Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(5)
Sweat trickled down into Van Sciver’s eyes, and he armed it off. He could still see through his right eye, but after so much meticulous concentration the blown pupil and bruised retina gave him trouble focusing. He could feel the muscles straining. He did his best to blink free the moisture.
Then he froze, seized by a notion.
Leaning forward, he parted the dead man’s eye. Its pretty blue iris had already filmed over. He thumbed at an upper lid, splaying the lashes. Nothing. He checked the lower lid next.
And there it was.
A lash hidden among others. It was glossier and more robust, with a touch of swelling at the insertion point.
It was a hair, all right. Just not the agent’s.
With a pair of tweezers, Van Sciver plucked out the transplant and examined it more closely.
The lash was synthetic.
This was not the future of data storage. It was the original data storage. For billions of years, DNA has existed as an information repository. Instead of the ones and zeros that computers use to ren der digital information, DNA utilizes its four base codes to lay down data complex enough to compose all living matter. Not only had this staggeringly efficient mechanism remained stable for millennia, it required no power supply and was temperature-resistant. Van Sciver had reviewed the research and its big claims—that one day a teaspoon of synthetic DNA could contain the entirety of the world’s data. But despite all the outlandish talk of exabytes and zettabytes, the tech remained nascent and the costs staggering. In fact, the price of encoding a single megabyte with digital information was just shy of twenty grand.
But the information on this single eyelash was worth more than that.
To Van Sciver it was worth everything.
It contained nothing directly related to Orphan X—Evan was too adept at covering his trail—but compared to the expansive data Van Sciver had been sifting through, it held a treasure trove of specifics.
Holding the lash up against the orange globe of the descending sun, Van Sciver realized that he had forgotten to breathe.
He also realized something else.
For the first time he could recall, he was smiling.
3
Everything He Held Dear
Venice was a beautiful city. But like many beauties, she was temperamental.
Furious weather kept the tourists inside. Rain hammered the canals, wore at the ancient stone, bit the cheeks of the few brave enough to venture out. The storm washed the color from everything, turning the Floating City into a medley of dull grays.
Nearing the Ponte di Rialto, Jim Harville spotted the man tailing him. A black man in a raincoat, bent into the punishing wind a ways back. He was skilled—were it not for the weather-thinned foot traffic, Harville never would have picked him up. It had been several years since he’d operated, and his skills were rusty. But habits like these were never entirely forgotten.
Harville hiked up the broad stone steps of the bridge, the Grand Canal surging furiously below. He reached the portico at the top and cast a glance back.
Across the distance the men locked eyes.
A gust of wind howled through the ancient mazework of alleys, ruffling the shop canopies, making Harville stagger.
When he regained his footing and looked back up, the man was sprinting at him.
It was a strange thing so many years later to witness aggression this naked.
Instinct put a charge into Harville, and he ran. Vanishing up a tight street, he took a hairpin left between two abandoned palazzos and shot across a cobblestone square. He had no weapon. The man pursuing him was younger and fitter. Harville’s only advantage was that he knew the city’s complex topography as well as he knew the contours of his wife’s back, the olive skin he traced lovingly each night as she drifted off to sleep.
He shouldered through a boutique door, overturned a display table of carnival masks, barged through a rear door into an alley. Already he felt a burning in his legs. Giovanna liked to joke that she kept him young for fifty, but even so, retirement had left him soft.
He careened out onto a calle at the water’s edge. Across the canal a good distance north, his pursuer appeared, skidding out from between two buildings.
The man saw him. He flung his arms back, and his jacket slid off gracefully, as if tugged by invisible strings. Rain matted his white T-shirt to his torso, his dark skin showing through, the grooved muscles visible even at this distance.
The man’s eyes dropped to the choppy water. And then he bounded across, Froggering from pier to trash barge and onward, leaving two moored gondolas rocking in his wake.
Dread struck Harville’s stomach like a swallowed stone. He registered a single thought.
Orphan.
The man was on Harville’s side of the canal now, but propitiously, a wide intersecting waterway provided a barrier between them. As Harville began his retreat, the man vaulted over an embankment, rolled across a boat prow, and sprang up the side of a building, finding hand-and footholds on downspouts and window shutters. Even as he went vertical, his momentum barely slowed.
That particular brand of obstacle-course discipline—parkouring—had come into popularity after Harville’s training, and he couldn’t help but watch with a touch of awe now.
The man hauled himself through a third-story window, scaring a chinless woman smoking a cigarette back onto her heels. An instant later the man flew out of a neighboring window on Harville’s side of the waterway.
Harville had lost precious seconds.