The Last Orphan
Chapter 4

More Pressing Objectives

The streets of Beverly Hills don’t mind name-dropping. Evan parked a block away from the intersection of George Burns Road and Gracie Allen Drive, a key juncture of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Mia had slumbered these past two months. It was a glorious Angeleno day, the kind of golden sun that had once provided the magnetic pull for manifest destiny.

An unfamiliar excitement stirred beneath Evan’s ribs. In a breathless burst, Peter had filled him in over the phone: Mia was awake and intact. That’s all Evan had needed to hear.

A hot breeze carried the scent of gyros from a nearby food truck. A trio of nurses in scrubs walked by slurping frozen Starbucks drinks the size of feed bags. Across the intersection medical workers on break stretched out on the wide concrete steps of Thalians Health Center, checking their phones or tilting their faces to the blue, blue sky. A stooped man rattled over the crosswalk tugging an IV pole, the wind flapping at his hospital gown, threatening a fleshy revelation.

Passing an outdoor lot, Evan scanned the vehicles, noting license plates. A Buick Enclave with tinted windows idled in the front spot. A windowless van with a Red Cross logo pulled past the kiosk. Evan gave it extra notice; driving over, he’d spotted it on the road behind him. A homeless guy sitting on the curb scrutinized an upside-down newspaper. His overcoat was in tatters, his shoes worn but functional. Evan kept his head down, kept moving.

Palm trees lined the center island running between the North and South Towers in case anyone had forgotten that they were in Southern California.

Evan cut beneath the South Tower’s overhang into the parking zone, putting his back to a concrete pillar and peering out. The Red Cross van kept rolling right through the outdoor lot and out again. Moving steadily his way. He watched until it drifted past and hooked left onto San Vicente.

The Buick stayed put.

The homeless guy was on his feet now, scratching repetitively at the back of his head. The caffeinated threesome of nurses disappeared into Thalians. The man with the IV pole made sluggish but steady progress in Evan’s direction.

Were there patterns in the movements? Or was he attributing patterns to movements?

With their security, choke points, and surveillance cameras, large facilities made him nervous. Mia was one of few people worth the risk.

Evan withdrew from the pillar, entered the hospital through the automated glass sliding doors, and rode up to the plaza level. Mia had spent the duration of her coma in the new critical-care building a block north, but Peter had reported that she’d been moved to the South Tower today for imaging.

The plaza, laid like an epidermis atop the parking structure, was bustling. An ambitiously named healing garden, an elevated squiggle of xeriscaping edged with teak benches, broke up the corrugated concrete of the high-rises. The soporific trickle of water features background-scored people conversing around tables and benches and potted plants. A Henry Moore sculpture broke a reclining figure into three cast-bronze lumps that resembled dog turds. Two middle-schoolers with chemo-bald heads sat on a bench near the bridge to employee parking, peering at an iPhone screen and giggling. Eyes dulled with sleeplessness, a father sipped coffee outside the cafeteria and cradled a newborn with hearing aids. A row of sky-blue umbrellas cast soothing shade, their underbellies adorned with cloud patterns.

There were worse places to be sick.

Patients and workers streamed between the buildings. Evan lost himself in the current, taking a meandering path to flush out potential tails.

Coming around a bend in the garden, he spotted the man with the IV pole emerging from a doorway across the plaza. Moving more swiftly than he had before. Less stooped, too.

Evan felt his pulse quicken ever so slightly.

Backing up, he sidled beneath one of the shade umbrellas, sweeping his gaze across the crowd. Pregnant mother shepherding twin toddlers with pigtails and cornrows. The middle-schoolers stayed lost in their iPhones. An exhausted mom tramped by with an infant rigged to her in a BabyBjörn.

Taking another step back, Evan bumped into a burly guy with a mullet, a sleeveless Nike dri-FIT, and a visitor name tag announcing him as Frank B.

“The f**k?” Frank B. barked.

Evan dropped his eyes to the guy’s feet. He was wearing flip-flops, unsuitable footwear for a stakeout or pursuit.

Frank B. bent down, angrily wiping at a smudge on his cargo shorts. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

But Evan wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. He’d already narrowed his focus to the man with the IV pole and the umbra thrown by one of the building’s concrete outcroppings. Another man was emerging from the darkness there, his gait familiar.

The homeless guy from the street, moving swiftly on his sneakers.

Evan let his vision blur so he could take in the full sweep of the plaza impressionistically. Through the tumult he discerned figures moving in concert as if connected by invisible strings.

He heard his own breath now, a rush in the ears, sensed his heartbeat ticking in the side of his neck, felt the brightness of the midday sun, a shard in his eye. The pedestrians around him were talking and bustling along, lost in the daily grind, cell phones pressed to cheeks, mouths moving. They were soundless, their words lost beneath more pressing objectives.

The homeless guy cutting one way, the gowned man with the IV pole another, the swiveling heads of three others at tables around the healing gardens. Coordinating trajectories, lines of sight.

The Third Commandment barked at Evan—Master your surroundings—and in a split second he shuffled through the schematics and blueprints he’d stored in his head. Service elevator behind South Tower reception. Utility closet on the top floor with an access hatch to the roof. Cafeteria kitchen rear door that let into a warren of restricted-access corridors. If he could make it to the Medical Offices Tower, there were outlets onto Third Street and Sherbourne Drive. But he didn’t know how much manpower they’d brought or how wide a net they’d thrown.

Best bet would be to disappear into the parking structure beneath his feet—dumpsters, stairs, elevators, countless vehicles, a sewer line to get him underground.

Evan stepped back again beneath the shade umbrella, pushing past Frank B. to shoulder against the wooden post.

“Hey, chief, now you’re really getting on my last—”

Across the plaza the guy in the hospital gown halted, his eyes sweeping the crowd. They locked on Evan’s. The man pushed the IV pole away. It slid a foot or two, tilted.

He skinned the gown off himself. It undulated in the breeze and fell away behind him. He was wearing form-fitting running clothes beneath. Slung around his neck, now in his hands, was a fat-barreled grenade launcher.

Evan felt it then, the conversion of potential threat into kinetic danger, a thrumming of his bones, a firing of the nerves, an imprinting of lesser phenomena like the shard-sharp glint of sunlight, breeze cooling the sweat at his hairline, the man talking at Evan’s side, Adam’s apple bouncing lethargically.

Without knowing it, Evan had moved to a calming breath pattern—two-second inhalations, four-second exhalations. His muscle memory had set the tempo, slowing him down, steadying him. This was what his tactical training had taught him: to decelerate real life until it moved in slow motion.

That’s what being present was. People think of a superpower as going fast when everyone else moves slow. But that’s not as useful as going slow when everyone else is moving fast.

Three-fourths of a second had passed. None of the bystanders in the plaza had keyed to the disruption. The man’s IV pole hadn’t yet struck the ground. The fat-barreled grenade launcher was still rising to aim at Evan.

The bright orange stripe around the muzzle broadcast it to be a less-lethal weapon. From this distance Evan couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a 40-millimeter designed to accommodate less-lethal projectiles. With crushable foam noses packed with irritant powders and hard plastic shells, the projectiles were good up to 130 feet. Despite their reassuring name, they could cause serious damage at close range.

Way to Evan’s right, the homeless guy came up with a 40-millimeter launcher of his own. The three men near the healing gardens now rose, bringing matching weapons out from beneath the tables. About a dozen more men spread throughout the plaza announced themselves similarly.

Like a flash mob, but less entertaining.

The only note of comfort was that the bright orange stripes made the operatives highly visible.

There was a moment of perfect stillness.

Then someone screamed.

Evan hoisted the umbrella up out of the weighted base.

And charged toward the stairwell to the parking structure.

Leaping through the healing garden, umbrella held before him like a shield, agave plants whipping at his calves. Shouts and stampeding. A projectile whined in, thumping the awning with nearly enough force to rip the umbrella from his hands. Another flew overhead. A third kicked up a chunk of soil by his boot, spraying his front side with dirt.

Hurdling a bench, tripping over a stainless-steel footlight, he crashed through the crowd. The tough canvas batted people aside but also obscured his line of sight, the peaceful cloud design discordantly soothing. A full-blown panic had erupted, people shouting and bulling for the exits. Evan pinballed between a few folks, nearly lost his footing, and caught a spray of lukewarm coffee from the side. As he sprinted across an open stretch of concrete, he sensed a few men behind him bucking the throngs of bystanders, circling to close ranks.

Questions flurried: Who was behind this? Why less-lethal? Did they want him alive to torture him? To get intel?

His breathing held, a metronome running of its own accord.

A volley of projectiles hammered the awning, and then one ripped straight through and sliced past Evan’s cheek so close that his eyes burned from the chemicals. The next tore away a section of fabric, stopping him in his tracks. He stared through the wreckage of the canvas at the fake homeless guy, standing right in front of him.

The man was fussing with the hinge action on the launcher. He looked up. He and Evan were at the edge of the plaza, no more than six feet apart, the crowd swirling around them.

The guy said, “Shit,” an instant before Evan jabbed him in the solar plexus with the umbrella post. He flew back, smashing into a trash can, the launcher clattering away.

A projectile glanced off Evan’s side, spinning him in a half turn and sending a flame of nerve pain through his underarm.

Six men closing in from behind.

Evan hauled himself upright, ARES 1911 in hand. His Woolrich tactical shirt rippled open in the front, the discreet magnets beneath the false buttons parted from when he’d drawn straight through the shirt from his appendix holster.

But his pursuers were shooting less-lethal.

And he didn’t know who they were. They could be cops, FBI, a sanctioned squad from State.

The First Commandment: Assume nothing.

The magnet buttons found their mates, clapping together, the shirt zipping itself back into place over Evan’s torso. He swung the sights, aimed at the metal links of a dangling cafeteria sign, pressed the trigger.

And missed.

A fraction of a second’s hitch of disbelief.

It was a wide-open shot, twenty or so feet with nothing between him and the target. No brisk wind, no shadows, no distracting reflections. He was moving, sure, but not spinning. He’d been trained to shoot left- and right-handed, off a roll, emerging from water, upside down, in free fall.

Orphan X was not a perfect shooter like Tommy Stojack, his nine-fingered armorer. He missed plenty of shots. But this was not a shot he missed.

Ever.

A significant if minuscule degradation of his shooting reflexes.

An eighth of a second had passed, maybe less.

He could afford no time for reflection. Being rattled was a luxury for later.

Reset the trigger. Sight picture. Smooth, clean press.

He fired again at one of the chains holding the dangling sign, and the round sparked as it severed the link. The sign swung down, scythelike, slamming one of his pursuers in the side of the head. He tumbled into his partner, spilling them both over a table, which toppled accommodatingly.

A trailing pair of operators with matching weapons filled the space the others had just occupied; the effect was uncanny, as if the same men had been set upright again, a couple of bowling pins. They were aiming imperfectly, their jarring steps making their muzzles bounce.

Evan ran toward them but not at them. As their projectiles blasted overhead, he veered hard to the side, slanting toward the wall at the last instant. Jumping to stab a boot three feet up into the concrete wall for traction, he kicked off for momentum and wound up for a left cross. His fist struck the lead man across the jaw, snapping his head around and sending him sprawling into his partner.

Four men now on the ground at Evan’s feet, blinking up at him and scrabbling toward their weapons. A projectile clipped off his shoulder, ripping a flap of his shirt up like an epaulet. The round punched through the cafeteria window, shattering the sneeze guard at the salad bar.

He ran.

Cutting through the crowd, head low, ducking and weaving to chart an imperfect line toward the stairwell into the parking structure. Now it was easier to spot his pursuers; they were the only ones running toward him.

He leapt over an upturned table, rolled into a graceless somersault, and popped up, replaceing himself face-to-face with the guy who’d sported the hospital gown. The coaster-size bore of the weapon stared straight at Evan. A round fired at this proximity would cave in his skull.

The man jerked the weapon lower to aim at Evan’s chest. Evan gave the descending barrel a heel strike, accelerating its trajectory so it whipped down to point at the man’s foot.

The trigger clicked, the projectile launching with a fooomp. The man gave a high-pitched scream, grabbed for his shredded sneaker, and hopped on one foot. Evan swept past him, catching the 40-millimeter launcher as it tumbled from his grip.

Spinning, he got off thigh shots to the nearest two men before the three behind them readied to launch a volley his way.

Evan do-si-do-ed with the hopping operator, getting behind him just in time for the guy to take three rounds to the spine. He jiggled in Evan’s grip, face twisted in anguish.

Evan said, “Sorry,” and let him fall away.

Tumbling backward over a two-top, Evan crawled toward the stairwell as a fresh round of projectiles rocked into the tabletop. Teak slats splintered, the overturned table scuttling in Evan’s wake as if animated.

He hit the stairwell door off an impromptu roll, replaceing his feet to stagger through the threshold and shoulder into the midst of four ascending gunmen ensconced in full tac gear.

He’d inadvertently inserted himself in the middle of them on the landing, like a protectee in a diamond formation of bodyguards. Patches stitched onto their black BDUs identified them as members of the Secret Service Counter-Assault Team. From all directions they blinked at him through tactical goggles.

“You’re gonna want to let me out of here,” Evan said.

Instead two of the CAT members jerked their launchers up, proving that they were in fact just dumb enough to shoot themselves point-blank in the face. Ducking, Evan knocked the barrels askew. The weapons fired, skimming cheeks, the projectiles bouncing off the concrete walls and ricocheting into the backs of their helmets. Their heads snapped forward, and they crumbled.

The remaining men stared at Evan, holding their weapons helplessly in a low-ready position. He grabbed the barrel of the nearest launcher, spun its owner into his partner, and shoved them up against the crash bar on the door. The metal rectangle depressed, the door unlocked, and they spilled out in the fray.

Turning, Evan lunged down the stairs, skipping five, six steps per leap. One side of the stairwell was open at intervals, bringing fresh air from outside and reminding him of how far he was above the ground. Grabbing the railing, he spun himself downward, descending as quickly as he could keep his feet beneath him. The fourth-floor landing flew by, now the third.

Already he heard commotion at ground level, a door creaking open, more boots hammering into the base of the stairwell, rising to meet him.

He risked a peek over the railing, caught sight of gloved hands on the one below. Shouts from above, CAT members piling into the stairwell, squeezing him from top and bottom.

Hammering footsteps converged on him. As he hit the second-floor landing, a wall of operators surged up at him. Skimming past their outstretched gloves, he vaulted through the gap in the wall above the side rail, h*p-bumping the concrete ledge to slow his momentum.

He whistled out into thin air.

He was still a story above the street, but it was his only hope. He prayed for an awning, a laundry cart, a magic carpet.

No such luck.

Just a van waiting below.

The Red Cross van.

He smashed belly-down onto the hood, the metal dimpling with a thunderclap.

And stared through the front windshield directly at Special Agent in Charge Naomi Templeton.