The Last Orphan -
Chapter 7
High-Value Target
As Evan broke the surface tension of consciousness, the first thing he noticed was the diaper. He was wearing a diaper. The crinkly lining was thankfully dry. It took a moment for him to determine that he was seated. Hard padding beneath him, metal at his back. A bench? An interrogation-room chair?
Wait. Thrumming beneath his legs. Movement. A helo? No—vehicle transport. No bathroom breaks permitted.
His eyes felt crusty and swollen. He opened them, but it made no difference.
Pitch-black.
Okay. A spit hood, then. No, something opaque, like a general-issue sandbag.
Disks clamped over his ears, the world muted. Earmuffs. He brought his attention to his ear canals, sensing the faintest pressure within. Earplugs beneath the earmuffs. It seemed like overkill.
Overkill was a language he spoke fluently.
An acrid chemical taste coated the back of his throat. His tongue was mashed to the floor of his mouth by … plastic? A mouth guard. He could feel the strap chafing his neck. His airway was open, but there would be no talking.
Oxygen seemed sparse, but he knew that was only an illusion. They wouldn’t go to all this trouble just to let him suffocate.
His first priority was not to hyperventilate.
Steady slow inhalation. Steady slow exhalation.
Again.
Again.
He kept his respiration subtle enough that no observers would notice. There was no advantage in anyone’s knowing he was awake just yet.
Next he focused on his skin. Heavy fabric that breathed slightly, a bit of give. Likely a cotton-polyester blend. A standard prison jumpsuit then, probably orange for the highest-security designation. Softness against the tops of his feet. Without moving he altered his feet’s pressure against the floor to gauge the give. Soft-soled disposable slippers.
He leaned his calves inconspicuously outward to little yield: an ankle bar with high-security cuffs on each end. The bar was unforgiving, a one-piece rod, probably stainless steel. From what he could tell, the cuffs were also bolted to the floor. No, not the floor. A metal footrest?
Weight tugged at his forearms. He used the same nonmovement to test the range of motion for his arms. Matching bar and cuffs at the wrists with the cuffs secured to the arms of his seat, which meant a restraint chair fastened into a cradle.
He was hunched over slightly, a stitch in his left side. As the vehicle rocked, he bobbed a bit more than necessary, clinking against a hard stop that indicated a security chain linking his wrist bar to his ankle bar.
Crunching down a bit more, he felt metal bite into his Adam’s apple paired with rising pressure on his limbs, as if he were clenched in a massive claw. They’d added a choke chain that connected the stainless-steel rods, threaded between his legs, up his back, and noosed around his throat. He noted additional bands of pressure against his torso and legs, restraining straps cinched into place.
He was a lucky recipient of the high-value-target treatment.
That gave him a bit more to work with.
They would have subjected him to a full-body scan while he was unconscious to check for any secret items like a sewing needle burrowed beneath the calluses of his hand or hidden contraband technology like a bazooka masquerading as a suppository.
They’d have run advance-team scouts to check transport routes and identify shelter points along the way—police and fire stations, government buildings with enclosed garages, military bases.
They’d have arranged multiple three-vehicle convoys, each with a driver, a team commander, two gunners, and two handlers armed with less-lethal.
They’d have ensured that no one in the other transport vehicles knew which convoy contained him and that each convoy had a different route and a distinct encoded comms channel.
They’d have put him in neither a lower-security nondescript windowless industrial panel van nor an overly conspicuous Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected light tactical vehicle but in an uparmored SUV that could veer off and blend into traffic once they cleared the area of operation.
They’d have placed air assets over each convoy, probably a fully equipped and armed Black Hawk, a Specter AC-130 gunship on station with a flight of F-16s heated up on the runway of the nearest air force base—the one in El Segundo. Maybe even a quick-reaction force of Boeing Little Bird attack variant AH-6s in case things got sporty.
He was the belle of a multimillion-dollar ball.
It would have been nice to be the recipient of so much attention if he were someone who liked attention.
His body hurt in innumerable places, and his head throbbed from the opioid injection. He took a silent internal inventory. Lots of bruises and aches, perhaps a cracked rib from the fall onto the Red Cross van, but nothing that would require surgery or a fracture reduction. The pain was present and undeniable, but he didn’t let it all the way in. He couldn’t afford to devote resources to physical suffering right now.
They had total control over his person.
They had total control over his bodily functions.
They had total control over his future.
He realized he had to start unstitching what had happened to him now, because God knew there’d be more to come.
Deep breath. Pushing it all the way out, making room for oxygen as Jack had taught him and as he’d taught Joey. He reached for meditation, found it, lost it, found it again. He lingered there in the relative calm, mustering his courage.
Then he irised himself open ever so slightly to thoughts of the capture. Unfortunately, that was all the opening needed for images to claw their way in. A cold-water hit to his nervous system, a kaleidoscope of horrors like—
her palm against his cheek
flowers thrashing against his thigh
windshield spiderwebbing
IV pole starting to topple
It was like fighting a war with the wind, each sensation stabbing into him anew, blurring past and present, and suddenly he was—
gripping a Makarov pistol, standing behind a round man slumped forward, face in his bowl of soup, the back of his head missing
down on one knee, slender adolescent neck bowed, drooling b***d onto the asphalt as the Mystery Man stares down, eyes hidden behind Ray-Bans
asleep on the mattress on the floor between bunk beds, the other boys sliding out with the morning sun, their feet pounding him awake
This is Ethan—er, Evan. His first placement fell through. He doesn’t talk much. But I’m sure you’ll all make him feel welcome.
baby mobile chiming a nursery rhyme, patterns on the ceiling way up above, a horse, a lion, a zebra, shouts somewhere in the house—A stroke, I think she’s had another—red flashing lights through the windowpane eclipsing the animals, the rhyme winding down, his tiny, tiny hand gripping a smooth white rail, and raw sobbing from another room with no more music to disguise it
The transport vehicle bounced over a pothole, throwing him back into the prison of his restraints, encased in darkness, his senses bound.
Sweat trickling down the back of his neck. The smell of French roast, wafting off his skin from the spray he’d caught on the plaza. And his breath, there for him as it always was. As long as he could breathe, he was okay. He gave himself a brief respite and then refocused once more.
Rewinding through his takedown, he replayed it inch by inch, forward and backward and forward again, extracting splinters of ancient linked memories, clearing them from his nervous system until each needle punch of sensation lost its sharpness, until they joined the thrumming of his heart and the wheels across the uneven road, until he was no longer locked off from sight and sound and voice, severed from himself, but able to observe his thoughts and emotions, to see clearly what he’d managed to hold at bay.
Panic had been there all along, a constant beckoning, the road not taken. He looked down the barrel of it now to the bottomless dark. Acknowledged it with respect.
Then he closed the door.
It was time to get to work.
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