Out of the Dark

2 An Absence of Light

Orphan X.

That was Evan’s designation, bestowed upon him at the age of twelve when he’d been yanked out of a foster home and brought up in a full-deniability program buried deep inside the Department of Defense. It wasn’t just a black program; it was full dark. You could stare right at it and comprehend nothing but an absence of light.

About a decade ago, the inevitable ambiguities of the operations Evan was tasked with had reached a tipping point. So he’d fled the Orphan Program and blipped off the radar.

He’d kept the vast resources he had accrued as a black operator and the skills embedded in his muscle memory. But he’d also kept the bearings of his moral compass that had, despite the blood he’d spilled across six continents, stubbornly refused to be shattered.

Now he was the Nowhere Man, lending his services to the truly desperate, to people who had nowhere else to turn. He’d been content to leave the past in the past. Even within the intel community, the Program had remained largely unknown. Evan’s code name, Orphan X, was dismissed as a figure of myth or an urban legend. Few people knew who Evan was or what he’d done.

Unfortunately, one of them happened to be the president of the United States.

Jonathan Bennett had been the undersecretary of defense for policy at the Department of Defense during Evan’s incipient years in the Program. Through a trickle-down system designed to maximize plausible deniability, Bennett had given the mission orders. Evan had been the most effective operator on Bennett’s watch, killing enough declared enemies of the state to fill a graveyard. Evan knew where the bodies were buried; he’d put them in the ground.

Years later, when Bennett had become president, he’d set about erasing any record of the constitutionally questionable program he’d overseen. Through sweat, blood, and hard work, Evan had discovered that Bennett was particularly obsessed with eradicating any trace of the 1997 mission.

Which put Evan at the top of the hit list.

He didn’t know why the mission held a special place in Bennett’s paranoiac heart or why that assassination in that distant gray city was relevant today. On that cold fatal morning, what mysteries had lingered outside the periphery of Evan’s scope? In pulling the trigger, had he toppled a domino, sparking a chain reaction with momentous consequences? Or in the dankness of that sewer, had he waded into something intimate, putting himself in the crosshairs of a personal vendetta? He didn’t have any answers.

Only that Bennett wanted him eliminated.

And that he, in turn, wanted to eliminate Bennett.

But Evan’s motives weren’t merely self-protective. Bennett was morally corrupt in the most profound sense, a rot seeping down through the chain of command. From the highest office, he had ordered the deaths of a number of Orphans, executing those who, under his tenure, had risked their lives for their country. And he’d had someone else killed as well, a man so steadfast and true that Evan had come to view him as a father.

That had been a miscalculation.

Which was why Evan was here now, pressed against the White House gates with a gaggle of tourists in the sticky June heat, waiting for a sign of the Man.

The woman to Evan’s side rose onto tiptoes, funneling her children before her to provide them a better view. “Look! I think that’s him! I think he’s coming!” She swatted her eldest on the arm. “Close out that Pokémon nonsense and take some pictures for your Instagram.”

Evan lowered the camera and retrieved his Big Gulp as the phalanx of vehicles rolled into sight, tailing down the circular drive as they departed the West Wing. The motorcade was the so-called informal package, eight Secret Service G-rides and three indistinguishable presidential limos. The three limos forced potential assassins to play a shell game when choosing a target; they never knew for sure which one the president was riding in. The decoys pulled double-duty as backup vehicles in the event of an attack.

As the convoy neared the South Lawn, it halted abruptly.

Excitement flickered in Evan’s chest, the lick of a cool flame. Was this the opportunity he’d been waiting on for 237 surveillance hours spread over the past six months?

He lifted the camera again in time to see an aide jog out from the edge of the Rose Garden, a soft-sided leather briefcase in hand. The trees cut visibility, the aide flickering in and out of view as he neared the motorcade. To keep the aide in sight, Evan threaded through the crowd along the gate.

The aide halted by the middle limousine, barely visible between the trees. The door popped open, just barely, and the aide slid the briefcase through the tiny gap.

The door closed once more.

The episode could have been witnessed by only a dozen people standing in the right vantage point along the gate.

It was indeed the break Evan had waited half a year for.

Bennett had shown his hand.

But because the president was in the middle limo now, that didn’t mean he’d be in the middle limo next time. Or that the limos drove in the same order each time.

Evan’s mind raced, grasping for variables.

The president might not have a favorite presidential limousine. But he’d almost certainly have a favorite driver.

Evan had to watch not the limos, but the drivers.

Or more precisely — since the drivers were hidden behind tinted windows in identical vehicles — Evan had to watch how the drivers drove, identifying any distinctive feature of how the middle wheelman commanded his vehicle.

He locked his primary attention on the central limo while also letting his vision widen to encompass the other two. The sun beat at the side of his neck. The crowd jostled with anticipation, the air smelling of Coppertone and deodorant. The Instagram kid whined that he was starving and sagged as though he’d misplaced his spine.

Evan maintained perfect focus.

As the convoy started up again, the end vehicles turned their wheels before the vehicles moved, rotating them in place on the asphalt while the limos were still at rest. But the middle driver turned the wheels only as he coasted forward, providing a smoother ride for the president.

A poker tell.

If Evan were one to smile, he would have now.

Instagram Mom tugged her kid upright. “Stand up, Cameron. The president’s coming this way.”

As the convoy banked around the curved drive, Evan put himself on the move, carving not too briskly through the onlookers, heading to where E Street intersected with East Executive Avenue.

President Bennett preferred this route, as it allowed him to avoid Pennsylvania Avenue, which ran across the front of the White House and provided a view of Lafayette Square, where an ever-growing mass of protesters gathered to call for his impeachment. They wielded signs and banners decrying a host of constitutional violations. Contravening the Arms Export Control Act. Funneling money and weapons illicitly to foreign fighters. Initiating widespread NSA surveillance of Americans. Monitoring domestic political factions that opposed him. Transgressing international conventions. Providing special access to defense contractors. Circumventing Congress. Usurping judicial powers.

But Bennett had masterfully erected a force field around his administration, fogging transparency sufficiently to hold his detractors at bay.

Evan was not interested in politics. Bennett’s transgressions of office, while appalling, were not what had Evan here on the sun-baked concrete outside the White House. It was not about the vast and the conspiratorial. Not about whispered conversations in the corridors of power. Not about kingdom-altering back-channel deals or the Rube Goldberg machinations that disguised originator from outcome, cause from effect.

It was the faces of the dead.

And the fact that the president of the United States had personally ordered the murder of men and women who as children had been taken from foster homes and trained and indoctrinated to spend their existence serving their country. They had done the best they could with the life that had been imposed on them. And he’d snuffed them out for the sake of his own preservation.

Ending Jonathan Bennett was the ultimate Nowhere Man mission.

Finally the motorcade reached the intersection and halted. Again the drivers of the bookending limos turned the tires while stationary, grinding tread against asphalt. And again the wheels of the middle limo rotated only as the driver pulled out.

It had not been a fluke, then. But a habit.

The convoy banked onto E Street and headed for Evan.

He adjusted his baseball cap and slowed his breathing until he could sense the stillness between heartbeats, the sacred space he occupied the instant before he pulled the trigger of a sniper rifle, when even the faintest thrum of blood in his fingertip could put him off his mark.

In less than a minute, the presidential limo would pass directly in front of Evan, bringing him at last within several meters of the most inaccessible and heavily guarded man on the face of the planet.