The Nowhere Man

16 Faithful Companions

Except for the swim cap, Candy McClure was naked. She loved being naked, though right now it was for work, not pleasure. That’s why she was hunched forward, the corpse flopped atop her back, marble-white arms dangling over her shoulders as she carried it toward the conveyer belt leading to the crematory unit. The dead body pressed against her skin wasn’t the most pleasant thing she’d felt this week, but she went to great lengths on disposal operations to avoid leaving fibers or residue at the scene.

It was one of those pet joints. She preferred animal mortuaries to human ones. If you could get around the inevitably cutesy names — they all seemed to be called “Loving Paws” or “Puppy Heaven”—they had certain advantages, looser security being foremost.

She’d broken into this outfit, Faithful Companions, in the glam outskirts of Muskego, because it used the Power-Pak II, her cremation unit of choice and the same one used for humans. Nice and roomy. Ideal for a St. Bernard or an investigative reporter from the Journal Sentinel who’d decided to start asking questions about black-budget allocations.

She flopped Jon Jordan’s body onto the track atop a rigor-mortised, three-legged American Shorthair. She’d preheated the unit before retrieving the body from the stolen van she’d parked by the back loading dock. Ramming the heel of her hand into the button, she engaged the equipment and watched the unlikely twosome rumble into eighteen hundred degrees of obliteration.

Curiosity killed the cats.

Snapping her gum, she stretched out her shoulders, limboed a bit to loosen her lumbar. The flesh of her back itched and burned. Jon Jordan was not a small man. She caught sight of her naked form in the stainless steel of the crematory unit and paused to admire herself.

A knockout body by all accounts. Large, firm breasts that still sat high and proud. Tapered waistline befitting a cello. Wide, feminine hips. Shapely legs.

But.

She turned slowly, bringing her mottled back into view. Since Orphan X had knocked her on top of her own jugs of concentrated hydrofluoric acid, she’d had countless skin grafts and scar-tissue-release surgeries. The pain was intense and unremitting, infections always one shower away.

From the front, a centerfold. From behind, Freddy Krueger.

Though she loathed to admit it to herself, the scarring had eaten away almost imperceptibly at her rock-star confidence. Self-doubt was not her strong suit. In fact, it wasn’t a trait she could remember experiencing, and yet there was something familiar in the shadows of doubt that crept beneath the repulsive surface now. Something from her early days in which she’d more or less raised herself, emotion she’d buried out of sight, excavation deep.

The question, like a whisper in her ear: Are you still good enough?

After all, the Orphan Program liked its products pristine. Candy had been perfect before. Now she had an incontrovertible flaw. Which made her human.

Orphans were not supposed to be human.

Beneath her swim cap, her cell phone vibrated against her skull. A girl punk band’s cover of Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman.”

The melody of employment.

She untucked the phone and answered. “Yes?”

“Is the package neutralized?”

The voice on the other end wasn’t so much a voice as a collection of words and syllables recorded from various TV shows and commercials — male and female, old and young, accented and not — hashed together, the audio equivalent of an old-timey ransom note fashioned from words clipped out of different newspapers.

Charles Van Sciver redefined paranoia. Though the calls were encrypted, he took this added step to dodge voice-recognition software. He was a ghost, a whisper in your ear. She’d met him only once, though she hadn’t seen him clearly, not even then. She knew him mostly through secondhand stories.

The upside of Orphan X’s efficiency was that he had knocked out the middleman. Now she could communicate with Van Sciver directly. Or at least with whatever software was proxying for his voice. She imagined him clicking away on his keyboard manically, Lon Chaney hunched over the organ in Phantom of the Opera.

She flopped down the unit door to gauge the progress of the flames, a housewife checking her pot roast. “The package is cooking as we speak.”

“I have a POTENTIAL lead on ORPHAN X,” the mosaic of voices informed her.

She rolled her lush lips over her teeth and bit down. Throughout the past year, there had been countless potential leads, all turning up nothing. And yet each time Van Sciver called with a juicy new morsel, her breath quickened. The only thing she found more stimulating than sex was the prospect of revenge.

Orphan X had defaced approximately 40 percent of her glorious surface area. What got her through the excruciating surgeries, the torturous recovery periods, the needle-stab showers and sleepless nights tossing in sandpaper sheets was one thing and one thing only.

The fantasy of what she was going to do to his body when she got ahold of him.

Van Sciver shared her enthusiasm. For him, too, nailing Orphan X was profoundly personal. She’d heard once that his relationship with X went back to when they were kids, but she knew nothing beyond that.

That’s how they had a first name, Evan. His original surname had long been abandoned. Though Evan operated now under his alias, the Nowhere Man, Van Sciver insisted on referring to him by his Program code name.

Van Sciver was Orphan Y.

She was Orphan V.

The code names bound them.

With a stainless-steel brush, Candy swept the remains from the crematory unit into an aluminum hopper to cool. “What’s the lead?” she asked, trying to keep the eagerness from her voice.

“The PHONE service for 1-855-2-NOWHERE was moved RECENTLY, PARKED at a company outside Of Sevastopol.”

Van Sciver’s data-mining algorithms cast a wide net, sifting the information superhighway for network ports, VoIP soft switches, bank accounts — any red flag that might mark a trail leading back to Orphan X.

“For OBVIOUS REASONS we can’t get ANY information OUT OF CRIMEA withOUT Putin’s goons catching WIND,” the voices continued. “I need YOU to GO THERE. You’ll BE paired WITH Orphan M.”

Ben Jaggers. A sullen, sallow little man who looked more like a door-to-door salesman than a trained assassin. And yet she’d seen surveillance footage of him putting a chopstick through the eye of a wavering informant in a crowded Shanghai marketplace, leaving the man lobotomized over his egg-drop soup.

In the Program’s original iteration, Orphans never worked together. But for Orphan X, Van Sciver had proved willing to make exceptions. When Van Sciver had taken over operations, there’d been a shift in focus. The Orphan Program still occasionally carried out the bidding of the secret-handshake men while allowing them full deniability. But since drone assassinations had demonstrated their click-button efficiency, there was less need of human assaulters and the complications that came with them. So a loyal core of Orphans under Van Sciver’s direction now devoted themselves to hunting down wayward operatives carrying damning information in their heads. Like sharks in the womb, devouring one another until only the strongest remained. The most elusive and most dangerous of their targets was Orphan X.

She dumped the remains from the hopper into the pulverizer, reducing what was left of Jon Jordan and Mittens to fine powder. “Why Orphan M?”

“Because he’s THE ONLY one who WON’T find you … DISTRACTING.” The last prerecorded word, spoken by a woman with an Indian accent, held particular emphasis.

“Why not?” Candy asked. “What’s wrong with him?”

No reply. Van Sciver didn’t waste words even when they were not his own.

“When am I leaving?” she asked.

“Now,” Van Sciver said through another voice, and disconnected the line.

A knock from the rear echoed through the crematorium.

Tucking the phone back beneath her swim cap, Candy sighed and walked across the Lysol-scented tiles. She opened the back door.

Jaggers stood in the cold, his stringy suit hanging from his bones. He was five foot four, maybe a buck twenty. He kept his eyes on her face, no small feat given what was on display.

“Don’t get in my way, don’t question my tactics, and I’m not gonna fuck you,” she told him. “Any questions?”

He coughed into a jaundiced fist. “What makes you think I want to fuck you?”

She turned, breezing back to the pulverizer, which had just stopped its brittle grinding. “Everyone wants to fuck me once they’ve been around me awhile,” she said. “You’ll see.”

If he took note of her burn scars, he didn’t show it. In fact, he seemed entirely unaffected by her body. A sexless mole of a man.

“I have our plane tickets,” he said. “We fly into Kiev and move from there.”

“We’re husband and wife?”

“Photojournalists for a Canadian travel magazine,” he said. “You can memorize the specifics on the flight.”

“Are we backstopped?”

“Yes. Several phone numbers deep, answering machines, our ‘editor’ on standby.”

She swept the ash into a tray and then distributed it into various urns lining a shelf against the wall — Fido, Spot, Max. Ah, Wisconsin, with your stalwart Midwestern values and anachronistic pet names. She loved it here. It gave her a glimpse of what a real life might have been like.

She ran her hands beneath a faucet and dried them across her firm, firm thighs.

“One more thing.” She walked up on Jaggers. Her breasts were level with his chin. Still he neither stepped back nor lost focus. “When we catch up to Orphan X, I get him alive first. Understood?”

He gave a faint nod.

“Okay.” She started for the door. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t follow.

“What?”

He gestured to the puddle of fabric behind her in the corner. “You forgot your clothes,” he said.