Agent Zero (Agent Zero, #1)

by Jack Mars

“No…” he said quietly. “No, there’s no way.” He avoided Mullen’s discerning gaze. “He’s dead. Zero is dead.”

Cartwright stood and buttoned his suit jacket. His legs felt weak. If Steele was still alive… well, he didn’t want to think about what could happen. With his hand on the doorknob, Mullen called out once more. “And Cartwright? It’s shoot to kill. You understand? I won’t have him rampaging across Europe again. That would be very bad for me… and for you.”

At the mention of children, the woman softened visibly. “By all means.” She pulled the computer from her bag and handed it to him.

Reid powered the computer on and logged into Skype’s website. He had a message waiting from Katherine Joanne’s account. It was just four simple words: Are we in danger??

He tried to narrow his search to the sixth century’s “cult of Amun,” the last surviving group that worshiped the ancient god before Christianity stifled and extinguished the old deity’s following. Yet he found little information about them, and even less that was new to him. He scanned several websites, looking for some detail, some sort of connection or possible explanation.

He stood there for a long moment, admiring it, fighting the urge to chuckle sardonically. How many times had Reid Lawson told himself that he would make this same trip? How often had he promised that one day he and the girls would visit Italy, Spain, France, Greece? And now here he stood, not for leisure but out of necessity, because his life quite literally depended on it.

The physical and mental trials one had to perform to become a member of the inner circle would, and often did, send most men to madness or suicide.

Johansson shrugged. “We all have our cover, Kent. According to most of the world, I’m a CPA from Baltimore. I can even do your taxes. We’re well trained. We lead two lives. That’s the way it’s always been.”

“The Fraternity?” “That’s what we called them. The terrorist collective.”

“But I know you.” She ran her fingers through his hair, down the back of his head, her fingernails gently trailing down his neck. A pleasant tingle ran down his spine. It had been a long time since anyone had touched him intimately—at least that he could remember. “Just stay a while. Let’s figure this out together.” She kissed him again, more passionately this time. He didn’t pull away.

Morris could have put a bullet in Kent’s skull right then and there. He could have reloaded, adjusted aim to the kitchen window, and popped off Johansson before she ever even knew that Kent was just outside her apartment. But he refrained.

Even so, he needed to ask the one question on his mind. “So we never…?” He very nearly said “hooked up,” a phrase he’d picked up from his students, but it didn’t seem at all appropriate for the situation.

She shrugged coyly with one shoulder. “Is that really what you want to talk about?” Reid wasn’t sure. He had other questions—if it had happened, where did it happen? Was Kate still alive at the time? If not, how long did they wait after her death to act on their impulses? Was it accidental, fueled by passion or alcohol, or was it a mutual acknowledgment of a long time coming? As trivial as those things might ordinarily seem, it was suddenly important to him to know the details of an intimate encounter—because it would give him some sort of insight into what sort of person Kent Steele was. What sort of person he had once been.

His internal scuffle must have been etched on his face, because Maria gently offered, “You were always loyal to her, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Right,” Maria murmured. “A stroke.” The sudden discomfort in the air was palpable. The room felt several degrees too warm. Reid stood and pulled on his jeans, his socks, and his boots. “You’re right,” he said a little too loudly. “We should eat. But first, I want you to tell me what leads you found when you were tracking the assassin.”

He wasn’t big on sports—he followed basketball, though he rarely watched games—but there was something about the Olympics that inspired ubiquitous patriotism, however brief it might be.

He had never driven a motorcycle before—at least Reid Lawson hadn’t—but Kent Steele handled the bike expertly. The February wind was cold and biting, but his fleece-lined bomber jacket and the thermal sweater kept him warm enough. A car might have been better for the weather, but the bike would be much easier to conceal and stash somewhere.

Reid twisted both arms in opposite directions and snapped the thug’s neck. The large man slumped back to the floor, his eyes wide, mouth frozen in a wide grimace. It takes only seven pounds of pressure to break the hyoid bone.

“Give me something,” Reid threatened. “We’ve got hours to do this.” That wasn’t true either; the three men in the other room were only bound with duct tape. They would work their way out of it eventually. He twisted again. The man tried to scream but it came out as a hoarse hiss of air.

At eighteen, Rais had enlisted in the US Army. He spent the next two years mostly at Fort Drum near Watertown, New York, a mere stone’s throw from the Canadian border.

He spent brief stints in Japan, Germany, and South Korea, and then it happened. Two years into his six-year contract, the events of September 11, 2001, unfolded three hundred miles south of his base. A few months after, his unit was deployed to Afghanistan. Rais’s three-man team scouted a section of Kandahar considered to be the last-known whereabouts of a prominent Al Qaeda bomb-maker. Rais was ordered to call in a strike on a building believed to be their headquarters. He could clearly see that it was full of women, children, and families that had nothing to do with the conflict. Rais refused. The bombs fell anyway. One hundred and twelve people died that day. The Afghani bomb-maker was not among them. As far as Rais knew, none of those that perished in the conflagration had any ties to terrorism.

Rais waited in the bedroom of the suite for the meeting to finish and his fate to be decided. He did not try to eavesdrop but could still hear pieces of the hushed conversation taking place between the German doctor, the sheikh, and Amun.

“The world will change in two days’ time,” Amun continued. “Zero cannot be allowed to interfere. A CIA task force has being sent to collect him and bring him here, to Switzerland.”

“Amun was an ancient Egyptian god,” Kent explained. “I don’t have all the details yet, but I believe this group is based on a fanatical cult that died out in the sixth century.”

Cartwright would never admit it out loud, but he was a little impressed. This Agent Zero sitting across from him was a far cry from the self-assured, borderline-haughty Kent Steele that he knew before. “When do they plan to do this? Do we have a timetable?”

“Nineteen months ago, Kent Steele, also known as Agent Zero, was announced killed in action. Yet here I am. For the past year and a half, I’ve been living in New York with my two daughters, teaching European history at Columbia University. Up until four days ago, I had no memory of ever being an agent in the CIA.”

Kent told them about the bomb-making facility in Belgium. He told them about finding Reidigger’s body in Zurich, along with a photograph that led him to Rome. He explained how he reconnected with Johansson and about Morris’s subsequent attack.

Reid breathed a sigh of relief. Maya had missed her last check-in, but the message put his mind at ease. He set his fingers to the keyboard, but he wasn’t sure what to say.

Maya typed: Tell me something so that I know it’s you. A thin smile curved his lips. She was as cautious as she was smart. Reid was incredibly proud—and at the same time he desperately hoped that she never got any ideas in her head to join the CIA. I’m sorry you missed your Valentine’s date in the city, he typed.

“Specs, right. Sara is fourteen, about four-foot-nine, blonde hair, shoulder-length. Maya is sixteen, five-three, brunette, long hair. Tell the agents to approach using the name Katherine Joanne, so they know it’s the right guys.” At the mention of Kate, Maria glanced up, but she said nothing.

Reid grabbed him by the collar of his filthy tunic and hauled him upright. “Tell me!” he shouted in the man’s filthy face. The Amun man grinned wide, displaying the empty sockets in his mouth. “I know, Agent Zero, that you have two daughters. And we know how to find them.”

Reid saw red. He lost control. Later, when asked to recount the event, he wouldn’t remember what happened next. It wasn’t that Kent took over. It was blind fury blacking out his memory. It was Kent’s strength and skill, Reid’s protective nature, and both their love and devotion to their children that galvanized into a burning, unadulterated hatred for the leering, cackling, emaciated prisoner.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry, Kent.” The edges of his vision blackened. His knees weakened and buckled. His last thought before he hit the carpet was of his girls, their smiling, beautiful faces, and the fact that he would never see them again.

Even though her dad had proved it was him, something about it still hadn’t felt right to her. She already didn’t feel safe, and with the news that they might need to be protected, Maya’s instincts told her they should move again. She packed up their bags and her sister, and they took a taxi to a Hampton Inn a bit further down the highway. She paid in cash and checked in using a fake ID under the name Miranda Bennett, age eighteen. She had gotten it only a few months earlier under peer pressure from her friends, but she had never used it before.

“Squeak, if you don’t get out of bed in the next thirty seconds, I’m dragging you out,” Maya said sternly. “I need you showered, dressed, and packed. Let’s go.” She hated sounding like a mom—after all, she was only two years older than Sara—but sometimes it was necessary.

Then, after Mom died, they moved away from Virginia to New York. He stopped traveling and started teaching full time. Life was good—she missed her mother desperately, but life in New York had been kind to them, right up until four days ago when their father went missing.

Maya hesitated. Much like the hotel the night before, something didn’t feel quite right, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. They’ll ask for your Skype ID, her dad had said in his message. If anyone approaches you by any other name, you run and get help.

Maya kissed her on the forehead and then helped hoist her up to the height of the window, where Sara unlatched the lock and swung the pane outward. It took almost a full minute, but she managed to wriggle her way outside.

“Now they will come anyway! Come. Hurry up!” He tugged again on Maya’s hair, forcing her forward, but she barely felt it. Her legs were rubbery. They didn’t want to work properly. She had just witnessed a murder. An innocent person. And it was her fault.

Reid closed his eyes in an effort to extinguish the threat of tears. That one word, just the sound of Maya’s voice, and it was as if all his worry and mental anguish was exhaled from him. “It is so good to hear your voice, sweetheart. You okay?”

“Wait, Zero, there’s one more thing,” Watson said. “The Turkish guy, before he kicked it, he said something. It wouldn’t have stuck out to me if it wasn’t so odd. He said, ‘The ground will split open with the heels of their feet.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

“You want a good reason?” Reid interrupted. “Because I’m not entirely sure the leaks aren’t coming from you.” He hung up.

if this tracks. One of the goons that Amun sent after my girls, as he was dying, he said ‘The ground will split open with the heels of their feet.’ I thought it sounded familiar.” He spoke a mile a minute, gesticulating with his hands as he did. “It’s a line from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian poem… The rest of it goes, ‘As they whirled in circles, Mount Hermon and Lebanon split.’ It’s referring to Gilgamesh’s battle with Humbaba.” Thank you, Professor Lawson, he thought. The reason it had sounded so familiar was because he had taught it once, years ago, when he was an adjunct professor at George Washington University.

“Look, if I’ve learned anything from teaching history, it’s that we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past unless we learn from them. I can’t learn from something that I don’t remember, and I don’t want to be that guy again. I don’t want to put anyone in harm’s way, and I don’t want to jeopardize everything that’s at stake here. We only have a few minutes until we land, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. This may be the only chance that I get to find out why I stopped being Kent Steele.”

I was wrong. Sion isn’t the target at all. The terrorist in New Jersey, his dying words weren’t a clue. They were a distraction, a way to incite an international panic while the real threat loomed elsewhere, ignored—and a trap, to get Kent Steele there alone. He had failed.

This man is psychotic, Reid thought. Or just completely indoctrinated.

His ribs were most certainly bruised. His palm was bleeding amply. His left knee throbbed. He wasn’t sure he could outrun the assassin down the access corridor through which he had entered the building, and that was the only sure exit he knew of.

But this was no longer about satisfaction. He was going to kill Rais. He couldn’t let someone like that live.

Amun had discovered that Kent Steele was alive, and they dispatched the Iranians to find and kill him. They sent Morris after him. They sent Rais after him. They tried to get to his girls. And now the false lead about an attack on the Olympics.

He had failed. Even a single detonation was still a terrorist attack. He had failed to stop it.