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“In addition to a gas mask, my driver would be wearing a tearaway jumpsuit, which he’d rip off after he liberates me from my restraints.”
“What’s he wearing beneath it?” Paddy asked. “Wait—lemme guess. Superman Underoos.”
“No,” Evan said. “Just black BDUs, body armor, helmet, and tactical goggles, and he’d be carrying a select fire SR-16 with a SIG P229 in a drop-leg holster. Boys and their toys. So predictable.”
The man’s smile grew stale on his face.
Evan continued, “He’d haul me out of the cloud of liquid nitrogen—”
Naomi’s eyes were shiny, excited. “And in the commotion, we’d mistake him for one of us.”
“Right until he marches me to a decoy Black Hawk with a cloned IFoF beacon stolen during the hacked visual feeds.” Evan imagined a chopper and pilot supplied by his friend Aragón Urrea, an unconventional businessman with unlimited extralegal resources. “It would be setting down just about now while your real Black Hawk is off dodging a few hundred fake missile alerts. You all graciously help him load me aboard the helo. He accompanies me, of course. And we’re up, up, and away before you realize you’ve been duped.”
A silence asserted itself in the back of the SUV. Naomi stared at Evan thoughtfully, her head cocked. The men looked uneasy.
“Well,” the senior gunner said, “it ain’t happening today.”
“No,” Evan said, a note of resignation in his voice. “A different story for a different time.”
The only thing clear to him right now was that nothing would go like anything had ever gone before.
Naomi held the sandbag mopped around one hand. “I’ll leave the earmuffs and the mouth guard off,” she said. “But I’m gonna put this back over your head, okay?”
Evan nodded. “I could use a little rest.”
9
So Much Circling for So Many Years
Hooded and embedded in the restraint chair, Evan had been carried from the SUV. Like riding a palanquin but less luxurious.
He’d kept track of his movements as well as he could. After another fifteen minutes in the SUV, he’d been borne through a rattling gate, up three steps, through a door with a hissing hydraulic closer, down a long corridor with air-conditioning vents and significant echoing off hard surfaces, and now into what he gauged—given the reverberation of footfalls—to be a moderate size room.
He was set down with care.
Doors opened and closed, boots scuffling.
Then silence.
Save for the sound of someone breathing in the room with him. He smelled a trace of something fruity and vanilla, a cheap drugstore shampoo.
“Agent Templeton,” he said. “Would you mind removing my hood?”
“I’m not supposed to.”
A long pause, her shoes ticktocking back and forth as she paced.
Then she said, “Fuck it,” the bag lifted, and Evan blinked into the sudden light.
A plain box of a room, walls painted white. No one-way mirror, no furniture, nothing but a recessed light in the ceiling fifteen feet above, well out of reach.
Just him adhered to the restraint chair. Naomi on her feet. And a single folding table, also white, upon which rested a large monitor with heavy-duty cables linking it to an outlet in the wall and no visibly attached computer.
The table was ten feet away from Evan.
Naomi stayed six feet away.
Evan and Naomi had crossed paths enough times for him to have evolved a profile on her.
