Orphan X

11 What Now?

The first rule when drawing fire: Get off the X.

Evan rolled off the upended dim sum cart, jerking Katrin away from the window as two more rounds splintered the table. They came in not with the pop-pop-pop of a smaller rifle but the sharp crack of a major caliber, 30 or up. Echoes of the muzzle blast bounced around the room, a hall-of-mirrors effect as disorienting as it was unnerving. Evan half dragged Katrin toward the heart of the restaurant, trying to get clear of the sniper’s vantage.

The other customers exploded into a confused stampede toward all exits. Evan kept Katrin’s arm as he led her through the tumult, hip-checking another cart and sending forth a volley of pork bao. His hand drove straight through his shirt, popping the magnets, and ripped his pistol free from the holster.

A chunk of floor gave way at their heels, bits of tile biting at their calves, and then they were clear of the kill zone. An older woman fell to one knee, nearly getting trampled, but a surge of bodies flung her back onto her feet, and the human tide whisked her out a side door. A baby’s high-pitched mewling rose above the screams.

“They followed you!” Katrin was shouting. “Did you do this?”

Evan ignored her. Only the exit route mattered. Over the wall of receding shoulders, a single face pointed back toward the restaurant interior, a man standing eerily still in the middle of the rush.

Not the guy with the baggy shirt. The older man in the tailored business suit.

His head and upper torso were visible, the rest of his body a murky shadow behind the fish tanks that split the lobby from the restaurant proper. His fist rose, clenched around a pistol. The barrel flashed, and a woman in front of them screamed and spun in a one-eighty, a crimson spray erupting from the shoulder of her blouse.

Though Evan and Katrin had hit the brakes, the surging crowd drove them toward the man in the suit. No backing up. Too many civilians to return fire. A shooter unconcerned with collateral damage.

Evan straight-armed Katrin to the floor and dove forward over one shoulder. He finished his somersault rotation and hammered both feet into the lobster tank’s base. It was sturdier than he’d hoped, sending shock waves through his legs, but the glass above gave off a sonorous warble that sounded promising. A splash of salty water slapped Evan’s face. He blinked hard, saw the shooter looming above, aiming down.

Then the tank toppled.

The man’s arms swung up, the gun discharging once into the ceiling, and then gallons of green water wiped him from view. Lobsters twitched and flopped on the slippery tile, claws secured with blue bands. Washed halfway across the lobby, the shooter scrambled after his pistol on all fours. As the last of the customers dashed out, he reached between their fleeing legs and scooped up his gun. He’d just turned to rise when Evan hit him from above with a modified roundhouse, the points of his first two knuckles crushing the skull at the temple. The squama of the temporal bone was usefully thin there, and it caved pleasingly beneath the well-placed blow.

The man fell, his cheek and chest slapping the floor. His hands and feet curled inward, twitching, the last impulses shuddering from his brain.

Evan turned to find Katrin standing behind him, breathless, her pale skin ashen with shock.

“He’s dead?”

“Follow me. Close.”

He kept the pistol pointed at the ground as he shoved them through the double front doors into the bright light of the plaza. Red and yellow plastic pennants rode the wind, fluttering overhead on strings, and the smell of incense tinged the air. Terrified passersby swept through his field of vision, running haphazardly in all directions, but he focused on a rental minivan parked dead ahead, blocking an alley, hazard lights flashing. The back doors were swung open, a few boxes of produce stacked on the ground as props.

The restaurant now blocked the sniper’s angle, but Evan didn’t want to give him time to reposition. Taking Katrin’s arm, he dashed through the crowd, heading for the wall of shops and the blocked alley. A panicked flush had overtaken her cheeks, a strand of glossy dark hair caught in the corner of her mouth.

“Wait,” Katrin said. “Where are we going? There’s nowhere to—”

Evan hit a remote-controlled key fob in his pocket, and the minivan’s facing door slid open. He shoved Katrin in, diving after her. He’d left the backseats flattened for precisely this contingency. His thumb keyed the autofeature again, and the sliding door rolled shut behind them, absorbing a bullet from the big rifle. The sniper had picked them up. Another round hammered the door, punching a hole the size of a dinner plate over their ducked heads. Inside the box of the minivan, the clang of metal on metal was deafening. The sniper was working the bolt fast, and if they didn’t want to ingest lead or shrapnel, they had to get clear of the van.

Evan yanked at the opposite sliding door and spilled out the far side into the cramped alley, tugging Katrin so she landed on top of him. Behind them the minivan rocked some more, the windows blowing out.

Katrin’s hands hovered by her ears, her eyes brimming.

“Save it for later,” he said.

Their shoulders scraped either side of the narrow alley, leaving flakes of dried paint in their wake. A kitchen’s back window exhaled hot air and the stench of fish. They reached a T at the alley’s end and peeled right. Six paces down, his Chrysler sedan waited, pointed at the main line of Hill Street. They jumped in and he tore out, blending into a current of traffic.

His eyes darted from the road to the rearview to the road. Katrin jerked in one breath after another.

“Who did you tell you were meeting me?” he said.

“No one.”

“Which phone did you call me from?”

Her hand dug in her jeans, came up with a BlackBerry. “This one, but—”

He snatched her phone, flung it out his window, watched in his side mirror as the pieces bounced.

“What are you doing? That’s the only way they could reach me about my dad—”

“We don’t want them to reach you right now.”

“They followed you.”

“No,” he said. “They didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

He screeched into a liquor-store parking lot, eased behind the building. “Out.”

He met her around back and pulled from the trunk a black wand with a circular head. Starting at her face, he waved it over her, scanning her torso, arms, legs, and shoes for electronic devices. The nonlinear junction detector showed nothing. She made no noise, but tears spilled down her cheeks and she was shaking. He spun her, scanned down her back. Clear.

“Get in the car.”

She obeyed.

He veered out from behind the liquor store, shot across the street, and merged onto the 110.

Her hand was at her mouth, muffling the words. “What now?”

For once he did not have a ready answer.