Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

A few minutes into the meditation, he became aware of his bones, his muscles and ligaments, his skin wrapping him into an embodied whole. The boundary between him and the room blurred until he felt of a part with the space around him, the air itself, until he—

The RoamZone vibrated on the bed beside him.

Aggravated, he rolled off the bed onto his bare feet and picked it up. He’d upgraded the screen recently from Gorilla Glass to an organic polyether-thiourea that was able to self-repair when cracked.

He was tempted to shatter it himself now when he saw the caller ID.

Same number. Same Argentina area code.

Glaring at the digits, he felt an uncharacteristic rise in body temperature. He argued with himself.

Looked away from the screen.

Looked back.

Clenching his jaw, he thumbed the green virtual button and answered.

7Cookie-Cutter Psyops

Normally as the Nowhere Man, Evan would ask , Do you need my help?

But now he just waited.

He could hear her breathing on the other end.

“Who are you?” he said.

“I told you.”

Her voice was regal and touched with age, a slight huskiness that put her in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. She spoke with no accent and enunciated well, as if she’d had training in theater.

“No,” he said. “No.”

“I heard you help people.”

“I’m retired.” Curiosity flared, a fuse burning down. “How did you hear that?”

“I know someone who needs your help.”

“Who are you?”

The call, routed through fifteen encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels on both hemispheres, crackled in the silence. The pause felt dramatic. She was thinking. He was, too.

“I left you with Rusty and Joan Krauss,” she finally said. “A stalwart couple. Or so I thought. Joan was medically compromised, though I didn’t know it at the time.”

He felt a drop of sweat trickle down his temple. “Who are you?”

“I’d driven through the night,” she said. “Across the border from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

“You could have looked any of this up,” he said.

“I know your middle name.”

“Well, I don’t,” he said. “So that doesn’t help us any.”

“After … after I left you, I got two blocks away from the Krausses’ house and I pulled over. And wept.”

He swallowed.

“I didn’t want to leave you there, but it was a different time. It wasn’t easy being an independent-minded young woman. I don’t mean to imply hardship, but you take my meaning. It’s just important to me…”

His legs felt numb, his bare feet insensate against the cold concrete. If this was a gambit, it was a superb one, playing all the right notes on the bars of his ribs, coaxing an emotional response into resonance.

He heard himself say, “… what?”

His voice sounded different than it had in decades. Smaller.

She said, “It’s important you know that you were wanted.”

He cut the connection, threw the phone onto the bed, and stared at it, breathing hard, his shoulders heaving.

It hadn’t occurred to him to want to be wanted.

The phone gazed up blankly, the screen dark. He wasn’t sure if he hoped she’d call back.

He reached for the fourth of the Ten Commandments that Jack had handed down to him: Never make it personal .

“It’s bullshit,” he told the phone, the room, himself. “Cookie-cutter psyops. Clear your head. You know better than that.”

No answer save the gentle whisper of the vent overhead.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “You’re being played.”

He snatched up his glass and the phone and walked into the bathroom. He nudged the shower door hanging on its barn-door track, the frosted-glass pane vanishing into the wall. Stepping inside the stall, he gripped the hot-water lever. An embedded digital sensor read the print of his palm, allowing him to twist the lever in the wrong direction. An inset door, seamlessly camouflaged by the tile pattern, swung inward, and he stepped through into a hidden space.

The Vault.

An armory, a workbench, and an L-shaped sheet-metal desk crammed into an irregular four hundred square feet of walled-off storage space. The public stairs to the roof zigzagged the ceiling overhead, an optical illusion that made the room appear to be shrinking.

He circled to the desk, sank into his chair, and flicked the mouse on its pad. The three walls horseshoeing the desk illuminated. A mosaic of heretofore invisible OLED screens, each less than three millimeters thick, awakened to cloak the rough concrete walls.

Right now the front wall displayed pirated feeds from the Castle Heights surveillance system, the same footage Joaquin would be watching at his security station downstairs right now if he were managing to stay awake. The north wall was plugged into a variety of state and federal databases, Evan’s personal hijacked portal into the computing power of the agencies. And the south wall displayed the call log of his RoamZone.

He’d already captured the caller’s IMEI and pegged the location using advanced forward-link trilateration, which forced the network to automatically and continually report the woman’s phone’s position between cell towers. Based on the phone’s movements and resting times, it seemed she was staying in the affluent Recoleta neighborhood on the northeast slant of the city. He’d been to Buenos Aires only twice, once to garrote a visiting Venezuelan dignitary on the D line of the underground, the other to sit surveillance on a cartel leader whom he’d eventually dispatched in the parking lot of El Gigante de Alberdi, a fútbol stadium in Córdoba seven hundred kilometers to the interior.

When he’d tried to backtrack the user identity on the SIM card earlier, he’d run into a dead end. It was a prepaid Movistar, available at pretty much any kiosk, supermarket, or pharmacy. This was suspicious, but not as suspicious as it might be in the U.S., especially if the woman was traveling.

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.