Evan had certainly cultivated plenty of enemies. As a covert operator, he’d put countless notches into his gun belt, and he’d added quite a few more as a freelancer. His would-be murderer could be anyone from a foreign insurgent leader to a vengeance-bent relative of someone Evan had dispatched. Whoever it was had been working a long, smart play. They’d waited and watched, reading patterns and collecting clues, just as Evan himself had been trained to do.
He reached a patch of darker shadow beneath an overpass, the area cleared of homeless encampments, prostitutes, and druggies. A spot of privacy in the beating heart of the city. The water rustled past, its dank scent coating his lungs. He raised his tough rubber phone and dialed the number of the man who’d murdered Sam White.
It rang. And again.
There was a click, but no one spoke.
Evan said, “Which one are you?”
A silence. And then a familiar voice said, “What?”
“Which. Orphan. Are. You?”
Somewhere from another dimension came a screech of tires, the blare of a horn. The moon lay rippling on the muddied surface of the slow-moving water. A few bats flurried beneath the overpass, then settled peacefully back into the gloom.
At last the voice sounded in Evan’s ear. “Some say the best. Until you. Now there seems to be some debate on that point, doesn’t there…” A brief, savored pause. “… Orphan X?”
Hearing his alias spoken aloud for the first time in nearly a decade left his head humming. He’d been identified. Named. The moment he’d been dreading for two-thirds of a lifetime.
He pulled the phone away from his mouth, cleared his throat, then brought the receiver back to his lips and returned the favor. “Orphan Zero,” he said.
“That’s right.”
Who better to hire to go after the Nowhere Man than a former Orphan? The person who wanted Evan dead had made inquiries in the right circles, had hired the best. And the best happened to be not only one of Evan’s own but one of the few who could connect the dotted trail between the Nowhere Man and Orphan X. Danny Slatcher likely didn’t know Evan’s actual name, but he understood the shadowy contours of Evan’s identity as Evan understood his.
Evan thought of Slatcher’s redacted file. He thought of a dismantled Orphan Program, all those trained assaulters out of work, unmoored from purpose and oversight, left to find meaning — and jobs — on their own. He thought of Katrin’s face when she’d heard the pop of the gunshot through the phone, the deadweight thump of her father’s body hitting the floor.
Evan felt his hand grow tight around the phone. Never make it personal. Never make it personal. Never …
Blackness pooled in his chest, drowning out thought and reason, drowning out the hum of cars all around, Jack’s voice in his head, the Commandments themselves.
He said, “You shouldn’t have killed Sam White.”
He hung up and started back for his car.
Danny Slatcher set down his phone and eased his considerable frame back against the headboard, the box spring groaning beneath him. Candy came out of the bathroom, naked save the threadbare motel towel twisting up her hair, to shoot him an inquisitive glance. He did not look over at her.
She took in his expression and retreated into the bathroom.
Slatcher’s arm span was such that he could reach the round wooden breakfast table from the bed with barely a lean. He plucked up the slender metal box and set it in his lap.
Inside, ten press-on, peel-off fingernails and the high-def contact lens display rested in the molded rubber interior like some relic from the future.
He appareled himself with an ease that he found mildly distasteful.
The virtual cursor blinked in space a few feet from his right eyeball as he waited for Top Dog to accept his request. At last the cursor shifted from red to green.
Slatcher elevated his hands like a pensive concert pianist, then typed: WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM.
29
There and Gone
“Wait,” Katrin said. “Just wait.” She circled the tiny loft, running her hand across the tinted glass that made up the west-facing wall. Her fingertips squeaked unpleasantly across the window. “You’re the target?”
As he’d recounted his discovery in Chinatown, she’d grown tenser and tenser, until he could see the muscles tightening in her neck. Even now she was still trying to sort through the ramifications.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “Now we have two sets of people after us. My bad guys and your bad guys.”
“I don’t think that’s the case,” Evan said. “I believe my bad guys took over from your bad guys. Paid them off to clear them out of the way.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because it’s what I would do.”
“But how would the guys after you even know about me?”
“They must have gotten on your tail somehow when they realized you were going to make contact with me.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe from Morena. Maybe from an intercepted call, though I don’t know how—”
“Then what?”
“They sussed out your situation, determined that you owed the wrong kind of money to the wrong kind of people.”
“They could find that out?”
“As well as I could. Yes.”
She stared at him a moment, then shook her head in disgust or disbelief and resumed her pacing. While she faced away, he pulled her passport from his pocket and slid it into her purse on the counter. His self-loathing materialized as a bitterness at the back of his throat.
She whirled on Evan just as he withdrew his hand. “Paid two-point-one million dollars.”
“Yes.”
“Just for a shot at you?”
“Yes.”
“How are you worth that much? Who are you?” She threw her hands up. “Right. Evan. That’s who you are. The Nowhere Man.”
He stood behind the kitchen island, facing her across the loft.
She lifted a hand, pressed it to the side of her head. The cut on her face had all but vanished, the tiniest blemish on the curve of her cheekbone. “Why do they want to kill you?”
“I don’t know.”
“But they bought my marker to draw you in. They bought my dad. They’re the ones who … who killed my dad?”
The word came like broken glass. “Yes.”
There were tracks on her cheeks, glittering in the winking lights of the city.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She wiped at her face. “And your bad guys? They’re even more dangerous?”
He nodded.
“More dangerous than Vegas hit men?”
He nodded again.
“And I know too much now — what they did to my dad, at the motel, that they’re after you. So I can’t even run. I’m at greater risk now. Because of you.”
Evan put his palms on the Caesarstone counter, dotted with sleek black take-out containers from the robata restaurant next door; she’d been eating when he’d arrived. Mustard portobello caps, tiger prawns with yuzu pesto, filet bites with sea urchin butter — the rich smells made his stomach churn. Nestled in the puffed-up lining of the trash can to his side was the discarded Powerade bottle. At the sight of it, he felt his guilt ride its way up his throat, flushing his face. As if on cue, his cell phone gave a sonar ping.
The GPS signal, now active, transmitted from Katrin’s digestive tract to the hidden patch behind her ear to Evan’s pocket.
The submarine alert sounded again, and Evan silenced his phone.