Into the Fire(5)
Ordinary
On the twenty-first floor of the high-end but somewhat dated Castle Heights Residential Tower, there is a door.
It looks like an ordinary door, but it is not.
The thin wood fa?ade, which resembles every other residential door in the building, disguises a steel interior, which in turn houses an elaborate network of security bars. The core is filled with water, a new measure designed to disperse heat from a battering ram. A ram will buckle before it will breach.
On the other side of the door is a penthouse.
It looks like an ordinary penthouse, but it is not.
If you wander the seven thousand square feet of gunmetal-gray floor, you will see a variety of workout pods, from heavy bags to racked kettlebells. You will see a freestanding fireplace, a few rarely used couches, a spiral staircase winding up to a reading loft. The open design gives you a clear view into the kitchen with its poured-concrete countertops and brushed-nickel fixtures. You will encounter a living wall from which sprout mint, chamomile, and a potpourri of other culinary herbs. What you won’t notice is that the panoramic glass walls that gaze east to downtown Los Angeles and south to Century City are composed of bullet-resistant polycarbonate thermoplastic resin. Or that the retractable sunscreens, shaded an innocuous periwinkle, are made of an exotic titanium composite woven tightly enough to stop any sniper rounds that might penetrate the bullet-resistant panes.
At the back of the clean, minimalist space, you can walk down the sole hall. You might enter a master bedroom suite. To the right is a bathroom.
It looks like an ordinary bathroom, but it is not.
If you nudge the frosted-glass shower door, it will roll back silently on barn-hanger carbon-steel wheels. The hot-water lever hides invisible sensors, keyed to the palm print of one person only. Concealed expertly in the tile pattern is a secret door.
The bedroom is as sparse spotless as the rest of the house—bureau, floor, bed.
It looks like an ordinary bed, but it is not.
At second glance you might notice it is floating in the air. The mattress sits on a slab that is repelled from the floor by neodymium rare-earth magnets strong enough to anchor a small ship. Steel cables hold the slab suspended two feet off the floor. Were they severed, the slab would fly up, smash through the ceiling, and go airborne above the Wilshire Corridor.
A man sits on the bed, legs crossed, spine straight, so still that he might be carved from marble. He lives by a set of Commandments, and this act of meditating embodies the Second: How you do anything is how you do everything. His eyes are closed, but not all the way. His open hands rest on his thighs. He is nowhere, but precisely here. He is nothing more than his breath. He is doing one thing and one thing only. This is the opposite of multitasking.
He looks like an ordinary man.
He is not.
* * *
Within the top echelon of intel circles in nations of influence and instability, Evan Smoak was known as Orphan X.
At the age of twelve, he’d been pulled out of a foster home in East Baltimore and raised in a full black covert operation buried so deep inside the U.S. government that virtually no one knew it existed. His upbringing consisted of relentless physical, emotional, cultural, and psychological training, a grinding wheel that honed him into a razor-sharp implement. His handler, Jack Johns, raised him not merely to be a top-tier assassin but also a human being—two reactive elements that, if put under enough pressure, might combust.
And then Jack had taught him to integrate those pieces. To balance on the tightrope dividing yin from yang. To not combust.
It was a lifelong challenge.
When Evan had gone rogue from the Orphan Program, he’d kept his other alias—the Nowhere Man—and devoted himself to helping people in dire circumstances who had no one to turn to. His clients reached him by calling a little-known number that had become the stuff of urban legend: 1-855-2-NOWHERE. Each digitized call traveled over the Internet through a maze of encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels, circling the planet before reaching Evan’s RoamZone phone.
He answered the same way every time: Do you need my help?
And then he stepped in to protect the innocent because no one else would, to shield them from those who would do them harm. To hunt a monster, the shopworn proverb went, you must become one. But to Evan’s ear the saying had always rung hollow.
He had been monstrous once, a weapon sharpened to a singular point. His role as the Nowhere Man was an undoing of that. Every time he helped someone, he regained some tiny part of his soul.
And when he was done, he asked his clients to pass the favor along. To empower themselves by finding someone else in untenable circumstances.
Evan had last helped a young man with a gentle demeanor and a special brain, who had been terrorized by an entire criminal enterprise. Like every client before him, Trevon Gaines had his assignment—to find Evan the next person in desperate need. To give the Nowhere Man’s phone number to that person. And Evan would be waiting once more on the other end of the line, ready to pick up and do it all over again.
“Redemption” was an imperfect word for what he was seeking. Confronting the world with his own code, illuminating the darkness with the guttering light of his own morality—that was a process of becoming.
Becoming less sharp. More human.
The more life he let in, the more he could sense the dawn of a different existence shimmering miragelike in the distance. He’d been on a single trajectory since the age of twelve, launched from a slingshot into all the menace mankind had to offer. As the Nowhere Man, he’d shifted his bearings, sure, but not his fundamental direction.