Mixed Signals
Imagine a meteorite.
No. Let’s be more specific than that.
Now imagine it suspended for a year inside a terra-cotta amphora from Italy filled with ultra-premium vodka.
The magnetized box, designated for one of Evan’s many false-front addresses, has taken a circuitous route through a half dozen mail-forwarding services to arrive in his hands.
Exuberant marketing copy touts a “slow and controlled exchange of oxygen that results in a smoother and more refined texture” and claims that the infusion of chondrite from the meteorite imparts “unrivaled taste and structure.”
Evan sips only the world’s finest vodkas, which Pegasus Shooting Star purports to be.
He reads more of the fine print.
From space to your glass.
Savor the sky.
Enjoy responsibly, obviously, on the rocks.
Etc.
The bottle, limited edition 391 of 4806, is colored a garish metallic teal green that is not promising.
Evan has drunk his fair share of gimmicky boozes and has found the overwhelming majority of them lacking.
Even ones with such grand claims as Pegasus—enriched by millions of years of space travel, derived from organic Burgundy wheat and given three slow reflux distillations, reduced for a month with spring water hoisted 150 meters up a limestone well—often taste like rubbing alcohol strained through a marketing committee.
Evan considers the bottle, resting now in the center of his spotless poured-concrete kitchen island.
Most of his seven-thousand-square-foot penthouse in the Castle Heights Residential Tower is gunmetal gray, stainless steel, and brushed nickel.
Weight stations, training mats, and hanging heavy bags spot the great room.
Floor-to-ceiling windows look east to downtown L.A.
and south to Century City. The one jarring break from the OCD-friendly hard surfaces and muted colors is the living wall, a vertical garden crawling with herbs and greens, most of them suited to martini garnish.
The penthouse sports more hidden security measures than make sense to recount, not when we are awaiting our first sip of a beverage this unlikely.
It is only late morning, not an hour for spirits, but curiosity beckons.
Evan withdraws to his freezer vault, a glass-walled room the size of a generous walk-in closet.
The underlit glass shelves hold an astonishing array of perfectly spaced bottles.
It is easily the best vodka bar on the continent though it serves only one patron, a lone-wolf assassin with limited social skills.
Mist fills his lungs. From a freezer drawer in the centered station he withdraws a stainless-steel martini glass and then a shaker, which he feeds with four ice cubes.
He returns to the kitchen island, cracks the garish bottle, and dribbles two fingers into the shaker.
As he corks the bottle, Brooke’s words echo in his mind: He’ll hurt me if I tell. He’s dangerous. Vodka is necessary. But duty beckons.
Leaving the shaker to sit a moment, he takes out his RoamZone and calls a very dangerous man who is either his nemesis or his associate depending on their respective moods and modes.
Luke Devine answers on the first ring. “Mr. Nowhere?”
There is humming in the background—the sound of another line ringing, businesslike chatter from staff, the murmur of a financial-news program.
Before Evan can speak, Devine says, “Hang on.” A rustling as the phone is pressed to something—his chest?
—and then Luke’s muffled voice says, “I don’t give a shit if he’s on the board of the WEF, you tell that Davos-hole if he tries to take a bite out of cobalt processing in Congo, I will bury him.
Remind him I have the uncut Diddy tapes from the 2006 spring White Party, and that I control electronic billboards in Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, and Shibuya Crossing. ”
Devine is a less sane version of Elon Musk, prone to dizzying manic heights and thunderous lows.
A power broker and mind-fucker of the highest order, he is a predator who sits at the center of an elaborate web of corporate entities, limited liability companies, and offshore enterprises, on constant vigil for the faintest spider-thread tingle.
The Gatsbyesque parties he throws at his secret-camera-riddled Southampton mansion have allowed him to collect an exhaustive compendium of blackmail materials, which he uses to enforce his version of greater good on the world—or at least to hold to account players more malicious than he.
His Santa Claus naughty list ranges from world leaders to Supreme Court justices, movie stars to media moguls.
The strings he pulls make the world dance.
He is the most powerful person Evan has met who is not Evan.
Evan has done Luke Devine several favors, including not killing him when he mostly deserved it and recently helping him through a mental crackup while ensuring he didn’t blow up half the world in the process.
Though their Venn-diagram moral overlap is no bigger than a pinpoint, they have recently managed to persist in a cautious alliance, helping each other in the rare instances when their respective extrajudicial interventions align.
Devine comes back to Evan now. “Yes?”
“I need to get to Long Island. Will you arrange a plane?”
Devine has made his private fleet available to Evan as a sign of appreciation for Evan’s coming to his aid when he was at his worst. After years of flying under backstopped aliases with Melinda Truong’s impeccably forged documents, Evan is grateful to have private jets at his disposal.
Not just because they allow him to dodge security checks, but because they make his sojourns immensely more efficient.
Plus his matte-black ARES 1911 can ride along with him.
“Why?” The word, from Luke, sounds more like a demand than a question.
“Young woman in trouble.”
A sigh. “You are nothing if not predictable.”
“That’s a yes?”
“Airport?”
“Van Nuys.”
“When?”
“Five minutes ago.”
“That it?”
“I also need to make use of the Brain.”
An extension of Devine’s magnificent prefrontal cortex, the Brain is an AI data-and biometric-gathering system encased in a Faraday cage within a secret room in Devine’s mansion.
It has illicit access to databases the world over, an all-seeing, all-knowing eye of God several orders greater than Evan’s nerve center hidden in the secret Vault behind a trick door in his bathroom.
It will help him zero in on Brooke Hawthorne with greater efficiency.
“Which means,” Devine says, “you’ll bring the girl?”
The girl: Josephine Morales, a seventeen-year-old Orphan Program washout and genius hacker who happens to be like a niece-daughter to Evan.
Recently he has begun trusting Joey to go into the field with him, an enormous step for a lone-wolf assassin who has operated solo for decades.
Joey has been the first person to cross the operational divide between his black and white worlds.
Her expertise and insight enhances him. If just barely, she is worth the disruption of bringing the messy personal along.
“Yes.” Already he is shooting Joey a text, putting her on standby for the trip.
“A family affair,” Devine says. “Very well. Mi casa, su remote office. However, I insist that you come to dinner tonight. I’ll have my driver take you straight from the hangar.”
“Dinner?” Evan feels a pulse of dread. “Like a normal-person dinner?”
“Where we’re not trying to kill each other. This is what friends do.”
“We’re friends?”
“Perhaps merely warm acquaintances. But I do feel I owe you after you helped me put my mind back together.”
“I’ll bring a shitty house red and a bouquet of peonies.”
“No need to get snippy. Rawlings’ll text flight details within the quarter hour.”
Evan hangs up. He needs to pack, check key gear, get to the airport.
Which means moving things along. After all, the ice in the shaker is melting and no one needs watered-down meteorite vodka.
Condensation already frosts the stainless steel.
Vodka is meant to be tasted at room temperature. But it is designed to be enjoyed cold.
He shakes and shakes and shakes some more.
The frozen metal seeps its numbing chill into his palms. This discomfort he enjoys, a foreplay of sorts.
Rarely does he indulge more than a few sips.
It’s not an alcoholic effect he desires but the ritual itself, a purification ceremony involving an elixir that has undergone a transformation from base matter into something approximating perfection, a transformation mirroring the process he endured as a throwaway foster kid alchemized through Orphan training.
He prizes his hands from the shaker. The pour into the frosted metal martini glass is viscous, a skein of ice crystals texturing the surface.
Then he crosses to the living wall. A dwarf lemon tree protrudes from the upper right quadrant.
As he plucks one of its offerings, he pulls out his Strider, the shark fin riding the back of the blade catching on the pocket edge to snap the folding knife open.
He slices a thin sprig of skin from the lemon.
Then rims the lip of the martini glass with the lemon garnish, dips it once into the drink, and dispenses with the peel.
He walks across the great room to the wall of floor-to-ceiling glass looking east to downtown.
The high-rise across is laid ant-farm open to him, its large-windowed apertures baring its human idiosyncrasies and quotidian rhythms. He observes at an anthropologist’s remove as the denizens conduct their weekend rituals.
A teenage girl throwing a rubber ball against the wall for a scrambling schnauzer.
A middle-aged couple lounging in an adjustable bed, bodies crinkled atop the reclined support, bathed in the light of TV.
A grandfather reading an old-fashioned newspaper at a kitchen table while twin grandkids wrestle in front of a plastic play kitchen behind him, spilling bowls of snacks.
So much life. So much mess. So many stories.