Evan—or more precisely the Benelli combat shotgun—had convinced Papazian to give up what information he had in exchange for a painless exit. Evan now had to stage the next phase of the mission, which meant getting to the databases and buckling down. By the time he returned to Castle Heights, an early-morning buzz had already filled the lobby. The tenants were clustered around the love seats, some dressed for work, others lounging in retiree leisure wear.
Evan lowered his head and vectored for the elevator.
“Ev. Ev! Come over here. My God, you won’t believe what happened to Ida.”
Lorilee’s face looked Saran Wrap–tight beneath the bright lights of the lobby. He glanced down and halted at the sight of the crimson mist across the toes of his boots.
He had not been counting on prework social hour in the lobby.
He glanced at the group. “Maybe you could tell me later.”
A storm of objections assailed him, the loudest from Hugh Walters, 20C. Hugh was the HOA president and never tired of reacquainting the residents with that fact. “I think you need to hear this,” he said, his long face drawn longer with stageworthy distress. “It represents a security threat to this building’s residents. And it can’t wait for tomorrow’s HOA meeting.”
Evan’s shoulders lowered another notch. He’d made a great effort to forget about the HOA meeting and the “nibbles” he was tasked with providing.
Stalling, he snuck another glance at the dappled red on his Original S.W.A.T. boots. There was no way he could join the others without their noticing. He raised one foot as if to scratch the opposing calf, wiping Papazian’s blood onto the back leg of his cargo pants. He had to do the same with his left boot without looking obvious.
And without looking like he was performing a rain dance.
Everyone waited on him expectantly.
He had no choice but to shift his weight and fake-scratch at his other leg.
At that moment a burst of music exploded from his pocket: AAAH LIKE BIG BUTTS AND I CANNOT LIE!
He fumbled out the RoamZone, saw Joey on the caller ID.
YOU OTHABROTHAZ CAN’T—
He thumbed the green button to stop the atrocious ringtone.
Joey’s voice came through. “Well, did you find him? What happened?”
Turning slightly from the stunned residents, Evan said in a low voice, “Impeccably bad timing. And the ringtone? Better go away.”
“Oh,” Joey said. “Oh, yeah. Sorry ’bout that.”
He hung up, gave a quick check of the wiped-clean toes of his boots, and approached the love seats. As long as he faced the others, they wouldn’t see the blood streaks on the backs of his pant legs.
He said flatly, “What happened to Ida?”
“Okay,” Lorilee said, shouldering her way to the front. “Well, I was stuck at my place last night because the cleaning lady was coming. And then I had to rush out to Pilates and, let’s see, grab an açai bowl for dinner—”
“Lorilee.” Evan told his face to smile but managed only an impatient twitch of the lips. “What happened to Ida?”
“Right. Sorry. So I got back late and found her bleeding on the sidewalk right out front.”
Evan felt his irritation harden into something sharper-edged. “What happened?”
Lorilee’s face broke, an approximation of sobbing. She threw her arms wide. “Can you just hold me?”
Evan said, “No.”
But it was too late. She collapsed into him, crying. Her breasts had about as much give as cannonballs.
Awkwardly he patted her back twice and extracted himself. “What happened?” he asked again.
“She got robbed,” Johnny Middleton said. “That classy necklace she was showing off? A guy clocked her and ripped it off. Sounds like some fucked-up shit, man. If I was there, I woulda…” He made a few choku-zuki punches in the air, his fist position too low and then too high. It looked like semicoordinated flailing. “I mean, who the hell decks a eighty-something-year-old lady?”
“It’s important that we all take proper precautions,” Hugh said. “Until this maniac is caught.”
“Is she at the hospital?” Evan asked.
“She’s back home now,” Hugh said with a paternal nod. “Resting.”
Evan felt that sharp-edged anger shift inside him again and reminded himself that Ida Rosenbaum and her antique jewelry were not his concern. He wouldn’t let anything derail him from the mission objectives.
“Thanks for letting me know,” Evan said. “I’ll keep an eye out.” He backed away toward the elevators, not wanting to expose the bloodstains at his calves.
Everyone was still looking at him. He found himself offering another little wave, a ridiculous flare of the hand that had inexplicably become his trademark.
It wasn’t until the elevator doors closed behind him that he realized he’d been holding his breath.
The instant he’d shut his penthouse door, Evan stripped naked. Using his boots as a tray, he carried his clothes across the great room and laid them before the freestanding fireplace. He fished two steel shanks from the ashes and a scorched watch fob, all that remained of his outfit’s last iteration, and then fired up a trio of cedar logs. Once the flames were sufficiently robust, he fed them the clothing he’d worn to Papazian’s house.
Then he padded down the rear hall to the master suite and scoured himself in the shower. After drying off and stepping into boxer briefs, he went to his dresser.
The top drawer held a stack of unworn 501s on the left and a stack of unworn cargo pants on the right. Each item was folded so crisply that it looked stamped from a mold. After putting on a fresh pair of cargo pants, he donned a V-necked dark gray T-shirt that he peeled from the leftmost of three identical columns housed in the second drawer.
He’d switched around which drawers held which articles of clothing at least a half dozen times over the past year. His brain told him that the compulsion came from seeking maximum efficiency, but his mind sent a different message, that he was enacting the ritual to soothe some part of himself that needed soothing.
He could handle chaos in the world as long as there was order at home.
The closet came next. He removed a new Victorinox watch fob from its packaging and clipped it to his belt loop, then grabbed the top shoe box from the tower in the corner and stepped into a fresh pair of Original S.W.A.T. boots. Ten Woolrich shirts hung from hangers in perfect parallel, as equidistant as the slats in a set of vertical blinds. Careful not to disturb the spacing of the others, he slid free a shirt and pulled it on, the magnetic buttons clapping together.
He exited the closet, stepped into the still-wet shower, and placed his hand on the hot-water lever. A brief delay as it scanned his palm print, and then an electronic hum announced the opening of the door hidden in the wall tiles. It swung inward, differentiating itself from the wall, the lever serving as a handle.
The Vault didn’t look like much.
The four hundred square feet of walled-off storage space was accessible only through the secret door. The unfinished box of a room trapped the night cold. Toward the rear the ceiling crowded down in the shape of the public stairs above that led to the roof.
An armory and a workbench lined the back wall. A sheet-metal desk shaped like an L held a profusion of servers and computer towers. But there seemed to be no monitors.
At least until Evan clicked his keyboard and three of the four walls came to life. The OLED screens, made of meshed glass, were invisible when not animated, clear panes showing nothing but the rough concrete walls behind.
Now they displayed a menu of hacked security feeds from Castle Heights and an abundance of links to federal and state databases. The screens to his left held the status of several of his bank accounts, including the main one, hidden in Luxembourg under the name Z$Q9R#)3 and protected by a password consisting of a forty-word nonsensical sentence. As Orphan X, Evan had been issued enormous sums of money straight off the presses from Treasury. Jack had helped him stash it in numerous accounts in numerous nonreporting countries, buried beneath beaver dams of trusts and shell corporations.
When Evan had operated as Orphan X, it was essential that he be fully funded and fully self-sufficient. His job had been to enter territories the United States could not and commit acts that it would not. He knew the target he was to neutralize and nothing more. The ultimate cutout man, he had no useful information to relinquish if he were captured no matter how enhanced the interrogation got. The very government he served would deny any knowledge of him, leaving him to be tortured in a Third World dungeon or worn to a nub in a hard-labor camp.
By the time he’d bolted from the Program, he’d known where a lot of the bodies were buried; he’d buried most of them himself. If he’d been killed by now, plenty of people at the highest level in D.C. would be able to sleep more soundly.
He let his eyes scan across the digital offerings that wallpapered the Vault.
His e-mail, the.nowhere.man@gmail.com, showed no messages. He and Jack used to communicate inside the Drafts folders, but since Jack’s passing, the e-mail had lain largely dormant.
Evan fired up his hardware and hit the databases, connecting through a four-step process of anonymous proxies and encrypted tunnels. The last step obfuscated any remnant of a digital address that might have remained, hiding Evan’s imprint in a sea of noise, a droplet in the ocean of the Internet.
Michael Papazian had given him the names of those who constituted the money-laundering scheme that Grant Merriweather had been closing in on. Four men, led by David “The Terror” Terzian. Though they kept more hired muscle beneath them, they were the only ones with operational knowledge. The money itself wasn’t generated from drugs or guns. But from gambling. The Terror had been running a hugely profitable underground fighting ring. Bets taken in cash were then mainstreamed through the operation.
Within seconds Evan filled the screens cloaking his walls with criminal histories, rap sheets, case files, investigative trails, court cases, social-media profiles, and related news stories.
Terzian was a burly man, thick with muscle. A close-shaven beard roamed high on his cheeks, crowding within an inch of his eyes. Early photos from his Facebook page showed him to be your basic street soldier—loose plaid shorts, white undershirt, gold-tinted sunglasses, a big cross around his neck. He had AP tattooed by one temple with three attendant teardrops for the enemies he’d dispatched. He liberally flashed gang signs—“OK” thumb circles held against his chest right side up and upside down like German quotation marks.
He and his inner cadre—the three other names Evan had extracted from Papazian—had been investigated for a variety of crimes. Drugs. Extortion. Kidnapping businessmen from the community and ransoming them back to their families in various stages of intactness. Set plays straight out of the Armenian Power playbook.
The gang was a newer addition to L.A.’s underworld, forming in Hollywood, North Hollywood, Burbank, and Glendale during the eighties to offer immigrant students protection against the more established Latino gangs. Strength on the streets eventually meant numbers in the system, Armenian Power gaining a solid foothold within the state prisons.
As Evan scrolled through Terzian’s digital history, he noticed a transformation taking place. Terzian and his cadre began to move into more sophisticated financial crimes. Medicare and mortgage fraud. Debit-card skimming. ID theft. Bank-account-draining scams run on elderly homeowners. Rather than tattoo their flesh, they started to carve it, overlaying lines of ink with scarification. Bringing a more menacing look to softer targets meant tilting the scales even further to their advantage. Wolves roaming among sheep.
A rare conviction had ensnared Terzian two years ago. He’d beaten his girlfriend severely and then forced her to cover her head with a pillowcase when he was home so he wouldn’t have to look at her damaged face. Simple battery, a misdemeanor that carried with it a two-thousand-dollar fine and six months in L.A. County.
To Evan that seemed an exceedingly light punishment.
Since Terzian’s release, records of his activity were sparse. That was presumably when he’d graduated to richer pastures, a new money-laundering scheme that kept him off the radar and returned millions of dollars a month.
Evan was not surprised to find Lorraine Lennox’s name on the byline of several journalism pieces pecking at the edges of Terzian’s domain. Though much of her work was unrelated—a dognapping ring, a secret cabal of unidentified city leaders doing secret-cabal things, the rising risk of shark attacks in Malibu—she had deep-dived into the criminal networks gaining traction in Hollywood. She’d been sniffing around, getting familiar with the topography, which was undoubtedly why Grant had chosen her to receive the cache in the event of his demise.
As Evan closed out the open windows, he did his best not to note how much his processing speed lagged behind Joey’s. Then he clicked to the Google Earth images on the address Papazian had coughed up.
The location was a local TV station abandoned several years ago in the wake of a merger. Buried behind high fences in a run-down part of Hollywood, it was an ideal criminal headquarters. Evan zoomed in on several buildings on the lot, everything looking dusty and disused. Papazian claimed that he was due to report back to the team there after dark tonight, which was when they generally met up.
Evan would get there early to observe. And then approach.
For now his work was done. Which gave him the rest of the morning to relax.
He logged off and exited the Vault, stepping through the shower stall and heading into his bedroom.
A safe distance from his floating bed, he removed his treasonous boots. Then he sat in the middle of the mattress in a slant of morning light, closed his eyes, and focused on his breathing.
The coolness of the air at his nostrils, in his windpipe, filling the crevices of his lungs. The weight of his bones tugging him down. A heightened awareness where the air met his skin, where his skin met the bed.
He’d not yet fully descended into his meditation when an image intruded.
A grown man punching Ida Rosenbaum in the face.
Tearing free a necklace from around her neck.
Her fragile bones striking the sidewalk.
He opened his eyes. Looked at the door.
“Goddamn it,” he said.