Trapping Zero

by Jack Mars

  Doesn’t feel right, his instincts told him. Either this place had been vacated, or they were lying in wait. The insurgents certainly would have heard the helicopter coming, but they would have had less than a minute to prepare for the team’s arrival.

  Unless they suspected we’d be coming.

  Strickland paused outside a heavy wooden door into the main building. He put his ear close to it and one hand on its surface, fingertips spread. He wasn’t just listening for noise, Reid realized; he was feeling for vibrations, any indication that there was life on the other side.

  After a moment Strickland shook his head to them and gestured to Maria. She lifted one boot straight into the air and planted a solid kick to the jamb, just above the knob. The wooden door flew open and Strickland rushed inside, his MP5 up. Maria followed and immediately turned left, while Reid went right. He held his Glock in his left hand and his flashlight in his right, swinging both in unison pendulously over the room.

  They appeared to be in some sort of dining area, with rough wooden tables and metal chairs. But there was no movement, no people.

  Strickland nodded once and gestured towards the open doorway on the southern end of the room. It was a rudimentary kitchen, with a gas-powered stove hooked to a propane tank and a copper well sink.

  Still, no sign of life.

  Beyond the thoroughly rustic kitchen was a common area, what might have passed for a living room, and a set of stairs leading up to the second floor. Strickland paused, staying stock-still and listening. They heard nothing.

  The young agent slowly lowered the MP5 so that it was hanging from the strap over his shoulder and used both hands to gesture to Reid and Maria. No one home?

  Reid blinked in surprise at the unexpected trigger. Just like Russian, Slovakian, and Arabic before it, the knowledge of American Sign Language rushed back into his head as easily as if it had been downloaded. It was exactly as Guyer had said: your mind has a way of collating that data, so to speak. He knew ASL, practically as well as his own native English.

  Maria signed back. Could be. Maybe they knew the bomb could be traced back here.

  Reid shook his head. He didn’t trust it; these sorts of groups didn’t tend to flee after claiming responsibility for their atrocities. They were fully prepared to meet their maker and be rewarded for their transgressions.

  Clear the back room, Reid signed to Strickland. We’ll go up. Meet us on the second floor.

  Strickland nodded as he hefted his MP5 again and headed towards the final room of the first floor. Maria took point on the stairs, treading lightly from heel to toe as she ascended. Reid covered her, his pistol aimed upward towards the second floor landing.

  Despite her best efforts, one of the wooden steps creaked loudly under the pressure of her foot. Reid winced, noting that it was the fifth stair so he could avoid it—

  He caught sight of a flurry of movement above him, upward, on the landing. His reflexes kicked in as he reached up and grabbed the back of Maria’s tactical vest, yanking her backwards as he let himself fall.

  “Allahu—” The insurgent’s Tekbir cry was drowned out by a spray of automatic gunfire, shredding the silence of the compound.

  Reid grunted as he hit the floor, and then again as Maria crashed atop him. She quickly rolled to the right as he pulled loose a stun grenade from his belt. “Flash-bang out!” he shouted as he hurled the cylinder in a hooked toss towards the top of the stairs. He covered his ears with his arms and squeezed his eyes shut.

  A sharp pop split the air at a hundred and seventy decibels, so loud and startling that even with his head covered it felt like the jarring report was in his skull. His eyes were protected against the intense flash of light the stun grenade produced, so bright it would temporarily blind anyone within thirty feet for at least five to ten seconds.

  Reid was on his feet again in an instant, surging up the stairs three at a time with his Glock in both hands. He hadn’t realized he had dropped his flashlight and there was no time to find it.

  The insurgent that had fired on them was lying on his back at the top of the staircase, his expression dazed and slack-jawed and a thin bead of blood running from each ear. Reid ignored him, for the moment, and trained his gun down the second-floor corridor.

  “Clear,” he said breathlessly as Maria came up behind him. She rolled the insurgent onto his stomach as she pulled a long white zip cord from her vest and secured it around his wrists.

  Reid frowned as he noted that Maria seemed to be panting harder than she should for a run up the stairs. “Are you hit?” he asked urgently.

  “I’m fine,” she said, her voice strained. “The vest caught it. Just hurts like hell.”

  Reid heard footsteps on the stairs and instinctively spun, then pulled his barrel aside when he saw Strickland coming up towards them.

  Reid signaled to him that the hall was clear. No sooner had he gestured than he heard a click—a door at the end of the hall flew open and a silhouette filled the frame, the shadow of a rifle coming up to his shoulder.

  “Down!” Reid leapt forward, across the hall, and smashed through a door with his forearms up. Maria hit the deck and rolled through an open doorway opposite him, and Strickland crouched on the stairs as gunfire tore down the hall.

  Reid recovered and brought up his Glock to clear the room. It was someone’s bedroom, by the looks of it, and void of bodies.

  He glanced across the hall at Maria, who had taken cover in a bathroom. Distraction, she signed. He nodded and tore the top linen sheet from the king-sized bed. He holstered his pistol, just for the moment, and took the sheet in both hands like a matador taunting a charging bull. Standing in the doorway, he billowed the sheet out into the hall to make it appear as if someone was making a charge. A fusillade of bullets ripped through it immediately.

  Maria, on her knees, leaned out from the bathroom doorway and aimed. Her Glock barked twice; from down the hall a man cried out and a body hit the floorboards.

  “Clear,” she whispered.

  Reid dropped the sheet as Strickland reached the top of the stairs warily. He gestured down the hall and brought the MP5 to his shoulder. But Reid lingered, turning his attention back to the bedroom.

  It hadn’t struck him immediately, not while actively taking fire, but now that he had a second look this room seemed much more ornate than the rest of those he had seen. The bed was large and adorned in soft sheets and several pillows with silk cases. The furniture was handmade and looked expensive. To the left of the king bed was a small table, and beneath it was a red bag with a white cross—medical supplies.

  He had little doubt about it. This was the old man’s room, Abdallah bin Mohammed.

  Reid slid his Glock from its black nylon holster. It was just a feeling, but he couldn’t shake the sensation that he wasn’t alone. Yet no one had made a bid for his life. He carefully checked behind the door, and then crouched to peer beneath the bed. There was a closet on the eastern wall, but there was little more in there than a rolled prayer mat, clothes, and more medical supplies.

  In the far corner Reid noticed that what he had originally thought was a table was actually a wooden chest—certainly large and tall enough for someone to fit inside.

  Maybe bin Mohammed was too old to flee. Or too sick, by the looks of things. Maybe… he’s still here. He approached the chest cautiously, holding his gun steady as he reached for the lid and threw it open.

  The startled man inside yelped, his limbs folded underneath him and his arched back facing Reid. But one look told him that it was not a sixty-seven year-old man hiding in the chest. It was not bin Mohammed.

  “Get up,” Reid told the man in Arabic.

  The insurgent glanced at him, surprised he spoke the same language. “Do not kill me,” he pleaded.

  “On your feet. Hands above your head.”

  The frightened man stood slowly and did as he was told, raising both hands overhead. He was short, several inches shorter than Reid, and his receding
hairline and creases around his eyes suggested he was in his early forties at best.

  “Turn around.” The man did so and Reid patted him down for weapons. The insurgent had none, nothing on him at all. Reid tugged a zip cord from his vest pocket and secured it around one of the man’s wrists, and then twisted it around his back and zipped it tightly with the other. “What is your name?”

  “My name,” the man said softly. “My name… is Awad bin Saddam.”

  Reid scoffed. This man, this frightened man hiding in a chest while his people fought, was the leader of the Brotherhood? It was outright shameful.

  He put a finger to the radio piece in his ear. “I’ve got him,” he said. “I’ve got bin Saddam.”

  “Roger. Second floor is clear,” said Strickland through the radio. “Coming back to your location.”

  “Come on,” Reid prompted bin Saddam in Arabic. “Out of there.”

  The man carefully lifted one leg and stepped out of the chest. No sooner did it touch the floor than a rattling burst of gunfire startled them both. Reid’s Glock was up again in an instant.

  It sounded distant, muffled; not coming from this building, but from one of the others. His instincts told him it was the sound of an AR-15—no, more than just one. Overlapping barrages.

  “Dammit,” he muttered as he dashed into the hall, nearly running into Maria. “Clear the third floor and make sure bin Saddam doesn’t go anywhere,” he said quickly.

  “Kent! Where are you going? They can take care of themselves!”

  “I know,” he said as he took the stairs down to the first floor. He had no intention of helping the Division.

  But if he had to, he was going to stop them from doing anything reckless.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Maya sat on the edge of the bed in their room at Engelberg. Sara sat on the other bed beside her, her knees drawn up, staring at nothing in particular. The TV was on, playing some old sitcom on one of the few American channels they got at the lodge, but neither of them was paying any attention.

  Agent Watson sat in an armchair near the window, his gaze directed passively at the television. If he was thinking anything, he wasn’t showing it.

  Maya’s anger had assuaged from the confrontation in the streets of Zurich earlier. She hated to admit it, but her dad was right. Faced with an opportunity to help, to keep people safe, he couldn’t turn it down.

  She knew that she wouldn’t have either.

  What bothered her most was the faraway look that had returned to her younger sister’s eye. It was strikingly similar to the look Sara had had in her eyes for the past few weeks, ever since they had returned home, and she very much hoped that her sister wasn’t backsliding into a stupor again.

  “Our flight back to the States doesn’t leave for a few more hours,” Watson said suddenly. His voice was quiet but deep enough to feel as if it filled the room. “You girls should eat something.”

  Maya wasn’t hungry, and she doubted Sara was either. “This hotel doesn’t have room service,” she muttered instead. As soon as she said it a notion struck her, a possible opportunity for a temporary escape from the vacuous silence that would reign until they were ready to leave. “But I saw a pizza place not far from here, less than a block. They don’t deliver, but I’d be happy to run and grab a pie.”

  Watson arched an eyebrow in her direction. “I don’t think that would be wise,” he said slowly. “I’d rather order in—”

  “We could go together,” Maya suggested instead. If she couldn’t go alone, at least she could get out of the hotel room with an escort.

  Still Watson seemed dubious. Clearly he didn’t like the idea of them leaving the room at all until it was necessary. “Tell you what,” he said as he rose to his feet, “I’ll ask at the front desk, and if it’s as close as you say, I’ll run down there and pick us up something.”

  Maya’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Lock this door behind me,” Watson told her as he shrugged into a jacket. “And here. Take this.” He reached into a pocket and removed a black plastic fob with a single round button in the center.

  Maya took it from him. “What is it?”

  “It’s a panic button. Push that and it’ll instantly send an alert to my phone.”

  She rolled her eyes. “We’re not babies.”

  “No,” Watson agreed. “But you are children, and you’re Zero’s children. From where I’m standing, that means something. Lock it after me.” He pulled the door open, looked briefly left and right, and then closed it again behind him.

  Maya sighed as she twisted the door lock. Then she tossed the panic fob onto the bedspread. “So much for getting some fresh air.” She paced the floor a few times before she noticed the thousand-yard stare on her sister’s face.

  “Hey,” said Maya, gesturing to the fireplace. “I have an idea. Let’s get a fire going. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  Sara only shook her head. “Don’t want to,” she murmured.

  Maya sighed. She lowered herself on the edge of the bed beside her sister. “Okay. Then let’s just talk. I want to know what’s going on with you, Squeak—”

  “Don’t call me that,” Sara said quietly.

  “Sorry. I want to know what’s going on with you, Sara. Much as it pains me to say it, Dad was right. Talking about this kind of stuff can help.”

  “I know,” Sara admitted. “It’s just… it’s not what you think.”

  Maya frowned. “What do you mean? Talk to me.”

  Sara shrugged. “I’ve just been… I’ve been thinking a lot about Mom lately. How she always knew what to do to make things better, no matter how bad it seemed.”

  Maya couldn’t help but smile at that. It was true; their mother did always have a knack for saying and doing the perfect thing to cheer them up when times seemed tough.

  “And,” Sara said in nearly a whisper, “I keep thinking that if she was still here, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Maya wrapped her sister in a hug. “Maybe not,” she said. “But we don’t know, and we’ll never know, because Mom’s gone, Sara. But I know what she would want if she was here. She’d want us to be strong. She’d want us to be able to take care of ourselves, the way she took care of us. You know, even if… even if Dad doesn’t keep this job, he’s not going to be around all the time. I’ll be off to college soon, and so will you only a couple years after. Then we’ll be adults. So I think maybe it’s best if we learn that now. We take care of ourselves—and each other—and what happened will never be allowed to happen again.”

  “Yeah,” Sara agreed, resting her head on Maya’s shoulder. “There’s something else.”

  “What is it?”

  “Earlier, Dad said something to you, before he left. He said, ‘like father, like daughter.’ He said that if you want something to stop you have to be part of the people trying to stop it. What did he mean by that?”

  Maya bit her lip. She was still dead-set on the goals she had outlined for her father, of going to West Point and joining the CIA. But she wasn’t prepared to tell Sara that; the last thing her sister needed was the knowledge that Maya planned to put herself in the line of fire.

  Luckily she didn’t have to explain, because there was a brisk knock at the door to their room. Maya jumped a little at the sudden noise, and then laughed at herself.

  “I bet Watson forgot his wallet,” Maya said. “Hang on!” she called out, loud enough to be heard from the other side. She rose from the bed and crossed the room to the door, but she paused before her hand reached the lock.

  What if it’s not him? They were two teenage girls in a foreign country, vulnerable and alone. She didn’t know who else might know this quickly that their dad had left, but it wasn’t worth taking a chance. Like Watson said, they were Zero’s kids, and while she wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, it meant something to him. Besides, she had just been telling her own sister that they needed to be stronger, better prepared.

&n
bsp; The tiny black stun-gun her dad had given her was in her coat pocket, hanging on a hook near the door. Maya reached into the coat pocket and pulled out the small black stick, concealing it in a palm.

  “Who is it?” Maya called out.

  There was no answer; not a verbal one, anyway. But a knock came again, more urgent this time.

  “Don’t open it,” Sara said in a whisper. Her eyes were large as saucers and her face had paled.

  “I’m not,” Maya promised her. “I want you to stay right there unless I say otherwise. And get the button.” If they pushed the panic button, they should hear the alert to Watson’s phone through the door. “It’s on my bed there—”

  Before she could finish there came a thudding crash. The jamb splintered and the door flew open, the knob cracking the wall behind it. Maya let out a small shriek as she jumped back in shock. Sara sat bolt upright, frozen to the spot.

  The man that forced his way into their room was tall, white-skinned, with dark hair and a beard and wearing a black leather jacket. He held both his hands up, palms out to show the girls they were empty.

  “Maya, Sara,” he said breathlessly. “Thank god you’re okay. I didn’t know if someone was in here with you…”

  “Who are you?” Maya demanded, her voice sounding surprisingly small.

  “I’m Agent Nolan with the CIA,” he said quickly. “Something’s happened to Agent Watson. He was jumped by three men right outside the hotel. We have to go, now—”

  “What?!” Maya exclaimed. Watson was jumped? And who was this second agent?

  “I saw it happen but I couldn’t help him,” Nolan said quickly. “My orders were to stay hidden unless something happened to Watson, and then get you to safety. Please, you need to come with me.”

  Maya’s mind raced. This was happening fast, too fast, and nothing about it seemed okay. Her dad’s words from earlier ran through her head: Don’t trust anyone that isn’t us or Agent Watson. She glanced over at her sister and saw the clear distrust in Sara’s eyes.

  “Credentials,” Maya said suddenly. “Your agency credentials. I want to see them.”