The following morning Evan returns from a run to find in the driveway a red Acura Integra with a bobblehead Jesus adhered to the dash.
Puzzled, he enters the house. A trace of jasmine perfume lingers in the air, as anomalous in the wood-paneled front hall as a feather boa on a marine.
Jack waits in the study, Maria Callas belting “Suicidio!” from the record player. When Evan’s shadow falls into the room, Jack looks up. “You can’t lose your mind over women, over sex. And that means you need to acclimate to it. She is a professional, she is clean, and you are to treat her with courtesy and appreciation. Do you understand?”
Evan nods.
Jack goes back to the third volume of Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
Upstairs, Evan’s bedroom door is slightly ajar, enough to reveal a slice of bedding. The fabric shifts. A woman’s bare form rolls into view. He glimpses a thatch of shadow between ivory white legs and feels his blood jump.
The next day Evan does pull-ups on the rusted bar by the log pile, his biceps screaming. Jack sips coffee, his breath visible in the night air.
“Respect for women is essential,” Jack tells him. “Women’s rights and economic development within a country are highly correlated. Treating women properly is not just a moral position — which it is — or an American value — which it is. It’s a strategic imperative, and you will always, always lead by example in this regard.”
Evan makes a grunt of consent and drops from the bar. When he goes upstairs, there are two women waiting in his bed.
His education in and out of the sheets intensifies. By the time he turns eighteen, he is five-eleven, 175 pounds of lean, ridged muscle. He is neither too tall nor too big nor too evidently strong. He can vanish in a crowd. Half the men in a given bar might think they could best him in a brawl. This is ideal.
Jack decides to call wind for Evan on the sniper range one crisp fall morning. It’s been a long while since it was just the two of them with no instructor.
Evan dials the elevation into his scope, correcting for the ballistic arc.
At his side Jack presses binoculars to his face. “She says you shoot almost as well as Orphan Zero now.”
“I thought we were only letters.”
“Zero’s a nickname for Orphan O.”
Evan exhales through pursed lips, applies steady pressure to the trigger. The stock kicks into his shoulder, and a hole appears centered in the red bull’s-eye six hundred meters downslope.
“Who’s Orphan O?” Evan asks, fitting his eye again to the cup of the scope.
“An active Orphan. Some say the best. Until you.”
Evan fires again.
Jack lets his binoculars drop into the brittle leaves, annoyed. “Focus, Evan. You missed the whole damn target.”
“Look closer,” Evan says.
Jack lifts the binocs again. There it is, the eclipselike bulge where the second bullet nudged the perforation outward on the left side.
Two bullets, one hole.
Jack bobs that bulldog head, makes a noise deep in his throat. As Evan looks over, some heretofore undetectable filter falls away and Evan sees that Jack has aged since that first meeting when he pulled up to the rest stop where Evan was left seven years ago. His flesh seems heavier, tugging at that broad jawline, and his gaze is more human somehow. The glimpse of this Jack, a man nearing sixty with more traveled road behind him than open road ahead, strikes a vulnerability inside Evan that he didn’t know he had.
“When Clara died,” Jack says, keeping his eyes downrange, “I couldn’t see anything. Only the spaces she used to occupy.” He rolls his lips, swallows. “Until you.”
His mouth firms, and once more he is a baseball catcher, square and armored, impervious to collision. He rises, his boots crunching mulch as he turns back to the truck, his face holding the faintest note of dread.
“You’re ready,” he says.
Evan’s eyes opened in the soft morning light of his bedroom. He lay on his floating bed, stared at the ceiling, Jack’s words still echoing in his head.
He’d been ready for a long time. Briefly, he wondered what all that readiness had cost him.
And then he rose.
It was time for him and Katrin to make contact.
19
Advertising Cost
“I’m scared.”
Sitting at the edge of the motel-room bed, Katrin shoved her clenched hands into the already stretched hem of the woefully oversize T-shirt Evan had brought her. Her hair, still wet from the shower, fell at blunt angles into a bob. Her irises, a crystalline sea green, looked even clearer given the absence of eyeliner. She took in his face in darting glances, her knees nutcrackering the union of her fists again and again.
Evan pulled a chair around to face her. “It’ll be okay.”
“How can you know that?”
“It always has been before.”
The air, still humid in the aftermath of her shower, felt oppressively heavy and carried the hospital-hygienic scent of bad motel soap. He’d arrived minutes ago to find her pacing around the cramped space, chewing a dark-painted thumbnail to the quick. Now she rammed her hands again into the belly of the ill-fitting shirt, the V-neck tugging down, showing the top swell of her breasts. Nerves firing, limbs jumping — her anxiety fighting the confines of her body.
His black briefcase rested on the bureau beside the TV, knocking out any surveillance devices that might be in the area. He punched a code into the lock, turning off the wideband high-power jammer.
It was time to make a phone call.
Sensing this, Katrin picked up the burner phone from the mattress beside her. She pressed it to her lips, closed her eyes as if praying.
Evan removed his RoamZone. “We’ll use mine,” he said. “Untraceable.”
She gave a quick nod. “Hang on. Just hang on.” She took a few breaths. Opened those wide eyes, brimming with fear. “Okay.”
He dialed. Hit speaker. Set the phone on the corner of the mattress, between him and Katrin.
As it rang, Katrin squeezed one hand in the other.
A man picked up. “Who’s this?”
“Do you have Sam?” Evan asked.
“Looking at him.”
Katrin muffled a cry in her throat.
“Proof of life,” Evan said. “Then we discuss terms.”
A shuffling sound, and then came a ragged masculine voice. “Hello? Katrin?”
“Dad?” Katrin blinked, and tears slid down her ivory cheeks. “I’m here.”
“Hi, baby.”
“Have they hurt you?”
“I’m all right.”
She wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to them better. I’m sorry I went to someone for help.”
“Honey, I want you to know … I want you to know I don’t fault you for any of this. For anything that happened. Whoever you’re with, I hope he protects you. I hope he—”
A clamor of grappling as the phone was ripped away. Then the first man’s voice again. “You didn’t adhere to our instructions.”
“That’s my fault,” Evan said. “But I’m prepared to negotiate Sam’s release. I have money, and I have—”
“We don’t care about money. Not anymore. Our directions were not obeyed.”