Orphan X

22 Pieces of His True Self

Evan came back to himself kneeling on his bedroom floor before the open dresser drawer, the bloodstained collar of Jack’s flannel looped around his hand like a rosary. The gunshot seemed to echo through the doorways of his condo, a ghost sound that filled the air all around and yet had no source. That noise had sent him into a new life. He’d slipped out of that underground parking structure beneath the Jefferson Memorial and into a different existence.

The first weeks after Jack’s death he’d spent in a rented cabin in the Alleghenies, alone with the smell of pine mulch and the rustle of leaves. In his entire life, he’d known only one genuine human connection, and the loss of it had left a hole clean through his center. In his bones, his chest, beneath the vault of his ribs, he ached as if the damage were physical. In a way he supposed it was.

Either he’d drawn Jack into the open or he had been followed himself. Two marked men in the same location, a public meet that Evan had insisted on.

This is not your fault. I made the decision to meet you.

No matter Jack’s intent, his words conveyed the opposite. Evan replayed them, hearing them as he’d heard Jack’s whiskey voice reading him Shakespeare by the light of the fire when he was a kid: And Brutus is an honorable man.

In that drafty cabin, Evan hibernated, grief bleeding him of energy. At the month mark, he started to emerge from the etherlike stupor, grasping that Jack’s murder had ramifications beyond the emotional. Evan’s only tie to legitimacy had also bled out on the concrete floor of P3.

He had no handler, no contacts inside the government, no nation that wasn’t actively hunting him, even the one he served. He was, in a word, untethered.

Jack’s voice cut through the haze. Get over yourself, son. There is no emotion more useless than self-pity.

Evan rose that morning, walked into the crisp autumn breeze, and gazed across the slopes. They were stubbled with red spruce, the Christmas-tree smell sharpening the air. Needles stabbed his bare feet. The wind blew clear through him, and he had a sense of a wider world and his place within it.

He had a virtually limitless bank account, a particular skill set, and nothing to do. He was untethered, yes, but that also meant he was free.

He moved to Los Angeles, the farthest he could get from D.C. without tumbling off the edge of the country. And he rebuilt. A third life, in the open as well as in the shadows. An operational alias built with pieces of his true self. A cover that let him hide in plain sight. He stayed mission-ready. Kept fit and trained up. He never knew who would come looking, what fist might knock on his door.

Several years passed.

He stayed alert, vigilant, kept his ear to the ground to listen for underworld tremors. Word filtered back to him through various sources that the Orphan Program had been dismantled, the operators scattered to the four winds. He never learned the fate of those Orphans who turned, but he imagined that the others now sold their specialized services to the highest bidder or had retired to a beach in a quiet corner of the world. Neither option appealed to him.

And so he decided to put his training to personal use. A pro bono freelancer, helping others who could not help themselves. Either way he had a calling, aligned with the heading of his own moral compass. Five years, a dozen successful missions.

And now he had failed.

Pop of a gunshot.

Thump of deadweight.

The blue flannel shirt stained with Jack’s blood seemed an indictment and a testament of the day’s loss, his own Shroud of Turin.

Dad? No. No. No.

Evan laid the stiff fabric gently in the false bottom of the drawer, lowered the concealing particleboard over it, and rearranged his clothes. The drawer closed with the faintest click.

He couldn’t save his own dad. He didn’t save Katrin’s.

All he could offer her now was vengeance.

He passed the floating Maglev bed on his way out, padded down the cold hall with the Japanese woodblock prints and the mounted sword.

Shards of the tumbler lay scattered across the counter, in the sink. A sharp alcohol waft reached him, the antiseptic fragrance of overpriced vodka. He swept up the bits of glass. Wet a hand towel and wiped down the counter, the backsplash. One of the reflective subway tiles had sustained a tiny chip. He worked the flaw with his fingernail, as if he could sand it back to perfection.

It remained.

He’d just sat down, exhaled deeply, and prepared to meditate when a vehement shrill jarred him from his peaceful pose on the Turkish rug. He didn’t place the sound right away. It returned, strident enough to make his teeth hurt. Not an alarm but his rarely used house phone, installed only because a local number was required for the HOA Resident Directory.

He’d just picked up when Mia’s voice came at him. “Drain cleaner in water bottles? What were you thinking?”

Evan exhaled quietly.

“Look, I know you were joking. He told me it was a joke. But if he repeats that to a teacher? It would be considered a terroristic threat. You don’t understand how insane schools are these days.”

Evan rolled his lips over his teeth. Bit down. Told the muscles of his neck to relax. “You’re right.”

“You know what? This isn’t your fault. It’s my fault. I should’ve … I don’t know—”

“I get it,” Evan said.

“Okay.” A brief pause. “Um. Good-bye, then.”

“Good-bye.”

Well, that was that. Good. No complications. No distractions. He’d made a brief, uncharacteristic foray into a sticky domestic situation, and now he could retreat into dealing with his work and the considerable danger facing him and Katrin.

The bitch is next. Then you.

In the morning he’d regroup with Katrin. He’d run down the people behind the murder of her father. And he’d eliminate them before they could pose a further threat.

Forgoing his meditation, he walked down the hall, the concrete cool beneath his bare feet. He took a hot shower, the steam burning his lungs, then toweled off. The floating platform that held his mattress wobbled ever so slightly as he slipped into bed. He cleared a space inside his mind, a park of his own, and populated it with the oak trees of his childhood, the ones visible from the window of his dormer room in Jack’s house. He’d always envisioned bounding across the burnt orange canopy, forty feet off the ground. He counted down slowly from ten, part of a self-hypnotic technique for falling asleep.

He’d just hit zero and drifted off when the perimeter alarm sounded. A staccato series of beeps — external intruder, windows or balconies.

He flipped off the bed, landing in a four-point feet-and-hands sprawl on the floor. Two shoulder rolls took him through the door into the bathroom. He gripped the hot-water lever, shoving through into the Vault.

His eyes swept the monitors. Nothing, nothing—there. Bumping against his bedroom window, a foreign object.

He exhaled with annoyance when he realized what it was.

After silencing the alarm, he walked back into his room and raised the armored sunscreen. Floating outside his window, a balloon.

With the logo of a children’s shoe store on it.

Each upper-story window of Castle Heights tilted open only two feet at the top before a locked hinge stopped it for safety. Evan had disabled the hinge on his bedroom in case he needed to exit the building quickly in the event of a frontal assault on the penthouse. Letting the pane yawn wide now, he tugged the balloon inside. Knotted around the mouth was a kite string that tailed down the side of the building to — he assumed — the twelfth floor. A folded note was Scotch-taped on the balloon’s side. Evan raised the flap of paper and read.

“I’m sorry I told Mom yor joke. Do you fergive me? Chek Yes or No. Your frend, Peter.”

Taped beside the note on the balloon, a stubby pencil and a sewing needle.

The grinding of Evan’s teeth vibrated his skull. He had a team of professional assassins tracking him and the woman he’d sworn to protect. Her father, murdered. Two Commandments and counting already out the window. The last thing he needed was an eight-year-old kid invading his condo and his sleep with schoolroom notes.

Evan closed the window hard on the kite string and went back to his bed. He pulled the sheets up and floated there in the darkness on his levitating mattress, detached from the world. He counted down from ten, but sleep didn’t come. He kept his eyes closed, focused on his body, the weight of his bones, his own quiet breathing. From time to time, he could hear the balloon squeaking faintly against the ceiling.

Exasperated, he threw back the sheets and crossed to the balloon. He pulled off the pencil, made an X in the “Yes” box, and popped the balloon with the conveniently supplied needle. He opened the window and threw the deflated sack to the wind. He started to cinch the window closed again, then hesitated. He stuck his head out in time to see the white string being taken up through a window nine stories below by two tiny hands.