Orphan X

52 The Other Guy’s Hand

On the third day, Evan finally entered the Vault. Within twenty minutes he’d cleaned up the Castle Heights surveillance footage. It was odd watching himself zombie-stumbling through the corridors, smearing charcoal along the walls. An entire seven minutes of his life that he had little memory of, operating unconsciously on the training drilled into his body. He fast-forwarded to find whatever else would need to be deleted. A short while later, Mia appeared in the corridor of the twelfth floor. On various monitors he followed her to the elevator, up to the twenty-first floor, then along his corridor. She paused outside his penthouse. He’d left the front door ajar.

She entered and moved tentatively toward his bedroom. He was lying on the bed, unconscious. Going quickly to him, she checked his pulse. Then his forehead. For a time she sat beside him and held his hand. He watched the minutes tick by.

Then she left the penthouse, closing the door firmly behind her. She returned to her condo and emerged a minute later, bucket and brush in hand. It was the middle of a night in which she’d already endured a home invasion. She’d only just gotten her traumatized boy put to bed. And yet there she was, scrubbing the floors, walls, and elevator for nearly two hours.

Protecting him.

He was standing to leave when he spotted an icon that an e-mail had arrived, after a long journey of autoforwards around the globe, into the in-box of the.nowhere.man@gmail.com. He couldn’t remember the last one he’d received.

Two days old, it was from one of Tommy Stojack’s accounts. And the subject line read: “Katrin White.”

A chill moved through Evan’s stomach, making the scabbed wound tingle.

He took a moment, then sat down, rolled his chair back to the desk, and read Tommy’s message.

“Bad news: My hook at Harrah’s left. Good news: He moved over to Caesars. Your girl’s in the databanks over there. They couldn’t pin nuthin on her, but she had a run on a poker table that JDLR.”

Stojack slang for “just didn’t look right.”

Evan opened the attachment, an internal report from Caesars. A scanned copy of a gambler rewards card featured a photo. There was that milk-white skin, the emerald gaze, her choppy hipster hairstyle rendered here not in black but a rich auburn. The name beneath: “Danika White.” A header written in party streamers read: “Vegas. Be whoever you want to be.”

His throat was dry enough that it took some effort to swallow. He read on.

Danika was a high roller, working the no-limit tables at Caesars and racking up serious debt, which had been mysteriously paid off on December 7. Two days after Evan killed William Chambers and three days before Katrin White had set the meeting at Bottega Louie. Shared intel with other casinos showed arrears all up and down the Strip, similarly wiped off the books two weeks ago.

The lies compounded. There had been no covert poker circle. No Vegas hit men skinning indebted Japanese businessmen. No trust-baby husband who’d left her in the financial lurch. Danika had simply gotten in over her head gambling too hard for too long. Slatcher — or whoever was behind him — had stepped in and purchased her casino markers; they’d paid their money and bought her outright.

But they wouldn’t have been able to if she hadn’t been willing to make the deal at the outset. In his sordid career, Evan had seen plays like this dozens of times. Reach out to a desperate mark. Offer her the shot of a lifetime. Then once you own her, tighten the screws.

By the time Danika White understood the nature of the pact she’d entered, it would have been too late.

Armed with her real name, Evan’s virtual excavations grew drastically easier. Danika’s parents were alive and well, retired to a planned community in Boca Raton. She had no husband of record and one daughter, twenty years of age.

Her name was Samantha.

In his head, Evan replayed Danika’s reaction in the motel when the gunshot had sounded over the phone: Sam! Dad? No. No. No!

In her state of panic, her first reaction had been a tell. She’d used the proper name of who she’d really thought had been hurt before catching herself.

As each fabrication toppled, it knocked over the next, a domino chain of deception. Vowing to follow it to the end, Evan breached the DMV’s database. Samantha’s driver’s license showed her to be a beautiful kid, the resemblance to her mother striking. After a two-year stint at Santa Monica City College, Samantha had gotten a financial-aid package at UCLA. Though she held down two work-scholarship jobs, her tuition account showed multiple interest charges for late payments. Evan unearthed a cell-phone number for her and dialed.

The voice, young and breezy: “Yeah, it’s Sam?”

In the background Evan heard a bustle of activity, someone calling her name. It sounded like classes letting out, or maybe she was walking through the quad. He exhaled, relieved that she wasn’t being held hostage. A good strategic move on Slatcher’s part — he could get to her readily, so why deal with the complications and risks of detaining her?

“Hi, Sam,” Evan said. “I’m a friend of your mom’s and—”

“Wow. Almost ten months this time. Impressive. I thought she’d finally given up for real.”

“Sorry?”

“What’s she need now? More money? Like I’m not working enough to pay for my own life? I told her — I don’t want to see her or talk to her. And that includes any lame go-betweens.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just … She stopped returning calls the past few weeks—”

“Get used to it. Look, dude, I don’t know who you are, but let me save you some years of your life. At the end of the day, when it comes to Danika, all that matters is Danika.”

Evan approximated a crestfallen tone. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Hey,” Sam said. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m just trying to help so you don’t have to go through what I went through.”

She hung up.

Evan cocked back in his chair and closed his eyes, letting the picture resolve more clearly. Danika — probably at Slatcher’s command — had fashioned Katrin from pieces of her true self. She’d kept her last name and her gambling habit. She’d appropriated Sam’s name for her fake dad. Her fictional husband invested in planned communities in Boca Raton, just as her real parents lived in one.

Evan recalled building his own first operational alias with Jack, toiling by the light of the birch fire in the farmhouse. Jack had taught him to assemble the cover story using more truth than lies, giving him less to remember and less to forget. Evan had learned to align himself with his false persona as closely as possible, forging a true emotional attachment so his instincts would respond accordingly. He’d learned to fall into a role and forget the part of himself that did not believe it.

Slatcher and his crew had done this for Katrin. After acquiring her in Vegas, they’d traumatized her, coercing her into a damaged state that matched what they needed her to display. After Slatcher had seemingly shot and killed Sam, Evan remembered holding Danika on the motel bed, how she’d wept herself hoarse against his chest. Slatcher and his crew must have threatened Samantha’s life, promising to hurt her if Danika didn’t come through. They’d ensured that the guilt and terror thrumming through her body were real. They had to be to allay Evan’s suspicions.

A former Orphan, Slatcher had tailored her cover story to suit Evan. A terrorized woman up against impossible odds, in desperate need of his help. The father with his life on the line, dying because of Evan’s miscalculation. Katrin had laid Evan’s own secret guilt bare. I made a stupid fucking mistake, and my dad’s paying for it, she’d said. Do you have any idea how that feels?

Yes.

This indicated that Slatcher — and his employer — knew about Jack. Had they been behind his death? Evan followed the chain of logic all the way down to the depths and did not like where it led him.

Danika had all but dared him to check her passport, pointing out that she had it on her, leaving it in clear view in her purse at the loft. The salient fact that Slatcher’s employer could generate a real passport as well as a full network of backstops in the databases was not lost on Evan.

He set his elbows on the sheet-metal surface of his desk and rubbed his eyes.

Sam’s dying words to his daughter over the phone had only set the hook deeper: Whoever you’re with, I hope he protects you. Through his suspicions, against his judgment, Evan had protected her. Though their location had been tipped off to their pursuers time and time again, though the Commandments had crumbled away one after the other, Evan had stuck with her right up until she’d skewered him with his own knife. Who better to fill that role than a poker player, skilled at analyzing others, reading scenarios, bluffing for gain? Ultimately, Danika had summed it up best herself.

You’re not playing your hand, she’d told him. You’re playing the other guy’s hand.

Dangling from his pull-up bar, Evan practiced knee raises to break up the fresh-forming scar tissue in his stomach. He moved slow and steady, breathing through the pain. He was focused so intently that he didn’t at first hear the RoamZone ringing.

Jogging to the kitchen counter, he snatched it up.

Vegas. Pay phone.

“Morena?”

“You okay?”

He was genuinely confused. “What?”

“Last time I called you, you sounded hurt. Bad.”

He breathed, felt the scar tissue strain. “I was,” he said. “Not bad.”

“Okay. I thought you might be dead or something. I just wanted to check.”

Evan restrained his urge to press her, trying to imagine how Jack would’ve played this out. He’d always had that knack — when to take up space, when to give it.

Evan walked along the row of sunscreens, patches of muted light rolling across him. “Is that the only reason you called?”

“At first I thought it was his cop friends, you know? Coming after us for revenge. You and me, we’re the only ones who knew anything about what happened to William Chambers, so I knew I had to get away from my sis and my aunt.”

“That was brave. And wise.”

“But these aren’t his cop friends, are they?”

“No,” Evan said. “They’re much worse.”

“They think I know something. I don’t know nothing. My life, it’s over. But Carmen, she can have a good life, maybe.”

“You will, too,” he said.

“I can’t go near you again. If I stick my head up, they’ll get me.”

Evan fought an urge to argue with her. Walking a lap around the great room, he did his best to channel Jack. I will never lie to you. If there was not trust, there would be nothing else.

“Yes,” Evan said. “They will.”

Wet breathing. A hiccup of a sob. “I’m scared. I should be scared, right?”

“Yes. You should.”

“It’s hard living like this. Invisible to the world. Apart from everyone. Like I don’t even exist.”

He thought of Mia in her bedroom, swaying to the Oscar Peterson Trio. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

She cried some more, muffled gasps. Seventeen years old, targeted by a world-class assassin. Rage rose in Evan’s throat, but he choked it off.

“If you don’t tell me where you are,” he said, “I can’t protect you.”

When Morena spoke again, her voice was heavy with sadness. “I know,” she said.