Orphan X: A Novel (15 page)

It’ll be okay,
he’d told her.
It always has been before.

An image slotted back into place in his mind: Sam’s DMV picture, taken on an ordinary day in an ordinary life. A denim shirt collar poking up into view. Tousled gray-white hair.

Dad taught me pretty much everything.

Evan’s legs moved him down the hall, past the row of Japanese woodblock prints and the nineteenth-century katana mounted on the wall. He cleared the doorway, and the master suite sprawled before him.

Pop of a gunshot.

He found himself on his knees before the bureau, tugging open the bottom drawer, sweeping aside his boxer briefs to reveal that carved crescent catch.

Thump of deadweight
.

His fingernail caught, and the false bottom of the drawer lifted. He removed the thin veneered particleboard and dropped it onto the floor beside him. On his knees he stared down into the newly revealed depths of the drawer, his breath tight in his throat.

Inside rested a torn blue flannel shirt, stiff with blood that had gone black with age.

A relic.

21

Dead Drop

Armed with only the training he has amassed over the past seven years, Evan finds himself navigating a treacherous new reality in treacherous new lands. There are no faces he recognizes, no safe havens, no conversations in his native tongue. He learns when to drift, when to anchor, when to project a potency beyond his nineteen years. Together in the comforting flicker of a birch fire in the farmhouse, he and Jack had built an operational alias that Evan wears now like a well-loved overcoat. It is composed of more truths than lies, the easier for Evan to align himself with it. Jack taught him the difference between acting his cover and living his cover. Evan does not act. He believes, laying down genuine emotion over the false foundation.

Missions follow, too many to count. Evan and Jack communicate by typing inside the same message saved in the drafts folder of Evan’s e-mail account. That way not a word is actually transmitted over the Internet, where it could be detected or captured. From various countries on various continents, Evan gets photographs, addresses, instructions. He reads, replies, saves, or deletes.

For a dormant account, [email protected] has an extremely active drafts folder.

Evan dispatches an Egyptian operative in a treetop lodge in Kenya, a drug lord in a São Paulo bathhouse, a Syrian rebel in the storage room of a lampshade shop in Gaza. In a dreary Lebanese slum, Evan modifies orders by removing a car bomb after his target proves to drive only with his children in the backseat. He winds up infiltrating an armed compound and shooting the man in bed, a dangerous improvisation that draws a rare censure from Jack.

Then 9/11 brings a tidal-wave surge in activity, Evan conducting more denied-area operations than ever and also moving unseen through Spain, France, Italy, lending a little uninvited help to friends. At some point—though it is not a distinct moment—his alias becomes known by three-initial agencies in certain territories. The ever-powerful databases have identified patterns of activity that are ascribed to him. The Nowhere Man: executioner and terrorist, wanted for a variety of offenses by a variety of nations, including the United States of America. But this doesn’t concern him, as he doesn’t technically exist. No clear photograph of him can be found in any file the world over. As his legend grows within particular shadowy circles, quite a few missions are misattributed to him. Raids are conducted to capture him, often in the wrong hemisphere. At least twice a suitable candidate is killed and the Nowhere Man taken off the rolls until another covert action demonstrates his apparent immortality.

Only Jack knows. He remains Evan’s sole link to legitimacy. To the rest of the world and his own government, Evan is a wanted man. Jack takes his orders from people at the highest level, and there they perch, breathing the rarefied air, enjoying the ultimate protection. Evan is plausible deniability personified. He is an enemy of the very state he protects and serves. Ball bearings within ball bearings.

He nearly forgets that there are others like him until one winter morning in his twenty-ninth year. At a dead drop in Copenhagen, he receives the message.

“I am one of you. Would like to meet. The Ice Bar, Oslo
.
”
A date and time are given.

It is signed
“Orphan Y
.
”

He stands for a time, note in hand. Snowflakes land on the paper but do not melt. He already knows two things—that he will go and that he will not tell Jack.

He arrives well before the appointed hour, surveilling the block, the bar, exits and entrances, stairwells and tables. The bar features a long glass-walled encasement running the length of the north wall, kept as cold as a freezer. Near the door of the encasement, fur coats hang, donned by men and women alike before they enter. Inside, slate ledges display innumerable bottles of vodka and aquavit. A bartender serves each chosen spirit in a shot glass made of ice.

The rest of the bar is stark and modern. Waitresses distribute pickled herring and reindeer satay on wooden paddles. Evan chooses a corner booth within leaping distance of the kitchen’s swinging doors and sets a revolver on the cushioned bench beside him, the length of the barrel pressing into his thigh, aiming out.

He spots the man the moment he enters, the bearing instantly recognizable even seventeen years later.

Same ginger hair, same ruddy complexion.

He winds through the crowd, peels off his winter coat, stands opposite Evan. They stare at each other. Fine hairs bristle on Charles Van Sciver’s arms. Across from them, in the freezer, a group of drunken young people, bearlike in their furs, throw back drinks, hurl their ice shot glasses against the glass wall, and high-five.

“Evan. Holy shit, huh?” Van Sciver says. He slides into a chair, takes in the upscale decor. “We’re a long way from the Pride House Group Home, aren’t we?”

“How did you find that dead drop to contact me?”

“We’re well trained.” A half smile. “I do appreciate your coming.”

“Why Oslo?”

“I’m here for a mission.” He hails the waitress, orders two glasses of aquavit, then returns his attention to Evan. “I wanted to see someone else who doesn’t exist. Nice to have a reminder now and then that we’re really here.”

The drinks arrive, and Van Sciver lifts his in a toast. They clink.

“I heard about you now and then during training,” Van Sciver says. “Passing references. They used your code name, of course, but I knew. Orphan Zero and you, best of the best.”

The notion of Evan’s reputation spreading through the Orphan Program seems to him bizarre. Almost as bizarre as sitting across from someone with shared experiences. And a shared history as well. For most of his life, Evan has operated without a present, let alone a past.

“You had a handler,” Evan asks. “And a house?”

“Oh, yeah, the whole nine. My dad, he was great. Laid out the Edicts, a way of life. He put me in the world.”

Curiosity burns inside Evan, fanned by every tantalizing detail, and he tells himself to dial it back, to remain on guard despite this sudden, unexpected, hard-to-define connection—if not camaraderie, then at least an uneasy rapport. He sips, the Norwegian aquavit smokier than its Danish counterpart.

They talk for a time, being careful but not too careful, nibbling at the edges of things. Mission stories stripped of proper nouns. Training incidents. Operational mishaps.

The glass-walled freezer opposite them fills up, more men and women in fur coats crowding together in the tight space, raucous cheers, shattering ice glasses, but Evan barely registers the annoyance. His and Van Sciver’s dimly lit table seems a haven from the noise and revelry, a quiet place in the world.

Van Sciver gulps his sixth shot, though he seems unaffected by the alcohol. “What I like best?” he says. “The glorious simplicity. There are orders and nothing else.”

A discomfort bubbles up from the base of Evan’s skull, though he can’t put a name to it. “‘Nothing else’?”

Van Sciver shakes his head. “Just getting it done. I was in and out of the Sandbox for a time, playing some offense. This one day I was tucked into the hillside behind a mansion, got a high-value target in the scope through a kitchen window. Tough shot—two hundred and change, wind factor, narrow vantage. But I had it. Problem was his kid, right? Maybe six years old, sitting in his lap. And there are security patrols working the mountain, so I have to roll in and out of the brush at intervals. I couldn’t get the target clean in the scope without that kid. And my window’s closing. Dusk coming on.” He wets his lips. “So I zero in on the kid’s eye socket, right? One less skull wall for refraction. I lined it up. Then I thought about it.” His big hand closes around the delicate cordial glass. He sips.

Evan has been there himself, on his very first mission, hiding in a fetid Eastern Bloc sewer, sniper rifle aimed through a curb drainage grate, his scope zeroed in on the eye of an innocent. He leans forward. “What’d you do?”

“I took the shot.” Van Sciver’s thumb and forefinger twist the stem of the glass back and forth. “Edict Twelve: Any means necessary.”

Evan’s head feels slightly numb from the booze and Van Sciver’s revelation, but through it he also feels a swell of affection for Jack. He wonders just how different Jack’s rules are from those of the other handlers.

He hears himself ask, “Did it work?”

“The round didn’t kill him, but the bone frags did.” Van Sciver picks up his drink, seems to think better of it, puts it back down. “I turned a six-year-old’s skull into a weapon,” he says, with some measure of dark pride. “I had to get it done. And I did. We don’t question. We take our marching orders. And we march.”

There is a flat shine to Charles’s eyes, the certainty of a True Believer, and Evan feels an unexpected stab of envy. What an easier line to walk. With the envy comes a degree of fascination.

“Do you ever wonder…?”

“What?” Charles prompts.

Evan rotates his glass in its condensation ring, strives to reframe the question more specifically. “How do you know he was a terrorist?”

“Because I shot him.”

Evan does his best to keep his reaction from his face, but Van Sciver must read something in him anyway, because he adds, “That’s how the game’s played. You don’t like the rules, play a different game.” He tosses back the remainder of his shot and rises, tugging on his coat. “It is what it is, and that’s all that it is.”

Evan remains sitting. They stare at each other for a moment, and then Evan gives a little nod. “See you somewhere or somewhere else.”

He knows there will be no closing pleasantries, but even so, the abruptness with which Van Sciver turns on his heel and walks away catches him by surprise. In the freezer the revelers pound shots and send their ice glasses crashing to the floor. Van Sciver threads through the tables and slips into the freezer, enveloped in the press of bodies.

Through the big glass wall, Evan watches him loop an arm around one drunken man’s neck and peel him slightly away from the others, who are toasting raucously with their next round. Booze trickles down their wrists onto the cuffs of their fur coats. They shoot the vodka. Wearing a loose grin, Van Sciver whispers in the ear of the drunken man, who is nodding in flush-faced agreement—the instant bonding of the inebriated. As the next volley of ice glasses shatter against the concrete, the man jerks in Van Sciver’s grasp. High fives are thrown all around them. Someone climbs up on the bar, nearly slipping. Van Sciver leans the drunken man against the glass wall and guides him down so he’s sitting on the floor. His back leaves a dark smudge on the pane. His head tips forward, chin to chest, and he is still. Van Sciver lifts a hat from one of the other partiers and sets it on the man’s drooping head, tilted over his face. Just another passed-out fool. His friends point at him, laugh, and keep drinking.

As Van Sciver glides out of the freezer room, his ruddy face finds Evan for a split second. He shoots a wink and is gone in the crowd.

He’d said it himself: He was here for a mission. Evan has to admire the cold-blooded efficiency. Two birds. One stone.

He throws down a wad of kroner and takes his leave.

Over the following months, the meeting with Van Sciver weighs on him. Snatches of their conversation return at inconvenient moments.
Any means necessary.… We don’t question.… Because I shot him
.
…
A moral blurriness has been introduced to the equation that Evan cannot, no matter how hard he tries, pull into focus.

And the missions keep pinging into the drafts folder of [email protected]. The summer finds him in Yemen, on the trail of a financier to radical imams. On an afternoon baked into lethargy by a gravy-heavy heat, he finally catches up to the man on an outing at a park. Hours pass as Evan waits for the man to separate from his young wife. Finally he heads into the filthy public bathroom, where Evan garrotes him beside the stall. A messy, up-close business. The man fights, kicking hard enough to break one of the porcelain urinals. After, Evan’s shirt is little more than a torn rag of sweat and blood.

When he gets cleaned up and back to his hotel, the local stations are lit up with news of a dead human-rights activist whose face happens to match that of the man Evan has just dispatched. He feels a dull thudding in his stomach, the beat of paranoia. Or is it doubt? Doubt is one thing he cannot afford.