by Jack Mars
Sara nodded slowly, staring at the concrete floor of the garage. She licked her lips, and at last opened her mouth. “I just… I think sometimes…” Then she sighed.
“Tell you what. Think for a minute about what you might want to say. I’m going to grab a beer, be right back. You want something to drink?”
“Make it two?”
Alan chuckled. “Sure. Root beer, or birch beer?”
It was worth a shot. “Root beer sounds good.”
“Back in a flash.” Alan headed toward the door that connected the garage and the office.
As soon as he was through it, Sara stood from the stool. She strode quickly to the workbench at the furthest end of the garage. The top of it was littered with tools; underneath was a gas-powered generator and an air compressor. And behind the compressor, she knew, was a rectangular steel toolbox. She reached for it, pulled it out, opened the clasp.
Inside the old toolbox was a loose socket set, a messy assortment of both metric and standard sizes, but the tray they sat in was a false bottom. She’d seen Alan pull this toolbox out once before, saw that the socket tray lifted easily, and she already knew what she would find beneath it.
She didn’t care about the money, a bundle of emergency cash held together with a red rubber band. She didn’t care about the fake ID or passport; they had Alan’s picture on them anyway, a clean-shaven one from his younger years, showing what he used to look like before he grew the beard and became Mitch. He was thinner then, had fewer lines around his eyes, more color to his cheeks and no gray streaks in his hair.
There were only two things in the toolbox that interested her. First she took the compact black handgun. It was small, the barrel stubby, but it fit nicely in her hand and thin fingers. She didn’t know what this gun was called but she knew enough to be able to find the release for the magazine and how to tell if it was fully loaded.
It was.
The second thing she took from the toolbox was a black cylinder. A screw-on suppressor.
Sara shoved the suppressor in her pocket and the gun in the back of her pants and closed the toolbox and pushed it back into its spot behind the air compressor, and then she hurried toward the office. She retrieved her bike and pulled open the office door and almost ran right into Alan Reidigger, who took a quick step back with two glass bottles in his hands.
“Oh! Sorry,” she said quickly. “You’re right. What you said. And, uh, I think I should get home. Thanks.”
“Sure thing.” He stepped out of her way as she walked her bike out into the night. “Get home safe. Come see me anytime.”
“Thanks,” she said again, and then she pedaled away from Third Street Garage as quickly as she could.
She did feel a small pang of guilt, taking advantage of Alan like that. He kept his guard up naturally, all the time, around everyone—almost everyone. He had a soft spot for her and Maya, always had. Ever since he’d revealed his identity to them, ever since he’d saved their lives in a Nebraska safe house, he’d been like a trustworthy uncle, the one they could run to when they needed to talk, when life at home got frustrating.
He’d never suspect what she had been there for, what she’d done.
*
Sara wasn’t lying. She was going home. There was just one brief stop to make on the way.
Her dad had suggested she talk to someone. A professional, he’d said. That was a good idea, now that she thought about it. She had just the person in mind.
His name was Wesley. Wesley Strode. But he went by Wes. Wes was a professional, in his own right. He was a security guard at one of the fifty-something high schools in the surrounding D.C. area. Sara didn’t know which one. But she knew where Wes lived.
Her dad had a slightly different idea of the type of professional she should talk to. But that wasn’t the type of professional she needed. Someone like Wes, that’s who she needed to speak to.
It took her more than an hour to pedal to Wes’s one-story ranch-style house just outside the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. She didn’t care; it was a nice evening and she was feeling better after her talk with Alan. She was in no rush.
She would talk to Wes. But talking, she knew, solved nothing. There was a whole saying about it and everything. Actions spoke louder than words.
Sara let her bike fall to the patchy grass of Wes’s small front yard. She strode up to the front door and knocked on it. It just before ten o’clock at night and there were lights on inside.
“Yeah?” Wes yanked open the door, wearing boxer shorts and straining a white T-shirt with a beer belly that hung over his waistline. When he saw who it was he bristled instantly. “I’ll call the cops,” he told her quickly.
“No you won’t.” She had warned him, not two weeks earlier, not just with words but with two black eyes as a reminder. Wes was a big guy who used his size and strength to intimidate. But Sara had been training with Mischa for months. And if there was one thing she could learn from a thirteen-year-old former assassin, it was how to use someone’s advantages against them.
Wes took a cautious step back. “This is my house, you’re trespassing.”
“I warned you,” Sara told him. “Didn’t I warn you?” She was reminded of a joke, an old sexist joke she’d heard somewhere, that she mentally tailored for her own use.
What do you tell a serial abuser with two black eyes?
Nothing. He’s already been told twice.
She reached for the pistol at the small of her back. She’d already screwed the suppressor tip onto it.
Wes’s eyes bulged at the sight of the gun. He tried to turn, to run, but Sara had it up, aimed, and fired a single shot at his abdomen. It hit as he was turning, entering right around where a kidney would be.
A tingle went up her spine as the gun chirped. She got a small thrill from the way it jumped in her hand.
“God!” Wes shrieked and fell to a knee. “Dammit!”
Words solved nothing. Actions spoke louder than words. Or they would, unless the action was silenced by a nine-millimeter suppressor and the words were screamed in agony.
Sara took a step over the threshold, through the open door. The TV was on in a quaint, wood-paneled living room, tuned in to some sitcom rerun from the late nineties.
“Wait,” Wes panted, both hands pressed over the bleeding wound. “Wait, wait, don’t—”
Wes had an ex-girlfriend, a lovely young woman named Becca who used to be a regular at the trauma group Common Bonds. Sara had long since stopped going to group but she still kept tabs on the women there as best she could. Becca’s absence was notable; everyone there had heard the stories of Wes’s abuse after Becca tried to break it off. His late-night drunken visits to her house. Having his friends threaten her on social media. Leaving her voicemails from payphones and intimidating her family.
Becca had stopped coming to group, not by choice, but because she was in the hospital.
Sara had warned him. She’d even gotten violent. It hadn’t stopped him. It would never stop him.
“But this will,” she said quietly. She shot him three more times. Wes stopped moving. Then she tucked the gun back into her pants and retrieved her bike.
She hadn’t lied to Alan. She was going home. She’d just had to make one brief stop on the way.
CHAPTER THREE
Zero’s first instinct upon landing in Zurich was to head straight to the hotel and check in. But after he gave it some thought he realized that he knew very little about what it was that Dr. Guyer actually wanted to do with him, how long it might take to examine him, or how much of it could be done with the assistance of Dr. Dillard back home. Guyer was a hands-on sort of guy; Zero was all too aware that the only reason he was here in Switzerland was so that the neurosurgeon could get a direct look at Zero’s head and not have to rely on being sent scans and reports.
In short, if Guyer didn’t need him there for more than a day, Zero would catch an earlier flight back. As silly as it sounded for him to fly to and out of Zuric
h again in the same day, and as much as he had to realize that this trip was about potentially saving his life, he couldn’t help but feel like it was a bit superfluous considering everything else going on at the time.
Almost funny, he thought, how often taking care of himself seemed to take a backseat.
He took a cab from Zurich Airport to within just a few blocks of the Swiss National Museum. He knew Guyer’s address—he’d been to the office before—but it felt criminal to visit such a beautiful city and not get at least some cursory sightseeing in. Guyer’s practice wasn’t far from the museum, so Zero took his time, meandering down Löwenstrasse, parallel to the Limmat River. He admired the green-capped cathedrals, the centuries-old architecture. The air was a bit brisk; even in early September, at this altitude and latitude it wasn’t even sixty degrees, but the views more than made up for it.
He did not venture inside the Swiss National Museum, as much as he would have liked to, but rather admired it from the outside. The building itself was stunning, unlike any museum he’d ever seen; the original museum was designed in 1898 by architect Gustav Gull, very much resembling a medieval monastery, while a modern expansion had been built in 2016, comprised of windowless angles and a palette on the beige end of the spectrum. The result looked something like a Hogwarts outbuilding had been added to by Elon Musk.
Last time he was here had been with his girls, a few years earlier. Before they really knew who, or what, he was. He’d left them in a movie theater watching a documentary about the history of Zurich from the Middle Ages to the present while he snuck off to see Dr. Guyer for the first time. Well—for the first time that he could remember.
Dad of the Year, he thought glumly.
And then…
Then Maria had shown up. She’d tracked him there, to Zurich. She knew what it meant, him being there, and she’d cared enough to fly there, all the way to Switzerland, to ensure that his appointment with Guyer had gone well.
And then she and he and Maya and Sara had spent the day together. The girls were, of course, a bit suspicious about the nature of Maria’s sudden appearance in a foreign country, but they had taken a surprising shine to her. It was then, that day, when he first thought that they could have a real shot at normalcy. That they could have a life, even though at the time he hadn’t fully known it would mean together.
And what an idiot you were. Normalcy? He didn’t deserve normalcy. If he could go back in time to that day, he’d slap himself to his own senses. Where had attempts at normalcy gotten him? A murdered spouse. An addict for one daughter. A CIA agent for another, and he couldn’t decide which of the two latter fates was worse.
He’d done enough sightseeing, enough recalling for now. Those memories, painful as they felt now, were all he really had left of Maria, and he couldn’t lose them too. Zero crammed his hands in his pockets and doubled his pace toward the neurosurgeon’s office and the treatment that he hoped would fix his brain.
Guyer’s practice was located on the third floor of a wide, four-story professional building two blocks off Löwenstrasse and across a courtyard from a cathedral. This might have presented a strange sort of dichotomy had the structure, which couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, not been built in a similar Romanesque style. It was as far a cry as could be from the bland, even uninspired sort of medical buildings that Zero was accustomed to in the US.
The modern interior of the building made the effect of its appearance all the more dizzying. There was even an elevator. Zero took the stairs.
On the third floor he found the dark oak door with a bronze knocker and the doctor’s name inscribed on a metal plate above it. He chuckled then, at the sight of the honest-to-goodness knocker, recalling that on his last visit, Alina Guyer had electronically locked this door from the inside with just the push of a button.
He didn’t bother with the knocker. The door wasn’t locked anyway.
Zero pushed into the small reception area of the neurosurgery practice. It was instantly familiar; it looked like nothing much had changed since the last time he was here. Dr. Guyer’s keen eye for art—or perhaps his wife Alina’s keen eye—was on full display in colorful Impressionist paintings on the walls. The swirling textures of a Van Gogh, undoubtedly a print of course, was eclipsed only by the sinewy sculpture in the corner that Zero had since confirmed for himself with Guyer during a video chat was indeed a genuine Giacometti.
Even so, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. His instinct kicked in before his senses did, but it was there. A scent, at least an undertone of one, a layer just beneath the floral air freshener plugged into the wall. A coppery, metallic scent that would only be perceived for what it was by those who had smelled it before, yet every mammal brain was programmed to know it, to be repelled by it, to fear it.
Guyer’s office smelled of blood.
Zero dropped his suitcase on the seat of a cushioned waiting-room chair and crossed the small room in three vaulting strides. Opposite the door was Alina Guyer’s cocobolo desk, carved from a single reddish-brown irregularly shaped piece with dark, swirling patterns in the grain. On his first visit, the desk had been the second-most stunning thing in the room, the first being the natural beauty of Dr. Guyer’s Swiss-born wife, Alina.
She had been the kind of woman who would leave any man breathless, perfectly arched eyebrows and pouting lips. Blonde hair that perfectly framed a heart-shaped face. Eyes that appeared too crystalline blue to be real.
She had been.
Those eyes stared up at him, wide and blue, deep as the ocean but vacant now. The trail of blood that ran from her desk to the hall to the place where she’d fallen, just outside the closed door of her husband’s office, told Zero the story of what had happened.
But now was not the time for stories. Zero had no weapon but his own two hands but still he took a breath and threw open the door to Dr. Guyer’s office.
It was still and silent in there and smelled even more of death than the reception room had. Guyer was there, seated behind the desk, his cheek lying atop it and arms at his sides. When Zero had last been here he had been impressed by the number of framed records of achievement that adorned Guyer’s walls, among them certifications, diplomas, photographs of travels. They told of a life well lived, a life of curiosity and exploration and accomplishment.
Here, now, the arc of arterial spray across the walls and frames told Zero that Guyer had not been killed in his chair, behind his desk, but rather posed there.
There would be time for shock later. There would be time to mourn the loss of a friend, of two innocent lives—if he was even capable of more mourning. But the blood was fresh, still bright and wet, not yet dark and dry. This had happened recently. Less than an hour ago by his best guess.
Whoever did this might still be here.
Zero bolted out of the office, past Alina’s body a second time, further down the hall and into a wide white room with dim blue lighting. This was Guyer’s examination room, the largest of spaces in his practice to accommodate the array of medical equipment he used—had used—for his consultations. He did not perform actual surgeries here (those would be done in a hospital setting with specially trained assistance) but still the room contained an X-ray machine, a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, and an ultrasound generator. Along the furthest wall were monitors and computers and a mounted light box for reading scans.
Broken. All of it was broken. Anything glass had been cracked or shattered. Metal had been dented. Wires, exposed and torn out.
Why?
To make it look like a robbery?
No…
To make it look personal.
Zero frowned.
Was this personal?
He quickly checked the washroom, the utility closet, and a small kitchenette before determining definitively that whoever did this was long gone.
He hurried back to Alina’s desk, which required passing her body a third time. He recalled that the button to electronically lo
ck the door was affixed to the underside of the beautiful Brazilian rosewood desk. He pressed it, and heard the lock slide into place.
He sat behind at the computer and clicked the mouse. Their appointment bookings were digital, open on the desktop. A quick glance told him that Guyer had cleared the entire day for him, for Zero’s appointment. The killer was gone, and no one else would be showing up here unexpectedly.
At last the tension ran from his shoulders. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly in a long sigh, and rubbed his face with both hands.
“I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely to the empty office, the blood on the floor, the two bodies.
He immediately wondered why he did that. Why had he apologized? Because, simply, he assumed that he had something to do with this. Yet he knew he shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Guyer could have had enemies. Other clients with dangerous associations.
Like who? The Swiss mafia?
At last he rose, wiped the mouse clean of his prints, and returned to Alina’s body. He knelt beside her and let her tell her story.
She had no defensive wounds. In fact, she had only one wound at all. It took some careful inspection to confirm it, as her hands as well as the front of her were covered in blood, but the narrative became clear.
Someone had entered the practice. Someone unassuming enough that they had not raised any alarms. Alina had probably smiled at them, asked how she could help. They might have smiled back, for the sake of their cover, as they approached the desk. That’s when they struck, just once, an incredibly well-placed and clean shot straight into the jugular vein of her neck.
Zero retrieved an ice cube from the kitchenette and rubbed it gently against the woman’s throat until he cleared the puncture site of excess blood. It was thin, tiny, like a keyhole. Whatever sort of blade had done this was narrow and smooth, not serrated…
A scalpel, he realized. Someone had murdered her with a surgical scalpel.
Alina had stood then. One hand, maybe both, would have flown to her throat as she realized with horror what had just happened. Maybe, in that same instant, she even realized that she was going to die. And in her very last moments, with literally seconds before she passed out from blood loss, she had tried to run down the hall to warn her husband. She had gotten to the door of his office.