“Fine. In the meantime, I need to see you.”
“Boy, aren’t you paying attention? You’re not safe to be in the world.”
Wetzel tried to swallow, but his throat gave only a dry click. He eyed the rearview, taking in the empty streets. Steam floated up from a sewer grate, wisps unfurling like tentacles. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“If I was Orphan X, I wouldn’t be watching the president. I’d be watching you.”
Sweat ran down the side of Wetzel’s neck. He loosened his tie a bit more, unbuttoned his shirt’s top button.
He wasn’t sure what happened next, but he heard a screech of tires — his own — and his face smacked the top of the steering wheel. He pushed himself off, feeling a warm trickle ford his upper lip. He smelled iron and burned brake pads.
The phone had wound up somewhere on the dashboard. His briefcase had flown from the passenger seat and landed on the floor mat.
He gave the brake an exploratory tap, but it was still depressed.
Then his windshield wipers went on, scraping dryly across the glass.
He reached for the door, but it stayed locked.
At once the Tesla reversed, so fast that he had to brace against the steering wheel with his forearms, eliciting a baleful honk.
The Tesla spun around, smacking his head against the driver’s-side window, the wheel spinning of its own accord. Driving itself, the car eased through a laid-open chain-link gate and coasted into the shadows in the far reaches of the dilapidated auto shop.
It stopped, shifting itself into park.
Dots clouding his vision, Wetzel white-knuckled the steering wheel, his hands quivering. He tried to shift gears, but the car wouldn’t obey.
His thoughts roiled, a paranoid flurry. Someone had hacked his car?
The familiar hum made him start, a waft of night-cool breeze blowing across his face. His window had rolled down. He turned to look out and spotted a dark figure in the shadows no more than five feet away, sitting on the side steps that led to the old auto shop’s office. The man was lit faintly by the glow of a laptop resting on the uneven wooden plank beside him. He removed his hands from the keys as if relinquishing a joystick.
The sweat seemed to freeze on Wetzel’s face.
The figure rose.
Wetzel scrunched his eyes shut, a long-buried childish impulse. He heard the crunch of a footstep and then another.
He opened his eyes. The man was standing right there, the top of the window frame cutting him off above the chin.
A hand came at Wetzel’s face, grabbed the lanyard around his neck, and tore the flash drive free. Next the disposable phone was plucked from the dashboard, the call presumably still active.
Wetzel watched the phone rise out of sight to the man’s face.
The voice carried back to him. “Orphan A,” it said. “Wetzel first. Then everyone else who’s helping you. Then you. Then him.”
Wetzel strangled a sob in his throat.
He heard the reply, tinny through the disposable phone. “Not if I kill you first.”
The phone dropped to the ground. A heel crushed it into the asphalt.
The man leaned down, at last bringing his face into view.
“Hello, Doug,” Orphan X said. “You and I need to have a talk.”
32
See Every Angle
Tonight’s Class 3 threat was that Naomi’s father was refusing to eat prunes.
Hank Templeton, legend of the Service and protector of presidents, was backed up from an array of meds and so far out of his right mind that he refused to cooperate with two nurses and the rounding physician. He shook his head back and forth like a child confronted with broccoli, grizzled lips clamped shut before the proffered prune.
Naomi had been called into her father’s room, which smelled of urine and the too-strong detergent necessary for bedsheets in a facility like this. “Dad, you have to—”
Hank knocked the prune out of her hand with his bone-lumpy knuckles. “No, goddamn it. Where’s Jason?”
“He’s not here, Dad. It’s just me.”
“Where’s Robbie? Where are my sons? I need someone who can get something done around here.” His pronounced eyebrows bunched, his face set with familiar New England obstinacy.
A nurse unknown to Naomi leaned her father forward and started to untie his gown to change him. Naomi looked away. For her modesty or his? Clearly he didn’t care. Fenway nuzzled into her side, wet nose in her palm.
Naomi took a step back, gathered her bangs in a fist, squeezed hard enough to feel the hair pull at the roots. She kept her eyes on the floor. “Okay, Dad. Look, I brought Fenway. Do you want to see…”
Her voice went dry, and she lost the back half of the sentence.
Amanaki suddenly was at her side. “I got it from here, honey. Why don’t you take a moment?”
Not trusting her voice, Naomi nodded and relinquished the leash.
In the hall she called Jason and got voice mail. But she reached Robbie. In the background she could hear the sound of a family dinner in full swing.
“Hi, Nay-Nay,” he said.
“Robbie.” She pressed a knuckle to her lips. There was no crying in the Templeton family. “I’m with Dad. I could really use your help.”
“Jesus, Naomi.” The full name now. “I’m sending, what? Four grand a month? I have two kids in private school and—”
“Not money. Just someone else here. I’m dealing with … I have a thing at work and trying to manage that and Dad is a lot. Plus, you should see him. You should just see him.”
“Dad doesn’t recognize anyone. He doesn’t know who the hell we are anymore.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“Maybe you do, okay? Because the way you frame it, to try and guilt me into dropping everything for Dad, it’s bullshit. If you thought about it, you’d realize — you don’t want me there for him. You want me there for you.”
She felt it then, a blowtorch flame of anger cutting through the grief. “No, Robbie. It’s so that when you’re lying in a bed like … like a remnant of who you were, you can look back and not be embarrassed by how you acted when he needed you.”
“That’s the thing. He doesn’t need me. Never did. He never needed any of us.”
“Be a man,” she said. “Not a child.”
She hung up and walked down the corridor, her head hot and thrumming. She sat on the plastic-cushioned chair, a shade of aqua not found outside waiting rooms, and tilted her face into her hands.
When had men gotten so small?
Her father, for all his flaws, had been forthright and loyal, shouldering responsibility and adhering to his own strict code. He’d always shown up, even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.
It was difficult to square who he’d been with the boy-men her brothers were — let alone the dude-bros on the open market. Guys who were overmanicured and body-sprayed, who talked about little beyond microbrews and college basketball, who thought texting ’SUP? at booty-call hours constituted witty repartee. She replied the same every time: SERIOUSLY?
Her last date had been months ago, procured through one of the less-gropey dating apps. “Wellesley,” he’d said over pork-belly sliders. “Isn’t that, like, a girls’ college with no men?”
“No,” she’d said. “It’s, like, a women’s college with no boys.”
She recalled the furrowing of his brow, more confusion than offense.
“Oh,” he’d said.
Like her, they’d been raised on YouTube and swipe-right screens. On every billboard and music video, there was the unattainable fantasy, curated personalities, skin smooth and shiny, glammed up and spray-tanned, and she knew it was all fake, a media creation or whatever, but it was still effective, still teasing some high-school not-belonging part of her. That was even more infuriating: to know it was a lie but to want to believe in it anyway.