Hellbent

He’d already done an extensive news search online and had not been surprised to find that there was no report of a Black Hawk’s crashing anywhere in the world last night. Van Sciver’s non-fingerprints were all over it. If Evan wanted to pick up the trail, he’d have to shine a light in the shadows.

He focused on the footage as the freelancers in flight suits positioned themselves around the Black Hawk’s cabin.

Someone off-screen shouted, “Look into the camera!”

The hostage obeyed.

Evan searched the captors for identifying tattoos, insignias, but they were geared up from their boots to their necks, only their faces showing. These freelancers loved their apparel. Evan studied their comportment, their builds, their postures. The men not in motion stood like they had two spines. Their boots were straight-laced, the preferred style of hipsters and ex-military.

Evan presumed they were not hipsters.

Van Sciver liked to use spec-ops washouts as his guns-for-hire, dishonorably discharged men who had all the training but were too brutal or unruly to stay in the service.

A voice came from off camera: “What are your current protocols for contacting Orphan X?”

The hostage kept his feet wide for balance and talked to the lens.

As the back-and-forth continued, Evan’s eyes picked across the scene for any telling details — a Sharpied nickname on a rucksack, a serial number on a gun, a map with a cartoon red X on it. No such luck. They’d done a superb job of sterilizing the visual field.

The hostage squared to the lens, gave his line: “And you’re dumb enough to think that puts you at an advantage.”

The ensuing commotion, if viewed with detachment, bordered on comedic. The calmness of the hostage, such a contrast to the terror of his captors.

As the digital camera flew around the cabin, Evan worked his RFID-covered fingernails, bringing up virtual settings that shifted the footage to slow-motion. In the chaos perhaps something would be revealed.

He watched the scene through five, six times to no avail.

Then he changed his focus to a later segment of the footage, when the camera sailed free of the failing helo. He put on a night-vision filter, hoping to identify something on the ground, but it was whipping by too fast. Even when he moved to frame-by-frame, all the flying lens caught were blurs of occasional lights, tracts of what looked like farmland.

He was about to give up when he caught a glimpse of a bigger earthbound splotch, less illuminated than the other lights. He reversed and freeze-framed. It was darker because it wasn’t in fact a light. The night-vision wash had picked it up, lightening it to the brink of visibility.

He rotated forward one frame. Back one frame. That was about all the space he had. He returned to the middle frame, squinted, instinctively leaned forward. Of course, the virtual image moved with his head, holding the same projected distance.

Fortunately, Vera II didn’t judge.

Evan grabbed the splotch, enlarged it, squinted some more.

A water tower.

With a hatchet cut into it? It looked like an apple.

No — a peach.

A peach water tower.

There was one of those, all right. He’d seen it on a postcard once.

He was already scrambling to free himself of the contact lenses. Off with the new tech and in with the old.

A Google search brought up the Peachoid, a one-million-gallon water tower in Gaffney, South Carolina. It was located just off Interstate 85 between exits 90 and 92 on the ingeniously named Peachoid Road.

It wasn’t a big red X on a map.

But it was pretty damn close.

7

Two Graves

Evan’s Woolrich shirt sported fake buttons hiding magnets that held the front together. The magnets gave way easily in case he needed to go for the holster clipped to the waistband of his tactical-discreet cargo pants. Right now the holster was empty. He wore lightweight Original S.W.A.T. boots that with his pant legs down looked like boring walking shoes. The boots would be a pain to unlace at airport security.

In his back pocket, he had one of many passports gorgeously manufactured by a gorgeous counterfeiter, Melinda Truong.

The matter was too urgent to wait for a cross-country drive.

It was oh-dark-hundred, and the elevator was empty this early — thank heaven for small mercies. As the doors zippered shut behind Evan, he smelled a trace of lemongrass. On the floor was a pea of balled-up tinfoil, the Ghost of a Hershey’s Kiss Past.

Or maybe he was the ghost, drifting invisibly among the living, following in their wake.

The ride down was quiet. He enjoyed it.

* * *

Evan carved through the whipping desert wind and ducked into the armorer’s workshop. Lit like a dungeon, it was off the Vegas Strip and off the beaten path. Evan checked the surveillance camera at the door, verified that it had been unplugged before his arrival, as was the standing arrangement.