Hellbent

He said, “Let’s get to it, then.”

41 Borrowed Time

Joey chewed her thumbnail, leaning over Evan’s shoulder as he sat before the Dell laptop, staring at a list.

Five names.

One of them was Joey Morales.

Morales. All this time he didn’t know her last name. He’d been unable even to get her full first name out of her.

The hillside crowded the back windows of the safe house, shadows making the interior dismal. That ever-present moisture had taken hold in the trapped air, turning the place dank. It smelled of microwaved food and girl’s deodorant. Evan ran his eyes across the screen once again.

“So much encryption,” Evan said, “for five names.”

She paused from chewing her thumbnail. “Not just five names. It’s a list of people in the Program who were associated with Jack in some way. Look.” She shouldered him aside, taking over the keyboard. When she hovered the cursor above the top name, a hidden file appeared. She clicked it, and a host of images proliferated. “This guy? Jim Harville? He was Orphan J. One of the original guys. Jack was his handler way back when. It says it was Jack’s first Program assignment.”

Evan scanned the files. “How the hell did Van Sciver get his hands on this? This is intel that isn’t supposed to exist.” He scrolled down the page. “And it’s from channels outside the Orphan Program. Look here. See, this is NSA/CSS coding.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means someone else in the government is watching Van Sciver and the Program — keeping tabs. Van Sciver didn’t oversee this intel collection, and he doesn’t control it.”

“Well,” Joey said, “till he got control of it.”

Dread crept into Evan’s stomach, digging in its nails. Van Sciver’s cryptic comments looped through his head once again: You have no idea, do you? How high it goes? You still think it’s about me and you.

Evan said, “What happened to Orphan J?”

“They caught up to him in Venice.” She brought up a crime-scene photo of a man lying in a flooded piazza, the back of his head blown off. Another red spot bloomed below one of his shoulder blades. Blood ribboned the water around him. The picture had been taken moments after he was shot, a cell-phone snap.

Evan noted the time stamp on the photo. “Van Sciver’s updating the initial files, building on the intel pieces he got his hands on. He’s taken these five names and turned them into active hit missions.”

“That’s right. Like Orphan C.” She brought up a picture of an older man, half in shadow, moving through the concourse of a shopping mall in Homewood, Alabama. He was dressed shabbily, toes showing through one of his sneakers. “Now look at this.” She’d dug up an article about an unidentified homeless man murdered beneath a freeway ramp in Birmingham. A picture from a local shelter accompanied the article, showing the man at a soup kitchen.

Evan sank back in the chair. “That’s why Jack was in Alabama. He knew this was coming, that this file could leak.”

“And that’s why he found me,” Joey said. “Why he moved me to Oregon and hid me.”

Evan stared at the name, bare on the screen: Joey Morales.

“It’s beyond creepy.” Joey slid the cursor over her own name, and a surveillance grab from a 7-Eleven security camera popped up, showing her walking through the aisles, baseball hat pulled low. But the angle was sufficient to capture her face. It was dated nearly a year ago, an address listed in Albuquerque. Same faded NSA/CSS stamp at the bottom of the page.

“This is from a week after I took off from Van Sciver,” Joey said. “But it was enough to get them on my trail. And lead them here.”

She tapped another link, and zoom-lens surveillance photos of the Hillsboro apartment populated the screen. Joey through a rear window, brushing her teeth. Joey shadowboxing, no more than a silhouette in the unlit apartment. Joey in the open doorway, casting a wary eye as she paid for a take-out order. She minimized the windows, exposing a report beneath that listed sixty-three nodal points of facial recognition and the same Oregon address that Jack had scrawled on his truck window right before he’d been forced aboard that Black Hawk and lifted sixteen thousand feet in the air.

“You were right,” Joey said. “They had someone sitting on me. Waiting for you.”

Evan looked at the remaining two names.

“Tim Draker,” he said. “Jack told me about him. Orphan L. He was one of Van Sciver’s guys until they fell out about a year ago. Is he dead, too?”

“Probably,” she said.

Evan put his finger on the trackpad, targeted Draker’s name. A streetlight camera had caught him exiting an anonymous drug-rehab center in Baltimore ten months ago. The imagery featured the NSA/CSS stamp.