Orphan X: A Novel (3 page)

Evan made it his business to be intimately acquainted with his setting. His head held a catalog of directories and blueprints for anything within eyeshot—every resident, every stairwell, every electrical closet and yapping dog.

The Third Commandment, beaten into his head from the age of twelve:
Master your surroundings.

For a time he sipped the crisp vodka and breathed the crisp air.

Habit beckoned him to check the black RoamZone phone again. Despite the high-power-density lithium-ion battery, it was down to one bar. He went inside at once, plugged it into its charger on the kitchen counter, and synced the ringer to the built-in speaker system so he could hear it anywhere in the seven thousand square feet of the condo. The number was easy enough to remember.

1-855-2-NOWHERE.

It featured one digit more than was necessary, but given the condition that callers were in when they dialed, they required something simple and memorable.

The black phone hadn’t rung in ten weeks. Which meant it might ring soon or it might ring months from now. He never knew. No matter how long it took, he would wait.

Feeling impatient, he repeated the Seventh Commandment in his head like a mantra:
One mission at a time. One mission at a time.

He stripped down to his boxer briefs, then started a fire with birch logs and burned his clothes, the stained grocery bag, and the bloody sock. Carrying the twin pistol suppressors, he padded back to the master bathroom and set them on the counter. The centerpiece of the room was a Maglev bed that literally floated two feet in the air, a slab repelled from the floor by preposterously strong neodymium rare-earth magnets. Cables tethered the slab in place, preventing the slightest wobble. The Finnish design company claimed that the magnetism had a healing effect, but medical evidence was scant. Evan just liked how it looked. No legs, no headboard, no footboard—minimalism in extreme.

Heading for the bathroom, he nudged the frosted-glass shower door, which rolled aside silently on its tracks. He turned on the shower, as hot as he could stand. The water scoured away the grime and sweat and gave him a clearer look at the wound on his forearm. Not bad at all. It was a fairly neat cut and should heal well. Stepping out of the shower, he toweled off, then attended to the wound. Deciding against sutures or butterfly stitches, he pinched the skin together and superglued it closed. As the skin healed, it would push the dried glue out.

He moved back into the bedroom. His bureau held twenty or so gray V-necked T-shirts, a dozen pairs of matching dark jeans, and the same number of sweatshirts. After he dressed, he hesitated and stared at the bottom drawer.

He exhaled. Slid it open. Shoved the folded squares of boxer briefs to one side. A fingernail-size divot at the edge of the wood was the only indication of the false bottom.

He reached for it. But his hand stopped a few inches above the wood.

He contemplated the item hidden beneath, then rearranged the boxers and closed the drawer. It had been a long day, and there was no need to open up that false bottom and everything that came with it.

After a quick detour to the kitchen to grab an ice cube, he returned to the bathroom and scooped up the pistol suppressors from the counter. Stepping into the still-wet shower, he gripped the lever handle that controlled the hot water and turned it the wrong way. The lever was electronic, keyed to his palm print. As he pushed it through the point of resistance, a door concealed seamlessly within the tile pattern swung inward, revealing a hidden room.

He mentally referred to the irregular four hundred square feet beyond as the Vault. During an ostensible remodel, he’d “walled off” the awkward storage space in the back of his condo. Crammed beneath the public stairs to the roof, the room had exposed beams, rough concrete walls, and the underbellies of steps descending from the ceiling to crowd the head. No other condo had such a space; no one would know to look for it, let alone miss it.

Accessible only through this hidden door, his armory and workbench lined the wall beneath the inverted stairs. A central
L
-shaped desk constructed of sheet metal held a confusion of computer towers, antennae, and servers. A bank of monitors along one wall showed the innards of Castle Heights, various angles of halls and stairwells. The video feeds were easily pirated from the cheap but sturdy Taiwanese-make security cameras installed about the property.

One computer unconnected to the Internet held his banking information. His main account was stashed in Luxembourg under the name Z$Q9R#)3 and had a forty-word password in the form of a nonsensical sentence. The account could be accessed only over the phone and his money transferred solely via voice commands. There was no electronic access, no virtual transactions, no debit cards. He’d sprinkled secondary accounts through other areas of nonreporting—Bermuda, Cyprus, the Caymans—and any paperwork was directed through a series of trusts and shell corporations based in Road Town, Tortola.

As Jack used to say,
Ball bearings within ball bearings.

Evan had come a long way from the projects of East Baltimore.

Beside the mouse pad on the central table, a glass salad bowl held a fist-size aloe vera plant nestled in cobalt glass pebbles. Evan dropped the ice cube into the clutch of serrated spikes, a simple watering that Vera required every week.

He put the suppressors away in one of the weapon lockers and then emerged, sealing the Vault behind him.

In the big room, he sat at last. Cross-legged on the area rug, his back straight, hands resting gently on his knees. Meditating. He observed the shape of his body from the inside. The pressure of his bones against the floor. The weight of his palms. The breathing channel, nose to throat to chest. The aroma of the burning birch logs tinged the back of his throat. He noticed the whorls in the sandalwood cabinet, individual threads of the Turkish rug, the way the blinds diffused the city lights into a gauzy orange glow. The aim was to see everything as if for the first time. That was the aim everywhere. All the time.

His breath was his anchor.

He veiled his eyes, neither open nor closed, turning the space around him dreamlike and vague, and there was no past and no future. He released the day—the four-hour drive from Las Vegas, the slashing knife, the drone of Hugh Walters’s voice in the elevator. Air-conditioning tickled the back of his neck. His forearm wound radiated a throbbing heat that was not entirely unpleasant.

His left shoulder, he realized, felt out of whack, and he relaxed it from its slight hunch, lowering it a few millimeters and feeling the muscle stretch. He aligned himself, flesh and thought, until he became the breath and only the breath, until the world was the breath and there was nothing else.

For some time he sat like this, lost to blissful stillness.

And then Evan was yanked out of his trancelike state on the Turkish rug. He blinked a few times, acclimating his eyes and reorienting himself. He realized what had jarred him from his meditation.

The black phone was ringing.

3

Broken Like Me

The ringing of the RoamZone phone seemed straightforward enough.

However.

The direct-inward-dial number itself, 1-855-2-NOWHERE, originally acquired through a Bulgarian Voice over IP service, was set up so that calls were digitized and sent over the Internet through an encrypted virtual private network tunnel. The tunnel was routed through fifteen software virtual telephone switch destinations around the world to the Wi-Fi access point and VoIP adapter belonging to Joey Delarosa in apartment 19H across the street. From there it was popped back into the Internet via Verizon’s LTE network. If, by some miracle beyond miracles, the secret-handshake men ever traced the data stream to that point and stormed Joey’s place, Evan could watch the whole debacle from behind his lowered sunscreen.

After every significant contact, Evan rotated the phone service where he parked the number. Right now it was housed by a company in the Jiangsu province of China, a jurisdictional and logistical nightmare for any inquiring mind. The phone hooked seamlessly into the GSM network, functioned in 135 countries, and utilized prepaid vending-machine SIM cards that Evan crushed and replaced on a regular basis.

He rose, his bare feet tapping the polished concrete as he crossed to the kitchen counter.

He answered the phone as he always did. “Do you need my help?”

The voice came in on the faintest delay. “Are you … I mean, is this a joke?”

“No.”

“Wait. Just …
wait.
” A young woman, late teens. Hispanic accent, maybe Salvadoran. “You’re real? I thought you was like … like some urban legend. A myth.”

“I am.”

He waited. Heard breathing, faster than usual. This was common.

“Look, I’m in trouble. I don’t have no time to screw around if … if…” A choked-down sob. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What’s your name?”

“Morena Aguilar.”

“Where did you get this number?”

“A black guy give it to me.”

“Describe him.”

The First Commandment:
Assume nothing.

“He had a beard, all scruffly like, with some gray. And his arm was broke. In a sling.”

Clarence John-Baptiste. A meth gang took over his house in Chatsworth last fall, held him and his daughter captive. Clarence and his girl had not been treated gently.

“Where do you live?”

She gave an address in Boyle Heights, East L.A., in the flats below the Los Angeles River. Lil East Side territory.

“When should we meet?” Evan asked.

“I can’t … I don’t know.”

Again he waited.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow in the middle of the day?”

“Where can you meet?”

“I ain’t got no car.”

“Is it safe to meet at your residence?” he asked.

“Midday, yeah, it is.”

“Noon, then.”

Noon was good. He would require three hours to sweep the surrounding blocks, to case the house, to check for digital transmitters and trace signatures of explosive materials. If this was a trap and he had to engage, he’d engage on his own terms.

The Ninth Commandment:
Always play offense.

*   *   *

Later, in the Vault, Evan drank fresh chamomile tea as he ran Morena Aguilar through the databases.

Aside from hard-core terrorist intel, law-enforcement databases are by and large connected to the Internet. The vast majority of criminal and civil records can be accessed by any local police department’s patrol car with a mobile data terminal. This includes any Panasonic Toughbook laptop hooked to the dashboard of a basic LAPD cruiser. Each of those laptops talks directly to CLERS, CLETS, NCIC, CODIS, and literally hundreds of other state and federal databases.

Once you crack a dashboard computer on a single cruiser, you can get your hands on Big Brother’s control board.

Evan wasn’t a master hacker by any stretch of the imagination, but he’d made his way unattended into various cruisers and uploaded a piece of reverse SSH code into their laptops, leaving a virtual back door open for himself.

Now, tucked in the hidden room, Evan cruised the information superhighway to his heart’s content, gathering particulars for tomorrow’s mission and sipping the last of his fragrant tea.

*   *   *

For the past forty-five minutes, Morena Aguilar had been sitting on the overturned recycle bin on the front porch of the dilapidated tract house, her hands wedged beneath her legs so her thin arms bowed outward. Her bare feet bounced nervously on the splintering wood, her knees jerking. Her dark hair was cinched back so hard that it conformed precisely to her skull before tumbling curly and wild from a rubber band. Darting eyes, ducked head, a hint of sweat sparkling at her temples.

Scared.

Parked past the intersection behind a rusting heap of an abandoned car, Evan scanned the street again through a detached rifle scope. On a patch of dead grass in the front yard across from Morena’s house, a teenage mom, also Latina, emerged with a diapered infant under her arm. She set him down to play in an aluminum-foil turkey pan filled with sand. The child looked to be mixed race, bright green eyes offset against caramel skin. As he started digging in his makeshift sandbox, she lit up a Marlboro Red and blew a stream of smoke at the sky, scratching at a strawberry birthmark on the underside of her arm. She couldn’t have been older than eighteen, but her face was grim. A cell phone bulged her back pocket. Another teenage mom shoved a baby stroller up onto the dead lawn next to her. The first one flicked a cigarette up from the pack in offering. They didn’t speak. They just stood side by side, smoked, and watched the street. Two young women with nothing else to do.

Once Evan was convinced they were harmless, he lowered the scope, picked up a black metal briefcase, and got out of the truck.

As he approached, Morena saw him coming and rose, clutching one arm at the biceps. He stepped up onto the porch. The years were heavy on her face, stress lines and a hardness behind her pretty brown eyes. The smell of hair spray was strong.

“I’m hawking reverse mortgages door-to-door,” he said. “You’re not interested. Shake your head.”

She did.

“I’m going to go around the block, loop through the backyard. Your rear door is unlocked. Please keep it that way. Now look annoyed and head inside.”

She banged through the screen door, and he stepped off the porch and kept on up the street.

Ten minutes later they were seated across from each other in torn lawn chairs in the tiny living room of the house. Evan faced the grease-stained front window. On the coffee table before him sat his locked black briefcase. If the combination was input incorrectly, it threw off eight hundred volts of electricity. It contained a voice-activated microphone, a pinhole lens, and a wideband high-power jammer that squelched any surveillance devices.

And it held papers.

The stifling air stank of birds. A ragged parrot rustled in a cage in the square adjoining bedroom. The open door looked in on two mattresses on the floor, a dresser and cracked mirror, and a battered trumpet case leaning against a long-disused fish tank.