“Wait!” Katrin said. “We can fix it. We can make it okay again.”
“This is our advertising cost,” the man said. “For the next time.”
A single pop of a gunshot.
The thump of deadweight hitting floor.
Evan came up off the chair, almost knocking the phone from its perch. He stared at the speaker holes in disbelief.
As if from a distance, he was aware of Katrin sobbing. “Sam! Dad? No. No. No!”
The voice came again, slicing through the shock static filling Evan’s head. “The bitch is next. Then you.”
The line cut off.
The static thickened until it drowned out everything. He’d made an operational miscalculation, his first in eight years. That night came back to him as a swarm of sensations — the choppy slate of the Potomac, cherry blossoms wadding underfoot, a hot coppery scent piercing the sawdust-filled air of the dank garage.
Katrin’s sobs rang in his ears, drawing him back into his shell-shocked body. Her father’s blood was on his hands as sure as if he’d fired the shot himself.
As Evan reached for the dead phone, he realized that his hand was shaking for the first time in as long as he could remember. The room gave a vertiginous tilt, the Fourth Commandment falling by the wayside.
It was personal.
20
Red Hands
He stayed with her all day as she wept but did not presume to hold her. At nightfall she pulled him onto the bed and curled into his chest like a child. Those three tattooed stars peeked out from behind her earlobe. Her fingers, resting on his chest, were laden with rings, and bracelets circled her thin wrist, rippling snakelike when she shifted her hand. Her breaths were broken, irregular from all the crying. He rested his hand on her side over the fragile cage of her ribs. When her arm brushed his knuckles, her skin felt soft as cream.
“They’re gonna find me next,” she said. “And they’re gonna kill me.”
“No.” Evan stared at the popcorn stucco of the ceiling. “They won’t.”
“Why should I believe you now?” Her voice held no note of malice.
“Because they’re not gonna be around much longer.”
He stroked her hair gently until she fell asleep. Then he slipped out. He’d already told her that he needed to run down a few angles and would be back in the morning.
He drove once again to Chinatown. Thirty-six hours later, the apartment complex was still an active crime scene, too populated for him to penetrate. He was eager to investigate the sniper’s perch, eager to stand where the sniper had stood, to breathe the same air and see what it told him.
The pop of that gunshot kept returning to Evan, cycling in his mind. Sam White, with that sun-toughened skin, the crinkles at the temples. His final words to his daughter: Whoever you’re with, I hope he protects you. Evan filled in the blanks, painting the scene from the other end of the phone. The recoil of the pistol, the snap of the head, the concise black dot of an entry hole. And then that distinctive crumpling of a body once life has left it, the herky-jerky cascade of limbs, the limp neck, the chalk-outline sprawl on the floor.
Once home and in the elevator, he found himself standing beside Mrs. Rosenbaum, who clutched her tiny snap purse to her belly with both hands as if to ward off snatchers. “Two more days,” she said, holding up a pair of pruney fingers in case he required a visual. “Two more days until my son visits with my grandchildren. He’ll fix my doorframe, no doubt about it. Then I can tell that useless manager…”
That voice from the phone looped in Evan’s head, drowning her out: We don’t care about money. Not anymore.
The elevator groaned upward. Evan sensed Ida’s gaze as she craned to look up at him.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He managed a nod.
“You’re just standing there breathing,” she said. “Not even the usual ‘yes, ma’am, no, ma’am’ nonsense. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“At least there’s that now.”
“I believe this is your floor.”
“Oh. Well.”
For the rest of the ride up, he relished the silence. Entering his place, he beelined for the freezer, then shook himself an U’Luvka martini for so long that his palms adhered to the stainless steel. He poured the vodka over even more ice in a tumbler, craving the antiseptic chill, wanting his teeth to ache as much as his red hands.
Pop of a gunshot.
Thump of deadweight.
Dad? No. No. No!
The tumbler was at his lips. He could breathe the sharp fumes, taste them even at the back of his tongue.
Sending a high-level kill team in on a $2.1-million marker seemed overzealous, but Vegas was clearly willing to go to extremes to teach a lesson to the next big-ticket loser.
This is our advertising cost. For the next time.
Before he knew what he’d done, he’d hurled the glass across the counter at the back of the sink. It exploded pyrotechnically, shards and ice catching light, throwing rainbow prisms on the muted, blue-tinged paint of the ceiling. The crash sounded unreasonably loud off the tile and metal and concrete.
It’ll be okay, he’d told her. It always has been before.
An image slotted back into place in his mind: Sam’s DMV picture, taken on an ordinary day in an ordinary life. A denim shirt collar poking up into view. Tousled gray-white hair.
Dad taught me pretty much everything.
Evan’s legs moved him down the hall, past the row of Japanese woodblock prints and the nineteenth-century katana mounted on the wall. He cleared the doorway, and the master suite sprawled before him.
Pop of a gunshot.
He found himself on his knees before the bureau, tugging open the bottom drawer, sweeping aside his boxer briefs to reveal that carved crescent catch.
Thump of deadweight.
His fingernail caught, and the false bottom of the drawer lifted. He removed the thin veneered particleboard and dropped it onto the floor beside him. On his knees he stared down into the newly revealed depths of the drawer, his breath tight in his throat.
Inside rested a torn blue flannel shirt, stiff with blood that had gone black with age.
A relic.
21
Dead Drop
Armed with only the training he has amassed over the past seven years, Evan finds himself navigating a treacherous new reality in treacherous new lands. There are no faces he recognizes, no safe havens, no conversations in his native tongue. He learns when to drift, when to anchor, when to project a potency beyond his nineteen years. Together in the comforting flicker of a birch fire in the farmhouse, he and Jack had built an operational alias that Evan wears now like a well-loved overcoat. It is composed of more truths than lies, the easier for Evan to align himself with it. Jack taught him the difference between acting his cover and living his cover. Evan does not act. He believes, laying down genuine emotion over the false foundation.
Missions follow, too many to count. Evan and Jack communicate by typing inside the same message saved in the drafts folder of Evan’s e-mail account. That way not a word is actually transmitted over the Internet, where it could be detected or captured. From various countries on various continents, Evan gets photographs, addresses, instructions. He reads, replies, saves, or deletes.
For a dormant account, the.nowhere.man@gmail.com has an extremely active drafts folder.
Evan dispatches an Egyptian operative in a treetop lodge in Kenya, a drug lord in a São Paulo bathhouse, a Syrian rebel in the storage room of a lampshade shop in Gaza. In a dreary Lebanese slum, Evan modifies orders by removing a car bomb after his target proves to drive only with his children in the backseat. He winds up infiltrating an armed compound and shooting the man in bed, a dangerous improvisation that draws a rare censure from Jack.