Out of the Dark

READ THE PROLOGUE AND THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS

 

PROLOGUE: PERENNIAL RAIN

Evan is nineteen, fresh off the plane, trained up, mission-ready. And yet untested.

His first assignment as Orphan X.

He adjusts rapidly to this foreign place, a city with drizzly rain, imperious ministry buildings, and men who kiss on both cheeks.

His backstop is impeccable, endorsed by visas, a well-stamped passport, verifiable previous addresses, and phone numbers that ring to strategically placed responders. Jack, his handler and surrogate father, has built for him a suitably banal operational alias—enterprising young Ontarian, recently separated from his equally young wife, eager to shepherd his family’s home-siding business into territories unknown. He and Jack worked the identity, kneading it like dough, until Evan was aligned with it so thoroughly that he actually felt the sting of his domestic setback and the fire of ambition to expand into this brave new market. Evan has learned not to act but to live his cover. And he does his best to stash away the part of him that does not believe his alias until the point at which he will require it.

He moves frequently around this gray city to prevent degradation of cover. Now and then in the streets, he comes across others his age. They seem like creatures of a different species. They don backpacks and trickle in and out of hostels, drunkenly recounting school tales in foreign tongues. As always, he remains separate—from them and everyone else. The United States has no footprints in this country. There will be no rolling-car meetings, no physical contacts from an embassy. If he fails, he will expire in a cold prison, alone and forgotten, after decades of suffering. That is, if he’s not fortunate enough to be executed.

One night he is meditating on a threadbare blanket in a hotel seemingly as old as the country itself when the mustard-yellow rotary phone on the nightstand gives off a piercing ring.

It is Jack. “May I speak to Frederick?” he says.

“There is no one here by that name,” Evan says, and hangs up.

Immediately he fires up his laptop and pirates Internet from the travel agency across the avenue. Logging in to a specified e-mail account, he checks the Drafts folder.

Sure enough, there’s an unsent message.

Two words: “Package waiting.” And an address near the outskirts of the city. Nothing more.

He types beneath: “Is it a weapon?”

Hits save.

A moment later the draft updates: “You’re the weapon. Everything else is an implement.”

Even from across an ocean, Jack casts arcane pearls of wisdom—part koan, part war slogan, all pedagogy.

Evan logs off. Because they communicated within a saved message inside a single account, not a word has been transmitted over the Internet, where it could be detected or captured.

On his way out of the rented room, Evan freezes, hand wrapped around the wobbly doorknob. He has been tasked. Once he goes through that door, it is official. Seven years of training has brought him to this moment. His body is gripped by a comprehensive, bone-crushing fear. He doesn’t want to die. Doesn’t want to crack rocks and eat goulash in some labor camp for the rest of his days. Doesn’t want his last moments to be the pressure of a Tokarev nine-mil at the base of his skull and the taste of copper. The perennial rain streaks the window, a tap-tap-tapping on his nerves. He’s sweated through his shirt, and yet the tinny doorknob remains cool beneath his palm.

Like a prayer, he hears Jack’s words in his ear as if he were right beside him: Envision someone else, someone better than you. Stronger. Smarter. Tougher. Then do what that guy would do.

“Act like who you want to be,” Evan tells the stale air of the hotel. He vows to leave his fear behind him in that room. Forever.

He opens the door and steps through.

The bus out of the city reeks of body odor and sweet tobacco. Sitting in the back, Evan applies a thin sheen of superglue to his fingertips to avoid leaving prints. He prefers this to gloves because it looks less conspicuous and allows him better tactile sensation.

Uneven asphalt erodes into a winding dirt road carved into a mountainside. Eastern Bloc municipal rigor dissolves into hamlets in shambles. Bedsheets flap in the wind. Buildings lean crookedly. Riding a wet gust, a muezzin’s call to prayer. It is as though they have traversed not communities but continents.

The address belongs to a walk-up apartment overlooking a cart- congested road. Evan mounts the curved stucco staircase, padding across blue-and-white Turkish tile, and knocks on a giant arched door, its wood embellished with rusting metal straps. It creaks open grandly to reveal a round man in loose-fitting clothes of indeterminate style.

“Ah,” he says, wireless spectacles glinting. “I trust your journey was safe?” A sweeping gesture of arm and draped sleeve accompanies his softly accented English. “Come in.”

The ceiling is high, churchlike. A Makarov pistol rests in plain view on top of a television with rabbit-ear antennae. The man and Evan pass through clattering bead curtains into a cramped kitchen and sit before shallow teak bowls filled with figs, dried fruits, and nuts.

The man produces a small plastic bag with eyes only Magic Markered on the label in Cyrillic. Inside the bag is a single bullet casing. Evan examines it through the plastic. A copper-washed steel cartridge from a 7.62 × 54mmR round.

It dawns on him that this shell holds a fingerprint, that it is to be left behind to direct blame elsewhere for what Evan will be instructed to do.

He thanks the man and moves to rise, but the man reaches across the table, wraps his brown fingers around Evan’s wrist. “What you hold in your hands is dangerous beyond what you can imagine. Be careful, my friend. It is an unsafe world.”

The next morning Evan takes to the city neighborhoods he has been scrupulously exploring for the past few weeks. He knows where to make inquiries, and these inquiries land him in the back of an abandoned textile factory, speaking to a trim little Estonian over an industrial weaving loom on which Sovietski rifles are laid out at fastidious intervals.

The preserved shell in Evan’s pocket requires a round that fits a limited range of guns. He looks over the Warsaw Pact offerings, spots a surplused-out Mosin-Nagant with a PSO-1 scope. He points, and the Estonian, using a clean gun cloth, presents it to him. As he observes Evan examining the Russian sniper rifle, his smile borders on the lascivious.

The gun will give Evan a two-inch grouping at a hundred meters, which is all he needs, but he affects a negotiator’s displeasure. “Not a world-class rifle.”

The man folds his soft pink fingers. “It is not as though you are going to the National Matches at Camp Perry.”

Evan notes the reference, tailored for him, a North American buyer. He lifts a wary eye from the scope, regards the little man in his ridiculous suit and pocket square.

The Estonian adjusts his tie, dips his baby-smooth chin toward the rifle. “And besides,” he says, “three million dead Germans can’t be wrong.”

“Alvar?” A weak feminine voice turns Evan’s head.

A beautiful young girl, maybe fifteen, stands in the office doorway, naked save for a ratty blanket drawn across her shoulders. Her eyes sunken and rimmed black. Bones pronounced beneath her skin. Behind her, Evan spots a filthy mattress on the floor and a metal cup and plate.

“I’m hungry,” she says.

Evan catches her meaning through his grasp of Russian, though he presumes she is speaking Ukrainian. He makes a note to add this linguistic arrow to his Indo-European quiver.

The Estonian seethes, an abrupt break in his middle-management demeanor. “Back in your fucking bedroom. I told you never to come out when I am conducting business.”

She doesn’t so much retreat as fade back into the office.

Evan hefts the rifle, as if he will be paying by the ounce. He flicks his head toward the closed door. “Looks like she keeps you busy.”

Alvar grins, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “You have no idea, my friend.”

To the side a pallet stacked with crates of frag grenades peeks out from beneath a draped curtain. The Estonian notices Evan noticing them.

“My friend, 1997 has proven good to me,” he says. “It is the Wild West here now. Orders coming in faster than I can fill them. High quantity now. These are the kinds of movers who move nations.”

“For which side?” Evan asks.

The man laughs. “There are no sides. Only money.” At this prompt a wad of bills changes hands.

Seventy-two hours later, Evan finds himself in the sewer beneath a thorough-fare, stooped in the dripping humidity, Mosin-Nagant in hand. He stands on the concrete platform above a river of sludge, waiting. The eye-level drainage grate set into the curb grants him a good head-on vantage down the length of the boulevard. In the distance, squawks from mounted speakers and the roar of an erupting crowd. The parade drawing nearer.

Various coded dispatches from Jack have filled in some of the blanks. The target: a hawkish foreign minister gaining power by the day, vocal about nuclear development. Breathing the swamplike air, Evan waits. A cheer emanates from the street above him. He lifts the rifle, the tip inches from the mouth of the curb inlet, and clarifies his view, allowing the scope to become his world.

Children held aloft on shoulders laugh and clap. On the banked curve of visible street, sawhorses hold back the masses. Miniature flags flicker before faces like swarming insects.

The front of the processional, a phalanx of armored SUVs, turns into view several hundred meters away. The vehicles head up the stretch of asphalt toward Evan. His view is slightly offset from each windshield as it flashes in the muted midday sun.

Evan aligns himself with the rifle to reduce recoil and allow for quick repeatability if he has to cycle a second shot. He calculates the mechanical offset—the one-and-seven-eighths measurement between the crosshairs and bore axis. Then he adjusts the intersection point for ninety meters, the spot where the vehicle spacing is optimal for the angle he requires. His field of view will diminish the closer the car gets. If the target passes the mark, his shot will grow more difficult by the meter. It must be ninety meters—no more, no less.

He sets himself in position. Aside from the breath cooling his pursed lips, he is still.

At once, looming large in the scope, is the target. A tall, balding man with a dignified bearing, lean in a dark suit, surrounded by various generals in full regalia and his wife in a flowy aubergine dress. Waving to the crowd, they are clustered in an open boat of a vehicle that brings to mind the Popemobile.

One hundred ten meters. One hundred.

There is a problem.

The foreign minister’s wife turns to face the opposite side of the street, completely blocking Evan’s view. Her head right in front of her husband’s.

Ninety-five meters.

Panic. In a split second, Evan falls apart and regroups.

If he has to go through her, it’s better to penetrate the eye socket so there’s only one chance for the skull to deflect the round. Evan lays the crosshairs directly on her pupil.

Ninety-three.

He takes the slack out of the two-stage trigger, breathes breath number one. He is looking directly into her eye, into her. Mascara on the curled lashes, joy crinkling the upper lid. She is not part of the mission. Should he disregard her as collateral damage? In the corridors of his mind, Evan listens for Jack but hears nothing aside from the hiss of passing tires and the frenzied stir of the crowd.

Second breath. Exhale. The final half breath before the shot.

If he waits any longer, a host of new problems will present themselves. A one-millimeter movement of his finger pad gets it done.

Inconveniently, Jack’s voice announces itself now, a whisper in his ear: The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.

The vehicle coasts forward. It is on the X. The dark dot of her pupil, the minister’s head pulling back, aligning perfectly behind her. Now.

And then they are past.

Evan discards the half breath. Sweat stings his eyes. His mind races, recalculating, adjusting intersection points, dialing back the magnification, faces zooming and shrinking as he fights to hold the mission together in the circle of the scope. As he’s feared, his field of view diminishes, complications stacking on top of complications.

He breathes. Focuses.

Slack out of the trigger. Mag dialing back, back. There will be a moment, one moment, to get it done right and clean, and when it presents itself, he will be ready.

The generals shuffle around the wife, smiling beneath mustaches, the minister’s face popping in and out of view, there and then gone. Seventy-five meters now, the preceding vehicle squeezing the angle tighter and tighter, diminishing it to a slice.

The universe is reduced to the tunnel of the scope. There is nothing else, not even breath. The wife turns, her sturdy bosom filling the vantage, the minister drifting again behind her. Evan waits for her arm to rise for another wave to the crowd, and at last it does, a sheet of cloth draped wing-like beneath her arm. The minister is invisible behind it, but Evan has tracked his movement, anticipates how far to lead him.

He exhales slow and steady, then pulls. The bullet punches through the gauzy cloth an inch and a half below the wife’s straightened elbow.

Evan’s hands move of their own volition, manipulating the bolt for a follow-up shot, the shell spinning free and clattering at his feet. But there will be no need for a second bullet. The foreign minister leans propped against two of the generals, his eyes vacant, one cheek dimpled by a hole the size of a thumb. His wife’s mouth is stretched wide and trembling in a scream, but Evan can hear nothing over the eruption of the crowd.

He drops the weapon into the stream of passing waste below. After pocketing the kill brass, he takes out the plastic bag and shakes onto the dank ledge the copper-washed steel shell case with its invisible fingerprint, a fingerprint that he now knows belongs to a Chechen rebel of some reputation.

They will search the crowd, the surrounding buildings, the parked vehicles before they will think to look beneath the earth, but nonetheless Evan runs to his exit point and emerges through a manhole cover into a park five blocks north. He walks three blocks east, away from the quickening commotion, and boards a bus. A few klicks later, he exits, flips his reversible jacket inside out, and zigzags the city, the spreading news on the lips of passersby, wafting in snatches from café tables, blaring from car radios.

Once he’s safely back in his rented room, he logs in to the e-mail account and creates a new saved message consisting of a single word: “Neutralized.”

A moment later the draft updates: “Close the operation.”

Evan stares at the words, feeling the glow of emotion beneath his face. He runs a hand over his short hair, and his palm comes away damp with perspiration. He stands up, walks away from the laptop, walks back. Types: “Request phone contact.”

He hits refresh. Hits it again. Nothing. Jack is thinking it over.

Seventeen anxious hours later, Evan finally receives a response, and two hours after that he is standing at the specified cross street, having reached Jack at a pay phone from a pay phone. He’s caught Jack on the front edge of an East Coast morning, though he seems as alert as ever, his station-agent’s mind shaping his responses into neat packets of words, articulate silences, loaded intonations.

“All he did is provide a cartridge case,” Evan says. Jack says, “That’s all he did of which you’re aware.” “He seems loyal. An asset.”

“Don’t believe everything you think.”

The breeze blows flecks of moisture into Evan’s face, and he hunches into the collar of his jacket, turning this way and that, watching pedestrians, vehicles, the windows of the towering, stone-faced buildings all around.

“He’s not a friend to us,” Jack says. “He’s a friend to everyone. A businessman. He doesn’t just sell cartridge cases with fingerprints. He moves weaponry.”

“Weaponry?”

“Fissile material. Highest bidder. He is a complicating factor in our work there. That has to be enough for you.”

“What about the Sixth Commandment?” Evan says, anger creeping into his voice. “ ‘Question orders.’ ”

“You’ve questioned them,” Jack says. “Now execute them. Close the operation. Your friend and anyone else you might have used. This cannot— will not—come back on us.”

The steady hum of a dial tone follows.

Evan wanders the neighborhood until he comes upon a GAZ Volga, a four-door sedan as common on these streets as a Chrysler in Detroit. He hot-wires it and leaves the city, driving into a bruise-colored sunset. He parks several blocks from the apartment with the curved stucco stair- case and then closes the distance under cover of the rapidly falling night. Only once he’s reached the blue-and-white Turkish tiles does he remove his pick set. The rusting lock on the arched wooden door gives itself up within seconds.

Evan steals silently across the dark front room with its vaulted ceiling. The Makarov pistol remains in its place, resting atop the antique television. It is loaded.

In the rear of the apartment, the kitchen is lit, and carrying through the beaded curtain is the static-filled sound of an animated radio announcer rattling on in a language with which Evan is unfamiliar. Tajik? Bukhori?

How little he knows of this life he is about to extinguish.

The hanging beads slice his view into vertical slats. The man sits at the small chipped table, facing away, spooning soup from a bowl. An old-fashioned radio rests on the counter beside a hot plate. A prosaic little portrait: Man Eating Dinner Alone.

Evan steps through the curtain, the clattering beads announcing his presence. The man turns and looks back through his wireless spectacles. There is a moment of recognition, and then the lines of his face contract in sorrow. There is no anger or fear—only sadness. He nods once and turns slowly back to his soup.

Evan shoots him through the back of the head.

As the man tilts forward, his chair slides back a few inches and his body remains resting there, chest to the table’s edge, face in the soup.

Evan lifts him out of the soup, upright into the chair, and cleans his face as best he can. His left eye is gone, and part of his forehead. As Evan returns the dish towel to the counter, he comes upon a crude clay ashtray, shaped by a child’s hand.

He vomits into the sink.

After, he finds a bottle of bleach in a cabinet and sloshes it into the drain.

As he exits onto the dark staircase, he becomes aware of a man easing up the stairs, drawn perhaps by the sound of the gunshot. The man’s left fist gleams even in the shadow.

They freeze midway down the stairs.

The man is all dark silhouette to Evan, just as Evan is to him. The man’s head dips, orienting on the pistol in Evan’s hand. The man lowers his own gun, opens his other palm in a show of harmlessness, and shakes his head. Evan nods and brushes past him.

Ten minutes later, halfway back to the city, his knotted chest still prevents him from drawing full breaths.

His next stop is the abandoned textile factory. As he enters, darting through the warren of giant fabric rolls, the trim Estonian appears suddenly. He holds a no-shit Kalashnikov, its curved magazine protruding like a tusk. Evan has brought a pistol to an AK-47 fight. They are stand- ing by the industrial weaving loom where they met before.

The Estonian cocks his head with benign curiosity, but his grip stays firm on the assault rifle, his small eyes hard like pebbles. Even at this hour, roused from sleep, he wears neatly pressed trousers and a tailored shirt, though one flap remains untucked. The door to the office behind him is closed, but a smudged glow illuminates the fogged glass of the window.

The men square off in an uneasy truce, not aiming their weapons but not putting them away either.

“I need your help,” Evan says. Slowly, cautiously, he raises the Makarov, then fiddles with the slide. “It keeps jamming.”

The Estonian’s smile appears, a neat arc sliced through soft pink cheeks. “That is because you did not buy it from me.” He reaches for the gun. “But seriously, this is a statistical near impossibility. Makarovs do not jam.”

Evan knows this, but it was the only excuse he could fabricate in the moment.

The Estonian shakes his hand impatiently. Beneath his other elbow, the muzzle of the AK nudges forward. “Well?”

Evan is forced to relinquish the pistol.

The Estonian takes it, then sets down his own weapon on the loom. He drops the magazine, examines it, then grins at Evan’s ignorance. “The underside of the magazine feed lip has a burr from grinding on the clearance.” With the toe of his loafer, he hooks a cardboard box and tugs it out from beneath the loom. Digging through the contents, he produces a new mag- azine, jams it home, and hands the pistol back to Evan.

“I’m sorry,” Evan says, and shoots the man through the chest.

The Estonian falls back, his palms slapping the concrete. He is trembling, his arms wobbling violently. A cough leaves a coat of fine spittle on his blue lips. His pupils track up in little jerks, find Evan. Never has Evan seen such terror in another person’s face.

Evan crouches, takes his manicured hand. The nails are clean and cut short. The Estonian clutches Evan’s fingers, grips his forearm with his other hand, pulls him closer. The partial embrace in another context would be affectionate. Perhaps it is even now. Evan lowers him gently to the floor, cradling his head so it doesn’t strike the concrete. He holds the man’s hand until it goes limp.

Then he rises, walks back to the humble office, and opens the door. The girl, bloody-lipped and ashen, lies balled up on the mattress. A heroin kit rests on a metal folding chair. She is naked, spotted with bruises, skin tented across bones. Her left shoulder looks dislocated. It is impossible that she would not have heard the gunshot.

On a metal desk across from the mattress, a cigar box brims with bills. Evan picks it up, sets it on the floor by her thin arm. “You’re free to go now,” he says.

She rolls her eyes languidly toward him. “Where?” she says. He leaves her there with the box full of cash.

That night he beds down at a different hotel, logging in to e-mail and leaving a draft for Jack. “Operation closed.”

He checks departure times out of the second-largest airport of the neighboring country. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

 

CHAPTER 1

Face in the Crowd

A man melted into the throng of tourists gathered along the E Street walkway. He was neither tall nor short, muscle-bound nor skinny. Just an average guy, not too handsome.

A Washington Nationals baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes to thwart the security cameras. He’d shoved rolls of dental cotton above his molars to alter his facial structure and thwart the biometrics software that the Secret Service ran on every face in the crowd. He wore fitted clothing that showed the contours of his body, no out-of-season overcoat that might conceal gear or weaponry and draw unwanted focus.

He had flown to D.C. from the West Coast—as he had the time before and the time before that—under a passport in another name. He’d rented a car using a different identity and checked in to a hotel using a third.

He slurped the Big Gulp he’d picked up at 7-Eleven, another prop to augment the T-shirt from the National Air and Space Museum and the Clarks walking shoes he’d bought last week and tumbled in the dryer with dirty rags so they’d look broken in. The soda tasted like what it was, sugar soaked in corn syrup, and he wondered why people willingly put this type of fuel through their system.

He knew which visual triggers to avoid; he wasn’t sweating and was careful to make no nervous movements—no protective hunching of the shoulders or jittering from foot to foot. He didn’t carry a bag or a backpack and he kept his hands out of his pockets.

Evan Smoak knew the Secret Service protocols well.

He’d spent the past half year assembling intel piece by piece and tiling it into a larger mosaic. He was nearing the final stages of general reconnaissance. It was time to get down to mission planning. He set his hands on the bars of the eight-foot-high gates. The trees of the South Lawn formed a funnel leading to the White House, which would have been a fine metaphor for Evan’s own narrowed focus if he were the type to bother with metaphors.

Setting his Big Gulp on the pavement, he raised the camera dangling around his neck and pretended to fuss with it. In order to slip it between the bars of the fence, he had to remove the hood from the 18-200mm Nikkor lens. When he put his eye to the viewfinder, a zoomed-in image of the White House’s south side loomed unobstructed.

Lost in a mob of tourists taking pictures, he let the lens pick across the grounds. The obstacles were impressive.

Strategically positioned steel bollards dotted the perimeter.

Subterranean beams waited to thrust up from the earth at the slightest provocation.

Ten feet back from the fence line, ground sensors and high-res surveillance cameras lay in wait, ready to capture any flicker of movement or tremble of the earth on the wrong side of the bars.

Uniformed Division officers stood “at” high-visibility posts at intervals across the terrain, backed by an emergency-response team equipped with FN P90 submachine guns. In keeping with Secret Service stereotypes, the agents wore Wiley X sunglasses, but the shades had a strategic advantage as well: A would-be assailant could never be sure precisely where they were looking. The high-visibility posts kept people in the crowd from seeing all the security measures they were supposed to miss.

At the southwest gate, a pair of Belgian Malinois commanded a concrete apron that was thermoelectrically cooled so it wouldn’t burn their paws in the summer heat. They sniffed all incoming vehicles for explosives. They were also cross-trained to attack in the event a fence jumper made it over the spikes. If there were worse places to wind up than in the jaws of a seventy-five-pound Malinois, Evan wasn’t sure where they were. The dogs were bona fide assaulters, way above their weight class; SEAL Team Six had gone so far as to parachute into the Abbottabad compound with a specimen of the breed.

Next Evan swiveled the camera to the White House itself. The semicircular portico of the south side, like the rest of the building’s exterior, was outfitted with infrared detectors and audio sensors, all of them monitored 24/7 by on-site nerve centers as well as by the Joint Operations Center in the Secret Service headquarters a mile to the east.

Agents at JOC additionally monitored radar screens that showed every plane entering the surrounding airspace. They maintained an around-the-clock interface with the Federal Aviation Adminis- tration and the control tower at Reagan National Airport. If a drone or a superhuman pilot managed to steer through the gauntlet of early warning mechanisms, an air defense system loaded with FIM-92 Stinger missiles was hard-mounted to the White House itself, standing by for dynamic air interception.

Evan tilted the zoom lens up to the roof above the Truman Bal-cony. A designated marksman with a Stoner SR-16 rifle held a permanent position providing overwatch for the south lawn, where enormous red coasters marked the landing zone for Marine One, the presidential helicopter. Countersnipers patrolled the roof toting .300 Win Mags, good to fifteen hundred meters out, which created a protective dome stretching a mile in every direction.

It wouldn’t merely be tough to reach the White House. It would be impossible.

Not that it got easier if some lucky soul managed to get to the building’s threshold.

Between metal detectors, guard stations, and magnetometer wands, nothing entered the White House that hadn’t been painstakingly screened. Not a single one of the million pieces of annual incoming mail. Not even the air itself. Electronic noses at all entrances detected the faintest signature of airborne pathogens, dangerous gases, or any other ill wind blowing no good. The Technical Security Division ran daily sweeps on every room, checking for weaponized viruses, bacteria, radioactivity, explosive residue, and contaminants of a more exotic stripe.

Even if by a miracle someone was able to actually penetrate the most secure building on earth, the White House was equipped with further contingencies yet. The interior hid not just countless panic buttons, alarms, and safe rooms but also multiple emergency escape routes, including a ten-foot-wide tunnel that burrowed beneath East Executive Avenue NW into the basement of the Treasury Department across the street.

Lowering the camera, Evan drew back from the reinforced steel bars and let out an undetectable sigh.

Killing the president was going to be a lot of work.

 

CHAPTER 2

An Absence of Light

Orphan X.

That was Evan’s designation, bestowed upon him at the age of twelve when he’d been yanked out of a foster home and brought up in a full-deniability program buried deep inside the Department of Defense. It wasn’t just a black program; it was full dark. You could stare right at it and comprehend nothing but an absence of light.

About a decade ago, the inevitable ambiguities of the operations Evan was tasked with had reached a tipping point. So he he’d fled the Orphan Program and blipped off the radar.

He’d kept the vast resources he had accrued as a black operator and the skills embedded in his muscle memory. But he’d also kept the bearings of his moral compass that had, despite the blood he’d spilled across six continents, stubbornly refused to be shattered.

Now he was the Nowhere Man, lending his services to the truly desperate, to people who had nowhere else to turn. He’d been content to leave the past in the past. Even within the intel community, the Program had remained largely unknown. Evan’s code name, Orphan X, was dismissed as a figure of myth or an urban legend. Few people knew who Evan was or what he’d done.

Unfortunately, one of them happened to be the president of the United States.

Jonathan Bennett had been the undersecretary of defense for policy at the Department of Defense during Evan’s incipient years in the Program. Through a trickle-down system designed to maximize plausible deniability, Bennett had given the mission orders. Evan had been the most effective operator on Bennett’s watch, killing enough declared enemies of the state to fill a graveyard. Evan knew where the bodies were buried; he’d put them in the ground.

Years later, when Bennett had become president, he’d set about erasing any record of the constitutionally questionable program he’d overseen. Through sweat, blood, and hard work, Evan had discovered that Bennett was particularly obsessed with eradicating any trace of the 1997 mission.

Which put Evan at the top of the hit list.

He didn’t know why the mission held a special place in Bennett’s paranoiac heart or why that assassination in that distant gray city was relevant today. On that cold fatal morning, what mysteries had lingered outside the periphery of Evan’s scope? In pulling the trigger, had he toppled a domino, sparking a chain reaction with momentous consequences? Or in the dankness of that sewer, had he waded into something intimate, putting himself in the crosshairs of a personal vendetta? He didn’t have any answers.

Only that Bennett wanted him eliminated.

And that he, in turn, wanted to eliminate Bennett.

But Evan’s motives weren’t merely self-protective. Bennett was morally corrupt in the most profound sense, a rot seeping down through the chain of command. From the highest office, he had ordered the deaths of a number of Orphans, executing those who, under his tenure, had risked their lives for their country. And he’d had someone else killed as well, a man so steadfast and true that Evan had come to view him as a father.

That had been a miscalculation.

Which was why Evan was here now, pressed against the White House gates with a gaggle of tourists in the sticky June heat, waiting for a sign of the Man.

The woman to Evan’s side rose onto tiptoes, funneling her children before her to provide them a better view. “Look! I think that’s him! I think he’s coming!” She swatted her eldest on the arm. “Close out that Pokémon nonsense and take some pictures for your Instagram.”

Evan lowered the camera and retrieved his Big Gulp as the phalanx of vehicles rolled into sight, tailing down the circular drive as they departed the West Wing. The motorcade was the so-called informal package, eight Secret Service G-rides and three indistinguishable presidential limos. The three limos forced potential assassins to play a shell game when choosing a target; they never knew for sure which one the president was riding in. The decoys pulled double-duty as backup vehicles in the event of an attack.

As the convoy neared the South Lawn, it halted abruptly.

Excitement flickered in Evan’s chest, the lick of a cool flame. Was this the opportunity he’d been waiting on for 237 surveillance hours spread over the past six months?

He lifted the camera again in time to see an aide jog out from the edge of the Rose Garden, a soft-sided leather briefcase in hand. The trees cut visibility, the aide flickering in and out of view as he neared the motorcade. To keep the aide in sight, Evan threaded through the crowd along the gate.

The aide halted by the middle limousine, barely visible between the trees. The door popped open, just barely, and the aide slid the briefcase through the tiny gap.

The door closed once wrote.

The episode could have been witnessed by only a dozen people standing in the right vantage point along the gate.

It was indeed the break Evan had waited half a year for. Bennett had shown his hand.

But because the president was in the middle limo now, that didn’t mean he’d be in the middle limo next time. Or that the limos drove in the same order each time.

Evan’s mind raced, grasping for variables.

The president might not have a favorite presidential limousine.

But he’d almost certainly have a favorite driver.

Evan had to watch not the limos, but the drivers.

Or more precisely—since the drivers were hidden behind tinted windows in identical vehicles—Evan had to watch how the drivers drove, identifying any distinctive feature of how the middle wheelman commanded his vehicle.

He locked his primary attention on the central limo while also letting his vision widen to encompass the other two. The sun beat at the side of his neck. The crowd jostled with anticipation, the air smelling of Coppertone and deodorant. The Instagram kid whined that he was starving and sagged as though he’d misplaced his spine.

Evan maintained perfect focus.

As the convoy started up again, the end vehicles turned their wheels before the vehicles moved, rotating them in place on the asphalt while the limos were still at rest. But the middle driver turned the wheels only as he coasted forward, providing a smoother ride for the president.

A poker tell.

If Evan were one to smile, he would have now.

Instagram Mom tugged her kid upright. “Stand up, Cameron.

The president’s coming this way.”

As the convoy banked around the curved drive, Evan put himself on the move, carving not too briskly through the onlookers, heading to where E Street intersected with East Executive Avenue.

President Bennett preferred this route, as it allowed him to avoid Pennsylvania Avenue, which ran across the front of the White House and provided a view of Lafayette Square, where an ever-growing mass of protesters gathered to call for his impeachment. They wielded signs and banners decrying a host of constitutional violations. Contravening the Arms Export Control Act. Funneling money and weapons illicitly to foreign fighters. Initiating widespread NSA surveillance of Americans. Monitoring domestic political factions that opposed him. Transgressing international conventions. Providing special access to defense contractors. Circumventing Congress. Usurping judicial powers.

But Bennett had masterfully erected a force field around his administration, fogging transparency sufficiently to hold his detractors at bay.

Evan was not interested in politics. Bennett’s transgressions of office, while appalling, were not what had Evan here on the sun-baked concrete outside the White House. It was not about the vast and the conspiratorial. Not about whispered conversations in the corridors of power. Not about kingdom-altering back-channel deals or the Rube Goldberg machinations that disguised originator from outcome, cause from effect.

It was the faces of the dead.

And the fact that the president of the United States had personally ordered the murder of men and women who as children had been taken from foster homes and trained and indoctrinated to spend their existence serving their country. They had done the best they could with the life that had been imposed on them. And he’d snuffed them out for the sake of his own preservation.

Ending Jonathan Bennett was the ultimate Nowhere Man mission.

Finally the motorcade reached the intersection and halted. Again the drivers of the bookending limos turned the tires while stationary, grinding tread against asphalt. And again the wheels of the middle limo rotated only as the driver pulled out.

It had not been a fluke, then. But a habit.

The convoy banked onto E Street and headed for Evan.

He adjusted his baseball cap and slowed his breathing until he could sense the stillness between heartbeats, the sacred space he occupied the instant before he pulled the trigger of a sniper rifle, when even the faintest thrum of blood in his fingertip could put him off his mark.

In less than a minute, the presidential limo would pass directly in front of Evan, bringing him at last within several meters of the most inaccessible and heavily guarded man on the face of the planet.

 

CHAPTER 3

Identified Threat

Excitement electrified the crowd cramming the sidewalk. People surged toward the curb, strained their necks, waved dumbly. A flurry of hands bearing smartphones rose in unison, most people twisting around to capture themselves in the photos. The motorcade barreled forward, the sight that launched a thousand selfies.

As reviled as President Bennett had proved to be, he was still good for a social-media status update.

Surrounded by civilians, Evan watched. The air was East Coast heavy, rippled by a humid breeze. The taste of soda lingered on his tongue, coating his teeth.

The vanguard of G-rides and the front decoy swept by, the presidential limousine coming into clear view. Dubbed “Cadillac One” or “The Beast,” it deserved both nicknames.

Set down on the chassis of a GMC truck, the limo was nearly eight tons, each door the same weight as a cabin door of a Boeing 747. Military-grade armor, an amalgam of ceramic and dual-hardness steel, was coated with aluminum titanium nitride. Slabs of ballistic glass a half foot thick composed the windows. A steel plate sol- dered beneath the vehicle guarded against the possibility of a frag grenade or an improvised explosive device. Even if a hail of bullets shredded the puncture-resistant, run-flat, Kevlar-reinforced tires, the limo could still drive away on the steel rims beneath. The limo was designed to take a direct hit from a bazooka.

Evan had a Dr Pepper Big Gulp.

If need be, Cadillac One could serve as a self-sustained, fully functional emergency bunker. Bottles of the president’s blood were stored beneath the rear seats. At an instant’s notice, a designated backup oxygen supply fed the air-conditioning vents. Firefighting gear stowed in the trunk was accessible through a hatch behind the armrest. The gas tank self-sealed, preventing combustion. Encrypted comms gear maintained continuous contact with federal and state law enforcement.

Evan had cotton wads in his cheeks.

Behind the wheel of Cadillac One was a master driver from the White House Transportation Agency. The driver would have received highly specialized army training in evasive maneuvers, route analysis, tactical steering, and vehicle dynamics.

Evan had comfortable dad shoes.

The presidential limo coasted up level with Evan, and for a split second he stared from the sea of faces at the tinted window behind which Bennett drifted in a cocoon of safety and comfort.

Close enough for Evan to spit on the pane. The motorcade drove on.

He reminded his face to relax as he watched it go.

Jonathan Bennett did not sweat.

He never issued a nervous laugh, a tense smile, or gave an accommodating tilt of the head.

And his hands never quavered. Not when as a special agent for the DoD he’d found himself at gunpoint on multiple occasions. Not when as an undersecretary of that same department he’d pushed a button in a command center and watched a black-budget unmanned aerial vehicle unleash hell halfway around the globe. Not when he flipped the pages of his rebuttal notes during his first presidential debate or his sixth.

Body control was a learned skill, one he’d been taught in his early training at Glynco and which he used every day as the com- mander in chief. Without uttering a word, he could assuage the concerns of the American public and project power on the world stage. He sold himself to the populace not by appealing to their better angels but by manifesting subtle dominance displays that voters registered in their spinal cords.

The fact that he’d been largely successful at appeasing the population was testament to his sheer force of will. His detractors had gained a bit of traction, yes, but he knew precisely which levers he’d need to pull before the midterm elections to maintain control of both houses.

He settled into the butter-smooth leather of the presidential limo now and scanned the urban-development report he was due to weigh in on at this afternoon’s cabinet meeting.

When his driver negotiated the presidential limo into a left turn more abruptly than usual, Bennett registered a slight uptick in his pulse.

He looked at his deputy chief of staff, his body man, and the Secret Service agent riding in the rear compartment with him, but none seemed to have registered the deviation.

He waited two seconds, and then the Secret Service agent stiffened, his hand rising to the clear spiral wire at his ear.

Bennett thought, Orphan X.

He checked in on his breathing, was gratified to note that it had not changed in the least.

The agent’s hand lowered from the radio earpiece. Bennett waited for him to say, Mr. President. We’re deviating course. There’s been an identified threat.

The agent said, “Mr. President. We’re deviating course. There’s been an identified threat.”

Bennett said, “Has there, now.”

He pointedly caught the eye of his deputy chief of staff and then turned and watched the buildings slide by beyond the tinted glass.

Secret Service agents stacked the seventh-floor hall of the upscale residential building. Despite the lush carpet, they moved delicately on the balls of their feet as they eased up on Apartment 705.

The lead agent folded his fingers into his fist—three, two, one— and the breacher drove the battering ram into the door, ripping the dead bolt straight through the frame.

They exploded into the apartment, SIG Sauers drawn, two-man teams peeling off into the bedroom and kitchen.

“Clear!”

“Clear!”

They circled back up in the front room, stared at the sight left in clear view of the open window. A tired breeze fluffed the gossamer curtains and cooled the sweat on the men’s faces.

No sounds of traffic rose from F Street below; the block had been barricaded once the sighting had been called in.

The lead agent looked around the apartment, taking stock. “Well, fuck,” he said. “Ain’t this theatrical.”

The breacher glanced up from the windowsill. “It’s been wired,” he said. “The window. Someone slid it up remotely.”

“How long’s the place been rented?”

Another agent weighed in. “Manager said six months.”

There was no furniture, no boxes, nothing on the shelves and counters.

Just a sniper rifle atop a tripod there in full view of the open window along President Bennett’s route.

“Someone contact that new special agent in charge over at Protective Intelligence and Assessment,” the lead agent said. “Templeton’s kid.” He tore free the Velcro straps of his ballistic vest to let through a little breeze, his mouth setting in a firm line of displeasure. “Someone’s been planning for a long time.”