Page 1 of The Code

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.”