Zero Zero

by Jack Mars

  He smiled. “She will understand. Come, it’s this way.”

  Maya caught up with him and walked alongside him, or mostly so, lagging just a half-stride and keeping an eye on his hands. Just because she might be paranoid didn’t mean she couldn’t also be streetwise.

  “So,” the man said. “You are tourist? Or, maybe student?”

  “Tourist.”

  “Ah. And may I ask what happened? Were you, separated, from your… friends? Family?”

  “Yeah. Separated from family. I tried to ask around, but…”

  The Frenchman chuckled. “But French hospitality towards Americans is traditionally lacking, yes?” He turned off the main street and headed up an alley.

  “It would seem.” She paused. The alley was narrow, barely more than a car width, and had no streetlights. An alarm blared in her head. “I never said I was American.”

  “Oh. My apology. I assumed.” He paused as well, turning to her with an eyebrow raised. “It is just up here, come along. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

  But she didn’t move. Nothing about this seemed right. “I need you to empty your pockets.”

  The Frenchman took a small step back, his brow creasing into a frown. “Pardon? Are you… robbing me?”

  “No. I just need to see that you’re not carrying any weapons.”

  “Weapons? Merde. Is this what I get for trying to help—”

  The Frenchman’s body jerked twice, and with it came the familiar sound of a chirping gun. As he fell forward, Maya threw herself to the right. There wasn’t enough space to roll so she hit the ground hard and slid behind a metal trash can as two more shots rang out. Small chunks of brick exploded just above her head.

  The Frenchman looked at her from his spot on the ground, facing her, his eyes open wide in terror. He blinked once, and then didn’t again.

  He really had just been trying to help her. Now he was dead for it.

  Maya stayed entirely still, listening, waiting, but no more shots came. Instead she heard footsteps, heavy and deliberate, stalking closer to her position.

  She could try to make a run for it, down the mouth of the alley. But she’d be an open target; a single well-placed shot could end her. Even if she made it to the street, there was nowhere to hide. She didn’t know the area.

  The footsteps ceased. “Come on out,” said a gruff voice. American, by the sound of it. “I promise I’ll make it quick.”

  Her heart pounded in her chest. She did not want to die at all, much less alone in a dirty alley in Paris.

  Think, Maya!

  The only thing she had was her cover, the metal garbage can she was hiding behind.

  “The longer you wait, the harder this gets,” the gunman warned.

  Maya pushed against the metal can, tipping it forward slightly, just enough to get her fingers under it. Her other hand reached up and wrapped around the top lip of it.

  Then she stood, and she hefted the can, holding it in front of her like a shield. She couldn’t see where she was going, but still she charged forward anyhow.

  “What the hell…?” Two shots thwipped. She felt them strike the front of the can, no doubt penetrating one side but not through.

  She surged forward in the narrow alley, hoping to ram into him, to knock him off balance, just long enough to get the gun away…

  Something struck her ankle. A foot. She stumbled forward, landing on top of the garbage can with a clatter. It rolled away from her as she rolled onto her back.

  The gunman stood over her. She could see his grin in the moonlight. “Nice try,” he admitted. “But you brought a garbage can to a gunfight.” He raised the pistol.

  Maya winced.

  There was a shout, and for an instant it looked like the gunman had grown a second head. No—there was someone behind him, someone taller, someone jumping at him. The new figure grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him down in a full-body tackle. Maya rolled out of the way as they crashed down in a tangle of limbs. The gun was loose; she reached for it.

  The new figure regained his footing first. He kicked the gunman in the chin before he could stand. Then he grabbed the gunman by the back of his pants and his collar, and heaved him into the brick façade with a grunt.

  The gunman staggered, dazed, bleeding from his head and chin as Maya pointed the pistol at him.

  “Thanks, Trent,” she murmured. She wanted to be relieved, to be happy to see him, but she was still uncertain about his role in all this. Still—he had saved her life just now.

  Trent Coleman breathed hard and showed her his empty hands. “I didn’t shoot him this time.”

  “You still have that gun?”

  “I’ll give it to you if you want.”

  She took her eyes from the gunman for just a second. Trent’s gaze was apologetic, remorseful. And also a little scared.

  “Keep it.” She turned her attention back to the gunman. “You. Are you CIA?”

  The man touched his forehead gingerly and inspected the blood on his fingers. “Is that a joke?”

  “Then who are you?” she demanded.

  “Name’s Mick. And that’s all I’m telling you.”

  “You’ll tell me who sent you or you’ll get a bullet in an uncomfortable place.”

  Mick—if that was his real name—laughed derisively. “Look at you; you’re just a girl. You ever shot anyone before? You don’t have the nads—literally.”

  Maya shot him in the kneecap.

  The bullet tore through flesh and muscle and lodged in bone. Mick screamed and grabbed at the leg with both hands.

  “Now I’ve shot someone,” she said. She pointed the gun at his other knee. “Who do you work for?”

  “Wait, don’t!” Mick wheezed. “I-I’m a contractor. Out of New York…”

  A contractor? He meant a contract killer. An assassin. But not a real pro, like Krauss or Rais. Mick was just a thug with a gun.

  “Who hired you, Mick?” she demanded.

  “Clients are… anonymous.” He grimaced. “God, I think I’m gonna bleed to death. Please, call an ambulance!”

  “Information, Mick,” Maya said as calmly as she could. “Who did they tell you I was?”

  “They didn’t tell me anything! Just a photo. And to… follow you, take you out.” He gritted his teeth. “I lost you when you… ran off. But saw you… from the park…”

  His head slumped.

  “Mick.” Maya knelt and slapped him twice. He tried to open his eyes again, and murmured something groggily, but his head lolled again and he passed out. “Dammit.”

  “We should go,” Trent said gently behind her.

  But she didn’t move. She was thinking. She believed Mick when he said he wasn’t CIA; he fought dirty and lacked formal training. He’d killed the Frenchman to get to her. He’d tripped her like they were in a schoolyard scrap. His gun was a reliable one, a 9mm Browning, but it was at least a decade old.

  Yet he’d known things that only the CIA was supposed to know. He’d been provided with information. Mick had been a failsafe in case the first gunman failed—whoever wanted her dead had sent two after her.

  Maybe more, she realized suddenly. Trent’s idea seemed like a good one.

  She stood, tucked the Browning in the back of her pants, and turned to face Trent Coleman. “Someone is out to kill me. There might be others. So I’m only going to ask this once. Can I trust you?”

  Trent nodded solemnly. There were no jokes, no smirks, no gentle ribbing, and nothing in his gaze that betrayed him. “Yes. Of course you can, Maya. I’d never hurt you. I panicked earlier. That guy… and this guy… they wanted you dead.” He looked down at the toppled trash can. “I won’t let that happen if I can help it.”

  “Okay. Then let’s go. You got our things?”

  “This way.” He trotted back to the mouth of the alley and grabbed up a black nylon bag he’d left there.

  “The sat phone?”

  He dug in the bag and handed it to her.


  She dropped it to the ground and stomped it until it was in a dozen pieces.

  “What did the phone do to you?” Trent asked, wide-eyed.

  “Who knew where we were?” she asked pointedly. “Who knew exactly where to find us?”

  “Walsh,” he answered, with some venom in his tone.

  “Yes. But more broadly, the CIA. And who’s on the other end of that phone?”

  “The CIA,” he murmured.

  “Right. So we’re on our own now.” As much as Maya would have liked to put a call in to Penny, or even her dad, she couldn’t count on the phone not being tracked or recorded. “We need to get on a plane and back home, now.”

  Before anyone else shows up to kill me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  “We’re running low on favors,” Alan grumbled as they disembarked the Cessna at Rome-Fiumicino Airport. There were far worse ways to travel than private jet—Zero knew it firsthand, having flown internationally while being bound and hooded in the back of a cargo plane, and yet another time cramped for hours inside a wooden crate.

  But Alan was right. Their resources were already scarce; they couldn’t go burning every bridge. To get to Rome, Zero had enlisted the aid of Ryan Scott, a pilot who had once illegally flown him to Ankara, Turkey, when he had no one else. Scott owed him nothing—less than nothing, since he’d been a friend of Chip Foxworth, who had died to save Zero.

  Still, Scott came through and got them aboard a plane with a manifest to Rome under the pretense of a corporate scout scoping Italian properties for expansion.

  Zero was far from well rested, but at least he had managed to get some sleep on the flight. He’d stolen only snatches of slumber, his unconscious thoughts plagued by the memory he had of Kate, her strange words, her outright lie that it had been work.

  Not real, he reminded himself. He had to believe that. There were too many other things going on at the moment to concern himself with it.

  Mischa had been wide awake and alert the entire time, thanks to the overly caffeinated and sugar-saturated beverage Alan had bought for her, and though she should have been crashing from the high she seemed just as alert as ever.

  She didn’t say it, but he couldn’t help but imagine she was enjoying this. As well as she’d acclimated to a (somewhat) ordinary American life, espionage and combat were what she’d been trained for most of her life.

  Strange as it was, he was glad to have her. He’d spent so much time trying to keep his daughters out of harm’s way, to save them from one horror or another, that it felt like an outright betrayal to have her along. Still, having her at his side meant she was safe, and he felt a little safer for it too.

  They hailed a cab at the airport and asked him to take them to the Piazza Mattei. The driver popped the trunk, expecting luggage, and raised an eyebrow at the lack of it, but he didn’t ask any questions and drove without a word.

  The street signs they passed, the sights and structures of Rome, were all familiar to him, like seeing the face of a long-lost friend. It was here that he and his team, years prior, had established an off-the-books safe house in an Italian apartment. It was here, after the suppressor had been torn from his head, that he found himself returning—only to find Maria holed up in the apartment. It was here that the rogue Agent Morris showed his true colors and tried to kill Zero.

  The cab dropped them off and Alan paid the fare, and then the three of them stood in the Piazza Mattei. It was a lovely plaza, paved in cobblestones, arranged with small planters, and surrounded by colorful apartment buildings. The centerpiece of the piazza, however, was what tended to draw tourists there. The Fontana delle Tartarughe, or simply Fountain of Turtles, was not particularly large in relation to other Roman fountains, or even all that grand in comparison, but it was stunning.

  At the fountain’s center, four men cast in bronze held up a vasque, each with a hand raised up as if they were reaching for the very realistic turtles around the edge of the marble basin. The Fontana delle Tartarughe was more than four hundred and twenty years old. It had survived since the days of Pope Gregory XIII, originally built to provide citizens of Rome with drinking water from an aqueduct supplied by the Tiber.

  It was a beautiful spot. In fact, its beauty had been the impetus for establishing a safe house there in the first place. Zero’s former team—Reidigger, Johansson, and Morris—had planned an operation there, in a hotel across from the piazza. Years earlier, they had reconned the area and found a vacant apartment that provided the perfect view of the entire plaza. When the operation was finished, none of them wanted to give the place up, so they had leased it for ten years, paid in full on the dime of the Central Intelligence Agency, and had the cost hidden in an expense report as payment for collateral damages while apprehending insurgents.

  It was Bixby who had helped them hide the expense, with some clever computer work, making five people in the world that knew about the place. At least as far as Zero knew.

  Zero looked past the fountain, at the tall, white-bricked building behind it. It was the former manor house of the Mattei family, long since renovated into luxury apartments. The entrance was through a stone archway, which opened onto a small courtyard, across which was a set of exterior stairs leading up to a covered corridor, which ended at a door, which opened on the smallest unit on the second floor. That unit had two windows that faced the piazza, both of which afforded a magnificent view of the Fountain of Turtles.

  He glanced up at those windows. With the time difference it was morning in Rome, and the eastern sun glared on the glass. He couldn’t see anything that might tell him what was going on inside.

  And anyone who might be in there would need only to take a look out one of the two windows and recognize him standing there. But there was no other way in.

  “You two should wait here, just in case,” he told them.

  Alan snorted. “Like hell.”

  “What he said,” Mischa added.

  Zero scoffed lightly, but he wasn’t going to change their minds. They were stubborn, just like him. Just like his other two daughters, and just like Maria had been. Headstrong, every one of them. “Then let’s go.”

  He crossed the piazza and walked under the domed stone archway of the apartment building and into the courtyard. The gardens were well tended; even in early fall the impeccable rows of vibrant flowers were carefully cultivated. He followed a paved walkway to the stone stairs that led upward. Mischa stuck close behind him and Alan brought up the rear.

  Zero reached the top and the corridor with two doors on each side. The walls were rough and uneven, decades-old plaster over centuries-old stone. There was a history to these walls, an artisanal beauty to their asymmetry. He’d been a small part of that history, an almost negligible part, but a part all the same. Like humanity, in the scope of the age of the earth.

  He paused just before the last door on the left and stowed away sentimentalities as he slid the Glock from its place, tucked in the inner pocket of his light jacket.

  He motioned for Alan and Mischa to stay put. Then he reached out with his left hand and tried the knob, gripping it with only two fingers and turning it slowly, very slowly.

  It twisted easily in his grasp. Not locked.

  He pushed the door just a few inches, putting the barrel of the Glock in the opening as he carefully glanced into the apartment. He was looking into a small living room. A dark-stained coffee table. A secondhand sofa with a few colorful throw pillows on it. Exposed wooden beams overhead.

  It was exactly as he remembered it. It also appeared empty.

  He took a breath and pushed the door open a bit further, taking a cautious step across the threshold by turning his body sideways and slipping inside.

  From his vantage point he could see only the edge of the small, corridor-like kitchenette, around the corner from the living room. With the Glock in both hands, he whirled around the corner.

  There was someone there, and it was just the person he’d hoped to find there,
but not at all how he hoped to find them.

  “Jesus… Bixby!” He dropped the gun and knelt beside the body.

  Alan and Mischa were inside in an instant, but stopped at the threshold to the kitchen when they saw the state of him.

  The time away hadn’t been terribly kind to the old engineer; though he was pushing sixty he’d always looked good for his age, dressed in colorful bow ties and vests, kept his face shaved and his hair neatly parted.

  But the Bixby on the floor was disheveled, his hair a mess, a few days’ worth of gray stubble on his chin, and several stab wounds to his abdomen.

  Zero’s fingers trembled as he examined the wounds. The blood was fresh; this had happened recently. If he wasn’t mistaken, it was still flowing, still leaving his body.

  He realized sourly that they may have walked right past the killer when they arrived at the Piazza Mattei.

  “Bixby… I’m so sorry,” he murmured. “You didn’t deserve this. I should have gotten here in time. I shouldn’t have hesitated.” He felt Alan’s hand on his shoulder.

  And then Bixby coughed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  “Bixby!” Zero carefully cradled the engineer’s head with one arm, propping it up as gently as he could. He didn’t dare try to sit him up, but he reached up with his free hand and grabbed a hand towel from the narrow counter of the kitchenette.

  Bixby winced as Zero pressed it softly to his abdomen. “Zero.” His voice was hoarse, croaking. “You came?”

  “I did.” A few minutes too late. “Just hang tight. We’ll call an ambulance.” He looked up at Alan and Mischa, neither of whom had moved from their positions. “Call someone!”

  He felt Bixby’s weak grip close around his arm. “Zero… look at me. We both know… what this means.”

  The hand towel was already saturated in blood. It was incredible that Bixby was still alive now, let alone speaking. Of course Zero knew what it meant, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it, much less say it.

  He’d be dead inside a minute.

  “How?” Zero demanded. “How’d they find you here?”