by Jack Mars
“You can just drop me off at the downtown Hilton,” she said casually.
The Secret Service agent smiled coyly. “We’re the US government, Ms. Pavlo. We know where you’re staying.”
She chuckled lightly, trying to keep the nervous edge out of her voice. “I’m sure. But I’m meeting a friend for dinner at the Hilton.”
“Even so,” the agent replied, “the president’s orders were to take you back to your hotel, so that’s what I have to do. For security reasons.” He sighed then, as if he commiserated with her plight even though she was fairly certain he was going to kill her. “I’m sure you understand.”
“Oh,” she said suddenly. “My things? My phone and my clutch?”
“I have them.” Joe patted the breast pocket of his suit.
After a long moment of silence Karina followed up with, “May I have them…?”
“Of course,” he said brightly. “Just as soon as we arrive.”
“I’d really like them back now,” she pressed.
The agent smiled again, though he kept his eyes forward on the road. “We’ll be there in just a few minutes,” he said placidly, as if she were a petulant toddler. Karina very much doubted that he had her things in his jacket.
She settled into her seat, or at least gave the appearance of doing so, trying to seem relaxed as the SUV eased to a stop at a red light. The Secret Service agent dug around in the center console for a pair of black sunglasses and put them on.
The light turned green.
The car in front of them started forward.
The agent took his foot off the brake, pressed the gas.
In one swift movement, Karina Pavlo pressed the release of her seat belt with one hand while shoving open her door with the other. She leapt out of the moving SUV, her heels hitting the asphalt. One of them broke. She lurched forward, hitting pavement with her elbows, rolling, and then staggered to her feet. She kicked both shoes off and sprinted down the street in her stockings.
“What the hell?!” The Secret Service agent slammed the brake, threw the vehicle into park right there in the middle of the street. He didn’t bother shouting for her to come back, and he certainly didn’t just let her go—both indicators that she was absolutely right about her notion.
Drivers honked and shouted as the agent leapt out of the car, but by that time she was more than half a block away, practically barefoot as her stockings tore, ignoring the occasional stone that stung the soles of her feet.
She turned the corner sharply and darted down the first opening she saw, not even an alley but rather just a walkway between two storefronts. Then she made a left, running as fast as she could, glancing over her shoulder every now and then for the agent but not seeing him.
As she came out on the next street, she spotted a yellow cab.
The driver nearly spat his coffee, a Styrofoam cup to his lips, when she all but hurtled into his backseat and shouted, “Drive! Please drive!”
“Jesus Christ, lady!” he scolded. “Scared the hell outta me…”
“Someone is chasing me, please drive,” she pleaded.
He frowned. “Who’s chasing you?” The irritating driver actually glanced around. “I don’t see anybody—”
“Please just fucking drive!” she screeched at him.
“Okay, okay!” The cabbie shifted and the taxi veered into traffic, eliciting a new fusillade of honks that would no doubt tip the agent off to her relative location.
Sure enough, as she twisted in the seat to look out the rear windshield she saw the agent rounding the corner at a full sprint. He slowed to a trot, his eyes meeting hers. One of his hands briefly snaked into his jacket, but he seemed to think twice about pulling a gun in broad daylight and instead put a hand to his ear to radio someone.
“Turn left here.” Karina directed the cabbie to make the turn, drive a few more blocks, take a right, and then she jumped out again as he shouted after her for payment. She ran down the block and did that three more times, jumping into cabs and out of them until she was halfway across DC in such a serpentine manner she was certain there was no way that Joe the Secret Service agent would find her.
She caught her breath and smoothed her hair as she slowed to a brisk walk, keeping her head down and trying not to look frazzled. The most likely scenario was that the agent had gotten the cab’s license plate number and the unfortunate (though somewhat slow-witted) cabbie would be stopped, frisked, and background-checked to make sure he wasn’t part of some preconceived getaway plot.
Karina ducked into a bookstore, hoping no one would notice she was shoeless. The store was quiet and the shelves were tall. She quickly navigated her way to the back, headed into a restroom, splashed water on her face, and struggled to keep herself from breaking down into heaving sobs.
Her face was still sheet-white from the shock of it all. How quickly everything had gone wrong.
“Bozhe moy,” she sighed heavily. My god. As the adrenaline wore off, the full gravity of her situation struck her. She had heard things that were never supposed to leave the White House basement. She had no identification. No phone. No money. Hell, she didn’t have shoes. She couldn’t go back to her hotel. Even showing her face in any public space where there might be a camera was risky.
They were not going to stop pursuing her for what she knew.
But she had the pearls in her ears. Karina absently touched her left earlobe, caressing the smooth stone there. She had the words that were spoken in the meeting—and in more than just her memory. She had proof of the dangerous knowledge that the American president, an alleged Democratic liberal who had earned the country’s admiration, was being puppeteered by the Russians.
There in the ladies’ room of a downtown bookstore, Karina looked at herself in the mirror as she murmured desperately, “I’m going to need some help.”
CHAPTER ONE
Zero sat on the edge of the queen-sized bed and wrung his hands nervously in his lap. He’d been through this before, had seen it in his mind a thousand times. Yet here he was again.
His two teenage daughters sat on the bed adjacent to his, a narrow aisle between them. They were in a room at the Plaza, an upscale hotel just outside of DC. They had decided to hole up there instead of going home in the wake of the assassination attempt on President Pierson’s life.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
Maya was on the brink of seventeen. She had her father’s brown hair and facial features, and her mother’s sharp wit and biting sarcasm. She regarded him passively, with a shadow of trepidation over such a dramatically foreshadowing statement.
“It’s not easy to say. But you deserve to know.”
Sara was fourteen, still round-faced with youth, teetering at a conflicted age between clinging to childhood and burgeoning womanhood. She had inherited Kate’s blonde hair and expressive face. She looked more like her mother with every passing day, though at the moment she looked nervous.
“It’s about your mother.”
They had both been through so much, kidnapping and witnessing murders and staring down the barrel of a gun. They had stayed strong through it all. They deserved to know.
And then he told them.
He’d played it in his mind so many times before, but still the words were difficult to summon to his throat. They came slowly, like logs drifting on a river. He’d thought that once he started it would get easier, but that wasn’t at all the case.
There in the Plaza hotel, with Alan out getting pizza and a sitcom muted on the TV mere feet from them, Zero told his daughters that their mother, Kate Lawson, had not died of an ischemic stroke as had been reported.
She had been poisoned.
The CIA had called a hit on her.
Because of him. Agent Zero. His actions.
And the person who carried out the sentence…
“He didn’t know,” Zero told his daughters. He stared at the bedspread, the carpet, anything other than their faces. “He didn’t kn
ow who she was. He had been lied to. He didn’t know until later. Until after.” He was rambling. Making excuses for the man who had killed his wife, the mother of his children. The man Zero had sent away instead of killing him outright.
“Who?” Maya’s voice came out hoarse, a harsh whisper, more of a sound than a word.
Agent John Watson. A man who had saved his daughters’ lives more than once. A man they had come to know, to trust, to like.
The silence in the next few moments was crushing, like an invisible hand squeezing his heart. The hotel room’s air conditioning unit rattled to life suddenly, loud as a jet engine in the otherwise vacuum.
“How long have you known?” Maya’s tone was direct, almost demanding.
Be honest. That was the stance he wanted with his girls. Honesty. No matter how bad it hurt. This admission was the last barricade between them. He knew it was time to tear it down.
He already knew it would be what broke them.
“I’ve known for a little while that it wasn’t an accident,” he told her. “I needed to know who. And now I do.”
He dared to look up then, to look at their faces. Sara cried silently, tears streaming down both cheeks, not making a sound. Maya stared at her own hands, expressionless.
He reached for her. It was the only thing that made sense in the moment. To connect, to hold a hand.
He remembered exactly how it had actually happened. As his fingers closed around hers, she pulled away violently. She scrambled backward, leapt off the bed. Sara jumped, startled, as Maya told him she hated him. Called him every name in the book. And he sat there, and he took it, because it was what he deserved.
But not this time. As his fingers closed around hers, Maya’s hand disintegrated beneath his in a wisp of fog.
“No…”
He clambered for her, a shoulder or an arm, but she vanished under his touch like a column of ash in a breeze. He turned quickly and reached for Sara, but she only shook her head ruefully as she too evaporated before his eyes.
And then he was alone.
*
“Sara!”
Zero woke with a start and immediately groaned. A headache roared through his forehead. It was a dream—a nightmare. One he’d had a thousand times before.
But it had happened that way, or nearly so.
Zero had saved the day. Thwarted a presidential assassination attempt. Stopped a war before it began. Uncovered a conspiracy. And then he and his girls had gone to the Plaza; none of them wanted to go home to their two-story house in Alexandria, Virginia. Too much had happened there. Too much death.
It was there that he’d told them. They deserved to know the truth.
And then they left him.
That was… how long ago now? Nearly eighteen months, by his best recollection. A year and a half ago. Still the dream plagued him most nights. Sometimes the girls evaporated before his eyes. Sometimes they screamed at him, hurling curses far worse than had actually happened. Other times they silently left, and when he ran out into the hallway after them they had already vanished.
Though the ending varied, the real-life ramifications were the same. He woke from the nightmare with a headache and the grim, despairing reminder that they really were gone.
Zero stretched and rose from the sofa. He couldn’t remember falling asleep in the first place, but it wasn’t surprising. He didn’t sleep well at night, and not just because of the nightmare about his daughters. A year and a half ago he had recovered his memories, his complete memories as Agent Zero, and with them came harrowing nightmares. Recollections would shoulder their way into his subconscious while he slept, or tried to. Heinous scenes of torture. Bombs dropped on buildings. The impact of hollow-point bullets on a human skull.
Worse still was that he didn’t know if they were real or not. Dr. Guyer, the brilliant Swiss neurologist who had helped him recover the memories, warned that some things might not be real, but a product of his limbic system manifesting fantasies, suspicions, and nightmares as reality.
His own reality felt barely just so.
Zero trudged into the kitchen for a glass of water, barefoot and groggy, when the doorbell rang. He jumped a little at the sudden break in silence, every muscle tightening instinctively. He was still pretty jumpy, even after all this time. Then he glanced at the digital clock on the stove. It was almost four thirty. There was only one person it would be.
He answered the door and forced a smile for his old friend. “Right on time.”
Alan Reidigger grinned as he held up a six-pack, a thumb and forefinger looped in the plastic rings. “For your weekly therapy session.”
Zero snorted and stepped aside. “Come on, we’ll go out back.”
He led the way through the small house and out a sliding glass door to a patio. The mid-October air was not yet cold, but crisp enough to remind him that he was barefoot. They took a seat in a couple of deck chairs as Alan liberated two cans and passed one to Zero.
He frowned at the label. “What’s this?”
“Dunno. The guy at the liquor store took one look at my beard and flannel shirt and said I’d like it.” Alan chuckled, popped the tab, and took a long sip. He winced. “That’s… different. Or maybe I’m just getting old.” He turned somberly to Zero. “So. How are you?”
How are you. It suddenly seemed like such a strange question. If anyone other than Alan had asked it, he would have recognized it as a formality and answered with a simple and hasty “Fine, how about you?” But he knew that Alan genuinely wanted to know.
Yet he didn’t know how to answer. So much had changed in eighteen months; not just in Zero’s personal life, but on a macro scale. The US had averted a war with Iran and its neighbors, but tensions remained high. The American government had seemingly recovered from the infiltration of conspirators and Russian influence, but only by cleaning house. President Eli Pierson had remained in office for another seven months after the attempt on his life, but was ousted in the next election by the Democratic candidate. It was an easy victory after Pierson’s cabinet was revealed to have been a veritable nest of snakes.
But Zero hardly cared. He wasn’t involved in any of that anymore. He didn’t even have an opinion about the new president. He barely knew what was going on in the world; he avoided the news whenever possible. He was just a citizen now. Whatever was unfolding in the shadows did so without his influence.
“I’m fine.”
He was stagnating.
“Really. I’m good.”
Alan took another sip, obviously dubious but not mentioning it. “And Maria?”
A thin smile crossed Zero’s lips. “She’s doing well.” And it was true. She was taking to her new position swimmingly. In the wake of the conspiracy coming to light, the CIA had been completely restructured; David Barren, high-ranking member of the National Security Council and Maria’s father, was named interim director of the agency and oversaw vetting of each and every person under its banner until a new director was named, a former NSA director named Edward Shaw.
Maria Johansson had been appointed as deputy director of Special Activities Division—a job that had been formerly held by the now-deceased Shawn Cartwright, Zero’s old boss. She in turn named Todd Strickland as Special Agent in Charge, a position formerly held by one Agent Kent Steele.
And she was good at it. There would be no corruption under her watch, no renegade agents like Jason Carver, and no shadowy conspirators like Ashleigh Riker. It was obvious, though, that she still missed the fieldwork; it wasn’t often, but occasionally she would accompany her team on an op.
Zero, on the other hand, had not gone back. Not to the CIA, not even to teaching. He hadn’t gone back to anything.
“How’s the shop?” he asked Alan, for want of changing the subject from something other than himself and his morose introspection.
“Keeping busy,” Reidigger replied casually. He ran the Third Street Garage, which despite Alan’s background in espionage and covert operations w
as, in fact, a garage. “Not much to say there. How’s the basement coming?”
Zero rolled his eyes. “It’s a work in progress.” After the falling out with his girls, he just couldn’t stay in the Alexandria house alone. He put it on the market and sold it to the first offer that came along. He and Maria had made their relationship official by then, and she too was seeking a change of scenery, so they bought a small house in the suburbs of the unincorporated town of Langley, not far from CIA headquarters. A “Craftsman bungalow”—that’s what the real estate agent had called it. It was a simple place, which was good for them both. One of the many things he and Maria had in common was that they yearned for simplicity. They could have afforded something bigger, more modern, but the little one-story house suited them just fine. It was cozy, pleasant, with a big picture window in the front and a master suite loft and an unfinished basement, all smooth concrete walls and floor.
About four months earlier, at the beginning of summer, Zero had the idea that he’d finish the basement, make it into usable living space. Since then he’d gotten as far as framing out the walls with two-by-fours and stapling up some strips of fluffy pink insulation.
Lately, just the thought of going back down there exhausted him.
“Anytime you want me to come by and help out, say the word,” Alan offered.
“Yeah.” Alan made the same offer every week. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.”
“It might have been if they hired contractors who knew what they were doing.” Alan winked.
Zero scoffed, but smirked. The can in his hand felt light, too light. He shook it and was surprised to find it empty. He didn’t remember even taking a sip, let alone registering the taste. He set the can down on the patio beside him and reached for another.
“Careful,” Reidigger warned with a grin. He gestured toward Zero’s midsection and the speed-bump of a paunch that was developing there.
“Yeah, yeah.” So he’d gained a few pounds in his semi-retirement. Ten, maybe fifteen. He wasn’t sure and certainly wasn’t about to step on a scale to find out. “Look who’s talking.”