The tonnage of Advil in Evan’s system kept the pain in his head to a low roar as he disabled the various front-door locks and pushed into his penthouse. The first thing he saw: dirty plates on the kitchen island. The first thing he smelled: dog. The first thing he heard: pounding footsteps and claws scrabbling across the concrete floor.
He held up a hand as Joey and Dog the dog flew up the hall from the master suite. “Wait, my head’s really—”
But Joey slammed into him with a hug, her cheek pressed to his chest. Despite the thunderous throbbing in his skull, he held her. The dog nudged his wet snout between them until Evan lowered his palm to be nuzzled. Joey’s hair smelled of fresh shampoo, the shaved right side bristling against his chin. Her hands were clamped around the small of his back, ratcheting him tight enough that his bruised ribs ached.
But he didn’t let go.
Not until she shoved him away, wiped her nose, and averted her gleaming green eyes.
“I’m glad to see you, too,” Evan said.
“I’m not glad to see you,” Joey said. “I’m just relieved you didn’t get yourself killed. There’s a difference.”
“I understand.”
She wiped at her nose again. Her face was still flushed. “I tore Bedrosov’s life apart and didn’t find anything else. I think you did it. I think he’s the end of the line.”
The finality seemed to weigh at them both. Was this really the end of the mission? The end of the Nowhere Man?
Evan broke the silence. “Nice work.”
She nodded. “Remember that when you get all anal-retentive about the fact that me and Dog slept in your stupid floating bed.”
“You let the dog—”
Joey held up a finger in warning. “Not a word. Except thank you.”
Evan clenched his jaw. “Thank you.”
“You look like shit. How’s your concussion?”
“Okay.”
“Good. It’s over. Which means you do nothing now but rest. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Joey snapped her fingers, and Dog trotted over to her side. “So me and this stupid dog you stuck me with better get out of here before anyone notices. Every time I took him out to go potty, we had to Scooby-Doo our way around that tight-ass HOA guy with the Where’s Waldo? glasses.”
“I have no idea what any of that means.”
Already she was out the door, her voice wafting back. “You need a shower. And shave already. You look like a hobo. A concussed hobo.”
The door closed.
He stood a moment in the quiet, trying not to let the crusted plates on the counter and the dog hair on the floor aggravate him. What a different way to come home. Footsteps, a hug, a warm muzzle in the palm.
Maybe his new life could include these things.
He took Joey’s advice, showering, shaving, and then dressing in his own clothes. The bedsheets were swirled atop the mattress and flecked with dog hair. The floor was a mess. A half-drunk glass of OJ had left a ring on the nightstand.
All the imperfections felt overwhelming, scratching at his focus, and he felt a compulsion to clean and order, to curate the environment until it was pleasing to his eye. He entered the Vault and checked the corner where Dog had relieved himself. Joey had cleaned that up at least, though various plates were scattered across the L-shaped table. And crumbs. Was it that hard to position one’s mouth over a plate while eating?
He supposed he shouldn’t complain. He was finished now, with nothing ahead on the calendar but getting Max back to his life and doing some light cleaning.
He glanced up at the OLED screen and froze, his compulsion vanishing.
His e-mail, the.nowhere.man@gmail.com, showed a new message.
A rarity.
He glanced over at Vera II in her dish of cobalt pebbles. She, too, seemed surprised by the e-mail.
He moused over and clicked.
No sender. No subject line.
It contained nothing but a single phone number. A code word. And an extension.
(202) 456-1414. Dark Road. 32.
The main switchboard for the West Wing and the means to get directly through to the Oval Office.
Evan was not a friend to the Oval Office, nor was it a friend to him.
Especially recently.
He looked at Vera II. “What do you think?”
She exuded oxygen and an air of skepticism.
He said, “Me, too.”
He wondered why the hell President Donahue-Carr would want to talk to him and concluded it was not for anything good. He just hoped that whatever complications arose wouldn’t get between him and his retirement. One thing was certain: He needed to find out as soon as possible.
He dug a Pelican case from the corner of the Vault and headed to the parking level beneath the building.
Joey had returned his Ford F-150 pickup to his spot beneath Castle Heights. When he opened the driver’s door, In-N-Out wrappers dribbled out onto his boot, a booby trap too perfectly aggravating not to have been devised.
He ensconced himself behind the wheel and dug for the RoamZone in the center console. The screen showed he’d missed a call.
An international number starting with 54, the country code of Argentina.
No message.
Puzzled, Evan stared at the screen. Twice before he’d received wrong-number calls, consumers looking to purchase refill vacuum bags. But perhaps the Oval Office had managed to run down this number and used it to attempt a second outreach. Had this been an attempted contact routed through a U.S. embassy? That didn’t seem to make sense.
He hit REDIAL.
The call dumped straight into voice mail. A feminine voice, slightly throaty, one he didn’t recognize. A mature woman, late fifties, maybe sixty. She spoke unaccented English: You’ve reached my voice mail. Leave a message, or call back later, or do whatever else you’d like to do.
She sounded more like a seeker of vacuum bags than a trained operative. Wrong number, then.
He hung up. Examined the RoamZone.
It was loaded with a preposterous amount of encryption, but if he was going to reach out to 1600 Penn, he’d have to take measures beyond the merely paranoid.
He slid the SIM card out, snapped it in two, and slotted in a virgin one. Pairing his laptop with his phone for a secure Internet connection, he hopped online and moved the phone service where he parked the number from a company in Reykjavík to one in Maracay.
Then he drove up the ramp, through the porte cochere, and got on the 60 Freeway heading east.
For two hours and forty-three minutes, he beelined it into the platter of the Mojave. At one point the throbbing in his head intensified to the point where he thought he might have to pull over, but then it subsided. He forged on, finally veering off at a random spot just shy of the Joshua Tree National Park. His window was down, the cool air slicing through his shirt. The headlight beams swept across stunted trees and jutting slabs of stone, a postapocalyptic landscape. He cut the engine, grabbed the Pelican case, and climbed out.
The moon was shining in force, caught in a haze of stars. A cicada buzz filled the air.
Evan took a knee over the Pelican case, ignoring the brief spell of dizziness. From the top he slid up a yagi directional antenna and aimed it at a distant cell tower. Then he accordioned out a small tripod and attached it to the case top, using an SMA connector and a small omni stubby antenna. He waited, crouched over the tight assemblage of equipment as if it were a campfire. The tiny makeshift GSM base station dodged all authentication between itself and the nearest cell tower, but it was now participating fully in the network.
His own personal rogue cell site.
Completely untraceable.
Only now did he thumb on his RoamZone’s Wi-Fi hot spot, joining the LTE network.
He dialed.
When the switchboard operator picked up, he said, “Dark Road.”
Then he punched in the extension.
He waited, the old-fashioned ring loud in his ear.
A moment later the president of the United States picked up.
Silence crackled over the line. A tarantula lumbered by, brushing the toe of Evan’s boot.
At last she said, “X?”
Victoria Donahue-Carr had ascended to the throne after Evan had removed her predecessor in creative fashion. He’d always thought that she seemed principled, or at least as principled as a politician might be.
He waited. The RoamZone’s sound filters would drown out the cicadas along with any background noise. He fed her the silence some more.
She said, “I’m interested in a face-to-face.”
He said, “No.”
“At a minimum I require a live video feed. Audio can be replicated, synthesized. How am I supposed to know you’re you?”
He said, “You’re not.”
“We’d need to discuss terms, of course, but I’m confident we can reach an arrangement.”
“I don’t respond to euphemisms.”
“An informal pardon,” she said quickly. “I assume you don’t want to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.”
Her words caught him completely by surprise. Here he was on the verge of walking away from the demands of being the Nowhere Man, and the offer had materialized out of the thin desert air, his deepest wish made manifest. How surreal that hours ago he’d been locked inside 121 B-Pod of the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, and now here he was conversing with the leader of the free world about his future. He took a moment to gather himself. He had to get to Max and close out the mission. Then he’d be ready to walk away.
“I’m not looking over my shoulder,” he said. “Are you?”
The silence lasted a bit longer this time.
“Think about it,” she said. “You know how to reach me.”
He cut the connection. Broke down the gear and nestled it back into the black foam of the Pelican case. Removed the chip from his RoamZone, crushed it under his heel, and slid in a new one.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, he fired up his laptop once more and moved the phone-number hosting service from Maracay to an outfit in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Paranoia was an Orphan’s best friend.
He rubbed his eyes, trying to take in the turn of events that had for once proved fortuitous.
An informal pardon from the president of the United States. A quiet life tending his living wall, sipping chilled vodka, and meditating. Maybe at some point, he could even see about rehabilitating his relationship with Mia. And Peter.
He was all clear. Nothing ahead but the unbroken horizon, the faintest outline of shapes to be colored in. Nothing between him and freedom but wrapping up the mission with Max and bringing his old life to a close.
The truck bounced across the cracked earth of the desert for a time before rumbling onto a paved road. Several kilometers later he merged onto the freeway and blended into the river of lights flowing toward Los Angeles, just another guy in another truck beneath the endless night sky.