Orphan X: A Novel (12 page)

Sam White. Katrin’s father.

Held hostage this very minute by men unafraid to fire into a crowded restaurant in broad daylight.

Sam wore a half smile that crinkled his eyes, his skin toughened from sun exposure. He’d worked as a construction manager and looked the part. A guy you’d want to share a beer with, watch a game. Someone to teach you to play poker.

Evan had put Katrin through the paces—changing the location, a bus ride, leaving her car behind, switching her chair at the table. A pattern of movement designed to keep her off balance and himself safe. But one that clearly had aroused the interest of the sniper or the men behind him.

Any meeting that carefully orchestrated obviously went against their wishes and directives.

Katrin’s words returned with a sting:
Me calling you? That could’ve killed my father.

A pulse beat in Evan’s temple. The walls of the Vault retained a bit of dampness, enough that he could feel moisture in his lungs on the inhale. Through the vent he could smell tar from the roof. For a time he sat there, that picture of Katrin’s father staring back at him. He thought of the false-bottomed drawer in his bureau and what it contained.

Never make it personal
.

Just make it right.

Tomorrow he’d call Sam’s captors. He’d give everyone a night’s sleep to settle down, then engage under the light of a new day. In one fashion or another, he would engage.

Exiting through the shower and walking back to the big room, he sat to meditate, setting his pistol on the area rug beside him. Crossing his legs, he relaxed into his flesh, felt the tug of his bones, the weight of himself against the floor. His eyelids half closed, and beyond the blinds the city lights streaked into comets of yellow and orange.

He inventoried the minor aches from the day, starting with his feet and moving up his body. A slice on his calf carved by a shard from the blown-out window. A bruise on his left hip. Some joint tenderness around the shoulder.

The pain flickered in these spots, warm, pulsing. He focused on the hot points, breathed into them, smoothing them out with each exhalation as if beneath a rolling pin. And then they were gone, everything gone but the rise and fall of his chest, the coolness at his nostrils.

The breath was his anchor.

There was nothing else but his body and the chill air moving through it, feeding the blood in his veins, centering him here in this instant, his life measured one breath at a time. For a while he drifted across a blank slate, mindful and aware and yet without thought.

And then, as if stumbling, he lost the thread of the present, spinning back twenty-five years.

16

The Two Wolves

On the drive home from the dark Virginia barn, Jack lays out some facts, serving them to Evan like a well-earned meal. “You are part of what is called the Orphan Program. You are exceptionally well adjusted and even-tempered in the face of the unknown, selected for the program precisely for these qualities. There are others like you. You will never meet them.” His blocky hands command the steering wheel, the vehicle, the road. “You will be trained impeccably for your profession.”

“What’s my profession?”

“Weapon,” Jack says.

The truck thrums across some railroad tracks. The vinyl seat has grown hot beneath Evan’s legs. His head goes swimmy, like he’s in a dream. But it’s not a bad dream.

Finally Evan asks, “A weapon for what?”

“For solo, offline covert operations.”

Jack seems to forget that Evan is a kid. Or perhaps he speaks to him that way, the vocabulary just out of reach, making Evan stretch, stretch. Evan thinks for a time, piecing together what that might mean.

“Like a spy?”

Jack’s chin dips, his version of a nod. “Like a spy. But you’ll be different from other assaulters.”

Assaulters
. Evan likes the word.

“You’ll be a cutout man,” Jack continues. “Fully expendable. You’ll know only your silo. Nothing damaging. If you’re caught, you’re on your own. They will torture you to pieces, and you can give up all the information you have, because none of it is useful. You will go places you are not allowed to go and do things you are not allowed to do. Everyone at every level will deny any knowledge of you, and this will not be entirely false. Your very existence is illegal.”

“An Orphan,” Evan says.

“That’s right. This is your last chance to pull the ripcord, so consider carefully. If you die, you will die alone and no one will know of your sacrifice. No one but me. There will be no greater glory, no parades, no name on a monument wall. That is the choice before you.”

Evan thinks about where he came from—secondhand shoes, food out of cans, low ceilings and cramped walls. Jack Johns seems like a portal to a vast, wide-open world, a world Evan had always imagined existed somewhere beyond reach. Now maybe there could be a place out there even for someone like him.

Evan pokes at the cut in his palm bestowed by the hooked blade. “Sounds good,” he says.

Jack looks over at him. Back at the road. “There is only me. I’m your handler. I am the only person who will ever know who you are. I will protect you. No matter what.” The trees scroll by behind that rough-hewn profile. “You and I are all we have. Do you understand?”

Evan watches the foliage whip by. “I think so.”

“Equivocal answers aren’t answers, Evan.”

“Yes. I understand.” Evan looks down at his arms, dotted with puncture marks. “So I’m gonna do more training? With that guy?”

“Him and others. Under no circumstance are you to reveal to them your name. They will know you only as ‘Orphan X.’”

“
X
as in the letter or the number ten?”

Jack appears pleased with this question. “Alphabet.”

“So there were twenty-three Orphans before me?”

“Yes.”

“What happens when you run out of letters?”

Jack laughs. It is the first time Evan has heard him do so. It’s a rich laugh, aged in his chest. “Then I suppose they’ll go to numbers.” He veers around a wood-paneled station wagon, a family out for a Sunday drive. “I will only interject one instructor at a time into your life. At the beginning of your training, you will never be alone with an instructor. I will always be there. Like today.”

“Yeah, but I’ll never be as good at handling pain as that guy.”

Jack pulls a thoughtful frown. Then he says, “You don’t have to. You just have to do better than you did last time.” Jack looks across at him. “You know the two best words in the English language?” he asks.

Evan is at a loss.

“‘Next time,’” Jack says.

Evan feels unconvinced.

Jack says, “You’ve read the
Odyssey,
right?”

“No.”

“We’ll change that soon enough.” Jack takes a moment to look displeased. Then: “Odysseus is not as skilled a fighter as Achilles. Not as great an archer as Apollo. Not as fast as Hermes. In fact, he’s not the best at anything. And yet
overall
? He is unrivaled. ‘Man of many wiles.’” Jack’s eyes move from the rearview to one side mirror, then the other. “Your job is to learn a little bit about everything from people who know everything about something.”

Evan’s next years are spent doing precisely that.

He is taught hand-to-hand from a Japanese master who is maddeningly calm, even as he delivers devastating attacks. There are no belts, no dojos, no special white pajamas; it is junk martial arts, the most effective destructions, a little of the best from each form. In Jack’s sweaty garage, Evan spans the globe in a single fight, finding himself on the receiving end of an around-the-world offensive. A muay thai
teep
-kick interception of his right cross leads to a wing chun
bil jee
finger jab to the eye that sends him reeling. Before he can restore his equilibrium, an Indonesian pencak silat open-hand slap to the ear leaves his nervous system ringing. Half blinded by static, he swings, but the master delivers an upward elbow Filipino kali
gunting
combined with a hand trap, smashing Evan’s fist against the tip of the ulna. Evan sits on the floor, hard, the collective wisdom of four cultures distilled into a single ass-kicking.

He doesn’t know which part of himself to check first.

The master bows to him respectfully.

Evan swipes blood from his lips. “This guy ever lose his temper?”

In a beach chair to the side, from behind a tattered copy of Vidal’s
Lincoln,
Jack says, “He doesn’t have to.”

Evan dips his head, drools blood into the cup of his palm.

“Next time,” Jack says, and gets up to go into the house.

Evenings they spend in the study with its towering bookshelves and mallard green walls, where Jack conducts what he calls “Area and Cultural Studies.” Evan learns rules, etiquette, history, sensitivities. How to respond if he accidentally steps on someone’s foot in the Moscow subway. What Armenians think of Turks. The proper way to proffer your business card in China. How to sink the French
r
in his throat. There are elocution lessons as well, eradicating every last trace of East Baltimore until Evan’s accent is as nonspecific as that of a midwestern newscaster. Soon enough when he speaks, he offers no information beyond what he chooses to divulge with his words.

As the seasons pass, he grows accustomed to the forty-five-minute drive to Fort Meade. Jack always enters through a back gate, the guard station left conspicuously empty for their approach. Most of the activities take place in and around a clandestine set of hangars at the foresty rear of the base. A half-crazy battalion captain with an angry snarl of scar tissue for a chin runs Evan ragged, teaching him how to move under live fire. He uses concealment to head toward cover, zigzagging through tree trunks as rounds bite chunks of bark overhead. The captain’s gleeful bellowing stalks him ghostlike through the boughs: “School’s in session, X! Lock in that muscle memory. How you train is how you play!”

One day, frustrated with Evan’s evasive movements, the battalion captain smacks him across the back of the head. Jack morphs out of thin air, standing nose to nose with the man. “Hurt him all you want if you’re training him. But if you lay a hand on him again in
anger,
I will make the rest of your face match your chin. Do you understand me?”

The battalion captain’s eyes achieve a sudden clarity. “Yes, sir,” he says.

Driving home, Evan says, “Thanks.”

Jack nods. The truck rattles across potholes. The dashboard vent blows hot and steady. Jack seems to be working up to something. Finally he says, “I know that details of your background are … hazy. If it’s important to you, we can run a genetic test, find out your ancestry, who you are.”

The choice awes Evan into silence. Jack seems to sense that this is one time not to push. He waits patiently.

At last Evan clears his throat. “I know who I am,” he says. “I’m your son.”

Jack makes a muffled noise of agreement and angles his head away, perhaps so Evan can’t see his face.

The pace of training is relentless. Evan learns to breach, to scale barbed-wire fences, to rappel from trees, fences, walls. He works with an old-school surveillance engineer annoyed by his weak grasp of circuitry and with a teenage hacker frustrated with his processing speed. He’s taught how to approach people, to find and exploit weaknesses. To eliminate nonverbal tells, he masters the art of remaining still when talking or listening. Every time he lifts his hands, the interrogation specialist raps his knuckles painfully with a metal file; eventually Evan sits as if his wrists are tied to the arms of a chair. A whip-thin psychologist administers batteries of tests with esoteric questions: Have you ever cheated or betrayed a loved one?
No.
Have you ever had sex with an animal?
No.
Where does loyalty stop?
When someone asks you to have sex with an animal.
In the corner Jack sprays out a mouthful of coffee.

Evan shoots standing, kneeling, prone, firing on targets from seven to three hundred yards. After he is trained on conventional targets, his marksmanship instructor moves him to human silhouettes, then full-body photos of women and children. When he hesitates, she says, “People don’t run around with target rings on their heads and chests. Man up, X.” For sniper work she dresses mannequins in clothes, then cores out lettuce heads, fills them with ketchup, and mounts them atop the collars. She walks back uprange to where he waits. “When you pull the trigger,” she says, “I want you to see a head explode.”

As he lines up the shot, she lectures, “We keep death at a distance here, X. Hospitals and nursing homes tuck it away. Our food comes to us neatly packaged. Refrigerators preserve it. It used to be you wanted a chicken, you walked out back and snapped its neck.” Her deodorant carries to him on the breeze, citrusy and surprisingly feminine. It stirs something in his sixteen-year-old body. “My old man was a colonel, wanted me to understand that slaughterhouses did our bidding for us. When I was about your age, he took me to one. Just us and a machete and the steaming horror of an afternoon, looking Death in its rolling eyes.”

He fires, and a lettuce head downrange turns to red mist. “Nicely done,” she says.

Later she duct-tapes an orange over her eye, makes him tackle her and punch his thumb through it. “Good,” she pants, sprawled in the dirt, her breath hot against his neck. “Now stir your thumb. Curl it like a fishing hook. And pull out what you can.” While he does, she screams and thrashes. He stops, mortified. Her one bare eye glares up at him. “You think it’ll be calm?”