by Jack Mars
“Let’s go,” said the young agent. The driver nodded and pulled the car out of the lot.
The sinking feeling hadn’t left Zero’s gut. Relax, he told himself. You haven’t done anything wrong. You’ll be able to talk your way out of this. Maria will be furious, but she’ll help.
He felt a twinge of guilt at his inability to help the interpreter. But not only could he not help her now, he’d landed in hot water himself. There was nothing he could do for her.
She needs you…
No. No one needs me. It was foolish of him to think otherwise.
The rough-looking fellow in the passenger seat put a cell phone to his ear. “We’ve got him,” he said gruffly.
But he wasn’t speaking English. He spoke in Russian, though Zero understood every word. He glanced casually out the window and tried to pretend he hadn’t. Glad to see my language skills are up to snuff at least.
It was silent enough in the car for him to hear the voice through the phone. “Bring him to the compound. Kozlovsky wants to know how he knows the woman.”
“She is not talking?”
“Not yet. Either she will, or he will when he sees what we do to her.”
“Fifteen minutes. Do svidaniya.” The Russian ended the call and nodded once to the driver.
What compound? Zero wondered. And why does it feel like the Russian president is running the show here? His mind went immediately to the events of eighteen months prior. Whatever was said in that meeting was important enough for them to not only want the interpreter, but to want to bring him in as well.
“So,” he asked, trying to sound cavalier, “where we headed?”
“Like you said,” the young agent told him, “we’re going to see your boss.”
“Uh-huh. So to Langley then?” At almost ten o’clock at night? Not likely.
“Right. To Langley.”
Zero’s heartbeat sped up, but he didn’t show it. He weighed his options: stay put and let these men bring him to wherever they were going to bring him and improvise from there, or do what he could here and now.
Sure. It’s one against three. You’re unarmed. That wasn’t entirely true; he still had the silk scarf in his hand. He almost laughed at himself. It wasn’t exactly a formidable weapon.
The driver pulled the car off the main street and onto a back road winding its way out of downtown proper. Zero knew this area; in just a couple minutes there would be fewer homes and businesses as they gave way to larger, sprawling properties in a wealthy neighborhood. A compound, he thought. Is it someone’s home?
His window in which to act was closing quickly, but his trepidation was keeping his muscles taut and unwilling to move. He stretched his elbows up.
The young agent beside him reacted instantly, hand reaching for the gun at his shoulder holster but not drawing.
Zero chuckled at him. “Relax. I’m just stretching. Joints get stiff, you know?”
The agent simpered and his hand fell away from his jacket. “Getting old, Zero?”
“Happens to us all.” Relax, he told himself. He’d have to relax for what he was about to do. This is crazy. He reached over his shoulder and tugged the seatbelt down across his body. “Forgot my seatbelt.”
The agent behind the wheel laughed lightly. “If half the stories about you are true, I’d imagine a seatbelt is the last thing you’d be worried about.”
“Safety first.”
He said it in Russian.
The Bratva-looking guy in the passenger seat whipped his head around, his eyes wide in surprise. At the same time, Zero threw out his right arm, his hand flat and rigid, and struck the young agent in the windpipe.
“Ack!” Both hands flew to his flattened trachea.
Zero’s other fist loosened and the silk scarf fluttered free. He leaned forward and whipped it around the driver’s face, and then yanked back with both hands.
The car veered to the right as the Russian reached for his gun. The tires left the road, the driver blinded by the scarf, and they bounced violently over furrows in the grass as they careened down an embankment. Zero jostled left and right, but kept his grip on the scarf even as the caroming Russian managed to free a pistol from his jacket.
The car’s front end plummeted into a deep rut at forty-five miles an hour and the bumper struck earth, stopping them instantly. The Russian’s head smacked the window hard enough to crack it as the back end of the car shot upward. The young agent tumbled into the front seat.
For a moment the car stayed upright, front end in the narrow ditch and rear bumper reaching for the sky. The seatbelt dug painfully into Zero’s chest but kept him in place. Then, with a deterministic groan of metal, the car fell forward and crashed down onto its roof hard enough for the windows to burst.
Zero was upside down. He winced as he pushed himself up from the roof, unclipped the seatbelt, and carefully climbed out of the broken window. A quick wiggle of limbs, fingers, and toes told him nothing had broken. Then he checked the damage.
The young agent who had been in the backseat with him was in a crumpled heap resting on the roof of the car. His eyes were closed, but he had a pulse. The driver was tangled in him. His eyes were open wide, staring back at Zero as he took rapid breaths through clenched teeth. One of his incisors was missing, a bloody gap where it had been only moments earlier. His left arm was pinned beneath his cohort; his right was clearly broken, evident by the lump of bone jutting just below the elbow.
“You,” he hissed. “You… you…”
“Shh. Don’t move. Don’t try to talk.” Zero quickly relieved them both of radios, phones, and guns. Each carried a compact black Glock, his own personal preference in small arms. He hefted the weight of the gun, felt the smooth grip, the action. It felt good in his hand. “I’ll call you an ambulance soon. Just hang in there.” These two had just been following orders. They were likely good agents and decent men who had been misled.
The Batva, the Russian gangster, moaned as he opened his eyes. He was mostly upside down, shoulder and half his body resting on the car’s roof. Zero quickly rounded the car, reached into the broken window, and dragged the man out by his black jacket. The Russian yelped and tried to strike him, tried to flail, but he was weak and disoriented.
Zero found his cell phone and stuck it in his own pocket. “Where were you taking me?” he asked in Russian. “Where is the compound?”
The man looked up at him, his eyes glazed and unfocused. “Go. To. Hell,” he said in heavily accented English.
“Kind of figured you’d say something like that.” Zero checked the cell phone. He opened the GPS app and took a look at his recent history against their current location. Earlier that same evening the Russian had entered an address a mile and a half away. “Never mind. I got it.”
He reached into the broken window again to tug the keys out of the ignition and turn the headlights off. It would be unlikely that anyone could see the overturned car from the road at night, down the steep embankment as it was, but he didn’t want to risk it before he could get to his destination. As he climbed back out he noticed something resting on the floor—or rather, the roof—of the car. The Russian’s pistol, a Sig Sauer with a suppressor on its tip.
“Must be my lucky day,” Zero murmured to himself. He carefully climbed back out of the wreckage, noting that his lower back ached in protest.
A flash of movement in his periphery. As he spun, the Russian tugged a small revolver from a holster at his ankle and brought it up. Before Zero could react, he fired. It missed him by inches, whizzing past his ear. Zero fired once in response, a single silenced shot that entered the Russian’s right cheek and exited the back of his skull.
He frowned. His reflexes were slow, and his aim was a bit off. He flexed the fingers of his right hand. He’d sustained a pretty heinous injury when the hand had been crushed with a steel anchor by a member of the Brotherhood. Three surgeries and a lot of physical therapy later, he thought he’d regained use of it, but now he realize
d he hadn’t fired a gun since it healed.
He’d have to remember that. There would likely be more shooting.
It almost didn’t seem real. On the one hand, he suddenly felt more like himself than he had in months, maybe longer. On the other, he fully realized that in less than two minutes he’d grievously injured two Secret Service agents and killed a man who was presumably a member of President Kozlovsky’s attaché. In typical Zero fashion, he’d made a quick decision to not become a victim and simply acted. It wouldn’t be long before the car was found, and the two agents that were still breathing would sing. He couldn’t bring himself to kill them. Besides, the Russian had already radioed that they had Zero in custody.
There was only one thing to do. With the two Glocks tucked in his pants, the Sig Sauer in his jacket, and the Russian’s phone in his hand, Zero jogged up the embankment to the road and followed the GPS route to his destination.
She needs you.
He was out of breath by the time his feet touched asphalt. His back hurt. His whole body hurt. He’d likely have a nice long bruise across his chest where the seatbelt had dug in.
As he jogged down the dark road, he thought of Danny Glover, the actor who played Roger Murtaugh in one of his favorite action movies, a real classic. Lethal Weapon.
He murmured the line to himself as he jogged.
“I’m getting too old for this shit.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He was more than halfway there, following the GPS route on the Russian’s phone, when his own cell chimed from inside his pocket. He’d almost forgotten he had it, which could have spelled trouble if it went off when he was trying to sneak around.
Zero pulled his phone out and saw a text from Maria.
Where are you? Are you okay?
Right. He’d nearly forgotten about that too. In fact, the fight with Maria, if it could be called that, felt like days ago now even though it had only been earlier that afternoon—before he impulsively flew to Jacksonville, briefly visited his irate daughter, and then (equally impulsively) accepted a death wish of an assignment from a woman he barely knew to save another woman who might have been dead already.
He thought about replying with a lie or an excuse, or simply saying that he needed time before they spoke again, but ultimately he opted not to say anything. It wouldn’t be the truth. Maria could have just used CIA resources to track his phone and find out where he was, but she hadn’t invaded his privacy.
So instead he opened the back of his phone, tore out the battery, snapped the SIM card in half, and tossed each piece into the tall grass to the right of the road as he continued his brisk pace toward his destination. The people at this “compound” were expecting him to arrive any moment, and Maria was far from the only one capable of tracking a cell phone.
According to the Russian’s map, he was to make the next left onto a narrow road and follow that as it wound its way to the compound. He tossed the Russian phone into the grass on the side of the road, no longer having a need for it, and continued on his way until he found the access. It was one lane, the asphalt pristine in the moonlight, suggesting it wasn’t driven on often. It seemed as if it was simply a long driveway to the compound.
There were headlights behind him, and Zero turned away from the road as the car approached and silently hoped that it wasn’t there for him. Thankfully the vehicle didn’t slow as it passed, and soon the brake lights vanished around the next bend. Still he didn’t move from his position at the mouth of the narrow road.
Wait. Think about what you’re doing before you go down this road.
Yesterday he had spent half his day lying on the sofa, feeling sorry for himself. Now he was about to storm some compound and—what? Kill more Russians? Save this woman, this interpreter, who for all he knew could be a lie by Sanders to get one of her FIS agents out of a tight spot?
But he knew he’d already come too far. Attacking the Secret Service agents, killing the Russian… Maria couldn’t get him out of that, and there would be no more presidential pardons for him. He wasn’t an agent anymore—he wasn’t anything anymore, he reminded himself again—which meant that what he had just done was assault and murder.
There was only one thing to do. Get to this interpreter, find out what she knew, and hope that the information was valuable enough to strike a deal with the powers-that-be. Involve Maria and the CIA with clear evidence so that he could justify his actions and be granted immunity.
Besides…
She needs you.
He started his way up the dark road as it sloped upward along a gentle hill. There were small trees on both sides, planted a near-perfect twenty feet apart and about five feet in front the driveway’s edge. This wasn’t a compound, he realized, as much as it was a stately home, fit for the area.
The narrow road made one last gentle bend before the structure was in view. Zero stepped off the road and into the darkness of the stout trees. Ahead he saw a black iron gate as wide as the pavement, most likely electronic, lit by a pair of floodlights behind it. There were silhouettes behind the gate, little more than two dark shapes pacing. Waiting, no doubt, for their Russian friend to deliver Zero.
On either side of the iron gate was a stone wall, about eight or nine feet tall and extending for a few dozen yards before making an abrupt turn. Zero stole through the trees and followed the wall, away from the floodlights and around to the eastern side of the property. Then with a slight groan he grabbed the top of the wall and pulled himself up, peering over the stone.
The wall enclosed about an acre and a half of perfectly manicured lawn and beautifully appointed landscaping, stout cherry blossom trees dotting the yard from small mounds of dark black mulch. In the center was a house, if it could be called that, a contemporary design of glass and sharp angles, well lit from the inside. The home was only one story but sprawling. A short distance behind it he saw a dark guest house and a small maintenance shed.
Zero knew what this was. He’d heard of places like this, properties owned by the government that were away from the city proper, isolated and quiet. They were kept on reserve for diplomats and invited guests and visiting dignitaries who traveled with families or otherwise preferred it over the downtown penthouses or White House guest suites.
But it seemed as though the Russians were using it as a hideaway.
He pulled himself over the wall and dropped to the soft grass with a slight grunt. The place wasn’t exactly a fortress and security seemed lax; so far he had only noticed the two guards at the gate. Clearly they weren’t expecting any trouble, though he wasn’t about to assume that they weren’t prepared for it.
Zero stayed low and crouched behind the nearest tree, the trunk of it barely wide enough to conceal him.
Okay, what’s your plan here?
Get in. Get the woman. Get out.
Sure. Piece of cake. But you might want to come up with something better than that.
The two Russians at the gate could pose a problem getting out, and he needed to know if they were armed. He’d have to neutralize them first.
And try not to kill anyone else, he reminded himself.
He stayed low as he crept closer to the gate, keeping mindful of the bright floodlights. The two men wore black, one in a suit and the other in a leather jacket. The guy in the jacket had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder by a strap. The other one didn’t have a gun in hand, but Zero could see the pistol holster at his hip. They paced the width of the driveway as they muttered to each other in Russian.
“They should be here by now. Try him again.”
“I just did. No answer.”
“Something is wrong. We should tell Kozlovsky.”
Kozlovsky? Zero hadn’t actually expected the Russian president to be there in person. What are you going to do, stick a gun in a president’s face?
“Don’t bother him. Just get a car,” said the one with the compact SMG. “We’ll go and—”
The sound of wailing sirens cut him off. B
oth Russians ceased their pacing and looked out beyond the gate.
Someone must have found the wreck and called it in, Zero reasoned. As the pair of men stared off into the distance, the floodlights suddenly clicked off. In the darkness, the Russians were mere silhouettes.
“Do you think they ran into trouble?” one of them said.
“Get a car. We’ll go take a look for ourselves.”
Now! Zero rushed forward to take them by surprise. He took two steps, and suddenly the powerful floodlights clicked on again, practically blinding him. Motion sensors.
The two Russians spun and they too froze for a moment in shock. The three of them stared at each other.
“Hey!” The Russian reached for the submachine gun hanging from his strap. The other snaked a hand into his jacket.
Zero sprang forward, instincts kicking in. He stuck out a hand and pushed against the suited Russian’s elbow, keeping him from pulling his gun. He mule-kicked backward into the second Russian’s gut, doubling him over. A solid hook to the one in front of him crumpled the man. Then he spun, grabbed hold of the submachine gun, and twisted it around his own shoulder. The strap went taut against the Russian’s armpit and neck and his feet left the ground. Zero turned his body ninety degrees as he dropped to one knee. The Russian flailed, careening ass-over-teakettle and landing on the asphalt with a thud that rattled Zero’s own teeth.
He stayed like that for a moment, on one knee and breathing hard, listening to the sirens of several emergency vehicles in the distance. The floodlights clicked off and he sat there in the darkness. If either of the Secret Service men in the car were conscious and could talk, he might be expecting unwanted guests in minutes. He had to move.
He got to his feet and the lights clicked on again. Zero winced. The Russian he’d thrown stared up at him wide-eyed and not breathing, his neck bent at an odd angle. It must have broken when he hit the driveway.