by Jack Mars
Now he sat alone in a conference room of an Illinois state police department off of I-55, just a few miles north from where he had failed. He stared into the middle distance under the droning buzz of florescent lights.
There would likely be hell to pay over the downed helicopter, the failed roadblock, the truck crashing into a residential backyard. There would be harsh inquiries into how they could have failed, how they had fallen for the distraction.
But Zero wasn’t thinking about any of that. He was thinking about the Bosnian boy he had seen in his crosshairs, in his memory. He was thinking about the boy he had killed.
As much as he tried to convince himself that it wasn’t real, that it couldn’t be real without anything to substantiate it, he simply felt it. The memory had come back as if he was actually there; he had smelled an acrid scent of smoke on the air. He saw the boy’s genuine smile at finding the coin on the ground in the moment before his murder.
Murder. He might as well call it what it was. Not an assassination; it was murder.
And he couldn’t stop playing it over and over in his head.
He heard the conference room door open but didn’t look up until he heard Maria’s voice quietly say, “Hey. Got you this.” She set a white takeout carton on the table. “Chicken lo mein. You need to eat something.”
“Thanks,” he murmured. “But I’m not hungry.”
What if this memory was something that my subconscious was fighting to keep locked away? he wondered. Maybe even before the memory suppressor. What if this was my own mental block, and not an artificial one?
“…from the NSA or our tech team,” Maria was saying.
Zero blinked a few times and tried to get out of his own head. He had barely realized she was talking. “Sorry, what?”
She frowned at him. “I was just saying, we haven’t gotten any new information or leads from the NSA or our tech team. Since we know the woman was here, we’ve narrowed OMNI’s search parameters to a four-state region surrounding Illinois. We can only hope that she tries to contact her team or her people…”
“She won’t.” Zero shook his head. “They played us, and it worked. She won’t let us find her again that easily.”
Maria sighed heavily. “I just don’t understand. What was the point of it? There hasn’t been another attack—not that I want there to be one. But there’s no purpose to a decoy if there’s not something else to distract us from.”
“Because that wasn’t the point,” Zero said simply. “It wasn’t a decoy. It was a message.”
“Oh? Then what was the message?”
“That they’ve got the better of us.”
Maria scoffed. “You’re in their heads? You understand them all of a sudden?”
“Better than you do, yeah.”
He knew how it sounded, and he expected her to snap back at him, to get angry. But instead she merely sat down beside him and put a hand on his arm. “I’m as frustrated as you are about this,” she said softly.
I doubt it.
“But we’re going to find them.”
What possible reason would I have had for killing a child? He wasn’t that person. He wasn’t like John Watson, the man who had murdered Zero’s wife simply because the CIA had ordered him to.
The door to the conference room opened again, and Strickland stuck his head in. “Johansson,” he said. “Can I borrow you a moment?”
“Sure.” She gave Zero’s arm a slight squeeze. “Eat something,” she told him. “We’ll be off as soon as we have a direction.”
But he barely heard her words. He was thinking about who else might have known about this new shadow of his past, who he could go to for answers. And he thought he already knew—the very same person he’d just been talking to.
Maria knew more about him than anyone else—possibly more than he knew about himself. If there was darkness behind him, more darkness than he was aware of, she would be the most likely person to know about it.
But if it’s something I didn’t want myself to remember, can I trust her to tell me the truth?
*
Maria closed the conference room door behind her, leaving Kent inside to his thoughts. She was worried about him; he seemed out of it. She had been furious when she discovered that the truck was empty, but Kent had been oddly placid. Ordinarily on an op like this, he would be just as eager and adamant as she was about finding these people—if not more so. But now…
“What is it?” she asked Strickland over the din of state troopers working to find the redheaded Russian woman.
Todd glanced over her shoulder. “Is he okay?”
“Yes. I mean… I don’t know. He seems a bit dazed, if I’m being honest,” she admitted. “Maybe it was the crash. I told him he should get checked out, but he refused…”
“I don’t think that’s it.” Strickland’s gaze flitted to the left. He knew something that he wasn’t telling her.
“Explain?” she said curtly.
“He’s just been acting strangely.” Todd sighed hesitantly. “Back in Bixby’s lab, when we were gearing up, he was holding the Glock in one hand, and the magazine in the other… and I swear if I didn’t know any better, he had no idea what to do with it.”
Maria couldn’t help herself; she actually let out a short laugh. It was a preposterous notion. “You’re kidding, right? He’s loaded a gun a thousand times.”
“I know. That’s what I thought at the time. But then in Vegas, there was more. He was patting himself down, like he’d forgotten something.” To Maria’s flat look he quickly added, “I know that it doesn’t sound like much. But you saw what happened with the truck and the redheaded woman. At that distance? He could have easily made that shot, Maria.”
“There was a child,” she countered. “I wouldn’t have tried to make that shot. Not with a kid in the way. Would you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not,” Strickland conceded quietly. “I’m just telling you what I saw.”
Maria had to admit that Kent didn’t seem himself—but at the same time she had to acknowledge that this was his first time back in the field, in an official capacity, in a long while. He was on the verge of repairing his relationship with his daughters when he got pulled away. There was undoubtedly a lot on his mind, more than just these attacks.
“Is that why you wanted to talk to me?” she asked.
“No, there’s something else. State cops impounded the crashed grocery truck and did a thorough search. They found this.” He pulled something from his jacket pocket—an older-model flip phone.
Maria frowned as she took it. “You two didn’t find it when you searched the truck?”
“It had slipped between the cushions of the driver’s seat,” Strickland said. “There’s no passcode to access it, but I couldn’t make anything out. I don’t read Russian.”
Maria flipped it open and the screen lit up, showing about twenty-five percent battery life remaining. The phone was indeed in Cyrillic, and undoubtedly a burner; the digital screen wasn’t even in color.
She checked the contacts first, but there was nothing there. The call log yielded a few results though; numbers, not associated with any names, the most recent of which was dated more than twenty-four hours earlier. She had been right; these people were staying off of phones ever since the Kansas attack.
But still, this was something. More than something. This was the best she could hope for under the circumstances. Then she opened the text messages, and what she read there made her throat run dry.
There was only one message thread, brief and one-sided and sent from an unassociated number that must have been another burner. There were three messages there, in Russian:
Get rid of truck.
Times Square.
We will be waiting.
“Christ,” she murmured, a mixture of alarm and excitement rising. “We just hit the goddamn jackpot. We’ve got phone numbers, and a text message that suggests their next target is Times Square.”
“Or it was left there intentionally.” Neither of them had heard the conference door open behind them, but suddenly Kent was there, standing in the doorway. “A phone with that kind of information on it was just left behind, no screen lock or passcode?”
“We can’t jump to that sort of conclusion,” Maria argued. “That woman crashed the truck and got out of there in a hurry, with a child in tow. It’s entirely possible she left it behind on accident—”
“We were supposed to find that truck,” Kent countered. “They wanted us to see that woman. And by that logic, they wanted us to find the phone.”
“You have to admit,” Strickland said hesitantly, “it does seem a bit overly fortuitous.”
Maria scoffed. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing—and from both of them, no less. “It doesn’t matter how fortuitous it might be, or what we were supposed to find.” She waved the phone in front of their faces. “We have phone numbers, and a text that suggests their next attack is going to be in the heart of New York City. I don’t need to tell either one of you what sort of fallout we could be dealing with there. We need to move on this, and now.”
Kent just shook his head. “I don’t think this is the right move.”
“Then what is?” she shot back. “You want to stay here, hope the cops find that woman before she gets halfway across the country?” She lowered her voice to almost a whisper and added, “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I need you to snap out of it and focus, okay? You know as well as I do that we can’t ignore this. We have to go, and we have to contact the right people, right away.”
Kent didn’t argue any further. He didn’t even meet her gaze. He merely nodded.
“Grab your stuff, we’re going back to the jet,” she instructed. “I’ll have Bixby track the phone numbers from there, and we’ll alert Director Shaw and the president and see how they want to handle this.”
Times Square, she thought as Strickland and Kent separated to grab their gear. An incident there would be a thousand times worse than the Midwest attack on any given day. And Kent’s strange reluctance to act on it was almost just as alarming. It wasn’t like him at all.
Maybe Todd was right, and something was going on his head that was worse than what she thought. Clearly some demon was cloying at his mind. But she couldn’t worry about him and the safety of innocent people at the same time. One would have to take precedence—and it meant that Kent would have to take care of himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
President Rutledge paced the West Wing corridor, his black wingtip shoes barely making a sound on the impossibly clean carpet. It still felt strange, living in the White House; often it felt to him more like a museum than a home, and at times like this, he felt terribly out of place.
He couldn’t sit in the Oval Office any longer, or the Situation Room, or even his bedroom—not like he was getting any sleep that night. His top agent, a man named (amusingly enough) Roosevelt, had even suggested that Rutledge be moved to a more secure location until the weapon and the people behind it were found. But he had refused.
He wasn’t going anywhere. Not until he had answers. Not until he had results. He needed good news. He needed…
I need to stop being followed.
He paused in his pacing and turned on a heel to face the two Secret Service agents that were following him at about a five-yard distance. “Guys.” He smiled as amiably as he could. “I know this is your job, but I’m not going anywhere. I just needed to stretch my legs. Think you could give me some space?”
The pair of agents each nodded stoically. “Yes, sir. Of course.”
“Thanks.” The two of them strode briskly down the hall and took a position at the far end, from which they could still see him and act if necessary.
And Rutledge paced. For all the presumed power that a president held, he felt rather impotent at the moment. The ultrasonic weapon was still out there somewhere. The people were confused. The media was speculating. The answers were his to give, yet he was adamant about keeping this under wraps for as long as possible to avoid panic. And while all that was going on, Tabby Halpern was attempting to organize a special session of Congress for the following day to vote in a vice president.
Never a dull moment around here. He missed dull moments.
Rutledge reached the end of the hall and, just briefly, he considered making a dash around the corner. Not leaving the White House, but fleeing from his security detail, finding a place that he could truly be alone, even if just for a short while.
Running and hiding. He almost laughed at himself. You’re thinking about running and hiding.
Instead he turned around to pace back the other way—and very nearly ran headlong into one of the Secret Service agents. Hadn’t he just asked them to give him a break?
“I’m sorry, sir.” The agent held something out to him. A cell phone. “There’s a call for you. CIA Director Shaw is on the line.”
“Oh.” Rutledge patted his own pockets; he’d left his phone back in the Oval Office. “Right. Thank you.”
“Would you like to take it in the office, sir?”
“No. This is fine.” Please be good news. He took the phone, and the agent dutifully backed off as Rutledge put it to his ear. “Director Shaw? This is Rutledge.”
“Good evening, Mr. President,” Shaw said quickly and flatly. “There’s been a development.”
Rutledge almost sighed out loud. A “development” was rarely good news.
“I have Deputy Director Johansson patched in with us,” Shaw continued. “I’ll let her explain what’s happening.”
“Thank you, Director Shaw,” Johansson said. Her voice sounded somewhat distant and tinny. “Mr. President, I’ll try to keep this brief. We located the truck and one of the perpetrators, but she managed to elude us—”
“She?” Rutledge couldn’t help but ask. He hadn’t expected that.
“Yes sir. The weapon wasn’t aboard either. But we did recover a cell phone, and on it is a text message exchange in Russian that suggests their rendezvous point, and very possibly their next target, is Times Square.”
This time the president did sigh aloud, the air rushing out of him as if he was squeezed. “Times Square. Jesus. Do we know anything else?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Johansson. “We don’t have a time frame or a more specific location. We’re en route now on a jet, ETA about eighty-eight minutes to LaGuardia. But under the circumstances, I have to advise an evacuation.”
Evacuate Times Square? On the eve of a major holiday? He imagined that right then most New Yorkers were stuffed with food, or half-drunk on wine… Would they even leave? “Johansson, we’re talking about tens of thousands of people.”
“No sir,” she corrected. “I’m not just talking about Times Square. I’m suggesting that we evacuate the island of Manhattan, at least as much as possible.”
Rutledge put out an arm, leaning against the wall to steady himself. She must have been joking. He wasn’t even certain that such a thing was logistically possible. Where would they go? How long would that take?
“If the Russians are serious about striking at Times Square,” Johansson continued, “they’ll notice an evacuation attempt. That might inspire them to initiate early—or to relocate, and strike another target in the city.”
“What if we put the city on alert,” Rutledge countered. “Warn people of the possibility, advise that they stay indoors…”
“That won’t matter, sir. The frequency the ultrasonic weapon uses can travel through walls, through glass, even through steel.”
This was too much. The president knew what he should do; he should convene an emergency meeting of the joint chiefs to discuss this, prepare for the worst and determine a course of action. But the thought turned his stomach; he already had too many voices in his ear. He didn’t need to contend with the likes of General Kressley, who would no doubt have a differing opinion about how to handle the situation.
“Is Agent Zer
o there with you?” he asked.
“I am, sir,” said a male voice. “You’re on speaker, on the jet.”
“What’s your take on this?” Rutledge asked.
Zero was silent for a long moment, long enough for the president to wonder if he lost the connection. But then he said at last, “I think Deputy Director Johansson is right, sir. We can’t ignore this, and we don’t have enough information to make any assumptions. In Las Vegas, we didn’t evacuate because we had a specific meeting time and place to cut them off; here we’re going in blind. We don’t even know their motive for targeting…” Zero trailed off for a moment, and then murmured something under his breath.
“Sorry?” Rutledge asked.
“Black Friday,” Zero said louder. “Black Friday is tomorrow. Times Square and the surrounding area is going to be packed with people…”
“And most of them don’t wait until tomorrow,” Johansson chimed in. “A lot of stores open their doors as early as midnight tonight. People are probably already coming in to wait in lines.”
“If these people are allowed bide their time,” Zero said, “we won’t be talking about tens of thousands, Mr. President. We’ll be talking about hundreds of thousands.”
Rutledge didn’t know what to say—other than Zero was right. He had hardly given a thought to the biggest shopping day of the year, or the fact that Fifth Avenue alone would be jammed so tightly with bargain-hunters that traffic would be at a standstill.
“What do I do?” he heard himself asking.
“Evacuate,” said Zero firmly. “Start with Times Square—42nd Street up to 47th, and Third Avenue over to Seventh. After that, we go block by block, or even borough by borough.”
“I’ll have to call in the National Guard,” Rutledge murmured. “Alert the NYPD.”
“And it might be time to involve the FBI,” Johansson added. “There are only three of us. We’ll need help if we’re going to find these people.”
“Yes,” Rutledge agreed simply.
“We’ll be there as quickly as we can. Make the calls, sir. We’ll take it from there.” Johansson ended the call, but Rutledge continued holding the phone to his ear, longer than necessary. Finally he let his arm fall slowly by his side. He felt dazed, almost numb. More of his hair was falling out on the spot, he was certain.