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  As a drill for the Easter holiday of Evan Smoak’s seventeenth year, Jack makes him undertake a cross-country zigzag flight through five connections under the legend of a young Portuguese entrepreneur. Portuguese in particular sucks because it always tangles up in Spanish or Italian and every verb tense has six different conjugations. Evan crams hard for the three days he’s been allotted and feels confident in getting by in English with a Portuguese accent. His confidence evaporates upon his collision with two people whom Jack had planted with vicious precision—a Portuguese-American flight attendant who wants to reminisce about her time in seven of Portugal’s eighteen districts, and an exceedingly conversational Brazilian national who just happens to be sitting next to Evan on the longest leg. Evan improvises, covering his linguistic inadequacies with a feigned speech impediment. The whole time, the ingrown big toenail of his left foot heralds trouble. The Carlos Santos loafers he’d had overnighted from São João da Madeira had arrived a half size too small, compressing the toe through twenty-seven hours of shitty commuter hauls. It feels like it might burst. The emergency twenty-dollar bill he slipped beneath the insole is princess-and-the-pea discomforting, so he switches it to his right loafer on one of the layovers.

  He arrives at San Diego International at 5:37 P.M., stepping into a bleary smudge of February flint gray.

  Forty-two-minutes later he is standing in combat boots that are equally excruciating, freezing surf washing around his calves, and he is being screamed at.

  So: He is not in a great mood.

  “You silver-spoon ball-slurping teabagee. Got the whole damn course open just for Princess No Name so he can train solo. Why’s that? Having teammates upsets your delicate crumpet-munching sensibilities?”

  The BUD/S training course in Coronado is dark and desolate. The sea sucks at the coast and at Evan, hungry and wild.

  He says, “No, sir.”

  The master chief is up on top of Evan, bulging the seams of his field cammy pants and logoless blue instructor shirt. His bald head glistens, skull plates pronounced. He is five foot nine and about as wide. His doughy nose has more bends than seems possible for the anatomy to hold. He wears loosely tied jungle boots that seem a part of his body, like hooves. “Worried they’re gonna see you puke all over yourself?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you scared? You look fucking scared.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Get it outta yer eyes then.”

  This is how training in the Orphan Program goes. The past five years has seen Evan thrown into brutal scenario after brutal scenario with zero warning. His job is to suck it up, to perform with near perfection, to prove his worth. The covert program, buried deep inside the Department of Defense, has a singular purpose: to find throwaway boys and girls from foster homes and turn them into unrivaled assassins.

  Foster kids have particular advantages. They tend to be desperate and pliable. They have minimal footprints to scrub within official systems. And most useful: Should they die in action, get taken hostage, or wind up murdered, there is no one to miss or mourn them. Because they are given no more information than that which they require to follow orders, if they are tortured, they have nothing useful to reveal.

  The Orphans are raised in silos separate from one another and the rest of humanity, and trained in isolation—no friends, no teammates, no backup. When they are ready to deploy, they operate in areas the United States government cannot be and do things the United States government cannot do. Technically, they do not exist.

  Every Orphan is overseen by a handler. Evan’s is Jack Johns, a former CIA station chief who yanked him out of East Baltimore’s Pride House Group Home at the age of twelve, a semi-abduction Evan was happy to yield to given the dismal future he was facing. Jack is as tough and taciturn as a man can be. He is also the only person who has ever treated Evan as if he has any worth. Over the years, he has become a father to Evan, reminding him at every turn: The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.

  But right now, trembling in icy waters on the receiving end of spit-flecked bellowing from a master chief Jack has conspired with to batter Evan into better shape, he does not feel particularly warmly toward Jack.

  “So you think you’re better than the real sailors, that it?” the master chief screams in his face, tilting his head so their noses don’t bump. “That why you get to skip Hell Week and just prance your ass in here for Second Phase?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Ever heard of stolen valor?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s you standing here on this patch of Uncle Sam’s holy earth. The real sailors that come through here? They enlist just to have a shot at training like this. They wash out, they’re a swabbie on a deck for four years, not swept off on a private flight back to Pussyville. That’s why you’re wearing the baby-white T. You haven’t earned the brown shirt that goes with Second Phase. Now get wet and sandy.”

  Evan drops into the surf and rolls. The cold compacts his lungs, collapsing them like cotton candy. It feels like he is breathing through a straw. He pops back to his feet. The sun is freshly gone, the last bit of uncold leaching from the air, everything plunging to ice.

  “Why’d you skip the line? You some fancy-ass-bullshit-Skull-and-Bones-Yale-final-club-CIA tit-sucker?”

  Evan thinks: Final clubs—Harvard. Secret societies—Yale. Eating clubs—Princeton.

  “Or r’you one a them DoD off-the-books silver spooners? Get yer own pretty packaged training, bespoke as a cock ring for the Marquis de-fucking-Sade?” The master chief’s face is close, tilted up at Evan’s, his breath stale cigars. “One-on-one training from some gilded-lily program. Don’t think I don’t know. Top medical, psyops, linguistics, cup-yer-balls-for-you-when-you-take-a-leak. My guys would wipe their asses with you and I wipe my ass with my guys. I can tell just sniffing you: You ever go out in the field, you’re gonna get fucking crushed. You understand just how inadequate you are?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Three-mile timed run.” The master chief’s head articulates left and then right, his nose an inch off Evan’s as he eye-fucks him senseless. “Well? Waiting for a perfumed letter from the Duchess of Gloucester? Suck it up, buttercup, and get moving.” A quarter-second hesitation. “Go.”

  “Where?”

  “Where? Where? Where’d you think? We’re gonna helo you to a private track at the Nike facility?” His arm, solid as a sailboat boom, rises to point at the icy darkness. “Here. The fucking beach. Three-mile timed run. And the time started four seconds ago.”

  Evan runs.

  The beach is endless. The sand makes for shitty traction. He is sweating and grunting and seeming to make no progress. His ingrown toenail goes from aching to throbbing. Soon enough, every step brings a needle-jab of pain. Toward the end, he is stoop-limping like Igor. When he spots the cherry of a cigar piercing the darkness up ahead, he straightens out his form. The master chief sits on the hood of his Jeep, his legs folded with surprising agility, making him even more compact.

  Evan slaps the front headlight and stops, hands on knees, panting.

  The master chief slides off the hood, climbs into the Wrangler, kicks the passenger door open. “Next stop,” he says. “You can puke out the window on the way.”

  Next stop proves to be underwater knot-tying drills in the Combat Training Tank, the master chief glowering at Evan from the aquarium window, cigar still lodged in his molars. Orphan training has forced Evan to reconcile with the reality that he is the eternal focus, separated from his tribe to be anthropologically observed and improved. Jack tells him that is how many people feel while in the crush of whatever vises fate has chosen for them and that at least Evan has the opportunity to be solidly built into excellence. Sunk in the tank, held breath firing his lungs, his hands working a clove hitch, he feels a thought tickle the back of his mind: Maybe one day if he is still alive and has served his time, he might orient whatever excellence he’s achieved to the light of some other sun.

  Hauled out of the tank, Evan is shoved up to his tits in the surf, where he eats an MRE, shrimp jambalaya, the worst kind. The throbbing in his toe spreads through his entire foot, barbed-wire claws twisting up his calves. He makes the call—after the obstacle course, he’ll ask for medical. That’ll get him out of the three-mile night swim, the grand finale, which he dreads more than anything else.

  The O-course is murder, with its five-story cargo net, the elevated rib-breaking logs he has to beanbag himself onto, and the platformed tower he pull-ups to the top of and then shimmies down from on a suspended fast rope hung with Golden Gate undulations. He collapses over the finish line, panting into the sand. The ingrown toen ail has taken him out, every movement ramming the edged keratin into raw puffy flesh.

  The master chief clicks the stopwatch. “Ain’t that a sad time. I’ve had boys come through in half that, younger’n you, nuthin’-years-old with a waiver. And you’re lying there like you just took marathon gold at Munich. On yer feet, Sally.”

  The pain is so bad Evan can barely speak. “… need … need medical.”

  The toe is too far gone. Without permission he curls up on his side, tugging off the boot. He winces from the pain, bites his lower lip to stifle a cry. The smell is diabolical, rotting meat basted in sweat. Whimpering, he peels his sock off.

  The toe looks postapocalyptic. It is deserving of some trace of pity, even from a SEAL master chief. And Evan has timed this perfectly to shirk the night swim.

  The master chief crouches over him, knees cracking. He stabs his lit cigar at the spectacle on Evan’s foot and it takes everything Evan has not to flinch. “Go.”

  Medical is a one-mile jog. He does it with gratitude. He is moving toward the glow at the end of the tunnel. His body is exhausted, his mind melting. The pain feels like it has roosted permanently in his toe; the digit will never not be a hot poker of agony.

  He thumps through the door into medical.

  Another instructor is waiting. A blue shirt and khaki shorts, despite the hour. There is a TV on an office-beige file cabinet and it shows a clip of a shark attack, rolling hockey-puck eyes, teeth undulating like a spike harrow on a tractor. The instructor is half the depth and width of the master chief but still, next to Evan, he looks like a gun safe. He gestures at a metal folding chair with a pair of janky paramedic scissors.

  Evan’s stomach drops through the floor.

  He sits. He is facing the television. A great white breaches, ripping a sea lion from side to side. On the metal tray by the instructor’s foot waits a pair of needle-nose pliers.

  The instructor lowers the scissors toward the sickly black-green wreckage of the toenail. “You might think this is blackout pain. But it’s not. So keep your eyes open.”

  Evan does.

  He also makes noises he cannot help and there is no shame in them as long as he doesn’t look away. His eyes water and his chest convulses, but he is there and present and breathing so it does not count as crying.

  The scissors chomp down the middle of the nail past the cuticle to the root.

  Before Evan can find breath, the pliers wrench the two stiff planks free from the nail bed.

  He swoons from the pain but the instructor catches his sagging forehead on a meaty biceps, props him once more into the folding chair, and slaps a cold washcloth on the back of his neck. The TV documentary has switched to fatal shark attacks on humans—churning red water, missing limbs, last-ditch medical attention.

  “You got five breaths,” the instructor says.

  “Till my car?”

  The instructor laughs. “Ocean water’s good for the swelling. And it’ll help disinfect it.”

  Evan feels an instant of utter and comprehensive defeat.

  There is no way.

  They can’t make him.

  He can’t do it.

  His toe looks like someone lit off a firecracker under the nail. He thinks about sand. He thinks about flippers. He thinks about salt. He thinks about blood in the water. He thinks about great white sharks breaching for the kill.

  “That’s your fifth. Go on now, son. You think Lash is grumpy now, try makin’ that man wait.”

  Evan hobbles back out. Another mile run across the compound to the first meet spot. Carrying one boot and wearing the other, he makes moaning noises with each step because there is no one to hear. His exposed toe is bleeding but at least not psssss bleeding.

  The master chief—Lash—waits at the pitch-black edge of the ocean by his Jeep. He throws stubby swim fins at Evan. Made of stiff car-tire rubber, they look Korean War–era.

  Trembling and cowering, he sits and snaps on the first, eases on the second. His whole body throbs; he shivers and clatters. The rigid fins are horrendously tight, denting his Achilles tendon, cramping down over his ruined toe.

  The master chief hops in his Jeep, clicks his stopwatch with emphasis. Then he speeds off down the beach, spraying sand on Evan.

  Evan looks up at the moon. Unmoved, it looks back down.

  He wades into the freezing water. Grit. Salt. Pain.

  In a tortured crawl, he swims parallel to the beach. Time goes in and out.

  At some point he hears a horn honking and he sees he’s passed the Jeep and he cuts for shore. The waves rush up his back, seething across his shoulders, and he falls over and rips the fin off.

  “Rinse yerself,” the master chief says. “I don’t need your sand in my rig.”

  Evan does.

  He climbs in. The master chief drives him back to another building in the compound. Evan’s teeth are chattering. There’s a big locker room and an open shower, a dozen nozzles and him. The SEALs shower together here. He imagines camaraderie, swim buddies pulling each other through. Evan wonders what that might feel like.

  The master chief throws a towel at him and stands still, crossed arms ballooning like Popeye’s. A change of navy-issue clothes sits on a bench along with Evan’s dainty Portuguese loafers. Light-headed, Evan tries not to slump, hang his head, or nod off.

  “Just so you know,” Lash says, “I haven’t updated my opinion about you. Not one bit.”

  And then—Was that a wink?

  Evan doesn’t know if the master chief just winked at him. And that wink would be everything. And there is no way he can ask.

  Before he can say anything, the master chief steps back out of the locker room and swings the door shut in Evan’s face.

  The water isn’t hot but after what Evan’s been through it feels like a soothing warm spring. The spray singes his toe but it’s not so awful now with the offending nail out. He leans against the wall. He dozes off, catches himself just before he tumbles to the hard tile.

  He towels off, dresses. Given the toe, he opts to keep the protective combat boots over the fashionable loafers. Before dumping the loafers in the trash, he removes the secreted-away twenty-dollar bill and transfers it to the same beneath-the-insole spot in the right boot. When he walks outside, no one is around.

  The wind blows sand into his face, his teeth.

  In a distant parking lot, headlights flare.

  He walks over.

  As he nears, a shadow of a man climbs out of the driver’s seat of a rusted Toyota pickup and walks away into the night, leaving the truck running, headlights on.

  Evan climbs in. The seat receives him. Though it is shitty, it feels so, so plush and comfortable. He could sleep. Right here.

  On the passenger seat is a stuffed envelope.

  And a burner cell phone, on speaker.

  Jack’s voice comes at him from the phone: “I hear you performed passably.”

  “Yes.” Evan picks up the envelope. “There was a toe thing.”

  “Decent job flying out there as Portuguese national.”

  A rare compliment.

  Evan braces himself. He tilts the envelope. Out slide three bundles of hundred-dollar bills, a Spanish passport, and a credit card in the name of GUILLERMO RODE ESCANDON.

  Jack’s disembodied voice orders, “Come back tomorrow as a Northern Spaniard.”

  * * *

  Exhausted and disheveled, Evan drags himself off the airplane at Dulles International. He is tired of playing someone else, of being on constant alert, of speaking Spanish with a lisp.

  Also? He is just plain fucking tired.

  As he exits the gate, a slender-shouldered man awaits him, Mr. E.S. scrawled on the sign he displays like a mugshot placard. The guy’s about forty, sandy-blond mustache, looks like a TV salesman for an electronics superstore. Despite his ramrod posture, he can’t be taller than five foot five.

  Did Jack actually send someone to pick Evan up, a brief post-mission reprieve? Evan imagines sinking into the soft leather of a backseat, tilting his head to the window, and slumbering.

  He approaches warily, speaks the code he has been taught: “Thanks for waiting on the X.”

  “That’s the mission, sir.” Protocol confirmed. The man’s name tag reads BOB, another nod to his everyman-ness. “This way.”

 

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