Gregg Hurwitz - Hellbent

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To Gary and Karen Messing

and

Darra and Zach Brewer.

You dont get to choose your family,

but sometimes you luck out.

And now that you dont have to be perfect, you can be good.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Evans scuffed knuckles, a fetching post-fight shade of eggplant, ledged the steering wheel. His nose was freshly broken, leaking a trickle of crimson. Nothing bad, more a shifting along old fault lines.

He inspected his nose in the rearview, then reached up and snapped it back into place.

The Cadillacs alignment pulled to the right, threatening to dump him into the rain-filled roadside ditch. The seat springs poked into the backs of his thighs, and the fabric, dotted with cigarette scorch marks, reeked of menthol. The dome light housed a bare, burned-out bulb, the brake disks made a noise like an asphyxiating chicken, and the left rear brake light was out.

He should have stolen a better car.

Rain dumped down. That was Portland for you. Orif he was being precisea country road outside Hillsboro.

Big drops turned the roof into a tin drum. Water sluiced across the windshield, rooster-tailed from the tires.

He sledded around a bend, passing a billboard. A moment later smeared red and blue lights illuminated the Caddys rear window.

A cop.

The broken brake light.

That was inconvenient.

Especially on this car, since a BOLO had likely been issued. The cop would be running the plate number now if he hadnt already.

Evan blew out a breath. Leaned harder into the gas pedal.

Here came the sirens. The headlights grew larger.

Evan could see the silhouette of the officer behind the wheel. So much like a shooting targethead and chest, all critical mass.

Hillsboro prided itself on being one of the safest cities in the Pacific Northwest. Evan hoped to keep it that way.

As he popped the brakes and jerked the wheel, the heap of a car rocked on its shocks, fanning onto an intersecting road.

Two more cop cars swept in behind him from the opposite direction.

Evan sighed.

Three patrol cars lit up like Christmas, sirens screaming, spreading out across both lanes and closing in.

That was when the thumping from the trunk grew more pronounced.

Evan moved swiftly through the door to his penthouse suite at the Castle Heights Residential Tower, his RoamZone pressed to his ear. The phone, encased in hardened rubber and Gorilla glass, was as durable as a hockey puck and essentially impossible to trace. Every incoming call to 1-855-2-NOWHERE traveled in digital form over the Internet through a labyrinth of encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels. After a round-the-world tour of software telephone-switch destinations, it emerged through the receiver of the RoamZone.

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 Evans 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 hed been the Programs top asset. Given the sensitive information in his head, the bodies hed 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 didnt 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 hed 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.

Evans 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 couldnt identify. Fear?

Jack.

The reception crackled some more, and thenfinallyJacks voice came through again. Evan?

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

Im here, Evan said. Are you okay?

Through the receiver he could make out more road rolling beneath Jacks 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 Id never taken you out of that boys home? That Id just let you live an ordinary life?

Jackwhere are you?

I cant tell you. Dollars to doughnuts theyve 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 couldnt know that Jack was being pursuedsurreptitiously, yet not so surreptitiously that Jack didnt noticeby five SUVs in rolling surveillance. Or that a Stingray cell-tower simulator was intercepting Jacks 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 drivers seat, his 98.6-degree body temperature rendered in soothing reds and yellows.