Evan could hear the pain in Jack’s voice. “What?” he pressed.
“They went to the other side.”
“Do you have any more information than that?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, if you want me to hunt down an Orphan, you’d better unfuck Washington and get me a specific answer as to why.”
“There are no answers. You know this.”
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t questions. The Sixth Commandment — or did you forget?”
Evan looks across at the open laptop. He sees Van Sciver staring out, but he also sees the young Van Sciver, circling them up on the blacktopped basketball courts in the shadow of the high-rise Lafayette Courts projects, a huddle of young thugs with nothing but time and nothing better to do.
“I won’t do it,” Evan says. “I won’t kill my own. He came up with me.”
“He’s dead anyways,” Jack says. “It’ll be you or someone else.”
“That strikes me,” Evan says, “as a faulty moral argument.”
A silence. Then Jack says, “Fair enough. Head back to Frankfurt. They’ll send someone to clean up behind you there.”
“They always do.”
Evan hangs up.
He initiates another call three days later, dialing the number of the next burner cell phone on the list he has memorized. Jack answers in the kitchen; Evan can hear the tail end of the coffee’s percolating.
“I need to see you,” he says.
“No way. You are taking a lot of heat for the Bulgaria job — you could be wrapped in surveillance right now.”
“I’m not.”
“How do you know?”
“Because. You trained me.”
A beat.
Then Jack says, “This is an irregular contact.”
For Jack there is no word more damning than “irregular.”
“It’s an irregular life. I need to see you. Now.”
“No. Stay in Germany. Get off the radar. You’ll never make it into the country right now.”
“I’m calling you from L Street and Connecticut Ave.”
The ensuing silence is protracted.
Jack says, “There may have been a leak on this end. I don’t want to be drawn out. I’m watching my movements.”
The Bulgaria job. A leak. Uncharacteristic excuses from a man who does not make any.
Jack says nothing. Evan doesn’t either.
At last Jack caves. “There’s an underground parking lot on Ohio Drive directly south of the Jefferson Memorial. It’s closed for construction. I’ll be at P3 at midnight. For five minutes.”
He leaves Evan with a dial tone.
After nightfall Evan walks along the choppy slate of the Potomac, hands shoved in his pockets. The cherry trees are in bloom, and he is surprised, as always, at how little fragrance they give off. The fallen blossoms wad underfoot.
He finds the structure and does a few walk-bys before approaching, threading through orange cones and hazard tape. A makeshift plywood sheet has been nailed too often over the door to the north stairwell, and it unseats readily with a gentle prying. He walks each level, moving between the slumbering cement mixers and construction trucks loaded with equipment. He descends to P3, surveils the perimeter of the dark floor, and tucks in behind a concrete pillar to wait. For over two hours, he makes not a single move, as inanimate as the gear and vehicles surrounding him.
At midnight on the dot, Jack materializes from the far end of P3, where, to Evan’s knowledge, there is no stairwell. Then again, it’s a magic trick befitting a onetime station chief. Ball bearings within ball bearings.
His footsteps tick-tock across the open. A glowing red elevator sign casts him in severe light, stretching his shadow across the oil-stained floor. He stops in the open, looking directly at the patch of darkness hiding Evan.
“Well?” he says.
Evan emerges. They embrace. Jack holds him for an extra beat. It has been twenty-six months since the last time they saw each other — a fifteen-minute meet in a coffee shop in Cartagena. The years have made Jack slightly more jowly, though he still looks fit, no extra padding. The sleeves of his blue flannel shirt are cuffed up past his forearms, which are as muscular as ever. Baseball-catcher arms.
When they pull apart, Evan scans the parking level. Clears his throat. “I’m out,” he says.
Jack takes his measure. “You’re never out. You know this. Without me you’re just—”
“A war criminal. I know. But I’m going underground. The Smoke Contingency.”
The designation, a joking play on his name, had become a shorthand between them.
“We cannot be having this conversation,” Jack says. “Not here, not now. Do you understand me? I know you think you’re alone out there. But there are protections I afford you. The well-placed phone call. The friend at the passport checkpoint. I am the only person who—”
Emotion crowds Evan’s chest — a smothering black claustrophobia. “I can’t do it anymore!”
The sharp words ring off the concrete pillars and walls. He cannot recall the last time he’s allowed emotion to color his voice. He wipes his mouth, looks away.
Jack blinks. He is looking at Evan in a way he never has before, a parent noticing for the first time that his child is no longer a child. His eyes are moist, his lips firm. He is not at risk of crying, and yet his expression seems a precursor to the act.
“I wanted you to see more than black and white. I wanted you to remain … human. In this, perhaps, I failed you.” He blinks again, twice, his big square head canted, pointed at the tips of Evan’s shoes. “I’m sorry, son.”
Too late, Evan feels the rumble of a moving vehicle through the soles of his shoes. He tenses. An engine roars, and headlights sweep the north wall like a prison watchtower light. At the far end of the parking level, a black SUV careens down the circular ramp from P2, bottoming out, riding a cascade of sparks.
Already two guns are firing through the windshield, flares of light through spiderwebbing glass. Jack hooks Evan’s arms and tugs him behind a pillar, rounds powdering the concrete inches from their faces. Evan has his Wilson drawn, and he rolls across the back of the pillar and out the other side, holding a Weaver shooting stance, his bladed body presenting a narrower target. As the SUV barrels toward them, he fires into the shattered maw of the windshield.
A bullet rifles by, close enough that he can feel the heat at the side of his neck, but his hands stay steady, his aim sure. He cannot see through the windshield, not yet, but he places rounds through both front seats and whoever occupies them. The SUV’s roar diminishes, the tires slow. Evan dumps a mag, loads another, keeps firing even after the cabin is decimated, even as the vehicle slows, slows, the broad hood nearing, the front bumper kissing his thighs as it finally stops.
The red elevator light illuminates the interior, two riddled bodies splayed forward against the dashboard. Hair and bone.