Page 6 of Into the Fire

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 spotless as the rest of the house—bureau, 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 two 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.