Into the Fire

Evan Smoak was taken from a group home at the age of twelve and trained as a deniable government assassin known as Orphan X. After he broke with the Program, he became the Nowhere Man, a shadowy figure who helps people with nowhere else to turn. The government sent its best operatives to hunt him down, and every one of them failed. With his worst enemies gone, Evan faces an unfamiliar question: what does he do with his life now that nobody is trying to kill him?

Max Merriweather is at the end of his rope. He is separated from the woman he loves, short on money, and seen as a letdown by nearly everyone around him. Then his wealthy cousin Grant is brutally murdered. Two months earlier, Grant had given Max an envelope and told him to hand it to a reporter if anything ever happened to him. Now the reporter has vanished and Max's apartment has been ransacked, so he makes a desperate call to the Nowhere Man.

Evan takes the job with mixed feelings. He quickly locates the men after Max and sets a plan in motion to protect him, but the case proves far less straightforward than it first appears. It becomes one of the hardest missions of his career, and one he cannot get through alone. He turns for help to Joey Morales, a genius-level hacker and the last recruit taken into the Program, and to Tommy Stojack, a gifted off-the-books gunsmith. This is a last mission for Orphan X, set against the uncertainty of his own future.