Assassin Zero

by Jack Mars

  Again the two minds crept in.

  He was right to do that.

  He had no right to do that.

  She remembered vividly how it had all started. One morning Sara had been shaken awoke by Camilla because she’d been screaming in her sleep; she still had night terrors about the Slovakian traffickers that had abducted her and her sister. This nightmare was one of the worst she’d ever had; even after waking she trembled from head to toe, barely able to stand let alone go to work. Camilla, in her own way, tried to be a good friend and offered her a half a bar—the street name for a blue oblong Xanax.

  It did the trick, calming her nerves at least enough to make it through the day. And it should have stopped there. But the next morning, she realized how much she’d liked the feeling. She wanted another one.

  Soon a half a bar wasn’t enough. But a full bar made her feel rundown and mute for the whole day, even after work. Then one evening she came home to find Tommy and Jo doing stubby lines off the glass-topped coffee table.

  “Want to try it?” Jo had asked her.

  “She won’t,” Tommy had said snidely. He’d always thought of her as a frightened little girl. He had no idea what she’d been through.

  Not one to back down, Sara dropped to her knees and put her face to the table and sucked up a thin line of coke from the table’s surface. She didn’t at all like the way it burned in her nasal cavity. She didn’t like the acrid taste at the back of her throat. But less than a minute later, when her brain registered the feeling it gave her, she liked that.

  So the cycle went. A bar in the morning, floating dreamily through the day, and a bump at night as a pick-me-up. Though sometimes it was two. Or three. And sometimes she would only get snatches of sleep in a night, a few hours, and she’d need a bump in the morning just to drag herself to work. And then a bar to get through the day. But soon a bar wasn’t doing the trick anymore, so Camilla showed her how to use a pill grinder, so she could snort the blue powder instead of taking it orally…

  “God,” Sara murmured in the passenger seat of the SUV.

  “What’s that?” Maya asked.

  “Oh. Nothing.” She hadn’t realized she said it aloud. She hadn’t really forced herself to think about all of that in a long while. She had been tuning it out—because thinking about was like admitting she had a problem.

  You do. You do have a problem.

  Dad knew it, and he thought he could help her. He really tried.

  Yeah, and now he’s dumping you somewhere so he can run off to the CIA.

  No, said the other side. That’s not true. What he does is important. More important than…

  Than what? More important than you? More important than taking care of his daughter?

  That wasn’t fair. She had seen the news, same as Maya. That video… it still gave her chills thinking about it. Her dad had a job to do, and it was stopping people like that. Not being her babysitter. Maya had school. She couldn’t expect them to put their lives on pause for her.

  “What will you do?” Sara asked suddenly, desperate for something to talk about. Something to take her two minds off the quarrel they were having. “After you drop me off. Will you go back to Dad’s?”

  Maya shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know when he’ll be back. I’ll head over to the airport, leave his car in long-term parking, and hop a flight back to New York.”

  Sara frowned. “Will anyone else be at the school over the holiday weekend?”

  “Don’t know. I’m sure somebody will be.” Maya flashed her a smile and added, “Besides, I’ll be home for Christmas break, when you’re done. And I’ll call whenever I can.”

  “Yeah,” Sara murmured. Maybe her sister did understand, at least a little bit—not about what was going on in her head, but at least part of it. In that brief, fake smile, Sara saw the same kind of loneliness she had seen in the mirror for the past four weeks.

  “Hey, if you want,” Maya joked, “you’re welcome to swap with me. You can go to West Point for the next month and I’ll spend some time Virginia Beach.”

  Sara chuckled halfheartedly, but then she reached over and squeezed her sister’s hand. “Thanks.”

  “For what?” Maya asked.

  “For… just for always making me feel like I have someone. Even when I didn’t feel like I should have anyone.”

  “You know I’m always here for you. After what we’ve been through, we have to stick together.” She didn’t elaborate—but she didn’t need to. “You’re a Lawson. You’ve already proven before that you’re stronger than you realize.”

  “You’re right.”

  I can do this, she told herself.

  We’ll see, said the dark voice inside her. When the going gets tough, you’ll get going.

  She shook her head, as if she could somehow jar the second mind out of her head. But it was no use. It seemed, at least for now, that it was there to stay.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Zero came to learn the hard way that the pilot of the Gulfstream was something of a maverick—or else just took his job very seriously when Maria told him “as quickly as possible.” As the wheels of the jet touched down at Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport, on an unused freight runway outside of the passenger lanes, the air brakes squealed in protest as the Gulfstream ground to a halt. Zero had to put his forearms up to keep from smacking his head on the seat in front of him. He felt the tires shimmy and, for a brief moment, feared the plane would careen sideways. But the would-be daredevil pilot righted it, expertly slowing from a 140-mile-per-hour landing speed to a human’s running pace in less than half the tarmac it should have taken.

  Strickland was out of his seat before the jet came to a stop, pushing the lever to open the door and lower the ramp. Zero slung his gear bag over a shoulder while behind him, Maria jabbed at her tablet and spoke into a Bluetooth headset, connected with Bixby and a small tech team back at Langley.

  “I’ve got a suspicious person on camera thirteen,” she said even as she rose from her seat to follow them off the plane. “Male, red baseball cap, black jacket. Look into it.”

  It had taken the Danish hacker forty-seven minutes to crack into the Mirage’s camera system undetected and link the feed to Maria—twenty-seven cameras in all that covered the entrance, the lobby, the hotel’s reception area, and most of the casino floor.

  “Nine minutes,” Strickland said nervously. He disembarked first, practically jumping down the four stairs from the Gulfstream cabin to the ground, and then jogging toward the car that waited for them.

  “I’m driving,” Zero called after him. He was beginning to feel it again—the rush of the job. The thrill of the chase. There wasn’t adrenaline, not yet; though it would come soon enough, he knew, flooding his brain, numbing pain and exhaustion and leaving only the high…

  Oh god, he realized suddenly, though his feet didn’t stop moving. I’m jonesing for it.

  Had he sent Sara to rehab for a habit that he himself was guilty of? Or worse—had he passed it on to her?

  What if it’s my fault that she’s like this?

  No. He couldn’t think of that now, as he hurtled toward the waiting car. Maria had called ahead and procured an unmarked gray cruiser from Vegas PD, complete with dashboard lights and a siren. The police didn’t know the full nature of the request; they just knew that when the CIA asked for something, you gave it to them, which was in addition to the request that they be on standby for what was about to unfold.

  “Bixby,” Maria said into her earpiece as she hurried after Zero, “alert local PD, tell them to move on the Mirage in… Todd?”

  “Eight minutes,” Strickland said over his shoulder.

  “Thirteen minutes,” Maria told Bixby. Zero knew the five-minute cushion was to keep the cops from raining on their parade and potentially frightening off their Russian targets.

  She had been the busiest of them on the plane; as soon as the hacker granted her access to the casino’s cameras, she
initiated facial recognition software to vet every employee they could spot inside the Mirage, including valets, dealers, porters, receptionists, and even custodians. Any suspicious persons milling about were flagged, their faces scanned and their movements tracked by the techs back in Virginia. While she handled that, Zero and Strickland studied the layout of the Mirage and tried to ascertain the most likely places for an attack to occur.

  Zero slid behind the wheel of the cruiser. The keys were waiting in the ignition.

  “ETA with normal traffic is sixteen minutes,” Strickland said breathlessly as he hopped into the passenger seat. “Think you can get us there in half that?”

  “Less.” Zero shifted into drive before Maria’s door was closed and slammed the gas. The cruiser was powerful, a turbocharged V8 engine under the hood, though he wished it wasn’t an automatic. He had more control with a stick shift, more power when he needed it.

  The car roared down the rest of the runway, skidded onto a short access road, and sped through a gate intended for delivery trucks. The back end skidded, the tires screeching as Zero turned onto the perpendicular road that would lead them to the Strip. Traffic was, thankfully, almost nonexistent. But he knew it wouldn’t stay that way as they got closer.

  “Seven minutes,” Strickland announced. “Take the next right.”

  Zero spun the wheel without taking his foot off the gas, the cruiser drifting across two lanes and eliciting a series of angry honks from an oncoming sedan. Zero righted the car and course-corrected, missing a sideswipe by a margin of less than a foot.

  He felt eyes on him, and quickly glanced to his right to see Strickland frowning at him. “You’re grinning like a maniac,” he noted.

  “I am?” He didn’t realize he had been.

  “Trust me, that’s normal for him,” Maria muttered from the back seat.

  Zero bit his lip to keep the smile off his face, but he could still feel it tugging at his cheeks. It was the same reason, he imagined, that people dove out of airplanes or jumped off bridges with a cord around their ankles—seeking the thrill. But for him it was doing eighty-five down an urban street with mere minutes to stop a possible terrorist attack.

  He was back, and it felt good.

  Zero swerved around a van going far too slow and flicked on the dashboard-mounted lights, the red and blue flashers visible to other drivers through the windshield. He used the siren as sparingly as possible, giving a small whoop-whoop anytime someone got in his way.

  Maria grunted as the car mounted the curb, sending her bouncing in the seat behind him. “Jeez, we want to get there alive.”

  “Any hit on the redhead?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she reported. “No sign of her. All the employees we can spot are vetted; doesn’t look like it’s going to be an inside job.” He knew she had been hopeful that they would get a hit on an ID before they even got there; the casino floor made the most sense as a location, which meant they would need to somehow get their weapon out there without scrutiny. Posing as staff would have made that possible.

  “Just a—” Strickland started, but he was cut off by a sharp blare of the siren as Zero skidded into the opposite lane and back again. “Just a thought. What if the point of the rendezvous isn’t the attack? What if they’re just planning it? Then they could be anywhere. Holed up in a hotel room, maybe…”

  “Cops will be five minutes behind us,” Maria said. “If we haven’t found anything by the time they arrive, we’ll lock the place down and search every person, every room.”

  Zero really hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Not only would that take hours and involve hundreds of disgruntled people—but it sounded terribly boring, and he was amped up, ready.

  “Cut through that lot and make a left,” Strickland instructed. “That’ll take us onto the Strip, near the Palazzo. Then another left and we’ll be less than two blocks away.”

  “Radio.” Maria reached forward and handed Zero a small plastic earpiece, translucent and wireless. He fit it into his ear without taking his eyes off the road as she said, “Stick to the plan. We split up, cover the most likely places for the attack.”

  “Three minutes,” Strickland said.

  “Remember, reports said four to six guys, plus the redhead,” Maria continued. “Find, incapacitate, and apprehend. Zip ties are in your gear bags. Try your best not to kill anyone.”

  Zero held back a smirk, fairly certain that the last comment was for him. The cruiser blew through a red light and turned once more, this time onto the multi-lane Las Vegas Boulevard, lined with enormous hotels and sprawling casino properties. But he couldn’t appreciate the sights; he kept his eyes forward, cutting the dashboard lights and easing the car forward as fast as he was able without being too conspicuous.

  “One last thing,” Maria told them. “If you feel anything like Bixby was describing, put the earplugs in. Don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

  That comment, Zero thought, was definitely for him.

  He honked twice and skirted around pedestrians before turning off the boulevard, easing the car under the white archway that announced the entrance to the Mirage, and came to a squeaking halt in the valet roundabout.

  “One minute to rendezvous,” Strickland said as the three of them jumped out of the car. He flashed his badge at the young attending valet. “Leave it there, and leave it running.”

  “Good luck,” Zero called to his teammates as they split up. Maria and Strickland peeled off left and right, Maria toward the hotel’s reception floor and Todd toward the table games as Zero headed straight, plunging into the rows and rows of slot machines, inundated by colorful lights and sounds.

  He had never cared much for casinos. He had done enough gambling with life and limb in his career that he didn’t need to throw money into the mix. A memory zipped through his head, one that he hadn’t thought of in a long time; early in his agent training, he had studied some of the more devious casino tactics. Almost everything about them was carefully designed to have a psychological impact on a person: the lack of windows or clocks so that time has little meaning. The psychedelic patterns of the colorful carpet that jars the senses (and hides stains). The lights and sounds to simulate success. Even the layout of the machines, arranged in a deliberate labyrinthine manner to keep people gambling.

  Everything about the casino was a careful manipulation, one that Zero simultaneously found a bit nauseating yet, in a strange way, couldn’t help but appreciate.

  Focus. The casino was hardly populated. Despite all the noise and constant flashing lights surrounding him, it was still early afternoon on a holiday. He kept his gaze forward and checked his periphery as he strode down a bright-carpeted avenue between two rows of touch-screen slot machines. To his left, a few Asian women in their sixties poked at the screens. To his right, a man sat alone on the row, perched upon a stool and mindlessly feeding the machine. He was a bit scruffy, his face gaunt. He looked like a man who had nowhere else to go on a day like today.

  “Nothing here, over,” Maria’s voice said in his ear.

  “Same,” Strickland chimed in. “All quiet on the western front. Over.”

  Zero continued down to the end of the row of slot machines, suddenly unsure of himself. What if he was wrong and the message of “illusion” hadn’t meant the Mirage? At the time he’d been so confident, but now he realized there couldn’t have been more than fifty or sixty people in the whole casino. It was hardly ripe for an attack.

  What if it’s about to happen somewhere else in the city, right now?

  He rubbed his forehead, glancing around. A young couple passed by him, speaking Spanish in low tones. An elderly woman nearly bumped into him as she rummaged through her purse. A black-haired woman, slim and attractive and wearing a low-cut cocktail dress, glided by and strode down the row.

  Zero froze. He sniffed the air, the cloud of scent that lingered in the wake of the raven-haired beauty.

  He knew that scent. A moment earlier he never would have b
een able to name it, let alone place it, but as soon as it hit his nostrils an image snapped into clear focus in his mind’s eye: the interpreter, Karina Pavlo, had favored it. The woman he had rescued, briefly loved, and then watched die—she had worn that same perfume.

  It was called Moscou Rouge. In English, Red Moscow. And that couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Is that her? Is that the woman we’re after? She could have been wearing a wig, or have dyed her hair after being spotted in both Havana and Kansas.

  Zero thought fast, digging into his pocket for his phone and putting it to his ear, though he didn’t make a call. Instead he said into the inactive device, “Honey, where are you?”

  The woman in the black dress lowered herself onto a stool in front of a machine—right next to the scruffy-looking man, though there were plenty of other open machines.

  “Kent?” Maria said through the radio. “Do you see something?”

  “I’m standing by the slot machines, but I don’t see you,” he said into the radio and the phone, glancing about as he did and hoping that he looked the part of a husband who lost his wife in the maze-like casino. He watched the woman out of the corner of his eye as she took a hundred-dollar bill out of a black purse, and then set the bag down on the floor between her stool and the man beside her.

  “On my way,” Maria said, picking up that he was speaking in code.

  “Same,” Strickland parroted.

  “Great,” said Zero loudly, “I’ll just stay put and you can find me, then.”

  His ruse seemed to be working; the woman in the dress paid him no mind as she fed the bill into the machine and pulled the crank. The digital dials spun and landed on a bust. She spun again as Zero took a seat at the furthest machine on the row of seven, the phone still to his ear and craning his neck as if looking for someone.

  “I’m over by the ‘Pharaoh’s Treasure’ machines,” he said. “Are you on your way?”

  “This place is huge,” Maria said into the radio. “Be there in a minute.”

  The woman in black glanced over at him then, only briefly, but long enough for him to meet her gaze and for her to smile coquettishly his way. He smiled back, and then looked down at the carpet, the swirling paisley pattern of bright hues that would hide spilled liquor and cigarette ash and even bodily fluids…