Hellbent

Tommy took the skinny gun and slid it into the laptop’s hard-drive slot where some hidden mechanism received it. “All they’ll see on the X-ray is the solid block of the hard drive. I had to go thirteen-inch screen on the laptop to make the specs fit, so they might make you take it out, power it up, all that security Kabuki-theater bullshit, but you’ll be GTG. Obviously you gotta clean the piece so there’s no residues that’ll ring the cherries in a puff test. As for the laptop, I filled it with bullshit spreadsheets, generic documents, a few stock photos.” He picked up the laptop, showed off its slender profile. “High speed, low drag.” He made a production of handing it off to Evan, a waiter displaying the Bordeaux. “Go forth and conquer.” He gave his gap-toothed smile. “Fair winds and following seas.”

Evan took the laptop and started for the door.

“Hey.”

Evan turned back.

“You’re not exactly a barrel of belly laughs generally, but you seem decidedly more somber. This ‘highly personal’? It’s actually highly personal?”

“Yes.”

Tommy studied him, tugging at one end of his horseshoe mustache. The crinkles around his eyes deepened with concern. “You get in a jam, send up a smoke signal. I’m not too old to cover your six, you know.”

“I know. But it’s something I have to handle alone.”

Tommy nodded slowly, his gaze not leaving Evan’s face. “Remember what Confucius say: ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’”

“Oh,” Evan said, “I’m gonna dig a lot more than that.”

8

Serve with Gladness

It had all been for shit.

Evan stood in front of his rented Impala on the side of Peachoid Road, staring at the street’s namesake, which he had grown to despise. He held the giant fruit monstrosity personally responsible for the stagnation of his pursuit.

He didn’t know precisely what he was looking for, but some indication that Jack and a ten-ton Black Hawk helicopter had struck the earth in this vicinity would have been a start.

Van Sciver’s Orphans were a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. Not just at killing — they were good at killing, very good, but humans had been killing one another for a very long time. No, this is what they did best — erased any trace of their actions from the official world everyone else lived in. Nothing for the media, local PD, FBI, even CIA to grab hold of. They moved with the fury of a hurricane and didn’t leave a dewdrop in their wake.

Evan had driven the frontage and access roads, carved through the checkerboard plots of farmland, housing, and forest surrounding the novelty landmark, searching for that dewdrop to no avail. There was no wreckage, no scorched earth, no Jack’s truck abandoned at the side of a road.

The flight from Las Vegas, with a layover in Houston, had taken seven hours and seven minutes. Driving fifty-three miles from Charlotte Douglas International had tacked on another hour and twenty. A long way to come for a whole lot of nothing.

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, but Evan preferred to serve it piping hot.

He took in a deep breath and a lungful of car exhaust.

The Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.

He repeated it over and over in his head until he almost believed it.

Then he got into his Impala and drove off. He took a final loop upslope, winding through thickening forest that coaxed a distant memory of the trees surrounding Jack’s farmhouse.

He checked his RoamZone. Even after a long day, the high-power lithium-ion battery kept the phone’s charge nearly full. He wondered briefly what he would do if the next Nowhere Man case rang through — a real Nowhere Man case as opposed to the personal mission he was on now. After he helped his clients, he asked them to find one — and only one — person who needed his help and to pass on his untraceable number.

He had a rule, encoded in the Seventh Commandment: One mission at a time.

For Jack he was willing to make an exception.

He pulled over to get a bottled water at a convenience store. As he headed back to the car, chugging down the water, he caught a chorus of singing voices on the breeze.

Only when he turned and saw the open front door of the Baptist church across the parking lot did he realize that it was an actual choir. Drawn by the music, he walked over, climbed the stone steps, and entered. The pews sat empty, but the singers were in place in the choir stand, decked out in royal-blue gospel gowns. They were working on an a cappella hymn, practicing beneath a stark wooden cross flooded with light from behind. The choir conductor, an older man, directed from a podium. The voices rose pure and true.

Evan’s form in the doorway cut the light, and the director half turned, his hands still keeping time for the singers. He gave a welcoming nod in the direction of the pews.