The Nowhere Man

13 Last Glance Back

For Evan’s seventeenth birthday, a former Army Ranger exposes him to a brutal week of sleep deprivation and caloric reduction, then drives him to a desolate stretch of the snowy Allegheny Mountains, gives him a set of coordinates, and leaves him shivering in a T-shirt and jeans. As the four-wheeler pulls away with a cheery toot of the horn, Evan recalls Jack’s Third Commandment: Master your surroundings. Looking around, he wonders how this is possible.

He has weathered SERE training, which focuses on the four basics of operational up-the-creek-ness — survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. He’s been taught woodcraft and wilderness skills, counterinterrogation and camouflage techniques. He can make a fire, build a shelter, and distinguish mushrooms he can eat from mushrooms that will Cuisinart his kidneys or send him on a psychedelic trip on the magic bus, but now, as he faces the reality of the damp earth and empty pockets, it seems like all that knowledge is for shit.

Forty-eight hours later, near hypothermic and bedraggled beneath a paste of mud and leaves, he stumbles upon a long-deserted cabin. The roof is partially torn off, the walls rotted, critters nesting in the walls. In a fallen cabinet, he finds an ancient energy bar still in the wrapper and devours it.

Mistake.

Too late he notes the bitter aftertaste at the back of his tongue. A gentle poison or emetic, probably hydrogen peroxide or syrup of ipecac. Curled up on the dusty floorboards, he vomits the scant contents of his stomach. It seems that the heaving will never end. In hour two he hears an engine approach over the rugged terrain. The door opens, and a shadow falls over him.

“Why the hell would there be an energy bar in a deserted cabin?” Jack asks.

“The First Commandment,” Evan croaks.

“That’s right.” Jack crouches, sets down a bottle of water by Evan’s face. “See you at home.”

Four days later, having staggered out of the woods, cleaned up in a gas-station bathroom, stolen clothes from a church coatroom, and hitchhiked dogleggedly back to northern Virginia, Evan passes through the twin stone pillars and begins the painful climb up the dirt slope to the two-story farmhouse. Strider meets him at the porch, nuzzling his palm, wagging his tail so hard his rear end swivels.

Jack is sitting at a dinner table set for two, a steaming turkey in a basting pan set on a trivet before him. He sips a vodka martini, still ice-crystal cloudy from the shaker.

Evan crosses his arms, winces from the pain. He thinks back to Van Sciver, how when they were kids he always seemed to loom overhead, backlit by the sun, the edges of his red hair turned golden, the bearing of a god. He would’ve done better. He would have faced the wild fearlessly. He would have known to avoid the energy bar. He would have made it out a day quicker. Or two.

Evan feels emotion in the back of his throat, in his nostrils. The words come like broken glass. “I didn’t do so hot.”

Jack is all rough edges and rugged exterior, but his eyes and the etched skin around them convey something much, much softer. “Next time,” he says. “Next time.” He rubs his hands, appraises the turkey. “It still needs to rest before carving. There’s a hot bath waiting for you.”

Evan nods and heads upstairs.

Several years later on a bleak gray morning, Evan finds himself riding shotgun east on Route 267, a carry-on bag across his thighs. In his back pocket is a real passport with real stamps and a false name. Jack’s hands grip the wheel in the ten-and-two, and he gazes straight ahead as signs for Dulles International float overhead.

“I am the only person who knows who you are,” Jack says. “What you do. The only person inside the government or out. The only person in the world.”

This is not news. Evan wonders what is motivating Jack to break character this dreary East Coast morning by repeating the obvious.

“I am your only connection to anything,” Jack continues. “Anyone else contacts you, says I told them, do not believe him. I am it.”

“Okay,” Evan says.

“I will always be there. The voice on the other end of the phone.”

Evan realizes he is witnessing something he has never seen before: Jack is anxious.

“Jack? I’m ready.”

The airport cop flicks a gloved hand, and Jack coasts up to Departures. At the curb ahead of them against the backdrop of a minivan, a teary mother and a stoic father hug their son. The teenager wears a college shirt with intersecting lacrosse sticks. He looks impatient.

Evan reaches for the door handle. “See you when it’s clear.” He starts to get out, but Jack’s hand grips his forearm firmly, stilling him in the passenger seat.

“Remember, the hard part isn’t killing,” he says, not for the first time, or the fiftieth. “The hard part is staying human.”

A microexpression flickers across Jack’s features so fast that Evan might have missed it if he didn’t know him the way he does.

Fear.

Evan feels his throat constrict ever so slightly. Neither of them is accustomed to expressing emotion. Not trusting his voice, Evan nods.

The vise grip on his arm relents. Jack waves a hand at the waiting terminal. “Go on, then,” he says, slightly bothered, as though Evan has been holding him up.

Evan climbs out, the chill whipping around his neck, cooling the flush that has crept up into his face. He blends into the thickening crowd entering the international terminal, walking neither too fast nor too slow, a face among faces, invisible in plain sight. The boarding pass rustles in his hand. When he reaches the printed destination, there will be additional orders from Jack, directing him to a man he will kill.

He is nineteen years old and as ready as he’ll ever be.

He gives a last glance back through the big glass doors at Jack, his only connection to legitimacy.

He is also Evan’s only connection to humanity.