The Last Orphan
Chapter 5

Something Older Than Fear

Templeton was in the passenger seat, headphones clamped over her bluntly cut blond hair. The driver, a scrawny young man who looked two steps out of RTC, had recoiled in the driver’s seat, arms crisscrossed in front of his face like a B-movie actress fending off an encroaching monster. Through a gap in the bulkhead partition, Evan could see into the high-end surveillance setup in the back, four men in a nest of equipment, sweating through button-up shirts.

Evan’s ears rang from the impact, and his chin throbbed where it had slammed into the hood of the van.

He and Naomi blinked at each other.

Panicking, the driver grabbed for his sidearm and raised it to the windshield. Evan told his muscles to roll him off the hood, but they lagged, stunned into inertness from the landing. Naomi yelled at the driver, lunging for his arms, but she couldn’t reach him before he fired into Evan’s face.

The Secret Service service pistol, a P229 in .357 SIG, fired rounds with 506 foot-pounds of force and a muzzle velocity of 1,350 feet per second.

Evan’s forehead was barely a yard from the bore, separated only by the pane of the windshield.

He watched in awe as the glass spiderwebbed before his face, cracks spreading from the point of impact.

But there was no collision, no last-instant blaze of light, no gray matter exploding out the back of his skull. The pane had turned opaque, clouded with cracks, and that’s when he noticed the small cluster of lead resting in the bull’s-eye eighteen inches from his nose.

Bullet-resistant glass.

On a tactical van.

Inside, Naomi was shouting at the driver as she leaned across the console, disarming him.

Evan decided not to stick around.

He slid off the side of the hood, ankles and knees screaming as his boots struck concrete. His flank was knotted up, and his elbows ached.

All around, people were streaming out of the South Tower, a messy evacuation overseen by armed operators. Bizarrely, in the midst of the commotion no one seemed to take note of him.

A familiar thump-thump-thump overrode the ringing in Evan’s head, and then a blast of wind nearly knocked him over, a Black Hawk setting down in the middle of Gracie Allen Drive. Two more spun into view above. Now the intersection was clogged with dark SUVs screeching in at all angles, sirens screaming, blocking off every avenue of egress. Agents hollered into radios, staticky bursts coming back at hiked volumes.

“—shots fired at street level. Repeat: shots fired—”

“—switching to lethal—”

Evan was in the eye of the storm, and his only hope was to lose himself in the maelstrom.

They’d be expecting him to run away.

So instead he’d run back to where it had started.

As he stumbled beneath the overhang, he could hear Naomi exit the van, charting his movement, yelling into her radio.

A stream of CAT members poured out of the stairwell from which he’d just ejected, and they stopped, heads swiveling to replace him amid the turmoil.

But he was gone inside, the glass doors to reception parting politely. He nodded at the receptionist and shuffled past two undercover agents jogging out, their eyes on the crowd outside.

Through their radios, he heard Naomi’s voice: “—no live ammo! He did not fire on us. Repeat: He did not fire on us.”

“—already got orders from the—”

“Keep on less-lethal!”

A wattle-necked worker was leaning out the door to the gift shop, gazing at the bodies washing by.

Ducking into the shop, Evan pulled on a mesh hat, its puffy white front panel sporting bubble letters announcing TACOFORNIA! He grabbed a bouquet of lavender flowers and spun back out, holding them to partially block his face.

A few nurses evacuated patients in wheelchairs. Another agent stood post by reception, ushering them out, chattering into his radio, “—clearing a few more from the rooftop. I’m securing the lobby.”

Evan walked briskly toward the heart of the hospital, elbow-knocking a handicap push plate, the sturdy door yawning open to a corridor. He scampered toward a stairwell sign pointing around a corner.

A single pair of footsteps quickened back in the lobby, a radio broadcasting off the hard surfaces: “—coming down now, flushing the stairs—”

He picked up the pace, reaching a trot down the long corridor before slicing into the intersecting hall.

And then Naomi’s voice came from behind him just around the bend. “Okay, okay. Alpha Team members each take a staircase and start up from ground level to trap him. I got the one off the lobby.”

“—lethal if we’re gonna—”

“No! Do not use—”

“—dealing with Orphan X. I’m not taking any f*****g—”

He could hear Naomi sprinting now, her breath coming harder. It was the closest he’d been to her since that night they’d cat-and-moused around her apartment in D.C.

“Less-lethal only!” An uncharacteristic note of concern animated Naomi’s voice. “Those are the ROEs straight from the top! Confirm!”

The rear stairs were up ahead. Evan slipped inside, eased the door shut, flew up and onto the first landing, flowers thrashing against his thigh.

Footsteps way up above, boots hammering. Leaning over, he peered up the stairwell. Gloved hands visible near the top floor, sliding briskly down railings.

He would fight them on the stairs. Close quarters hand-to-hand would cut their numerical advantage. Tight space, metal handrails, concrete walls. He’d claw, fight, and grapple his way to the plaza and then assess other stairwells and fire escapes or lose himself once more in the South Tower.

And then he heard it.

Different footfall, closer to him, two-thirds down. Quiet steps, awkward and rushed.

One or more civilians trapped between him and descending CAT members who were sufficiently alarmed to use lethal ammo.

The Tenth Commandment roared in his head: Never let an innocent die.

Evan froze on the landing, his mind flurrying through various civilians he’d seen in the plaza. Pregnant mother with twin toddlers. Chemo-bald middle-schoolers. Father and baby with hearing aids. Exhausted mom toting a newborn in a BabyBjörn.

Evan couldn’t risk anyone getting caught in the crossfire. And he didn’t have the luxury to move to another plan.

For the first time, fear set in, ice-hot cortisol and epinephrine firing through his bloodstream.

The civilian footsteps neared, the sound becoming distinctive. Flip-flop. Flip-flop.

Evan felt his stomach turn with realization an instant before a meaty hand gripped the railing above. A pudgy face, scarlet with fear and framed by a mullet, peered down at Evan.

Frank B.

The guy in the sleeveless dri-FIT who’d collided with Evan beneath the umbrella.

Frank B.’s mouth was agape, square white teeth even whiter against his flushed face.

Evan said, “Goddamn it.”

The Tenth Commandment didn’t allow wiggle room for assholes.

Cursing, he drew back and leapt down the stairs, hitting the crash bar hard and spilling into the corridor, the stupid Tacofornia! cap tumbling off his head. He’d kept the flowers in the unlikely event he could generate another ruse but had drawn his ARES again, leading the way in his left hand.

Naomi Templeton stood ten meters from him, stark in the bare corridor. She was aiming at his face.

He was aiming at hers.

Her chest was heaving, and he could see a flush at the base of her throat where her white button-up parted beneath her Kevlar vest. She wore her hair in a utilitarian cut—sharp bangs, a small stick of a ponytail, sweat-darkened wisps forming a neat fringe at her neck. With ice-blue eyes and clean features, she was striking but always seemed to underplay her looks, as if she were annoyed at the kind of attention they might bring her.

Just the two of them, alone in the rear hall.

They might as well have been on their own planet.

“Civilian on the stairs,” he said. “Call it in.”

Keeping her pistol locked on his critical mass, she tilted her shoulder radio’s mic toward her lips. “No-shoot on the northwest stairs. There’s a no-shoot on the stairs.”

Heartbeat fluttering in the side of his neck. The grab of the front frame checkering, eighteen lines per inch, against the inside curl of his fingers. High-profile straight-eight sights zeroed in on the bridge of her nose.

He knew he could get off the shot and roll to safety. She wouldn’t stand a chance.

The whites of her eyes were pronounced, but her grip was steady. He’d have expected nothing less.

He could taste his breath, bitter and hot. He felt something older than fear, something deep in his DNA, the terrified surrender of prey skewered in the jaws of an apex predator.

His entire life since the age of twelve had been a narrowing to this moment.

“Okay,” he said, more to himself than to her.

And he holstered his pistol.

He held his hands wide, his right fist still ridiculously clutching the bouquet. He took a step back from her, and she lowered her SIG Sauer and fired, the round embedding in the tile a few inches in front of his boot. It sent a spray of chips into his shin, hard flecks like sleet. “Freeze.”

“Freeze freeze?” Evan asked. “Or can I drop the hydrangeas?”

Naomi looked unsure of herself. “Drop the hydrangeas.”

He let them go.

“Hands! Hands!”

He raised them, palms showing.

The sound of men on the staircase was closer now, thundering down at them. He could sense movement through the closed doors behind him and also past Naomi along the corridor.

The noose tightening through the slipknot, cinching in.

“Let me take you, X,” she said. “The CAT boys have hot triggers. Best-case they break your ribs with less-lethal. Worst-case someone gets killed.”

Her eyes and muzzle steady, she reached for a nylon pouch looped to her belt and withdrew a syringe filled with clear blue liquid. Given the scope of the tactical response, he guessed she was wielding etorphine, a semisynthetic opioid three thousand times more potent than morphine, used by vets to sedate large animals. He would have preferred something more suited to humans but wasn’t in a position to get finicky. The corridor was swimmy, the bright lights disorienting.

She bit off the plastic cap, spit it to the side. “I need to put this in your shoulder. You have to give me your word you’ll let me.”

Shouts and footfall even closer, all around them. A cry from the staircase, no doubt Frank B. being overtaken. Evan and Naomi stared at each other. No one else in the world.

“Please,” she said, with the faintest tremor in her voice.

Evan knit his fingers together at the base of his neck and took his knees, one at a time.

Not with a bang, then. But a whimper.

Naomi moved forward, her shadow falling across him, blocking out the harsh glare. She kept her weapon drawn, the needle readied in her right hand.

Now she stood over him.

He looked up at her. She looked down at him.

He felt her breath stir the air, felt it brush his cheeks. There was great respect in her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

A jab straight through the shirt into the meat of his shoulder.

The buried fire of the injection.

She holstered her SIG, holding his head with her other hand. Weakly, he nuzzled into it.

Somewhere at what felt like a great remove, he heard doors banging open, voices and shouting. Countless shadows flickered along the white, white hospital walls. His muscles started to give, and then he slumped into a fetal position.

The last thing he felt was Naomi’s hand cradling his cheek so his head wouldn’t strike the floor.