The Nowhere Man

48 Some Bizarre Mating Dance

“Our beautiful women were hung naked from crosses, you see, in Der-es-Zor. My mother was child, but she remember. She say they were glorious even in this horror. Proud and naked, long hair blowing like the mermaids.”

The Great White Sark paused to wet his lips. Evan sat on a folding chair inside the Lexan vault in the ballroom. Sark overcrowded a matching chair on the far side of the transparent door. Just two men having a conversation. He looked much worse than when Evan had seen him last, his grizzled stubble the color of frost, pouches hanging beneath his milky eyes. He was an old man now, well into his seventies, but the power contained in his bearlike body was still evident.

“I have reclaimed this atrocity for my own use.” His lips parted, showing pitted yellow teeth. “The crucifixion. So painful you invented a word for it. Your word ‘excruciating,’ it comes from this. ‘Out of crucifying,’ it means.”

In his cold metal chair, Evan listened wearily. He had the gnawing sense of having traded roles, of finding himself in a situation befitting one of the people he’d devoted the past six years of his life to rescuing. Now he was the one captive and defenseless, ready to be sold to the highest bidder, just like Alison Siegler. The Lexan room was his own version of intermodular Container 78653-B812.

He’d received his visitors one after another, a newlywed outside the church, each potential buyer coming in to peruse the merchandise.

At some early-morning hour, Dex had roused him from bed with an electric shock to the neck and marched him downstairs to the ballroom. Dex had spread his left hand across the sensor panel to unlock the Lexan door, giving Evan a good view of the tattooed bloody scowl, a preview of things to come.

Security measures had changed. Dex now wore a handgun strapped to his wide belt. The other narcos had added pistols, too, in addition to their AKs. It was no longer just Evan they had to worry about. René had assembled a collection of the world’s most lethal criminal masterminds, and even if he’d had his men strip-search all the buyers and transport them here blind and disoriented, beanbag shotguns were no longer gonna cut it.

“When I buy you,” Sark continued, bringing Evan back to the claustrophobic present, “I will do this to you. Insert nails here.” He jabbed a too-long fingernail into the underside of his wrist. “A weak spot between bones of forearm. Nail go in nice and smoothly. Your feet also must be nailed to relieve strain on wrists. This will allow you to hang longer from cross. People, they die from…” His hand circled the air, searching out a word. He muttered to himself before snapping his fingers. “Asphyxiation. The arms grow tired. The chest and lungs, they overextend. This is when I will add a footrest to help you.”

Pale light sheeted from the high-set windows, giving the ballroom the aura of a cathedral. Dex stood near the dilapidated piano, arms crossed, his shiny dome catching light, his face shadowed.

Xalbador guarded the room’s entrance, the Kalashnikov slanted back over his shoulder, one thumb hooked behind a shiny gold rodeo belt buckle.

The four remaining narcos had shuttled the buyers back and forth all day, supervising them and giving curt directives, an armed bed-and-breakfast staff. The snipers, Evan figured, were still in the hills, providing just-in-case oversight.

Of the buyers who’d come to threaten him so far, he hadn’t seen the party he dreaded most — Charles Van Sciver or one of his Orphan representatives. Not that the guests Evan was receiving were pleasant.

“I want to savor every drop of your pain,” Sark continued. “No dying of shock, no quick-and-easy heart attack. Sepsis is my preference for you. It takes longest time, provides most agony. I want to keep you for days. My record is five.” He held up a callused hand, fingers spread, in case Evan needed a visual aid. “But you are strong. This I remember.” Standing seemed to take Sark some effort, his joints arthritic. He tapped the Lexan between them almost fondly, his mouth splitting in a grin, showing those pitted teeth once again. “I am hopeful you will do much better.”

Assim al-Hakeem entered the ballroom, the glare from the windows falling across his shoulders, seemingly adding more weight. He limped toward the provided chair outside the Lexan vault, one shoulder permanently shrugged. He’d suffered nerve damage from all the explosions.

In the summer of 2002, Evan had killed Assim’s twin sister, triggering the car bomb she was transporting to a Fourth of July parade in Virginia Beach. The early detonation had scattered her and her Dodge Neon across Interstate 264.

Sadly, Assim had not been in the passenger seat. He’d been a busy boy that year, sending a natural-gas truck into a synagogue in Tunisia and engineering a bus bombing in Karachi. American-born, he and his sister moved easily between nations, renting themselves out at exorbitantly high rates. Though ostensibly Muslim, they were not ideologues; they were devoted only to their bank balances. It was rumored that they’d even provided services to the CIA in Colombia.

With great relief Assim lowered himself onto the chair. He licked his chapped lips, showing chipped front teeth.

“Hello, Nowhere Man.”

“Assim. You look tired.”

He sighed. “All that traumatic brain injury. It’s like football. After a while you can’t even tell the difference between a hard hit and a concussion. There are lesions in my brain now, they tell me. I don’t have many years left. I’ve got all the money in the world and no time to spend it.” He gave a sheepish laugh, lifted a tremulous finger. “I have one thing to set right before I die. And I am willing to spend every cent I have amassed to that end.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Do you understand what you’ve taken from me?” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, his jittering arms making his shoulders wobble. “Do you understand what you do?”

“Yes. I do what you do. But for better reasons.”

“I don’t think so. Ayisha and I, we were pure. We understood our jobs, our motives. We never wrapped ourselves in dogma or morality or became true believers of one stripe or another. We called it what it was.” He looked weary, so weary. His gaze grew loose, unfocused. “She was beautiful.”

“Yes,” Evan said. “She was.”

“I miss her every day. I was with her from conception. We grew together in the womb, two parts of one whole. It’s like missing a limb — no, like missing half of my body.” His smile showed off the uneven edge of the broken teeth. “I hope to teach you what that feels like. Missing half of your body and being alive to know it.”

He rose unsteadily.

Xalbador had to assist him on his way out.

The Widow Lakshminarayanan did not bother to sit on the provided chair. Thin and birdlike, she circled the Lexan vault, taking in Evan from every angle. Her sari, a luscious orange trimmed with gold and money green, swept the floor around her invisible feet. She seemed more an apparition than a human. Wiry gray hair framed her small, wrinkled face; though she was in her forties, she looked like a great-grandmother.

She’d aged preternaturally after Evan had dispatched her husband with a cell phone packed with C4. He’d been a counterfeiter and launderer of epic proportion, an equal-opportunity provider who’d cleaned for everyone from Punjabi cartel leaders to Muslim extremists. Despite being a financial and technological genius, Shankar Lakshminarayanan had been a gentle soul who eschewed violence. He left personnel and business disputes to his wife, who displayed no such reservations.

She was said to prefer straight razors.

In the background now, two of René’s guards arranged folding chairs in rows on the stretch of hardwood before the Lexan vault, opening them and setting them down briskly. Snap. Clang. Snap. Clang.

The widow took another turn around the box, and Evan turned with her, keeping her in view. As she circled, he spun, like they were doing some bizarre mating dance.

The guards continued to set up for the coming auction. Snap. Clang. Snap. Clang. The quality of light had changed in the ballroom, afternoon fading into evening. With the exception of a single midday bathroom break, Evan had been inside these four Lexan walls since waking, breathing his own stale air. René had placed no restrictions on the buyers, and most of them had wanted to take their time with him.

It had been a parade of prior missions, a Dickensian haunting, a This Is Your Life tour of Evan’s past. The Nowhere Man, dragged from the shadows and placed on display inside a transparent box — it was his worst nightmare stretched along an exponential curve that grew steeper with every visitor. He’d seen foes from all around the globe. The daughter of a Serbian war criminal. The Fortune 500 father of a serial rapist he’d erased in an early pro bono mission as the Nowhere Man. A Hong Kongese gangster looking to preempt a future visit.

Everyone, it seemed, but the contingent that Evan feared most. Van Sciver and his happy band of repurposed Orphans.

Evan had stopped pivoting with the widow, but he could feel her predatory stare heating his back now, raising the hairs of his neck. Unease overtook him, and he spun on his heel.

She was clasping the wall behind him in a sort of embrace, scarecrow arms spread, bone-thin fingers clutching the Lexan. Her stare bored a hole right through him. Keeping her eyes locked to his, she licked the glass, leaving a smudge. Then licked it again.

At last she turned and walked out, Xalbador rushing to her side to steer her to her room.

Behind Evan the guards finished placing the last of the chairs. Snap. Clang. Snap. Clang.

He drew in a deep breath, wondering if his day was over at last.

A clopping of footsteps announced René’s entrance. His suit, which looked to be a thick wool blend, bulged at the hip. It seemed even the master of the chalet was bearing a handgun beneath all that fine fabric. David hung on his arm, an ornament on display, with an e-cigarette wedged between his index and middle fingers. Evan wondered if they’d been in the parlor entertaining.

“We done?” Evan hadn’t spoken in hours, and his voice came out husky.

“Not yet,” René said. “We have one final party, and they’re very eager to see you.”

Clasping his hands, he swiveled to the doorway.

Escorted by Xalbador and his AK-47, Candy McClure entered the room wearing a dark green halter dress, the dagger of the deep-cleavage neckline plunging down between her breasts to her belly button.

Orphan V, back from the dead.

Last he’d seen her, he’d locked her in a closet in the spillage of hydrofluoric acid, a little treat she’d intended for him. He’d heard her pounding on the door and screaming but had been massively outnumbered, busy ducking bullets and trying to get to a not-so-fair maiden in distress.

At Candy’s side now was a dead leaf of a man, short and slight, with jaundiced skin and darting flat eyes. No doubt another Orphan.

David vaped off his e-cig, eyeing Candy. “She is spectacular,” he said. “Isn’t she?”

Candy strode across the room on stiletto boots. She confronted Evan through the glass, legs spread, muscular thighs tensed.

She reached for the halter at the base of her neck, untied it, and let the top of the dress fall forward, exposing her torso.

Behind her, David gasped, one hand rising to cover his mouth. At first Evan didn’t understand.

Then she turned.

Whorling scars covered her back and shoulders. Evan stared at the ridges and fissures with disbelief. The seam of disfigurement ran nearly perfectly down her sides; she looked like a doll pressed together from two different molds.

She swung back around, giving him her glorious front.

“Hello, X,” she said. “We’ve been looking for you a long time.”