Evan’s Woolrich shirt sported fake buttons hiding magnets that held the front together. The magnets gave way easily in case he needed to go for the holster clipped to the waistband of his tactical-discreet cargo pants. Right now the holster was empty. He wore lightweight Original S.W.A.T. boots that with his pant legs down looked like boring walking shoes. The boots would be a pain to unlace at airport security.
In his back pocket, he had one of many passports gorgeously manufactured by a gorgeous counterfeiter, Melinda Truong.
The matter was too urgent to wait for a cross-country drive.
It was oh-dark-hundred, and the elevator was empty this early—thank heaven for small mercies. As the doors zippered shut behind Evan, he smelled a trace of lemongrass. On the floor was a pea of balled-up tinfoil, the Ghost of a Hershey’s Kiss Past.
Or maybe he was the ghost, drifting invisibly among the living, following in their wake.
The ride down was quiet. He enjoyed it.
* * *
Evan carved through the whipping desert wind and ducked into the armorer’s workshop. Lit like a dungeon, it was off the Vegas Strip and off the beaten path. Evan checked the surveillance camera at the door, verified that it had been unplugged before his arrival, as was the standing arrangement.
He smelled gun grease and coffee, cigarette smoke and spent powder. He peered through the stacks of weapon crates, across the machines and workbenches that were arrayed according to some logic he’d never been able to decipher.
“Tommy?”
The sound of rolling wheels on concrete presaged the nine-fingered armorer’s appearance. And then there he was, sliding in from stage left in a cocked-back Aeron chair, welder’s goggles turning him into some kind of steampunk nightmare. Beneath the biker’s mustache, a Camel Wide crackled, sucked down to within a millimeter of the filter. Tommy Stojack plucked out the cigarette and dropped it into a water-filled red Solo cup, where it sizzled out among countless dead compatriots. Given the ordnance in evidence, a misplaced butt would turn the shop into a Fourth of July display.
Tommy slid the goggles up and regarded Evan. “Fifteen minutes prior to fifteen minutes prior. I could set my watch by you.”
“You have it?”
“Of course I have it. What’s with the ASAP?”
“I’m on something. It’s highly personal.”
“Personal.” Tommy plucked out his lower lip and dropped in a wedge of Skoal Wintergreen. “Didn’t know that word was in your lexicon. You threw in an adverb and everything.”
Evan could count the people he trusted on the fingers of Tommy’s mutilated hand, with digits to spare. Since the Black Hawk’s disintegration, Tommy was one of the few remaining. Even so, Evan and Tommy knew nothing of each other’s personal lives. In fact, they knew little of their respective professional lives either. From the occasional dropped tidbit, Evan had put together that Tommy was a world-class sniper and that he did contract training and weapons R&D for government-sanctioned black-ops groups that were not as dark a shade of black as the Orphan Program.
Tommy supplied Evan with his firepower, too, and made each of Evan’s pistols from scratch, machining out a solid-aluminum forging of a pistol frame that had never been stamped with a serial number—a ghost gun. Then he simply fitted a fire-control group and loaded up the pistol with high-profile Straight Eight sights, an extended barrel threaded to receive a suppressor, and an ambidextrous thumb safety, since Evan preferred to shoot southpaw. He ordered all his pistols in matte black so they could vanish into shadows as readily as he did.
As Evan entered the heart of the lair, Tommy used a boot to shove himself away from a crate of rocket-propelled grenades, conveying himself over to a workbench where he at last creakily found his feet.
Laid out on a grease-stained silicone cloth were a laptop and a narrow pistol that looked like one of Evan’s 1911s that had gone on a diet.
“I skinny-minnied this little lady up for you,” Tommy said. “What do you think?”
Evan picked it up. It fit oddly in his grip. His usual pistol, sliced in half. It was barely wider than the 230-grain Speer Gold Dot hollow points it fired. He turned it over in his hand and then back. “The weight’ll take some adjusting to.”
“That’s your way of saying, ‘Thank you, brother. You’re PFM. Pure Fucking Magic.’”
Evan eyed the sights. “That, too.”
Tommy slung an altered holster across the workbench. “And here’s a special-sauce high-guard Kydex to fit it.”
Evan hefted the weapon a few more times. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure how you’d pull it off.”
“Pull it off?” Tommy’s head drew back haughtily. “Boy, I’ve been calibrating a laser gun for the navy that can knock drones out of the sky. I’ve been field-testing self-guided fifty-cal sniper rounds for DARPA that change direction in midair. Fine-tuned a smart scope that doesn’t let you shoot a friendly target.” He crossed his arms. “I think I can handle smuggling a handgun past a few mouth-breathing TSA agents.” He snapped his fingers, pointed to a sticky coffeepot gurgling behind Evan. “Fetch.”
Evan poured a mug for Tommy, had to wipe his hands on the gun-cleaning cloth. Tommy slurped the coffee across his packed lower lip. Then he lit up another Camel. Evan figured the only reason Tommy didn’t smoke them two at a time was that it hadn’t occurred to him yet.
Tommy pulled three Wilson eight-rounders from his bulging shirt pocket and offered them up. “Test-drive it.”
Evan slotted in the first mag, put on eye and ear pro, and walked to the test-firing tube. He ran through all twenty-four rounds without a hitch. Then gave a faint nod.
He came back over to the workbench. “How’s the A-fib coming?”
Tommy waved him off. “I’m getting extra beats in between my extra beats. I figure I speed shit up enough, I’ll go full-tilt Iron Man.” He jabbed the stub of his missing finger at the arrayed items. “Let me break it down Barney style. Same everything you’re used to but skinnier. ‘Why skinnier, Chief Stojack?’ you may ask.” The finger stub circled. “Witness.”
Tommy took the skinny gun and slid it into the laptop’s hard-drive slot where some hidden mechanism received it. “All they’ll see on the X-ray is the solid block of the hard drive. I had to go thirteen-inch screen on the laptop to make the specs fit, so they might make you take it out, power it up, all that security Kabuki-theater bullshit, but you’ll be GTG. Obviously you gotta clean the piece so there’s no residues that’ll ring the cherries in a puff test. As for the laptop, I filled it with bullshit spreadsheets, generic documents, a few stock photos.” He picked up the laptop, showed off its slender profile. “High speed, low drag.” He made a production of handing it off to Evan, a waiter displaying the Bordeaux. “Go forth and conquer.” He gave his gap-toothed smile. “Fair winds and following seas.”
Evan took the laptop and started for the door.
“Hey.”
Evan turned back.
“You’re not exactly a barrel of belly laughs generally, but you seem decidedly more somber. This ‘highly personal’? It’s actually highly personal?”
“Yes.”
Tommy studied him, tugging at one end of his horseshoe mustache. The crinkles around his eyes deepened with concern. “You get in a jam, send up a smoke signal. I’m not too old to cover your six, you know.”
“I know. But it’s something I have to handle alone.”
Tommy nodded slowly, his gaze not leaving Evan’s face. “Remember what Confucius say: ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’”
“Oh,” Evan said, “I’m gonna dig a lot more than that.”