His breath was his anchor.
He veiled his eyes, neither open nor closed, turning the space around him dreamlike and vague, and there was no past and no future. He released the day — the four-hour drive from Las Vegas, the slashing knife, the drone of Hugh Walters’s voice in the elevator. Air-conditioning tickled the back of his neck. His forearm wound radiated a throbbing heat that was not entirely unpleasant.
His left shoulder, he realized, felt out of whack, and he relaxed it from its slight hunch, lowering it a few millimeters and feeling the muscle stretch. He aligned himself, flesh and thought, until he became the breath and only the breath, until the world was the breath and there was nothing else.
For some time he sat like this, lost to blissful stillness.
And then Evan was yanked out of his trancelike state on the Turkish rug. He blinked a few times, acclimating his eyes and reorienting himself. He realized what had jarred him from his meditation.
The black phone was ringing.
3
Broken Like Me
The ringing of the RoamZone phone seemed straightforward enough.
However.
The direct-inward-dial number itself, 1-855-2-NOWHERE, originally acquired through a Bulgarian Voice over IP service, was set up so that calls were digitized and sent over the Internet through an encrypted virtual private network tunnel. The tunnel was routed through fifteen software virtual telephone switch destinations around the world to the Wi-Fi access point and VoIP adapter belonging to Joey Delarosa in apartment 19H across the street. From there it was popped back into the Internet via Verizon’s LTE network. If, by some miracle beyond miracles, the secret-handshake men ever traced the data stream to that point and stormed Joey’s place, Evan could watch the whole debacle from behind his lowered sunscreen.
After every significant contact, Evan rotated the phone service where he parked the number. Right now it was housed by a company in the Jiangsu province of China, a jurisdictional and logistical nightmare for any inquiring mind. The phone hooked seamlessly into the GSM network, functioned in 135 countries, and utilized prepaid vending-machine SIM cards that Evan crushed and replaced on a regular basis.
He rose, his bare feet tapping the polished concrete as he crossed to the kitchen counter.
He answered the phone as he always did. “Do you need my help?”
The voice came in on the faintest delay. “Are you … I mean, is this a joke?”
“No.”
“Wait. Just … wait.” A young woman, late teens. Hispanic accent, maybe Salvadoran. “You’re real? I thought you was like … like some urban legend. A myth.”
“I am.”
He waited. Heard breathing, faster than usual. This was common.
“Look, I’m in trouble. I don’t have no time to screw around if … if…” A choked-down sob. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What’s your name?”
“Morena Aguilar.”
“Where did you get this number?”
“A black guy give it to me.”
“Describe him.”
The First Commandment: Assume nothing.
“He had a beard, all scruffly like, with some gray. And his arm was broke. In a sling.”
Clarence John-Baptiste. A meth gang took over his house in Chatsworth last fall, held him and his daughter captive. Clarence and his girl had not been treated gently.
“Where do you live?”
She gave an address in Boyle Heights, East L.A., in the flats below the Los Angeles River. Lil East Side territory.
“When should we meet?” Evan asked.
“I can’t … I don’t know.”
Again he waited.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow in the middle of the day?”
“Where can you meet?”
“I ain’t got no car.”
“Is it safe to meet at your residence?” he asked.
“Midday, yeah, it is.”
“Noon, then.”
Noon was good. He would require three hours to sweep the surrounding blocks, to case the house, to check for digital transmitters and trace signatures of explosive materials. If this was a trap and he had to engage, he’d engage on his own terms.
The Ninth Commandment: Always play offense.
Later, in the Vault, Evan drank fresh chamomile tea as he ran Morena Aguilar through the databases.
Aside from hard-core terrorist intel, law-enforcement databases are by and large connected to the Internet. The vast majority of criminal and civil records can be accessed by any local police department’s patrol car with a mobile data terminal. This includes any Panasonic Toughbook laptop hooked to the dashboard of a basic LAPD cruiser. Each of those laptops talks directly to CLERS, CLETS, NCIC, CODIS, and literally hundreds of other state and federal databases.
Once you crack a dashboard computer on a single cruiser, you can get your hands on Big Brother’s control board.
Evan wasn’t a master hacker by any stretch of the imagination, but he’d made his way unattended into various cruisers and uploaded a piece of reverse SSH code into their laptops, leaving a virtual back door open for himself.
Now, tucked in the hidden room, Evan cruised the information superhighway to his heart’s content, gathering particulars for tomorrow’s mission and sipping the last of his fragrant tea.
For the past forty-five minutes, Morena Aguilar had been sitting on the overturned recycle bin on the front porch of the dilapidated tract house, her hands wedged beneath her legs so her thin arms bowed outward. Her bare feet bounced nervously on the splintering wood, her knees jerking. Her dark hair was cinched back so hard that it conformed precisely to her skull before tumbling curly and wild from a rubber band. Darting eyes, ducked head, a hint of sweat sparkling at her temples.
Scared.
Parked past the intersection behind a rusting heap of an abandoned car, Evan scanned the street again through a detached rifle scope. On a patch of dead grass in the front yard across from Morena’s house, a teenage mom, also Latina, emerged with a diapered infant under her arm. She set him down to play in an aluminum-foil turkey pan filled with sand. The child looked to be mixed race, bright green eyes offset against caramel skin. As he started digging in his makeshift sandbox, she lit up a Marlboro Red and blew a stream of smoke at the sky, scratching at a strawberry birthmark on the underside of her arm. She couldn’t have been older than eighteen, but her face was grim. A cell phone bulged her back pocket. Another teenage mom shoved a baby stroller up onto the dead lawn next to her. The first one flicked a cigarette up from the pack in offering. They didn’t speak. They just stood side by side, smoked, and watched the street. Two young women with nothing else to do.
Once Evan was convinced they were harmless, he lowered the scope, picked up a black metal briefcase, and got out of the truck.
As he approached, Morena saw him coming and rose, clutching one arm at the biceps. He stepped up onto the porch. The years were heavy on her face, stress lines and a hardness behind her pretty brown eyes. The smell of hair spray was strong.
“I’m hawking reverse mortgages door-to-door,” he said. “You’re not interested. Shake your head.”
She did.
“I’m going to go around the block, loop through the backyard. Your rear door is unlocked. Please keep it that way. Now look annoyed and head inside.”
She banged through the screen door, and he stepped off the porch and kept on up the street.