Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(12)

As the digital camera flew around the cabin, Evan worked his RFID-covered fingernails, bringing up virtual settings that shifted the footage to slow-motion. In the chaos perhaps something would be revealed.

He watched the scene through five, six times to no avail.

Then he changed his focus to a later segment of the footage, when the camera sailed free of the failing helo. He put on a night-vision filter, hoping to identify something on the ground, but it was whipping by too fast. Even when he moved to frame-by-frame, all the flying lens caught were blurs of occasional lights, tracts of what looked like farmland.

He was about to give up when he caught a glimpse of a bigger earthbound splotch, less illuminated than the other lights. He reversed and freeze-framed. It was darker because it wasn’t in fact a light. The night-vision wash had picked it up, lightening it to the brink of visibility.

He rotated forward one frame. Back one frame. That was about all the space he had. He returned to the middle frame, squinted, instinctively leaned forward. Of course, the virtual image moved with his head, holding the same projected distance.

Fortunately, Vera II didn’t judge.

Evan grabbed the splotch, enlarged it, squinted some more.

A water tower.

With a hatchet cut into it? It looked like an apple.

No—a peach.

A peach water tower.

There was one of those, all right. He’d seen it on a postcard once.

He was already scrambling to free himself of the contact lenses. Off with the new tech and in with the old.

A Google search brought up the Peachoid, a one-million-gallon water tower in Gaffney, South Carolina. It was located just off Interstate 85 between exits 90 and 92 on the ingeniously named Peachoid Road.

It wasn’t a big red X on a map.

But it was pretty damn close.





7

Two Graves

Evan’s Woolrich shirt sported fake buttons hiding magnets that held the front together. The magnets gave way easily in case he needed to go for the holster clipped to the waistband of his tactical-discreet cargo pants. Right now the holster was empty. He wore lightweight Original S.W.A.T. boots that with his pant legs down looked like boring walking shoes. The boots would be a pain to unlace at airport security.

In his back pocket, he had one of many passports gorgeously manufactured by a gorgeous counterfeiter, Melinda Truong.

The matter was too urgent to wait for a cross-country drive.

It was oh-dark-hundred, and the elevator was empty this early—thank heaven for small mercies. As the doors zippered shut behind Evan, he smelled a trace of lemongrass. On the floor was a pea of balled-up tinfoil, the Ghost of a Hershey’s Kiss Past.

Or maybe he was the ghost, drifting invisibly among the living, following in their wake.

The ride down was quiet. He enjoyed it.

*

Evan carved through the whipping desert wind and ducked into the armorer’s workshop. Lit like a dungeon, it was off the Vegas Strip and off the beaten path. Evan checked the surveillance camera at the door, verified that it had been unplugged before his arrival, as was the standing arrangement.

He smelled gun grease and coffee, cigarette smoke and spent powder. He peered through the stacks of weapon crates, across the machines and workbenches that were arrayed according to some logic he’d never been able to decipher.

“Tommy?”

The sound of rolling wheels on concrete presaged the nine-fingered armorer’s appearance. And then there he was, sliding in from stage left in a cocked-back Aeron chair, welder’s goggles turning him into some kind of steampunk nightmare. Beneath the biker’s mustache, a Camel Wide crackled, sucked down to within a millimeter of the filter. Tommy Stojack plucked out the cigarette and dropped it into a water-filled red Solo cup, where it sizzled out among countless dead compatriots. Given the ordnance in evidence, a misplaced butt would turn the shop into a Fourth of July display.

Tommy slid the goggles up and regarded Evan. “Fifteen minutes prior to fifteen minutes prior. I could set my watch by you.”

“You have it?”

“Of course I have it. What’s with the ASAP?”

“I’m on something. It’s highly personal.”

“Personal.” Tommy plucked out his lower lip and dropped in a wedge of Skoal Wintergreen. “Didn’t know that word was in your lexicon. You threw in an adverb and everything.”

Evan could count the people he trusted on the fingers of Tommy’s mutilated hand, with digits to spare. Since the Black Hawk’s disintegration, Tommy was one of the few remaining. Even so, Evan and Tommy knew nothing of each other’s personal lives. In fact, they knew little of their respective professional lives either. From the occasional dropped tidbit, Evan had put together that Tommy was a world-class sniper and that he did contract training and weapons R&D for government-sanctioned black-ops groups that were not as dark a shade of black as the Orphan Program.

Tommy supplied Evan with his firepower, too, and made each of Evan’s pistols from scratch, machining out a solid-aluminum forging of a pistol frame that had never been stamped with a serial number—a ghost gun. Then he simply fitted a fire-control group and loaded up the pistol with high-profile Straight Eight sights, an extended barrel threaded to receive a suppressor, and an ambidextrous thumb safety, since Evan preferred to shoot southpaw. He ordered all his pistols in matte black so they could vanish into shadows as readily as he did.