“If you won’t let me help you, then what are we supposed to talk about?”
“I suppose the stuff that really matters. Life. You and me.” Jack, breaking his own rules.
“Because we’re so good at that?”
Jack laughed that gruff laugh, a single note. “Well, sometimes we miss what’s important for the fog. But maybe we should give it a go before, you know…” More screeching of tires. “Better make it snappy, though.”
Evan sensed an inexplicable wetness in his eyes and blinked it away. “Okay. We can try.”
“Do you regret it?” Jack asked again. “What I did?”
“How can I answer that?” Evan said. “This is all I know. I never had some other life where I was a plumber or a schoolteacher or a … or a dad.”
Now the sound of a helo came through the line, barely audible.
“Jack? You still there?”
“I guess … I guess I want to know that I’m forgiven.”
Evan forced a swallow down his dry throat. “If it wasn’t for you, I would’ve wound up in prison, dead of an overdose, knifed in a bar. Those are the odds. I wouldn’t have had a life. I wouldn’t have been me.” He swallowed again, with less success. “I wouldn’t trade knowing you for anything.”
A long silence, broken only by the thrum of tires over asphalt.
Finally Jack said, “It’s nice of you to say so.”
“I don’t put much stock in ‘nice.’ I said it because it’s true.”
The sound of rotors intensified. In the background Evan heard other vehicles squealing. He was listening with every ounce of focus he had in him. A connection routed through fifteen countries in four continents, a last tenuous lifeline to the person he cared about more than anyone in the world.
“We didn’t have time,” Evan said. “We didn’t have enough time.”
Jack said, “I love you, son.”
Evan had never heard the words spoken to him. Something slid down his cheek, clung to his jawline.
He said, “Copy that.”
The line went dead.
Evan stood in his condo, the cool of the floor rising through his boots, chilling his feet, his calves, his body. The phone was still shoved against his cheek. Despite the full-body chill, he was burning up.
He finally lowered the phone. Peeled off his sweaty shirt. He walked over to the kitchen area and tugged open the freezer drawer. Inside, lined up like bullets, were bottles of the world’s finest vodkas. He removed a rectangular bottle of Double Cross, a seven-times-distilled and filtered Slovak spirit. It was made with winter wheat and mountain springwater pulled from aquifers deep beneath the Tatra Mountains.
It was one of the purest liquids he knew.
He poured two fingers into a glass and sat with his back to the cold Sub-Zero. He didn’t want to drink, just wanted it in his hand. He breathed the clean fumes, hoping that they would sterilize his lungs, his chest.
His heart.
“Well,” he said. “Fuck.”
Glass in hand, he waited there for ten minutes and then ten more.
His RoamZone rang again.
Caller ID didn’t show UNIDENTIFIED CALLER or BLOCKED CALLER. It showed nothing at all.
With dread, Evan clicked the phone on, raised it to his face.
It was the voice he’d most feared.
“Why don’t you go fetch your digital contact lenses,” it said. “You’re gonna want to see this.”
Five Days Earlier
2
Dark Matter
The burly man forged through fronds and the paste of the jungle humidity, his feet sinking into Amazonian mud. A camouflaged boonie hat shadowed his face. A cone of mosquito netting descended from the hat’s brim, breathing in and out with him. The ghostly effect—that of an amorphously shaped head respiring—made him seem like a bipedal monster flitting among the rotting trunks. Sweat soaked his clothes. On his watch a red GPS dot blinked, urging him forward.
Behind him another man followed. Jordan Thornhill was gymnast-compact, all knotty muscle and precision, his hair shaved nearly to the skull, a side part notched in with a razor. He’d taken off his shirt and tucked it into the waistband of his pants. Perspiration oiled his dark skin.
They’d left the rented Jeep a few miles back, where dense foliage had finally smothered the trail.
They kept on now in silence, mud sucking at their boots, leaves rustling across their broad shoulders. Strangler vines wrapped massive trees, choking the life from them. Bats flitted in the canopy. Somewhere in the distance, howler monkeys earned their names.
Thornhill kept tight to the big man’s back, his movement nimble, fluid. “We’re a long way from Kansas, boss. You even sure this dude has it on him?”
The invisible face beneath the boonie hat swiveled to Thornhill. The netting beat in and out like a heart. Then the man lifted the netting, swept it back over the brim. Surgeries had repaired most of the damage on the right side of Charles Van Sciver’s face, but there remained a few feathers of scarring at the temple. The pupil of his right eye was permanently dilated, a tiny starfish-shaped cloud floating in its depths.
Souvenirs from an explosive that had been set by Orphan X nearly a year ago.
As the director of the Orphan Program, Van Sciver had the resources to eradicate most of the physical damage, but rage endured just beneath the skin, undiminished.
Thornhill grew uneasy under Van Sciver’s gaze. That shark eye, it had an unsettling effect on people.
“It was on his person,” Van Sciver said. “I have it on good authority.”
“Whose authority?”
“Are you actually asking me?” Van Sciver said. The scars didn’t look so bad until he scowled and the skin pulled taut, stretching the wrong way.
Thornhill shook his head.
“The real question is, is it still there?” Van Sciver said. “For all we know, it could be riding in the belly of a jaguar already. Or if there was a fire—who the hell knows.”
“Sometimes,” Thornhill said, “all a man needs is a little luck.”
Yes, luck. For months Van Sciver had lived inside a virtual bunker built of servers, applying the most powerful deep-learning data-mining software in computational history to finding some—any—trace of Orphan X. The recent directives from above had been clear. Van Sciver’s top priority was to stamp out wayward Orphans. Anyone who’d retired. Anyone who hadn’t made the cut. Anyone who had tested questionable for compliance.
And most important, the only Orphan who had ever—in the storied history of the Program—gone rogue.
The Program’s large-scale data processing had at last spit out a lead, a glimmer of a fishing lure in the ocean of data that surged through cyberspace on a daily basis. Even calling it a lead, Van Sciver thought now, was too ambitious. More like a lead that could lead to a lead that could lead to Orphan X.
The story behind it had quickly become legend in the intel community. It went like this: A midlevel DoD agent had once, through a labyrinthine process of extortion and blackmail, acquired a copy of highly sensitive data pertaining to the Orphan Program. A few aliases, a few last-known addresses, a few pairings of handlers and Orphans. These key bits and pieces had been captured from various classified channels outside the Orphan Program in the seconds before they autoredacted.
The agent had hoped it would hasten his rise inside the department but quickly learned that he’d caught a hot grenade; the data was too dangerous to use. He’d kept it as an insurance policy despite standing orders to the contrary that originated from Pennsylvania Avenue that any and all data pertaining to the Orphan Program must be expunged. Rumors of this shadow file persisted over the past months but had remained only rumors.
Until the powerful data-mining engines at Van Sciver’s disposal had caught the scent of this shadow file and verified its existence by shading in bits of surrounding intelligence—like gleaning the existence of invisible dark matter by observing gravity effects around it. The midlevel agent had sensed the crosshairs at his back and had gone to ground.
In more ways than one.