Decoy Zero

by Jack Mars

  “Yes?” A curt male voice crackled to her right. She nearly jumped; she’d expected the door to open, but it seemed there was an intercom system worked into the brick that she hadn’t noticed.

  Get your head in the game, Lawson.

  She pressed the white button on the panel. “Um… is this Dr. Bliss? Dr. Howard Bliss?”

  “Who is asking?” the voice asked impatiently. “Are you a student?”

  A student…? Oh. He can see me. She glanced upward—the small black dome of a security camera stared down on her. From inside, all the doctor saw was a young woman on his doorstep.

  “No,” she told the intercom. “Not a student. I’m…” She had to come up with something fast that would get him to the door. “My name is Mary. My father is a patient of yours. Was a patient of yours. I have a question, and I promise it will only take a moment of your time.”

  “Who? Which patient?”

  “Please, sir.” Maya put on her best pouting voice, though she realized it had been a while since she’d used it. “I’d rather not have this talk like this. It’s something of an emergency. Just one minute.” To lay it on thicker, she decided to try to appeal to his self-worth. “I was told you’re the best neurosurgeon in the city. Maybe the whole state. Or am I mistaken?”

  Bliss sighed audibly through the intercom. “Just… give me a moment.”

  Bingo. Maya quickly rubbed two knuckles in her eyes to make them appear tearful and red. For good measure she unzipped her purse as well, just in case she needed to reach into it quickly.

  But you won’t. You won’t need to.

  A moment later a deadbolt clicked and the door was pulled open hastily. Maya was a bit taken aback by the man on the other side; he was older than she imagined, easily into his sixties, thoroughly gray, wearing honest-to-goodness silk pajamas and a red robe with lapels, as if he had some sort of Hugh Hefner aspirations.

  “Young lady,” he said through his teeth, “this is very unusual and I was just about to go to bed. You have precisely one minute to tell me why you’ve bothered me at this hour.”

  “I need to know about a former patient of yours,” she said quickly. “A man named Connor.”

  “Connor? Connor what?”

  “I… I don’t know,” Maya admitted.

  Dr. Bliss narrowed his eyes at her. “You said this was about your father, yet you don’t know his last name? What’s your last name?”

  “He’s not my father. But please, you must know something about what happened—”

  “There is a thing known as physician-patient confidentiality,” he spat. “Even if I knew who you were talking about, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything. And since you cannot even tell me who you are, I have absolutely no obligation to share anything with you. Please leave!”

  With that, the doctor slammed the door in her face—or tried to. As he pushed it shut, Maya stepped forward quickly and wedged a shoe in the frame just in time for the door to close on her foot.

  “Wait!” she demanded.

  Dr. Bliss scoffed at her in shock. “That’s it.” He reached into a pocket of his red velvet robe and pulled out a cell phone. “I’m calling the police.”

  Maya wasn’t sure what came over her. The sight of the phone, his dismissal of her, the hours she spent getting here and in frustratingly slow traffic, it all seemed to congeal into anger in her chest.

  With the palm of one hand she shoved the door open roughly, sending the doctor stumbling back a step. She swung out her right hand, swatting at the phone. It clattered several feet away onto a carpet.

  Her left hand plunged into the purse hanging from her shoulder, fingers wrapping around the grip of the Glock. As she kicked the door closed again behind her, the gun came out. It made her physically nauseous to point it at an innocent man, even if she knew it wasn’t loaded.

  You don’t know that he’s innocent, she reminded herself.

  The doctor stared at her in horror. “What is this?” he said hoarsely. “A robbery?”

  “No. I just want information. I don’t want to shoot you.”

  “Then don’t!” the doctor pleaded. “My wife… she’s upstairs. Asleep. Please don’t hurt her. Or me.”

  “I just want information,” Maya reminded him. “And I think you’re going to be honest with me, right?”

  Bliss nodded fervently.

  “Okay. For starters, are there cameras in here?”

  He shook his head. “No. None here. Only on the stoop, and at the back door. None inside. We value our privacy.”

  “Good.” Maya glanced around. They were in a high-ceilinged foyer, a chandelier over their heads and a set of stairs going up to the second level. To her right was an office; to her left was some kind of parlor or sitting room. “Let’s go talk in there.”

  Dr. Bliss stepped backward, not taking his eyes off of Maya or the gun as he retreated into the parlor.

  “Take a seat in that armchair,” she instructed. He did so. “Thank you. Now I’m going to ask you some questions. Please be honest.”

  “Yes.” Dr. Bliss nodded again. “I will.”

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Nearly five years ago—four years and ten months, to be exact—you were paid a sum of one hundred sixty thousand dollars from a consulting firm. You and I both know that the firm was a front for a government agency slush fund—”

  “No,” Bliss refuted. “No, no. That money was for my expertise! It was for textbooks. A series of medical textbooks that I helped compile and edit.”

  “Textbooks,” Maya repeated flatly. She recalled how often during her childhood her own father, whose CIA cover had been a career as an adjunct history professor at the time, would go away for “conferences” and “research.” He too had claimed to contribute to textbooks. It seemed a popular cover story for academic assets to the agency. “That’s a lie and we both know it. What did I say about honesty, Doctor?”

  Maya pressed the barrel of the Glock to his knee. Bliss sucked in a breath as his eyes clenched closed and every muscle in him stiffened. Of course the gun wasn’t loaded—

  But I never took the round out of the chamber.

  She quickly pulled the pistol away, another wave of nausea pounding at her gut. She had control here, over the situation and over herself, but just the thought of putting a loaded gun against flesh without the intent to pull the trigger was too much for her.

  She remembered something her dad once told her, when he had taught her to handle a gun. You don’t ever point it at someone if you don’t mean to use it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to hurt you. But I do want the truth. That money was not for textbooks or expertise or research. It was from the CIA, in exchange for something you did for them.”

  The doctor’s chest was heaving now. He gulped. “Who sent you? How do you know all this?”

  “No one sent me. No one else knows about this.” Maya thought it best to try to ease the doctor’s mind if she was going to get real answers out of him, even if it meant lying about the nature of her mission. “Beyond me, you have nothing to fear. It took me this long just to get to you, and I intend to see this through. You did something for them, and I believe it involved a man named Connor.”

  Dr. Bliss hung his head until his chin nearly touched his chest and he sighed resignedly, the way people often did when cornered in a lie. “Not Connor,” he corrected her. “Connors. Agent Seth Connors.”

  “What did you do to him, Dr. Bliss?”

  The doctor shook his head. “If you’re on this crusade, then you already know, don’t you?”

  Nope, not a clue. But she couldn’t very well tell him that. “I’d rather hear it from you than give you the opportunity to just agree with whatever I say. Walk me through it.”

  Bliss rubbed his forehead. “All right. But you must know, I never intended the outcome. If I’d known, I never would have agreed.”

  Maya bit back the quizzical frown and merely nodded once. “From the
beginning.”

  “There was a chip.” The doctor folded his hands in his lap, suddenly looking more like a vulnerable schoolchild than a respected medical professional. “A microchip, developed by the CIA. They contracted me because I was the best with some fairly new robotic surgery techniques at the time. I accepted it because… well, frankly, because I thought the very concept was a fiction and needed to see for myself.”

  “What was fiction about it?” Maya prodded.

  “Memory control,” Bliss said quietly. “Or, more accurately, memory suppression.”

  This time Maya couldn’t help her expression of surprise. Of course she’d heard the urban myths that the US government had been experimenting with mind control and memory, but of every possibility that she might have imagined, that wasn’t among them.

  “The chip was supposed to only suppress certain memories,” Bliss continued. “You see, Agent Connors was a volunteer. He’d lost a child, a daughter I believe, in a car accident.”

  “And he wanted to forget her?” Maya asked, appalled.

  “I don’t pretend to know that kind of pain,” said Bliss, “and I can only assume you wouldn’t either.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I performed the procedure,” Bliss told her simply. “I was aided by a nurse and a CIA engineer, one of the chip’s inventors. It was relatively simple, actually. But when Connors awoke… well, you must understand that the chip was a prototype, the first of its kind. There were bound to be certain setbacks—”

  “What sort of setbacks?” she demanded.

  Bliss hung his head again. “Connors’s entire memory was erased.”

  Maya could only stare. She had a thousand questions—chief among them being why her dad was after this former agent at all when he clearly seemed to have been a victim—but couldn’t seem to form any of them.

  “He still had perfect physical function,” Bliss noted. “No loss in motor skills or even language. He knew how to load a gun flawlessly, how to cook a meal, how to drive a car. But he could not recall anything about who he was. Not even his own name. Everything that made him him was simply gone.”

  “That’s monstrous,” Maya said quietly. She was right; this man was not innocent at all, and suddenly the thought of holding a loaded gun to his knee was not as unappealing as it had been a minute earlier. “Was it permanent?”

  “…In a way,” Bliss said carefully. “After the failure, the agency wanted us to remove the chip to see if Connors would recover his memory. However, I argued that doing so could result in more damage, like physical impediments or further mental impairment. The engineer on the project agreed with me.”

  “So you left it in his head.” Maya scoffed. She wasn’t sure what was worse: putting it in there in the first place or the refusal to remove it. “What then? Did they kill him?”

  Bliss shook his head. “Of course not. In order to improve the next prototype, they needed to monitor him for any changes, for better or for worse. Despite the chip not working in the intended way, its stability was still important to the endeavor.”

  Maya shook her head. “They kept him alive with no memory of who he is. No idea who his family and loved ones are. Everything he knew was gone, but they had to monitor him?”

  “Young lady,” Dr. Bliss said with some small force behind it. “Mary, was it? You’re beginning to sound like he would have been better off with a bullet in his head instead of the chip.”

  Maybe she was. But that wasn’t the goal right now. “So he’s still alive. Where?”

  “You’re asking me? I have no idea where they put him.”

  Yet even as he said it, Maya noticed that his gaze faltered. His pupils dilated slightly, flickering to the left as they did.

  “You’re lying.” The doctor knew where Agent Connors had been stowed away by the CIA, she was sure of it. “You accepted a six-figure payment to cripple a man’s memory and take his entire life away from him. You’d have to be a sociopath to just walk away from that. You don’t strike me as one.”

  “I can’t,” Bliss murmured. “I can’t tell you. They’ll kill me.”

  “And what, do you think this is a toy?” Maya threatened, waving the Glock in his face.

  “You won’t shoot me.” Even as he said it he didn’t sound entirely confident. “You need the information I have. And if you tried to wound me, my wife and neighbors would hear the shot and call the police.”

  Dammit. Of course Maya had no intention of shooting anyone, but now he’d gone and called her bluff. Her mind raced; all she needed was one more piece of the puzzle and she could get out of there. “This will all be far easier for everyone if you just tell me—”

  “Howard?”

  Maya and Bliss both turned their heads at the sound of a female voice calling down the stairs.

  “Howard, are you down there? I heard voices. Is someone here?”

  Maya nodded curtly to him and whispered, “Answer her. Make it good.”

  He cleared his throat. “Um… yes, Sharon. I’m down here. A student came by with a… an important question.”

  “At this hour?” Her footfalls were on the stairs.

  Bliss’s eyes widened in terror. “Please. Don’t hurt her.”

  “Then tell me what I want to know.” Maya lifted the Glock, aiming it through the open doorway of the parlor, at the empty space where Sharon Bliss would be any moment.

  “Please!” Bliss whispered hoarsely.

  “Tell me, or I put a bullet in her.” Maya clenched her jaw. She had no intention of shooting the woman, but she had to make it look good.

  “Fine! Fine. I’ll write it down. Don’t hurt her.”

  Maya shoved the gun back into her open purse. In almost the same instance, a woman stepped into her view from the parlor. Mrs. Bliss had high cheekbones and discerning narrow eyes.

  “Oh, hello!” Maya said cheerfully. “So sorry to disturb you so late. I had an important question for Dr. Bliss, and I happened to be in the neighborhood.” Before Sharon could ask anything further, Maya turned to the doctor. “Thanks again, I really appreciate the help. Can you write that prognosis down for me so I don’t forget?” She reached into her purse for a pen and a scrap of paper, finding a stray pharmacy receipt.

  “Uh… yes,” he said breathlessly, seemingly still reeling. “Yes. Of course. Just one moment, Sharon, and then we can go back upstairs.” He walked with Maya to the foyer. “What assurance do I have that you’re being honest? That you’re the only one that knows?” he whispered.

  “None but my word,” Maya told him honestly. She handed him the pen.

  He scribbled down the address. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  “The feeling is mutual.” She took the pen and the receipt from him, and read the barely legible doctor scratch on the back.

  John Graham. 501 Willow Street, Columbus OH

  “He doesn’t go by the same name anymore,” Bliss pointed out. “Obviously. And I can’t guarantee he’s still there.”

  Ohio. The man was in Ohio, easily a nine-hour drive if she didn’t stop at all. Suddenly she felt a lot more tired than she’d been when she arrived.

  “For what it’s worth,” the doctor said quietly, “I do regret it. Deeply. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him.”

  Maya wanted to tell him that his sentiment was empty and meaningless to her, because Seth Connors, or John Graham, or whatever name he went by, didn’t have the privilege of remembering anyone daily, for better or worse, thanks to Dr. Bliss. But she didn’t say anything in reply. Instead she left wordlessly, heading back out into the frigid night and across the street to the Skylark. She let the engine warm up for a few minutes; the visit hadn’t taken long, but it was still bitter cold out.

  She felt exhausted. There was no way she was going to be able to drive to Columbus in one shot. At least get out of the city, she told herself. Find a cheap motel, catch a few hours of sleep, and finish the drive tomorrow.

  She had to se
e this through. She had no idea what she would say to a man that wouldn’t remember who he was—but he might be able to tell her what her dad might want with him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Zero was uncomfortable.

  The single engine of Hannibal’s 1998 Cessna 206 was remarkably loud, so much so that even in the close quarters of the six-seat cabin they had to either shout to each other or remain silent, largely choosing the latter for the duration of the flight. Fortunately the distance from the airstrip in Addis Ababa to their seaside destination in Mogadishu was only about twelve hundred kilometers, or roughly seven hundred fifty miles, so takeoff to wheels-down would be just a little over two hours.

  Assuming we get there in one piece. The plane dipped precipitously, causing Zero’s stomach to lurch, and the wings wobbled a bit before evening out again. From the pilot’s seat ahead of them, Hannibal flashed a thumbs-up to indicate no worries.

  Zero would have preferred to have Alan flying; he’d even volunteered to do so, which Hannibal had swiftly denied with a curt reply of “My plane, I fly.” He would have definitely preferred the Gulfstream and the practiced hands of Chip Foxworth, but they all understood without it needing to be said that landing in Mogadishu with a luxury jet that was usually reserved for royalty and high-tier celebrities was the absolute definition of “conspicuous.”

  And so he sat, strapped in with a seatbelt that he knew would do very little in the event of a crash, and hoped that the end of Agent Zero would not be at the hands of a smuggler who clearly did not have a pilot’s license.

  He reviewed their plan in his head to distract himself. It was simple enough; Hannibal would get them into the port under the guise of his crew, claiming that he needed a boat to pull off an important arms deal. Something small, light, and fast. With a little luck, that would get them close enough to the water to get a visual if the stolen boat and railgun were there. They had all studied the schematic en route to Addis Ababa and had a pretty good idea of what it looked like. Any visual confirmations would get discreetly tagged with a magnetic tracking device, supplied by Penny, and the information would then be supplied to the battleships from Diego Garcia to chase them down.