Back to the Present
Evan was still sitting in the kitchen, the Sub-Zero numbing his bare back, the glass of vodka resting on his knee. The phone remained at his face. He felt not so much paralyzed as unwilling to move. Movement would prove that time was passing, and right now time passing meant that bad things would happen.
He reminded himself to breathe. Two-second inhale, four-second exhale.
He reached for the Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.
Jack had taught him the Commandments and would want—no, demand—that Evan honor them now.
The Fourth wasn’t working, so he dug for the Fifth: If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.
There was no situation that could not be made worse.
The vodka glass perspired in Evan’s hand.
The phone connection was as silent as the grave.
Van Sciver said, “Did you hear me?”
Evan said, “No.”
He wanted more time, though for what, he wasn’t sure.
“I said, ‘Go fetch your digital contact lenses. I have something you want to see.’”
Two-second inhale, four-second exhale.
“Let me be perfectly clear,” Evan said. “If you do this, nothing will ever stop me from getting to you.”
“But, X,” Van Sciver said pleasantly, “you don’t even know what I have planned.”
The line cut out.
Two-second inhale, four-second exhale.
Evan rose.
He set the glass down on the poured-concrete island. He walked out of the kitchen and past the living wall, a vertical garden of herbs and vegetables. The rise of greenery gave the penthouse its sole splash of color and life, the air fragranced with chamomile and mint.
He headed across the open plain of the condo, past the heavy bag and the pull-up bar, past the freestanding central fireplace, past a cluster of couches he couldn’t remember ever having sat on. He walked down a brief hall with two empty brackets where a katana sword had once hung. He entered his bedroom with its floating Maglev bed, propelled two feet off the floor by ridiculously powerful rare-earth magnets. Only cable tethers kept it from flying up and smashing into the ceiling. Like Evan, it was designed for maximum functionality—slab, mattress, no legs, no headboard, no footboard.
He entered his bathroom, nudged the frosted-glass shower door aside on its tracks. It rolled soundlessly. Stepping into the shower, he curled his hand around the hot-water lever. Hidden sensors in the metal read his palm imprint. He turned it the wrong way, pushing through a slight resistance, and a hidden door broke free from the tile pattern of the stall and swung inward.
Evan stepped into the Vault, the nerve center of his operations as the Nowhere Man.
Four hundred square feet of exposed beams and rough concrete walls, crowded from above by the underbelly of the public stairs leading to the roof. An armory and a workbench occupied one side. A central sheet-metal desk shaped like an L held an impeccably ordered array of computer towers, servers, and antennae. Monitors filled an entire wall, showing various hacked security feeds of Castle Heights. From here Evan could also access the majority of law-enforcement databases without leaving a footprint.
The door to the massive gun safe hung ajar. Beneath a row of untraceable, aluminum-forged, custom-machined ARES 1911 pistols, a slender silver case the size of a checkbook rested on a shelf.
Evan opened it.
Ten radio-frequency identification-tagged fingernails and a high-def contact lens waited inside.
The device, which Evan had taken from the dead body of one of Van Sciver’s Orphans, served as a double-blind means of communication between Evan and his nemesis.
Evan applied the nails to his fingertips and inserted the lens. A virtual cursor floated several feet from his head.
He moved his fingers in the space before him, typing in thin air: HERE.
A moment later Van Sciver’s reply appeared: EXCELLENT. ARE YOU READY?
Evan took a deep breath, wanting to hold on to these last precious seconds before his world flew apart.
He typed: YES.
* * *
Jack finally decided enough was enough and pulled his truck over onto a broad dirt fire road that split an endless field of cotton. Dust from the tires ghosted its way down the deserted strip of road. He couldn’t see the chopper in the darkness, but he heard it circling high overhead. He threw the truck into park, kept his eyes pegged on the rearview, and waited, his breath fogging in the winter chill.
Sure enough, SUV headlights appeared. Then another set. The vehicles parked ten yards off his rear bumper. Three more black SUVs came at him from the front. He watched them grow larger in the windshield until they slant-parked, hemming him in.
He traced his fingers absently on the driver’s window, drawing patterns. Shot a breath at the dashboard. Then, groaning, he climbed out.
The men piled out of the vehicles in full battle rattle, M4 carbines raised. A few of the men held AK-47s instead. “Both hands! Let’s see ’em.”
“Okay, okay.” Jack wearily patted the air in their direction, showing his palms.
He was still pretty goddamned fit for a man in his seventies, but he’d noticed that his baseball-catcher build had started to soften over the past few months no matter how many push-ups and sit-ups he did each morning. The years caught up to everyone.
He breathed in fresh soil and night air. The cotton stretched out forever, dots of white patterned against brown stems, like snow melting on a rocky hillside. It was Thanksgiving Day; the harvest looked to be running late.
He watched the men approach, how they held their weapons, where their eyes darted. They moved well enough, but two of them had their left thumbs pointing up on the magazine well grips rather than aligned with the AK barrels. If they were forced to switch shooting sides, the charging handles would smash their thumbs when they cycled.
Freelancers. Not Orphans. Definitely not Orphans.
But there were fifteen of them.
A few grabbed Jack, patted him down roughly, and zip-tied his hands behind his back.
One man stepped forward. His shaved head gleamed in the headlights’ glow. The plates of his skull ridged his shiny scalp. It was not a pretty head. It could have used a bit of cover.
He raised a radio to his lips. “Target secured.”
The others shifted in place, boots creaking.
“Relax, boys,” Jack said. “You did good.”
The guy lowered the radio. “You’re finished, old man.”
Jack pursed his lips, took this in with a vague nod. “He’ll come for you.” He cast his eyes across the freelancers. “With all the fury in the world.”
The men blinked uncomfortably.
The door of the closest SUV opened, and another man stepped into view. Compact and muscular. He threw his sculpted arms wide, as if greeting a long-lost relative.
“You’re a hard man to track down, Jack Johns,” he said.
Jack took his measure. “Jordan Thornhill. Orphan R.”
Surprise flickered across Thornhill’s face. “You know me?”
“Of you anyway,” Jack observed. “When you live as long as I have, son, you have eyes and ears in a lot of places.”
“You’re fortunate,” Thornhill said, “to have lived so long.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I was.”
The whoomping grew louder. A Black Hawk banked into view over the hillside and set down before them. Dirt and twigs beat at them. Jack closed his eyes against the rotor wash.
As the rotors spun down, a pair of geared-up men emerged. They wore flight suits and parachutes and looked generally overprepared. Three more men and the pilot waited inside the chopper.
Jack shouted, “A bit of overkill, don’t you think?”
Thornhill shouted, “We owe a debt of gratitude to helicopters this week!”
Jack didn’t know what to make of that.
“Well,” he said, “let’s get on with it, then.”
The two men in flight suits took Jack by either arm and conveyed him over to the helo. The others hauled him in. As they lifted off, Jack caught a bird’s-eye view of Thornhill vanishing back into the SUV as smoothly as he’d appeared. Two freelancers headed to search Jack’s truck, and the others peeled off to their respective vehicles and drove away.
The helo rose steeply and kept rising. Black Hawks have an aggressive rate of climb, and the pilot seemed intent on showing it off. This wasn’t gonna be a joyride. No, this trip had another purpose entirely.
Jack had done more jumps than he could count, so he knew how to roughly gauge altitude by the lights receding below.
They passed ten thousand feet.
Fifteen.
Somewhere north of that, they stopped and hovered.
One of the men donned a bulky headset and readied a handheld digital video camera.
Another slid open the doors on either side.
Wind ripped through the cabin, making Jack stagger. Given his cuffed wrists, he couldn’t use his arms for balance, so he took a wide stance.
The cameraman shouted, “Look into the camera!”
Jack did as told.
The cameraman listened to someone over his headset and then said, “What are your current protocols for contacting Orphan X?”
Jack shuffled closer, the wind blasting his hair, and squinted into the lens. “Van Sciver, you can’t honestly believe this will work on me.”
The cameraman listened again and then repeated his question.
Jack’s shoulders ached from his hands being cinched behind his back, but he knew he wouldn’t have to bear the pain much longer.
“There is nothing you could ever do to make me give up that boy,” Jack said. “He’s the best part of me.”
The cameraman winced, clearly catching an earful from Van Sciver over the headset, then squared to Jack with renewed focus. “I’d suggest you reconsider. We’re at sixteen thousand feet, and you’re the only one up here without a parachute on.”
Jack smiled. “And you’re dumb enough to think that puts you at an advantage.”
He bulled forward, grabbed the cameraman’s rip-cord handle between his teeth, and flung his head back.
There was a moment of perfect stunned silence as the parachute hit the cabin floor.
The wind lifted the nylon gently at first, like a caress.
And then the canopy exploded open, knocking over the men in the cabin. The cameraman was sucked sideways out the open door. The Black Hawk lurched violently as first the chute and then the cameraman gummed into the tail rotor.
The Black Hawk wheeled into a violent 360. Jack gave a parting nod to the sprawled men and stepped off into the open air. On his way out, he saw the powerful ripstop nylon wrapping around the bent metal blades.
By instinct Jack snapped into an approximation of the skydiver’s stable position, flattening out, hips low, legs spread and slightly bent. His hands were cuffed, but he pulled his shoulders back, broadening his chest, keeping his hanging point above his center of gravity. The wind riffled his hair. He watched the sparse house lights wobble below, like trembling candles holding strong in a wind. He figured he’d have hit 125 miles per hour by now, terminal velocity for a human in free fall.
He’d always loved flying.
Jack thought of the malnourished twelve-year-old kid who’d climbed into his car all those years ago, blood crusted on the side of his neck. He thought about their silent hikes through the dappled light of an oak forest outside a Virginia farmhouse, how the boy would lag a few paces so he could walk in the footprints Jack left shoved into the earth. He thought about the way his stomach had roiled when he’d driven that boy, then nineteen years old, to the airport for his first mission. Jack had been more scared than Evan was. I will always be there, Jack had told him. The voice on the other end of the phone.
The ground was coming up fast.
I will always be there.
Jack shifted his legs and flipped over, now staring up at the night sky, letting gravity take his tired bones. The stars were robust tonight, impossibly sharp, the moon crisp enough that the craters stood out like smudges from a little boy’s hand. Against that glorious canopy, the Black Hawk spun and spun.
He saw it disintegrate, a final satisfaction before he hit the ground.
* * *
Evan stood in the darkness of the Vault, breathing the dank air, watching the live feed with horror.
The dizzying POV of the camera flying haphazardly around the cabin, banging off tether straps, jump seats, screaming men. And then airborne, free of the cabin, spinning off into the black void. The only sound now was the violence of the wind.
Evan’s brain was still stuck thirty seconds back when Jack had walked out the cabin door as calmly as if he were stepping off a diving board.
The virtual ground came up and hit Evan in the face.
Static.
Evan’s last panicked text to Van Sciver remained below: NO WIAIT STOP I’LL TELL YOU WHEREWW I AM
His next exhalation carried with it a noise he didn’t recognize.
The cursor blinked.
Van Sciver’s response finally arrived: TOO LATE.
Evan removed his contact lens and fingernails and put them back in the case.
He walked out of the Vault, through his bedroom, down the hall, and across the condo to the kitchen area.
The glass of vodka waited on the island.
He picked it up with a trembling hand.
He drank it.