When Orphan A at last gave in and shaved his beard, the skin beneath was speckled with red nicks. He’d worked the comb too hard. He moisturized his face with coconut-hibiscus lotion from a sample tube by the sink.
What a weird fucking world.
He wandered out into the hotel room proper. On the bed lay a high-resolution photograph he’d taken of the federal prosecutor after he’d neutralized her. Proof of death.
He flipped over the photograph and stared up at the watercolor windsurfer framed above the headboard. Braced with Hemingwayesque determination, the painted figure was breaking through the frothy cap of a wave, long hair slicked back across one cheek.
Holt wondered what emotion that was intended to evoke in guests staying in a midrange hotel near Dupont Circle. That there was a big, adventurous world out there ripe for the taking? That by traveling to D.C. you were embarking on one such adventure? Or maybe it wasn’t anything like that at all. Maybe the colors and pattern had been focus-grouped and found to be soothing.
He stared a bit longer at the painting and wondered what emotion it evoked in him. All he felt was a sense of disconnection, of being unplugged from the world of sentiments that everyone else seemingly drew power from.
At his feet were two Pelican cases, and inside those were various handguns, frag grenades, body armor, and a half dozen FN P90s, courtesy of the Secret Service’s own White House armory. Designed in the eighties to penetrate Soviet titanium body armor, P90s took a 5.7 proprietary pistol cartridge, fifty rounds per mag. But that wasn’t what made them special. What made them special was that each FN P90 stored its rounds horizontally alongside the barrel, which meant no mag sticking down out of the body. That made it half the size of most personal-defense weapons, a nice short Star Wars –looking motherfucker that gave so little kick that a reasonably strong woman could fire it one-handed.
It was totally ambidextrous, geared for unusual shooting positions, great for close quarters—in a car, a hallway, the cab of an elevator. The brass ejected straight down, which meant no hot casings flying around, pinging off your neck, landing in your shirt collar.
Considerations like this governed him. It seemed that living with them for so long had made hibiscus-coconut lotion and painted windsurfers less alluring.
Maybe that’s what being an Orphan did, pressed the life force out of you until you were cold-blooded and slick-scaled, a creature bent to a single design.
A double rap came at the door. A pause. Another double rap.
Not room service.
He said, “Unlocked.”
The door opened, and the Brothers Sound and Fury entered, stooping to duck beneath the frame. Pasty and hulking, they wore leather biker vests with the sleeves cut off, white-supremacist ink cluttering up their visible skin.
The Collins boys stood shoulder to shoulder, Wade tugging at his bushy Abe Lincoln chinstrap beard, Ricky’s mouth bunched up so his face looked like a fist.
“Close the door,” Holt said.
“There’s more of us,” Wade said. “Cousins.”
He lifted his upper lip, part wolf, part rabbit, and sliced a whistle through his front teeth.
Five more men, slightly diminished versions of Sound and Fury, entered. Slightly diminished still put them at six-four, 230 each.
The last man in heeled the door shut, and then they crossed their arms in unison.
Orphan A took in the display. “You can cut the choreography,” he said. “This isn’t synchronized swimming.”
Wade said, “How ’bout you tell us exactly who the fuck you are and what you think we’re gonna do for you?”
Holt appraised their outfits. “We can’t exactly make you inconspicuous, but I’ll need you to dress like human fucking beings. Shave your beard, long sleeves to cover the arm tats, see about some cover-up for the Iron Crosses on the sides of your necks.”
Ricky sidled forward, Sound to Wade’s Fury. “I don’t think you heard the man.”
Holt looked him dead in the eye. “Lemme be clear. If you take one step closer, I’ll crush your windpipe and turn your head a hundred and twenty degrees on your neck before you hit the ground. You and your brother are outta your cages because of me. The instant I’m unhappy, the secret-handshake men’ll swarm your lives and put you back in your boxes to serve out the rest of your consecutive life sentences. So what do you say we cut the shit and get to work?”
The men locked eyes. Holt could smell the tang coming off Ricky, soured body chemistry and mental illness. He knew that he could make good on his promise, but the other Collins kin would extinguish him afterward. He wasn’t sure which way the situation would go. He wasn’t sure he particularly cared.
But then he thought of Orphan X and realized that he did.
What did it say that the only life-affirming glow that warmed his insides was the promise of revenge?
Ricky stepped back. “What’s the work?”
“Hunting,” Holt said.
This elicited grins from the cousins but nothing from the twin towers.
“We’re going after someone who’s going after the president,” Holt added.
“The president of what?” Wade said.
Holt gave him a dead stare until recognition dawned behind the grit and facial hair. “I have access to SFI. Serious Fucking Intel. All the eyes inside all the devices.”
“How?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
Ricky said, “Why aren’t the cops or whoever handling it?”
“Because it can’t be handled the way cops handle it,” Holt said.
Wade scratched at his beard again. Evidently the Abe Lincoln look came at a cost to personal comfort. “So we’re supposed to kill this guy?”
Holt said, “I didn’t have you released from prison for your dinner-party etiquette.”
“What if we get busted?”
“You still don’t get it.” Holt lifted a steel-tipped boot and laid open the top of the nearest Pelican case, revealing the gleaming ordnance beneath. “We’re the good guys now.”