File Zero

by Jack Mars

  “Where are we?” Maya asked as they drove. Her older sister sat by the window while Sara sat in the middle on the bench seat in the truck.

  “Nebraska,” Mitch said simply.

  Maya rolled her eyes. “No kidding. Where exactly?”

  “Better if you don’t know.”

  Despite everything, Sara wasn’t nervous or frightened. She was mostly just worried for her dad. And, if she was being honest, a little irritated at their sudden upheaval once again.

  At the far end of town, Mitch slowed the truck and turned onto a rural road overlooking a wooded hill. The homes they passed were spaced far apart, nearly a football field’s length between them. Finally he cut the headlights and eased the truck into the driveway of a house that looked like a handmade log cabin. It was cute, Sara thought, rustic and cozy-looking.

  “Wait here.” Mitch got out of the truck and did a slow walk around the perimeter of the house. Then he stepped up onto the wooden front porch and inspected the doors, the windows. The cabin was completely dark; it didn’t appear anyone was home or had been in quite some time. At last the mechanic got down on one knee and fiddled with the doorknob.

  “What’s he doing?” Sara asked quietly.

  “Looks like he’s picking the lock,” Maya replied.

  Then the door was open, and Mitch vanished inside for a few minutes. When he appeared again, he waved at them from the porch to join him.

  The cabin was bigger on the inside than it appeared from the outside, but it was apparent that no one had been there in years. The furniture was covered by white sheets and every horizontal surface was coated in a thick layer of dust. Spiders had made grand webs in the corners of each room. And much like the town of Sumner they’d passed through to get here, there was no evidence that they hadn’t time-traveled back to the nineteenth century somehow. There was no radio, no television, no computers or Wi-Fi.

  The kitchen didn’t even have a microwave.

  “What is this place?” Maya asked, wrinkling her nose to illustrate her disgust.

  “Some years back, this used to be a halfway house for witness protection,” Mitch told her. “They’d send people here for a few days, holed up with an agent or two, while they arranged a new identity and a place to live. Nowadays all that stuff is digital and happens a lot faster. Government owns this house, but it hasn’t been used in a long time. Lucky for us…” He flicked a light switch, and the overhead kitchen light came on. “They kept the lights on and water running.”

  “Why?” Sara asked.

  Mitch shrugged. “There are places like this all over the country. I bet by now the expense has gotten folded into some ‘miscellaneous’ category on an expense report somewhere. Anyone who knew about this place is likely retired or dead.”

  “Except you?” Maya mused.

  “Including me,” Mitch responded cryptically. He headed down a short hall and pulled open a narrow closet door. The hinges squealed in protest. “Ah! Good. Linens. They might be a bit musty, but they’ll do. There are two bedrooms in the back; you can share, or you can each take one. I don’t mind the couch. Go ahead and make yourselves up somewhere to sleep. In the morning I’ll make a run for supplies.”

  Sara went to the linen closet and grabbed a stiff, folded bed sheet and a scratchy wool blanket. The two bedrooms in the back were tiny, almost identical, each containing only a twin bed on a rusting frame and a small wooden nightstand.

  She spread the sheet out over the bed, and then the blanket, all the while knowing that it would be near impossible for her to sleep. She hadn’t been sleeping much lately, even at home, and now she was there in a Nebraska safe house in the middle of nowhere with a man they didn’t know at all.

  Sara sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her face with her hands. A couple of months ago, she might have burst into tears at the very thought of their situation, but she hardly cried anymore. It was as if a well inside her had run dry. The only time she shed tears was during the nightmares about what she had gone through at the hands of the traffickers.

  “Hey.” She looked up sharply at the sound of Mitch’s gruff voice and her hands fell away from her face. He stood in the doorway and leaned casually against the jamb. “You okay? Need anything? Hungry, or thirsty, or…?”

  She shook her head no.

  Mitch stared at the floor for a long moment. “You’re, what, fourteen now?”

  “Yeah.” Her voice sounded tiny, even in the small bedroom. From beyond the doorway, she heard a heavy snore; it seemed that Maya had fallen asleep immediately. Lucky, Sara thought.

  Her expression must have been showing it, because Mitch smiled paternally. “Can’t sleep, can you?”

  She shook her head again.

  “I know how that goes,” Mitch admitted. He gestured toward the floor of the bedroom. “Can I…?”

  Sara nodded, and he lowered himself with a groan to a seated position on the floor, facing her. “I knew your dad, back in the day. We used to work together.”

  “Were you an agent?” Sara asked.

  Mitch nodded. “I was. But that has to be our secret, okay? You can’t tell anyone. I’m sort of supposed to be dead.”

  Sara blinked. She very much wanted to ask why he was supposed to be dead, but she held back. “Okay.”

  “Anyway, your dad used to talk about you. Both of you. He called you a firecracker. Call your sister a smartass.” Mitch chuckled lightly. “Those were like his codenames for the two of you, so he didn’t have to use your real names in the field. ‘Firecracker’ and ‘Smartass.’”

  Sara couldn’t help but grin a little. “Maya is still kind of a… you know.” She drew up her legs and lay on her side on the bed. “What was he like?”

  Mitch shrugged a shoulder. “Not all that different than he is now.”

  “No, I mean… what’s he like? You know. When he’s working.”

  Mitch nodded slowly. He seemed to understand what she was asking; she wanted to know more about the side of her dad that she had only recently discovered, the hidden side that was terrifying and thrilling at the same time.

  “Confident,” Mitch told her. “Decisive. Proud. Capable. He was always the smartest guy in the room, but he didn’t make you feel like it. If he trusted you, he wanted to know how you were feeling, what you were thinking.” Mitch chuckled slightly and added, “Unless he didn’t like what you had to say. Then he could make you feel like an outright idiot.”

  Sara smiled. She could feel her eyelids growing heavy. “I think you’re a good person, Mitch. I think we can trust you.”

  Mitch smiled, the corners of his beard tugged upward. “I’m glad to hear that. But cool it with that ‘good person’ stuff. I’ve got a reputation to uphold.” With another groan he rose from the floor, but he lingered in the doorway as Sara felt herself drifting off. “I’ll keep you safe, though,” he promised quietly.

  Sara’s last thought before she fell asleep was how much she wanted to believe that, and how little she actually did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Zero maintained as brisk a pace as possible as he hiked to Indian Head Point, despite his aching limbs and the increasing pain in his broken hand. Attempts to distract himself by thinking proved generally fruitless; his thoughts kept coming back to the myriad unanswered questions that were swimming through his mind. How much time did he have, if any? Had he made any headway in convincing Pierson? Why had the CIA declared him dead? Did his girls safely arrive in Nebraska with Alan?

  None of them were questions he could answer alone in the woods in the middle of the night.

  At long last he reached the ridge and the small park that accompanied it. It took some searching, but he found the gray sedan, about a decade old, on a dirt pull-off at the head of a hiking trail. He didn’t approach it right away; instead he carefully and quietly scouted the perimeter.

  He wasn’t worried that Carver or the Division was there. He was worried that Strickland had gone against his word and was waiting for Zero
to arrive so that he could follow.

  At last he approached the car. The doors were locked but the keys were hidden atop the tire in the passenger-side wheel well. He checked the truck first; there was a small canvas bag there, and inside it were some supplies, the most welcome of which were three one-liter bottles of water. He drank one down in its entirety. Also in the bag were a Glock 17, a Ruger LC9, a black nylon holster for each, a sonic ear, headphones, a first-aid kit, a change of clothes, a wad of cash held together with a rubber band, and a burner phone.

  Zero stowed the bag in the passenger seat and turned the key in the ignition. The car rumbled to life; the engine was loud, but otherwise it seemed to be in good shape and there was a full tank of gas. He backed out to the road and drove about ten miles north, until he reached a twenty-four-hour diner, where he parked in the lot.

  First he checked the burner phone, half expecting Strickland to have left a message there for him, but there were none. There were two numbers programmed into it, one under “Eliot” and the other under “Doyle.”

  Zero frowned for a moment as he searched his memory. I don’t know anyone named Eliot. The only person named Eliot that he could recall ever hearing of was the poet, T.S. Eliot…

  He almost laughed out loud. T.S.—Todd Strickland. And the other name, Doyle, must have been a contact number for Watson. Arthur Conan Doyle was the author of the Sherlock Holmes books.

  “Didn’t know Strickland was that well-read,” he joked to himself as he opened the first-aid kit. Inside was an orange prescription bottle of Toradol, a non-narcotic painkiller. He took two tablets with water, and then carefully unwrapped the bandages from his hand. They’d gotten wet, and then dried, and then dirty after his plunge in the Potomac and subsequent hike.

  He winced; the pain seemed to increase with the sight of his hand. It was horribly swollen, purple and bruised all over, the metal splints over the broken bones staying in place by virtue of how puffy and disfigured his fingers were. The doctors had warned him that even after a few surgeries, the hand might never be the same.

  One of those surgeries was supposed to be that very day. I don’t think I’m going to make that appointment.

  He gently wiped his hand down with an alcohol swab, and then set about rewrapping his hand and splints in layers of gauze, careful not to make it too tight and sucking pained breaths through his teeth.

  Once he’d tended to his hand, he changed into the clothes Strickland had provided. It was a difficult process, changing with only one hand while seated behind the wheel of a car, but he managed to pull on the jeans, an olive-green T-shirt, and a light jacket, black and made of breathable cotton, as apt for the early spring weather as it was for concealing guns beneath.

  He stuck the phone and cash in the left pocket of his jeans, the Glock under his right armpit, and the Ruger in the left pocket of the jacket. Then he went into the diner and ordered a coffee to go. As he carried it back to the car, another thought struck him. He set the Styrofoam cup on top of the car and knelt beside the tire. He ran his hand around the curve of the wheel well, and then did the same for the other three. He found nothing.

  Zero popped the hood and searched under there, and then checked the car’s interior thoroughly, the floors and the glove box and under each seat.

  I know it’s here. If I was Todd, where would I put it? He glanced up at the dome light. Aha. It took a minute or so for him to pry the plastic dome off with his thumb, but once it was free he found what he was looking for—a tiny black box, about the size of a dime, one side magnetic and stuck to the car’s metal ceiling.

  It was a tracking device.

  Shame on you, Todd. He knew that Strickland had the best of intentions, but Zero wouldn’t let him follow. Not this time. He glanced around the parking lot and saw a pickup truck with New Jersey plates. Someone far from home. When he was sure nobody was looking, he stuck the magnetic tracker in the passenger-side wheel well of the truck.

  Then he drove north.

  *

  Zero parked the car three-quarters of a block away and across the street from a stately row house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. It was still dark out; it wouldn’t be dawn for another two hours. But he had a decent view of the front of the house and its red front door in his side mirror.

  Even with his memories returned, Zero had been to Deputy Director Shawn Cartwright’s home only once before, and that had been just the week prior when he and Maria showed up on his doorstep to try to convince him that the Brotherhood terrorists apprehended in Syria were not the real ones.

  His eyelids grew heavy as he sat there, waiting. He dozed in ten- or fifteen-minute intervals, snapping awake quickly and stretching his sore limbs. The hike hadn’t helped. He was exhausted, yet knew he couldn’t sleep. Not yet.

  It was about 6:30 in the morning, the sun just barely awake itself, before a car backed down the driveway. It wasn’t Cartwright’s car; it was a blue mid-sized SUV that must be his wife’s, Zero reasoned, but then he caught a glimpse through the window and saw who was driving it.

  Zero started the gray sedan and rounded the block, pulling back out onto the street three car lengths behind the SUV.

  Cartwright drove for about eight minutes through light morning traffic, close to the university, and pulled onto a downtown street lined with boutiques, coffeehouses, and taverns. Then he pulled into a parking spot. Zero kept going for about a half a block and parked as well, watching in the rearview as Cartwright fed the meter.

  Where’s he going?

  He watched as Cartwright disappeared into a coffee shop.

  Zero grunted in disappointment. He didn’t know if Maria had contacted Cartwright yet, or if they had established a meeting time or place; he only knew that she would get to him, and following Cartwright was the fastest route to get back to her and Sanders.

  The deputy director emerged again two minutes later with a tall green and white cup in his hands. But he didn’t return to his car; instead he took a seat at one of the small metal tables on the sidewalk just outside the coffee shop.

  Zero understood right away what he was doing and grabbed quickly for the sonic ear that Strickland had provided. He pulled the headphones over his head, lowered the passenger-side window halfway, and directed the satellite dish–shaped end of the device toward the sidewalk table.

  He hadn’t even noticed them at first. But seated at another outdoor table right behind Cartwright were two women. The one with her back to him had blonde hair, pulled up under a black baseball cap with a bun sticking out the back. She wore yoga pants and a track jacket, as if she had just come from the gym. The woman opposite her also wore sporty apparel, with short brunette hair and large dark sunglasses on her face.

  It was Maria and Sanders. They’d been sitting there in plain sight, even as he cruised right past them. They were well disguised, chatting idly and pulling apart scones.

  Zero carefully tweaked the dial on the rear of the sonic ear, honing in on their conversation. In the mirror, he saw Cartwright bring a phone to his ear.

  Then the conversation came through.

  “Johansson,” he heard Shawn Cartwright say. “Just what the hell is going on?” He didn’t raise his voice; he kept his eyes ahead and the phone to his ear as if he was answering a call. Maria didn’t turn either; she faced Sanders as if she was talking to her.

  “Too much for me to lay out on the table right now,” Maria admitted. “I’ll have to give you the abridged version. Iran is a conspiracy. Pierson is a pawn. If we go to war, it’ll mean that we take the strait, while Russia moves in on—”

  A trio of high school–aged kids walked by Zero’s car, laughing loudly and jostling each other. He cursed as they drowned out the conversation for a moment, and when they’d passed he dialed in again.

  “…Sounds too crazy to be true,” Maria was telling Cartwright quietly. “But that’s the long and short of it. I need you to believe this.”

  Cartwright sighed heavily. “
Jesus. I knew Riker was up to no good, but I thought she was just gunning for director. Not this.”

  Zero couldn’t help but notice how oddly familiar this felt, him spying on those he was supposed to consider allies. It was the same tactic he’d employed two years earlier. He’d compiled data on everyone—not just those he thought might be involved in the plot, but people close to him as well. Maria and Watson and Morris and Reidigger.

  “Is there any news on the Iran front?” Maria asked.

  “Yeah, there is,” Cartwright admitted glumly. “Shortly after you contacted me this morning, I got word that three IRGC ships have been destroyed in the Persian Gulf, not far from the strait. The official US Navy report claims that they were in pursuit of the Constitution, the ship that fired on theirs originally. An American battleship took all three out.”

  “So that’s it then,” Maria murmured, almost too quiet for Zero to hear with the sonic ear. “It’s going to be war.”

  “Not yet,” Cartwright countered. “Iran knows they don’t stand a chance against the entire Fifth Fleet. Declaring war would make it open season on their ships. They’ll force our hand. They’re going to close the Strait of Hormuz.”

  “When?” Maria asked. “Is there any speculation?”

  “There doesn’t have to be,” Cartwright told her. “They’re already doing it, as we speak.”

  Zero shook his head. On the one hand, he had forewarned Pierson that this was precisely what would happen. With a little luck, the president would realize that he was right and act accordingly. On the other hand, closing off the strait to the US would only make tensions mount in the Persian Gulf.

  “What do you need me to do?” Cartwright asked, jarring Zero from his thoughts.

  In the mirror, he watched as Maria transferred a brown satchel from her lap to the ground beside her chair. “In this bag are documents that Kent had been gathering, transcripts of calls and other evidence on the conspirators involved. I need you to make copies. Keep one in a safe place. One needs to get into the hands of the UN. One needs to get to President Pierson. And fast.”