Target Zero

by Jack Mars

  The doctor was hardly listening. He glanced around in wonder at the half-disassembled lab. “This man mutated one of the deadliest viruses known to mankind in a dirty French basement.” He shook his head sadly. “What a waste of immense talent. Imagine what he might have done if he hadn’t been brainwashed by these… animals. ”

  Barnard suddenly sucked in a breath and rushed to the far end of the basement, where a closed laptop computer sat upon a workbench. He pushed the lid open and the screen awoke, displaying Cheval’s work: a cyclical RNA strand awash in vibrant hues, labeled with colorful tabs of notations in French. “My god,” Barnard sighed. “This was his process, his mutagenesis. If we can transmit this to the WHO, it will make a vaccine significantly faster.” He spun toward Reid. “The battery is dying. I need the power source, the plug…”

  Reid looked around quickly but saw no power adapter for the laptop. “No time. Use these.” He reached into his jacket and produced the glasses that Bixby had given him. “There’s a camera in the lenses.” Reid took out his phone and opened the CIA drive. “Put those on and record whatever you can. It’ll upload to the CIA.”

  Barnard did as Reid told him, slipping the glasses over his own round frames and frantically clicked through every available file that Adrian Cheval had left on the computer. Reid set his phone on the workbench next to the computer and had a quick look around for himself. The Syrians had taken most of the equipment; there was little to find besides the laptop and a few items on a shelf beyond it.

  Or maybe there is . Reid retrieved the fallen Syrian’s switchblade, even as the man continued to hurl curses his way, and used the blade to cut open the side of Cheval’s decontamination suit. He carefully slid his hand in, retrieved the virologist’s cell phone, and slipped it into his own pocket.

  As he rose again, he heard the telltale whoop of approaching sirens. “Time to go, Barnard.”

  “Just one moment, Agent—”

  “Now , Barnard.” Reid pressed a finger to his earpiece. “We found the virologist. He’s dead. The Syrians have the virus.” There was no answer. “Maria? Watson?” No one responded. “Come on, Barnard…”

  It was too late. He heard the screeching of tires above him as sirens screamed into the alley. A moment later the wailing klaxons were accompanied by slamming car doors and at least a half-dozen urgent voices shouting to each other in French.

  “Dammit,” Reid murmured. They couldn’t afford to waste time explaining what had happened to the police and getting their story verified. He needed to know what the others had found—and why they weren’t responding.

  The thin Syrian on the floor grunted. “You are American, yes?” he asked in Arabic. With some difficulty he pushed himself up onto one elbow, his other arm pinned beneath him. “C-I-A?” He enunciated each letter carefully and in English.

  Reid ignored him, keeping an eye on the doorway above at the top of the stairs. A figure appeared there, silhouetted by the sunlight behind him. “If anyone is down there,” the officer called out in French, “show yourselves slowly, and come up with your hands above your head.”

  “Dead,” Barnard muttered. The laptop’s battery had depleted. “I believe I got enough to be helpful.”

  “We’ve got other problems at the moment,” Reid told him. “Let’s go. I’ll do the talking.”

  The wiry Syrian on the floor, his leg bleeding amply, laughed hoarsely. “Your people and the French, they are not always so friendly.”

  “What is he saying?” Barnard asked as he pulled off the high-tech sunglasses.

  “Ignore him. Listen, we show them credentials and we tell them the truth about what happened here. Do not mention the virus though. It’s not here, and I don’t want to cause a panic…”

  “How will they feel,” the Syrian continued in Arabic, “when they discover their deaths were on your hands?”

  Reid spun on him angrily. “What are you talking about? Whose deaths?” Only the tailor and a single terrorist had been killed, and neither at his hand.

  The Syrian laughed again as he worked his other arm free from beneath his body. Clutched in his fist was a cell phone, and his thumb hovered over the send button.

  “No!” Reid lunged forward, but not in time.

  The Syrian terrorist pressed the green button, and the van outside exploded.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  The detonation sent a jolting shockwave through Reid’s body. He felt it before he even heard it, a deafening explosion that filled the doorway above them in a roiling fireball. Flames licked the stairs, and he felt the intense heat on his face, even as he covered it with his hands and fell to the ground. Debris showered down the basement stairs.

  Dr. Barnard sat up on the concrete floor, swaying slightly and working his jaw as if trying to speak. He was trying to speak; Reid could hear nothing but a ringing in his ears.

  Are you okay? he asked—or he tried to. He couldn’t hear his own voice over the high-pitched whine in his head. He tried again and coughed on dark smoke.

  He crawled over to the doctor, gripped his arm, and pointed upward. Barnard nodded vaguely and followed along, stumbling slightly, as they made their way to the now-charred stairs.

  The Syrian was either unconscious or dead. In the moment, Reid didn’t care which. He climbed the wooden stairs carefully, fearing that the explosion might have weakened any one of them.

  The van was wired. Probably in case of this exact situation, if any authorities came around with knowledge of what they were doing. That was why the Syrian in the van had attempted to interrogate him. He wanted to know if they would be expecting others. The terrorist in the basement could have detonated earlier and killed both him and Barnard, but he waited.

  He waited until he would have the most casualties. Not unlike the Imam’s virus-bred jihad, striking the most populous cities around the globe.

  Slowly but surely he and Barnard made it to the top of the stairs, though Reid immediately wished they hadn’t. The scene was utterly horrific. The van still blazed, engulfed in orange flames. Several bodies lay in the alley, some charred beyond recognition, and others bloodied from the bomb’s force.

  “…beyond heinous,” Reid heard Barnard say behind him. The ringing in his ears was subsiding. “I cannot believe that any people would want to do this to others.”

  “We have to call this in,” Reid said hoarsely. He reached into his pocket for his phone—but the device he pulled out wasn’t his. It was the virologist’s. His phone was still in the basement, on the workbench where he had set it while Barnard recorded screenshots of Cheval’s computer. “I have to go back down there—”

  “Agent, wait!” Barnard grabbed his arm. The southern façade of the building, the one closest to the van, was blown inward, and the second floor threatened to topple. Wood groaned as it bent, and there was only so far it would give. “You can’t. It could collapse. Take mine, but don’t go back in there.”

  The building groaned and shuddered. This time Reid grabbed the doctor’s arm, pulling him back as the entire roof of the two-story building slid slowly off its peak. It crashed into the burning van, sending a shower of embers that had both men shielding their faces.

  If the Syrian in the basement wasn’t dead yet, Reid reasoned, he would be soon when a few tons of rubble came crashing down.

  “Give me your phone.” Barnard handed it over, and Reid brought up the number for Langley. He had to report what had happened here before French authorities, or anyone else, got the wrong idea. No one alive outside of Virginia had any idea that he and his team were in France.

  He was about to hit the green send button when a thought struck him so hard he nearly dropped the phone. “Jesus,” he murmured. If the van was wired, it was because they were expecting trouble. And if that’s the case… Claudette Minot’s flat might be wired too.

  Reid broke into an immediate sprint.

  “Agent Steele!” Barnard followed as best he could. “Where are you going?”

 
; He didn’t have time to explain. It was only three blocks away. “Try to raise them on the radio!” he called back to Barnard. He ran as fast as he could, struggling to bring up the GPS on the doctor’s phone at the same time.

  “Agent Johansson? Agent Watson?” He heard Barnard’s strained voice behind him as he gained a longer lead on the CDC doctor. All the while the mantra ran through his head, Please no, please no, please no…

  He rounded a corner and practically skidded to a stop. Maria and Watson were there, standing on the sidewalk outside a row of connected homes, both looking bewildered. Maria’s expression dissolved into relief when she saw him—and then immediately into concern.

  “Kent, what was that?” she asked quickly. “Are you okay?”

  “What did you find?” he demanded.

  “Not much. The two phones, but only one man, and we don’t think he’s the Imam…”

  One man. That’s all it would take. Why else would they leave someone there?

  “Which unit?” He sprinted past them. “Which one?”

  “Kent, will you stop for just a second and tell us what happened?” she insisted.

  He didn’t need an answer; only one of the units had a wide-open front door. He bounded through it to see Agent Carver standing over a Middle Eastern man, who was seated calmly on the sofa of the living room.

  Carver glanced up at him and frowned. “Zero, what the hell was that noise?”

  Reid didn’t answer. There were two cell phones on the coffee table—and with Carver’s attention on Reid, the Syrian lunged forward suddenly, reaching for one of them. Reid leapt and tackled the man off the couch in a tangle of limbs. The phone skidded across the floor. Reid clambered to it while Carver put his knee into the Syrian’s back.

  He tore open the burner phone and yanked out the battery. Then, for good measure, he did the same with the other, a modern smartphone.

  Watson and Maria stood just inside and watched for a moment as he dismantled the two phones. Barnard appeared in the doorway, panting and leaning against the frame.

  “What the hell happened?” Watson asked.

  “You’re sure you didn’t find anything else in here?” he asked.

  “We tossed the whole place,” Maria said. “There was nothing. No virus, no evidence…”

  “No bombs?”

  She blinked at him. “No, Kent. We didn’t find any bombs. Jesus, is that what happened out there?”

  Reid rubbed his face and his fingers came back with gray streaks. He couldn’t imagine how he probably looked to them, half-crazed and covered in soot and dust. “The virologist is dead. The lab was being dismantled by the Syrians. They had a van, and it was wired. It must have been two pounds of C-4, maybe more. They detonated… just after the police showed up.”

  Maria covered her mouth with a hand.

  “How many?” Watson asked quietly.

  Reid shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. Three cruisers, I think… maybe six people, not including three terrorists.”

  “Christ.” Watson paced the length of the living room and back again. “And you couldn’t stop them?” he asked. “You let them blow it?”

  “I didn’t let them!” Reid nearly shouted. “I didn’t expect them to—”

  “Didn’t expect it.” Watson scoffed. “Did you at least search them? Detain them? How did they blow it if you did what you were supposed to do?”

  “I did what I was supposed to do,” Reid said slowly. His fist balled instinctively. He very much wanted to hit something, to find an outlet for his frustrations and adrenaline and failure, and Watson was standing right in front of him, bristled and agitated.

  “No, Zero, what you’re supposed to do is avoid international crises when we’ve already got one on our hands. Since we’ve been out here, you’ve caused two—”

  Reid had just about enough. He had just watched the tailor die, saw the bomb explode, and averted another near disaster, yet they were no closer to finding the virus. He didn’t have the patience or tolerance to stand there and take any more abuse.

  He took a step toward Watson and nearly raised his fist, but Maria intervened. She stepped between them, facing Reid, and stuck a finger in his face. “Calm down,” she ordered.

  Her slate-gray eyes bored into his as he stared down at her. His nostrils flared and he opened his mouth to protest, but she glared right back. “I said, calm down.”

  He let out a long breath that he didn’t realize he had been holding. Some of the tension eased from his shoulders.

  “This is not the time for us to fall apart,” Maria told the room. “Now obviously we’ve hit a dead end, so there are two things we need to do: report to Langley with what’s happened, and chat with our new Syrian friend.” She turned to Reid. “Will anyone be looking for us?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  Maria raised an eyebrow expectantly. “You don’t think ?”

  “No. No one will be looking for us.” Everyone who had seen him and Barnard at the tailor’s shop and the basement were now dead.

  Outside, emergency sirens screamed as fire and rescue personnel dealt with the fallout of the explosion a few blocks away.

  “It was a mistake coming here,” Watson griped. “We should get clear before the French authorities come around.”

  “I said no one knows we’re here,” said Reid. “Look, don’t you see? This was a setup. The Imam is smarter than we gave him credit for. He left his phone at Claudette Minot’s flat for a reason. It was the only way we had to track him, if we could. And if we found the girl, we would find Cheval. No one had bothered to remove his phone either. That van was wired as a failsafe. Maybe they weren’t expecting trouble, but they had a way to slow us down if we came.”

  “But we didn’t find any bombs here,” Carver said. He hefted the Syrian man off the carpeted floor and shoved him roughly back onto the sofa. “Only this guy.”

  Reid thought for a moment. He glanced down at the dormant halves of the two phones lying on the floor where he’d tossed them. If their speculation was right, one of them belonged to the Imam, and the other to Claudette Minot.

  “What if he wasn’t trying to blow anything?” Reid suggested. “What if he was trying to warn someone? The trail led back here. The van was carrying explosives. Maybe they didn’t expect us to catch up this quickly. The bomb in the van could have been intended for elsewhere.”

  “One way to find out.” Maria stooped and picked up the battery and the two parts of the burner phone. “I can check and see if there are any numbers in here.”

  “No way,” Watson interjected. “We could be wrong. That thing could still be a trigger to a bomb somewhere else.”

  “Well, there’s one way to find out.” Reid strode into the kitchen and looked around, searching through cabinets and drawers.

  “Hey.” He felt a hand on his shoulder and spun to find Maria behind him. “You seem a little shaken.”

  “I’m fine.” He didn’t find much; a roll of duct tape under the sink, along with some cleaning chemicals, and a set of knives on the counter next to a gas stovetop. That’s all I need.

  “We tried to radio you when the bomb went off,” she said quietly beside him. “You didn’t answer.”

  “I lost my phone.”

  “Where?”

  He hesitated. “Under a building.”

  She nodded slowly, as if that explained everything. In our line of work, I guess it does. Then, to his surprise, she took his face in both her hands and kissed him gently. “We’re going to find it, okay?”

  “You’re damn right we will,” Reid said. “Give me ten minutes with that guy and we’ll know everything he does.”

  They returned to the living room, where the other three were standing over the seated Syrian.

  “We managed to upload a video of the virologist’s work,” Barnard was telling Carver and Watson. “Assuming the CIA received it, it should help considerably in the manufacture of a vaccine.”


  “But you said it yourself, Doc,” Watson replied dourly. “It could take months to mass-produce and distribute it.”

  “Well… yes,” Barnard admitted. “I just thought… it could be helpful.”

  Reid could tell that Barnard was making an attempt, in his own way, to diffuse the tense mood. Their lead had been a bust; they had a single person to interrogate, and no further leads. Whatever the man on the sofa had to tell them would have to be their next step, so Reid vowed to make sure that it was the truth—by whatever means necessary.

  “I got a good look at our former virologist,” Reid announced. “It appeared he’s been dead for no more than a couple of hours. That means it is entirely possible that whoever has the virus is still in France. We’ll talk to Langley and let them make the call on whether or not they alert French authorities. But my concern right now isn’t how it’s getting into where it’s going. It’s how it’s getting out of France.”

  “I’ll put the call in to Cartwright and Riker,” Watson said.

  Reid grabbed the Syrian man by an arm and pulled him to his feet. “Come on,” he said in Arabic. “You and I are going to chat in the kitchen.” He half-dragged the man through the doorway. “Ten minutes,” he told his team.

  Though not directly responsible for what happened at the tailor’s shop, this man knew about it. And Reid was sure he knew other things, too.

  And I’m going to make sure you tell me everything you know.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  “Some people might start something like this by saying that there’s an easy way, and a hard way.” Reid spoke in Arabic for the benefit of his captive as he twisted the dial to turn on one of the rear burners of the gas range. It clicked twice and ignited in a ring of blue flames. “I’m not going to say that. There’s only one way: my way.”

  The Syrian sat in one of the dining room chairs, facing away from the table. His hands were bound at the wrists by duct tape, his ankles taped to the wooden legs and another strip over his thighs, lashing him to the chair. Yet his face was passive. If he was concerned, he didn’t show it.