By the time they arrived at Evan’s Burbank safe house twelve hours and twenty-nine minutes later, they were driving a Prius with the license plates of a Kia. Bottlebrush and pepper trees shaded the street of single-story midcentury houses. Evan’s sat apart at the end of the block behind a tall hedge of Blue Point juniper. When he’d bought it, one of a half dozen he kept at the ready, the neighborhood had been affordable, the houses charming if slightly ramshackle. But owing to Burbank’s fine schools and proximity to the studios, the block’s gentrification had reached a fever pitch; now remodels perennially clogged the quiet street. He’d been planning to unload the place and would do so as soon as he and Joey were done with each other. He maintained a labyrinthine and impenetrable network of shell corporations that allowed him to shuffle and discard assets without fear of being traced.
He parked in the garage next to a decade-old Buick Enclave that had served him loyally. The garage door shuddered down, and then he and Joey were cocooned in darkness, safe.
He started to get out when she said, angrily, “What does it matter?”
“What?”
“Whether I kill someone?”
He took a moment to consider. “It changes you in ways you can’t understand. You’d never be able to have a normal life.”
“A normal life? So I can … what? Hang out at the mall? Go to prom? Take a thousand fucking selfies?”
Her voice held an anger he did not understand.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’d fit right in.”
“It’s about more than that,” he said. “We’ve talked about the Tenth Commandment. ‘Never let an innocent die.’ But maybe there’s another part to it: ‘Never let an innocent kill.’”
“I’m not an innocent.”
“No. But maybe we could get you back there.”
She did not seem satisfied with that.
She made no move to get out of the car. Sitting in the Prius, they stared through the windshield at nothing.
“I’m weak,” she said.
Her face cracked, contorting in grief, a flicker so fast that he’d have missed it if he’d blinked.
“Why do you think that?”
“I couldn’t pull the trigger on the guy in the duffel bag. I couldn’t do it at the rest stop either.”
“That’s not because you’re weak,” Evan said. “It’s because you’re stronger.”
“Than who?”
He hadn’t seen where the words were headed, not until now. He set his hands on the wheel, breathing the dark air.
“Than me,” he said.
* * *
For Evan, maintaining the safe houses was a part-time job. Every few days he watered the landscaping, cleared flyers off the porch, took in the mail, programmed the lighting-control systems. Each location had what Jack called “loadouts”—mission-essential gear and weapons.
He entered the Burbank house, disarming the alarm system. The interior was dark, hemmed in by trees, the backyard shaded by a steeply sloped hillside. The house always smelled slightly damp, moisture wicking up through the foundation.
Joey walked from room to room, mouth gaping. She came back into the living room, let the rucksack drop on the thick brown carpet along with a bag of junk food he’d bought her at the last gas station. Twizzlers and Red Bull, as promised, as well as instant ramen packs, Snickers bars, and sandwiches in triangular plastic containers.
“You just have houses everywhere?”
“Not everywhere.”
“Where do you live?”
“That’s off-limits.”
She held up her hands. “Whoa, cowboy. I got it. X’s place—off-limits. But how do you have so much money?”
“When I was operating, they set me up with an excess of resources. They wanted me to have no reason ever to be heard from. It was a huge investment, but it paid well.”
“Paid well?”
“How much is regime change worth?” Evan said.
Joey pursed her lips.
He said, “A well-placed bullet can change the direction of a nation. Tip the balance of power so a country’s interests align with ours.”
She shook her head as if shaking off the thoughts. “How has Van Sciver not tracked you down through your bank accounts?”
“He’s tried.”
“But you’re too good.”
“No. Jack was too good. He set everything up, taught me what I needed to know about keeping it untraceable.”
“But things have changed since then.”
“Right. I’ve refined the practices. After an unfortunate event last month, I diversified a little more. Bitcoin mining.”
She smiled. “Because it’s delinked from government regulation and oversight.”
“That’s right.”
“So. That’s why you can afford to have safe houses everywhere.”
“Not everywhere.”
She spun in a full circle, taking it all in. “And I can stay here?”
“Yes. And work.” Evan fired up the Dell laptop, set it on a round wooden table that, along with a mustard-colored couch, passed for the living-room furniture. “I need what’s in here. Getting Van Sciver? It’s a marathon, not a sprint. But we want to sprint the marathon. Understand?”
She folded her arms. “Let me explain to you what we’re looking at here. This Dell Inspiron is using a crazy strong encryption algorithm.”
“So you can’t brute-force the key?”
She gave a loud, graceless guffaw that was almost charming. “We’re talking a substitution-permutation cipher with a block size of sixty-four bits and key sizes up to two hundred and fifty-six bits. So no, we can’t brute-force the key unless you’ve got like a hundred or so years.”
“What’s the best way to get the key?”
“With a hammer from someone who knows it.”
“Joey.”
She sigh-groaned, sat down, and pulled the laptop over to her. “What’s your password to get online?”
He told her. Waited. Then asked, “What are you doing?”
Her fingers blurred. “Downloading the tools I need.”
“Which are?”
“Look,” she said, “going up against the algorithms could take weeks. We have to figure out the key. Which in all certainty will be composed—at least in part—of words or specific numeric sequences that are familiar to these guys in some way. So I need lists. I’m talking every name in the English language, European names, nicknames, street addresses, phone numbers, combinations of all of the above. Did you know there are only one and a half billion phone numbers in North and South America?”
“I did not.”
But she was barely listening. “There’s this newish thing from Amazon? Called an AMI—an Amazon Machine Image. Basically it runs a snapshot of an operating system. There are hundreds of them, loaded up and ready to run.”
Evan said, “Um.”
“Virtual machines,” she explained, with a not-insubstantial trace of irritation.
“Okay.”
“But the good thing with virtual machines? You hit a button and you have two of them. Or ten thousand. In data centers all over the world. Here—look—I’m replicating them now, requesting that they’re geographically dispersed with guaranteed availability.”
He looked but could not keep up with the speed at which things were happening on the screen. Despite his well-above-average hacking skills, he felt like a beginning skier atop a black-diamond run.
She was still talking. “We upload all the encrypted data from the laptop to the cloud first, right? Like you were explaining poorly and condescendingly to me back at the motel.”
“In hindsight—”
“And we spread the job out among all of them. Get Hashkiller whaling away, throwing all these password combinations at it. Then who cares if we get locked out after three wrong password attempts? We just go to the next virtual machine. And the one after that.”
“How do you have the hardware to handle all that?”
She finally paused, blowing a glossy curl out of her eyes. “That’s what I’m telling you, X. You don’t buy hardware anymore. You rent cycles in the cloud. And the second we’re done, we kill the virtual machines and there’s not a single trace of what we did.” She lifted her hands like a low-rent spiritual guru. “It’s all around and nowhere at the same time.” A sly grin. “Like you.”
“How long will this take?”
“Not sure. I have to oversee the control programs, check results, offer the occasional loving guidance. After all, they are just machines.”
“Okay. I have to get back. Towels in the bathroom. The fridge is stocked with food.”
“Wait—you’re leaving me here?”
He crossed to a cupboard, pulled out a burner cell phone, and fired it up for the first time. “Only call me. You know the number?”
“Yeah, 1-855-2-NOWHERE. One digit too long.”
“Yes.”
“So that’s it?” She looked around at the blank walls, the mustard-colored couch. “This is my life?”
“For now.”
“Is there a TV?”
“Nope.”
“What do I do?”
He picked up the keys to the Enclave from a dish on the kitchen counter. He’d left his Ford F-150 in a long-term parking lot at Burbank Airport; he’d do one last vehicle swap before going home. “Get into that laptop.”
“Okay,” she said. “And when I do?”
He headed for the garage. “Then I follow the trail.”
“No—I mean, what happens to me?”
He spun the keys around a finger once and caught them in his fist. He started out. “Just crack it, Joey.”
“So what? We’ll just figure out me later?”
“This isn’t about you, Joey. It’s about Van Sciver. You understand what I need to do here. That’s my only concern.”
He held her eye contact. She gave a little nod.
And he left her.