Nemesis

Tommy Stojack.

The guy’s name is everywhere, a hushed referral at an ammo trade stall, a proper noun rising above the buzz at the Green Beret Foundation booth, a fleck of sea-foam shot from the swirls and eddies of the churning crowd on the convention floor. It is a secret handshake, a dropped name to prove bona fides, a password to a private club.

Depending on which snippet of conversation is trustworthy, Stojack either gunsmithed at the local police range, or he ran the veterans’ parade, or he demilitarized obsolete and surplus munitions at the Hawthorne Army Depot, or he’d bare-assed the Ward 5 councilman at last year’s city meeting for cutting survivor benefits for the spouses of firefighters. The valets joke about Stojack’s filthy rig, and the bartenders compare notes on his generous tips.

Evan does not know the man nor has he come here looking for him, but his situational awareness demands that he take notice. He’s been trained to read the street wherever he goes, to assemble unofficial dominance hierarchies in his mind – which warlord oversees which zone of rubbled mountainside, which bureaucrat requires a palmed-off wad of yuan in a well-appointed consulate office, which oligarch demands more elbow room in which forgotten corner of Eastern Europe.

Muscle memory pounded into his cells from the age of twelve, when Evan had been taken from a foster home and ensconced in the dark arts of the Orphan Program, a full black operation buried so far beneath the DoD that its protocols never glimpsed the light of day.

A throwaway child brought to the water’s edge of his American promise, a promise that receded from him when he bent to it, a promise that is his to uphold, if not for himself then for others.

Like the other products of the Program, Evan had been a clean asset with no familial or community entanglements. Any record of his brief pitiful existence had been wiped from the databases. His face was unknown, his biometrics uncaptured. As the twenty-fourth recruit, he’d been assigned the matching letter of the alphabet for his operational alias.

X.

It was stamped on him, his alias, the cruel power of his own nothingness. Two bloody strokes against oblivion, the awesome, awful power to obliterate.

They’d turned him into an expendable human weapon deployed around the globe to complete missions unsanctioned under US or international law. If caught, tortured, or killed, he would be neither claimed nor missed.

His mind is a treasure map of buried bodies, verboten knowledge sufficiently radioactive to overthrow administrations and unleash wars. Which makes him all the more dangerous to the Powers That Be since he’d fled the Program, slipped off the radar, and rebooted himself on the left coast under a new alias as an importer of industrial cleaning supplies. A great number of powerful men would sleep more soundly in a great number of soft beds could they ensure that Evan joined the legion of corpses he’d put six feet under.

They’d already executed Jack Johns, the handler and father figure who’d raised Evan from the age of twelve, training him in isolation aside from myriad subject-matter experts brought in to augment his instruction. Jack had been the first person to treat Evan as if he had inherent worth, a dizzying concept that even now as a young man Evan struggles to embrace.

Early on, Jack had told him that the hard part wouldn’t be making him a killer. The hard part would be keeping him human.

Turned out the hardest part was to contain both warring directives inside one person.