stuck with a thousand pins. His body was immobilized save for the scorching pain still twitching the nerves of his arm. Somewhere he registered sounds of retreat, the bedroom door slamming shut.

  Lying there on his back gave him an excellent view of the gas hissing through the ceiling vent above, wavering the air like a heat mirage.

  13

  Last Glance Back

  For Evan’s seventeenth birthday, a former Army Ranger exposes him to a brutal week of sleep deprivation and caloric reduction, then drives him to a desolate stretch of the snowy Allegheny Mountains, gives him a set of coordinates, and leaves him shivering in a T-shirt and jeans. As the four-wheeler pulls away with a cheery toot of the horn, Evan recalls Jack’s Third Commandment: Master your surroundings. Looking around, he wonders how this is possible.

  He has weathered SERE training, which focuses on the four basics of operational up-the-creek-ness—survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. He’s been taught woodcraft and wilderness skills, counterinterrogation and camouflage techniques. He can make a fire, build a shelter, and distinguish mushrooms he can eat from mushrooms that will Cuisinart his kidneys or send him on a psychedelic trip on the magic bus, but now, as he faces the reality of the damp earth and empty pockets, it seems like all that knowledge is for shit.

  Forty-eight hours later, near hypothermic and bedraggled beneath a paste of mud and leaves, he stumbles upon a long-deserted cabin. The roof is partially torn off, the walls rotted, critters nesting in the walls. In a fallen cabinet, he finds an ancient energy bar still in the wrapper and devours it.

  Mistake.

  Too late he notes the bitter aftertaste at the back of his tongue. A gentle poison or emetic, probably hydrogen peroxide or syrup of ipecac. Curled up on the dusty floorboards, he vomits the scant contents of his stomach. It seems that the heaving will never end. In hour two he hears an engine approach over the rugged terrain. The door opens, and a shadow falls over him.

  “Why the hell would there be an energy bar in a deserted cabin?” Jack asks.

  “The First Commandment,” Evan croaks.

  “That’s right.” Jack crouches, sets down a bottle of water by Evan’s face. “See you at home.”

  Four days later, having staggered out of the woods, cleaned up in a gas-station bathroom, stolen clothes from a church coatroom, and hitchhiked dogleggedly back to northern Virginia, Evan passes through the twin stone pillars and begins the painful climb up the dirt slope to the two-story farmhouse. Strider meets him at the porch, nuzzling his palm, wagging his tail so hard his rear end swivels.

  Jack is sitting at a dinner table set for two, a steaming turkey in a basting pan set on a trivet before him. He sips a vodka martini, still ice-crystal cloudy from the shaker.

  Evan crosses his arms, winces from the pain. He thinks back to Van Sciver, how when they were kids he always seemed to loom overhead, backlit by the sun, the edges of his red hair turned golden, the bearing of a god. He would’ve done better. He would have faced the wild fearlessly. He would have known to avoid the energy bar. He would have made it out a day quicker. Or two.

  Evan feels emotion in the back of his throat, in his nostrils. The words come like broken glass. “I didn’t do so hot.”

  Jack is all rough edges and rugged exterior, but his eyes and the etched skin around them convey something much, much softer. “Next time,” he says. “Next time.” He rubs his hands, appraises the turkey. “It still needs to rest before carving. There’s a hot bath waiting for you.”

  Evan nods and heads upstairs.

  Several years later on a bleak gray morning, Evan finds himself riding shotgun east on Route 267, a carry-on bag across his thighs. In his back pocket is a real passport with real stamps and a false name. Jack’s hands gr
ip the wheel in the ten-and-two, and he gazes straight ahead as signs for Dulles International float overhead.

  “I am the only person who knows who you are,” Jack says. “What you do. The only person inside the government or out. The only person in the world.”

  This is not news. Evan wonders what is motivating Jack to break character this dreary East Coast morning by repeating the obvious.

  “I am your only connection to anything,” Jack continues. “Anyone else contacts you, says I told them, do not believe him. I am it.”

  “Okay,” Evan says.

  “I will always be there. The voice on the other end of the phone.”

  Evan realizes he is witnessing something he has never seen before: Jack is anxious.

  “Jack? I’m ready.”

  The airport cop flicks a gloved hand, and Jack coasts up to Departures. At the curb ahead of them against the backdrop of a minivan, a teary mother and a stoic father hug their son. The teenager wears a college shirt with intersecting lacrosse sticks. He looks impatient.

  Evan reaches for the door handle. “See you when it’s clear.” He starts to get out, but Jack’s hand grips his forearm firmly, stilling him in the passenger seat.

  “Remember, the hard part isn’t killing,” he says, not for the first time, or the fiftieth. “The hard part is staying human.”

  A microexpression flickers across Jack’s features so fast that Evan might have missed it if he didn’t know him the way he does.

  Fear.

  Evan feels his throat constrict ever so slightly. Neither of them is accustomed to expressing emotion. Not trusting his voice, Evan nods.

  The vise grip on his arm relents. Jack waves a hand at the waiting terminal. “Go on, then,” he says, slightly bothered, as though Evan has been holding him up.

  Evan climbs out, the chill whipping around his neck, cooling the flush that has crept up into his face. He blends into the thickening crowd entering the international terminal, walking neither too fast nor too slow, a face among faces, invisible in plain sight. The boarding pass rustles in his hand. When he reaches the printed destination, there will be additional orders from Jack, directing him to a man he will kill.