The Nowhere Man

65 Fragile Little Bond

The cab swept into the porte cochere, delivering Evan to Castle Heights. He spilled out of the car, raw from pain and two days of grueling travel, his bedraggled appearance undercutting the grand entrance. When he reached for the heavy glass door to the lobby, a dagger of pain shot across his ribs. He lowered his arm and staggered a half step to the side, nearly colliding with Ida Rosenbaum of 6G.

The wizened woman, crusted with makeup and built like a fire hydrant, glowered up at him. “Careless, aren’t you?”

“Sorry, ma’am. I’m just…”

“You’re just what?”

He tried to let his right arm hang normally. “Just a little jet-lagged.”

“Jet-lagged? Had a rough business trip, did you?”

He ducked his head to hide the band of skin on his neck that still bore scabs from the shock collar. “You could say that.”

“My Herb, may he rest in peace, worked his fingers to the bone and never complained a day in his life. We knew what hardship was, our generation.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We weren’t kvetchers.”

“No, ma’am.”

She clutched her purse to her jacket, a shade of red not found in nature. He realized she was waiting for him to open the lobby door for her. To avoid doing a close-quarters pirouette, he had to reach for the handle with his right hand.

He braced himself, opened the door through the fireworks exploding inside his shoulder, and smiled with gritted teeth. With a waft of rose water, she passed beneath his arm. And with great relief, he released the door and stepped into the cool air of the lobby.

“Evan Smoak!”

As he pivoted at the sound of the raspy voice, Peter collided into him with a hug. Wincing, Evan patted his back.

The boy wore true-blue jeans with a toy gun and holster on one hip and a lasso on the other. A shoved-back cowboy hat completed the John Wayne vibe.

“You like my Halloween costume?”

Evan gave a nod, shuffle-stepping for the elevator. He needed to get upstairs and peel off the dressings before he bled through. “Can’t beat the classics.”

When he looked up, Mia stood right there, holding an empty pillowcase. “Hi, Evan.”

“No costume for you?”

“This is my costume.” She flared her arms theatrically. “It’s called ‘Single Mom Without the Time-Management Skills to Comb Her Hair.’”

He caught himself noticing the birthmark kissing her temple, the way her curly chestnut hair fell across her shoulders, and reined in his focus.

Elevator. Upstairs. Now.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” Mia said. “What mysterious things have you been up to?”

“Too mysterious to recount,” Evan said.

She took him in more closely, her forehead twisting with concern.

Peter tugged at Mia’s sleeve. “Can he come over for dinner tonight instead of Ted?”

Ted?

“Can he? Mom — can he?”

Mia colored. “No, honey.” Then, to Evan, “He’s a … friend.”

Evan gave another nod, took another step toward the safety of the elevator doors.

“Then can he go trick-or-treating with us?”

“Peter, I’m sure Mr. Smoak has better—”

“I’m gonna shoot horse thieves and bad guys. You should totally come.”

The toy gun was out of the holster, and Evan was staring at it, a hard edge of discomfort rising inside him, something he was unaccustomed to feeling in the floral-scented lobby of Castle Heights. “I can’t—”

“What did you dress up as when you were a kid?”

“I didn’t … I didn’t really celebrate Halloween.”

“Why not?”

Evan was eight hours from his last dose of Advil, the pain starting to cramp his peripheral vision. “Don’t aim that gun at me.”

His voice startled all three of them.

Peter lowered the toy gun. “You don’t have to be mean.”

“I wasn’t being mean.”

“Yes,” Peter said. “You were.”

Mia slung an arm over Peter’s shoulder. “C’mon, sweetheart. Let’s get you some candy.”

They withdrew. Evan stood a moment before turning to the elevators.

By the time he got upstairs, the headache had crept down into his neck, meeting the fiery nerve lines shooting up from his shoulder. He went straight to the kitchen, tugged open the freezer drawer of his Sub-Zero, and assessed his options. A single bottle of Stolichnaya Elit remained. Triple-distilled, the vodka was purified through a freeze-filtration process that dropped its temperature to zero degrees to eliminate the impurities. He wasn’t sure his arm could inflict the abuse he generally put a martini shaker through, so he poured two fingers over ice, palmed a trio of Advil, and took a sip.

As crisp as it was clear. It struck him that his vodka indulgence was something like a purification ceremony. After all the blood and filth he’d waded through, he didn’t drink to numb his senses. He drank to try to cleanse himself from the inside out.

He pressed the frozen bottle to his shoulder. It stung. He let it.

Leaning on the poured concrete of the center island, he glanced across at his vertical garden, the wall textured with herbs and plants. The mint was taking over, as it did. This wall, the sole splash of green amid the metals and grays, was his one stab at living with life. The attempt struck him as poignant and pathetic at the same time.

I wanted you to get out. I wanted you to have a chance.

At what?

At a life! That isn’t this.

He pushed away Jack’s voice, exhaled through clenched teeth.

Whatever Jack had hoped for him couldn’t be worth as much as the sight of Alison Siegler being tended to by paramedics. Her shoulders had been hunched and she’d started at the touch of the paramedics, but when she rose to walk to the ambulance, she’d stood tall, unbroken. Evan had been across the St. Johns River by then, watching from an unlit pier on the opposite bank.

He took another sip, let the Stoli blaze a path through his insides. After the past couple weeks, he couldn’t get his muscles to believe that it was safe to relax. The alarm was set, the front door barred, the windows armored. Even the walls here had been upgraded — half-inch residential Sheetrock replaced with five and eight-tenths commercial-grade, which provided better sound attenuation and more structural rigidity in the event that someone tried to breach the place. He considered how much of his life he’d spent bricking himself in.

A wife. Maybe even kids. I tried to free you. I didn’t think you’d scurry right back to it.

What else did he know? For his entire adult life, he’d been one of those rough men standing ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do harm. A sentry willing to go up against the Hector Contrells and René Cassaroys, the Assim al-Hakeems and Tigran Sarkisians. If not him, then who? Maybe now that he’d been freed from the guilt of killing Jack, he’d be freed from seeking endless absolution for his sins. Freed from being the Nowhere Man.

Which meant he could be someone.

Someone real.

He thought of Mia and Peter out in the neighborhood right now, going door-to-door, collecting Kit Kats and M&M’s.

He downed the last of the vodka, studied the empty glass, trying to ratchet himself back to reality.

He had to get a new RoamZone up and running in the event Anna Rezian had found the next client requiring his help. He owed her, and he owed whoever would call.

Plus, René was out there. Which meant Evan still had a job to do. As Evan sat here waxing philosophical over an empty tumbler, René was no doubt already laying the foundations for his next operation, another kidnapping, the next gruesome medical lab. If Evan wanted to finish René, he’d have to beat the FBI to him while dodging Van Sciver and his attack-dog Orphans.

He owed as much to Despi. She’d brought him a tire jack, and her entire family had been slaughtered for it. I don’t know how to live with this, she’d told him. With what I saw.

René was a devourer of lives. Evan couldn’t let him continue, not with the wreckage he’d leave in his wake.

And yet … that birthmark, a kiss on Mia’s temple. Peter’s charcoal eyes, his croaky voice.

Evan washed the glass and then made his way down the hall, passing the empty brackets where the new katana was supposed to hang. Over the past few days, he’d learned to remove his bandages and undress with minimal pain.

Standing naked at the threshold of the shower, he flashed back to that bathroom at the chalet. The floor sloping to a drain. Bar of soap and a folded towel. Prison toilet, trash-can liner to the side.

Of their own accord, his fingers had moved to his scabbed neck.

He ducked into the warm stream. The first hit of water always stung the collarbone, but the burn quickly abated. He breathed hard, reminded himself that he was home.

He was, he realized, barely holding it together. His weight tugged him to the side, the wall cool against his ribs. He let the hot water beat against his crown.

At some point autopilot clicked on, the rituals of survival keeping him in motion. He got out, toweled off, rebandaged. In his bedroom he confronted the dresser, glaring at the bottom drawer with its false compartment bearing the bloodstained flannel — Jack’s very own Shroud of Turin.

Evan carried Jack’s shirt up the hall and across the great room to the free-standing fireplace, set it atop the pyre of cedar logs, and watched it burn. The coordinates by which he had charted the past eight years, up in smoke. As matter turned to air, he recognized that his own misguided sorrow and guilt had coalesced in the stiff fabric, as much a part of the shirt as the dried blood staining it. Even after no trace of the flannel remained, he found himself standing before the flames.

Returning to the bedroom, he pulled an unworn pair of dark jeans from the stack of duplicates. One drawer up were the fresh V-necked gray T-shirts, also neatly folded, also identical. A hinged wooden box in the closet held four Victorinox watch fobs still in the package. He took one out, clipped it to his first belt loop on the left side.

What did it say about him that he was so easily put back together? He’d long thought that it was a positive attribute, a testament to his durability, but now it felt artificial, unhuman. He was rebuildable, a snap-together Lego toy. His well-stocked drawers reminded him of the mac-and-cheese meals of his childhood, an assembly-belt existence from as far back as he could remember. And as far ahead as he could see. One mission would bleed into the next until the inevitable. If not Van Sciver, someone else. Evan would get older. His reflexes would get slower. Sooner or later he’d be a half-second too slow. Would he have balanced the books by then? And even if he had, would it make a difference?

Not a train of thought an assassin should engage in.

Exhaustion descended over him, a heavy cloud. That was it, then. He was tired. A good night’s sleep would purge his brain of this existential nonsense.

Heading back to the bathroom, he stepped through the hidden door in the water-beaded shower and into the Vault. A Hardigg Storm Case by the weapon lockers held a neat row of replacement RoamZone phones, each nestled in black foam. He plucked one out, slotting in a new SIM card, then dropped into the chair before the bank of monitors burdening the sheet-metal desk. A few clicks and he’d switched the phone service to a company in Bahrain.

He turned on the RoamZone — no messages from Anna Rezian’s referral — and plugged it into the desktop charger.

An impulse grabbed him. With flying fingers he called up Castle Heights’ internal-security feeds, then zeroed in on the lens positioned by the twelfth-floor elevator. He rewound at 3x, the digital footage herky-jerky.

There.

A few minutes ago, the camera had captured Mia walking backward with a man down the hall, reversing into the elevator, the doors zippering shut behind them. She’d gone to meet him in the lobby. That seemed noteworthy.

Evan clicked PLAY, let the doors part, freeze-framed on the man.

Ted.

The guy looked pleasant enough. Rumpled hair, work-casual clothes, black Chuck Taylors throwing in a dash of cool. A Web designer or an advertising exec, maybe. He’d know how to barbecue. CrossFit gym membership, vacations to Maui. A peaceful, ordinary existence, work and play and time to reflect.

He thought of Mia’s smile and wondered how dinner was going downstairs.

With Ted.

The RoamZone perched in its charger, awaiting the next call from the next client. Evan stared at it with enmity. It wasn’t just a phone. It was a collar and chain. For an instant he let himself imagine what it would be like to be free of it.

Plucked fresh from the living wall, basil, sage, and tomatoes sizzled atop the cooking eggs. With a dip of his wrist, Evan folded the omelet, completing the half circle, and then slid it onto a plate.

He’d woken early, meditated, and stretched. He couldn’t yet hang from the pull-up bar with his full weight, but if he tugged at it with his right hand, he could lengthen out the muscles of the arm. He’d required the jungle penetrator to bear him up the side of the Horizon Express, the cable attached to the grappling hook reeling him in on the deployed seat like a hooked fish.

At the store this morning, he’d stocked up on the basics — eggs, cheese, vodka. Now he sat, ate, and enjoyed the view of Downtown twelve miles to the east. The high-rises thrust up abruptly, a compact little skyline fit for a snow globe.

He made his way to the Vault, cocked back in his chair at his L-shaped desk, and reread every last word of the printouts he’d taken from Jack’s cabin. They contained the starting points of the investigation into René Cassaroy, the trails the FBI was currently running down. The crime-scene photographs taken at the chalet seemed less useful, capturing the aftermath of the bizarre events. Bullet-riddled basement lab. Barn with two G-Wagons and a blue wrestling mat. Files spread across the Pakistani rug of the fourth-floor study, each one sporting a bright yellow evidence and property tag.

Evan set the papers to the side. It made no sense for him to follow the same tracks the FBI was. They had more resources and would be too far ahead. The question was, what did he know that the FBI didn’t?

He started with René’s escape. Jack had mentioned that the Bureau was looking into helicopter flight logs, so either the agents were on René’s heels already or he’d covered his tracks. René didn’t have to go in any one specified direction, which made it harder to—

Evan stopped, excitement pulsing in his chest.

Dex.

Severed hand, lifted out by helicopter.

His destination would have been set. A hospital. Not just a hospital — a hospital with a department of surgery and a helipad.

The FBI had no idea what had gone down in the ballroom, so they wouldn’t know to search for a patient missing a hand.

A quick Google spin gave Evan only three contenders within a helicopter tank’s distance of Chalet Savoir Faire.

To the databases. Whenever Evan did break-ins from his computers in the Vault, he went through a string of anonymous proxies, remote services that allowed him to go in with one IP address and come out with another. He routed through Shanghai, then Johannesburg, bounced between a triptych of Scandinavian countries, then popped through Colombia and Moldova for good measure.

He was ready to attack. Most hospitals relied on the Epic medical-records system, which Evan knew well. In no time he’d jimmied a few virtual back doors.

The second hospital rang the cherries. A six-foot-five male, 290 pounds, with a severed left hand had been admitted at 1:47 P.M. on Sunday, October 23. Name given: Jonathan Dough.

Heh.

The record noted that the patient did not — or would not — speak. He’d been seen immediately by a vascular surgeon and taken directly to the OR. He’d checked out early the next morning against medical advice. Payment had been made in cash.

Evan scanned the discharge forms. Most of the personal information had been left blank. But there at the bottom, a phone number was given.

Why would Dex, a mute, have a cell phone?

Already Evan was reaching for his RoamZone.

He dialed. It rang. And again.

A click as someone picked up. A heavy breath came across the receiver.

“René Cassaroy,” Evan said.

“You found the Easter egg I asked Dex to hide for you. I’m glad. I’ve been waiting for your call.”

It took Evan a moment to adjust to the sound of that voice again, especially here within the walls of his own place. He realized he was on his feet, pacing around the Vault. “Why’s that?” he asked.

“I wanted to talk to you. Set a few things straight.”

“There’s nothing you can say that will change what’s coming.”

“That’s where I tend to think ahead. You see, given what I know of you, I thought you stood a reasonable chance of getting out of that valley alive. I don’t know how you did it, but count me impressed. I’ve never had the opportunity to … behold a specimen like you.”

“I’m planning to give you another chance. To behold me.”

“That’s what I assumed. Which is why I took out an insurance policy.”

“Which is what?”

“Despi.”

Evan stopped pacing.

“You thought you were clever knocking out a few of my surveillance cameras. But did you really think we couldn’t regulate you in that room? We had full audio. You should’ve heard yourself, pathetic and delusional, babbling into a broken phone, talking to … talking to whom? Who were you talking to like your life depended on it?”

“Myself.”

“I guess you were.” René laughed. “But my favorite listening came from the snippets we picked up of your conversations with Despi. The woeful tale of her kidnapping. How we kept a loving eye on her parents, her sister. We listened to you two form your fragile little bond. I know you care about her. I know you’d be upset if any harm came to her.”

Evan was gripping the phone too hard, the tension radiating up into his right shoulder, fanning the flames. “Yes,” he said. “I would.”

“We have men in Despi’s vicinity, watching her just as they did her sister, her parents. You’re familiar with the work they did there?”

“I am.”

“She’ll be left alone if you leave me alone,” René said. “So decide if your need for revenge is worth her life. You’ve failed her once already.” The brief pause was underscored by the faint hum of the connection. “If I get the tiniest indication that you’re within a hundred miles of me, I will have her gutted.”

“What makes you think I’ll give you the tiniest indication?” Evan said, and cut the line.