The Nowhere Man

47 Collision Avoidance

Evan stuck his head and torso into the fireplace like an auto mechanic, examining the new bolts studding the flue damper. It didn’t give even a millimeter when he pounded it with the heels of his hand.

The Ninth Commandment dictated: Always play offense. But he was running out of moves fast.

He thought about what his last sortie had cost Despi. He could see the glow of René’s iPad in her deep brown eyes, how her face had crumbled at the sight held up before her.

He hit the flue even harder, the ring echoing up the closed-off chamber beyond. He kept striking the metal plate, unleashing frustration and rage until his knuckles ached.

Jack came to him in a wisp of memory: Good thinking, son. Damage the only weapons you got left.

Evan stopped, breathing hard in the musk of the hearth, letting the throb in his hands subside.

A faint noise reached him, and at first he thought it had been conveyed from somewhere inside the building through the chimney itself. But no, it was more distant. He drew himself out and listened carefully.

A scraping sound. Not from the chalet but from outside.

He moved to the sliding glass door and stepped through into a blast of snow. It was late afternoon, the front edge of dusk made gloomier by bruise-colored clouds blotting out the sun. Squinting against the flakes, he peered through the dense bars toward the sound.

It took a few moments, but finally several figures came visible about halfway between the chalet and the barn, forms laboring in the whiteness. He could make out only their outlines, but eventually it became clear that they were using shovels, their blades scraping against the ice.

As the snowfall diminished, he noted four of them working away.

Not digging. Clearing a space.

He leaned closer, hands clenching the cold bars. The space, set a good distance from the buildings and any trees, looked to be about ten meters by ten meters.

It struck him what they were making, and suddenly even the bite of the air couldn’t cool the electric surge of panic rolling through him.

He came inside, put his shoulders against the sliding glass door, and closed his eyes. Tilting his head back, he took a few deep breaths, trying to calm himself.

The hissing from the air vent caught him off guard. His eyes flew open, and he gulped in a mouthful before realizing what he’d done. Already he felt the haze climbing into his head, the weight gathering on his eyelids.

It was so much earlier than usual. René had been wise to vary the schedule, to make the gassing episodes unpredictable.

Stumbling to the bed, Evan barely had time to curse his lack of preparedness before passing out.

The vibration stirred him from a deep, dreamless sleep. He groped beneath his pillow, came out with the wrecked RoamZone. A familiar number flickered across the cracked screen and then vanished.

It took great effort to lift his head. “Yuh?”

His mouth was bone dry, his tongue bitter, coated with a chemical aftertaste.

The same hushed voice came through the line, barely audible over the poor connection. “Are you coming to get me?”

Evan sat up. With mounting frustration he looked at the new dead bolts, the welded cage of the balcony. He forced a swallow down his sandpaper throat. “No, I’m…”

He was at a loss for how to complete the sentence.

“Why won’t you?”

“I … I can’t right now.”

Static flared up, and Evan prayed the line wouldn’t cut out. How fragile his connection to the world, to what his life had been.

“Try,” the boy said. “You have to try.”

“I did. I am.”

“The girl said you take care of people who need help,” the boy said. “I should’ve known it was fake.”

“It’s not fake,” Evan said. “I’m not fake.”

Crackling on the line rendered the boy’s response inaudible.

Evan made a fist, pressed it against his thigh. Hard. “I just … I just don’t know how to help you right now.”

“It’s all lies and stories,” the boy said. “No one saves anyone.”

Breathing in powdered sugar and sunscreen at the Veterans Day parade, Jack’s warm hand resting on Evan’s coat-hanger shoulder. Pavarotti’s nine high Cs washing over them in the fire-warm study. The hard part is staying human. The view from the window of a dormer room that was his and only his.

“Yes. They do.” Evan couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten choked up. It felt bizarre, out of control.

In the silence he could hear the boy breathing across the phone.

“You’ll forget me,” the boy finally said. “Everyone does.”

“No. I won’t.”

The voice grew even quieter, barely a whisper. “You have to remember me.”

Heat burned beneath Evan’s face. “I will.”

The connection cut in and out, stealing the boy’s words. “… have to … be too late…”

As Evan strained to hear, a noise came from outside, a resonant thumping.

A sound he knew all too well.

He threw his legs over the side of the bed, willed himself to stand. His knees felt wobbly, his skull filled with concrete.

The noise grew louder, vibrating the walls, the floor beneath his feet, the flesh on his bones. He was unsure if the vise pinching his temples was a headache or just dread tightening its grasp on him.

“Listen,” he said into the phone. “Hold up. Just … hang on.”

He dropped the RoamZone onto the bed and stumbled to the balcony. The frosty air hit him full force, but the snow had vanished, leaving the night as clear as glass.

Two glowing dots approached through the sky, one red, one green.

Collision-avoidance lights.

The helicopter banked and set down on the patch of cleared ground between the chalet and the barn. A door swung open, and a man emerged onto the makeshift helipad, a black hood tied over his head.

Bundled in a thick coat, Dex walked out to meet him. The Dobermans at his side barked and barked at the still-spinning blades. Dex untied the hood from around the man’s head and tugged it off.

Even in the faint light, Evan recognized the man.

Tigran Sarkisian.

The Great White Sark.

An international private arms dealer.

In Spitak in 2005, operating as Orphan X, Evan had killed Sark’s brothers, his grown son, and six of his cousins.

Sarkisian shrugged off the cold and ambled for the house, accompanied by one of René’s narcos.

The helicopter lifted off. Through the slits in the steel, Evan watched it coast into the endless blackness to the west. As it grew more distant, the sound of its rotors oddly grew louder, amplified off the walls of the mountain range, coming at him in stereo.

Evan’s stomach fell away as he realized that he was no longer listening to the first helicopter.

He swung his head back toward the barn.

There they were, the lights of the next approaching helo. A good distance behind were two more floating dots, one red, one green. And behind that chopper, two more lights, and then two more, and then two more. He let his eyes skim across the incoming flight path, an airborne highway a dozen helicopters deep, each holding someone eager to lay hands on the Nowhere Man.

Alarm cut straight through the fog of the drugs, his mind suddenly alert, his skin prickling.

He remembered the RoamZone on the bed, the live connection, the tendril of a lifeline connecting him to the boy. Running back inside, he snatched up the phone.

“Hello? I’m here. I’m here.”

He stared at the RoamZone, dead in his hand.

The kid had hung up.