The bottom-left feed showed two SUVs blocking the horseshoe of the parking lot. Teams of geared-up operators charged for the front gate.
“Your backup’s here,” the girl said. “What—you couldn’t handle me yourself?” Her voice stayed tough, but her chest heaved with the words. She was scared, and this time he knew she wasn’t faking it.
Evan stared at the screen. The operators displayed a similar military precision to that of the men in the Black Hawk. Evan counted six of them.
Seventeen rounds. Six men.
Just don’t put all the holes in the same place.
On-screen the lead operator kicked the front gate, and it clanged open. Evan heard it in stereo, registered the vibration in the floor.
He and the girl watched as the men poured into the ground-floor corridor.
He said, “They’re not with me.”
His eyes met the girl’s, and he saw that she believed him.
Her voice was hammered flat with dread. “You left the gates unlocked behind you.”
Clang. The stairwell gate flew open, courtesy of Evan’s ill-spent twenty-five cents.
The men throttled up the stairwell. The girl’s eyes darted from the screen back to Evan.
“Enemy of my enemy,” he said.
She gave a nod.
He drew his ARES. “Get behind me. Pick up your knife.”
The girl moved, but not for the knife. She shot over to the mattress and lifted it, revealing a hatch cut through the floor. She looked at him, eyes wild, hair swinging. “My stuff,” she said. “Get my stuff.”
The clamor of the men reached the second floor, spilled onto the corridor.
Evan snapped the laptop shut, rammed it into the rucksack, tossed the combat knife in after. She slipped through the hatch and disappeared. The mattress fell back into place, covering the hole. He didn’t hear her land. He sprinted across the room.
As he yanked up the edge of the mattress, he heard the front door smash in. Snatching the rucksack behind him, he shoulder-rolled beneath the mattress, free-falling. A thump announced the sealing of the hatch above.
He rotated to break his fall, but a soft landing caught him off guard. His boots struck another mattress, positioned on the ground floor directly beneath the one above. He tumbled off the side onto the carpet.
He looked up.
The girl was waiting.
She wrenched the rucksack from his grip, pistoned her leg in a heel stomp directed at his throat. He caught her foot in both hands and twisted hard, flinging her aside. She bounced up off the floor like a cat, shot across the room, flung open the window.
As she leapt through, he grabbed a strap of the rucksack, halting her momentum. She jerked back and banged against the outside wall, one arm bent over the sill. She wouldn’t let go of the rucksack. They were both off balance, caught in a ridiculous tug-of-war across a windowsill.
Boots drummed the floor above. It was only a matter of time before one of the men looked under the mattress.
Evan dove through the window, collecting both the rucksack and the girl in a bear-hug embrace. They sailed past the elderly artist, their fall cushioned by the blanket covered with his paintings. The Cadillac’s radio blared away, the C-major coda galloping along in presto.
Evan hopped to his feet, broken frames falling away, the cubist pieces now cubist in three dimensions. Through the window Evan saw a beam of light appear, a golden shaft piercing the gloom of the ground-floor apartment.
The upstairs mattress, pulled back.
He looked helplessly across the street at his rental car.
Thirty yards of high visibility through traffic.
He’d never make it.
The artist rose from the sidewalk, his flat cap askew. “What kind of damn-fool nonsense is this?”
The girl thrashed free of Evan, landing on all fours. She scampered across the blanket to get away, but it bunched beneath her knees, impeding her progress.
Evan grabbed her arm, spun her up and around, and dumped her into the Cadillac’s open trunk, shattering her straight through a painting of a dissected bassoon. He slammed the trunk an instant before she started battering at it.
He snatched up the rucksack, slung it through the open rear window. “If they hear you, they’ll kill you.”
Her muffled shout came through the trunk. “How do I know you’re not gonna kill me?”
“Because I would’ve done it already.”
He hopped into the car. The keys waited in the ignition, enabling the radio and a pleasing whiff of air-conditioning.
As the concerto tinkled to a close, Evan looked out the open passenger window at the old artist. Through the window over the man’s shoulder, he saw the first shadow tumble from the ceiling.
“Sorry about your art,” Evan said, and peeled out.
He wheeled around the edge of the complex, blending into traffic, coasting past the open mouth of the horseshoe. He looked back at the building.
In the center of the parking lot, a man stood facing away, his head tilted up to take in the second floor. Waiting. He would have looked like an ordinary guy were it not for his posture; he stood with the perfect stillness of the perfectly trained.
Orphan.
One of the operators stepped out through the splintered door of 202 and gestured to the man with two fingers—He’s on the run, went down and out.
The traffic light turned red, and Evan hit the brakes, peering back transfixed as the man in the parking lot sprang into motion. He hit the front gate with his foot, vaulted up, ran four pounding steps along the high fence top, then leapt onto the outside of the stairwell cage. With a series of massive lunging leaps, he scaled the cage and then swung around onto the third-floor corridor. He jumped up, grabbed the hanging roof ledge, and spun himself onto the roof, where he stood with the command of a mountaineer claiming an apex.
He’d parkoured his way up the entire route in under six seconds. Evan allowed himself to be impressed.
The man peered down, evidently picking up the commotion on the sidewalk outside apartment #102. He began a slow rotation, pivoting like a weather vane, his eyes scanning the streets below.
Evan turned back around in the driver’s seat, cranked the sideview mirror to a severe tilt, and watched the man’s reflection. The man finished his rotation, staring down at the mass of cars at the traffic light. It seemed like he was looking directly at Evan in the Cadillac, but of course there was no way it was possible from that distance.
The light turned green, and Evan drove off.
12
Increasingly Rural Tangle
Keeping the needle pegged at the speed limit, Evan drove a circuitous route to the nearest freeway and ran past four exits before hopping off and shooting west through an increasingly rural tangle of desolate back roads. Gray clouds pervaded the sky, heavy with the promise of rain. Sure enough, a few drops tapped the roof, quickening to a rat-a-tat, ushering dusk into full night. Decreased visibility was good; it went both ways. Local law enforcement had undoubtedly already issued a Be On the Lookout for the Cadillac.
He had to change vehicles, but first he needed to get a good distance between himself and the men who’d raided the apartment compound. Then he would regroup, determine what the package was, and deal with the problem in the trunk and the myriad questions that came with it.
He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, settled his shoulders. He blew out a breath, opened his eyes, and reset himself, assessing everything as if he were confronting it for the first time.
Jack’s dying message.
A package.
An address.
A girl who was an Orphan—or at the very least Orphan-trained.
Who was hostile.
But not allied with the crew of men, led by another seeming Orphan, who had raided the apartment complex in pursuit of her, the package, or Evan himself.
A crew that had Van Sciver’s fingerprints all over it.
Which left a whole lot of questions and very few answers.
The rain thrummed and thrummed. The girl in the trunk banged a few times, shouted something unintelligible. The windshield wipers groaned and thumped.