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The flight attendant paused by Evan’s aisle seat with the drink cart. Earlier he’d requested a bag of ice to apply to his knuckles.
She mustered a pert if tired smile. “Get you something?”
“What vodkas do you have?”
She listed them.
Evan said, “Water’s fine, thank you.”
As she poured, an announcement came over the speakers that in forty minutes they’d begin their twilight descent to LAX. She set the drink on his tray, which, to the consternation of his seatmate, he’d scrubbed vigorously with an antibacterial wipe.
The flight attendant chinned at the pouch of mostly melted ice pressed against his hand. “Take that for you?”
Evan removed the dripping bag, revealing a wicked bruise across the knuckles of the ring and middle fingers of his left hand. Through a surrounding swell of yellow-blue, a spray of broken blood vessels formed an imperfect snowflake pattern. As he passed her the ice bag, her eyes snagged on the painful marks.
“Goodness, that looks awful. What is it?”
“I believe,” he said, “it’s the Icelandic rune for protection in battle.”
2
All That Annoying Zen Shit
A few minutes prior to midnight on the royal-blue padding of a training mat, Evan was on his hands and knees, holding tabletop position. Shoulders directly over wrists, hips over knees, all joints at a clean ninety degrees. But one thing was different. His palms, placed down on the mat, were spun all the way around so his fingers pointed straight back toward his knees.
It looked bizarre, grotesque, as if someone had snapped his hands off and put them back on facing the wrong direction.
The stretch through his forearms, which had absorbed the shock from a number of well-placed punches in Langjökull, took on a biblical level of intensity.
He held the stretch in the quiet of his penthouse, 21A of the Castle Heights Residential Tower. His neck was sore, too. Bar fighters—especially the big ones—tended to go for headlocks, not understanding that that put you inside their guard with easy access to the groin, the stomach, the tender inner arch of the foot. Exhaling, Evan pulled his hips back another few millimeters, thefascia of his arms tugging more intensely around muscle and nerve fibers.
He’d forgotten to breathe again. He centered himself here, in this spot on the planet, a seven-thousand-square-foot modern wonderland of poured concrete and stainless-steel fixtures, as sparse and cold as the Scandinavian terrain he’d traversed just hours before.
There were workout stations and motion-detection hardware. There were floor-to-ceiling bullet-resistant windows and retractable discreet-armor security sunscreens. There was a vodka freezer vault and a Vault of a different nature hidden behind the shower in the master suite. There was a floating bed held three feet off the floor by herculean magnets, and an aloe vera plant named Vera III who thrived on neglect. There was a mounted katana sword and a vertical garden fed by drip irrigation. There was a disco ball and a Velcro wall with compatible body suits for jumping and sticking.
The latter two were a long story.
The ache in his arms gave way to numb tingling, then pins-and-needles lactic-acid release, and then finally surrender. He breathed in the quiet. The air-conditioning here stayed pegged at a cool sixty-six degrees, the freestanding fireplace at rest. As was his habit, he’d already burned the outfit he’d worn on the outing and re-appareled himself in identical clothes. He liked the cold, the silence, the lack of external stimuli. Everything here felt frozen and sterile and safe, like an ice crypt in which he could rest for vampiric rejuvenation.
Since he’d fled the Orphan Program, he’d led a purgatorial existence as the Nowhere Man. With virtually unlimited financial resources and a stellar capacity to enact freelance retribution on behalf of others, he made sure to use his skills in keeping with the Ten Commandments handed down to him by Jack, a set of rules to ensure that he stayed operationally sound.
Given the past missions he’d conducted as Orphan X, he was considered a dangerous asset by those at the highest levels of the United States government. He’d been granted an informal presidential pardon contingent upon his ceasing all extracurricular activities as the Nowhere Man.
He hadn’t been very good at ceasing all extracurricular activities.
But he remained in the clear as long as no one found out. Not State, not NSA. Not CIA or FBI. Not Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Naomi Templeton, who’d pursued him relentlessly as her job demanded. Not President Victoria Donahue-Carr, who had herself set the terms of his unofficial clemency.
As long as the RoamZone stayed quiet, he wouldn’t have to worry. He could just relax here, take a bit of a break, and make sure—
The RoamZone rang.
Evan released his hands, sat back on his heels, and flapped his hands a few times as the aching subsided.
The caller ID showed nothing.
Curious.
He answered as he always did. “Do you need my help?”
