Orphan X

16 The Two Wolves

On the drive home from the dark Virginia barn, Jack lays out some facts, serving them to Evan like a well-earned meal. “You are part of what is called the Orphan Program. You are exceptionally well adjusted and even-tempered in the face of the unknown, selected for the program precisely for these qualities. There are others like you. You will never meet them.” His blocky hands command the steering wheel, the vehicle, the road. “You will be trained impeccably for your profession.”

“What’s my profession?”

“Weapon,” Jack says.

The truck thrums across some railroad tracks. The vinyl seat has grown hot beneath Evan’s legs. His head goes swimmy, like he’s in a dream. But it’s not a bad dream.

Finally Evan asks, “A weapon for what?”

“For solo, offline covert operations.”

Jack seems to forget that Evan is a kid. Or perhaps he speaks to him that way, the vocabulary just out of reach, making Evan stretch, stretch. Evan thinks for a time, piecing together what that might mean.

“Like a spy?”

Jack’s chin dips, his version of a nod. “Like a spy. But you’ll be different from other assaulters.”

Assaulters. Evan likes the word.

“You’ll be a cutout man,” Jack continues. “Fully expendable. You’ll know only your silo. Nothing damaging. If you’re caught, you’re on your own. They will torture you to pieces, and you can give up all the information you have, because none of it is useful. You will go places you are not allowed to go and do things you are not allowed to do. Everyone at every level will deny any knowledge of you, and this will not be entirely false. Your very existence is illegal.”

“An Orphan,” Evan says.

“That’s right. This is your last chance to pull the ripcord, so consider carefully. If you die, you will die alone and no one will know of your sacrifice. No one but me. There will be no greater glory, no parades, no name on a monument wall. That is the choice before you.”

Evan thinks about where he came from — secondhand shoes, food out of cans, low ceilings and cramped walls. Jack Johns seems like a portal to a vast, wide-open world, a world Evan had always imagined existed somewhere beyond reach. Now maybe there could be a place out there even for someone like him.

Evan pokes at the cut in his palm bestowed by the hooked blade. “Sounds good,” he says.

Jack looks over at him. Back at the road. “There is only me. I’m your handler. I am the only person who will ever know who you are. I will protect you. No matter what.” The trees scroll by behind that rough-hewn profile. “You and I are all we have. Do you understand?”

Evan watches the foliage whip by. “I think so.”

“Equivocal answers aren’t answers, Evan.”

“Yes. I understand.” Evan looks down at his arms, dotted with puncture marks. “So I’m gonna do more training? With that guy?”

“Him and others. Under no circumstance are you to reveal to them your name. They will know you only as ‘Orphan X.’”

“X as in the letter or the number ten?”

Jack appears pleased with this question. “Alphabet.”

“So there were twenty-three Orphans before me?”

“Yes.”

“What happens when you run out of letters?”

Jack laughs. It is the first time Evan has heard him do so. It’s a rich laugh, aged in his chest. “Then I suppose they’ll go to numbers.” He veers around a wood-paneled station wagon, a family out for a Sunday drive. “I will only interject one instructor at a time into your life. At the beginning of your training, you will never be alone with an instructor. I will always be there. Like today.”

“Yeah, but I’ll never be as good at handling pain as that guy.”

Jack pulls a thoughtful frown. Then he says, “You don’t have to. You just have to do better than you did last time.” Jack looks across at him. “You know the two best words in the English language?” he asks.

Evan is at a loss.

“‘Next time,’” Jack says.

Evan feels unconvinced.

Jack says, “You’ve read the Odyssey, right?”

“No.”

“We’ll change that soon enough.” Jack takes a moment to look displeased. Then: “Odysseus is not as skilled a fighter as Achilles. Not as great an archer as Apollo. Not as fast as Hermes. In fact, he’s not the best at anything. And yet overall? He is unrivaled. ‘Man of many wiles.’” Jack’s eyes move from the rearview to one side mirror, then the other. “Your job is to learn a little bit about everything from people who know everything about something.”

Evan’s next years are spent doing precisely that.

He is taught hand-to-hand from a Japanese master who is maddeningly calm, even as he delivers devastating attacks. There are no belts, no dojos, no special white pajamas; it is junk martial arts, the most effective destructions, a little of the best from each form. In Jack’s sweaty garage, Evan spans the globe in a single fight, finding himself on the receiving end of an around-the-world offensive. A muay thai teep-kick interception of his right cross leads to a wing chun bil jee finger jab to the eye that sends him reeling. Before he can restore his equilibrium, an Indonesian pencak silat open-hand slap to the ear leaves his nervous system ringing. Half blinded by static, he swings, but the master delivers an upward elbow Filipino kali gunting combined with a hand trap, smashing Evan’s fist against the tip of the ulna. Evan sits on the floor, hard, the collective wisdom of four cultures distilled into a single ass-kicking.

He doesn’t know which part of himself to check first.

The master bows to him respectfully.

Evan swipes blood from his lips. “This guy ever lose his temper?”

In a beach chair to the side, from behind a tattered copy of Vidal’s Lincoln, Jack says, “He doesn’t have to.”

Evan dips his head, drools blood into the cup of his palm.

“Next time,” Jack says, and gets up to go into the house.

Evenings they spend in the study with its towering bookshelves and mallard green walls, where Jack conducts what he calls “Area and Cultural Studies.” Evan learns rules, etiquette, history, sensitivities. How to respond if he accidentally steps on someone’s foot in the Moscow subway. What Armenians think of Turks. The proper way to proffer your business card in China. How to sink the French r in his throat. There are elocution lessons as well, eradicating every last trace of East Baltimore until Evan’s accent is as nonspecific as that of a midwestern newscaster. Soon enough when he speaks, he offers no information beyond what he chooses to divulge with his words.

As the seasons pass, he grows accustomed to the forty-five-minute drive to Fort Meade. Jack always enters through a back gate, the guard station left conspicuously empty for their approach. Most of the activities take place in and around a clandestine set of hangars at the foresty rear of the base. A half-crazy battalion captain with an angry snarl of scar tissue for a chin runs Evan ragged, teaching him how to move under live fire. He uses concealment to head toward cover, zigzagging through tree trunks as rounds bite chunks of bark overhead. The captain’s gleeful bellowing stalks him ghostlike through the boughs: “School’s in session, X! Lock in that muscle memory. How you train is how you play!”

One day, frustrated with Evan’s evasive movements, the battalion captain smacks him across the back of the head. Jack morphs out of thin air, standing nose to nose with the man. “Hurt him all you want if you’re training him. But if you lay a hand on him again in anger, I will make the rest of your face match your chin. Do you understand me?”

The battalion captain’s eyes achieve a sudden clarity. “Yes, sir,” he says.

Driving home, Evan says, “Thanks.”

Jack nods. The truck rattles across potholes. The dashboard vent blows hot and steady. Jack seems to be working up to something. Finally he says, “I know that details of your background are … hazy. If it’s important to you, we can run a genetic test, find out your ancestry, who you are.”

The choice awes Evan into silence. Jack seems to sense that this is one time not to push. He waits patiently.

At last Evan clears his throat. “I know who I am,” he says. “I’m your son.”

Jack makes a muffled noise of agreement and angles his head away, perhaps so Evan can’t see his face.

The pace of training is relentless. Evan learns to breach, to scale barbed-wire fences, to rappel from trees, fences, walls. He works with an old-school surveillance engineer annoyed by his weak grasp of circuitry and with a teenage hacker frustrated with his processing speed. He’s taught how to approach people, to find and exploit weaknesses. To eliminate nonverbal tells, he masters the art of remaining still when talking or listening. Every time he lifts his hands, the interrogation specialist raps his knuckles painfully with a metal file; eventually Evan sits as if his wrists are tied to the arms of a chair. A whip-thin psychologist administers batteries of tests with esoteric questions: Have you ever cheated or betrayed a loved one? No. Have you ever had sex with an animal? No. Where does loyalty stop? When someone asks you to have sex with an animal. In the corner Jack sprays out a mouthful of coffee.

Evan shoots standing, kneeling, prone, firing on targets from seven to three hundred yards. After he is trained on conventional targets, his marksmanship instructor moves him to human silhouettes, then full-body photos of women and children. When he hesitates, she says, “People don’t run around with target rings on their heads and chests. Man up, X.” For sniper work she dresses mannequins in clothes, then cores out lettuce heads, fills them with ketchup, and mounts them atop the collars. She walks back uprange to where he waits. “When you pull the trigger,” she says, “I want you to see a head explode.”

As he lines up the shot, she lectures, “We keep death at a distance here, X. Hospitals and nursing homes tuck it away. Our food comes to us neatly packaged. Refrigerators preserve it. It used to be you wanted a chicken, you walked out back and snapped its neck.” Her deodorant carries to him on the breeze, citrusy and surprisingly feminine. It stirs something in his sixteen-year-old body. “My old man was a colonel, wanted me to understand that slaughterhouses did our bidding for us. When I was about your age, he took me to one. Just us and a machete and the steaming horror of an afternoon, looking Death in its rolling eyes.”

He fires, and a lettuce head downrange turns to red mist. “Nicely done,” she says.

Later she duct-tapes an orange over her eye, makes him tackle her and punch his thumb through it. “Good,” she pants, sprawled in the dirt, her breath hot against his neck. “Now stir your thumb. Curl it like a fishing hook. And pull out what you can.” While he does, she screams and thrashes. He stops, mortified. Her one bare eye glares up at him. “You think it’ll be calm?”

He gathers himself, sinks his thumb back into the pulp.

That night over dinner, Evan fingers the spattering of dried pulp on his sleeve, shoves at his food.

Jack doesn’t need to look up. “What?”

Evan tells him about the orange, the thumb, the screams of his instructor, how he’d been on top of her, holding her down, breathing her breath.

Jack leans back, folds his arms. “We need to teach you to kill in the heat of the moment. And in the cold calm of premeditation. You have to live with them differently. Which means you have to train for them differently. Not just sniper distance. Not just bayonet distance. But face-to-face, eye-to-eye.”

“So I learn to treat people as objects to be broken?”

“No.” Jack sets his water glass down on the dining table, hard. “Conventional wisdom is that you should dehumanize the enemy. Dinks, krauts, sand niggers, numbers on the forearm. It may be easier in the short term, but long-term?” He shakes his head. “Always respect life. Then you’ll value yours. The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.”

“Is that what the other Orphans are taught?” Evan asks.

Jack twirls linguine on his fork, regards the bulb of pasta, sets it down. He glances over at the picture of his wife on the mantel, the one at some exotic black-sand beach where she’s knee-deep in surf, laughing, her wet sundress clinging to her thighs. Jack wipes his mouth. “No.”

It is a confession of sorts.

“Why not?”

“It’s harder.” With the heel of his hand, Jack pushes his plate a few inches away. “There’s a Cherokee legend. An elder tells his grandson about the battle that rages inside every person.”

“The two wolves.”

“That’s right. One wolf is anger and fear and paranoia and cruelty. The other is kindness, humility, compassion, serenity. And the boy asks his grandfather, ‘Which wolf wins?’ You remember the answer?”

“‘The one you feed.’”

“That’s right. Our challenge?” Jack folds his cloth napkin, wipes a smudge of Alfredo from the edge of his plate. Then he looks directly into Evan’s eyes. “Feed both.”

A furious rapping on the front door broke Evan from his meditation. By the time he registered a return to the present tense, he was on his feet on the Turkish rug, pistol in hand, staring down the locked door across from him and whoever waited behind it.