Orphan X

18 Look Closer

Around Evan’s seventeenth birthday, a threat arises, acquainting him with the real-life stakes of the profession. News reaches Jack that a file in a classified database somewhere may have been compromised. Drawing on a tenacity forged in his early infantry-sergeant days, he locks up the house and stays awake for seventy-two hours in the dark foyer, facing the front door from a wooden stool, combat shotgun across his knees, moving only to drink from a thermos and relieve himself. A phone call from a blocked number indicates that the threat, if it was a threat at all, has passed.

As Jack returns the wooden stool to its place at the kitchen counter, he calls Evan to his side. He throws some leftover turkey on a plate, then pours himself vodka over ice. Leaning against the sink, drink in hand, he wears a thoughtful expression; his vigil has left ample time for contemplation.

“I need to teach you how all this works, because knowledge is power and I will not have you take the risks you will take unempowered. Our program is a full-deniability, antiseptic operation run off a black budget. The money comes straight out of Treasury. It’s printed and shipped, utterly untraceable. Which means, essentially, that we have an unlimited budget. DoD manages this, threads the needle through an outlet in the Department of the Interior.”

“Department of the Interior?”

“Exactly. Land management, national parks. Who’s gonna look there?”

Jack proceeds to lay out the arcane arrangements. Bank accounts on various continents. The cash moves through a contracting agent in Aberdeen, Maryland, who doesn’t even know what he’s contracting, then filters out. P.O. boxes, traceless wires, currency swaps. Lawyers in closet-size offices rented by the week, concealed in beehive complexes housing jewelers, boiler-room operations, fly-by-night travel agencies. Desks and phones and nothing more.

Evan listens intently, his hand dipping below the counter from time to time so Strider can lap turkey from his palm. Jack pretends not to notice. The only permitted variation in discipline comes where the dog is concerned.

“Are you supposed to be telling me this?” Evan asks.

“No.”

The Sixth Commandment: Question orders.

The following morning Evan returns from a run to find in the driveway a red Acura Integra with a bobblehead Jesus adhered to the dash.

Puzzled, he enters the house. A trace of jasmine perfume lingers in the air, as anomalous in the wood-paneled front hall as a feather boa on a marine.

Jack waits in the study, Maria Callas belting “Suicidio!” from the record player. When Evan’s shadow falls into the room, Jack looks up. “You can’t lose your mind over women, over sex. And that means you need to acclimate to it. She is a professional, she is clean, and you are to treat her with courtesy and appreciation. Do you understand?”

Evan nods.

Jack goes back to the third volume of Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Upstairs, Evan’s bedroom door is slightly ajar, enough to reveal a slice of bedding. The fabric shifts. A woman’s bare form rolls into view. He glimpses a thatch of shadow between ivory white legs and feels his blood jump.

The next day Evan does pull-ups on the rusted bar by the log pile, his biceps screaming. Jack sips coffee, his breath visible in the night air.

“Respect for women is essential,” Jack tells him. “Women’s rights and economic development within a country are highly correlated. Treating women properly is not just a moral position — which it is — or an American value — which it is. It’s a strategic imperative, and you will always, always lead by example in this regard.”

Evan makes a grunt of consent and drops from the bar. When he goes upstairs, there are two women waiting in his bed.

His education in and out of the sheets intensifies. By the time he turns eighteen, he is five-eleven, 175 pounds of lean, ridged muscle. He is neither too tall nor too big nor too evidently strong. He can vanish in a crowd. Half the men in a given bar might think they could best him in a brawl. This is ideal.

Jack decides to call wind for Evan on the sniper range one crisp fall morning. It’s been a long while since it was just the two of them with no instructor.

Evan dials the elevation into his scope, correcting for the ballistic arc.

At his side Jack presses binoculars to his face. “She says you shoot almost as well as Orphan Zero now.”

“I thought we were only letters.”

“Zero’s a nickname for Orphan O.”

Evan exhales through pursed lips, applies steady pressure to the trigger. The stock kicks into his shoulder, and a hole appears centered in the red bull’s-eye six hundred meters downslope.

“Who’s Orphan O?” Evan asks, fitting his eye again to the cup of the scope.

“An active Orphan. Some say the best. Until you.”

Evan fires again.

Jack lets his binoculars drop into the brittle leaves, annoyed. “Focus, Evan. You missed the whole damn target.”

“Look closer,” Evan says.

Jack lifts the binocs again. There it is, the eclipselike bulge where the second bullet nudged the perforation outward on the left side.

Two bullets, one hole.

Jack bobs that bulldog head, makes a noise deep in his throat. As Evan looks over, some heretofore undetectable filter falls away and Evan sees that Jack has aged since that first meeting when he pulled up to the rest stop where Evan was left seven years ago. His flesh seems heavier, tugging at that broad jawline, and his gaze is more human somehow. The glimpse of this Jack, a man nearing sixty with more traveled road behind him than open road ahead, strikes a vulnerability inside Evan that he didn’t know he had.

“When Clara died,” Jack says, keeping his eyes downrange, “I couldn’t see anything. Only the spaces she used to occupy.” He rolls his lips, swallows. “Until you.”

His mouth firms, and once more he is a baseball catcher, square and armored, impervious to collision. He rises, his boots crunching mulch as he turns back to the truck, his face holding the faintest note of dread.

“You’re ready,” he says.

Evan’s eyes opened in the soft morning light of his bedroom. He lay on his floating bed, stared at the ceiling, Jack’s words still echoing in his head.

He’d been ready for a long time. Briefly, he wondered what all that readiness had cost him.

And then he rose.

It was time for him and Katrin to make contact.