Chapter 8 The Good Kind of Bad #2
“Be secure,” Cassie adds, mooshing his cheeks and swinging his face away from Morgan’s toward her big hazel eyes. “‘Secure’ is super sexy.”
This is the point. This is why he is here. To discover parameters in this strange dance between males and females, to learn to first do no harm when it comes to innocents, to ensure that he won’t do bad in the service of doing the good kind of bad.
“Mmm. Yeah. Secure.” Morgan skims a fingertip along the line of his chin. One of her legs is slung across Evan’s lower stomach, the thigh dimpled faintly with a prelude of cellulite. “And, like, quiet. And strong.”
He doesn’t say, Yes, ma’am.
He is being, like, quiet. And strong.
“He’s sort of like that already,” Cassie observes, talking to Morgan.
Cassie’s lips are plush. She fastens her mouth over his nipple, flicks her tongue absentmindedly, then looks up with a big lazy smile. The remaining lipstick shimmers on her lips, her breath pineapple and orange. His nerves—all of him—stand at attention.
That pink streak on her incisor once more throws static into his system.
The young women are not merely fantasy. They are real.
He is training to become a killer. And yet Jack has tasked him with remaining human. All his other training focuses on the former. This insists on the latter.
For him to become an Orphan worthy of Jack’s training, he has to contain all this inside him—how to feel pleasure while not becoming enslaved to it, how to relate interpersonally while maintaining distance, how to protect others in all their idiosyncratic messiness while sustaining operational perfection.
Cassie kisses his sternum and then the top of his stomach and then his internal obliques and Morgan is leaning over his face, lips moving against his mouth, and she is murmuring, “You can handle it. You can handle all this and not lose your mind,” and he is trying not to gasp and—
—the singing bowl pitch vibrated through the musculature of his lower back and—there, there—put a wobble into the snarl of muscle fiber, loosening it.
At last the knot unstitched against the ridge of hip bone, letting go and sending a sparkler streak of fire down to the pinkie toe of his left foot.
His shoulders flattened dead smooth across the mat and his neck twinged and he exhaled and kept exhaling longer than made sense until his back cracked from stem to stern.
Rolling off the block, he sagged into the fetal position and lay and breathed and breathed some more.
After a time, awash in endorphins and serotonin, he pulled himself to his feet and stood, swaying slightly, finding his bearings. Shirtless, shoeless, dripping with sweat—he felt feral.
One hour and seventeen minutes to wheels-up.
Walking to his master suite, he felt no twinge in his back. Entering the bathroom, he nudged aside the frosted-glass shower door, which retracted silently into the wall on hidden tracks. He showered in chilly water to dampen inflammation.
Drying off, he moved past his floating bed to the bureau.
Each drawer held stacks of identical precision-folded apparel—dark jeans, discreet-tactical cargo pants, gray V-necked T-shirts, black sweatshirts.
A dozen tactical shirts with magnetic buttons and machine-vision-thwarting patterns hung in the closet, spaced with precise two-inch gaps.
As he dressed, the recollection of his training with Cassie and Morgan lingered.
Though it seemed impossible, he was older now than they were then.
Like his other instructors, they had taught him control, discipline, restraint.
And—it struck him now—something more. Of all his teachers, they were the only ones who demanded that he see them in their totality.
An hour twelve minutes to departure.
A package resting on the middle shelf in the closet caught his gaze. Wrapped in brown paper and adorned with customs stamps, it had arrived a few days ago from Northampton, England, forwarded through several mailing address. He hadn’t opened it yet.
He reached for it, hesitated, hesitated some more, and then took it off the shelf and tore it open.
With reverence he lifted the lid off the box inside.
A flap of blue polishing cloth bore the coat of arms of the UK’s royal warrant.
He peeled back the fabric. Nestled toe-to-shin in the cardboard box, they gleamed inside.
A month ago, they’d beckoned to him from the window of Jermyn Street a few blocks off Savile Row.
He’d been strolling back to the Savoy after an Alessandro Palazzi free-poured martini at Dukes, the zest of Amalfi lemon lingering on his lips.
For a good twenty minutes, he’d stood on the pavement outside the shop, marveling at the camo brogue boots.
For as long as he could remember he selected his gear for maximum efficiency and performance.
But never had he acquired something simply because it caught his fancy.
He’d gone inside. And ordered a bespoke pair.
And now here they were. The finest Northampton leather, tanned with oak bark from the surrounding countryside and finished with a camouflage design.
The generational tradition of excellence that had given rise to them reached back to eight years before Victoria ascended to the throne.
Indeed they were functionally perfect—every stitch of the welt, every dot in the brogue pattern, every perforation of the wing tip.
Soles bunked, heels buffed, leather hand-burnished to a near-reflective patina.
Each pair of boots had to pass nearly three hundred individual operations and checkpoints before leaving the factory. Base material alchemized into an embodiment of human excellence. Like him, but beautiful.
He peered down into the box, beholding them.
They looked so out of place here in his penthouse with its poured-concrete surfaces and stainless-steel edges. They were decadent, distinctive, noticeable—everything he was not and could never be. Staring at them now he felt— What did he feel? Guilt? Pride? Unworthiness?
He closed the lid and put the box away again.
Then he donned his Original S.W.A.T.s, which blended into inconsequentiality beneath the cuffs of his cargo pants. He regarded himself in the mirror on the inside of the closet door.
He looked utterly forgettable. Average size, average build, just a normal guy, not too handsome.
Much better. Now he was ready.
The doorbell rang.
Could that possibly be Joey, uncharacteristically early by a full ten minutes? And ringing the doorbell rather than just breaking in with the duplicate key she’d made behind his back?
He moved to the front door and opened it. He expected the usual—Joey in torn jeans, oversize flannel, muscle undershirt, Big Gulp in hand.
But he scarcely recognized the young woman standing before him in a tailored light gray suit.
The contrast-stitched blazer sported notched lapels, and her slim-fit poplin blouse had a stand-up collar, revealing a slender dagger of flesh at the throat.
Trousers tight at the waist but flared at the cuffs.
Her lush brown-black hair was pulled up out of her face, swept loosely into an elegant topknot as big as a sunflower, her undercut even at both sides and understated.
Her usual rucksack had been replaced by a sleek leather portfolio briefcase large enough to accommodate her laptop and the usual half dozen items of hacker hardware she kept on her person at all times.
Evan was relieved to spot a few traces of Recognizable Joey—dimple in her right cheek, Doc Martens with embroidered roses, an emerald nose stud accenting her eyes.
He blinked a few times. “Did you get eaten by a fashion magazine?”
She checked an actual watch that she was wearing on her actual wrist. “We’re ten minutes ahead of schedule.
I have my truck gassed up and ready downstairs.
We can switch vehicles at the Encino safe house.
I’ve already Wazed the route to the airport, no traffic events.
I have two sets of spare license plates ready to—”
“Joey. We don’t need to do all that. We can just drive to Aragón’s private hangar and leave your truck there.”
She deflated slightly. “Copy that. I’ve squared away a professional sitter for Dog so there won’t be any disruptions on our mission—”
“This isn’t technically a mission.”
“—and I left three emergency contacts if anything comes up relating to his care so I won’t be distracted from the mission.”
Evan had rescued the Rhodesian ridgeback from an underground fighting ring and given him to Joey. At first, in an attempt to avoid growing attached to him, she’d refused to call him anything but Dog. Her ploy had failed disastrously but the generic name had stuck.
“Josephine. It’s your dog. You should have your phone on. And what’s with the i-banker cosplay?”
“I have to hold focus. The Second Commandment: How you do anything is how you do everything.”
“We might need some new Commandments.”
At last her young professional facade faltered, old-school Joey excitement shining through. “Really? Seriously? New Commandments? Can I choose one?”
“No,” Evan said. “And aren’t you going to give up and name Dog at some point?”
The scowl came up and all of a sudden she looked like an angry seventeen-year-old again instead of Joey 2.0. “What am I supposed to name him? Chester?”
“Yes. Chester. That’s the only option.”
She stormed past him into the great room, a wisp floating free of the topknot and standing on end from static electricity. “No proper noun can suit him. He’s archetypal. He contains multitudes. He’s my person. He’s Dog.”
Evan said, “Right.”
“But I am relieved I can keep my phone on,” she confessed, scratching at her topknot and unleashing a loop of hair that dangled artlessly to her shoulder.
“The stupid dog sitter didn’t even know how to clean ridgeback ears and we all know the yeasty nightmare that can turn into.
” She made Gross Yeast Fingers, which so far as Evan could tell had zero relationship to the actual composition of yeast. “So I had to teach her how with the squirt bottle and then Dog did his shaky-shake and got, like, ear juice splattered all over me so I had to shower again and this is, like, my backup suit. But you could still be, less, dunno, discouraging about my promotion.”
After her stiff entrance, jabbering about feelings and fungal dog ears felt bizarrely welcome.
“You’re not promoted. There is no promotion. You’re just tagging along.”
Unfazed, Joey rolled her eyes. “O-kay. Whatever you want to call it. But I for one am going to be more professional on this mission—”
“It’s not a mission.”
“—and I think we could both benefit from taking stuff to, like, the next level. Like: a rebrand.” The stray wisp standing out from her head waggled in the air-conditioning like a streamer.
Evan checked his Vertex fob watch. They were no longer running ahead of time. He started for the door but she didn’t catch the cue.
“I for one am making some changes. No more Dr Pepper and Red Vines.” Joey tapped her portfolio briefcase. “I packed antioxidant trail mix.”
“Proud of yourself for that, are you?”
She flushed slightly but kept on. “And you could stand to clean up your act, too. Cut out booze, maybe.”
Pausing at the door, he glanced back at her.
She looked so earnest. He let himself take her in, all the parts of her, the striving teen and the emerging adult and the little kid beneath it all.
Over her right shoulder rose the glass-walled vodka freezer vault, its shelves lined with the purest spirits from six continents.
“I can’t quit drinking,” he said, unfurling an arm to usher her out. “I’ve invested too much money in alcohol.”