Out of the Dark Read online

  Across the National Mall, the morning sun bronzed the dome of the Capitol Building. Evan circled to the north window, which provided a crystal-clear vantage onto the White House, the Ellipse, and, just beyond, the streamer of 16th Street rising up, up, and away.

  He posted up with his binoculars and waited. The president was scheduled to meet the Israeli prime minister at the National Gallery of Art for the ribbon-cutting of an exhibit featuring Nazi-looted art. Evan was tempted to attend, but at this stage of his operational planning he had to keep his distance. After yesterday’s events the Secret Service would be deploying even more electronic surveillance to feed in real time to the Joint Operations Center on the ninth floor of HQ, where facial-recognition software would be applied.

  Given that, strolling in wearing Groucho Marx glasses seemed ill-advised.

  Evan faded back to let a few other tourists take a turn with their faces to the window. But even from the rear, he kept his binoculars raised.

  Sure enough, at ten past the hour he saw movement across the White House’s South Lawn. A number of motorcycle units peeled out first, fanning wide and posting themselves at intersections, a heightened security measure. Evan watched them position themselves, the observation deck giving him an ideal perspective to take in the grid of the city.

  Finally the motorcade pulled into view, the three limos in a row crawling like beetles.

  This time the convoy took a new route, cupping the edge of the White House lawn before cutting west to 17th Street NW.

  A roundabout way to get to the Smithsonian. The Service was varying routine now, striving for unpredictability.

  That was good.

  Orphan X’s message had been received loud and clear.

  Evan adjusted the focus of his tactical binoculars, watching the tires of the three limousines, waiting for the telltale smooth rotation.

  There it was.

  President Bennett was in the rear limo.

  The people in front of Evan rambled off, and he pressed forward, alone for the moment. As he leaned against the frame with an elbow and zoomed in on Cadillac One, he heard a distinctive ringtone sound from one of his pockets.

  With its hardened rubber case and Gorilla glass, the RoamZone was a durable piece of gear. It was also impossible to trace. Each incoming or outgoing call was broken into digital packets and shot through the Internet, pinging through a network of encrypted virtual private network tunnels around the world before establishing the connection. Evan kept a filter on as well to screen out background noise that might provide clues to his location.

  The phone number—1-855-2-NOWHERE—was established for the pro bono clients he helped as the Nowhere Man, people in desperate need, grasping for a last lifeline before they went under for good.

  Evan always answered the phone the same way: Do you need my help?

  But as he eyed the caller ID screen now, he felt his pulse quicken in the side of his neck.

  It was blank.

  A few others—a very few—also had this phone number.

  He thumbed the icon to answer, held the RoamZone to his face, said nothing.

  A voice came through. “Orphan X.”

  Evan said, “Mr. President.”

  “I received the message you left for me in Apartment 705. Given that you announced your intentions rather than simply trying to take a shot, I assumed you wanted to establish contact with me.”

  Evan said, “Affirmative.”

  “You want to negotiate.”

  Evan said, “Affirmative.”

  He tracked the convoy as it cut across Constitution Avenue NW, passing horizontally before him.

  The measurement stadia of the binoculars marked off the precise distance, .5-mil hash marks graduating to .1-mil hash marks toward the edges. Evan didn’t need to measure now. But later, when he had to account for windage, minutes of angle, and the exterior trajectory of the projectile, it would become necessary.

  “I can give you an unconditional presidential pardon,” Bennett said. “For this current … situation. And for everything you’ve done before. I know you’re highly trained. If you have a continuing interest in making use of that training, I could offer you a position not unlike the one you used to occupy. Except at the head of the table this time. Or you could walk away with full immunity and start a real life. An ordinary life.”

  Evan thought of Mia Hall, the single mother who lived downstairs from him back in Los Angeles. The scent of jasmine on her skin and how the light caught in her curly hair. The loving disarray of the condo she shared with her nine-year-old son.

  As he imagined everything that Bennett was ostensibly offering, a smirk touched his lips. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

  Bennett let the silence speak for a moment, and then he said, “But permit me to be clear: This is your last chance and final offer.”

  “Oh,” Evan said. “You misunderstood me. I established contact to give you a final offer.”

  A cough of a laugh, transmitted from blocks away and routed through four continents, reached Evan on a slight delay.

  “Yeah?” Bennett said. “What’s that?”

  “Step away now, resign the office, and I won’t kill you.”

  This time there was no laugh.

  “You’re joking, right?” Bennett said. “Do you have any idea of the power I’ve got at my disposal?”

  “I do,” Evan said. “You’ve used it to kill so many of us already. And you’re going after the rest. To make it as though we never existed.”

  Bennett had been clear: He wanted them all dead. Former operators like Evan who had left the Program—who’d retired or fled or simply been used up and spit out. Who were overcome with PTSD and regret, pain and longing. They had known nothing but the inside of a foster home and the Program, but they’d gotten free somehow and fought their way back to a normal life. They were now wives or fathers or lost souls putting themselves together in a homeless shelter, a fragment at a time. As soon as Bennett finished with Evan, he’d resume hunting them.

  The convoy detoured once again, heading north on 14th Street before zigzagging back toward the Mall—serpentine progress to keep out of the executioner’s scope.

  “Let’s say this fanciful theory of yours is correct,” Bennett said. “How about what you’ve done? Your life’s work? Is that so different?”

  It wasn’t. And it was. Either way it was not a conversation Evan was interested in having with Bennett.

  “The ends justify the means,” Bennett said. “That’s how you were trained, why you exist as what you are. If you’re really good at it, do you know where you wind up?” The slightest crackle signaled his lips parting in a smile. “The Oval Office.”

  A family came up to claim a spot at the window, and Evan withdrew to the rear wall. Still he tracked the president’s limo, threading its way to its destination.

  “When it happens,” Evan said, “it’ll be over before you have any idea it’s started. This is your last chance. If I hang up this phone, you will die.”

  Bennett’s laugh sounded like the jangle of silver.

  Evan’s hand tightened around the Steiner binoculars. Cadillac One hooked around 4th, coasted up Madison Drive to the National Gallery. Agents lined the steps from the limo to the museum entrance.

  Evan said, “I’ve killed generals. I’ve killed foreign ministers. I’ve killed captains of industry.”

  The voice came back, calm as ever. “But you’ve never killed the president of the United States.”

  For a split second, Evan saw the man himself bob into view, just the back of his head and the top of a bespoke suit jacket framing his shoulders. One arm was raised, a phone pressed to his ear.

  Evan said, “Not yet,” and severed the connection.

  11

  Active Nightlife

  On the dashboard of Evan’s rental car, pressed up against the windshield, was a blocky electronic unit that resembled a police scanner. He was parked across the street from a brick building th
at wouldn’t have been out of place at an Ivy League school. Adams Morgan, a diverse neighborhood in Northwest D.C., was known for its active nightlife. People streamed out of bars and restaurants, providing plenty of movement to get lost in.

  Evan had been sitting here unnoticed for the past hour and forty-seven minutes.

  Waiting.

  The unit on his dashboard was a cellular tower device interceptor, better known as a Stingray. If a targeted mobile device came within its transmission range, it would force the device to affiliate with it rather than with the nearest legitimate cell tower.

  Law-enforcement cell phones featured increasingly effective encryption. But they had an Achilles’ heel in the authentication process.

  Authentication works in two directions—to and from the cell phone.

  One of those directions was rock solid, the network going to extreme lengths to confirm the validity of a phone before allowing it to connect.

  But the other direction was essentially unprotected. A phone did virtually nothing to determine that the network it was joining was in fact the network it claimed to be.

  The Stingray on the dashboard was, like Evan, presenting itself as something it was not.

  He’d lived under false cover for so many years that he wondered if he’d even know what it felt like to be real anymore.

  Peals of laughter snapped Evan out of his thoughts. A cluster of college-age kids strolled past, cheeks flushed with alcohol—You know you so want to hook up with him!

  They swept right past his car.

  The guys sported man-buns of different sizes. The women wore strikingly similar designer jackets, cigarettes stubbed up between manicured fingers, their lip gloss uplit by the screens of their iPhones.

  Watching them go, Evan had the experience he often did when looking at normal people: that of gazing through aquarium glass. They flitted by in happy schools, apart but somehow in concert, their movements choreographed to music that existed at some dog-whistle pitch he couldn’t hear.

  He’d been raised outside the mainstream, his childhood hours spent not at movies or the shopping mall but on rifle ranges and in dojos. He didn’t understand the unspoken rules of intimacy, but he knew precisely at which angle to thrust a finger strike to dislodge someone’s eyeball.

  Ahead, one of the girls pressed a guy up against a brick wall and kissed him, one foot lifted behind her as the moment demanded. They broke apart a bit breathlessly and ran laughing to catch up to the others and the promise of the night ahead.

  For an instant Evan wondered if he’d be willing to trade his knowledge of a well-directed finger strike for the ability to go out into the night—just once—with the sole purpose of enjoying it.

  Across the street Naomi Templeton appeared.

  Her Jeep Cherokee cruised up to the curb, and she hopped out, head lowered, already thumbing at her Boeing Black smartphone.

  Evan raised the small Yagi directional antenna from his lap and aimed it at her.

  The Stingray lights blinked on and off, a low-key Christmas display, waiting for Naomi’s cell phone to affiliate itself with Evan’s impostor network.

  It did.

  Now that the small box on the dashboard was the end point of Naomi’s connection, it no longer mattered what kind of encryption was used, because Evan had all the keys.

  He pulled his laptop over from the passenger seat, straining the cord connecting it to the Stingray, and alternated his attention between Naomi and the screen.

  She headed for her apartment, phone pressed to her cheek.

  He thumbed up the volume on his laptop and heard her saying, “—still catching up to this. Look, Director, he said Doug Wetzel would be my main interface, and as much as I’m flattered by the president’s faith in me, I don’t trust that guy.”

  Director Gonzalez’s voice came through Evan’s speakers next. “You don’t have a choice, Templeton. This is what’s happening now. If the president wants you dealing with his deputy chief of staff, that’s who you’ll deal with.”

  “So I’m running point on the investigation.”

  “You’re not just running point. You’re running the whole fucking thing.”

  The call severed with a click, and Evan watched Naomi shoulder through the building’s front door a bit harder than seemed necessary.

  He scrolled down his laptop screen, scanning over her text messages. He could see inside her phone, and he could see inside everything the phone saw inside—data packets going back and forth, applications, her desktop calendar.

  The big question would be whether he could use her phone to breach the Secret Service databases, which resided on a private secure network unhooked from the Internet at large.

  To answer that, he’d have to get back home.

  For now, his work in D.C. was done. He’d given Bennett a final chance. The bridge had been torched, the last thread severed. Bennett wouldn’t call back.

  The next time the RoamZone rang, it wouldn’t be someone hunting for Orphan X. It would be someone who needed the Nowhere Man. Evan wondered what that mission would be and—given the danger of what he was about to embark on—how the hell he’d manage it.

  Maybe fate would look upon the daunting task before him—the murder of the most powerful and protected man alive—and take that into consideration before directing some innocent to reach out to him in time of direst need.

  He could always hope.

  12

  High-Functioning

  Trevon Gaines walked from the bus stop to Mama’s place. It was three blocks up and two over—but really two and three-fifths blocks over if you counted by house. Westchester was a nice neighborhood, and you got to look at planes flying overhead from LAX even though right now you could mostly only see their blinky lights ’cuz it was dusk. Tonight was a family dinner, and all his aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters would be there except Kiara ’cuz she was in Guatemala and Leo ’cuz he was at home with a broke jaw and Gran’mama ’cuz she was in the home and Daddy ’cuz he was in heaven.

  Trevon had a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s, ’cuz you always showed up with something—that was a rule—but it was confusing because it wasn’t chuck, it was “Shiraz” which was almost like that girl’s name from PE back in high school, the one who wore the tight shirt and he’d watch run around the track but not stare because staring made people nervous.

  The bottle was also confusing because it didn’t cost two bucks, it cost $1.99, which was one-sixth of what Trevon made an hour as the night watchman at the warehouse. Actually, it wasn’t one-sixth, it was 16.5833333 et cetera percent, because the penny made it not perfect. He didn’t like not perfect, but Mama always told him that not perfect was just fine, because things and people were made all different ways and they were all just as beautiful and you still loved them just as much.

  It was a lot to spend for the Shiraz, because he wouldn’t drink any of it, but Mama never let him show up without bringing something no matter how small even though she was rich and had a nice house and gave him money every month to help him stand on his own two feet ’cuz he was a twenty-seven-year-old man now and how was he ever gonna meet someone if he didn’t stand on his own two feet. If you thought about it, he was just spending Mama’s money to ride the bus to Trader Joe’s and buy something to bring back to her, which didn’t make sense, because why couldn’t she just go to Trader Joe’s and buy it herself, but that was a rule about how people did things, and rules were important to follow even if they didn’t make sense.

  He shoved his thick glasses up his nose and headed up the walkway and saw that the front door had been left open, and that was weird because Mama wasn’t raised in a barn.

  It was a heavy wood door, and the hinges creaked when he pushed on it. It was quiet inside, and it was cold. The tiles on the floor were red Spanish tiles, and there were forty-eight of them in the front hall, and they were too small to walk on and not step on cracks, but that was one of his rules and not a real rule
so he didn’t have to follow it, and sometimes it was even better not to.

  He went down the hall to where it hit the big kitchen and living room and family room and the glass sliding doors that stacked back onto each other and opened wide to the yard.

  He stopped.

  He stood there for a minute blinking.

  His first thought was of sangria, splashed on the walls, spilling off the accent table, staining the tile. He accidentally drank it once as a kid ’cuz it looked like juice, and he’d chewed the orange slices and then got all dizzy-headed. This looked like someone had dropped a pitcher. Or pitchers.

  Then he looked at what he was trying not to look at like he used to try not to look at Shyrece’s chest when she ran laps in PE.

  There were bodies, and they were sprawled on the couch and the floor and slouched against the walls, and they were the bodies of his aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters.

  He heard his mouth make a noise that sounded like a groan, and then he was saying, “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.”

  He closed his eyes, and he hummed a little.

  Then he opened them and looked at the twenty-seven drops of blood on the third tile from the back wall and the thirteen plastic spoons sticking out of the cup on the counter and the eighteen slats of the heating vent.

  He blew a shaky breath and walked out through the slid-back glass doors into the backyard. His cousin Aisha was lying on a lawn chair and Uncle Joe-Joe was floating in the pool and Auntie Tisha was on the lawn with her dress all tangled and—

  Mama was in her usual spot by the BBQ, except she was propped up in her chair now with her head nodded back so you could see all the rolls of her chin.

  Trevon stared at her and felt hot beneath his face. And then he blinked hard, because we don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself, and he said, “That’s okay, Mama. Don’t be scared. You’re in heaven.”

  It was getting harder to see everything, because dusk does that at the end, goes away fast. But Trevon heard footsteps crunching the gravel by the side of the house, and he turned around and the footsteps were getting closer, and he could feel his heart jerking in his chest.