Hellbent

Evan always answered the phone the same way.

Do you need my help?

This time, for the first time, the voice on the other end was a familiar one.

Jack Johns.

Jack had plucked Evan from the obscurity of a foster home at the age of twelve and placed him in a fully deniable black program buried deep inside the Department of Defense. Jack had turned Evan into Orphan X, an expendable assassin who went where the U.S. government would not and did what the U.S. government could not. Jack had fought for Evan to stay human even while teaching him to be a killer.

The only father Evan had ever known was calling this line now, a line reserved for those in mortal danger. And he had answered Evan’s question — Do you need my help? — with a single syllable.

Yes.

Evan and Jack had an elaborate series of protocols for establishing contact. Never like this.

For Jack to call this number meant that he was up against what others might consider world-destroying trouble.

All Evan had gotten over the phone so far was that one word. Static fuzzed the line infuriatingly, the connection going in and out.

He was gripping the phone too hard. “Jack? Jack? Jack.”

Eight years ago Evan had gone rogue from the Orphan Program. At the time he’d been the Program’s top asset. Given the sensitive information in his head, the bodies he’d put in the ground, and the skills encoded into his muscles, he could not be allowed to exist. The most merciless of the Orphans, Charles Van Sciver, had taken over the Program and was hellbent on tracking down and eradicating Evan.

Vanishing was easier when you already didn’t exist. The Orphan Program lived behind so many veils of secrecy that no one except their immediate handlers knew who the Orphans were. They were kept in separate silos and deployed through encoded comms that preserved plausible deniability at every level. Double-blind protocols ensured that even the handlers’ whereabouts were often unknown by higher headquarters.

And so Evan had simply stepped off the grid, keeping only the operational alias he’d earned in the shadow service, a name spoken in hushed tones in the back rooms of intel agencies the world over.

The Nowhere Man.

He now helped the desperate, those with no place left to turn, people suffering at the hands of unrepentant and vicious abusers. His clients called 1-855-2-NOWHERE. And their problems were solved.

Antiseptic. Effective. Impersonal.

Until this.

Evan’s tense steps echoed around the seven thousand square feet of his condo. The open stretch of gunmetal-gray floor was broken by workout stations, a few sitting areas, and a spiral staircase that rose to a loft he used as a reading room. The kitchen area was equally modern, all stainless steel and poured concrete. The views up here on the twenty-first floor were dazzling, downtown Los Angeles shimmering like a mirage twelve miles to the east.

Despite all that space, Evan was having trouble breathing. He felt something wild clawing in his chest, something he couldn’t identify. Fear?

“Jack.”

The reception crackled some more, and then — finally — Jack’s voice came through again. “Evan?”

It sounded as if Jack was in his truck, an engine humming in the background.

“I’m here,” Evan said. “Are you okay?”

Through the receiver he could make out more road rolling beneath Jack’s tires. When Jack spoke again, his voice sounded broken. “Do you regret it? What I did to you?”

Evan inhaled, steadied his heart rate. “What are you talking about?”

“Do you ever wish I’d never taken you out of that boys’ home? That I’d just let you live an ordinary life?”

“Jack — where are you?”

“I can’t tell you. Dollars to doughnuts they’ve got ears on me right now.”

Evan stared out through the floor-to-ceiling, bullet-resistant Lexan windows. The discreet armor sunshades were down, but through the gaps in the woven titanium chain-link he could still see the city sparkling.

There was no version of being too careful.

“Then why are you calling?” Evan said.

“I wanted to hear your voice.”

Over the line, tires screeched. Jack was driving fast, this much Evan could glean.

But he couldn’t know that Jack was being pursued — surreptitiously, yet not so surreptitiously that Jack didn’t notice — by five SUVs in rolling surveillance. Or that a Stingray cell-tower simulator was intercepting Jack’s signal, capturing his every word. That within five minutes the thwap-thwap-thwap of rotor blades would stir the clouds and a Black Hawk attack helicopter would break through the night sky and plummet down, fanning up dust. That thermal imaging had already pegged Jack in his driver’s seat, his 98.6-degree body temperature rendered in soothing reds and yellows.

All Evan knew right now was that something was terribly wrong.

The static rose like a growl, and then, abruptly, the line was as clear as could be. “This is looking to be my ninth life, son.”