Into the Fire(30)



Then he padded down the rear hall to the master suite and scoured himself in the shower. After drying off and stepping into boxer briefs, he went to his dresser.

The top drawer held a stack of unworn 501s on the left and a stack of unworn cargo pants on the right. Each item was folded so crisply that it looked stamped from a mold. After putting on a fresh pair of cargo pants, he donned a V-necked dark gray T-shirt that he peeled from the leftmost of three identical columns housed in the second drawer.

He’d switched around which drawers held which articles of clothing at least a half dozen times over the past year. His brain told him that the compulsion came from seeking maximum efficiency, but his mind sent a different message, that he was enacting the ritual to soothe some part of himself that needed soothing.

He could handle chaos in the world as long as there was order at home.

The closet came next. He removed a new Victorinox watch fob from its packaging and clipped it to his belt loop, then grabbed the top shoe box from the tower in the corner and stepped into a fresh pair of Original S.W.A.T. boots. Ten Woolrich shirts hung from hangers in perfect parallel, as equidistant as the slats in a set of vertical blinds. Careful not to disturb the spacing of the others, he slid free a shirt and pulled it on, the magnetic buttons clapping together.

He exited the closet, stepped into the still-wet shower, and placed his hand on the hot-water lever. A brief delay as it scanned his palm print, and then an electronic hum announced the open ing of the door hidden in the wall tiles. It swung inward, differentiating itself from the wall, the lever serving as a handle.

The Vault didn’t look like much.

The four hundred square feet of walled-off storage space was accessible only through the secret door. The unfinished box of a room trapped the night cold. Toward the rear the ceiling crowded down in the shape of the public stairs above that led to the roof.

An armory and a workbench lined the back wall. A sheet-metal desk shaped like an L held a profusion of servers and computer towers. But there seemed to be no monitors.

At least until Evan clicked his keyboard and three of the four walls came to life. The OLED screens, made of meshed glass, were invisible when not animated, clear panes showing nothing but the rough concrete walls behind.

Now they displayed a menu of hacked security feeds from Castle Heights and an abundance of links to federal and state databases. The screens to his left held the status of several of his bank accounts, including the main one, hidden in Luxembourg under the name Z$Q9R#)3 and protected by a password consisting of a forty-word nonsensical sentence. As Orphan X, Evan had been issued enormous sums of money straight off the presses from Treasury. Jack had helped him stash it in numerous accounts in numerous nonreporting countries, buried beneath beaver dams of trusts and shell corporations.

When Evan had operated as Orphan X, it was essential that he be fully funded and fully self-sufficient. His job had been to enter territories the United States could not and commit acts that it would not. He knew the target he was to neutralize and nothing more. The ultimate cutout man, he had no useful information to relinquish if he were captured no matter how enhanced the interrogation got. The very government he served would deny any knowledge of him, leaving him to be tortured in a Third World dungeon or worn to a nub in a hard-labor camp.

By the time he’d bolted from the Program, he’d known where a lot of the bodies were buried; he’d buried most of them himself. If he’d been killed by now, plenty of people at the highest level in D.C. would be able to sleep more soundly.

He let his eyes scan across the digital offerings that wallpapered the Vault.

His e-mail, [email protected], showed no messages. He and Jack used to communicate inside the Drafts folders, but since Jack’s passing, the e-mail had lain largely dormant.

Evan fired up his hardware and hit the databases, connecting through a four-step process of anonymous proxies and encrypted tunnels. The last step obfuscated any remnant of a digital address that might have remained, hiding Evan’s imprint in a sea of noise, a droplet in the ocean of the Internet.

Michael Papazian had given him the names of those who constituted the money-laundering scheme that Grant Merriweather had been closing in on. Four men, led by David “The Terror” Terzian. Though they kept more hired muscle beneath them, they were the only ones with operational knowledge. The money itself wasn’t generated from drugs or guns. But from gambling. The Terror had been running a hugely profitable underground fighting ring. Bets taken in cash were then mainstreamed through the operation.

Within seconds Evan filled the screens cloaking his walls with criminal histories, rap sheets, case files, investigative trails, court cases, social-media profiles, and related news stories.

Terzian was a burly man, thick with muscle. A close-shaven beard roamed high on his cheeks, crowding within an inch of his eyes. Early photos from his Facebook page showed him to be your basic street soldier—loose plaid shorts, white undershirt, gold-tinted sunglasses, a big cross around his neck. He had AP tattooed by one temple with three attendant teardrops for the enemies he’d dispatched. He liberally flashed gang signs—“OK” thumb circles held against his chest right side up and upside down like German quotation marks.

He and his inner cadre—the three other names Evan had extracted from Papazian—had been investigated for a variety of crimes. Drugs. Extortion. Kidnapping businessmen from the community and ransoming them back to their families in various stages of intactness. Set plays straight out of the Armenian Power playbook.

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