Orphan X

28 Unholy Union

Evan walked the L.A. River to clear his head. The unlikeliest-looking waterway in the county, it was a polluted trickle through a wide concrete channel. Shrubs dotted the water’s edge, and graffiti embellished the sloped sides of the basin. The slumbering homeless lay like sacks of grain, dead or drunk or just goddamned exhausted. Downtown was overhead and all around, and yet down here, sunk in a trough beneath the city, it felt like a desolate underworld, isolated from man and God.

The December air whipped at Evan’s neck as he sidestepped overturned shopping carts, loose tires from semis, the occasional mossy hull of a wrecked car left behind by some musclehead who’d tried to play drag-racing Danny Zuko when the water dried up.

Traffic hummed all around, invisible save the lightsaber headlights scanning the darkness above and the soothing white noise that thrummed the basin walls, a primordial murmur of blood rushing through veins. Evan had come to the stretch flowing beneath the East Los Angeles Interchange, the unholy union of Highway 101, Route 60, and Interstates 5 and 10. He’d read somewhere that this was the busiest highway exchange in the world, daily spinning half a million vehicles through its confusion of cloverleafs.

He realized now why he’d come to this place to make the phone call he was about to make: It was a comforting reminder of his anonymity in this great stacked sprawl of a city.

The bullets fired into Lotus Dim Sum had been meant for him. Someone had set Danny Slatcher on his tail, put him in the crosshairs. And Katrin wasn’t the bait. Couldn’t be the bait. Because Evan knew how to read people. Jack had taught him that, as had eight different psyops experts over years of training and countless under-the-gun interactions since then. Her tears had been real — as was her fear. Which meant that he’d dragged her into this. Devastated her life. Gotten her father killed.

Of the myriad questions scratching at the walls of his skull, one rose above the din: Who had hired Danny Slatcher to kill him?

Evan had certainly cultivated plenty of enemies. As a covert operator, he’d put countless notches into his gun belt, and he’d added quite a few more as a freelancer. His would-be murderer could be anyone from a foreign insurgent leader to a vengeance-bent relative of someone Evan had dispatched. Whoever it was had been working a long, smart play. They’d waited and watched, reading patterns and collecting clues, just as Evan himself had been trained to do.

He reached a patch of darker shadow beneath an overpass, the area cleared of homeless encampments, prostitutes, and druggies. A spot of privacy in the beating heart of the city. The water rustled past, its dank scent coating his lungs. He raised his tough rubber phone and dialed the number of the man who’d murdered Sam White.

It rang. And again.

There was a click, but no one spoke.

Evan said, “Which one are you?”

A silence. And then a familiar voice said, “What?”

“Which. Orphan. Are. You?”

Somewhere from another dimension came a screech of tires, the blare of a horn. The moon lay rippling on the muddied surface of the slow-moving water. A few bats flurried beneath the overpass, then settled peacefully back into the gloom.

At last the voice sounded in Evan’s ear. “Some say the best. Until you. Now there seems to be some debate on that point, doesn’t there…” A brief, savored pause. “… Orphan X?”

Hearing his alias spoken aloud for the first time in nearly a decade left his head humming. He’d been identified. Named. The moment he’d been dreading for two-thirds of a lifetime.

He pulled the phone away from his mouth, cleared his throat, then brought the receiver back to his lips and returned the favor. “Orphan Zero,” he said.

“That’s right.”

Who better to hire to go after the Nowhere Man than a former Orphan? The person who wanted Evan dead had made inquiries in the right circles, had hired the best. And the best happened to be not only one of Evan’s own but one of the few who could connect the dotted trail between the Nowhere Man and Orphan X. Danny Slatcher likely didn’t know Evan’s actual name, but he understood the shadowy contours of Evan’s identity as Evan understood his.

Evan thought of Slatcher’s redacted file. He thought of a dismantled Orphan Program, all those trained assaulters out of work, unmoored from purpose and oversight, left to find meaning — and jobs — on their own. He thought of Katrin’s face when she’d heard the pop of the gunshot through the phone, the deadweight thump of her father’s body hitting the floor.

Evan felt his hand grow tight around the phone. Never make it personal. Never make it personal. Never …

Blackness pooled in his chest, drowning out thought and reason, drowning out the hum of cars all around, Jack’s voice in his head, the Commandments themselves.

He said, “You shouldn’t have killed Sam White.”

He hung up and started back for his car.

Danny Slatcher set down his phone and eased his considerable frame back against the headboard, the box spring groaning beneath him. Candy came out of the bathroom, naked save the threadbare motel towel twisting up her hair, to shoot him an inquisitive glance. He did not look over at her.

She took in his expression and retreated into the bathroom.

Slatcher’s arm span was such that he could reach the round wooden breakfast table from the bed with barely a lean. He plucked up the slender metal box and set it in his lap.

Inside, ten press-on, peel-off fingernails and the high-def contact lens display rested in the molded rubber interior like some relic from the future.

He appareled himself with an ease that he found mildly distasteful.

The virtual cursor blinked in space a few feet from his right eyeball as he waited for Top Dog to accept his request. At last the cursor shifted from red to green.

Slatcher elevated his hands like a pensive concert pianist, then typed: WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM.