Zero Zero

by Jack Mars

  Since then, she could admit that her feelings had softened a bit. But only a bit.

  “So?” she asked as she folded her arms. “What am I thinking?”

  “You are thinking about how incredibly, devastatingly unfair it is that I look this good.” He grinned his boyish grin and spun once to show off the dark blazer, red tie, white shirt, all bespoke to his frame by the looks of it.

  “That so?” Maya raised an eyebrow. “Then what are you thinking right now?”

  “I’m thinking,” he said slowly, taking a step toward her, “about how incredibly, devastatingly unfair it is… that I look this good.”

  She couldn’t help it. A thin smile cracked. “Ass.”

  “Harpy.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “After you, partner.”

  Maya led the way to the security checkpoint, where they swiped keycards and walked through metal detectors, all very procedural and professional. Just the way she imagined it would be. Just the way she wanted it to be.

  For her first official day on the job, she’d chosen a charcoal blazer with light pinstripes and matching slacks. She was grateful that her dad was in Zurich, or else he might have noticed that she was old enough to fit in her mother’s old clothes. She’d had little time to shop lately and needed a wardrobe expansion, so last week she’d raided a box in the attic that her dad had kept and secreted it away to the dry cleaners and back again.

  She thought of Maria’s clothes, still hanging in the bedroom closet at home, and her offer to handle them for her dad while he was away. But he’d declined, said he would take care of it. She doubted it would be anytime soon.

  “So where are we supposed to go?” Trent asked her as they walked side by side down a wide corridor.

  “I get the feeling you were the kind of guy who had no idea where his classes were on the first day of school,” she mused.

  “What’s your point?”

  Maya rolled her eyes. “Conference room C. It’s right up here.”

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket as they approached the door. She checked it; it was a call from Mitch. Which meant Alan Reidigger.

  “One sec,” she told Trent. “Hello?”

  “Where are you?” There was an urgency to Alan’s voice she instantly disliked.

  “Langley.”

  “Good. Stay there. Possible trouble brewing, I don’t have the details. I’m going to get the girls, keep them with me until I hear otherwise. You have somewhere to go that’s not home if need be?”

  She glanced over at Trent Coleman, who was checking his hair in the reflection of a framed portrait of former President George W. Bush.

  “Uh… yeah. I guess I do. You need me?”

  “I’ve got it,” Alan told her. “Might be nothing anyway, and Langley’s pretty much the safest place you can be. Just steer clear of the house until you hear from me or your dad.”

  “Will do.” She ended the call and resisted the urge to turn on a heel and march out of there. While it seemed like there was a crisis in their household every other week, she still couldn’t help but worry for her sisters and her dad. But Alan had a handle on things. And he was right; no one would try to get to her here.

  “Everything okay?” Trent asked.

  “Family drama.”

  “Say no more.” He didn’t push the issue. Trent knew that her dad used to be Agent Zero. He knew that a dark agent had killed her mother, and he knew that she’d been trafficked when she was younger. Apparently those meager facts were enough to keep him from prying into her personal business.

  She entered the conference room first, Coleman on her heels. She paused abruptly and he nearly ran into her. She hadn’t expected to see so many faces. There were nine others in the room, every one of them clearly and significantly older than her, some possibly even as old as her dad, in pressed suits and combed hair with thin lines for mouths.

  Maya suddenly felt like a child. For all her academics and accolades and experience, she felt every bit the amateur among pros.

  It certainly didn’t help that she was the only female in the room.

  “Well!” said Trent behind her, louder than it felt the somber audience warranted. “If this isn’t a party.”

  “You must be my rookies,” said the man at the head of the long rectangular table. He stood, and Maya blinked; he was short, five-seven at best. Even she had a couple inches on him. “Sit.”

  There weren’t any two available seats next to one another, so Maya took the closest vacant swivel chair and Trent sat across from her.

  “Hi,” he murmured to the agent to his left. “Hi,” to the one on his right.

  Neither responded. Maya shook her head at him.

  “For our tenderfoots,” said the man at the head of the table, “allow me to introduce myself. I am Deputy Director Walsh. I run the CIA’s Special Operations Group of Special Activities Division.”

  To her, Walsh looked more like an accountant than a deputy director. He was short and slight of build, wore black-framed glasses, and his nose and chin were angular, almost pointed, in a way that was reminiscent of a rodent.

  “And you are?” Walsh asked expectantly.

  Trent sat up straight in his chair. “Trent Coleman, sir.”

  “Sorry?” Walsh leaned forward and tilted his head as if he’d heard wrong.

  “Agent.” Trent cleared his throat. “Agent Trent Coleman. Sir.”

  “Agent Maya Lawson,” she said loudly and clearly.

  “Lawson?” A devilish smirk crossed Walsh’s lips, though it looked foreign there, as if it hadn’t been used often. “I believe I may have known a relation of yours.”

  “I believe you may have, sir.”

  “Big shoes to fill,” he remarked.

  He was toying with her. He knew damn well who she was before she walked into this room. He’d no doubt read her file.

  Maya stared back at him, unblinking. “I’m not here to fill anyone’s shoes. Brought my own. Sir.”

  Walsh nodded slowly. “We’ll see, Agent.” He clapped his hands together once and kept them tented. “All right. You’ve met the newbies. You have your assignments. SOG2 team, you’ll take Lawson. SOG3 will take Coleman. Use them as you see fit, break them in—”

  “Sir.” The syllable slipped out of her mouth like a sneeze, unwillingly and forcefully. “With all due respect, Coleman and I work well together. We were partners… we are partners.”

  Walsh took a deep breath in and out through his nose, flaring his nostrils dramatically. “Lawson, I honestly expected to last more than three minutes in this meeting before I likened you unfavorably to your father. Yet here we are.”

  Maya’s throat flexed. Obviously some bad blood had passed between this man and her dad, and now on to her. Despite its vulgarity she was reminded of an old saying: shit always rolls downhill.

  “What I’m saying, sir, is that either team would benefit more from having both of us than each would from only one of us,” she said quickly.

  “You’re suggesting that I put not one, but two green agents on one of my Special Activities teams? Hmm? Teams responsible for operations that ensure the safety and freedom of not only the people of this United States, but the world over?” Walsh leaned on the table with both hands. “Is that what I’m hearing, Agent Lawson? That you and Coleman are such a great team that no security threat could possibly surmount your… what, power of friendship?” He scoffed.

  “Yes,” Coleman joined in, though he didn’t meet Walsh’s stare. “That is what she’s suggesting. Sir.” He nodded to her once.

  To Maya’s surprise, the man to her left straightened in his chair. “SOG2 will take them both if it’s agreeable. I’ve read their files; seems they can handle themselves—”

  “Ah.” Walsh held up a hand and the agent fell silent, though Maya noticed a slight curl of his lip. “I appreciate the sacrifice, Agent Fisk, but I’ll run this show, thank you.” Walsh straightened his tie. “SOG2, SOG3, dismissed. The two of you�
�stay put.”

  “Thanks,” Maya said quietly to the agent at her left, apparently called Fisk.

  “Good luck,” he muttered back.

  The eight other agents filed out of the conference room, the last of them closing the door behind him and leaving only Trent, Maya, and the deputy director at the table.

  Walsh unbuttoned the top button of his suit jacket and sat on the edge of the table. Maya gritted her teeth; in her experience, it was a gesture typical of adults who wanted to show affinity or camaraderie right before they talked down to someone.

  “I don’t like you much,” Walsh said candidly.

  Well, so much for camaraderie.

  “Was just thinking the same, sir.”

  “I didn’t like your father, either. If I’m to expect the same tactics from you, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before you blow up a city block or something.”

  Trent coughed. Maya smiled.

  “Depends on the city, sir.”

  Walsh smirked mirthlessly. “But in the meantime, we’re at an impasse. I can’t transfer you right out of the gate and I can’t fire you without good reason. I’m sure you’ll give me one, sooner than later, but until then the only thing I can do is suffer you. Certainly doesn’t help you’re female; human resources is all about the diversity hires these days.”

  Maya wondered if an arrest for assault would be worth the satisfaction of breaking his jaw.

  “But you two want to stick together? Fine by me. A few hours ago the NSA handed over some chatter that suggests a possible Islamic sleeper cell in Paris. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s nothing. Some guy tries to order falafel in Arabic and it gets mistranslated. But someone needs to look into it. Ordinarily that’d be Interpol, but if our president’s treaties are on the line here and someone is planning something, we make it our business.”

  “You want us to go to Paris,” Maya said flatly.

  “I do. Yes. Ideally as soon as possible. You look too much like your father for this conversation to go much longer without triggering my PTSD.”

  She knew precisely what this was; Walsh was assigning them a low-level throwaway op and trying to get a rise out of her. Trying to get her to react negatively, maybe even physically. If she did, he’d have immediate grounds to fire her. If she didn’t, they’d be relegated to an operation that should have been assigned to a tech who was used to cold coffee and surveilling for hours on end.

  And even though her first instinct was to argue, there were far worse things than a few days in Paris eavesdropping on a Muslim man who was probably flagged just for using the word “bomb” out of context.

  Besides. No way would she give Walsh the satisfaction of getting under her skin.

  “We’re on it, sir.”

  “We are?” Coleman asked.

  “We are,” she told him.

  “Terrific,” Walsh said with no inflection. “Get your briefing from Agent Fisk. Then head down to R&D and gear up. Fisk can show you where—”

  “I know where it is.” Maya stood and buttoned the top button of her blazer.

  “You do?”

  She allowed herself some gratification from Walsh’s surprise; she knew Dr. Penelope León well, and had even on one occasion used Maria’s keycard to access the subterranean level of Langley where Penny’s lab was located.

  “Of course I do.” She smiled as sweetly as she could muster at the deputy director.

  “Come on, Agent Coleman.”

  “Um, yup.” Trent stood quickly and followed her out.

  But Walsh, it seemed, was not yet content to leave it be.

  “Right,” he said loudly behind her. “Dr. León is chummy with your family, isn’t she? Speaking of—”

  Maya stopped in her tracks, one hand reaching for the doorknob.

  “I heard about what happened. So sorry for your loss. Maria Johansson was… well, she was really… something.”

  Son of a bitch.

  She could hear the smirk in his voice. The wry satisfaction of knowing just where to jab. Try as she might, she couldn’t let it go. Walsh had just stepped in it.

  “Go ahead, Trent.” She nodded to him. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Maya…” he said in a low voice.

  “It’s fine,” she promised.

  Trent looked from her to Walsh and back again, and then he left the conference room, closing the door behind him.

  Maya turned back to the deputy director. She didn’t dare step closer to him out of fear that her urge to relieve him of a few teeth would be too great.

  “Let’s get one thing straight,” she said. “You may be my boss. You can order me around, chastise me in front of other agents, send me on shitty assignments. But you don’t get to say her name to me, ever again. Understand?”

  Walsh dug a pinky in his ear. “Are you threatening me, Agent Lawson?”

  “I am. And you can tell whoever you want that I did so, and you can tell them why I did so.” She looked him up and down, and she scoffed. “On your best day you’re not half the person she was.” Maya turned on a heel and pulled the door open.

  “For now,” Walsh said.

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m your boss… for now.” He smiled wide. “Good luck in Paris.”

  Maya joined Trent in the hall, and they headed to the elevators wordlessly. It wasn’t until she had pressed the down button that Trent finally said, “That guy… is a world-class dick.” He let out a ragged sigh. “Are we really going to Paris all for some chatter? You know that’s almost always nothing.”

  “Oh, I know it’s almost always nothing.” The elevator doors opened and she stepped in. She would go to Paris. She would do the job. If nothing else, it would give her some time to figure out what to do about her deputy director problem. “But sometimes, it’s something.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mischa had a game she liked to play. She sat up straight in her chair, eyes open, attentive, nodding every now and then when the teacher said something particularly meaningful.

  It was a game like any child might play; make-believe or playing pretend or whatever they might call it. In her game, Mischa was pretending to be an undercover agent. She’d recently discovered several spy novels on Zero’s shelves (and another, curiously, in the trash of his bathroom when she’d gone in there in search of Q-tips), burned through them in a few days, and decided she would become a spy.

  In order to be a spy, she had to be undercover. In order to be undercover, she needed an alias. And her alias, she decided, was that of an ordinary eighth-grade student, eager to learn, one who didn’t know the material being taught. She sat up straight and stayed attentive. She jotted down notes in the spiral-bound notebooks that Maria had bought for her. She wore ordinary clothes like any other girl in her class, and she pretended to be a spy, because otherwise school would have been terribly insufferable.

  “Now, who can solve for x?” Mrs. Court asked, gesturing to the equation she’d written in black marker on the dry erase board. “And remember, you must be able to show your work.”

  Mischa might have scoffed, but she could not blow her cover. Of course she already knew that x was 9. She’d been solving algebra tougher than this since she was seven years old. And show her work? Why? Wouldn’t it be far more impressive to know the correct answer without showing her work?

  “Anyone?” asked Mrs. Court.

  Mischa did not raise her hand, because her alias did not know the answer. Knowing the answer might give her away. In her game, she suspected that Mrs. Court was feeding intel to the Serbians, names and possible locations of her fellow undercover agents in Europe.

  While her history teacher, Mr. Blankenship, droned on and on about the American Civil War, Mischa suspected that he was part of a cabal that owned a construction company and had laced the cement foundation of several new buildings with explosives.

  When the wood shop teacher, Mr. Heder, commended her on a near-perfect cut with a miter saw, Mischa knew he
was speaking in code that would translate into coordinates leading to the last-known whereabouts of Stefan Krauss.

  Of course it was just a game. Equally of course was that Krauss invaded even her imagination. There were few times when she didn’t think of him; school barely held her attention, and every glance in the mirror showed her the fading vestiges of the bruises that Krauss had left her when they’d fought in the courtyard of a downtown DC hotel.

  She’d had him. She’d had him.

  And now he was gone.

  She would have much preferred to skip school and spend her time in search of him anew, but Zero insisted on her formal education, which up until now had been decidedly informal.

  It’s what Maria would have wanted. That line was growing tiresome, even if no less true.

  A tone sounded from overhead. Not the bell; class wasn’t over for another twenty-three minutes. The tone was a PA announcement, and it was followed by a flat female voice who said, “Mischa Johansson, please report to the main office. Mischa Johansson to the office.”

  Mischa frowned. The last time she’d been called to the office, the guidance counselor, a thin woman with frizzy hair named Ms. Biggs, had spent thirty minutes asking her gentle questions about the bruises on her face.

  Mrs. Court nodded to her. “Go ahead, Mischa. Take your things with you.”

  She closed her textbook and notebook and shoved them into her backpack, and then slung it over her shoulder as she strode to the door. Children whispered to each other behind her, as they would when a classmate was called to the office, speculating on her possible offenses.

  She had been honest with Ms. Biggs. Mostly honest. She’d told the guidance counselor she had gotten in a fight with a boy, and that her sister had come to her aid, and that the boy ran off.

  Mischa walked down the empty hall, glancing into rooms with open doors as teachers lectured and students took quizzes.