Page 134 of Lone Wolf

The device was unwieldy and ridiculous-looking, like a jet pack worn on the front side. Under cover of darkness, accompanied by mechanical hisses and vacuum pops, Evan humped his way up the wall. Strapped to his back was a tightly rolled three-foot length of high-pile carpet.

Nearing the top, he set his boots in the stirrups, hung from a paddle with one hand, unfurled the carpet beside him, and then slung it up over the spikes. It took some wriggling to free himself from the straps, find new handholds, and leave the clunky contraption behind. Once he squirmed up and on top of the fence, he reached back to release the last suction cup, which gave way with a cephalopodic pop, and the unit fell back into the hedge of yew bushes.

He slid over the fence to the other side, bringing the carpet with him. It dragged in his wake, sliced into neat ribbons by the razor spikes.

From his cargo pocket he pulled out a flashlight. Its diffuse filter ensured he was throwing a sufficiently subtle glow not to flare the surveillance cameras even as he scanned the darkness to spot their glinting lenses.

He needn’t have worried; they were predictably positioned among the cypresses along the narrow drive. Keeping to the landscaping, he climbed his way up.

No camera on the porch. Allman’s crew probably figured that between the medieval wall and the bevy of cameras, no one could get here unspotted.

Evan scratched gently on the door with his fingernails like a branch in the wind or a horror-movie slasher.

A moment later he heard a stool squeak back and then footsteps tap across the foyer.

The movement of the door was smooth and easy, no indication of any fear behind it.

That came more directly a second later in Mr. Biltmore’s widened eyes.

He blinked it back, down, away, and then his smug jaw set once more with the conviction of a man who’d been given every last thing he’d wanted from the world. He crossed his arms and widened his stance, taking up more space like an agitated sage grouse.

“I know,” Biltmore said. “You’re thinking another fucking white-collar guy who thinks he’s tough. But I don’t think I’m tough. Sixth-dan black belt in tae kwon do, trained at the same dojo for eighteen years.”

“Where?” Evan asked.

Biltmore faltered. “Encino.”

Evan kicked him in the dick.

Well-placed, and the toes of his Original S.W.A.T.s were steel-lined.

It was crass and he knew it, but the guy had left an open lane as wide as the Chunnel and it would have been a disgrace to the Gods of Fighting for Evan to have shirked his moral obligation to capitalize on it.

Biltmore made a noise like an old door creaking open, his legs zippered up, ass sticking out. Then he toppled over.

Evan zip-tied his wrists and ankles together, hauled him up, dragged him across the threshold, and slung him into the sewer trench to the side of the porch. An audible clang as he ricocheted off the iron pipe below and then there came a groan, a muffled sob, and then silence.

Evan went back inside.

He stood in the security alcove, surveillance cameras feeding him live footage of various angles around the property and inside every room in the house. Convenient.

Evan stared at the image of himself in the security nook, his face fuzzed to an unidentifiable mess by the adversarial pattern of his shirt, lab-designed to confound capture. Body of a man, face of a ghost.

The Nowhere Man. Aside from him, only one person appeared to be on premises, a lump beneath the sheets in the master bedroom.

Evan glided back through the house.

Same unvented smell of crusted food, old sneakers, dusty furniture. Piles of batteries. Solventry delivery packages, piled three high, lined an entire side of the hallway.

The door to the powder room remained ajar, showing a half-squeezed toothpaste tube and a capless deodorant stick set on a marble sink basin. A wet vacuum cleaner lay on the carpet of a guest room, dissected as if for an autopsy, a plastic tank of moldy water set where the head would be. Heaps of framed art rested atop the unmade bed.

Evan had the sense of having entered an animal’s den. It felt strange peeking into the intimate cubbies where life was unglamorously lived, where hours dragged into seasons, where an organism labored in the service of basic functions—hunger, respiration, self-care. This house wasn’t Allman’s reality. It was an inconvenience to which he had to acclimate his body so he could exist within the virtual world he’d engendered, a binary landscape of ones and zeros that matched the pattern of his own mind’s eye, that required neither nuance nor the moral shadings of human intelligence.

Evan kept on.

Double doors at the end of the hall, one open forty-five degrees.

Sensing no trap, he slipped through into the darkness of Allman’s bedroom. The air felt thicker here, hard to breathe.