Buy a Bullet: An Orphan X Story

She takes the pain, takes it so well. This is evident the moment she enters the upscale coffee shop in downtown Palo Alto. She is on the arm of a trim man with artfully tousled hair, two-day growth, and Bono sunglasses. Or rather, he is on her arm, his fist wrapped around her slender biceps, steering her, conveying ownership. She winces against the pressure of his grip, allowing a slight crimp of the right eye, but her grin doesn’t so much as flicker. Experience has taught her.

Bringing up the rear is a head-taller, broad-chested specimen of a bodyguard, ex-military judging by hair and posture. His deferential bearing suggests that when tasked, he also performs the services of a personal assistant, as do most employees in the orbit of the very rich. He is youthful. His body fat is single digit; muscles sheathe him like armor.

In the corner of the shop, a man notes this little retinue over a lifted cup of espresso. He is around thirty years old, not too handsome, unobtrusive. Just an average guy. At his feet sits a bag bulky with night-vision gear handed to him hours ago through the rear door of a Sand Hill office in exchange for a banded stack of bills. He is not a regular in the Bay Area; having collected what he came for, he has pit-stopped for a quick cup before the five-hour haul back to Los Angeles. But now his interest is piqued by this woman and the man clamped to her.

The coffee shop on University Avenue gets all kinds — or rather all Silicon Valley kinds. A trio of Scandinavian engineers in their Dockers and rumpled short-sleeve button-ups. Entrepreneurs-to-be hunched over slender silver laptops, plugged into headsets. Twentysomethings wearing Havianas and slurping free-trade coffee, key-chain carabiners dangling off their belt loops. The wood-paneled confines smell of Guatemalan roast and ambition, and hum with caffeine and a variety of pleasingly accented voices.

At the couple’s entrance, activity ceases for a moment but it is not, surprisingly, at the woman’s considerable Midwestern beauty. The ensuing stir appears to be due to the man in the yellow-tinted shades. From the whispers making the rounds, a name emerges — Steve Radack.

The watcher at the corner table lowers his demitasse to the tiny saucer. The name rolls around in his mind for a moment before slotting into place. Radack is a dot-com success story, which makes him, in these parts, royalty. A member of the three comma club, he is unaware of the attention or, more likely, inured to it. His knees jiggle beneath tailored pants. An unlit cigarette bobs from his lips. Sweat sparkles at his hairline. He is amped on something and the condition seems not unfamiliar to him.

Radack orders the bodyguard to bring him a Dead Eye — three shots of espresso added to drip coffee — and leads the woman to a table, his fingers still indenting her smooth pale skin. Patrons clear a path. At the table, the woman says, “Would you mind getting it to go?” and he slides his hand to her wrist and deals it a cruel twist. Her full lips part but she makes no sound. She lowers her head and sits, her emerald eyes slightly dulled. One side of her neck is streaked with faded bruises. Finger-width. Her nose is sloped just right with a scattering of freckles across the bridge, and her front teeth are Brigitte Bardot — pronounced, just shy of buck. She is stunning, and yet there is a blankness behind her features, the blankness of compounded trauma.

The watcher at the corner table knows this expression. He knows it well.

He has spent a lifetime in the vicinity of trauma, usually inflicting it. He is known by some as Evan Smoak. To a few, he is known as Orphan X. But generally he is not known at all.

He decides to extend his visit.

Steve Radack’s background and proclivities prove to be amply detailed on the World Wide Web. He is the visionary behind Thumbprint, a software that allows one to press a finger to a smartphone and pay for a variety of items in a variety of ways. To the watcher, this doesn’t seem like a concept worth a seven-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar buyout, but he is not an arbiter of the whims of the Silicon Valley gods. Sitting on a muted floral duvet in a Los Altos hotel room, sipping a Grey Goose over ice, he scrolls and clicks.

Radack is the self-described bad-boy of the software world, and though this seems a comically low bar, his accomplishments in self-debasement are impressive. Shortly after Thumbprint’s acquisition five years ago, he was ousted from the company’s board after the replacement CEO filed battery charges. Radack went on to total a Tesla Model S Signature and an Audi R8 Spyder in a three-day period. After the latter wreck, despite blowing nearly six times the legal blood-alcohol limit, he got his DUI overturned on a technicality by a team of attorneys. A run of thrill-seeking adventures followed, from big-wave surfing in Peru to BASE jumping from Dubai skyscrapers, the party culminating in a protracted cocaine bender that stopped his heart for a full seven minutes. A gaggle of concierge doctors at the Stanford University Medical Center and a pacemaker got him up and running again, and according to various accounts, he hadn’t lost a step. In a recent Wired interview, when asked to give his religion, Radack names Social Darwinism. Expounding upon the rights and obligations of the powerful, he quotes everything from The Art of War to the Leopold and Loeb trial.

But he is not the watcher’s focus. The focus is Radack’s girlfriend, the lovely Leanne Lattimore, who hails from Kansas City. The daughter of an insurance salesman and a schoolteacher, she came west to attend San Jose State, where she studied computer science. An internship at Thumbprint six summers ago brought her into contact with Radack and she’d been attached to him ever since. Or him to her. The watcher finds footage including her backstage at one of Radack’s TED talks. A well-timed pause captures her in close-up.

When he finally looks up from the screen, the windows are dark with night. He finishes his vodka, rises, and sets the glass neatly on the tray above the wet bar, nudging it until it is perfectly centered on the paper doily. An urge turns his head. He looks across at the bed and the open laptop on which Leanne’s image is frozen. He stands motionless with his fingertips tented on the brim of the empty glass, regarding her image, feeling the pull of instinct and muscle memory, his thoughts reshaping themselves until they form something dark and unyielding and true.

Perhaps she will be his first.

In the trunk of his Honda Accord is a black sweatshirt, a pair of Night Owl tactical binoculars, and a WiFi antenna with good gain. A few exits up Interstate 280 in Atherton, he finds Radack’s oft-referenced estate with little trouble. The fifteen-acre compound features multiple safe rooms, a fully stocked fish pond, and self-sustaining gardens and crops in event of nuclear winter or zombie attack. The watcher takes a single pass around, noting a sheltered dog run just east of the guest house. He parks on the back side of the compound in a blind spot between cameras mounted on the spike-topped fence. The binoculars’ night vision provides decent vantage through to the main house. He wonders which window Leanne is behind.

He opens his laptop and, with the help of the antenna and a thirty-dollar long-range WiFi modem, finds the network — TECHWARRIOR. It is password-protected. While he is hardly a tech warrior himself, he knows which tools to apply. Using the kismet and aircrack suite of programs, he recons the hidden wireless network and finds the encrypted credentials. These he e-mails off to a double-blind account at Hashkiller, and sets its 131-billion-password cracking engine to work.

Two Dobermans appear at the fence near his car, vibrating the windows with resonant barks. He checks the time — it took them three minutes and twelve seconds to notice his presence. They are overfed, boxy around the middle, further evidence of their owner’s lack of discipline. It is time to go; even fat dogs can raise an alarm.

Sliding his laptop onto the passenger seat, he drives off. Ten minutes away in Woodside, he finds an upscale restaurant, The Village Pub. The bar has the usual selection of vodkas. He settles on a Cîroc, up, with a twist, and tells the bartender to bruise it. It pours properly, with a film of ice crystals, and it drinks even better.

He sips it halfway down, tips the bartender handsomely, returns to his car, and checks the laptop. Hashkiller has already delivered the network authorization passwords. He drives back to Radack’s estate, this time parking two blocks away, and inputs the new-found passwords. Access granted. His laptop is now a member of Radack’s internal WiFi network. Once inside the system, he finds the security cameras with ease. The hundred-plus webcam and security links are neatly aggregated on a single webpage. The configuration of the web server tells him the location of the router as well as the VPN gateway. Hashkiller makes short work of those credentials as well, and the watcher is set up to access the estate’s security camera feeds over the Internet from any location.

Heading back to the hotel, he rolls down the window. The maples, spotting the vast lawns, have gone to orange and yellow, and the heavy air tastes of autumn.

In his room, he scrolls through the feeds. Library, kitchen, bowling alley, screening room, all empty. He finds Radack in the cigar parlor drinking mezcal and playing darts with a pair of bodyguards — the one from the coffee shop and another man, Hispanic, even more sturdy. The latter strains a T-shirt at the seams and has a circular tattoo covering one biceps. The watcher waits for the right angle to identify the tattoo, but the lighting is tough. Finally, he picks up what looks like a black spear inside the circle. He places it as the emblem from the United States Marine Corps Special Operations Command. Both men look to be in their late twenties, far too young to be out of MARSOC for any good reason, which points to disciplinary discharge or drug-testing. He picks up names from the banter — Kane and Padilla. Padilla sports a hip-holstered Glock and Kane wears a single-action revolver in an upside-down shoulder holster. Radack throws back another shot and spreads his hand on the dart board, daring his lackeys to a steel-tipped game of chicken. The watcher leaves them to it.

He clicks through various cameras, finding Leanne trying to sleep in the master bedroom down the hall from the parlor. She is curled around a pillow, covering her exposed ear. Every time a burst of laughter reaches her, she starts.

He observes her for a time.

She needs him. She really does.

When he clicks back to the parlor, Radack and his henchmen have disappeared. All that remains are two empty bottles of mezcal on the bar, next to a few residual lines of cocaine. There is blood on the dartboard.

He finds the trio in the bowling alley. Radack is firing a submachine gun at a target painted in blood above the middle lane. He is tearing up the wall, sheetrock dust clouding. The shots climb off the target, the gun running him rather than the other way around.

Despite the bravado, Radack is afraid of the gun. This is good to know.

Crimson drips from Padilla’s left hand; he appears to be the dartboard casualty and the fingerpainter behind the target. After Radack empies the magazine, Padilla applauds dutifully, radiating droplets of blood. From his front right pocket, Kane removes a baggie and a military folding knife and offers Radack cocaine off the blued tip. As Radack leans over to snort, the submachine gun comes into clear view. It is an H&K 94, illegal in California even without its clandestine conversion to full auto. Radack likes his toys and dislikes protocol.

The watcher captures the image of Radack’s nose nearing the blade and enlarges it. The knife is an Emerson, popular with former military. This, too, is good to know.

Back in the bedroom, Leanne sits with her shoulder blades pressed to the corner, hugging her knees, rocking herself. Her lips move but the sub-par audio picks up nothing.

In the bowling alley, Radack jams home another magazine and, to cheers and encouragement from his paid admirers, resumes shredding the wall above the target. Two hours and three bottles of mezcal later, the men stumble outside, leaning on one another, barely keeping their feet. Radack throws a grenade in the stocked fish pond. The pop is muffled. Water sprays the laughing men and dozens of white spots bob to the surface. They drink more and pass out on the lawn. The Dobermans tentatively approach, pull dead fish from the pond, and feast.

Inside, Leanne stays in the corner, trembling. She does not sleep.

The watcher does not either.

In the morning, he calls the Stanford University Medical Center, Radack’s hospital of choice, and identifies himself as a consulting physician for Ms. Leanne Lattimore. Would they be so kind as to send the medical files from her emergency room visits? They would, provided Ms. Lattimore signs a release. This of course will not happen, but he has confirmed his hunch that Ms. Lattimore is a frequent flier at the Stanford ER.

A medical supply shop on El Camino Real sells standard teal scrubs. He changes into them in his car, drives to the hospital, and steps into the bracing air conditioning of the main lobby. Rather than heading for the bustling ER, he detours to the medical floor, lingering by a water fountain until he sees a pretty Indian physician leave her office. He waits for a break in foot traffic and slips inside. The doctor has left her computer logged on to the Epic medical records system. The watcher types in Leanne Lattimore and brings up her files.

Her injuries and admitting complaints are telling. A gashed lip and broken cheekbone she claimed to have incurred in a fender bender. When presenting with suture-worthy tears at the introitus and vaginal mucosa, she confessed to being into rough sex. Clavicle and distal radius fractures she chalked up to a snowboarding fall. Deep scrapes to her upper arm required antibiotic ointment and dressings; she explained that she’d been clawed by a dog. Photographs had been taken at the nurse’s insistence for legal reasons, should Leanne want to press charges against the dog’s owner. The watcher studies them. He has been clawed by many a dog and her wounds feature none of the trademark gouges. They do however look familiar. He has seen this nasty little trick twice before, once in Zagreb, once in Bangkok. The lacerations are caused by a potato peeler.

He is now ninety-nine percent sure, but with what he’s considering, there can be no shadow of a doubt, not an eyelash of uncertainty. This is the First Commandment: Assume Nothing.

He slips out of the hospital unobserved, stops for a quick lunch, and returns to his hotel. The woman behind the reception desk is attractive and her eye contact direct, but he pretends not to notice.

As he passes, she asks, “In town for business?” and he gives a benign nod.

In his room, he again accesses the security cameras from the estate, splitting the screen to watch multiple feeds at once. Radack’s goons are only now stirring. Radack is in the pool house, showering. A squat, middle-aged housekeeper finishes cleaning up the bowling alley with a dustpan and broom. In the screening room, Leanne sits on a padded bench, tapping at an iPad. She wears large round retro eyeglasses that accent her round face and somehow make it prettier still.

When Radack emerges from the shower, he admires himself in the mirror. A scar runs zipper-like from above his navel to the base of his throat where they cracked his chest to resuscitate him. Another scar to the side indicates where the pacemaker was inserted. He dresses and enters the main house, crossing paths with Padilla in the foyer.

“Erase the footage from last night,” he says. “Bowling alley and front yard. The pond. Get that shit gone.”

Padilla nods and shuffles off to the adjoining study. Deleting evidence seems to be a habit of Radack’s, a habit that will prove useful.

As Padilla sits at the computer, the watcher brings up another screen. From inside the system, he sees the previous night’s footage vanish from the net video recorder application. The watcher notes the precise time of Padilla’s meddling — 15:31. The archives already look like Swiss cheese, showing an extensive history of holes where Radack has ordered illicit activity excised from the record.

Back to the live feeds. Radack is walking down a long hall. He enters the screening room. Leanne jolts upright and turns off her iPad. Radack crosses his arms.

“You e-mailed your mom to get you a plane ticket,” he says.

The air leaks from Leanne; she seems literally to deflate on the bench. Her fingers twist together in her lap, tugging.

“I’m a software visionary, you dumb cooze. Do you really think you can do anything without me noticing?”

Her words are almost too quiet to be picked up by the speakers. “Why don’t you let me go?”

Radack leans back on his heels, appeals to the upholstered ceiling. “I don’t want to break up with you,” he says. “I want to ruin you so no one else will ever want you.” He wipes at his nose with finger and thumb. “What do you have to say to that?”

She has nothing to say to that.

He points through the wall. “Kane and Padilla, they are my blood brothers. My guard dogs. Wherever you go, they will hunt you down. And bring you back to me.”

She says, “Go to hell, Steve.”

He moves like a flash, two quick strides and a backhand, and she is sent sprawling off the couch. On all fours, she gropes for her broken glasses.

He stands over her, wide-postured, legs spread. “Hell ain’t a place. It’s a state of mind.”

He walks out. She waits frozen for a few moments and then clamps a palm over her mouth and sobs into it. Finally she rises, weak on her legs, clutching her shattered eyeglasses. She pokes her head through the doorway, then moves quietly down the hall and turns left. The watcher loses her, not knowing which feed to pick up. He finds her in the maid’s quarters, where the housekeeper looks stunned to see her. Leanne asks her to read the Bible with her, and the woman nods. They kneel together at the side of the bed before the worn book. Leanne holds up one intact lens to read through. She laces her free hand in the housekeeper’s.

In the living room, Radack gathers his H&K 94 and his bodyguards. They head to the screening room first and find Leanne missing. They begin a march through the house, prowling, opening doors.

Leanne reads faster. Her body tenses. Her eyes squeeze shut. The housekeeper looks terrified.

The hunting party nears. The door to the maid’s quarters opens.

Radack says, “Go home, Marisol.”

Marisol rises. She has to pull her hand free of Leanne’s. Marisol nods respectfully to Radack and slides out through the men. Rushing down the hall to the foyer, she begins to weep soundlessly.

In the room, Leanne has still not looked up. Her eyes remain closed; her lips are moving soundlessly. Radack steps forward and places the muzzle of the submachine gun to her forehead.

The watcher knows now. She is the one.

She is the catalyst for his reinvention.

Leanne’s lips stop moving but even now she does not open her eyes.

“The killings in Rwanda,” Radack says. “Know what the Hutu tribesmen did? They made their victims buy the bullets they’d be killed with if they didn’t want to get hacked to death.”

Behind him, Kane laughs at the thought of this.

“So,” Radack says. “What do you say, Leanne? Wanna buy a bullet?”

Leanne remains very still for a long time, maybe a full minute. Finally she shakes her head. He clocks her with the barrel of the carbine, knocking her over. Then he tugs down his pants and advances. The bodyguards look on. He finishes and rises. There are smiles and high fives.

As Radack exits, he says, “Have a go.”

The men are willing. They step forward, already unbuckling, and set upon her like dogs. The watcher does not flinch. He does not look away.

When it is over, he turns to the window. It is night.

Night is good.

He packs up, walks downstairs, and checks out. The receptionist says, “How was everything?” and he smiles and says, “Fine, thank you.”

He drives over to Radack’s estate, abiding the speed limit, and parks on the quiet street behind the compound. A check of the laptop shows Radack shirtless, playing a first-person-shooter video game in the living room, the real submachine gun resting on the cushion beside him. He has seemingly ordered Leanne to the facing couch, for she lies there fetally, shuddering. Padilla mixes margaritas on the kitchen island behind them, and Kane patrols the halls. Both bodyguards wear satiated grins. There are white lines on the coffee table before Radack and white lines on the granite slab of the island and the three men’s motions have more zip than seems standard.

The watcher applies Superglue to his fingertips, covering the prints, and then pops the hood and trunk. He climbs out, removing the floor mat and hanging it over his open door. He takes the battery from the engine and jumper cables from the back and throws them over the fence. He pays the security cameras no mind; he will make sure later that no footage from tonight exists. In the archives, it will appear as though Padilla shut down the security cameras altogether during his visit to the study at 15:31.

The watcher slings the floor mat up to cover the spikes and scrambles over the fence.

The wet wind is blowing out, buying him time before his scent travels. He slices through the maze of the gardens, darting between pea planting beds. Emerging from a row of corn stalks, he sprints for the fish pond.

At the bank, he kneels. He has just attached a jumper cable to the positive terminal on the battery when he hears the dogs’ snarling approach. He slings the other cable into the pond and trawls it, a few paralyzed fish rolling up to the surface.

The Dobermans explode into view. He drags the cable clear of the water to preserve the battery for his ride to Los Angeles, and puts the pond and its offerings between him and the dogs. Sure enough, they catch sight of the fish and their interest is diverted. They wade heavily into the pond, dip their snouts, and come up with dinner. He walks boldly between them, signaling his fearlessness. They pause from gnawing, their eyes rolling to track him.

“Sit,” he says in a low, hard voice.

They sit.

He walks to the house. The front door opens, Kane ambling out onto the porch, already shouting: “Thor! Zeus! C’mon, b—”

Kane stops, on his heels.

The watcher is ten feet away.

Now five.

Kane’s hand flies to his shoulder holster and the revolver is out, swinging toward the watcher’s head. Hopping the step onto the porch directly into the path of the muzzle, the watcher grabs the gun around the wheel, clenching so the cylinder cannot rotate and the weapon cannot fire. For a split-second, he is staring straight down the bore. Kane is still tugging the trigger, confused, when the watcher torques Kane’s gun hand, forcing him to spin to keep the elbow intact. The watcher slides neatly behind him. His free hand hooks to Kane’s front right pocket and he rakes the Emerson knife free, knowing that the shark-fin hook riding the blade top will snare the pocket edge and snap the knife open. Kane is arched backwards, his vitals bared, and the blade work is direct and efficient. The scents of tequila and deodorant are joined by a fresh, coppery tang.

The watcher eases the collapsing form to the concrete and pivots to the door, his momentum barely slowed.

He is inside.

The house smells of teak and lavender — it smells of money. He strides through the foyer but Padilla is already stepping into view from the living room on the far side, surprising him. It is clear now just how large Padilla is.

The men halt and consider each other across the six-foot span.

“What the hell?” Radack calls out from behind. “Where’d Kane go?”

The watcher lunges before Padilla can go for his hip holster. Padilla leads with a jab and the watcher sidesteps and flicks the Emerson. But the big man is well trained, parrying the swipe and countering with a cross that whistles overhead. The watcher lunges with the blade and Padilla catches his arm midflight, one giant hand crushing his wrist. His arm and the knife are going nowhere; the men are locked up. Padilla draws back his fist, but before he can swing, the watcher does the unexpected; he opens the hand clenched around the knife handle. The blade tumbles past their eyes, their chins, their chests, Padilla seeming to realize what is coming an instant before it does.

The watcher’s free hand darts forward, grabbing the tumbling knife as it falls between them and driving it into Padilla’s gut. He punches it two more times up Padilla’s left ribs—smack smack—and the man falls away in slow motion.

The watcher is already gliding down the steps into the sunken living room, angling for the kitchen. As the watcher hoped, Radack has the H&K 94 in hand. He swings the submachine gun blindly as the watcher hip-slides across the sleek granite slab and drops behind the island.

Radack dumps all thirty-two rounds in a single wild burst. Wine bottles shatter. Bullets ping off the Sub-Zero. The Viking stove crumples inward and emits a puff of gray smoke. Lighting fixtures spark overhead. Chunks of the ceiling dump down. Somewhere on the floor beside the couch, Leanne screams.

The island remains, predictably, untouched. The watcher could have stood in plain view and every last bullet would have sailed overhead.

He rises now and crosses to Radack, who struggles to drop the magazine from the useless gun, his panic tangible. Drops of sweat cling to the tips of his disheveled hair. As the watcher nears, Radack gives up on the mag and clubs at him with the barrel. The watcher knocks the weapon wide and, with the butt of his palm, delivers a single stun blow to the heart.

Radack makes a noise like a bark and veins pop in his throat. He takes a step back, his clawed hand hovering an inch off his chest. The skin has gone to scarlet, the sutures scars standing out in defiant white. He lean-sits against the couch back and his eyes widen and widen some more and then his head lolls forward and he is dead.

The room is thick with smoke and dust billowing from the torn-open ceiling.

Leanne resolves through the debris-filled air. She lies on her stomach, half twisted over one hip like the crippled girl from that Wyeth painting.

The watcher says, “You’re safe now.”

He takes the knife and balls it into Radack’s hand for the prints, then lets it fall to the carpet by his bare feet.

“Radack went crazy,” he tells her. “Hopped-up on coke. They beat and raped you. Then he went paranoid. Killed his own guards and shot up the place. The security cameras will be wiped.”

She pulls herself up to sit against the base of the couch, holding one hand to the side of her head. Bruises are coming up around her left eye and there are small cuts where Radack shattered the eyeglasses against her temple earlier. Tears stream, though she makes no noise.

He crouches, keeping a distance, not wanting to crowd her. In the air is the familiar hot-metal taste of a gunfight’s aftermath. “You’re free.”

Her face is tilted to the ceiling and her lips move in a quiet murmur. It seems she is speaking more to herself than to him. He thinks he makes out her hoarse whisper.

— thank God thank God thank—

“I have to go now. I have one thing to ask of you. Only one thing. So please listen carefully.”

She tries to speak but coughs dryly instead. Then she squints at him through the swirling dust. “Who are you?”

He hesitates. He hasn’t used the name, not in several years and never in this context.

“The Nowhere Man,” he says.