Whatever Jack had hoped for him couldn’t be worth as much as the sight of Alison Siegler being tended to by paramedics. Her shoulders had been hunched and she’d started at the touch of the paramedics, but when she rose to walk to the ambulance, she’d stood tall, unbroken. Evan had been across the St. Johns River by then, watching from an unlit pier on the opposite bank.
He took another sip, let the Stoli blaze a path through his insides. After the past couple weeks, he couldn’t get his muscles to believe that it was safe to relax. The alarm was set, the front door barred, the windows armored. Even the walls here had been upgraded — half-inch residential Sheetrock replaced with five and eight-tenths commercial-grade, which provided better sound attenuation and more structural rigidity in the event that someone tried to breach the place. He considered how much of his life he’d spent bricking himself in.
A wife. Maybe even kids. I tried to free you. I didn’t think you’d scurry right back to it.
What else did he know? For his entire adult life, he’d been one of those rough men standing ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do harm. A sentry willing to go up against the Hector Contrells and René Cassaroys, the Assim al-Hakeems and Tigran Sarkisians. If not him, then who? Maybe now that he’d been freed from the guilt of killing Jack, he’d be freed from seeking endless absolution for his sins. Freed from being the Nowhere Man.
Which meant he could be someone.
Someone real.
He thought of Mia and Peter out in the neighborhood right now, going door-to-door, collecting Kit Kats and M&M’s.
He downed the last of the vodka, studied the empty glass, trying to ratchet himself back to reality.
He had to get a new RoamZone up and running in the event Anna Rezian had found the next client requiring his help. He owed her, and he owed whoever would call.
Plus, René was out there. Which meant Evan still had a job to do. As Evan sat here waxing philosophical over an empty tumbler, René was no doubt already laying the foundations for his next operation, another kidnapping, the next gruesome medical lab. If Evan wanted to finish René, he’d have to beat the FBI to him while dodging Van Sciver and his attack-dog Orphans.
He owed as much to Despi. She’d brought him a tire jack, and her entire family had been slaughtered for it. I don’t know how to live with this, she’d told him. With what I saw.
René was a devourer of lives. Evan couldn’t let him continue, not with the wreckage he’d leave in his wake.
And yet … that birthmark, a kiss on Mia’s temple. Peter’s charcoal eyes, his croaky voice.
Evan washed the glass and then made his way down the hall, passing the empty brackets where the new katana was supposed to hang. Over the past few days, he’d learned to remove his bandages and undress with minimal pain.
Standing naked at the threshold of the shower, he flashed back to that bathroom at the chalet. The floor sloping to a drain. Bar of soap and a folded towel. Prison toilet, trash-can liner to the side.
Of their own accord, his fingers had moved to his scabbed neck.
He ducked into the warm stream. The first hit of water always stung the collarbone, but the burn quickly abated. He breathed hard, reminded himself that he was home.
He was, he realized, barely holding it together. His weight tugged him to the side, the wall cool against his ribs. He let the hot water beat against his crown.
At some point autopilot clicked on, the rituals of survival keeping him in motion. He got out, toweled off, rebandaged. In his bedroom he confronted the dresser, glaring at the bottom drawer with its false compartment bearing the bloodstained flannel — Jack’s very own Shroud of Turin.
Evan carried Jack’s shirt up the hall and across the great room to the free-standing fireplace, set it atop the pyre of cedar logs, and watched it burn. The coordinates by which he had charted the past eight years, up in smoke. As matter turned to air, he recognized that his own misguided sorrow and guilt had coalesced in the stiff fabric, as much a part of the shirt as the dried blood staining it. Even after no trace of the flannel remained, he found himself standing before the flames.
Returning to the bedroom, he pulled an unworn pair of dark jeans from the stack of duplicates. One drawer up were the fresh V-necked gray T-shirts, also neatly folded, also identical. A hinged wooden box in the closet held four Victorinox watch fobs still in the package. He took one out, clipped it to his first belt loop on the left side.
What did it say about him that he was so easily put back together? He’d long thought that it was a positive attribute, a testament to his durability, but now it felt artificial, unhuman. He was rebuildable, a snap-together Lego toy. His well-stocked drawers reminded him of the mac-and-cheese meals of his childhood, an assembly-belt existence from as far back as he could remember. And as far ahead as he could see. One mission would bleed into the next until the inevitable. If not Van Sciver, someone else. Evan would get older. His reflexes would get slower. Sooner or later he’d be a half-second too slow. Would he have balanced the books by then? And even if he had, would it make a difference?
Not a train of thought an assassin should engage in.
Exhaustion descended over him, a heavy cloud. That was it, then. He was tired. A good night’s sleep would purge his brain of this existential nonsense.
Heading back to the bathroom, he stepped through the hidden door in the water-beaded shower and into the Vault. A Hardigg Storm Case by the weapon lockers held a neat row of replacement RoamZone phones, each nestled in black foam. He plucked one out, slotting in a new SIM card, then dropped into the chair before the bank of monitors burdening the sheet-metal desk. A few clicks and he’d switched the phone service to a company in Bahrain.
He turned on the RoamZone — no messages from Anna Rezian’s referral — and plugged it into the desktop charger.
An impulse grabbed him. With flying fingers he called up Castle Heights’ internal-security feeds, then zeroed in on the lens positioned by the twelfth-floor elevator. He rewound at 3x, the digital footage herky-jerky.
There.
A few minutes ago, the camera had captured Mia walking backward with a man down the hall, reversing into the elevator, the doors zippering shut behind them. She’d gone to meet him in the lobby. That seemed noteworthy.
Evan clicked PLAY, let the doors part, freeze-framed on the man.
Ted.
The guy looked pleasant enough. Rumpled hair, work-casual clothes, black Chuck Taylors throwing in a dash of cool. A Web designer or an advertising exec, maybe. He’d know how to barbecue. CrossFit gym membership, vacations to Maui. A peaceful, ordinary existence, work and play and time to reflect.
He thought of Mia’s smile and wondered how dinner was going downstairs.
With Ted.
The RoamZone perched in its charger, awaiting the next call from the next client. Evan stared at it with enmity. It wasn’t just a phone. It was a collar and chain. For an instant he let himself imagine what it would be like to be free of it.
Plucked fresh from the living wall, basil, sage, and tomatoes sizzled atop the cooking eggs. With a dip of his wrist, Evan folded the omelet, completing the half circle, and then slid it onto a plate.
He’d woken early, meditated, and stretched. He couldn’t yet hang from the pull-up bar with his full weight, but if he tugged at it with his right hand, he could lengthen out the muscles of the arm. He’d required the jungle penetrator to bear him up the side of the Horizon Express, the cable attached to the grappling hook reeling him in on the deployed seat like a hooked fish.
At the store this morning, he’d stocked up on the basics — eggs, cheese, vodka. Now he sat, ate, and enjoyed the view of Downtown twelve miles to the east. The high-rises thrust up abruptly, a compact little skyline fit for a snow globe.