His tasks for the day completed, Evan sat at his kitchen island before a plate of steaming mahimahi, seasoned with thyme from his living wall. The plate was centered precisely between knife and fork. Offset symmetrically beyond the plate were two bowls, one filled with fresh pomegranate seeds, the other with cherry tomatoes, also plucked from the vertical rise of vegetation. His vodka tonight, shaken until bruised and served up, was 666 Pure Tasmanian, fermented in barley, single-batch-distilled in copper pots, and filtered through highest-grade activated charcoal. Ice crystals glassed the top.
He’d prepared the meal with focus.
And he didn’t want any of it.
He wondered what Mia and Peter were eating in their condo nine floors below. Their colorful home with action figures on the floor, dishes in the sink, messy crayon drawings magneted to the refrigerator. When he’d first visited them, the disorder had made him uncomfortable. But he’d learned to understand it differently, as an affirmation of lives being fully lived.
He forced a bite. The flavor was good and told his body it was hungry. He reminded himself that no matter what emotions were cycling through him, he was a machine bent to a single purpose and machines required fuel.
He ate.
When he was done, he scrubbed the plate, dried it, put it away atop a stack of others. It struck him that only the top plate ever got used.
He took the vodka over to the big windows stretching along the north wall and stared out at the Los Angeles night. He could see clearly into the building across from his, like peering into a dollhouse. A man emerged from an elevator, scrubbing furiously at his collar with a handkerchief. The fabric came away lipstick red. He folded the handkerchief into his pocket, walked down the hall. Evan watched his wife react happily to the door’s opening. They embraced. Three floors up, a family quartet lay on their stomachs on the living-room carpet, playing a board game. Next door to them, a woman sobbed alone in a dark bedroom. An older couple on the top floor practiced ballroom dancing. The woman had a flower in her steel-gray hair. They both smiled the entire time.
All that humanity in motion. Like observing the inside of an intricate clock, gears and cogs and hidden machinations. Evan could tell the time, but he would never fully grasp the inner workings.
His gaze returned to the woman crying in the dark. As he watched her, he felt something inside him twist free, a fresh shoot of grief rising up to match hers. He’d never lacked sympathy—no, that he’d always had in spades. But he’d protected himself from empathy, had withdrawn here to his Fortress of Solitude and taken up the drawbridge.
He watched the woman sob and envied her ability to release so powerfully and so well.
His release would be paid for in blood.
He took a sip of his drink, let it slide across his tongue, cleanse his throat. Hint of dark chocolate, touch of black-pepper heat.
He dumped out the remaining vodka, then crossed to the Turkish rug near the fireplace, sat crossed-legged, and rested his hands gently on his knees. He straightened his vertebrae and veiled his eyes so they were neither open nor closed.
He dropped beneath the surface of his skin and focused on his breath, how it moved through him, how it left his body and what it took with it.
He felt the grief and fury inside him, a red-hot mass pulsing in his gut. He observed it, how it crept up his throat, seeking egress. He breathed through it, even as it raged and fought. He breathed until it dissipated, until he dissipated, until he was no longer Orphan X, no longer the Nowhere Man, no longer Evan Smoak.
When he opened his eyes sometime later, he felt purified.
He set aside his grief. He set aside his fury.
It was time to get operational.
* * *
The high-def contact lenses had their own data storage and as such could be rewound and replayed. Evan watched the footage dispassionately, a bomb investigator searching a blast site for clues.
The POV blinked on, a shuddering view of the Black Hawk’s interior. Evan ignored the handcuffed man it was pointed at. Instead he watched one of the captors slide open the cabin doors to reveal paired slices of night air.
It was too dark to pick up any surface bearings. Evan could not determine how high the helo was, though one of the captors had mentioned sixteen thousand feet. As the wind whipped through and ruffled the hostage’s hair, the moon jogged into sight in the corner of the open door. If Evan had a team of NASA astronomers at his disposal, perhaps he could determine the chopper’s location based on star position.
But all he had in the Vault was himself and an aloe vera plant bedded down in a dish filled with cobalt-blue glass pebbles. She was named Vera II, and while she made for excellent company, she lacked the computing power of a team of NASA physicists.
He’d already done an extensive news search online and had not been surprised to find that there was no report of a Black Hawk’s crashing anywhere in the world last night. Van Sciver’s non-fingerprints were all over it. If Evan wanted to pick up the trail, he’d have to shine a light in the shadows.
He focused on the footage as the freelancers in flight suits positioned themselves around the Black Hawk’s cabin.
Someone off-screen shouted, “Look into the camera!”
The hostage obeyed.
Evan searched the captors for identifying tattoos, insignias, but they were geared up from their boots to their necks, only their faces showing. These freelancers loved their apparel. Evan studied their comportment, their builds, their postures. The men not in motion stood like they had two spines. Their boots were straight-laced, the preferred style of hipsters and ex-military.
Evan presumed they were not hipsters.
Van Sciver liked to use spec-ops washouts as his guns-for-hire, dishonorably discharged men who had all the training but were too brutal or unruly to stay in the service.
A voice came from off camera: “What are your current protocols for contacting Orphan X?”
The hostage kept his feet wide for balance and talked to the lens.
As the back-and-forth continued, Evan’s eyes picked across the scene for any telling details—a Sharpied nickname on a rucksack, a serial number on a gun, a map with a cartoon red X on it. No such luck. They’d done a superb job of sterilizing the visual field.
The hostage squared to the lens, gave his line: “And you’re dumb enough to think that puts you at an advantage.”
The ensuing commotion, if viewed with detachment, bordered on comedic. The calmness of the hostage, such a contrast to the terror of his captors.
As the digital camera flew around the cabin, Evan worked his RFID-covered fingernails, bringing up virtual settings that shifted the footage to slow-motion. In the chaos perhaps something would be revealed.
He watched the scene through five, six times to no avail.
Then he changed his focus to a later segment of the footage, when the camera sailed free of the failing helo. He put on a night-vision filter, hoping to identify something on the ground, but it was whipping by too fast. Even when he moved to frame-by-frame, all the flying lens caught were blurs of occasional lights, tracts of what looked like farmland.
He was about to give up when he caught a glimpse of a bigger earthbound splotch, less illuminated than the other lights. He reversed and freeze-framed. It was darker because it wasn’t in fact a light. The night-vision wash had picked it up, lightening it to the brink of visibility.
He rotated forward one frame. Back one frame. That was about all the space he had. He returned to the middle frame, squinted, instinctively leaned forward. Of course, the virtual image moved with his head, holding the same projected distance.
Fortunately, Vera II didn’t judge.
Evan grabbed the splotch, enlarged it, squinted some more.
A water tower.
With a hatchet cut into it? It looked like an apple.
No—a peach.
A peach water tower.
There was one of those, all right. He’d seen it on a postcard once.
He was already scrambling to free himself of the contact lenses. Off with the new tech and in with the old.
A Google search brought up the Peachoid, a one-million-gallon water tower in Gaffney, South Carolina. It was located just off Interstate 85 between exits 90 and 92 on the ingeniously named Peachoid Road.
It wasn’t a big red X on a map.
But it was pretty damn close.