Into the Fire(25)
Evan said, “I’m not scared yet.”
15
Predacious Douchenozzle
Westwood Village hugged the south edge of UCLA, a jumble of restaurants, movie theaters, bars, and shops hawking college gear. As was the case in the rest of West L.A., the real-estate market had blown sky-high, but the students streaming through left the neighborhood pleasingly shabby in places. Frat-house lawns littered with beer bottles, pizza by the slice, sublet condos losing a war of attrition.
In the warren of streets east of Veteran Avenue, Evan approached a three-story apartment complex, assessing the security measures. The windows were single-pane, flimsy in their frames, easily breakable. The mounted light by the call box was broken, casting the entrance in shadow. The guard plate on the door had come loose enough to be pried free with a screwdriver. He raked the dead bolt in all of ten seconds with a half-diamond pick and took the stairs to the second floor.
Midway down the hall, he paused outside an apartment door backlit with a bluish electronic glow. In the thin gap by the frame, he could see that the three dead bolts had been left unlocked.
Lazy.
The doorknob lock looked to be as old as the building itself. Evan flicked open his Strider folding knife, slipped it into the doorjamb, and angled it to catch the ramped latch. Before he slid it back into its housing to free the door, he hesitated.
With his free hand, he took out his RoamZone and texted: YOU FAILED YOUR SECURITY ASSESSMENT. I’M COMING IN NOW. DON’T JUMP ME.
A moment later the reply hummed in: THEN DON’T GIVE ME A GOOD REASON 2 JUMP U.
He thumbed in: KAY.
With a tilt of the blade, he opened the door.
A workstation pod consumed the entire front room, towers and servers stacked atop a circular desk. Monitors were mounted three high on metal racks, hiding the chair from view. The sound of furious clacking echoed off the walls and cottage-cheese ceiling, low-level violence being visited upon a keyboard.
As Evan closed the door behind him, a feminine voice said, “Hang on,” and then a teenage girl emerged from the circular desk through a missing slice.
A too-big flannel hung unbuttoned from her lithe, muscular frame. The red T-shirt beneath boasted an image of Hello Kitty brandishing an AK-47. Lush brown-black hair tumbled past the girl’s shoulders and mostly covered the shaved strip above her ear on the right side.
Joey Morales was the finest hacker Evan had ever encountered.
She was also a washout from the Orphan Program. She’d once had a target on her head, but Evan had saved her, and in a manner of speaking she’d saved him, too. She’d been the last of the Orphans whom Jack had trained. His dying wish was that Evan look after her, a burden that had become a responsibility that had in turn morphed into something deeply meaningful to him in ways he could neither understand nor express.
Evan had cleared her out of the country, parking her in a Swiss boarding school until he could eliminate those who wanted to eradicate her and anyone else with Orphan training. Once the threats had been neutralized, he’d relocated her here. Or, more precisely, she’d relocated herself.
He’d come home one night to find his unpickable front door unlocked and his impenetrable alarm system incapacitated. He’d drawn his ARES 1911 and made an adrenalized tactical approach across the great room only to find Joey sitting barefoot on the couch eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
Napkinless.
Though she never admitted as much, she wanted to live close to him. And though he never admitted as much, the feeling was mutual. So after he didn’t shoot her on his couch, he oversaw her move to the apartment a few miles away. He’d already set her up with some money stashed in a trust and with fake documents making her a legal adult, so she’d rented the place herself and furnished it with hardware befitting her genius hacker brain. As part of his ongoing attempt to mainstream her into normal civilian life, he insisted that she enroll in courses at UCLA in the coming semester, an arrangement she wasn’t happy with and was already no doubt scheming to undermine.
He’d spent the past few months doing his best to keep track of her.
Keeping track of a sixteen-year-old girl, he’d learned, was more challenging than neutralizing a high-value target inside a guarded desert training camp.
She currently held a Big Gulp, which she waved in his direction. “What’s with the ‘kay’?”
She seemed indignant.
Evan said, “What?”
“‘Kay’ is angry in textspeak. Like, passive-aggressive pissed off, you know?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the worst? Is the lowercase-k ‘kay.’ ’Cuz you know the person put effort into taking off the caps lock. Lowercase k is a declaration of war.” To punctuate the point, she raised the Big Gulp to her mouth and slurped a hit of soda through the wide red straw.
“There are words coming out of your face,” Evan said. “But they don’t make any sense in the actual world out here.”
“Come on, X. Get with the times.”
He pointed back at the door. “You have to throw the dead bolts. Every time. How you do anything is how you—”
She was mouthing the Second Commandment along with him, her eyes rolled to white. She stopped when he stopped, a thumbprint dimple marking her right cheek as she grinned. She had a radiant smile that got her out of trouble more often than it should have.