Zero Zero

by Jack Mars

  “How do you know?” he asked, and then immediately followed it with a wave of his hand. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.” He had to keep in mind that he no longer enjoyed the amnesty that being a covert CIA operative afforded him; if Mischa was using some illegal means to track Krauss, then it was probably best if he could claim deniability.

  Besides, she was nothing if not thorough. He didn’t need to check her work.

  “So where do we go from here?” he asked.

  “I think we should try to locate the elusive Mr. Bright,” said Mischa, still not lifting her gaze from the tablet. “Unfortunately that may prove difficult. My only connection to him was the sleeper agent who called himself Pin, and he was found in a dumpster three days ago.” She said it candidly, as if reporting on her day at school. But Mischa was no stranger to death. “All I know is that he operates out of New York City. Midtown Manhattan, to be precise.”

  “But that doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” Zero remarked, rubbing his chin. “I’ll talk to Alan, see if he can check his network.” He and Reidigger still weren’t on the greatest of terms, but he knew that his best friend would still help him when he needed it—especially if it was to expedite the delivery of a bullet into the head of Maria’s killer.

  “Hey.” Maya snapped her fingers twice. “Look, I want to find him as much as you two. But right now, you”—she pointed at Mischa—“need to focus on eating. You’re making a mess. And you are getting on a plane to Zurich in less than two hours.”

  Mischa glanced down at her shirt, only now seeming to notice the stains there. Zero nodded tightly.

  He didn’t want to get on a plane to Zurich. He wanted to find Stefan Krauss.

  But he had responsibilities. Chief among them, being the single father to three girls. He had put revenge over family in the past, had seen the grave mistake of it. And the only way he could continue being a single father to three girls was to not die young from the slow deterioration of his own brain, and the only way he could do that was to see Guyer, let him run his tests, and pray to anyone listening that this experimental treatment might work.

  “Fine. Then I’m off.” He squeezed Maya’s arm gently. “Keep this place from falling down while I’m gone, okay?” To Mischa he said, “And you—go to school tomorrow. No more skipping.”

  She looked down at her bowl as if its contents were suddenly very interesting.

  “I mean it.” His throat flexed, but he managed to add, “It’s what Maria would want.” It was still difficult to say her name aloud.

  “Yes,” Mischa agreed quietly. “It is.”

  “I should say goodbye to Sara quick. Where is she?”

  “Where do you think?” Maya said flatly.

  Of course. In her underground lair.

  Zero pushed open the door to the basement and gently knocked twice on the wall. “Can I come down?”

  “Sure,” came the dull reply.

  He made his way downstairs. It was nearly dusk outside, but with the single window covered in dark curtains it might as well have been midnight. Sara sat by the light of a single lamp, scratching a pencil against the page of a sketchbook.

  “You’re drawing?”

  “No,” she said without looking up, “I’m perfecting a triple lutz into a backflip. Really think I might have a shot at gold in ladies’ singles.”

  Zero let the sarcasm slide. Sara had been distant for some time, but ever since Maria’s death it felt as if she’d slipped away from them. She came and went like she was a hotel guest rather than a member of their family. She rarely came up for meals with them, if she was even home, and trying to force her only resulted in scathing blow-ups. He couldn’t actually recall the last time he’d seen her eat something.

  “I’m leaving,” he told her.

  “Okay?” The pencil continued scratching.

  “I mean, I’m going to Zurich for a couple of days. I’ll be back late Tuesday night.”

  “See you then.”

  He sighed evenly. Dealing with Sara lately required more patience than he would have thought himself capable of. “I love you,” he said, and before she could say anything sarcastic he quickly added, “And if there was anything you ever wanted to talk about, I’m here for you.”

  “Actually, you’ll be in Zurich.”

  Frustration bubbled inside him like rising bile, but he pushed it down. He wasn’t about to leave the country on a sour note. “Fine. Then if not me, maybe someone else.”

  The pencil stopped scratching. Sara looked up at him without moving her head. Her gaze met his, and it made his heart break a little. She looked more like her mother every day as she grew into adulthood.

  “Like who?” she asked.

  “Like a professional.”

  “Ah. Someone paid to listen.”

  “Yes, Sara. Someone whose job it is to listen to you, heed your problems, and help you work through them.”

  “And what exactly would I say to them, Dad?” Sara slowly set the pencil on the page, closed the sketchbook around it, and set it upon her bedside table. “Maybe I could start with how I was kidnapped by an assassin and sold to human traffickers because my father had been a secret agent for the CIA my entire childhood?” She rose from the bed as she spoke, staring daggers at him now. “Oh, I know—maybe I’d ask how to reconcile the fact that the man who murdered my mother, who I thought died of natural causes, also saved my life twice.”

  Zero opened his mouth to speak—to apologize, not to argue—but she wasn’t finished. Her voice rose an octave as she said, “Or maybe I should talk to a professional about how my stepmother was only my stepmother for all of two days before being killed by yet another assassin that was trying to kill you.”

  Zero squeezed his eyes shut, fighting against the urge to shout back, to make some excuse, to do anything other than try his best to be compassionate. “Please, don’t talk about—”

  “Don’t worry,” Sara interrupted, “I’m through talking. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t bring anyone back from the dead or change anything that’s happened. It doesn’t make up for lies or crimes or murders.” She strode to the base of the steps. “Talk to someone? Get real.”

  Sara stomped up the stairs. His first instinct was to go after her, to… well, to try to talk it out, but she’d made herself clear. So instead Zero stood there, and he sighed. He found his gaze drawn to the sketchbook she’d been working in, her page kept by the pencil.

  He opened it.

  It was a rough drawing, just graphite on paper, but Sara had talent when she opted to use it. In this case, she’d sketched a first-person perspective: an arm, extended, ending in a pistol. Sharp, angry lines represented the muzzle blast. Beyond the gun was a man, wearing a tank top, his eyes wide in surprise and his mouth open. There was a hole in his forehead, and behind him was the product of the exit wound, penciled brains and dark lines of presumably blood spatter.

  “Jesus,” Zero murmured.

  It’s just a drawing, he reminded himself.

  Still, it was concerning.

  Still, the man she’d sketched seemed somehow familiar.

  He dropped the sketchbook back on the table. Maya was right; he had to go. He’d deal with this later. He was only one person, could only do one thing at a time, and right now going to Zurich and seeing Guyer was what he needed to do.

  Zero trudged back up the steps to the kitchen, where neither Maya nor Mischa were even attempting to pretend they hadn’t heard the argument.

  “Where’d she go?” he asked.

  “Stormed out,” Maya told him. “Must have been one hell of a goodbye.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You pick up your suitcase,” she said simply. “Get to the airport. Don’t miss your flight.”

  “Yeah.” He did so, grabbed up the small carry-on and his car keys. “I’m off. See you in a couple days.”

  Maya walked with him to the door. “Before
you go… here. Some light reading on the plane.” She pulled something out of her back pocket and handed it to him.

  It was a brochure; that much was obvious, but still it took him a moment to recognize what Maya had handed him. It was a brochure for a psychiatric treatment center in Fairfax County.

  “Maya…” He kept his voice low so Mischa wouldn’t hear. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking? Are you suggesting we have your sister…” He lowered his voice another register. “Committed?”

  Maya scoffed. “That’s an ugly way to put it. Think of it as involuntary psychiatric help.”

  Zero shook his head. “I couldn’t. She’d hate me forever.”

  His eldest shrugged a shoulder. “Not if it works.” She sighed, though it came out more as an impatient huff. “Look, you know I love Sara deeply. I would never suggest this if I thought there was an alternative. I just want her back. Don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” he agreed quietly. But this didn’t seem to him like the way to get that done.

  “Just think about it. Have a safe flight. Call me when you get there.” She squeezed him in a brief hug.

  In the driveway, Zero tossed his suitcase in the backseat of his SUV and then climbed behind the wheel. Before he started the car, he looked at the brochure once more.

  Then he tucked it into the glove compartment.

  He couldn’t do that to Sara. He wouldn’t.

  Maya’s heart was in the right place, but she was thinking, as she almost always did, in the manner of most logical and efficient. While he admired her ability to do so, not every situation called for it, and this didn’t seem like one of them. There was a way to handle this; he just hadn’t figured it out yet.

  Zero made a to-do list for himself in his head.

  One: go to Zurich, see Guyer, start treatment.

  Two: come home, deal with Sara.

  Three: find and kill Stefan Krauss.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sara pedaled harder, pretending she didn’t know where she was going even as she headed there, the breeze whipping at her hair. She wished she’d had the foresight to grab a hair tie from her bedside table before she’d stormed out, but anger had gotten the better of her and some sort of potentially misguided pride kept her from going back for one.

  It was a minor inconvenience. She hadn’t grabbed a sweater or light jacket either, but it was still early in September, not even officially fall yet, and even though the streetlights were flickering on, the air was still warm, pleasant even.

  It was irritating how pleasant it felt. She didn’t want to feel pleasant.

  The evening was clear, cloudless; she could see a few stars already overhead. That bothered her. She didn’t want a nice night for a bike ride. She wanted a shadowy, dusky night, with rolling clouds and thunderheads, possibly even some rain to fuel her anger and frustrations.

  This was no ordinary life, and she was tired of being expected to pretend that it was. This was no ordinary teenage angst, and she was outright exhausted of people pretending that she could talk her way through it, or lose herself in a hobby, or whatever other ridiculous ideas they had that might work for normal people with normal problems. Normal people’s parents hadn’t been murdered. Normal people hadn’t been lied to about it. Normal people hadn’t been tortured and forced halfway around the world with the intention of being sold as a sex slave for some stranger.

  More than that, she was just so tired of her family pretending that they could be normal. At least Mischa was understandable; she’d never even had a shot at normal to mess anything up. But Maya, the way she tried to channel her pain and anger constructively into academics and athletics and then a career, it was infuriating. Her dad, the way he tried to run a normal household, to get the kids off to school and work, the way he could pretend a wedding on the beach was something that people like them were allowed to have. Like it was something they deserved.

  She pedaled harder, pretending she didn’t know where she was going even as she headed there.

  Sara was seventeen years old. She should have been starting her senior year of high school. She should have been begging her dad to buy her a car, worrying about her social life, deciding what art schools to apply to. She should have been flirting with boys and sneaking out to go to parties where she’d have her first beer.

  Instead, she was an unemployed dropout with a GED. A recovered drug addict who thought at least twenty-five times a day about going back to the pills. When she looked in the mirror, it wasn’t to adjust her lip liner or eye shadow; it was to make sure that the broken, soulless girl looking back could still fake a smile if she needed to.

  To make sure she could look convincing if she ever had to lie about shooting her former drug dealer several times in the chest.

  Hell, she’d never even had a boyfriend.

  She’d left her phone behind at the house. Most teenagers would probably freak out without their lifeline to the world, but Sara had done it intentionally, for fear that her dad or Maya or even Mischa would be able to track her with it.

  This was not normal. This was not okay. She was not okay.

  She pedaled harder, pretending she didn’t know where she was going even as she got there. Third Street Garage was an unassuming place, three wide garage bays with an adjoined office that smelled of motor oil and a small apartment behind it so that the flat-roofed building looked like an L from a bird’s-eye view. It was both home and workplace to Mitch, a burly bearded mechanic who wore the same sweat-stained trucker’s cap so frequently Sara simply assumed he slept with it on. But she knew that Mitch, the grunting, un-emoting proprietor, was just an alias for former CIA Agent Alan Reidigger, her dad’s best friend and a man who had been friend, guardian, and, on more than one occasion, a life preserver to her.

  The lights were off in the office but on in the garage.

  Sara walked her bike into the small office, with its green Astroturf carpet and two folding metal guest chairs, and then let herself into the garage. The fluorescent lights overhead made her wince almost as much as the old stereo in the corner blaring a song, “Run Through the Jungle,” the name of which she knew thanks to her dad’s pre-programmed radio stations, but the name of the band it was by relegated in her mind to “Some Old Guys.”

  Alan’s legs, wrapped in stained jeans and ending in big brown boots, stuck out from beneath the jacked-up front end of a car that was easily older than Sara. He sang along to the song, poorly and off-key and not caring at all even though she was certain he knew she was there.

  He was harder to sneak up on than her dad was.

  “Go ahead and turn it down if you want,” he told her from under the car.

  “Off is better.” She cranked the volume knob to the left until it was entirely muted.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure, Sara?” he asked her.

  She skirted the question. “How’d you know it was me?”

  “Lavender vanilla,” he replied from his half-hidden place, referencing the body spray she preferred.

  “Ah. Do you actually fix cars here?”

  Alan chuckled. “Sometimes. Have to keep up appearances, don’t I?”

  “Guess so.”

  He lifted one of his bulky boots. “Pull me out.”

  She obliged, grabbing onto the boot with one hand. He rolled out from beneath the car, lying on his back atop a mechanic’s… dolly, or gurney, or whatever it was. “What’s that called? The cart thing.”

  “A creeper.” He grunted as he sat up.

  Sara grimaced. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.” Alan grunted again, more significantly this time as he rose to his feet. He pulled a rag from his back pocket, already gray from use, and wiped his face. She grimaced again. “Does your dad know you’re here?”

  “If I say no, are you going to call him?”

  He shook his head. “No. Just curious. You don’t usually come down here by yourself.”

  She shrugged a shoulder. “Just had to get out
for a bit. Dad left for Zurich and I didn’t feel like suffering through a Maya lecture.”

  “Yeah, she’s getting real good at that. How is he, anyway? Your dad. Haven’t seen him in at least a week.”

  How was he? She wasn’t sure how to answer that. Mourning? Overbearing?

  “Pretending,” she muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s fine,” she said louder. “All things considered.”

  “Good. And how are you? All things considered.”

  Sara said nothing. She wasn’t as good with words with her sister or her father. She knew she’d struggle to articulate what was going on in her head without getting frustrated, or angry, or a combination thereof.

  Alan seemed to sense that. He gestured to a metal stool. She sat as he leaned against a workbench. “It’s tough, for people like us.”

  “Like us?”

  “Yeah. People that have…” He thought for a moment. “That have gone through things that are harder to relate to. Things that don’t seem so… ordinary.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “You think that’s what I want to be? Ordinary?” Maybe it came out a bit too defensively. Sometimes she hated how good he was at reading people.

  Alan shrugged in response. “Don’t know. But I know I do, sometimes. You know, I’ve spent more than four years now as Mitch. There are less than a dozen people that know who I really am. There’s at least triple that number of people who’d want to kill me—or worse, people close to me—if they knew who I really was. This is the face I show the world because I have to. You see what I’m saying?”

  Sara saw, but she said nothing.

  “I go to the grocery store,” Alan continued, “or the pharmacy, or I fill my car up at the pumps, and people probably think, ‘look at that guy, he’s just your everyday blue-collar mechanic.’ They have no idea what’s going on up here.” He tapped a finger to his temple. “Or in here.” Alan put a hand over his heart. “And that’s tough. Gets lonely. So even though that number of people who know who I really am, what I really am, is small, I’m all that happier to have them. You need that. Everyone needs that.”