Orphan X: A Novel (16 page)

He requests phone contact with Jack, and two hours later, it is granted. He reaches Jack per the new standard protocol—burner cell phone to burner cell phone—and Jack immediately jumps into housekeeping. “I moved another eight-figure sum through the Isle of Man. It’ll octopus out to your second-tier accounts, and then—”

“Stop,” Evan says.

Jack does.

“He wasn’t a financier,” Evan says. “I saw on TV he was a human-rights activist.”

“It says news, not truth.”

“Let’s skip the maxims this time out,” Evan says. “This is starting to feel arbitrary.”

Jack sighs across the receiver. Then he says, “I had to put Strider down this morning. Stopped eating. Belly full of tumors.”

Evan feels the loss in his gut, his throat. “I’m sorry.”

He hears the clink of ice in a glass. He imagines the handsome dog’s creep beneath the dinner table, the feel of the muzzle slurping a secreted handful of turkey from his cupped palm. The closest thing to a brother he ever had.

Jack interrupts his thoughts. “What are you telling me?”

The feeling of grief still enfolds Evan. He is unaccustomed to it. It takes him a beat to reorient himself. “Maybe I need a break.”

“You’re saying you want to come in?”

“I’m saying I need a break.”

“You can’t have one. Not right now.”

“Next mission is set?”

“In your folder already.”

Evan is sitting cross-legged on a bed on the top floor of a crumbling hotel. The room is so small he can reach across and pull his laptop from the wobbly wooden desk. Pinching the phone between his shoulder and cheek, he logs in to his account. The sash window is crookedly open, overlooking blocky beige buildings, strings of drying laundry. The air hangs hot and still in the room.

“Hold on,” he says. “I’m there.”

He clicks on the drafts folder. He opens the sole e-mail-in-progress. The beach ball spins as the photo loads.

He sees the face, and the breath leaves his lungs. The sounds of traffic fade. There is nothing but a white-noise rush at his ears. He blinks hard around his thumb and forefinger, pinching the bridge of his nose, but when he looks back up, the pixelated photo is the same.

Charles Van Sciver.

Jack reads something in the silence as only he can. “You recognize him.”

“Yes.”

“From the home.”

“Yes. And.”

“And what?”

Evan stands up, goes to the window, trying to find fresh air. But the air is all the same here—in this room, outside, in the whole bone-dry country. “We met once. I know. Who he is now.”

“You
met
? That’s an unfortunate irregularity.”

“Call it what you like. If he’s an Orphan like me, why is he landing in my e-mail account?”

“He’s been compromised. A couple of our guys…”

Evan could hear the pain in Jack’s voice. “What?” he pressed.

“They went to the other side.”

“Do you have any more information than that?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, if you want me to hunt down an Orphan, you’d better unfuck Washington and get me a specific answer as to why.”

“There are no answers. You know this.”

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t questions. The Sixth Commandment—or did you forget?”

Evan looks across at the open laptop. He sees Van Sciver staring out, but he also sees the young Van Sciver, circling them up on the blacktopped basketball courts in the shadow of the high-rise Lafayette Courts projects, a huddle of young thugs with nothing but time and nothing better to do.

“I won’t do it,” Evan says. “I won’t kill my own. He came up with me.”

“He’s dead anyways,” Jack says. “It’ll be you or someone else.”

“That strikes me,” Evan says, “as a faulty moral argument.”

A silence. Then Jack says, “Fair enough. Head back to Frankfurt. They’ll send someone to clean up behind you there.”

“They always do.”

Evan hangs up.

He initiates another call three days later, dialing the number of the next burner cell phone on the list he has memorized. Jack answers in the kitchen; Evan can hear the tail end of the coffee’s percolating.

“I need to see you,” he says.

“No way. You are taking a lot of heat for the Bulgaria job—you could be wrapped in surveillance right now.”

“I’m not.”

“How do you know?”

“Because. You trained me.”

A beat.

Then Jack says, “This is an irregular contact.”

For Jack there is no word more damning than “irregular.”

“It’s an irregular life. I need to see you. Now.”

“No. Stay in Germany. Get off the radar. You’ll never make it into the country right now.”

“I’m calling you from L Street and Connecticut Ave.”

The ensuing silence is protracted.

Jack says, “There may have been a leak on this end. I don’t want to be drawn out. I’m watching my movements.”

The Bulgaria job. A leak. Uncharacteristic excuses from a man who does not make any.

Jack says nothing. Evan doesn’t either.

At last Jack caves. “There’s an underground parking lot on Ohio Drive directly south of the Jefferson Memorial. It’s closed for construction. I’ll be at P3 at midnight. For five minutes.”

He leaves Evan with a dial tone.

After nightfall Evan walks along the choppy slate of the Potomac, hands shoved in his pockets. The cherry trees are in bloom, and he is surprised, as always, at how little fragrance they give off. The fallen blossoms wad underfoot.

He finds the structure and does a few walk-bys before approaching, threading through orange cones and hazard tape. A makeshift plywood sheet has been nailed too often over the door to the north stairwell, and it unseats readily with a gentle prying. He walks each level, moving between the slumbering cement mixers and construction trucks loaded with equipment. He descends to P3, surveils the perimeter of the dark floor, and tucks in behind a concrete pillar to wait. For over two hours, he makes not a single move, as inanimate as the gear and vehicles surrounding him.

At midnight on the dot, Jack materializes from the far end of P3, where, to Evan’s knowledge, there is no stairwell. Then again, it’s a magic trick befitting a onetime station chief. Ball bearings within ball bearings.

His footsteps
tick-tock
across the open. A glowing red elevator sign casts him in severe light, stretching his shadow across the oil-stained floor. He stops in the open, looking directly at the patch of darkness hiding Evan.

“Well?” he says.

Evan emerges. They embrace. Jack holds him for an extra beat. It has been twenty-six months since the last time they saw each other—a fifteen-minute meet in a coffee shop in Cartagena. The years have made Jack slightly more jowly, though he still looks fit, no extra padding. The sleeves of his blue flannel shirt are cuffed up past his forearms, which are as muscular as ever. Baseball-catcher arms.

When they pull apart, Evan scans the parking level. Clears his throat. “I’m out,” he says.

Jack takes his measure. “You’re never out. You know this. Without me you’re just—”

“A war criminal. I know. But I’m going underground. The Smoke Contingency.”

The designation, a joking play on his name, had become a shorthand between them.

“We cannot be having this conversation,” Jack says. “Not here, not now. Do you understand me? I know you think you’re alone out there. But there are protections I afford you. The well-placed phone call. The friend at the passport checkpoint. I am the
only person
who—”

Emotion crowds Evan’s chest—a smothering black claustrophobia. “I can’t do it anymore!”

The sharp words ring off the concrete pillars and walls. He cannot recall the last time he’s allowed emotion to color his voice. He wipes his mouth, looks away.

Jack blinks. He is looking at Evan in a way he never has before, a parent noticing for the first time that his child is no longer a child. His eyes are moist, his lips firm. He is not at risk of crying, and yet his expression seems a precursor to the act.

“I wanted you to see more than black and white. I wanted you to remain … human. In this, perhaps, I failed you.” He blinks again, twice, his big square head canted, pointed at the tips of Evan’s shoes. “I’m sorry, son.”

Too late, Evan feels the rumble of a moving vehicle through the soles of his shoes. He tenses. An engine roars, and headlights sweep the north wall like a prison watchtower light. At the far end of the parking level, a black SUV careens down the circular ramp from P2, bottoming out, riding a cascade of sparks.

Already two guns are firing through the windshield, flares of light through spiderwebbing glass. Jack hooks Evan’s arms and tugs him behind a pillar, rounds powdering the concrete inches from their faces. Evan has his Wilson drawn, and he rolls across the back of the pillar and out the other side, holding a Weaver shooting stance, his bladed body presenting a narrower target. As the SUV barrels toward them, he fires into the shattered maw of the windshield.

A bullet rifles by, close enough that he can feel the heat at the side of his neck, but his hands stay steady, his aim sure. He cannot see through the windshield, not yet, but he places rounds through both front seats and whoever occupies them. The SUV’s roar diminishes, the tires slow. Evan dumps a mag, loads another, keeps firing even after the cabin is decimated, even as the vehicle slows, slows, the broad hood nearing, the front bumper kissing his thighs as it finally stops.

The red elevator light illuminates the interior, two riddled bodies splayed forward against the dashboard. Hair and bone.

From behind him he hears a gurgle. Jack, slumped against the pillar, his blue flannel shirt sopped at the shoulder. The blood is bright, arterial. Jack’s hand, gripping the wound, is so uniformly coated that it seems as though he has slipped on a crimson glove.

A blip of missing time and then Evan is on his knees, pulling off Jack’s flannel. The crimson stripe claims the white undershirt, angled like a sash, expanding through the cotton even now. Jack’s hand shifts, and a straw-thin spray squirts between his fingers.

Jack is saying something. Evan has to tell his brain to take in the sounds, to shape them into words, to ascribe meaning to the words.

“I’m already dead,” Jack says. “It caught the brachial.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t—”

“I know that.” He lifts a callused hand, lays it against Evan’s cheek perhaps for the first time ever.

Wafting down the shafts and the curved ramp, the sound of police sirens. A hot-copper scent cuts through the sweet smell of sawdust.

“I’m going to die,” Jack says. “Don’t blow cover. Listen to me.” A paroxysm of pain racks his body, but he fights out the words. “This is not your fault. I made the decision to meet you.
I
did. Go. Leave me.
Go.
”

Evan thinks he is choking, but then he feels the wet on his cheeks and realizes what is happening to his face. The sirens are closer now, a chorus of warbling screams. “No,” he says. “I won’t go. I won’t—”

Jack’s good hand drops to his belt, and there is a clank, and then his service pistol is up between them. He aims it at Evan. “Go.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Jack’s gaze is steady, focused. “Have I
ever
lied to you?”

Evan stands up, stumbles back a step. He thinks about the warnings Jack gave him. Heat from the Bulgaria job. A potential leak.
I don’t want to be drawn out.

And yet Evan had done precisely that.

He throws a panicked look over at the smoking SUV, the mystery bodies slumped forward, faceless. Back to Jack, each breath wheezing out of him. Evan wants there to be more time, but there is no more time. It dawns on him that Jack’s flannel shirt is still mopped around his hand. His fist tightens around it, moisture spreading between his fingers. Somewhere above them tires screech. Boots on concrete.

“Son,” Jack says gently. “It’s time to go.” He rotates the barrel beneath his own chin.

Backing up, Evan arms the tears from his face. He takes another step back, and another, and then finally he turns.

Running away, he hears the gunshot.

22

Pieces of His True Self

Evan came back to himself kneeling on his bedroom floor before the open dresser drawer, the bloodstained collar of Jack’s flannel looped around his hand like a rosary. The gunshot seemed to echo through the doorways of his condo, a ghost sound that filled the air all around and yet had no source. That noise had sent him into a new life. He’d slipped out of that underground parking structure beneath the Jefferson Memorial and into a different existence.

The first weeks after Jack’s death he’d spent in a rented cabin in the Alleghenies, alone with the smell of pine mulch and the rustle of leaves. In his entire life, he’d known only one genuine human connection, and the loss of it had left a hole clean through his center. In his bones, his chest, beneath the vault of his ribs, he ached as if the damage were physical. In a way he supposed it was.