Contrell’s destinations.
Evan’s work was not done.
The Tenth Commandment: Never let an innocent die.
5
The Eyes of the Data-Mining Beast
The room could have been anywhere. Midway up a high-rise. At the distal end of a mansion’s wing. Underground, even.
It was big.
The size of a movie theater, but without the rows of chairs. There wasn’t a screen.
There were hundreds of them.
Lining three walls, stacked top to bottom, the most elaborate display of computing power this side of DARPA. Each monitor scrolled an endless stream of code. The screens were the eyes of the data-mining beast; the banks of servers bunkered behind the bomb-resistant fourth wall were the brain.
Guttering light from the monitors strobed across the dim room, living camouflage. It was hard to see anything aside from the screens. Everything melted together — the rugs, the consoles, the sparse furniture. Even the few visitors with clearance to enter — usually a not-fully-read-in engineer making tech adjustments — seemed to disappear, fish blending into rippling water.
Charles Van Sciver liked it in here. Liked it for the darkness, through which he could drift alone and unseen.
There were no windows. No mirrors either, not even in the adjoining bathroom. He’d covered them up. The occasional visitor was made to stand at a distance so Van Sciver could stay bathed in the protective anonymity of the flickering lights.
It was safe and contained in here. Just him and his algorithms.
It wasn’t fair to say that all the computing power was directed at locating Orphan X.
Only 75 percent.
Or 76.385, to be precise.
After all, as the head of the Program, Van Sciver did have other mission responsibilities.
But none as important as this.
For better than a decade, Evan had been the top asset in the entire Orphan Program. He didn’t merely know where the bodies were buried. He had buried most of them.
Though the naked eye couldn’t process a sliver of the information whipping across the monitors, Van Sciver liked to watch the large-scale data processing in real time. Though he knew the buzzwords—“cluster analysis,” “anomaly detection,” “predictive analytics”—he couldn’t even comprehend what was before him. But he could grasp the output reports, which he checked meticulously on the hour, searching for filaments in the ocean of cyberspace. These threads of the Nowhere Man had to be delicately backtraced. If Van Sciver allowed the slightest quiver showing that he had something on the hook, the line would snap.
Lately his team of engineers had been focused on data warehousing, piecing together bits of information from offshore bank accounts, trying to reconstruct enough of the mosaic to point them in the right direction. They had leads on Evan, of course. A few floating strands on the water. But every time they tugged slack out of the line, they came up with more slack, a money transfer zigzagging off into the depths, a shell corp vanishing behind a mailbox corporation, another trail ending at a disused P.O. box off some dusty Third World dirt road.
Van Sciver paced the perimeter of the room, his ever-paler skin drinking in the antiseptic blue glow of the screens. The lack of human contact ensured that he would never be deterred from his goal. Ultimately it would come down to discipline and abstinence, and so he had cleared out any distracting clutter from his existence. His willingness to deny all pleasure and warmth was why he would win. That was why he would beat his nemesis. Victory would be pleasure enough.
Van Sciver halted. Facing the horseshoe of the rippling walls, he basked in the power represented before him. Time was meaningless in here. The present was spent reconstructing the past and extrapolating the future, a dragon ever swallowing its tail, an infinity of numbers that summed to zero.
But one day they would add up to everything.
One day they would search out the right thread of ones and zeros that would lead to Orphan X.
It was only a matter of time.
6
Struck Oil
Evan noticed everything when he drove. Especially gray Ford Transit Connect vans with no side windows and dealer plates. Like the one that had been hovering in his rearview mirror for the past few blocks.
He threw on his right-hand turn signal. The van did not. Either it wasn’t following him or it was driven by a pro unwilling to take the bait. Evan drove straight past the entrance of the Norwalk FedEx office, and the van kept right on behind him. Evan muted the signal, keeping his head down but his eyes nailed to the rearview. He waited a few beats and then abruptly veered off onto a side street. The van coasted by, not even slowing.
He could never be too careful.
He’d spent the morning completing a circuit of the safe houses he kept in the Greater Los Angeles Area, testing his load-out gear, checking the oil on his alternate vehicles, changing up the automated lighting. At his Westchester place, a crappy single-story beneath LAX’s flight path, he’d switched out his usual rig for a mud-spattered 4Runner with a scuba flag sticker in the back window.
On the side street now, Evan sat behind the wheel and watched the road for a while. Finally he dropped the transmission back into drive. Backtracking to the FedEx office, he entered, signed a series of customs forms, and left with an elongated cardboard box.
His new katana. This blade had been forged relatively recently, in 1653, by Heike Norihisa, last smith of the five-layered smelt. The katana was decorative, as Evan had intended the last one to be, and he was eager to mount it on the empty hooks in his hall.
But he had another location to check first. He’d spent hour after excruciating hour parsing the data from Contrell’s GPS, checking the man’s frequent stops, searching for the location where he stored the girls before shipping them out. With every passing day, more sand trickled through the hourglass.
Evan drove to Fullerton. A sheaf of papers rested in his lap, much of the data on them already crossed out with red pen.
The next place on the list proved to be a humble residence, semi-isolated behind a stretch of soccer fields gone to dirt. Detached garage, new shingles, fresh paint, curtains drawn. A security gate guarded a concrete front walk hemmed in by flower beds. A Stepford house writ small.
Evan parked several blocks away and doubled back. He vaulted the fence, put his ear to the door, heard nothing. The lock gleamed, a shiny Medeco. He raked it with a triple mountain pick, feeling for the rhythm of the wafers inside as they lifted to different heights. At last he felt the pleasing click of the release.
The well-greased door swung in on silent hinges. He drew his Wilson from his Kydex high-guard hip holster and eased inside. The interior, dim from the drawn curtains, stank of cleaning solution and unventilated air. Though he sensed that the place was empty, he moved silently from room to room. It was cheaply constructed and surprisingly clean. Dishes neatly stacked on a spotless counter. Sparkling linoleum floors. IKEA-looking slipcovered couch and chairs, calming taupes, distressed blues. In the living room, he parted the curtains with a hand.
The windows were nailed shut.
He ran his fingers over the heads of the nails, the metal cool against his prints. His heart rate ticked up with anticipation.
He moved on.
The master bedroom featured two double beds, sheets neatly made. Men’s clothes in the wardrobe. Big men’s clothes. One of the jackets looked like it could cover a deck chair.
Evan stopped, breathed, listened.
Then he started down the tiny hall to the rear room. Three door bolts. On the outside.