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  Evan forces the words through the pounding in his skull. “I’ll get bigger.”

  “You think that’s all it takes? Bigger?”

  “It’s all I’m missing.”

  At this the man laughs. “Look, I get it, kid. Grit and drive and all that. But you gotta understand—there’s nothing you have that I want. You’re not gonna surprise me. The kid I want? Charles Van Sciver? He’s got it. We’re just about done vetting him. And if he fails, next in line’ll be that husky kid, Andre. You’re not even on the list. Now, go home or whatever you call it and get on with your life.”

  Evan stands up, wipes his bloody mouth roughly. He looks at the tinted windows of the sedan, back to the Mystery Man. “I want to try again.”

  “There’s no trying again.” The man points at Evan’s face with the red cherry of the cigarette. “Get the fuck out of here. Or I promise you this: You’ll find out what a real punch feels like.”

  Jogging home this time, Evan feels the pain in his ribs anew, the reality pounded into him by Van Sciver.

  It feels like defeat.

  * * *

  At dinner Van Sciver spoons extra mac and cheese from the pot, then flicks the wooden spoon at Evan across the table, landing a few stray noodles on his shirt and his swollen lip. “What happened to your face?”

  “What happened to yours?”

  It’s not the wisecrack so much as the covered laughter from the others that lets Evan know he will pay for this later. Papa Z is across on his armchair, massaging his lower stomach as he does when his bowels won’t cooperate.

  Van Sciver points at Evan with the spoon. “Wait till you fall asleep.”

  But that night Evan does not fall asleep. After bed check there is a face-off, Van Sciver staring at him from his bed across the room, Evan staring back from the mattress on the floor, neither wanting to drift off first. By the time Van Sciver’s eyes stop glinting through the darkness, the inside of Evan’s thigh is purple where he’s been pinching himself to stay awake.

  Evan creeps across and watches the rise and fall of the bigger boy’s chest, watches the blue bandanna around his head, the bandanna he wears at all times, even sleeping. Then he sneaks down the hall, finds the cordless on the kitchen counter, dials the ominous ten digits.

  The Mystery Man’s voice sounds tired, cracked from sleep, a human vulnerability that seems discordant with what little Evan knows of him. “Yeah? Hello? Hello?”

  “Okay. I get it. I’ll never be Van Sciver. I’m not what you’re looking for. But I have something you need to know about him.”

  “What?”

  “Tomorrow. Same time, same place.”

  Now it’s Evan who hangs up.

  Chapter 9

  The Woman

  Buenos Aires felt like a European city plunked down at the edge of the wrong continent. December was Argentine summer, heat leaking up through the cobblestone street through the soles of Evan’s Original S.W.A.T. boots. Dusk had come on fast, the sun bleeding into the horizon through the endless blocky rise of the skyline.

  Evan sat at an outdoor café table sipping an arabica coffee worth its weight in rhodium. He’d been ranging around the plaza for seven hours, rotating surveillance positions among the proliferation of cafés. In the center two performers danced a tango wearing outfits straight out of a guidebook—glossy black fabric with fiery red trim. A few distracted German tourists ambled by, tossing pesos into an upended top hat resting next to the retro boom box. It was 7:53 P.M., which passed for morning in a city with a nightlife that found its feet around midnight. Three million souls rousing themselves after a long day of working and siesta-ing, ready to dance and drink and dine on entraña, a skirt steak capable of eliciting rapture. The residential buildings hemming in the square presented a cacophony of styles, charming and intricate. Municipal smudges of pollution shaded the stone and concrete façades.

  But Evan wasn’t here for the mercenary tango dancers or the celestial steak or the grimy old-country charm. He was here to confront the woman who had claimed to be his mother. The woman whose prepaid phone’s GPS signal blinked steadily in the screen of his RoamZone, pinning her down inside the ornate apartment building kitty-corner from the rickety chair he currently occupied.

  Her red dot blinked on his screen, an uncertain warning signal—stop, stop, stop.

  And then—at last—it was moving.

  He watched the stone face of the luxury high-rise. A doorman waited outside, anachronistic in his brass-buttoned jacket, white gloves, and impassive visage. At a movement inside, he animated, his shiny heels clicking against the pavement. He swung the door open with a flourish and a Victorian quarter bow that was promptly ignored by the emerging foursome.

  Three large men, richly tailored suits, in a triangle formation around a woman.

  Bodyguards.

  Curious.

  Despite the hour the woman wore a sleeveless black dress and an oversize black summer hat with a white satin scarf tied around it, draped across her face alluringly or strategically. She flashed into view between the bodyguards’ bulky shoulders and then was lost behind a sea of navy wool gabardine as her men closed ranks. When they turned to head for Avenida Pueyrredón, he caught a glimpse of white cheek and smoky eye shadow.

  She looked to be in her late fifties and exceptionally well preserved.

  Evan dropped a few Eva Perón banknotes on the table and followed.

  The tango music blared, accompanied by an overlay of speaker static, as the couple twisted and dipped. Evan cut through the sparse crowd at the plaza’s edge, maintaining a half-block distance behind the mysterious woman and her men.

  Was she of substantial wealth to require constant security? In witness protection? Had she crossed a local crime lord? Or—most likely—the bodyguards were there to ensnare Evan if he answered the call.

  The men gave the woman more stand-off room as they crossed the boulevard, but from Evan’s perspective he could make out little more than the back of her hat and the swaying of a single toned arm.

  He spooled out more line, letting them stretch to a block and then a block and a half. Having scouted the area extensively, he knew the pedestrian ebbs and flows of the neighborhood.

  The Third Commandment: Master your surroundings.

  They rimmed the border of the park, nearing the Gomero de la Recoleta, a massive rubber tree that was a planet unto itself. The centuries-old tree spread its tentacles across a distance wider than half a football field, some of the meter-thick branches swooping low to the ground. To remain aloft many of them required metal posts; one even rested across a statue of Atlas, who bore his load stoically on a welded steel shoulder. Children flitted along the branches, swinging and climbing.

  The woman paused to watch them, her back to Evan, a breeze riffling the white scarf. Evan turned to face a vending machine offering oranges and apples, the fruit arrayed in neat rows behind a shiny pane, the glass providing a useful reflection of the woman behind him. He watched her through the grainy cloak of dusk.

  She turned partway, her gaze seeming to hitch on him. But then she continued, strolling through the grand entrance of the cemetery, the well-heeled muscle moving in orbit around her.

  He waited a few minutes and then followed, passing through neoclassical gates bookended by Doric columns. A security guard warned him that they’d be closing soon.

  The Recoleta Cemetery was one of the world’s great necropolises. Nearly five thousand mausoleums in various states of disrepair were crammed into fourteen acres, rising like miniature houses along miniature neighborhood blocks. Street signs denoted each tree-lined lane, lending a Disneyesque touch to the diminutive town. The tombs ranged from art nouveau to baroque, simple to opulent, single-story to three-tiered. Some rose like Greek temples, others were embellished with statues—a beatific robed elder, an eternal sentry brandishing a sword, a loyal dog long oxidized, its nose rubbed to a bronzen shine. Beyond the tall cemetery walls, sleek high-rises soared, striking a surre
al contrast with the ancient stone.

  As darkness overtook the tombs, the last sightseers drifted toward the entrance, stray cats flossing between their ankles. Evan’s boots crunched across shards, broken bits from shattered stained-glass windows that once adorned a set of grand decorative doors.

  He kept the woman barely in view—the sway of her hips rounding a corner, a stiletto-heeled foot disappearing behind the edge of a tomb. Her men branched out wisely, minding the lanes around her.

  For a time they all cat-and-moused through the venerable gridiron.

  Evan found a deserted pocket and paused, pretending to admire a sitting room visible through a crumbled tomb wall. On marble shelves inside, coffins lay beneath long-rotted casket veils. A rusted chain had been strung haphazardly across the gap, but the front door remained intact, dried flowers protruding from the keyhole. A perfectly symmetrical spiderweb framed the doorknob, a backplate of glistening silk.

  He closed his eyes, letting the warm air press into his skin, opening himself to vibration and movement and sound. One of the bodyguards creaked the stone just behind the mausoleum; another coughed, a single ragged note coming from two lanes over. Evan smelled the faintest hint of lilac riding an easterly breeze.

  The woman.

  The third man would no doubt be at her side, close-in protection.

  Evan edged east, sourcing the tinge of perfume.

  Night had come on hard, the jagged mausoleums framed in shadow and ambient light from the distant streetlights. The three monkeys of lore, rendered in gray marble, crouched at gargoyle readiness atop a slab of funereal stone, their shadows stretched grotesquely across the ground.

  Listening for the two roving guards, Evan eased around a small-scale cathedral with caskets slotted into its rear wall. At the end of the lane, bent in the thickening darkness, the woman reached for a marble statue at the foot of a tomb.

  As his eyes acclimated to the night, the age-old statue came into focus—a baby swathed in cloth, the newborn’s likeness preserved in marble. The woman’s head was angled mournfully, her face lost behind the wide brim of the hat, her hand resting on the baby’s stone chest as if feeling for a heartbeat.

  Evan’s inhalation hitched ever so slightly in his throat. He became aware of a hike in his heart rate, the hot night air wrapping itself around his neck.

  As he breathed himself back to steadiness, he admired the woman’s tradecraft. A grief-steeped mother paying respect to a lost child—a clever ruse designed to turn a key inside him, to access some long-buried vulnerability.

  It almost worked.

  More important, it meant they suspected he was watching.

  As he drifted back out of sight, he sensed movement mirroring him on either side behind the mausoleums. Sure enough, as he came to the next intersection, the two roving bodyguards stepped into view to his left and right.

  Also by Gregg Hurwitz

  THE ORPHAN X NOVELS

  Orphan X

  The Nowhere Man

  Hellbent

  Out of the Dark

  Into the Fire

  Prodigal Son

  OTHER NOVELS

  The Tower

  Minutes to Burn

  Do No Harm

  The Kill Clause

  The Program

  Troubleshooter

  Last Shot

  The Crime Writer

  Trust No One

  They’re Watching

  You’re Next

  The Survivor

  Tell No Lies

  Don’t Look Back

  YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

  The Rains

  Last Chance

  About the Author

  GREGG HURWITZ is the New York Times bestselling author of the Orphan X books, including the forthcoming Prodigal Son. Critically acclaimed, his novels have graced top-ten lists and have been published in thirty-two languages. Additionally, he is a screenwriter for film and television. Hurwitz resides in Los Angeles with his family and more Rhodesian ridgebacks than any sane person should have. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Excerpt: Prodigal Son

  Also by Gregg Hurwitz

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE LIST. Copyright © 2020 by Gregg Hurwitz. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 120 Broadway, New York, NY, 10271.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Cover design by Ervin Serrano

  Cover photographs: woman © Tongsai/Shutterstock; street © Evgenii Emelianov/Shutterstock

  Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].

  First Edition: 2020

  eISBN 9781250796479

  First eBook edition: 2020