The Last Orphan -
Chapter 9
So Much Circling for So Many Years
Hooded and embedded in the restraint chair, Evan had been carried from the SUV. Like riding a palanquin but less luxurious.
He’d kept track of his movements as well as he could. After another fifteen minutes in the SUV, he’d been borne through a rattling gate, up three steps, through a door with a hissing hydraulic closer, down a long corridor with air-conditioning vents and significant echoing off hard surfaces, and now into what he gauged—given the reverberation of footfalls—to be a moderate size room.
He was set down with care.
Doors opened and closed, boots scuffling.
Then silence.
Save for the sound of someone breathing in the room with him. He smelled a trace of something fruity and vanilla, a cheap drugstore shampoo.
“Agent Templeton,” he said. “Would you mind removing my hood?”
“I’m not supposed to.”
A long pause, her shoes ticktocking back and forth as she paced.
Then she said, “F**k it,” the bag lifted, and Evan blinked into the sudden light.
A plain box of a room, walls painted white. No one-way mirror, no furniture, nothing but a recessed light in the ceiling fifteen feet above, well out of reach.
Just him adhered to the restraint chair. Naomi on her feet. And a single folding table, also white, upon which rested a large monitor with heavy-duty cables linking it to an outlet in the wall and no visibly attached computer.
The table was ten feet away from Evan.
Naomi stayed six feet away.
Evan and Naomi had crossed paths enough times for him to have evolved a profile on her.
Her late father had been a legend in the Service, ran the “big show”—the Presidential Protective Detail—for several administrations. Her last name carried an almost hallowed aura within governmental circles. Early on in her career, there’d been whispered claims of nepotism, though her father had in fact lent her scant professional support. She’d made her way up the agency hierarchy on her own undeniable talent, solidifying a lot of good habits in the process of proving herself.
She was indefatigable.
For a time they stared at each other. After so much circling for so many years, it felt surreal to be face-to-face.
Evan broke the silence. “A diaper? Really?”
“Sorry about that,” she said.
“You’re scanning my clothes?”
“Yes. And your vehicle. Explosive-detection dogs hit on it a few blocks from the hospital. Unless of course someone else was driving a truck with a small arsenal locked in vaults in the bed.”
He wasn’t worried. They’d replace nothing beyond a forged registration, insurance purchased under a false name, and ordnance, including a reusable, unguided, Russian rocket-propelled grenade launcher he’d recently acquired but had yet to try out. His first thought—to ask Tommy to supply him with a replacement—was severed by a pang of dread.
He would likely not breathe free air again.
Naomi crossed her arms. She’d taken off her body armor, her ill-fitting starched white shirt still looked nice on her despite her best efforts. A silver pen clip showed at the corner of the front left pocket of her slate-gray ripstop pants. She had no jewelry, no watch, and wore lightweight tactical shoes with paracord laces of a contrasting color, cinched tight to prevent rattle with her footsteps.
“You could have shot me,” she said. “But you didn’t.”
He stared at her.
“You’re an unsanctioned assassin,” she said. “You don’t believe in the law.”
“I don’t believe the law is always sufficient,” Evan said. “But I believe it’s necessary.”
“So you’re there to fill in the gaps? Like some kind of civil disobedience?” she said, her cheeks suddenly flushed. She appeared to notice that she’d drawn closer to him and took a brisk step back, shaking her head. “All these years.”
He said, “All these years.”
“Never once did you leak an intel dump about the Program, scribble out some manifesto.”
“I try not to complain about anything I’m not doing something about. And when I’m actually doing something, I don’t have time to complain.”
Her mouth popped open. Closed again. She wore no makeup, but her lips looked plenty red against her pale complexion. “You live around here, then?”
“I don’t live anywhere.”
“Right. The Nowhere Man. Helping the hopeless, one murder at a time.”
“Not hopeless. Powerless.”
The pressure at his ankles, groin, lap, wrists, shoulders, chest, and neck threatened to tighten him into full-blown claustrophobia. His chin itched, but he resisted the urge to dip his face to rub it against the strap. He would allow his discomfort no toehold.
Naomi leaned back against the table. “Why do you help people?” she asked. “To atone?”
“Nothing so lofty.”
“What then?”
“Because of what you—the government—made me, there’s only one thing I am excellent at. And extremely limited circumstances under which I can do it in ways that are …”
“What? Moral?”
“No.” He contemplated. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you get to choose what’s good?”
He thought about it. The choke chain twisted slightly when he swallowed, pinched the skin of his neck. It took him awhile to replace words not cloyed with cliché.
“There’s no getting around suffering,” he said. “But if someone’s being terrorized at the hands of another person, that’s something different. Not playing victim, not claiming to suffer on behalf of someone else, not being a martyr to themselves. Not suffering over ideas or ideals or some metaphysical bullshit. When it’s too painful for any of that. When you see it in their eyes. Bone-deep suffering.” His voice had intensified, and he took a moment to back down what he felt rising in his chest. “Suffering for no better reason than that someone else wants them to. Then it doesn’t matter where they’re from or the color of their skin or who they want to f**k or marry or pray to or vote for. They’re in pain. And trying to alleviate that? Is the closest thing to good I’ve found.”
That was also why he let his clients choose the next person to pass his covert phone number on to. Because they understood suffering. They could see it, know when it was real.
It was the most he’d ever spoken at once.
Ever.
Naomi hadn’t moved. Her attention was locked on him so intently that were it not for the gentle rise and fall of her chest, she could have been a paused image on a screen.
She asked, “Then you kill for them?”
He watched her face closely, no excessive use of the forehead muscles to indicate insincerity. No, he trusted her. Which meant they could honestly disagree on what they disagreed about.
“Then I escalate the situation as far as it needs to go,” he said. “That’s what my adversaries aren’t counting on.”
“Someone who will escalate?”
The air was cool, and his throat still felt raw, coated with chemical aftertaste. He wet his lips. “Someone who can escalate higher than they can.”
“You’ve been pretty effective.”
“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you go out into the world not feeling like you deserve anything from it.”
A muffled sound of amusement escaped her. “That should be my motto.”
He lowered his eyes to indicate the restraint chair he was captive to. “You’ve been pretty effective, too.”
“We identified you heading into the medical center a few months ago,” she said. “A security camera in the parking garage. Your face was blurred, but we got gait recognition.”
That would’ve been when he’d arrived to see Mia into her surgery. Medical confidentiality issues meant scant cameras inside the private areas of the hospital, so they wouldn’t have been able to chart his course and connect him to her—a small blessing. He wondered at the scale of NSA surveillance they must’ve been running across the country in order to replace him in one parking garage at the western edge of the nation.
“We’ve been staking it out since. The manpower alone.” Naomi shook her head. “You can’t begin to imagine what it’s taken to catch you.”
“You could’ve just asked nicely.”
“I did.” Her smile was melancholy, even doleful. “In the end.”
A chime jarred them from the moment. Naomi withdrew a Boeing Black smartphone from her pocket. A quick glance at the incoming message, and then she turned away from Evan, picked up a comically tiny remote control hidden behind the monitor, clicked it, and stood back.
The encryption code scrolled across the screen.
A moment later the monitor went black.
Then blinked to life again.
Evan found himself face-to-face with the president of the United States.
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