The Nowhere Man

70 The Slightest Misstep

It had been hell.

Not just weathering Van Sciver’s quiet rage. But being stuck with Ben Jaggers. And stuck with him Candy was, until the job was done.

As if she needed another motivation to reduce Orphan X to ash.

She sat in the driver’s seat of a Passat wagon that had been advertised as “family-size.” She mostly liked it for its trunk space.

To avoid Jaggers’s stink, she breathed through her mouth, but then she got worried about all that funk getting into her lungs, and so she went back to breathing through her nose and suffering silently.

Croatia was amazing. More specifically, Croatian men were amazing. Tall and broad, full heads of lush dark hair, light eyes and golden skin — like Olympic athletes, the whole lot of them. And they proclaimed their love so readily. On the first night, on the first meeting. Of course, Candy got that a lot, but she got it more in Croatia.

When she wasn’t stuck with Ben Jaggers.

Watching a luxury condo complex on a city-center street crowded with exhaust-belching buses.

In a fucking Passat.

Van Sciver — or, more precisely, Van Sciver’s room of supercomputers — had unearthed René’s location fairly quickly after the chalet combustion. A hub of five major freeways, Zagreb is a confusion of bypasses and congestion. An ideal location for René to slip in and out of. Plenty of avenues for escape. But also plenty of stakeout spots like the one Candy and Jaggers had pinned down for the past week, parked off a major artery among a crowded lineup of other vehicles.

Why couldn’t it have been Split with its view of the sparkling Adriatic or Dubrovnik with stone city walls and hills of lavender? But no, here she was in the Detroit of Croatia, stuck in a Volkswagen with that yellow bastard.

A group of Croatian men dressed in soccer uniforms hopped off a bus ahead of them, joking and shoving one another. Forked triceps and cleft chins. She felt taunted, a cat in an aquarium.

“Are you watching the building?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Candy said, flicking her eyes back across the four lanes of traffic to the high-security condo complex. She resumed watching people trickle through the front gate.

Fat woman with stroller. Silver-haired captain of industry. Three schoolgirls in fetching plaid skirts.

René had already had his daily morning outing, a trip to a bakery for a croissant and juice and to the drugstore for God knew what. Dex never left his side, his remaining hand shoved in his trench-coat pocket, a lumbering gumshoe with a thyroid condition.

Now they were back in the condo, a baited trap, and Candy had nothing to do but ogle soccer players, endure Jaggers, and wait for Evan to show up.

Under cover of night, Jaggers had managed to get several hidden surveillance cameras up around the building’s perimeter, streaming into the laptop that rested on the console between them. It was available for close-ups and replays, but over the past days they’d seen few customers worth a second look.

Her phone sounded, Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.” She’d chosen the new ringtone mostly to annoy Jaggers, though he seemed annoyingly unannoyable.

He just sat in the passenger seat, as still as a frozen rat, an elaborate GPS unit resting across his stick-thin thighs.

She picked up.

“STATUS upDATE?”

“In clear view of restaurant. Still no sign of the expected party.”

“LIGHTNING BUG is ON StandBY. AwaitING coordinates.”

For obvious reasons Van Sciver had to keep the drone out of the air for as long as possible. Which meant no sky surveillance. Once Candy and M confirmed Orphan X’s precise location, they’d input it into the handheld GPS unit, an unmanned armed aerial vehicle would flash above the thick clouds, and Zeus would hurl a thunderbolt from the heavens. There’d be no collateral damage. No noncollateral damage either, if you thought about it.

If you killed the Nowhere Man, did anyone really die?

The targeted zap would get blamed on Hamas or Israel or some shit — that was up to Van Sciver to figure out. He was delighted to have a shot off U.S. soil and wasn’t going to miss his chance. One of the joys of operating OCONUS was that there was no hue and cry over ROEs and constitutional rights and court precedents. There was a guy one moment and a crater the next and then everyone standing around with their hands in their pockets, shrugging.

The GPS unit in Orphan M’s lap mapped the street and the surrounding buildings, drilling down coordinates using not degrees but minutes and seconds, which were accurate to 1/3600 of a degree, precise enough to guide a missile through a doughnut. The thing even accounted for minute tectonic crustal movement, Jaggers had informed her fetishistically. She’d told him that that sounded like a medical condition.

Candy focused again on her call with Van Sciver. “I was still hoping to have a more leisurely meal with the diner,” she said.

They’d been over this.

“The COORDINATES,” the collection of anonymous voices said. “And then DESSERT.”

The line cut out.

Evan sat in the bay window of the boutique hotel overlooking the crowded Zagreb city center, an open laptop resting on the cushion beside him. He had a clean sight line to the third floor of the condo building across the street where René Cassaroy was bedded down. Dex was there as well, in a connecting condo. Evan was still recovering full use of his right arm, but Dex was missing a hand, so he figured that put them no more uneven than they’d been before. At least Evan still had two opposable thumbs. He hoped to put them to good use.

He’d have to be extremely cautious in his approach to ensure that no communication went out to the men watching Despi. The slightest misstep could trigger a text or a call, and she’d be dispensed of as proficiently as her parents and sister had been.

Evan could understand why René had chosen to hide here. Several prominent businessmen and ministers lived in the complex, which was riddled with security cameras.

Logging on to the Internet, Evan accessed an untraceable account at Hashkiller and set its 131-billion-password dictionary to work. Within minutes he was on the luxury condo building’s network. He found the security camera system next, matching the name to the decals on the building’s main fence. Hashkiller made short work of that, and then a hundred-plus internal and external camera feeds appeared.

He picked the lenses along the route he was planning to take and then opened up the camera-control links. First he slewed the pan-tilt zoom lens above the front gate to face the sun. The image turned a uniform white. The neighboring ones he aimed directly at streetlights to the same effect.

The cameras in the interior east stairwell didn’t have the same operability, so he turned off their auto-irising and then directed them to stop down. The pictures went black.

In case René had hacked into the security cameras on his own floor, a likely precaution, Evan took a single frame of valid video from each one, duplicated it 50 million times, and injected the gapless IP feed back into the video storage server. This created a spoof of each camera’s normal scene, showing forever-empty corridors. Snapping the laptop shut, he stood, stretched out his shoulder, and headed for the door.

It was time.