by Jack Mars
The gunshot echoed through his head, as sudden and startling as the crashing thunder outside, and with it came an explosion of light. His field of vision turned from black to white in an instant, fading slowly and leaving a vague afterimage that turned yellow, and then red, and the purple.
As the bizarre, hallucinatory burst of light faded, the memories surged through his head just as powerful as the violent storm over the city.
The Dubai businessman, shot from an apartment window across the street.
An Irish woman, the sister of an IRA terrorist.
A semi-retired accountant in Des Moines who handled the accounts of a holdings company that funded illegal arms smuggling in Kuwait.
The Bosnian boy.
Memories of a dozen assassinations swirled through his head, maybe more, all of them at his hand. He saw himself, years younger, strangling a college-aged student as he walked alone through a parking lot so that the CIA could capture the kid’s neo-Nazi uncle in a sting operation at the funeral. In his mind’s eye he slipped a knife between the ribs of an ailing Iraqi patriarch and framing a rival insurgency group so that two warring factions would eliminate each other.
He remembered them all, in what might have been an instant or could have been an hour. He remembered them, and more.
You are not employed in any official capacity by the CIA or the US government.
Before Maria, before Alan Reidigger, before being a full-fledged agent. Before being Agent Zero.
If captured, we will disavow any and all knowledge of you. Your files will be permanently deleted. You will be forgotten and left to be tried as a criminal.
Years earlier, at the dawn of his career, he had been recruited not as a field agent, but as something else. A CIA assassin. A glorified hitman.
A dark agent.
The phrase flitted through his head before he truly understood what it meant. But once it had, he knew—that was how he had begun his career in the CIA. As a “dark agent,” one who carried out assassinations of carefully planned targets that would imbalance a bigger equation.
Not targets, he told himself. Victims. They were your victims.
He was told who to kill, and he killed them. A whole part of his own past that was locked away in his head now came flooding back—and as soon as it did, he wished it didn’t. The memories barely even felt like his; they felt as if they belonged to someone else, some darker and younger version of himself that had far fewer scruples and everything to prove.
And worst of all, this darkness in him hadn’t come at a low point in his life. He remembered it clearer with every passing moment. He was recently married to Kate. Purchasing their first home. A child on the way. They would name her Maya. And while his wife attended doctor’s appointments and bought baby clothes, Reid Lawson murdered for money.
“No!” He sat up quickly, splashing water over the side of the tub. He clambered out, nearly slipped, water all over the tiled floor. His hands groped in the darkness. One of them found the wall and slid around desperately for the light switch. His other grabbed onto the edge of the sink, feeling along its surface. He felt the Ruger under his grip as he flicked on the switch.
A second sudden explosion of light, this time from the daylight bulbs of the vanity. He winced as it blinded him. He panted before the mirror, naked, hair plastered to his forehead, tears in his eyes.
He didn’t like the person he saw there.
Zero squeezed them shut. Behind his lids was no better; he saw the younger version of himself, the kind that killed indiscriminately simply because he’d been told to. Through the turmoil, a vague realization struck him; he’d never stopped to wonder how or why killing came so easily to him. He told himself it was necessity, that it was a natural fight-or-flight instinct, that it was his extensive training as an agent…
But now he knew the truth.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was hoarse, something between a whisper and a whimper. “I’m sorry,” he said again, to everyone and to no one.
At last he opened his eyes to face himself, the person he couldn’t pretend not to be. He hadn’t realized he had grabbed the gun, couldn’t remember picking it up… but there it was, in his right hand, and pointed at his own temple.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Zero dropped the gun as if it was red-hot. It clattered into the sink as he jumped back, hands trembling.
I’m not okay.
Tears stung at his eyes no matter how much he tried to will them away. He couldn’t trust his brain. He couldn’t trust his memory. He couldn’t trust himself. Though he was still dripping wet and his hands still shook, he managed to wrestle into a pair of jeans. He frantically tugged on his T-shirt, ignoring the damp spots that sprouted instantly against the fabric. Whether it was cold sweat or bathwater, he didn’t know.
Zero tore open the door to his hotel room and staggered into the hall, catching himself against the opposite wall.
I need help.
For a moment he couldn’t recall Maria’s room number. He glanced back over his shoulder at his own door—206. Right. She was in 209. Barefoot and hair clinging to his forehead, he smacked against her door with the flat of a palm.
“Maria!” He needed help, and he needed a familiar face. He couldn’t be alone right now. His breath was coming faster—a panic attack was coming on. Perhaps a full-blown breakdown. He slapped at the door again. “Maria!”
“Hang on,” came the sleepy reply. The lock slid aside the door opened.
Zero took a step back in confusion.
The woman’s light eyebrows knit in the center. “Kent! Are you okay?”
He knew Maria. Of course he knew Maria. He knew her laugh. He knew her voice, her mannerisms. He even knew the feel of her skin on his.
But this woman before him, looking increasingly concerned, was a stranger to him.
“Kent? Why are you wet? Were you out in the rain?”
This blonde-haired stranger, her eyes somehow vibrant despite being the gray of slate, was utterly foreign.
“I-I need help,” he managed.
He had forgotten her face. Just like he forgot Kate’s name, or how to load a pistol. He could conjure every detail about Maria, down to the birthmark on her right thigh—but not her face. It was a blank in his mind, somewhere in there yet impossible to grasp, like a misplaced word right on the tip of his tongue.
“Come in,” she urged him. “Come on, tell me what’s wrong.” He flinched slightly as she reached for his elbow, but he let her guide him into the hotel room. It was identical to his, but everything was opposite. Like a parallel dimension, a mirror of this one. Maybe this Maria wasn’t the same Maria. Maybe it was a doppelganger from this opposite place…
I’m losing my mind.
“Talk to me, Kent.” Her voice was gentle, oozing with concern.
“Wait. Just wait.” Zero squeezed his eyes shut tightly. He thought of Rome. The apartment overlooking the famous Fontana delle Tarterughe, the Turtle Fountain. That’s where he had found her. She’d thought he was dead. She opened the door, her eyes wide and surprised, dropping the coffee cup in her hands. “Tell me you’re Maria.”
“What?” she asked incredulously.
“Please,” he insisted. “Just… just tell me.”
“Kent.” He felt both her hands envelop one of his. “I’m Maria.”
He opened his eyes slowly. As her face came into focus through the hazy blur of his moist vision, so did the memories. He breathed a small sigh of relief; he recognized her. It was Maria. “Okay,” he said in a breathy whisper. “Okay.”
“What’s happening to you?” She said it as if she already knew, or at least suspected, that something was amiss.
His hands were still trembling. “I don’t know how to explain it.” How could he? How could he make her understand what it was like to forget in an instant the face of your closest friend and former lover? How could he explain opening his eyes and seeing his own hand holding a gun to his head?
&nbs
p; “Try.”
He nodded and took a breath. “I’ve been having… problems. Forgetting things, simple things. But meaningful things.” He paced as he spoke, his cadence growing more rapid. “I think my brain is damaged. And memories—new memories are coming back. Of killings.”
“Killings?” Maria repeated.
“Murders. Assassinations of people who, who may or may not have been innocent. A boy. A woman. Before all this, before becoming a field agent… I think I was an assassin. A CIA killer.” He stopped abruptly and looked her in the eye. “A dark agent.”
“Okay,” Maria murmured. She reached for him again, this time taking him by the shoulder and directed him to the edge of the bed. “Sit.” She lowered herself beside him. “Hold my hand. Good. Now listen to me. Dr. Guyer told you that certain things might manifest in your mind, right? Fears, delusions, fantasies. What seem like memories, but aren’t real. Didn’t he?”
“He did,” Zero admitted quietly. “But these were so real. So vivid. Like I was there—”
“They wouldn’t seem like memories if they weren’t,” Maria countered. “Remember when you were convinced that we were having an affair before Kate…” She paused. “While Kate was still alive?”
He nodded. She was right again; he had once been utterly convinced by a fantasy-turned-memory that he and Maria had started their tryst long before Kate’s murder.
“Furthermore,” she added, “I’m a deputy director now. So I can tell you with some authority that there is no such thing as a ‘dark agent.’ That’s a CIA fairy tale. We don’t hire assassins to kill innocent people. If we did, I would know about it, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” he muttered. Maria was only one step removed from the head of the most clandestine arm of the entire Central Intelligence Agency. She knew things that even Zero didn’t know.
But then…
“But you didn’t know about the Russian,” Zero pointed out. “The guy in Vegas, the one trading nuclear secrets for amnesty.”
“Well… no.” Maria stared down at the bedspread as if it might hold a satisfactory answer.
“You said it was ‘above your pay grade’…”
“Those kinds of secrets could cause an international crisis—” Maria argued.
“Like an American assassin killing children on foreign soil,” Zero said flatly.
“Kent!” Maria dropped his hand and threw up her own in exasperation. Thunder clapped outside, as if punctuating her outburst. “There are no dark agents, okay? You didn’t kill people for money! You got your memories back; you think you would have forgotten your own background?”
“I don’t know.” He stood again, thinking clearer now that Maria had calmed him to some degree. “Maybe. Maybe I did. You and I both know that the agency has been working on mind control and memory suppression since the seventies. The CIA invented the memory suppressor that was installed in my head. Bixby worked on that tech himself.” He looked up at her sharply. “What if those memories, those assassinations were intentionally repressed, even before I became a field agent? Maybe the agency did something to me back then, but they’re still in there, and now that my limbic system is completely fucked, they’re coming back…”
“Jesus, Kent, listen to yourself. You’re sounding like a conspiracy nut.”
He scoffed. “After everything we’ve seen, everything we’ve done—everything we’ve kept quiet! You really think it sounds crazy?” She couldn’t dissuade him from seeing the truth of it now. The memories had shown him.
He was no better than John Watson, killing an innocent woman on the street without asking as much as her name.
“I’m not sure what to think anymore.” Maria pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “But I do know that I can’t keep you out here like this. Once this storm clears up, I’m sending you home.”
Home. Yes. That was what he needed. Out here, he was a liability. He could forget how to drive a car and endanger lives. He could forget how to shoot and get his teammates killed.
But…
He realized grimly that there was no one waiting for him at home. Sara was at the rehab facility. Maya was likely heading back to school, if she wasn’t there already. And Maria would be out here, in the field. Zero wouldn’t burden Alan with his problems when he had his own. At home, he would be alone with his thoughts. And he couldn’t trust himself.
When he looked up again, Maria was gazing at him through narrowed eyes. “Why not?”
“Huh?”
“You just said you couldn’t trust yourself.”
Zero blinked. Had he said that aloud?
“Kent, are you having… harmful thoughts?”
“What? No. Of course not.” He shook his head adamantly. He wouldn’t tell her about the gun he’d held to his own head. That was a fluke, a bizarre physical reaction to emotional trauma. Or so he told himself. If he copped to it, she’d never let him stay. “No,” he insisted again. “And I want to stay. I want to see this through. I need to. Afterwards, when we’re done… I’ll figure all this out after.”
Maria didn’t quite look like she believed him. But if he knew her, and he did, she was thinking the same thing he was: that the best place for him was here, with her, under her watchful eye. “We’ll just have to be careful then.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Careful.”
She patted the spot next to her on the bed, and he sank into it. She wrapped her arms around him and guided his head to her shoulder, not caring that his hair was still dripping. He felt safe with her. Protected. This was where he should be. Not at home alone with his thoughts. For the briefest of moments, he even let himself believe that the memories of assassinations were false. She ran her fingers through his wet hair and held him. They stayed like that for several minutes, until Zero’s heart rate finally slowed to normal, until his hands stopped trembling. Until he let himself remember that even if he was a killer and a liar, someone still cared.
But then the fingers stopped running along his scalp. Maria’s grip fell slack, and when he glanced up, she was looking past him. He followed her gaze. Zero hadn’t even realized that the television was on, tuned to the news and muted. He saw what she saw, the ticker along the bottom of the screen.
A.M. SPECIAL SESSION CALLED TO VOTE IN VP.
He blinked at the words for a moment as his exhausted brain struggled to grasp meaning. A special session—that meant Congress was being convened. In the morning. To vote in a new vice president…
He finally caught up to what Maria was undoubtedly already thinking.
“That’s it,” she said in a whisper.
“The target,” he murmured in agreement as he sat up straight.
The group they were after had phoned in a threat on the most populous city in the United States that had all but proven to be a red herring. And while all eyes were on the tumult in New York, the next sonic attack would cripple the country by targeting its leaders.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
“Ouch!” Sara exclaimed as she pulled her thumb from her mouth. She’d chewed every nail down to the quick before circling back around to her left thumb, and now a narrow crescent of blood blossomed from the tear she’d bitten in the tender nail bed. She stuck the thumb back in her mouth and sucked on it as she checked the time on her phone.
It was two fifteen in the morning. Good enough. She’d planned on waiting until three, but her skin was crawling. Anticipatory sweat was prickling on her forehead. Despite being physically tired, exhausted even, she was mentally alert and awake. Her brain was excited.
She was jonesing hard.
After her meeting with Dr. Greene, Sara had made the definitive decision to leave this place, this Seaside House, and go home. She started to create an escape plan that didn’t involve the rehab facility knowing she was even gone. But then something else had happened in her mind: a taste of freedom had loomed. And with it came an urge, a craving, more powerful than any she’d had in weeks.
She had some cash, g
ifted to her by Maya, and after she made her escape she’d have hours before anyone knew she was missing. Not her dad, not the doctors. She could do whatever she wanted. And that’s when the darkness in her, that duplicitous voice, started in.
You could do it. Score just one hit. That’s all it would take, you’ve been off it so long.
One hit. One high. Then back home.
No one needs to know.
Ever since that tiny thought had sprouted in her mind, she could seemingly think of nothing else. It would be like a farewell party, one more for the road—and then she would get serious about her recovery. Do things on her own, the way she knew she could. She was stronger than her addiction. But just one more taste wouldn’t hurt anyone.
Sara climbed off the bed and put her plan into action. It was all conceptual at this point; she had no idea if it would work. It was time to see. Her room at Seaside House was situated like a hotel room, with a bed and a bureau and a small writing desk, an attached bathroom decorated in seashells, and a decent-sized closet.
She went into the bathroom. The tub was a little small, but hanging over it was a cloth curtain with the pattern of a coral reef, a plastic liner behind it. It was suspended from twelve metal loops around the shower rod. She reached up and carefully opened each loop, taking down the curtain.
Then she went into the closet. There was a metal bar hanging there for clothes. It was stronger than the shower rod would be, so she reattached the twelve rings to the closet bar. Then she bunched them up, all twelve of them close together, the shower curtain tight between her hands. She held on tight as she could and suspended herself there, lifting her feet off the floor.
There were cameras in the halls. She’d noticed them walking back to her room after the meeting with Dr. Greene. There were cameras at the main entrance and every other exit to the building. There were cameras covering the front of the place, and there was a man sitting guard just inside the facility’s lobby, watching the comings and goings. She couldn’t as much step foot into the hallway without being seen, much less walk out through any doors.