Jack looked heartbroken. He studied Evan. “You don’t owe anything, son. For what I tasked you to do. It’s on me. You’ve got nothing to atone for.”
“I pulled the trigger, Jack,” Evan said. “Every last time.”
For a few minutes, they sat and listened to the wind rush around the ancient stone. Jack pinched the crinkled skin beneath his eyes. When he looked back up, his gaze was clear.
“People talk about starting over,” he said. “But you can’t start over. All you can do is change direction.”
“Maybe we could do that,” Evan said.
Jack gave his non-smile, that slight bunching of his right cheek that said he was pleased. He tilted his face to the Mediterranean sun. “Funny that we’re meeting here in the shadow of the gods. Destiny ringing from the stones. The old stories.” He blinked a few times and suddenly looked much older. “Can we break it?”
“What?” Evan asked.
“The cycle.”
“I don’t know.”
Jack looked across at him. “Are you willing to try?”
Evan said, “Yes.”
Jack drained the last of his espresso, set down the glass, and stood up. Backlit, he looked down at Evan. “Would you like to take a walk?”
Evan rose to join him.
73
Resolute
Anna Rezian looked nothing like the wrecked sparrow of a girl Evan had seen just a few months ago. She stood in a circle of girls on the high-school quad, laughing and sharing pictures on her iPhone. Her hair had mostly grown back, covering the patches she’d plucked out.
Sitting in his idling F-150 pickup, Evan watched her through a rise of chain-link fence. He didn’t generally go near a client once he’d completed his mission, but he wanted to see her, wanted to be reminded of the good in the world.
A brief article had appeared online this morning. An American expat had been discovered in a high-end luxury condo in Zagreb along with a dead body. He’d been in terrible shape. The story had carried a single photo of the police leading him out.
The man looked to be in his nineties, his strawlike hair gone white, his loose skin bagging around his face, his joints angled arthritically. He hadn’t yet recovered his capacity for speech, and one of the physicians remarked that he didn’t know what the man could have encountered to have aged him so violently.
No one had any idea what had happened behind the gate of the high-end complex or whether it was related to the nearby street explosion that had claimed a life a week ago.
The school bell rang, the sound crisp in the November breeze. Evan drew in a breath of fresh air and watched Anna walk to class with a friend.
Maybe she wouldn’t bother finding the next client to pass on the Nowhere Man’s number to. The next client who would find the next client who would find the next. Evan found himself wondering if Anna might just let it go and move on with her life.
No.
Not wondering.
Hoping.
For the first time since he’d built the compound, Charles Van Sciver powered down the monitors. One wall at a time until all three had gone dark, his eternal horseshoe dimmed at last. The warmth of the screens vibrated the air, the afterglow of something just killed.
The act was largely symbolic. The computing power still churned in the banks of servers behind the concrete wall, and he could reignite the monitors at a moment’s notice. But sometimes symbolic was good.
Sometimes you needed to drench yourself in darkness.
In the darkness his thoughts and desires clarified. In the darkness the path ahead was illuminated.
It was time to leave the foxhole.
He prepared himself. Then reached for the telephone.
One of three heavy black phones rang on the Resolute desk. Fashioned from the timbers of the British frigate that was its namesake, the desk had been gifted to the United States by Queen Victoria. American seamen had saved the ship after it had been frozen in Arctic ice, and the desk had pinned down the oval carpet ever since.
The seal on this carpet was rendered in bas-relief like Truman’s, the cut pile trimmed to different lengths to delineate the eagle and stars. It was monochromatic, shadows within shadows.
A handsome man in his fifties excused himself from the assembly on the couch, crossed to the desk, and answered.
This was the only call on which Van Sciver didn’t dare use his anonymizing voiceware. “We lost him, Mr. President.”
The handsome man pouched his lips and paused. If there was one thing he’d learned in office, it was the value of a two-second pause before responding. “Get him back in play.”
He leaned to hang up, but Van Sciver’s voice came through, so he moved the phone back to his face.
“Next time,” Van Sciver said, “I’ll handle it personally.”
The president allowed another two-second pause.
Then hung up.
74
Overlord of Everything and Nothing
It was hard to pick up the trace of sun-dried raisin in the vodka, but it was there, lingering behind the aftertaste. Handcrafted in small batches, Dash organic vodka was distilled seven times, filtered through coconut shells, and then micro-oxygenated until it was smoother than velvet.
Sitting on his black suede couch, Evan sipped it now, looking past the slit in the floor that housed his retractable flat-screen TV and focusing on the view beyond.
Los Angeles, a constellation of nearly 4 million lights. All of them seemed to be on display tonight. Checkering the neighboring apartments, running up and down the high-rises of Downtown, headlighting the cars Tetris-ing their way through the gridlocked streets below.
And Evan floating twenty-one stories up, observing it all with his glass of vodka, an overlord of everything and nothing.
Alone.
The congestion on the streets looked thicker than usual, and he realized: It was Thanksgiving.
He thought of Anna Rezian, her life back in motion. The RoamZone bulged in his pocket, charged and ready to go. What would next week bring? And the week after? How many more Hector Contrells would he face? How many seedy doorsteps would he darken, steeling himself for whatever atrocities waited inside? How long had he been stuck here inside this fortress-prison, inside this trope, this story? He thought about breaking out of the narrative, about time moving along and — for once — him moving along with it. Unclicking that pause button and stepping into life with all its ordinary wonders and concerns.
You can’t start over.
The drink had lost some of its charm.
All you can do is change direction.
And then Evan was up and walking. Through the door, up the corridor to the elevator, riding down nine floors. He moved briskly to 12B, tapped on the door before he could convince himself not to.
He sensed a shadow at the peephole, and then the door pulled open, a trace of lemongrass presaging Mia’s appearance in the gap. From behind her, soft lighting and the smells of a laden table.
“Evan, it’s—”
“If I stopped it all, would you consider letting me in?”
She stood in the doorway, confused. “I— Wait— What? You’d do that? For me?”
“No,” he said. “For me.”
She blinked at him. Peter leaned forward from his chair onto his elbows, his face poking into view, angled above a still-steaming bowl of mashed potatoes.
“That’s what you’re saying?” she asked. “That you’re willing to stop it all?”
He stared at her, feeling the pull of a thousand buried instincts as they fought their way to the surface. He opened his mouth to reply.
In his pocket the RoamZone vibrated.