Bundled in a thick coat, Dex walked out to meet him. The Dobermans at his side barked and barked at the still-spinning blades. Dex untied the hood from around the man’s head and tugged it off.

Even in the faint light, Evan recognized the man.

Tigran Sarkisian.

The Great White Sark.

An international private arms dealer.

In Spitak in 2005, operating as Orphan X, Evan had killed Sark’s brothers, his grown son, and six of his cousins.

Sarkisian shrugged off the cold and ambled for the house, accompanied by one of René’s narcos.

The helicopter lifted off. Through the slits in the steel, Evan watched it coast into the endless blackness to the west. As it grew more distant, the sound of its rotors oddly grew louder, amplified off the walls of the mountain range, coming at him in stereo.

Evan’s stomach fell away as he realized that he was no longer listening to the first helicopter.

He swung his head back toward the barn.

There they were, the lights of the next approaching helo. A good distance behind were two more floating dots, one red, one green. And behind that chopper, two more lights, and then two more, and then two more. He let his eyes skim across the incoming flight path, an airborne highway a dozen helicopters deep, each holding someone eager to lay hands on the Nowhere Man.

Alarm cut straight through the fog of the drugs, his mind suddenly alert, his skin prickling.

He remembered the RoamZone on the bed, the live connection, the tendril of a lifeline connecting him to the boy. Running back inside, he snatched up the phone.

“Hello? I’m here. I’m here.”

He stared at the RoamZone, dead in his hand.

The kid had hung up.

48. Some Bizarre Mating Dance

48

Some Bizarre Mating Dance

“Our beautiful women were hung naked from crosses, you see, in Der-es-Zor. My mother was child, but she remember. She say they were glorious even in this horror. Proud and naked, long hair blowing like the mermaids.”

The Great White Sark paused to wet his lips. Evan sat on a folding chair inside the Lexan vault in the ballroom. Sark overcrowded a matching chair on the far side of the transparent door. Just two men having a conversation. He looked much worse than when Evan had seen him last, his grizzled stubble the color of frost, pouches hanging beneath his milky eyes. He was an old man now, well into his seventies, but the power contained in his bearlike body was still evident.

“I have reclaimed this atrocity for my own use.” His lips parted, showing pitted yellow teeth. “The crucifixion. So painful you invented a word for it. Your word ‘excruciating,’ it comes from this. ‘Out of crucifying,’ it means.”