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Tenpenny answered, “Angela Buford? Never heard of her.” Forehead elevating, eyelids dimming, a partially suppressed grin twitching the edges of his mouth—microexpressions correlated with deception. “There’s so many girls around here.” He kept Rath’s bulk between himself and Evan. “I know your type. I learned folks like you inside and out from a lifetime as a fixer. You’re one of those guys who thinks well of yourself, who thinks he rises above it all. When we both know that if you had the access I do, you’d get your dick dirty every chance you got.” A gleam of a smile. “Just like me.”
The rain was lighter now, little more than a summer mist stirred into the fog. Evan’s skin felt cold and raw, and he could feel paint melting down his cheeks. The mansion loomed at Tenpenny’s back, seeming to grow right out of him, an edifice of power, of faceless dominance. An echo of Joey’s words returned to Evan, cutting through the soupy air:I’m mad at the otherasaltantes culeroswho abused me just because I was there and small and had the right anatomy. He thought about how much bigger the other foster boys had been than him—the Mystery Man, too. How he’d once been a twelve-year-old knocked down on his hands and knees, drooling blood onto the cracked asphalt of a handball court.
For a moment it felt like there was no bottom. That it would never end. Just an everlasting cycle of might against those with nothing more than a prayer and whatever grit they could summon out of thin air.
Tenpenny seemed to sense his thoughts. “You know themostfun part?” His leer hung crooked on his face. His sideburns were coarse, unclipped. “Knowing how to undress someone who needsconvincing. It’s hard business. Getting the jeans off. They bunch at the shoes. You want to fuck them when they’re lively, you see. If you have to force it outright, then they get disoriented. That’s less fun. So you make them do the calculation. Will it hurt more if they get knocked around a little? Choked a bit in the heat of the action? If they get their face banged against the headboard? You want them to understand it’s most enjoyable for everyone if they. Just. Give. Up.”
Evan blinked against the rain. His thoughts pooled, dark and rageful.
“We’re locking down the estate,” Tenpenny said. “No more sneaking inside with your Halloween getup, cute as it is.”
The right side of Rath’s chin was shiny with rain or drool that had leaked past the seal of his malformed lips.
“I’ll leave the chitchat to you two.” Rath set the heel of his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. “And I’ll leave the airy-fairy bullshit to Mr. Devine. But I want you to know. I’m a knife-and-bullets man. Just like you. But better.” He shuffled forward a half step, close enough for Evan to smell his sweat. His eyes were pretty blue, one clear as day, the other stabbing out through a morass of necrotic flesh. His voice came as a grumble bleared through his misshapen mouth. “You know how this ends, don’t you?”
The line sounded rehearsed, like something said by a sheriff in a two-bit western.
The rain picked up, fuzzing everything at a hard slant. The men didn’t retreat so much as fade back toward the house, and then Evan was alone on the desolate extravagant edge of Billionaire’s Row.
He stood with his face uptilted, feeling the mask melt off it.
The dynamics inside Luke Devine’s domain felt surreal and disorienting. Was he a nation-state as Naomi feared? His own center of gravity around which other power players rotated captively? The crazed genius whom Echo had described? He did emanate a kind of influence that was hard to put to words. It was as though he had a distortion field around him that warped perspective. Evan couldn’t get a handle on him.
Evan had approached Tartarus and Devine as he had targets in the past. But this mission was unlike any other. And Devine—in his unerring coolness, in his inscrutable manner, in the intel at his command—was different from anyone Evan had encountered.
Which meant that to face him Evan had to be different, too.
baby mobile chiming a nursery rhyme
The water ran chalky and opaque down his black shirt. He peeled it off, used it to wipe his face. Beneath he wore a lab-engineered undershirt designed with an adversarial pattern to confuse machine-vision algorithms and thwart facial-recognition software.
raw sobbing from another room
The air smelled of salt and perfume and champagne. The front of the house was surprisingly free of guests, a peaceful break in the storm after the late arrivals had trickled in. Twinning rows of exotic foreign cars funneled to the porch. The massive front door was closed, guards and valets sheltering from the rain inside.
his tiny, tiny hand gripping a smooth white rail
And then
letting
go.
The rain tapped Evan’s bare face as he looked up at the broken sky. He dropped the black shirt, smudged white with makeup, in the mud, strode back onto the property, and rang the doorbell. Even over the din of the party, he heard throaty chimes, deep like organ pipes.
The towering pivot door yawned open, a break in the sheer face of the mansion.
A half dozen guards formed a semicircle in the foyer. In their suits they looked like a receiving line at a wedding. Behind them the party pulsed and roared. Tenpenny and the surviving marines were nowhere in evidence.
“The Nowhere Man here to see Mr. Devine,” Evan said. “Please ask if he’ll receive me.”
The guards instinctively stepped away from him, widening their gaps but holding the line. One patted Evan down over his clothes, his hand freezing when it reached the outline of the ARES pistol snugged in the Kydex appendix holster. When Evan removed the 1911, the men tensed as if braced for an intercontinental ballistic missile to come through the roof. When Evan handed his weapon over, the guard breathed out a gust of relief.
One of the others pressed forefinger to earpiece, turning away and murmuring something in a Slavic accent. A bead of sweat trailed from his sideburn to his collar. He kept his eyes on Evan the entire time.
The guard nodded at the voice on the other end and then nodded again. “Please,” he said to Evan. “Come in.”
As Evan moved a few steps into the enormous foyer, the lights pulsed—the gargantuan chandelier, the sconces, the accent lights—all of them all at once. The string quartet stopped midnote. The rain-bars ceased, their final downpour vanishing into the floor. The staff stopped moving—the guards, the busboys, the caterer’s assistants with their silver trays—and a moment later the guests did as well. A silence asserted itself through Tartarus, everyone paralyzed in a kind of awe.
