Out of the Dark

28 A Touch to the Outside

Baseball cap pulled low, Evan sat in his rental car across from 6071 I Street, a pricey condo complex with a conveniently windowed lobby that showed off pods of leather couches, a few phallic cacti, and a wall of smoked mirror that would have been considered tacky a few years ago but now was retro cool. He wondered how Doug Wetzel afforded to live here on a deputy chief of staff’s salary.

It was nearing 10:00 A.M. on Saturday, the D.C. streets clogged with tourists. A souvenir shop just past his parking meter received a steady influx of customers, clouding his car in a hurricane swirl of activity. He would have been jet-lagged had he bothered to notice, but he was busy sitting surveillance, waiting for Wetzel to show his bearded face.

Removing superglue from the backpack on the passenger seat, Evan applied another sheen to his fingertips, further obscuring his prints.

The familiar action tripped his memory, taking him back to 1997, riding a bus out of that gray Eastern European city to see a man about a copper-washed shell from a sniper round. He closed his eyes, pictured the little plastic bag, the Cyrillic lettering spelling out EYES ONLY. He’d reassembled that mission like a puzzle but was still missing a crucial piece that, to President Bennett, represented an existential threat.

Given that Wetzel was Bennett’s go-to guy for dirty work, Evan wanted to search his condo in hopes he could find something to point at the puzzle piece that had landed him on the bull’s-eye.

He blew on his fingers, waiting for the superglue to dry. In the backpack he had fingerprint adhesives as well, impressionable silicon composite films that were fifty microns thin, or half the width of a piece of hair. He’d acquired the DARPA-developed commodity at great expense and preferred to use the films sparingly. So, for now, superglue it was.

He pulled out his RoamZone and logged in to the.nwhr.man@gmail.com. He’d left a query for Joey inside the Drafts folder: “Are we into Secret Service private secure network yet?”

Her reply was where it should be, typed inside the same unsent message: “no, mr. patience.”

Frowning, he thumbed: “Keep me posted.”

An instant later the draft updated: “ya think?”

Amused, he deleted the draft, killing it in its cradle. Another sense memory hit him — sitting on a ratty bed in a foreign hotel communicating with Jack inside a shared e-mail draft just like this. And now time had lurched forward and landed Evan in an iteration of his past, two lost souls communicating across the black expanse of the Atlantic.

His mind tugged to when Joey had caught him off guard with a hug and the epiphany that had followed — that she owned a small piece of him.

How had she gotten in?

Surely Jack was to blame. In cultivating not just Evan’s lethality but his humanity, Jack had embedded a vulnerability in him as sure as every air-gapped system had a leak. What had Joey called it? A touch to the outside.

Evan’s touch to the outside left him exposed, open to attack.

But it also left him open to the world and all the awesome, awful responsibility that came from living in it.

He thought about Mia and Peter, a single mother and a fatherless boy, and how if he were a better man with a better past, his missing pieces might fit with theirs.

Across the street the lobby of Wetzel’s building remained empty. Through a break in foot traffic, Evan caught a glimpse of his own rental car cast back from the smoky mirror. In the space where he should be, the reflection showed nothing but the tinted glass of the driver’s window.

He looked across at the souvenir shop with its red blaring sign: WE SELL ITEMS STRAIGHT FROM THE WHITE HOUSE GIFT SHOP!

Shouldering his backpack and its mission-essential valuables, he climbed out. Keeping an eye on the condo building, he perused the shop’s offerings. He picked out a sleek half-moon plaque, custom-cast with a brass patina.

As he paid in cash, the shop owner asked, “Want me to wrap it?”

Evan said, “Yes.”

After the shop owner finished, Evan took the package, the size of a halved Frisbee, and shoved it into his backpack. When he looked up and across the street, he caught Wetzel emerging from the elevator into the lobby. He was dressed in a sharp suit, the tips of his mustache rising with speakeasy gusto.

Evan moved swiftly out from under the awning of the shop, keeping Wetzel in view. Evan expected him to cut through the back door into the parking garage, but instead Wetzel paused beside an industrial aluminum trash can near the tea-and-coffee counter.

Wetzel glanced around the lobby, making sure that no one was near. Then he put his hand on the trash can’s metal swing lid, flipped it upside down, and checked beneath.

A dead drop.

Presumably he didn’t find what he was looking for. Letting the lid fall back into place, he vanished through the rear door. Moments later he emerged from the parking gate behind the wheel of a Tesla S.

As Wetzel zoomed off, Evan decided not to search his place but to watch the dead drop instead.

He got back into his rented Nissan Altima, once again safe behind tinted glass.

Twenty minutes passed. Forty.

Near the hour mark, a man across the street caught Evan’s attention. It wasn’t his appearance but his sense of purpose, the way he cut through pedestrians, head lowered, his movements conveying latent power. Reddish brown hair cut short, receding but thick where it remained, clung to his skull like an ivy leaf laid over the crown. He was on the short side — maybe a whiff over five-eight — with a welterweight’s build, wiry and dense at the same time.

Everything about him screamed Orphan.

Evan tracked him through the crowd but couldn’t get a clear look at his face.

Still turned away, the man slowed at the entrance of Wetzel’s building. Outside the lobby door, he tapped in a code, one arm raised, the sinewy forearm like knotted rope. Slipping inside, he tugged up his shirt and retrieved a buff clasp envelope tucked against the small of his back.

Through the window Evan watched the man beeline to the trash can. Barely slowing his pace, he flipped the swing lid, slapped the folder into place beneath, and continued up the brief hall toward the garage.

He banged through the rear door and was gone before the trash-can lid had stopped swaying.

Evan sat in the car for a few minutes. He remembered hearing whispers of Bennett’s reliance on one of the Orphans — the first Orphan — back in his early DoD days. Evan had even uncovered a photo once, a decades-old surveillance shot taken in a bustling souk in Amman. It had captured a partial reflection of Orphan A’s face in the side mirror of a parked car.

Evan hadn’t caught a clear enough look at the features of the man now to compare. But the guy’s age, somewhere in the mid-fifties, put him into consideration.

Evan waited a time longer, staring through the stream of pedestrians at that trash can and whatever had been hidden for Doug Wetzel beneath the lid.

Then he got out of the Altima.

Seating his backpack on his shoulders, he crossed the street and walked the same course as the likely Orphan had before him. He paused a few yards from the door and pretended to answer a cell-phone call.

A few moments later, an elderly woman with a rat-size dog trudged from the elevator to the front door. Evan caught it on the backswing and slipped into the cool lobby.

He moved swiftly to the trash can, flipped the lip upside down, and tore free the taped envelope beneath. He pinched the clasp, raised the flap, and slid out a high-res eight-by-ten photo of a woman who looked to have been battered to death with a blunt object.

Interesting.

It seemed the president’s deputy chief of staff had been checking the dead drop for confirmation of an ordered kill.

Staring at the woman’s sprawled form, the unhuman arrangement of the plates of her skull, Evan felt a bone-deep weariness overtake him. His life guaranteed that he saw ugliness in all its varied and gruesome forms. But that touch to the outside meant that he felt it, too.

Using the camera of his RoamZone, Evan sized up the frame and took a picture. Then he flipped the photograph over. On the back an address, a date, and a time had been rendered in meticulous block letters.

He took a picture of that, too, and then slid the photo home, reseated the clasp, and rotated the swing lid so he could seat the envelope back on its underside where he’d found it.

He sensed a shadow at the lobby entrance and glanced up, one hand grasping the envelope in plain view, the other holding the trash-can lid.

He found himself staring through the window at Agent Naomi Templeton, standing before her Cherokee on the sidewalk.

She was staring right back at him.