The Last Orphan
Chapter 8

A F*****g Selfie with Orphan X

Evan straightened up as much as the restraints allowed and feigned choking. Gagging against the mouth guard, knees bouncing, shoulders rattling the metal at his back.

“Shit— He’s choking. He’s choking.”

“Get the f*****g hood off, now!”

“Careful—wait—careful—don’t—”

Hands seized his shoulders. The GI sandbag was ripped off his head. Drooling around the mouth guard, he kept his eyes fluttering, rolled to white.

Gloved hands grabbed his head roughly, chin and crown. Someone unsnapped the plastic band and yanked the guard free of his mouth, and then the earmuffs were lifted and the earplugs tugged free.

The clamp on his head was released, and then he heard the clank of geared-up bodies flying back to hit the bench across from him, everyone keeping a good safe distance.

He opened his eyes.

He was indeed cuffed and barred and chained and strapped to a restraint chair seated in a metal cradle in the back of an uparmored SUV with blacked-out windows. The vehicle had been reconfigured with facing bench seats.

He was indeed wearing soft-soled disposable slippers and a standard prison jumpsuit, though it was black, not orange.

There were indeed two gunners. They were ensconced in body armor over black BDUs, select fire SR-16s with SureFire suppressors at the ready, SIG P229s in drop-leg holsters, double flashbangs bulging in pouches.

There were indeed two handlers armed with the now-familiar grenade launchers and various caustic sprays and shock devices poking from various cargo pockets.

And seated directly across from him, Naomi Templeton herself playing the role of team commander.

Evan immediately stopped choking and let his face replace dead calm. The men’s eyes bulged beneath their tactical goggles. Legs bouncing with adrenaline. They couldn’t take their eyes off him. Naomi alone looked unflustered.

Evan cleared this throat. Once. “You sure you have enough firepower?”

Naomi’s lips tensed, an almost-smile. “Maybe.”

The younger of the gunners was breathing hard, his finger curled around the trigger instead of resting alongside the guard. “You’re really him?” he asked. A glance at Naomi. “Can I …”

“What?” She did not sound pleased.

“If I stay over here, can I take a selfie with Orphan X?”

“No, Chip, you cannot take a f*****g selfie with Orphan X,” she said.

Chip jerked his head twice in a nod. “Okay.”

A car honking. Distant children’s laughter. The whine of a lawn mower, someone working a leaf blower. Straining to listen, Evan could barely make out the Black Hawk overhead.

“SR-16s are a bad call in a confined space like this,” he said to Naomi. “You should know better.”

“Standard operating procedure for CAT,” she said. “You know, boys and their toys. So predictable.”

Evan watched the baby-faced gunner. Chip’s neck muscles had tightened, and the wrinkles of his forehead were centered between the brows. Afraid.

“It’s okay,” Evan told him. “Breathe deep.”

“I’m fine.”

“Your safety’s off. And the guy next to you would probably feel better if you placed your trigger finger outside the guard.”

Chip’s throat bobbed with a hard swallow. He made the adjustments.

Evan glanced down as far as the choke chain allowed. “My jumpsuit,” he said. “All this and I don’t even rate orange?”

“We thought black suited you better.”

“Plus, it helps me blend in with you all in case we get hit and we need to switch convoys.”

“Perhaps that, too.”

“I’d love to see that,” the other gunner said. Graying hair showed beneath his helmet, and he had a broad, cynical face. Faded permanent marker on his helmet ID’d him as Paddy. “Even you couldn’t come up with an extraction plan for this. Not if you had a year to plan it.”

“No?” Evan said.

“No way.”

Evan smirked. He sensed amusement in Naomi’s face as well.

Chip still looked breathless. “How, then?”

Evan took a breath, considered. “I’d wait for the convoy to reach a relatively populated area, like the suburbs we’re passing through right now.” A jerk of his chin to the blacked-out windows through which he’d heard landscaping being tended. “I’d have arranged for an associate to hack into every satellite-TV dish in a three-mile radius and reconfigure them to give off sporadic electromagnetic pulses on the same frequency used by ground-to-air targeting systems. The Black Hawks”—he let his eyes pull north through the roof—“and the AC-130 gunship you have standing by at the Los Angeles Air Force Base would be flooded with hundreds of missile-targeting-system alerts a second. That neutralizes your air game.”

“No hacker could do that.”

Evan thought of Joey’s fingers working her keyboards with preternatural proficiency, a half-chewed Red Vine flapping from her mouth as she slurp-devoured it hands-free. “None that you know.”

“How would he even know which convoy was carrying you?”

“He,” Evan said, relishing the assumed pronoun, “would already be inside the visual feeds of the overwatch Black Hawks. From the air it’s relatively easy to gauge which convoy is driving the most cautiously. Once that’s established, we’d release a massive EMP through every area dish to take targeting and visual tracking offline and kill all your comms. That’d also knock out the engine ignitions. So we’re stalled.” He gave an emphatic nod. “Right here.”

“Fine,” one of the handlers said, getting in on the action. “Then what? You’d have to roll in an army regiment to take us.”

“Sure,” Evan said. “If I thought like you.”

Paddy was growing agitated. “So enlighten us,” he said, “with your special brand of magical thinking.”

“I’d send someone in a tanker truck full of liquid nitrogen to crash into us.” Evan felt a ping of amusement at the image of Tommy Stojack commandeering a massive fuel truck, windows down, breeze riffling his biker mustache and dragging smoke from the tip of his Camel Wide. “In the restraint chair, I’d be the most safely secured for the crash. Thank you for that. Then my driver would pop off the valves on the tanker and start hosing down the armored wall right behind your heads.”

The men glanced nervously around them. Chip’s thumb slipped over to double-check his seat belt.

“Now the vehicle body’s at subzero temperatures,” Evan continued. “And because it’s about to crack like a sheet of ice and the incoming gas is threatening to suffocate those of us unfortunate enough to not have a GI sandbag over our heads offering some filtration, you all scramble. Wisely. Once you’re clear of the compromised vehicle, the cloud of liquid nitrogen creates a visual barrier and f***s up your helmet- and weapons-mounted thermal vision.”

“Okay,” Naomi said, finally entering the fray. Leaning toward Evan, she rested her elbows on her knees. “Now what? You and your superhero driver are still surrounded by heavily armed transport specialists from three convoy vehicles.”

“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.”