Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(60)

Evan scanned the files. “How the hell did Van Sciver get his hands on this? This is intel that isn’t supposed to exist.” He scrolled down the page. “And it’s from channels outside the Orphan Program. Look here. See, this is NSA/CSS coding.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means someone else in the government is watching Van Sciver and the Program—keeping tabs. Van Sciver didn’t oversee this intel collection, and he doesn’t control it.”

“Well,” Joey said, “till he got control of it.”

Dread crept into Evan’s stomach, digging in its nails. Van Sciver’s cryptic comments looped through his head once again: You have no idea, do you? How high it goes? You still think it’s about me and you.

Evan said, “What happened to Orphan J?”

“They caught up to him in Venice.” She brought up a crime-scene photo of a man lying in a flooded piazza, the back of his head blown off. Another red spot bloomed below one of his shoulder blades. Blood ribboned the water around him. The picture had been taken moments after he was shot, a cell-phone snap.

Evan noted the time stamp on the photo. “Van Sciver’s updating the initial files, building on the intel pieces he got his hands on. He’s taken these five names and turned them into active hit missions.”

“That’s right. Like Orphan C.” She brought up a picture of an older man, half in shadow, moving through the concourse of a shopping mall in Homewood, Alabama. He was dressed shabbily, toes showing through one of his sneakers. “Now look at this.” She’d dug up an article about an unidentified homeless man murdered beneath a freeway ramp in Birmingham. A picture from a local shelter accompanied the article, showing the man at a soup kitchen.

Evan sank back in the chair. “That’s why Jack was in Alabama. He knew this was coming, that this file could leak.”

“And that’s why he found me,” Joey said. “Why he moved me to Oregon and hid me.”

Evan stared at the name, bare on the screen: Joey Morales.

“It’s beyond creepy.” Joey slid the cursor over her own name, and a surveillance grab from a 7-Eleven security camera popped up, showing her walking through the aisles, baseball hat pulled low. But the angle was sufficient to capture her face. It was dated nearly a year ago, an address listed in Albuquerque. Same faded NSA/CSS stamp at the bottom of the page.

“This is from a week after I took off from Van Sciver,” Joey said. “But it was enough to get them on my trail. And lead them here.”

She tapped another link, and zoom-lens surveillance photos of the Hillsboro apartment populated the screen. Joey through a rear window, brushing her teeth. Joey shadowboxing, no more than a silhouette in the unlit apartment. Joey in the open doorway, casting a wary eye as she paid for a take-out order. She minimized the windows, exposing a report beneath that listed sixty-three nodal points of facial recognition and the same Oregon address that Jack had scrawled on his truck window right before he’d been forced aboard that Black Hawk and lifted sixteen thousand feet in the air.

“You were right,” Joey said. “They had someone sitting on me. Waiting for you.”

Evan looked at the remaining two names.

“Tim Draker,” he said. “Jack told me about him. Orphan L. He was one of Van Sciver’s guys until they fell out about a year ago. Is he dead, too?”

“Probably,” she said.

Evan put his finger on the trackpad, targeted Draker’s name. A streetlight camera had caught him exiting an anonymous drug-rehab center in Baltimore ten months ago. The imagery featured the NSA/CSS stamp.

A newer surveillance photo caught Draker smoking outside a facility in Bethesda, Maryland. It was dated November 28, two days ago, the time stamp showing 8:37 P.M. Minutes before Evan had blasted through the door of the pest-control shop, killed everyone inside, and taken the laptop. Van Sciver’s update must have just come in. This second photo had no stamp or coding of any kind.

“The NSA intel put Van Sciver on the trail of drug-treatment places,” Joey said. “From there it was only a matter of time.”

Evan stared at the date on that surveillance photo and knew in his gut that Draker was lost.

“Which means that we’re down to one little Indian,” Joey said.

Evan stared at the last name: David Smith. Moved his fingertip a few inches. The ghost file opened.

A photo of a twelve-year-old boy. A birth certificate. A file painting a familiar story, various foster homes in various poverty-stricken counties. And then it showed a recruitment report from two years ago, listing Tim Draker as David’s handler.

Evan looked for more information, but there wasn’t any to be had. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Won’t Van Sciver have found him by now?”

“There are 33,637 people named David Smith in the country,” Joey said. “And believe me, with how well Jack’s been stashing people? The kid ain’t using that name anymore.” She jabbed a finger at the screen. “These people are hidden as well as it is possible to hide someone. Everything I know—hell, everything you know about being invisible? We learned from Jack. So I think Van Sciver’s still searching for this kid. I think he’s chasing him down now. And if we don’t find him first, he’s gonna kill the kid like he killed everyone else.”