Hurtada and Cortés slotted their automatics into a gun rack lining one wall. Hurtada sported two handguns, one on each hip. He drew them both, handing one off to Cortés.
Aiming at Evan from either side, they steered him across the room and stood him before the glass.
He stared at his reflection. Dark beads dripped from his fingertips. His left eye throbbed, a bulge coming up under the brow, crowding the upper lid.
He’d looked better.
An electronic click announced itself over hidden speakers, and Russell Gadds’s voice came over the loudspeakers. “How many of my men did you kill?”
“So far?” Evan said. “Ten.”
“Doesn’t look like you’ll be doing any more damage now.”
When Evan blinked, he felt the bite of crusted blood. He looked down at his slashed-up palms. “No. I guess not. I guess I’m finished.”
The voice came back on and said, “Did you frisk him?”
Cortés nodded at Evan’s ARES and the RoamZone, resting on the battle-scarred table behind them. “Head to toe, chief.”
“Bring him in.”
Hurtada and Cortés pushed Evan toward another reinforced door, which clicked open, and then he was through into an office.
This, too, was just as Trevon had described it. A fancy desk with a leather blotter, complete with gold-plated swivel pen holders. Tables with digital scales and packing materials. Doors leading back down dim corridors, the building octopusing out across the property.
Hurtada and Cortés flanked Evan, guns raised. They were taking no chances. Behind him Evan heard the door shut with a weighty clank that spelled finality.
Russell Gadds was parked at the desk, a pair of cowboy boots resting up on the edge of the desk, looking like a soap-opera bad guy. His bloodshot eyes bulged, pronounced beneath a tumble of shiny dark curls.
He regarded Evan and seemed unimpressed with what he saw. “You’re the one who’s cost me so much?”
Evan said, “Yes.”
“Who hired you?”
“Trevon Gaines.”
Gadds’s boots thunked to the floor as he rocked forward in the chair, his eyes bulging a bit more, one hand slapping the blotter. And then his lips parted, his teeth bared. He made a sound like a laugh.
He covered his mouth, sealing in the sound, and blinked a few times rapidly. Then he took a measured breath. Another. With each one he sank back further into his chair.
Finally he said, “Do you have any idea what I’m gonna do to that retard when I’m done with you?”
Evan said, “No.”
Through the bullet-resistant glass, Evan could hear the other men huddled around the table, joking and laughing.
Gadds made a noise like a whinny, which he muffled beneath closed lips. “Know what they taught me in the classes?”
Evan had no idea what he was talking about.
“They taught me that anger is a secondary emotion. That it usually covers fear, sadness, guilt. I thought this was helpful at first. I spent so much time trying to excavate the feelings that lay beneath, to see if that would help me control myself better.” Gadds’s meaty features had turned ruddy. He looked more than slightly unhinged. “But do you know what I discovered?”
Evan said, “No.”
“For me? Anger just covers more anger.”
“They say knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment.”
“Who says that?”
“People who quote Lao-tzu.”
Gadds swept his shiny locks back off his forehead. “Who the hell are you?”
Evan said, “The Nowhere Man.”
Gadds had no immediate reaction, but from the corner of his eye Evan sensed Hurtada’s face loosen slightly.
“The Nowhere Man?” Gadds said. “That some sort of secret identity?”
“Something like that.”
“I heard of him, chief,” Hurtada said. Sweat glistened in his buzz cut. The wrist of his gun hand was slightly slack, the muzzle dipping. “People call him, and he helps them, like some kinda vengeance service. I thought he was … you know, like a urban legend.”
“Well,” Gadds said, “looks like he bleeds the same as everyone else.” He stood up, pressed his knuckles into the chocolate leather of his blotter. “So what is it exactly that you do, Nowhere Man?”
“Why don’t you call my number and find out?”
With some effort Gadds converted his scowl into a smile. He dragged the phone closer on his desk and punched the speaker button. The dull whine of the dial tone filled the office. He stared at Evan expectantly.
Evan said, “It’s 1-855-2-NOWHERE.”
“I get it,” Gadds said. “That’s cute.”
He snatched one of the pens from the gold-plated swivel and began punching in the numbers. The men stood expectantly. Evan watched closely.
“And also?” Evan said.
Gadds finished dialing, looked up.
Evan said, “Thanks for gathering all your men in one place for me.”
Gadds’s head jerked down at the phone speaker as the call went through.
In the blastproofed front room, Evan’s RoamZone did not ring.
Instead it forwarded the call.
To the tiny circuit-wired detonator inside the fresh magazine he’d inserted into his ARES 1911.
That magazine wasn’t packed with bullets.
It was packed with C4.
The boom was impressive.
The aluminum forging of the ARES provided plenty of shrapnel. The plates on the walls turned the room into a steel box, amplifying the overpressure waves that Evan had calculated from the precise dimensions of the space supplied by Trevon.
The four men were dead instantly, cut through by flying chunks of aluminum, their organs collapsed from blast pressure.
A weighty throw of flung spatter thrummed the bullet-resistant window in its frame.
Of the men inside the office, only Evan was expecting the explosion.
He skipped back from between the two men guarding him, grabbing the wrist of Hurtada’s gun hand as he fired, aiming the shot past his own chest into Cortés’s.
He twisted the fat man around, seized the remaining pen conveniently presented by the gold-plated swivel on the blotter, and jabbed it twice into the side of Hurtada’s neck.
The carotid spurt shot straight up, tapping the ceiling. It attained less height with the next heartbeat.
Evan dropped the pen and turned around. One of the doors leading back from the office still trembled on its hinges.
Russell Gadds was gone.
Panting audibly, Gadds ran through the warren of corridors, passing storage bays, packing rooms, surgical tables dusted with baking soda, an assemblage of recycled lab equipment, heaps of gas masks.
He couldn’t rate his anger on a scale of one to ten, but it was safe to say his terror was at an eleven.
Rounding a corner, he tripped over a shipping box filled with jugs of paint stripper. As they rattled on the concrete floor, he stared behind him up the long, unlit corridor, waiting for the Nowhere Man to appear.
Nothing.
Shoving himself to his feet, Gadds doubled back, cut through an open galley kitchen, and stumbled into a parallel hall.
Way up its length, he could see another of the doors to his office laid open.
Hurtada sprawled on the floor, one hand covering his throat, the other at his side. He was long gone, but darkness still oozed between his fingers, slowed to a trickle.
Sensing a change in the air, Gadds spun around frantically, but there was no one behind him.
With a moan he lunged up the hall to the Rage Room with its padded, soundproofed door, as secure as a vault.
He lurched in, slamming the door shut behind him and shoving it until he heard the autolock engage. The room had been replenished at his command, a new stock of delicate furniture and valuables there for the smashing.