The nowhere man, p.34
The Nowhere Man, page 34
At the back of the clean, minimalist space, you can walk down the sole hall. You might enter a master bedroom suite. To the right is a bathroom.
It looks like an ordinary bathroom, but it is not.
If you nudge the frosted-glass shower door, it will roll back silently on barn-hanger carbon-steel wheels. The hot-water lever hides invisible sensors, keyed to the palm print of one person only. Concealed expertly in the tile pattern is a secret door.
The bedroom is as sparse as the rest of the house—bureau, spotless floor, bed.
It looks like an ordinary bed, but it is not.
At second glance you might notice it is floating in the air. The mattress sits on a slab that is repelled from the floor by neodymium rare-earth magnets strong enough to anchor a small ship. Steel cables hold the slab suspended three feet off the floor. Were they severed, the slab would fly up, smash through the ceiling, and go airborne above the Wilshire Corridor.
A man sits on the bed, legs crossed, spine straight, so still that he might be carved from marble. He lives by a set of Commandments, and this act of meditating embodies the Second: How you do anything is how you do everything. His eyes are closed, but not all the way. His open hands rest on his thighs. He is nowhere, but precisely here. He is nothing more than his breath. He is doing one thing and one thing only. This is the opposite of multitasking.
He looks like an ordinary man.
He is not.
* * *
Within the top echelon of intel circles in nations of influence and instability, Evan Smoak was known as Orphan X.
At the age of twelve, he’d been pulled out of a foster home in East Baltimore and raised in a full black covert operation buried so deep inside the U.S. government that virtually no one knew it existed. His upbringing consisted of relentless physical, emotional, cultural, and psychological training, a grinding wheel that honed him into a razor-sharp implement. His handler, Jack Johns, raised him not merely to be a top-tier assassin but also a human being—two reactive elements that, if put under enough pressure, might combust.
And then Jack had taught him to integrate those pieces. To balance on the tightrope dividing yin from yang. To not combust.
It was a lifelong challenge.
When Evan had gone rogue from the Orphan Program, he’d kept his other alias—the Nowhere Man—and devoted himself to helping people in dire circumstances who had no one to turn to. His clients reached him by calling a little-known number that had become the stuff of urban legend: 1-855-2-NOWHERE. Each digitized call traveled over the Internet through a maze of encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels, circling the planet before reaching Evan’s RoamZone phone.
He answered the same way every time: Do you need my help?
And then he stepped in to protect the innocent because no one else would, to shield them from those who would do them harm. To hunt a monster, the shopworn proverb went, you must become one. But to Evan’s ear the saying had always rung hollow.
He had been monstrous once, a weapon sharpened to a singular point. His role as the Nowhere Man was an undoing of that. Every time he helped someone, he regained some tiny part of his soul.
And when he was done, he asked his clients to pass the favor along. To empower themselves by finding someone else in untenable circumstances.
Evan had last helped a young man with a gentle demeanor and a special brain, who had been terrorized by an entire criminal enterprise. Like every client before him, Trevon Gaines had his assignment—to find Evan the next person in desperate need. To give the Nowhere Man’s phone number to that person. And Evan would be waiting once more on the other end of the line, ready to pick up and do it all over again.
“Redemption” was an imperfect word for what he was seeking. Confronting the world with his own code, illuminating the darkness with the guttering light of his own morality—that was a process of becoming.
Becoming less sharp. More human.
The more life he let in, the more he could sense the dawn of a different existence shimmering miragelike in the distance. He’d been on a single trajectory since the age of twelve, launched from a slingshot into all the menace mankind had to offer. As the Nowhere Man, he’d shifted his bearings, sure, but not his fundamental direction.
In the past year, he’d resected the cancer of his past. He’d vanquished the corrupt Orphans pursuing him. And the man at whose direction they’d been acting—the president of the United States. The plan to wipe out the innocent Orphans had been stopped and the survivors scattered to the wind.
Now that Evan was no longer running from something, he’d started to wonder where he was running to. Lately he felt worn down, bone-tired. More and more, questions were arising from some deep-buried place.
How much atonement was enough?
How much longer could he forge through the refuse-choked alleys of cities, staring down eyes as black as the abyss, souls clouded with sick intentions?
Would he just keep going until he was holding down a slab at the morgue?
At some point had he earned enough of himself back to deserve something better?
He didn’t know. But he’d decided nonetheless.
The next adventure would be his last.
One more ring of the durable black phone that he kept on his person at all times. One more time he’d shatter through into the underworld and—if he could make it back alive—carry someone out of damnation. One more time sacrificing a pound of his flesh to win a piece of his soul.
One last mission and he was out.
Evan Smoak is a man with a dangerous past. Chosen as a child, he was raised and trained as an Orphan, an off-the-books black box program designed to create the perfect deniable intelligence asset: An assassin. Evan was Orphan X—until he broke with the program and used everything he learned to disappear.
But those behind the Orphan program refuse to let go of their asset…
Don’t miss a single Orphan X Thriller!
For more information visit gregghurwitz.net.
Also by Gregg Hurwitz
THE ORPHAN X NOVELS
Orphan X
The Nowhere Man
Hellbent
Out of the Dark
OTHER NOVELS
The Tower
Minutes to Burn
Do No Harm
The Kill Clause
The Program
Troubleshooter
Last Shot
The Crime Writer
Trust No One
They’re Watching
You’re Next
The Survivor
Tell No Lies
Don’t Look Back
YOUNG ADULT NOVELS
The Rains
Last Chance
About the Author
Gregg Hurwitz is a New York Times bestselling author of fifteen thrillers, including, most recently, Orphan X. Critically acclaimed, Hurwitz is a two-time finalist for the International Thriller Writers’ Best Novel prize and a finalist for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Steel Dagger. Hurwitz is also a screenwriter, TV producer, and comic book writer. The first book in the Evan Smoak series, Orphan X, has been published in twenty-one languages. Hurwitz lives in Los Angeles. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
1. What He Needs to Know
2. The Social Contract
3. War Machine
4. Clean as a Scalpel
5. The Eyes of the Data-Mining Beast
6. Struck Oil
7. The Inevitable Gurgle
8. His Own Dollhouse
9. Our Lady of Holy Death
10. The Strange Language of Intimacy
11. No Longer the Same Place
12. Magical Machinations
13. Last Glance Back
14. Rambo in a Bespoke Shirt
15. Back-Alley Philosophers
16. Faithful Companions
17. Beautiful Monster
18. Flesh and Bone
19. Somewhere Much, Much Worse
20. No End Point
21. In Trouble
22. Divine Right
23. Destroying Angel
24. A Complex, Sticky Business
25. Not Very Nice
26. Man or Nature
27. Six in Total
28. The Grim Reapress
29. Your Bad Self
30. Someone’s Idea of a Library
31. A Hard Man
32. Ready
33. The Inexpressible
34. What It Is You Do
35. Into the Snowy White
36. A Real Fighter
37. More Animal Than Human
38. A Bad Night’s Work
39. To the Brink
40. People Who Deserve It
41. No Ready Answer
42. Corners of His Mind
43. Unleash Hell
44. Celebration
45. A Different Kind of Ruckus
46. All the Honey
47. Collision Avoidance
48. Some Bizarre Mating Dance
49. Flicker of Coldness
50. Making His Preparations
51. A Shout into the Abyss
52. Some Kind of Advantage
53. Some Delicacies
54. Bad Dogs
55. Almost There
56. Mostly Certain
57. A Very Persuasive Call
58. Cold
59. Reborn
60. The Only Person Worse Than Us
61. To Do Harm
62. That Gnawing Feeling
63. The People No One Wants
64. The Slender Man
65. Fragile Little Bond
66. Banged Up in All the Right Ways
67. What Was Missing
68. Object Permanence
69. No Extradition
70. The Slightest Misstep
71. Vaporized
72. The Old Stories
73. Resolute
74. Overlord of Everything and Nothing
Acknowledgments
Excerpt: Into the Fire
Also by Gregg Hurwitz
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE NOWHERE MAN. Copyright © 2016 by Gregg Hurwitz. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover photograph © Patrick Kang/Arcangel Images
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-06785-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-13749-4 (international)
ISBN 978-1-4668-7652-1 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466876521
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.
First Edition: January 2017
Gregg Hurwitz, The Nowhere Man
