Hellbent

60 Not Good

“Know any good your-mama jokes?” Peter peered up at Evan and Joey as the elevator doors clanked shut.

His charcoal eyes were dead earnest, as if he were asking for a physician referral.

Evan and Joey had pulled in to Castle Heights right behind Mia in her Acura, returning from picking up Peter at school. Peter had practically run circles around the two of them across the lobby and onto the elevator.

Standing beside his mom, Peter yanked the straps of his oversize backpack. It looked like it was loaded with bricks. How many textbooks could a nine-year-old possibly require?

Joey said, “What are you talking about?”

“Like: Your mama’s so fat she jumped in the Red Sea and said, ‘Take that, Moses.’”

Mia said, “Your public-education tax dollars at work.”

Peter kept on, undeterred. “Your mama’s so ugly she made a blind kid cry.”

Mia said, “I like that one because it’s offensive in two distinct ways.”

“Your mama’s so fat she can’t even fit in the chat room.”

Joey looked away to hide her grin.

They reached the twelfth floor, and Peter shot out, holding the elevator open with one skinny arm.

“See you for dinner tonight, right, Evan Smoak?”

Evan’s face failed to conceal the fact that he’d forgotten.

Contacting Xavier upon touching down in Ontario, Evan had laid out a plan that required him to be in Pico-Union by ten o’clock. Dinner at seven put him clear by eight-thirty, which gave him time to get across town. As he ran this quick calculation, he felt the heat of Mia’s gaze. The elevator door bumped impatiently against Peter’s arm, retracting with an angry clank.

“Yes,” Evan said.

Peter smiled and let the door go.

Evan pounded the heavy bag, the blows echoing off the floor-to-ceiling glass. He reached his count and stopped, drenched with sweat, breath heaving through him. He’d just started back to the shower when he heard Joey call his name with urgency.

He jogged across the empty expanse and up the winding staircase to the loft.

She was sitting on the couch, the open laptop discarded on the cushion beside her. She peered at him over the red notebook he had pulled from the microwave in Richmond.

“Pilot FriXion pens,” she said.

He waited.

“Know how erasable ink works?” she asked.

“You use the eraser.”

“Funny,” she said, sans smile. “The ink they use is made of different chemical compounds. When you use the eraser, you create friction, friction creates heat, heat makes one compound activate an acid compound, which neutralizes the dye.”

“The microwave.”

“Right. They figured out how to use heat to make the ink disappear without friction. You can wipe out all your mission notes with a quick zap in the microwave.”

“But that would leave behind—”

“Impressions,” she said. “Unfortunately, it looks like the notebook pages are treated to, like, replump with heat to prevent that.”

“Is ‘replump’ a word?”

She ignored him. “Know how they feel a little stiffer, like higher stock?”

By way of display, she rubbed a page between thumb and forefinger.

“So everything’s wiped out?” he said.

“Almost. One page in the middle didn’t quite get there. Like, you know the cold spot in the center of a frozen burrito?”

“No.”

“Never mind. C’mere.” She fanned the pages at him, and he could see that she’d shaded every single one with a pencil all the way to the margins. They were uniform charcoal except for one of the innermost pages, on which a snippet of writing had been brought into negative relief.

“6-1414 Dark Road 32.”

It reminded him of Jack’s last message, the one he’d written invisibly on the driver’s window of his truck.

“A partial address?” Evan asked.

“Would you believe there isn’t a single address that includes ‘6-1414 Dark Road 32’ in America?”

“How about not in America?”

“There isn’t one in any English-speaking country. I checked translations, too. No, it’s gotta be a code. Which got me thinking about what kinds of codes Van Sciver might be using with his men. Remember how Delmonico and Shea’s files had top-secret classification?”

“‘Had’? Past tense?”

“Check it out.” She tapped her laptop screen, and Evan was surprised and not surprised to be looking at several documents emblazoned with the highest classified designation. “They were former marines, all right. That’s why you got that read on them. But after they left the Corps? They became Secret Service agents.”

Staring at the eagle-and-flag security stamp, Evan felt a weightless rise in his gut, the moment before a roller-coaster plummet. Van Sciver’s taunt over the phone came back to him once more: You have no idea, do you? How high it goes?

Evan had once found himself hugging a cliff edge in the Hindu Kush in the dead of night, waiting for an enemy convoy to pass on the narrow road above. One of his boots had slipped from a thumb-size lip in the sheer face, sending a cascade of stones tumbling. He’d managed to cling to the wall and, looking down, he’d watched the stones vanish into darkness. It was a rare windless night, the mountain air chilled into silence, and yet he’d never heard them hit bottom.

He had the same sense now — holding on for his life with no sense of the greater terrain.

“What does that mean?” Joey asked. “That they used to be Secret Service, too?”

“I don’t know for certain,” Evan said. “But it’s not good.”