There is a flat shine to Charles’s eyes, the certainty of a True Believer, and Evan feels an unexpected stab of envy. What an easier line to walk. With the envy comes a degree of fascination.
“Do you ever wonder…?”
“What?” Charles prompts.
Evan rotates his glass in its condensation ring, strives to reframe the question more specifically. “How do you know he was a terrorist?”
“Because I shot him.”
Evan does his best to keep his reaction from his face, but Van Sciver must read something in him anyway, because he adds, “That’s how the game’s played. You don’t like the rules, play a different game.” He tosses back the remainder of his shot and rises, tugging on his coat. “It is what it is, and that’s all that it is.”
Evan remains sitting. They stare at each other for a moment, and then Evan gives a little nod. “See you somewhere or somewhere else.”
He knows there will be no closing pleasantries, but even so, the abruptness with which Van Sciver turns on his heel and walks away catches him by surprise. In the freezer the revelers pound shots and send their ice glasses crashing to the floor. Van Sciver threads through the tables and slips into the freezer, enveloped in the press of bodies.
Through the big glass wall, Evan watches him loop an arm around one drunken man’s neck and peel him slightly away from the others, who are toasting raucously with their next round. Booze trickles down their wrists onto the cuffs of their fur coats. They shoot the vodka. Wearing a loose grin, Van Sciver whispers in the ear of the drunken man, who is nodding in flush-faced agreement — the instant bonding of the inebriated. As the next volley of ice glasses shatter against the concrete, the man jerks in Van Sciver’s grasp. High fives are thrown all around them. Someone climbs up on the bar, nearly slipping. Van Sciver leans the drunken man against the glass wall and guides him down so he’s sitting on the floor. His back leaves a dark smudge on the pane. His head tips forward, chin to chest, and he is still. Van Sciver lifts a hat from one of the other partiers and sets it on the man’s drooping head, tilted over his face. Just another passed-out fool. His friends point at him, laugh, and keep drinking.
As Van Sciver glides out of the freezer room, his ruddy face finds Evan for a split second. He shoots a wink and is gone in the crowd.
He’d said it himself: He was here for a mission. Evan has to admire the cold-blooded efficiency. Two birds. One stone.
He throws down a wad of kroner and takes his leave.
Over the following months, the meeting with Van Sciver weighs on him. Snatches of their conversation return at inconvenient moments. Any means necessary.… We don’t question.… Because I shot him.… A moral blurriness has been introduced to the equation that Evan cannot, no matter how hard he tries, pull into focus.
And the missions keep pinging into the drafts folder of the.nowhere.man@gmail.com. The summer finds him in Yemen, on the trail of a financier to radical imams. On an afternoon baked into lethargy by a gravy-heavy heat, he finally catches up to the man on an outing at a park. Hours pass as Evan waits for the man to separate from his young wife. Finally he heads into the filthy public bathroom, where Evan garrotes him beside the stall. A messy, up-close business. The man fights, kicking hard enough to break one of the porcelain urinals. After, Evan’s shirt is little more than a torn rag of sweat and blood.
When he gets cleaned up and back to his hotel, the local stations are lit up with news of a dead human-rights activist whose face happens to match that of the man Evan has just dispatched. He feels a dull thudding in his stomach, the beat of paranoia. Or is it doubt? Doubt is one thing he cannot afford.
He requests phone contact with Jack, and two hours later, it is granted. He reaches Jack per the new standard protocol — burner cell phone to burner cell phone — and Jack immediately jumps into housekeeping. “I moved another eight-figure sum through the Isle of Man. It’ll octopus out to your second-tier accounts, and then—”
“Stop,” Evan says.
Jack does.
“He wasn’t a financier,” Evan says. “I saw on TV he was a human-rights activist.”
“It says news, not truth.”
“Let’s skip the maxims this time out,” Evan says. “This is starting to feel arbitrary.”
Jack sighs across the receiver. Then he says, “I had to put Strider down this morning. Stopped eating. Belly full of tumors.”
Evan feels the loss in his gut, his throat. “I’m sorry.”
He hears the clink of ice in a glass. He imagines the handsome dog’s creep beneath the dinner table, the feel of the muzzle slurping a secreted handful of turkey from his cupped palm. The closest thing to a brother he ever had.
Jack interrupts his thoughts. “What are you telling me?”
The feeling of grief still enfolds Evan. He is unaccustomed to it. It takes him a beat to reorient himself. “Maybe I need a break.”
“You’re saying you want to come in?”
“I’m saying I need a break.”
“You can’t have one. Not right now.”
“Next mission is set?”
“In your folder already.”
Evan is sitting cross-legged on a bed on the top floor of a crumbling hotel. The room is so small he can reach across and pull his laptop from the wobbly wooden desk. Pinching the phone between his shoulder and cheek, he logs in to his account. The sash window is crookedly open, overlooking blocky beige buildings, strings of drying laundry. The air hangs hot and still in the room.
“Hold on,” he says. “I’m there.”
He clicks on the drafts folder. He opens the sole e-mail-in-progress. The beach ball spins as the photo loads.
He sees the face, and the breath leaves his lungs. The sounds of traffic fade. There is nothing but a white-noise rush at his ears. He blinks hard around his thumb and forefinger, pinching the bridge of his nose, but when he looks back up, the pixelated photo is the same.
Charles Van Sciver.
Jack reads something in the silence as only he can. “You recognize him.”
“Yes.”
“From the home.”
“Yes. And.”
“And what?”
Evan stands up, goes to the window, trying to find fresh air. But the air is all the same here — in this room, outside, in the whole bone-dry country. “We met once. I know. Who he is now.”
“You met? That’s an unfortunate irregularity.”
“Call it what you like. If he’s an Orphan like me, why is he landing in my e-mail account?”
“He’s been compromised. A couple of our guys…”