He stared at the blinking GPS dot just off the Plaza Francia, watching her in real time.
He drummed his fingers, an uncharacteristic fidget. Then he looked down at the pinecone-shaped aloe vera plant resting on the desk in a glass bowl beside his mouse pad. His sole companion was named Vera II. He’d killed her predecessor with neglect, a sad statement as she required nothing more than an ice cube dropped in her dish once a week. The edges of her serrated spikes were browning now, and she was glaring up at him from her bed of cobalt glass pebbles, clearly displeased.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to move on. It’s not you. It’s me.”
She was unmoved.
He fished the diminished ice sphere from the old-fashioned glass and rested it atop her spikes just to shut her up. The trace of vodka wouldn’t hurt either.
He sensed movement on the front wall of monitors. Mia Hall entering the building from the parking level, struggling under the weight of her nine-year-old son, Peter, who was slumped in her arms, comatose. Small for his age, he wore a Mickey Mouse–ear hat cocked to the side, his cheek smudged pink and blue from some sugary indulgence. They’d just come through a traumatic stretch, and Mia had vowed to spend more time with him, which evidently included hooky days at Disneyland.
Evan wondered what Disneyland was like. And pink-and-blue candy. He’d never indulged in either. But he’d carried Peter asleep a time or two as Mia carried him now, and Evan recalled the warmth of the boy’s cheek against his shoulder, his sweat-sticky blond hair against his chin. Those few episodes when his life had stitched together with Mia’s and Peter’s lives represented his closest brush with what normal might feel like. If she weren’t a district attorney sworn to uphold the law and he hadn’t been raised an assassin sworn to break it, perhaps the road ahead might have felt like a solid possibility rather than a tiptoe across land mines. Mia didn’t fully know what Evan did, but she knew enough to know that he—and their affiliation—was less than safe.
Evan switched his focus back to the south wall, concentrating on the blinking GPS dot of a phone in Argentina. His supposed mother.
Vera II stared at him.
“There’s no way,” he told her. “It’s impossible. She can’t be.”
Vera II stared at him.
“What are the odds? And how the hell would she have found me? Found me?”
Vera II stared at him.
He leaned back and crossed his arms. It was the longest of long shots. But still. He needed to know.
On the front wall, Mia bundled Peter across the lobby and waited for the elevator. The overheads caught her spill of wavy brown hair, highlighting gold and chestnut. Her bare arms flexed under the weight of her son. Her lips were moving. She was murmuring a lullaby.
He tore his eyes from the lobby feed, refocusing on the beacon of the prepaid cell phone.
He couldn’t operate as the Nowhere Man anymore. Not without jeopardizing his informal presidential pardon. One move deemed insufficiently discreet and he’d have the full force of the United States government back on his tail. Which would mean no more leisurely evenings at the Polo Lounge. No more sipping Japanese vodka for the sheer joy of it rather than to take the edge off the operational wear and tear on his body and mind. No more nights with oil painters from the Royal College of Art. And no more hope of maybe, just maybe, having a shot at nights more meaningful than that.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noted the elevator doors open downstairs. Mia and Peter stepped inside, vanishing from view.
There was so much to recommend normalcy.
And yet.
He thought about the drive home from Jeanette-Marie’s. The taste of adrenaline. The sharpness of the night air. All five senses alive, and maybe even a sixth.
“I don’t miss it,” he told Vera II. “I really don’t.”
Already his hand was moving the mouse, bringing up an incognito search engine.
“I’m not breaking the agreement,” he said, keying the number of one of his forged passports into the airline website. “It’s not a mission. It’s just a trip.”
He risked another glance at Vera II, but she’d already made her position clear. She assimilated carbon dioxide disapprovingly.
He clicked purchase.
8
Sucker
The next day at noon, the dark sedan is back, and so is the Mystery Man, both in the same place. Evan rounds the handball wall and stops, holds his fists up as he’s seen boxers do on TV, a technique the boys mimic in street fights to questionable results. His ribs ache from Van Sciver, and beneath his shirt his back hosts a collection of scarlet abrasions from the belt that look like half-formed question marks. But he is here and he is ready. The Mystery Man throws his hands wide and does something wholly unexpected. He smiles.
“Good. That’s a good stance.” He starts toward Evan. “Look, kid. Sorry about yesterday. Sometimes I can be a little overzealous. I mean, what the hell was I thinking? A grown man—”
He sucker-punches Evan again. Too late, Evan realizes he’s been disarmed, that he’s let his arms drift south. The fist connects with his cheek, grinding flesh into bone. Not a hard punch, but perfectly placed, and again Evan goes down, and this time he stays down, crouching on one knee, trying to breathe.
The Mystery Man leans over him, hands on his thighs. The cigarette is still there, jutting from between two fingers; he didn’t even bother to put it out before swinging. “Look at you,” he says. “Do you honestly think you have what it takes?”
Evan forces the words through the pounding in his skull. “I’ll get bigger.”
“You think that’s all it takes? Bigger?”
“It’s all I’m missing.”
At this the man laughs. “Look, I get it, kid. Grit and drive and all that. But you gotta understand—there’s nothing you have that I want. You’re not gonna surprise me. The kid I want? Charles Van Sciver? He’s got it. We’re just about done vetting him. And if he fails, next in line’ll be that husky kid, Andre. You’re not even on the list. Now, go home or whatever you call it and get on with your life.”
Evan stands up, wipes his bloody mouth roughly. He looks at the tinted windows of the sedan, back to the Mystery Man. “I want to try again.”
“There’s no trying again.” The man points at Evan’s face with the red cherry of the cigarette. “Get the fuck out of here. Or I promise you this: You’ll find out what a real punch feels like.”
Jogging home this time, Evan feels the pain in his ribs anew, the reality pounded into him by Van Sciver.
It feels like defeat.
* * *
At dinner Van Sciver spoons extra mac and cheese from the pot, then flicks the wooden spoon at Evan across the table, landing a few stray noodles on his shirt and his swollen lip. “What happened to your face?”
“What happened to yours?”
It’s not the wisecrack so much as the covered laughter from the others that lets Evan know he will pay for this later. Papa Z is across on his armchair, massaging his lower stomach as he does when his bowels won’t cooperate.
Van Sciver points at Evan with the spoon. “Wait till you fall asleep.”