by Jack Mars
In this house, Sara had been so bright-eyed and inquisitive. She had wanted to follow her mother’s footsteps and go to art school. Maya had been a high schooler with a mind as sharp as her wit. He’d hoped she would get into Columbia, or at least NYU, and stay local.
But he couldn’t go home again, because it was here he’d lived when three Iranian terrorists, members of the fanatical faction called Amun, had kidnapped him and torn the suppressor out of his head.
What am I doing here?
He had to know. His feet were already propelling him forward toward the front door. Whoever had left that note was pointing him here, and if it was anything like he’d found in Zurich or Manhattan, he needed to know.
He knocked on the door and waited. A few moments later it was opened by a man who smiled awkwardly but politely back at him.
“Can I help you?” the man asked.
He was about Zero’s height, slight-framed, nebbish, his hair combed, and dressed as if he was just about to go somewhere.
Funny; in another life, he almost could have been Professor Reid Lawson.
Zero realized that he hadn’t thought for even a moment about what he might say. He’d been so concerned that no one would answer the door, that the current residents of the home would be dead, that he hadn’t even considered what he’d say if he found himself facing someone.
“Hi. Um, this is going to sound strange, but, uh, my name is… Reid, Reid Lawson, and I used to live here. In this house.” Zero was rambling, and at the same time imagining himself in the other man’s shoes and declaring himself a lunatic. “I found myself in the area, and…” He cleared his throat. This was going very poorly. No one was dead here. This was a dead end, or possibly a distraction. Or maybe he’d interpreted the note wrong.
“You know what?” Zero said, forcing a smile. “Forget it. Sorry to bother you.” He turned and started back down the walkway. It was foolish of him to come here.
“Hang on a sec,” the man called after him.
Zero paused and turned, and the man’s smile was still polite but not awkward. If anything, there was some compassion in it.
“I get it,” he said. “You wanted to see the old homestead. You raised a family here?”
“I did. Two daughters. My…” Zero sniffed. “My wife passed away.”
Both of them.
“Gosh, I’m so sorry.” The man shook his head. Then something appeared to dawn on him, as his eyes opened wide. “Hang on, did you say Lawson?”
“That’s right. Reid Lawson.”
“Well!” He stuck out a hand. “Reid, you can call me Carl.” They shook hands briefly. “Tell me, do you believe in fate, or are you more of a coincidence sort of fellow?”
Zero frowned at that. “Mix of both, I’d say.”
Carl smiled wide. “Then try this on for size: last night I had a package delivered to this address, but with your name on it.”
“You don’t say,” Zero murmured.
“And the very next day you show up at my door. How about that?” Carl chuckled and shook his head. “I was going to bring it down to the post office to get forwarded, but how about you come on inside and I’ll give it to you myself?”
An alarm blared in Zero’s head like a klaxon red-alert. This was no coincidence. He’d been led here. What if this man wasn’t what he appeared to be? What if he was some sort of assassin or agent, and the real family that lived here was dead inside? Was there even a package, or was it a ruse to get his guard down?
“Come on in.” Carl retreated through the open door and waved him on.
Zero had made a lot of bad decisions in life, and he was still standing. What was one more?
Wish I had a gun.
He followed Carl inside and closed the door behind him. His muscles were tense, ready for anything—except what he found.
The first thing he noticed, he was surprised to find, was that the house still smelled the same. Or close to it. It was a scent he couldn’t quite pin down, something too nebulous to name, but familiar, warm, and welcome as a hug.
But other things were strange, like seeing photos of another family on the walls rather than his own. A young son, no more than ten, and a daughter, around Mischa’s age. A wife with a dazzling smile. Carl was in the photos; if he was some kind of agent then this was all well-staged.
He took a few cautious steps into the living room. The furniture was all wrong; anyone with two eyes would have known that the sofa was in the wrong corner of the living room, the television faced in the least optimal way. At that angle the afternoon sun would create a terrible glare through the windows.
“Let me just grab it for you quick,” Carl said as he disappeared into the room that used to be Reid Lawson’s study. Zero watched the hall carefully, in case Carl emerged with a knife or a gun, in case he tried to get the drop on him.
But instead the voice called out, “You caught me just in the nick of time, too.”
Sudden as a heart attack, a sensation gripped him. A recollection, like déjà vu, of him, Reid Lawson, standing exactly where he was standing at that moment, halfway between the kitchen and living room where the corridor ended, looking down the hall toward the door of the study.
“I was about to run some errands…” Carl said.
But in his mind, he heard another voice. A memory.
“Zero-four-one-bravo, checking in. Status: routine.”
“Another fifteen minutes and I would have been out the door with your package, to forward it to you,” Carl said.
But in his head, it was Kate’s voice he heard down the hall.
“No changes in speech pattern or behavior. Physical and mental health, normal. Memory, maintaining.”
This had happened before, sudden memories resurfacing—like the time he had, without warning, recalled his past as a dark agent, the time that he spent in his early years with the CIA carrying out targeted assassinations.
But this was different.
In his mind’s eye, he stood there stock-still as Kate poked her head from the doorway of the study. He saw her there, in perfect detail, her blonde hair that she typically kept shoulder-length. Her blue eyes, full cheeks, a roundish, girlish face that kept her young despite being a mother of two.
“Hey, you’re home. Didn’t hear you come in.”
“Just a minute ago,” he heard himself say. “Who were you talking to?”
“Oh.” A short laugh. “Just a work thing.”
Then there was a soft grunt, and Carl exited the study with a sturdy cardboard box in both hands, no bigger than a shoebox.
Zero leaned against the wall with one hand.
“You okay?” Carl asked. He set the box down on the kitchen counter with a thud.
“Yeah… fine. Mind if I use your bathroom quick?”
“Not at all.” A short chuckle. “I suppose you know where it is.”
Zero nodded, and then left the kitchen to the small half-bath between it and the back patio. He closed the door and turned on the cold tap and splashed water on his face.
What was that memory? What did it mean? Was it even real? He’d had false flashbacks before. Guyer had warned him early on about such things, hopes or fantasies or even ideas forming in his deteriorating brain and masquerading as memories.
But this wasn’t any hope or fantasy he’d ever had. Kate had been talking like an operative. He heard the words himself, clear as day.
He couldn’t even tell when the memory might have taken place. Years earlier, obviously, but how many?
“Not real,” he told his reflection. He had bags under his eyes from lack of rest. His skin looked waxen. “It’s not real.”
It certainly had felt real.
Zero took a deep breath. Now was not the time to concern himself with that. He dried his hands and rejoined Carl in the kitchen as he busied himself with a few errant dishes in the sink.
“Heavier than it looks,” he noted, gesturing with his chin toward the box.
Right. The
box. Carl hadn’t been lying; there was a box, and it had this address on it, and it was indeed addressed to Reid Lawson.
“Who dropped this off?” Zero asked.
“I didn’t see,” Carl shrugged, “but I assume it was a delivery driver, right?”
“Right,” he murmured. “Last night, you said?”
“Mm-hmm.”
The same night that Bliss and his wife had been murdered in their bedroom.
He carefully tested its weight. The box was indeed heavy, probably fifteen pounds or so. Whatever was inside was dense, possibly metal, or otherwise…
“Oh.” The sound came out like a deflating hiss. He set the box back down slowly but didn’t take his eyes from it as he addressed his host. “Carl. Is anyone else in the house?”
“Um…” Carl frowned at the question. “No, just us. Why do you ask?”
“We’re going to leave,” Zero told him, trying to keep his voice measured and not panicked. “We’re going to walk outside and across the street, and from there you should call the police.” Already Zero was backing up slowly, toward the hall and the foyer.
“I’m confused, Reid. What exactly is it you’re talking about?”
Zero bumped into the front door behind him. He reached back for the knob. “Carl, please just step outside with me, leave the box, and I’ll explain…”
He twisted the knob and pulled the door open.
The heat came first, an intense wave of it that brought with it an invisible force that took him off his feet, sent him through the open doorway, tumbling through the air.
Then he hit the ground. His body bounced once over the front yard. He was vaguely aware of the sensation of grass on his cheek as a fireball plumed above him.
He wanted to stand, to leap up and see if Carl was alive or dead, but he already knew the answer. He couldn’t seem to lift his head, and then darkness consumed his vision.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Penny? It’s Alan.”
“Oh my god. Alan! Thank god you’re all right,” the tech gushed through the phone. “Are the girls all right? Are they with you?”
Reidigger sighed. He was on a landline in the safe house he’d set up, about an hour outside of D.C. The neighborhood was far from the best, but the old row house had come dirt cheap and the neighbors were not the sort that talked to authorities.
He’d stopped only once since leaving the shelled-out remains of Third Street Garage, to call in one of his owed favors. He swapped his truck for an old Buick with fake tags and a full tank and drove the rest of the way to the safe house, worrying every second about Sara and what had happened to her and resisting the urge to turn around and search for her.
Mischa had awoken, and tried to protest her sister’s absence, but she’d suffered what seemed to be a minor concussion in the blast and couldn’t protest much. She struggled to even keep her eyes open, as the daylight hurt her head.
When they’d arrived, Alan had pulled into a narrow, cracked driveway, and then he got Mischa inside and settled on a dusty sofa. He went back outside and pulled a tarp over the Buick. Then he’d tried to call Sara from the landline rotary phone in the kitchen. And then Zero. Both went to voicemail.
What the hell is the point of cell phones, anyway?
Finally he called Penelope León.
“Mischa’s with me,” he said at last. “Sara… she was with us too. But when the bomb went off, we… we got separated.” He tried to keep the tremor out of his voice thinking about what might have become of her.
“Alan, listen to me,” said Penny, “there were only four recovered in the blast. Four males, all with gunshot wounds. She wasn’t there.”
“I know,” he said, more for his own sake than for hers. “She got out. I know that.”
“She turned her phone off. She’s a smart girl. Put yourself in her shoes; where might she have gone?”
Alan thought for a moment. No way would Sara have gone back to the house; it was compromised. They had seen the men and the black van pull up. “Uh… she’s got a friend around here, Camilla something. Maybe there. Or to one of her friends from the trauma group.”
“Exactly,” said Penny. “Sara is smart, and she’s independent. She’ll keep her phone off, lie low for a couple of days, and poke her head out when she thinks it’s safe again.”
“Right,” Alan agreed, more for his own sake than for hers. “But still—I should look for her.”
“No,” Penny said immediately. “I heard from Zero. He’s in New York, and he has reason to believe that whoever’s behind this is eliminating people that know about the memory suppressor.”
Reidigger frowned. That made sense for Guyer. And for himself, and the girls. But what had Zero found in New York? He recalled the time that Maya had hijacked his cherry Skylark and left it in a Manhattan parking garage…
Right. There’d been a doctor there. A doctor who, Alan could assume, was now dead.
“But if that’s true,” he said, “then our lead suspect isn’t our lead suspect anymore.” That wasn’t Krauss’s style. He didn’t even know about the suppressor, presumably, and even if he did, he had no motive.
“True,” Penny conceded. “It also means you’re a target—”
“And you,” he reminded her.
“I’m bunkered down in R&D. No one’s getting me here. But if you go out there looking for Sara, and they find you, the girls will lose their best ally.”
Alan glanced over his shoulder at Mischa, who was dozing on the sofa. He shouldn’t be letting her sleep. “Hey,” he called out gently, “stay awake.”
“Stupid fat man,” she said groggily in Russian.
As much as he hated it, Penny was right. He couldn’t run out there in search of Sara without a solid lead of her whereabouts. He couldn’t go around asking about her to friends who might talk, or post something on social media. And he couldn’t leave Mischa alone.
“Fine,” Alan relented. “We said we’d hunker down, so we’ll hunker. If you talk to Zero, give him this number, yeah?”
“Will do,” Penny agreed. “Now I have to go. I have something else going on here that’s… well, it’s pretty much as classified as classified gets, and duty calls—”
“Hang on,” Alan interrupted. “If Zero is right… there’s only a handful of people on the planet that would know about the memory suppressor tech. You don’t think the agency has anything to do with this, do you?”
“No,” Penny said, as quickly as she did adamantly. “I don’t. Just stay hidden and stay safe. I’ll try to keep in touch.”
“All right,” Alan agreed. “Thanks, Penny.” He hung up, his hand lingering on the receiver.
Penny had reason to distrust the CIA, he knew. Not as much reason as he did, but reason all the same. Both their reasons stemmed from things they knew that they shouldn’t know, and now their lives were in danger over it. And they certainly both knew that killing innocent people just because of something they might have known was not exactly above the agency, as a whole.
He would stay hidden, and he would keep Mischa safe, but he wouldn’t discount the notion that the CIA had a hand in this. But he understood why Penny would; because if it was true, then she, and Todd, and even Maya were not in the safest place they could be.
They were in the worst.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Zero opened his eyes. A dull roar was in his ears; his own blood, rushing in his pounding head. At least that’s what he thought at first. He pushed himself up with a groan, first to his elbows and knees, and then to his shaky feet.
Everything hurt. But that was nothing new.
He turned slightly, and he saw the source of the dull roar. The house behind him was burning. The house that used to be his. Someone had painted the brown brick white, and now the white brick was black with soot and smoke and char as flames rolled from burst windows.
You really can’t go home again.
The interior of the house was completely ablaze. The roof hadn’t
yet collapsed. Two things were evident: first, that Zero hadn’t been unconscious for long; no more than thirty seconds, tops. Still, emergency crews would be on site soon.
And two: Carl was certainly dead. He had been innocent in all this. Even more so than Alina Guyer, or Sharon Bliss. But still, he had died for it. Just for buying the wrong house.
“Sweet Jesus!” a female voice cried. Zero spun. His vision was still a little fuzzy but he noticed that a small crowd of people was gathering across the street, neighbors and a couple of kids on bicycles. Out of them, a white-haired woman in house slippers, was the only one to dare to get closer to the blaze, to check on the man who had risen from the debris scattering the front lawn.
Zero recognized her. Her name was Mrs. Gorman, and she lived four doors down.
“Are you all right, son?” She hurried to him, gripped his elbow.
“Been worse,” he muttered. Then he waved a hand. “I’m okay. Thank you.”
“Ambulance will be here anytime,” she assured him. “Come along where it’s safe, have a seat…” She gave his elbow a gentle tug, and then wrinkled her nose as she peered into his face. “Wait one second now. Reid…? Reid Lawson?”
Dammit.
“Sorry, I think you have me confused with someone else.” He shrugged her off. “Thanks.” He trotted across the yard, away from peering eyes, away from the confused older woman who could now easily identify him at the scene if she wanted to.
What was he supposed to do? Threaten her?
No. But she did give him an idea.
There was pain in his left leg and it took a lot of effort not to limp on it. Being blasted out of the house and into the yard would take a toll on any body, let alone a forty-year-old body that just didn’t know when enough was enough.
So this is retirement, he thought glumly.
Didn’t seem like it was all it was cracked up to be.
With Mrs. Gorman at the scene, her house would be empty. He recalled that she was a bit of a busybody, so he was certain she’d stick around until the police and firefighters and EMTs arrived, and then tell them everything she saw as if she’d been involved in the blast.