From behind him he hears a gurgle. Jack, slumped against the pillar, his blue flannel shirt sopped at the shoulder. The blood is bright, arterial. Jack’s hand, gripping the wound, is so uniformly coated that it seems as though he has slipped on a crimson glove.
A blip of missing time and then Evan is on his knees, pulling off Jack’s flannel. The crimson stripe claims the white undershirt, angled like a sash, expanding through the cotton even now. Jack’s hand shifts, and a straw-thin spray squirts between his fingers.
Jack is saying something. Evan has to tell his brain to take in the sounds, to shape them into words, to ascribe meaning to the words.
“I’m already dead,” Jack says. “It caught the brachial.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t—”
“I know that.” He lifts a callused hand, lays it against Evan’s cheek perhaps for the first time ever.
Wafting down the shafts and the curved ramp, the sound of police sirens. A hot-copper scent cuts through the sweet smell of sawdust.
“I’m going to die,” Jack says. “Don’t blow cover. Listen to me.” A paroxysm of pain racks his body, but he fights out the words. “This is not your fault. I made the decision to meet you. I did. Go. Leave me. Go.”
Evan thinks he is choking, but then he feels the wet on his cheeks and realizes what is happening to his face. The sirens are closer now, a chorus of warbling screams. “No,” he says. “I won’t go. I won’t—”
Jack’s good hand drops to his belt, and there is a clank, and then his service pistol is up between them. He aims it at Evan. “Go.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Jack’s gaze is steady, focused. “Have I ever lied to you?”
Evan stands up, stumbles back a step. He thinks about the warnings Jack gave him. Heat from the Bulgaria job. A potential leak. I don’t want to be drawn out.
And yet Evan had done precisely that.
He throws a panicked look over at the smoking SUV, the mystery bodies slumped forward, faceless. Back to Jack, each breath wheezing out of him. Evan wants there to be more time, but there is no more time. It dawns on him that Jack’s flannel shirt is still mopped around his hand. His fist tightens around it, moisture spreading between his fingers. Somewhere above them tires screech. Boots on concrete.
“Son,” Jack says gently. “It’s time to go.” He rotates the barrel beneath his own chin.
Backing up, Evan arms the tears from his face. He takes another step back, and another, and then finally he turns.
Running away, he hears the gunshot.
22
Pieces of His True Self
Evan came back to himself kneeling on his bedroom floor before the open dresser drawer, the bloodstained collar of Jack’s flannel looped around his hand like a rosary. The gunshot seemed to echo through the doorways of his condo, a ghost sound that filled the air all around and yet had no source. That noise had sent him into a new life. He’d slipped out of that underground parking structure beneath the Jefferson Memorial and into a different existence.
The first weeks after Jack’s death he’d spent in a rented cabin in the Alleghenies, alone with the smell of pine mulch and the rustle of leaves. In his entire life, he’d known only one genuine human connection, and the loss of it had left a hole clean through his center. In his bones, his chest, beneath the vault of his ribs, he ached as if the damage were physical. In a way he supposed it was.
Either he’d drawn Jack into the open or he had been followed himself. Two marked men in the same location, a public meet that Evan had insisted on.
This is not your fault. I made the decision to meet you.
No matter Jack’s intent, his words conveyed the opposite. Evan replayed them, hearing them as he’d heard Jack’s whiskey voice reading him Shakespeare by the light of the fire when he was a kid: And Brutus is an honorable man.
In that drafty cabin, Evan hibernated, grief bleeding him of energy. At the month mark, he started to emerge from the etherlike stupor, grasping that Jack’s murder had ramifications beyond the emotional. Evan’s only tie to legitimacy had also bled out on the concrete floor of P3.
He had no handler, no contacts inside the government, no nation that wasn’t actively hunting him, even the one he served. He was, in a word, untethered.
Jack’s voice cut through the haze. Get over yourself, son. There is no emotion more useless than self-pity.
Evan rose that morning, walked into the crisp autumn breeze, and gazed across the slopes. They were stubbled with red spruce, the Christmas-tree smell sharpening the air. Needles stabbed his bare feet. The wind blew clear through him, and he had a sense of a wider world and his place within it.
He had a virtually limitless bank account, a particular skill set, and nothing to do. He was untethered, yes, but that also meant he was free.
He moved to Los Angeles, the farthest he could get from D.C. without tumbling off the edge of the country. And he rebuilt. A third life, in the open as well as in the shadows. An operational alias built with pieces of his true self. A cover that let him hide in plain sight. He stayed mission-ready. Kept fit and trained up. He never knew who would come looking, what fist might knock on his door.
Several years passed.
He stayed alert, vigilant, kept his ear to the ground to listen for underworld tremors. Word filtered back to him through various sources that the Orphan Program had been dismantled, the operators scattered to the four winds. He never learned the fate of those Orphans who turned, but he imagined that the others now sold their specialized services to the highest bidder or had retired to a beach in a quiet corner of the world. Neither option appealed to him.
And so he decided to put his training to personal use. A pro bono freelancer, helping others who could not help themselves. Either way he had a calling, aligned with the heading of his own moral compass. Five years, a dozen successful missions.
And now he had failed.
Pop of a gunshot.
Thump of deadweight.
The blue flannel shirt stained with Jack’s blood seemed an indictment and a testament of the day’s loss, his own Shroud of Turin.
Dad? No. No. No.
Evan laid the stiff fabric gently in the false bottom of the drawer, lowered the concealing particleboard over it, and rearranged his clothes. The drawer closed with the faintest click.
He couldn’t save his own dad. He didn’t save Katrin’s.
All he could offer her now was vengeance.
He passed the floating Maglev bed on his way out, padded down the cold hall with the Japanese woodblock prints and the mounted sword.
Shards of the tumbler lay scattered across the counter, in the sink. A sharp alcohol waft reached him, the antiseptic fragrance of overpriced vodka. He swept up the bits of glass. Wet a hand towel and wiped down the counter, the backsplash. One of the reflective subway tiles had sustained a tiny chip. He worked the flaw with his fingernail, as if he could sand it back to perfection.
It remained.
He’d just sat down, exhaled deeply, and prepared to meditate when a vehement shrill jarred him from his peaceful pose on the Turkish rug. He didn’t place the sound right away. It returned, strident enough to make his teeth hurt. Not an alarm but his rarely used house phone, installed only because a local number was required for the HOA Resident Directory.