Zero Zero

by Jack Mars

  “But why?” Hauser shook his head. “Why the palace?”

  “Right place, but totally wrong time,” O’Neill noted.

  “That,” said McMahon. He gestured toward the dais, the black leather portfolio, legal-sized and lying open, containing the document that was supposed to become the Cairo Accord. “That’s why.”

  Strickland understood. The bombing of the palace wasn’t about killing anyone in particular. It was about disrupting the accord. Todd had been so laser-focused on security here that he had completely overlooked a key fact: whoever was behind this didn’t need to attack the accord to stop it.

  And now a significant terror attack had been carried out on Egyptian soil while nine world leaders attempted to make peace. This was a message, loud and clear—and he was pretty sure he knew who sent it.

  This Cairo Accord is an effort on Rutledge’s part to secure peace, Zero had said on the phone. Which is very bad for business if you’re Bright.

  “Boss,” Hauser said gently. “We need an action plan here.”

  “Right.” Strickland rubbed his eyes. “O’Neill, secure the accord. It’s coming with us.” Only three member nations had signed before the disruption. They weren’t finished here. “Hauser, get on the radio with Is-Pal. Ensure everyone is out safely and en route to secure destinations. McMahon, find out what’s going on at the palace. If we can spare anyone to help with efforts there, we will.”

  They split off as he turned to Penny. “I want you to go back upstairs, lock yourself in there. I’ll get someone to come stand guard…”

  “Todd…”

  “Keep an ear to the ground for anything at all that might tell us who or what—”

  “Todd!” she said harshly. “Listen to me. Just a couple of minutes before the first bomb went off, I heard something. A call to local Cairo PD to a clothing shop not a block away from the palace. A woman said that an American man with a gun threatened her. He claimed he was chasing another man, but she only saw one.”

  He understood immediately. “You think Zero is here in Cairo.”

  “I don’t think so; I know so.” She turned the laptop she had propped on her forearm. Displayed on it was a grainy still image, but unmistakable. It was Zero, standing in a street, his mouth open as if mid-shout. “I was pulling up the traffic cam when the explosion happened.”

  Todd shook his head in dismay. He’d told Zero to stay away from Cairo, and here he was, nearly at ground zero just as the bombs were going off. Of course he didn’t think for a moment that Zero had anything to do with it—but clearly he’d known about it, and had done nothing. Instead of alerting authorities, he’d come here, presumably, to try to stop it himself.

  Zero tried to warn you.

  No; Zero had contacted him with a vague hunch, not a discernible threat. What was he supposed to have done—call off the accord?

  And now people were dead. The palace was destroyed. The accord was disrupted.

  “He has a phone. Find him.”

  “I can try—”

  “Find him, Penny. Now.”

  In his emergency protocol plan, EOT was the only group he hadn’t designated a task for—because at the time, he didn’t know what it might be. But now he did.

  Zero was going to answer for this.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  Pain. Blood. Confusion.

  It was like waking from a sound, dreamless sleep and finding the house on fire around you.

  No, that wasn’t quite right. It was like waking from a sound, dreamless sleep in a strange house, to find you were on fire.

  A clothing shop. Where, he didn’t know. Pain—searing, in his neck, in his head. Like an electric current passing through his brain.

  Men—three of them. Two were dressed alike. Uniforms. He didn’t know what the uniforms meant, but he knew he did not like them.

  The third—familiar but not.

  Who is he?

  Where am I?

  Who am I?

  Blood—on his neck. A gash there. On his lips. He’d bit struck. Perhaps beaten.

  Can’t remember.

  The explosion—he’d thought it was thunder at first. Jarring, adding to the confusion. The men in uniforms, they ran first. The third man, he didn’t seem to want to leave, but he ran too.

  A phone—on the floor. He took it. Standing was hard. He wasn’t going to leave the same way the other men did, so he looked for a back door. Found one, as well as a gun on the floor. He took that too.

  Outside—sensory overload. Colors, people, screams, running, shoving. There were signs in a language he didn’t recognize. Or maybe he couldn’t read. He wasn’t sure.

  The phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it and staggered along the street. More thunder. Black smoke, not far. Something was on fire. He ignored that too. Not his problem.

  No one seemed to care that he had blood all over him.

  He went in the opposite direction from the black, billowing smoke. He saw a sign that he could read. It had the strange, cursive-like writing on it that he didn’t understand, but then below that were words he recognized. It said “Banque du Caire.”

  And then below that it said, “Bank of Cairo.”

  Cairo.

  Something… grasp it… it’s right there… just hold onto it…

  Accord.

  Peace.

  Target.

  Yes. He was in Cairo, and he was supposed to kill someone.

  Was it the man from the clothing shop?

  Maybe.

  No.

  The phone buzzed again. He ignored it.

  He walked along slowly as people rushed past him. They shoved into him. He ignored them too. This didn’t feel real. How had he gotten here? He couldn’t remember. Why were there bombs going off?

  Is this Hell?

  No. You don’t believe in Hell.

  How do you know that?

  The burning in his head subsided, but it still hurt.

  A vision flashed suddenly across his mind. It came on so quickly, so powerfully that he put out an arm and steadied himself against a building.

  A beach. At night. A knife. A woman.

  He killed people.

  He was in Cairo, and he was supposed to kill someone.

  Who?

  The phone buzzed again. He pulled it out of his pocket in anger, about to throw it. But then he saw the two words on the screen: Unknown Caller.

  He knew that name. Not a name, not really, but he’d seen those words before. Had come to think of it as a name.

  “Hello,” he answered cautiously.

  “S? What’s going on? What’s the last thing you remember?”

  The voice was male, smooth, managing to sound casual and even unconcerned despite its questions.

  He knew this voice. A vision flashed through his mind, hazy, not completely formed. A figure, standing in front of him. Men, holding his arms. This voice, chuckling. Laughing at him.

  I’m not going to kill you, Krauss. I enjoy you too much. I’m just going to kill a little part of you.

  “Krauss,” he said into the phone.

  “What did you just say?” the voice demanded.

  “My name… was it Krauss? You called me that.”

  “Christ,” the voice muttered, annoyed. “Weisman, what the hell is happening?”

  “We’ve lost signal,” said another voice, behind the first. “Updates aren’t going through.”

  “S? Krauss. Listen to me. What happened?”

  His fingers reached for the open wound on his neck. The blood there was sticky as it dried. He felt the jagged edges of it—stitches. “Someone cut my neck. Someone else cut it again.”

  “Good grief,” the voice sighed. “Tell me he didn’t…”

  “I am in Cairo. I am supposed to kill someone.”

  “No. You’ve done what you went there to do. Get your ass back here—”

  “You tried to kill me,” he murmured. He didn’t know how. But he could still hear the voice chucklin
g in his head.

  I’m just going to kill a little part of you.

  “Who?” the voice demanded. “Who are you supposed to kill?”

  “I think we’ve lost him, boss,” said the second voice in the background.

  Who am I supposed to kill?

  Accord. Peace. Target.

  A woman on a beach. A knife…

  He knew. He knew who he was supposed to kill. The architect. The orchestrator. The one who had brought not only him there, but all of them.

  “The mastermind,” he said.

  “Krauss, hang on—”

  He ended the call. He was done talking. He dropped the phone on the sidewalk and left it there. Then he changed direction. He was going the wrong way. He could see the stadium from there, rising above the rooftops, and he started toward it, the black smoke still billowing skyward behind him.

  *

  Bright stared at the phone for a long moment after Krauss ended the call. He sighed.

  “Well. That experiment was short-lived. Fun while it lasted, though.”

  He spun in his chair on the forty-sixth floor of the Buchanan Building and looked out over Midtown Manhattan as the sun rose. It was early afternoon in Cairo, and he’d been up all night, operating on their time zone. That, and losing his assassin, justified a drink.

  “Weisman, get me a scotch, would you?”

  Across the wide office, his chief engineer looked up from a laptop. “You want me to stop trying to update?”

  Bright nodded. “We lost him.”

  Weisman pushed his wire-framed glasses up his nose. “I had a feeling that tech was faulty. Like the CIA could actually develop anything lasting like that…”

  “Weisman?” Bright held out his empty hand.

  “Yes sir.” The ponytailed engineer scurried to the oak mini-bar. “Perhaps I could write a patch for it,” he said as he dropped a single round ice cube in a rocks glass. He poured two fingers of scotch from a decanter. “It would take some time, but we can get him back—”

  “There’s no getting him back. It wasn’t the tech. Thank you.” Bright took a sip and sighed contentedly. “That’s good.”

  “Then what, sir?”

  “It was Zero. He tore it out of his head.”

  Weisman blanched. “He… no. Did he say that?”

  “In so many words.” Bright sat again, and swirled the glass idly. “I have to hand it to him; it was a hell of a desperate move, knowing what it did to his own head.”

  But it meant Zero was in Cairo.

  Krauss was in Cairo, for now.

  Perhaps this was a situation that required putting pride aside.

  “What now, sir?” Weisman asked nervously.

  “Two things. First—tell Ray to tighten up security.” If he made it out of Cairo, Krauss was going to come for him, or try to… again. And if he remembered the mistakes he’d made the first time, he wouldn’t make them a second time.

  The mastermind, Krauss had said. That’s who he was supposed to kill. Who else but Bright himself would he mean?

  “Second,” Bright said, “find me Zero. He’s in Cairo, and I’d like to talk to him.”

  Krauss would come for him, but only if he made it out of Cairo. For once, Bright and Zero had something in common. Neither of them wanted Krauss to leave the city alive.

  “Sorry sir, but… how do we find him?”

  Bright sighed in disappointment. “He’ll have a burner. Access the nearest cell tower to Krauss’s last-known location and search foreign, unlisted numbers that made outgoing calls in the last hour. Do I have to do everything?”

  “No sir. I’ll get on it right now.”

  “And call Ray,” Bright reminded him.

  “Yes sir.” Weisman scurried out of the office.

  Bright set the glass down on the desk. He didn’t want the drink anymore. He typically prided himself on being unflappable, collected in even the most chaotic of circumstances. But now he was just… annoyed.

  At least he’d stopped the accord. That should have felt like a win. But really all that had done was struck some fear in some hearts in the interest of maintaining the status quo.

  These days, it felt like staying on an even keel took too much effort. The ebb and flow between order and chaos wore on him.

  Perhaps he should take a page out of Zero’s book and retire. Though he chuckled aloud at that thought; look where retirement had gotten him.

  “What a mess,” he murmured.

  He should have just had Zero killed when he had the chance. He regretted it now; if he’d planted a bomb in the apartment in Rome, he’d still have S.

  But now they both needed to be eliminated, and ideally, at each other’s hand.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  Zero felt utterly useless.

  He hadn’t stopped Krauss. He hadn’t prevented the bombing of the Heliopolis Palace. After finding Mischa they had returned to the clothing store to find Krauss gone. They’d searched for him, briefly, but found nothing, and it wasn’t safe to linger.

  He’d come to Cairo on a hunch, and he’d been right, and he’d done nothing about it.

  Now the two of them were holed up in a small restaurant a block and a half north of the clothing shop. The streets were nearly vacant; several blocks had been evacuated. The place was empty, half-eaten meals still warm on the tables.

  All they had to do was wait until people started returning, and then they could slip out among the foot traffic. But right now they would be too conspicuous out on the streets.

  Mischa sat on a stool at the six-seat bar, her feet swinging, the burner phone on the bar in front of her. Penny had tried to call twice, but they hadn’t answered.

  He couldn’t hear her voice right now, not after his failure. Not after Bixby. The next time he spoke to Penny, it would be in person—if he wasn’t in jail or dead.

  “You’re certain you removed it?” Mischa asked him. He’d told her about the suppressor he’d cut from Krauss’s neck.

  “I’m certain.”

  “Did he remember who he was?”

  Zero shook his head. “Don’t know. But I don’t think so. If it was anything like what happened to me, his memories will come back bit by bit. Not all at once. Still, it felt different this time. Krauss looked… I don’t know. Feral, maybe. Or just really confused and in pain.”

  “But we can safely assume he is no longer Bright’s pawn.”

  Zero nodded. “Yeah. We can safely assume that.” He sighed. “We need a plan. We need to get out of the country.”

  “No,” Mischa argued. “We need to find and kill Krauss. He is here somewhere. He is still a threat.”

  “We have no idea what he’ll do now or where he’ll go.” Zero had hoped that by yanking out the suppressor, Krauss would remember the bombs. He’d been overzealous. He hadn’t thought it through. And the bombs had gone off anyway.

  “What he’ll do now is no concern of ours,” Mischa said forcefully. “Our goal was to find and kill Stefan Krauss. We know he is here, in this city. We haven’t been this close to him since he murdered Maria.”

  A flash of anger rose in Zero, but he stifled it. It wasn’t anger at Mischa. It was anger at himself; he’d had the chance twice now to kill Krauss, to just end it, and he hadn’t.

  He rubbed his eyes and then gestured to the phone.“Have you checked the news?” he asked her. “Any word on casualties?”

  “Don’t do that,” Mischa scolded. “You did not plant those bombs.”

  No. Not directly. But people were dead, and Zero felt like it was, at least in some way, his fault.

  “We need to get out of the country,” he said again. “Find Sara and Maya. Get somewhere safe, away from everyone.” Away from Bright, and his people…

  The phone rang from the bar top. Mischa silenced the tone without a second glance. But Zero leaned over to see if it was Penny again.

  It was not. The display read “Unknown Caller.”

  Same as it did when he answered B
ixby’s phone in Rome.

  He picked it up.

  “Don’t answer,” Mischa warned.

  He had to.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, Zero.” The voice was male, deep, didn’t sound like it was much older than he was.

  “How did you get this number?” he demanded.

  “Please don’t insult your own intelligence by assuming I can’t find you anytime I want to,” Bright said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “Yeah. I took away your new toy.”

  Bright scoffed. “Hurl all the quips you want, you know just as well as I do that you’ve just created something dangerous. I had him under control—”

  “Under your control,” Zero corrected. “You had a mindless terrorist at your fingertips.”

  “And you unleashed him.”

  Zero’s jaw clenched. He had no retort to that. “I’m not interested in talking to you. Goodbye—”

  “As it happens,” Bright said quickly, “our interests find themselves somehow aligned.”

  Zero had a feeling he was taking bait, but still he asked. “How so?”

  “Well, Krauss is dangerous to me. You already want him dead. I happen to know where he’ll go.”

  “And where is that?”

  “He’s going to leave Cairo. Or try to. He has a new target in mind.”

  “Who?” Zero demanded.

  Bright sighed. “Me.”

  “He told you that?”

  “In so many words.”

  This conversation was already growing tiresome. “Either you tell me what he said, or I’m hanging up…”

  “He said he’s supposed to kill someone, and he knows who. Then he said, ‘the mastermind.’”

  This time Zero scoffed. Bright’s hubris knew no bounds. “And that’s you?”

  “Who else would it be?”

  “So you want me to go after him and kill him so that he doesn’t come kill you. Why would I do that? Why wouldn’t I let him come kill you, and then kill him? He’d be doing me a favor.”

  “Because,” Bright said, “I’ll do you a better one. I’ll call the whole thing off.”

  Zero frowned. “What whole thing?”

  “Again, you insult my intelligence and your own. I know you kidnapped Shaw. I know Shaw folded and told you things. You know that I was asked to eliminate anyone who knew about the program. You know it was my people that took out your doctors, and your friend in Italy.”