Hunting Zero

by Jack Mars

  A small voice at the back of his mind shouted a warning, told him that the assassin was getting inside his head, but he ignored it. The image of the glinting blade on either of his children’s throats was too much to keep him thinking straight. He did not even realize that he was shouting unintelligibly, grunting louder in frustration with each near miss. Rais danced left and right, waiting for an opening, an opportunity.

  Wait. Watch him. He’s keeping his head turned. Reid feigned a swing and instead jumped backward two steps, breathing hard. The assassin seemed slightly winded as well, but he still wore his malicious grin—turned slightly to his left.

  He’s keeping his right eye on me. Reid understood immediately. The roundhouse kick to the face must have detached his retina or otherwise caused some amount of damage to Rais’s left eye. He had to keep his head turned to see Reid attack from that side.

  He circled slowly, like a shark, sidestepping to the left. As he did, Rais stepped in time to his right, keeping his head tilted further than he should have needed. For several seconds they circled, each waiting for the other to make a move.

  Stay on his left. Reid moved steadily, refusing to make the move. His anger was still palpable, throbbing in his chest, every limb aching to take a shot, but his brain sent signals forcing them to hold. Wait. Watch. And then…

  A shadow of agitation flickered across the assassin’s face. Rais swiped across from the right and Reid leaned away from it—but it was a false lead. Instead of swiping outward, Rais tossed the knife to his left hand and jabbed forward. Reid tried to counter his weight to the other side quickly enough to avoid it, but the thrust came faster.

  The knife pierced his abdomen just a finger’s span to the right of his belly button. He twisted away before the curved tip penetrated more than an inch or two, but it was still plenty enough to send scorching pain throughout his torso.

  He backpedaled several feet, taking small quick steps as he examined the wound with his fingertips. He refused to take his eyes off the assassin, but Rais held his ground, apparently relishing drawing blood.

  It’s shallow. His fingers came back slick and sticky. Bleeding badly, but shallow. The abdominal wall and subcutaneous layers are more than an inch thick. He didn’t puncture anything. Reid didn’t know if that was true or if it was something his mind was trained to tell himself to keep going—but it hardly mattered in the moment. This was a fight to the death.

  Rais approached slowly, the knife loose in his grip. The bloody tip was pointed at Reid’s heart.

  He’s going to fight dirty. You have to fight dirty too. Words he had once said to Maya flashed through his mind: Don’t fight fair. Do whatever you need to do. He had to do that now if he was ever going to see or speak to his daughters again.

  Maneuver around him. Force him to turn his head.

  Reid dropped the blackjack. It landed on the stone with a heavy thud. The pain in his abdomen was making his limbs weak, which would make his blows sluggish. Besides, he didn’t need it for what he was planning.

  Rais paused, raising an eyebrow at the move. He kept the hunting knife in his loose grip, holding it with just his fingertips. Reid read the body language; the assassin was going to attempt a flick of a slash at a soft part of his body. Likely his throat. If he was successful, it would be the end of their duel. There would be no coming back from that.

  He gritted his teeth and let Rais get a bit closer. Then he lurched forward and feigned to the right. Rais turned his head, tracking the movement with the knife tip—and Reid crouched low, bounced off his foot, back to the left and into the assassin’s blind spot. He stuck out his elbow as he crossed in front and jammed it into Rais’s solar plexus. The younger man let out a surprised whoosh of breath as he doubled over, giving Reid the precious two seconds he needed to slump his shoulders and shrug out of his brown blazer.

  As it slipped down the length of his forearms he grabbed the ends of both sleeves and spun around behind Rais, wrapping the blazer around the assassin’s body and yanking upward. Years-old training flooded flawlessly back into his muscle memory—he was using it as a kusari-fundo, a Japanese technique that utilized a length of chain, rope, or, in this case, a blazer.

  He forced both of Rais’s arms up into the air at an awkward angle and twisted the sleeves around his throat, and then brought them together at the nape of his neck. Reid turned his body and dropped to one knee, at the same time pulling the gathered sleeves over his shoulder with his full weight behind the throw.

  Rais’s entire body left the ground with a sharp gasp of shock. For a moment he was weightless, his head on Reid’s shoulder and his legs straight up in the air.

  Then he came crashing down, flat on his stomach and face. The dull slap of flesh against stone was accompanied by a sharp crack of bone as something in his body gave to the unyielding surface.

  Breathing hard, Reid reached to snatch up the hunting knife—or tried to. A hand grabbed at his wrist and yanked, sending him stumbling to regain his balance. Rais twisted and kicked at Reid in a blow that ordinarily would have merely glanced off of him, if not for its trajectory. His foot landed squarely on the abdominal stab wound.

  He staggered again and cried out in pain as Rais scrambled to his feet and shrugged out of the tangled blazer. The assassin swung low, scooping the air with two fingers extended, as if he were swinging a bowling ball.

  Both fingers found purchase in Reid’s open wound.

  Reid’s mouth fell open in a wide, silent scream. No sound came; his breath caught in his throat with the inexorable pain. Rais’s index and middle finger dug deeper into him, holding firm like steel. Reid wrapped both hands around the assassin’s arm, trying in vain to pull free, but his limbs quickly drained of all strength.

  Rais leaned into it, pushing forward, his bloody, pulpy mess of a face only inches from Reid’s. His wild green eyes were unyielding, his teeth gritted and lips pulled back in a snarl.

  Reid reached for Rais’s throat, his face, anything to stop him, but he had no power left in his grip. All that was left was the pain, radiating from his core to every part of him.

  In response, Rais swung his skull forward in a powerful headbutt. Reid couldn’t pull away, so instead he turned his head and the blow landed solidly across his cheek and jaw, sending his head lolling backward and reeling. He barely felt the fist that connected a moment later with the side of his face.

  This is it. The last thing he would ever see was this maniacal fanatic’s bloody, snarling visage. Not his girls. There would be no saving them now. He had failed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  Rais grunted and pushed forward again, sending a fresh shockwave through Reid’s body. He gasped as he stepped backward in a vain attempt to alleviate the pressure.

  His right heel touched something on the ground behind him.

  He did not dare look back, but he knew what it was. The security guard’s body. His foot was against it, and Rais was unaware, his bared teeth and wild eyes unblinking.

  Reid carefully lifted his foot and stepped backward, hoping he would step far enough to clear the body. As he moved, Rais moved with him, forward, maintaining his iron-like grip on the stab wound.

  Reid cleared the body.

  Rais did not.

  The assassin’s snarl melted as his foot pushed against the downed guard. He stumbled forward. His grip on Reid came loose as his hands shot out to catch himself. Reid jumped to the side as Rais fell forward, tripping over the body he had left there.

  Everything hurt, and he had barely an ounce of strength left in him, but he was free. He had little chance of running from Rais now. Instead he hurried painfully toward the only sanctuary he could see: he clambered on his hands and feet up the stone stairs of Minceta Tower.

  As he reached the dark entranceway he glanced over his shoulder to see Rais pulling himself to his feet. The assassin was slow to get up. He was injured as well; the shoulder throw must have at least hurt him and, with any luck, broken something that wo
uld impede him.

  Only a few feet beyond the door inside the tower was inky darkness, strangely welcoming, the stone cool to the touch beneath his hands. Reid felt along the floor and rounded wall, creeping forward inches at a time, half-dragging his nearly useless body behind him. He wheezed in pain with every breath and mentally cursed himself for it; he would be easy to locate in the darkness if he couldn’t stay silent.

  Behind him came a panting heave of a sigh as Rais reached the top of the stairs. A glimpse at the doorway showed him the assassin’s silhouette, heavily favoring his right leg and holding one hand over his ribs.

  Even so, Rais hissed a quiet laugh. “You’ve spent so much time… coming for me.” His phrases were punctuated with an inward, pained rasp through his gritted teeth. “But now, you run from me.”

  Reid bit the inside of his cheek and gasped shallow breaths to keep quiet, continuing to feel his way around Minceta Tower. The medieval fortress was empty inside, merely stone walls and stairs, weathered by time and tourism. He reached a rounded corner and felt his way around it, putting out both arms at nearly full span to find himself in a short corridor.

  “A train station in Denmark… the ice rink in Sion… twice now you have failed to kill me… and I, you… there won’t be a third.” His voice was getting closer now; Rais was moving faster than Reid.

  As he pulled himself along the corridor the relief of stone began to take shape before his eyes. They were adjusting to the darkness—no, there was a light source somewhere nearby, dim but present. He rose to his feet and shuffled forward, trying to quicken his pace.

  “Look at what it took to get you to me.” Closer still. Rais had reached the corridor. “What I had to do. To take what is most precious to you in this world.”

  The corridor opened; to Reid’s left he could see the faint outline of a narrow stone staircase leading upward, the aperture at the top illuminated in bluish moonlight. The top of the tower.

  Rais’s shambling footfalls ceased. Reid paused as well, holding his breath in the absolute silence of the tower. “Do you want to know how I found them?” His voice lowered to a whisper. “Do you know how I knew you, Reid Lawson?”

  An involuntary shudder crept up Reid’s spine at the mention of his name, his real name. Ever since discovering the girls missing, he hadn’t stopped long enough to consider how the Amun assassin had found his home in Alexandria. He had assumed it was a CIA mole, like the former director Steve Bolton, who had provided Rais with the information.

  Every instinct told him to keep moving, to climb the stairs. Reach the top of the tower. Hold the high ground. The narrow stairs would make for a defensible position, even in his state. Yet he could not move, and not for lack of strength. He was uncontrollably compelled to hear it.

  “It was your wife.”

  Crouched in the shadow of the staircase, Reid froze, certain that he misheard the words.

  “Kate Lawson.”

  No. There was no way. Kate didn’t know about me. About my past.

  “You don’t believe me,” said Rais quietly. “She worked at the museum. Restorations department.”

  Reid shivered, suddenly feeling very, very cold.

  “At the time… I didn’t know who she was.”

  No. A vision of Kate danced across his conscious. Smiling, happy. Alive. Make him stop.

  “I didn’t know the… catalyst that it might be.”

  Reid’s legs suddenly felt weak. He dropped to his knees on the stone.

  “I didn’t even know her name. All I had was a photo, and a location.”

  “Stop,” Reid hissed to the darkness. “You’re lying.”

  Rais chuckled. “No, Kent Steele. Agent Zero. Reid Lawson. Whoever you really are.” He paused for a long moment. “Amun sent me to kill your wife.”

  “It’s not true,” he moaned. “It’s not.” But even as he said it, a headache spun into the front of his skull, and a new memory flashed into his mind—no matter how much he hopelessly wished it wouldn’t.

  You’re at the black site, designation H-6. The Special Forces troop stationed there calls it Hell Six. You believe Sheikh Mustafar knows more than he’s telling, but interrogation tactics are proving fruitless.

  Then—there’s a call for you. It’s Deputy Director Cartwright. Your boss.

  He doesn’t mince words.

  Your wife, Kate, had died.

  “You…” Reid stammered.

  Local PD responded. The official report was that she had suffered a sudden, devastating stroke. But you know better.

  It happened as she was leaving work, walking to her car.

  Sudden paralysis of the diaphragm that led to respiratory failure.

  She simply stopped breathing.

  “God, no…”

  They had gotten to her. Your target, the organization you knew only as the Fraternity back then… they had sent someone to the US, just for her.

  To send you a message. You were getting too close.

  Suddenly a deluge of fragmented memories flooded back to him concurrently: Kate’s autopsy revealed that she had ingested a high level of TTX—tetrodotoxin, a powerful poison that causes respiratory paralysis. His wife had died alone on the sidewalk, appearing to have choked on nothing at all.

  Almost immediately, the CIA hacked the database and altered the records to reflect an embolism that caused a sudden ischemic stroke. The lie that he, Reid Lawson, had genuinely believed for the last two years.

  The same lie he had told his children. His wife’s parents. Her sister.

  And yet Kent Steele knew the truth, and had kept it buried, repressed, shoved down deep.

  Your mind fills in the gaps, Maria had once told him about the memory suppressor. Your brain makes up the details for you.

  He had convinced himself of the lie, because the heartache of losing her was already too much. But her murder was his fault.

  Agent Kent Steele knew that then. Mad with grief, he had gone on his murderous spree across Europe and the Middle East, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. He tortured anyone who might have had information. He promised them amnesty for intel, and then he killed them anyway.

  The agency had tried to call him back in. He ignored them.

  On his knees on the cold stone floor of Minceta Tower, Reid heaved a single, racking sob that boiled up from deep inside him and escaped his cracked lips.

  He heard shuffling footsteps in the darkness. This is what that murderer wants, he realized vaguely. Rais really had destroyed his family; not when he took the girls, but two years earlier. He’s been waiting, biding his time to remind me of the truth. Waiting for me to be at my weakest.

  He would get no such satisfaction.

  A savage fury rose up in him. He wanted to tear this man apart, to rend him limb from limb. To watch the light die in his eyes. This killer—this monster—had taken the most precious gift he had ever received in his life, the one that he never felt he fully deserved. The mother of his children. The greatest love of his life.

  He understood now. The rumors of his rampage that he couldn’t comprehend, the allegations of ferocity that he previously could not fathom… he understood it all now.

  With a primal shout he lurched forward in the direction of the shuffling footfalls, keeping his head low and his arms outstretched in front of him. There was still pain, pain in his abdomen and face and limbs, but it paled in comparison to the fresh anguish in his heart.

  Reid struck the assassin in his broken midsection with a shoulder and Rais yelped, but Reid didn’t stop there. He drove the vicious tackle onward until both men slammed agonizingly into a stone wall of the corridor. Colors swam in Reid’s vision as they both fell to the floor in a heap, but again he pushed physical boundaries aside as he groped at the air until his hands found purchase around Rais’s throat.

  He squeezed with all the strength he could muster. Beneath him Rais belched choking gasps as his fingers clawed at Reid’s arms, his face, his neck. He leaned forward, pushin
g his body weight into the stranglehold, animalistic grunts from Reid’s own throat mingling with the dying rasps of his wife’s killer.

  He was going to crush this man’s windpipe, and then he was going to listen to the mellifluous sounds of him choking to death.

  Reid was barely aware that the hands had fallen away from his face before a solid object struck the side of his head with such force that blinding white flashed before his eyes like lightning. Dazed, he loosened his grip and fell slightly aside—enough for Rais to push out from beneath him and scramble away on his hands and knees.

  Reid’s head throbbed. His vision blurred and his fingers came away wet from his temple. A loose stone, he reasoned. Too hard to have been a fist. The fuzziness subsided enough for him to see Rais pulling himself up the stone stairs, bathed in blue moonlight, toward the top of the tower with wheezing, labored breaths.

  “No,” he growled. “You’re not getting away from me.” Reid pulled himself to his feet with a painful moan and staggered after him. He leaned most of his body weight against the black iron railing as he forced himself up, step by step.

  Rais had reached the top of the tower, but was nowhere to be seen. Lying in wait, Reid thought, reminding himself that the assassin was armed with a stone. He didn’t care. He was going to see this through, one way or another. At the top of the stairs he stepped through the open doorway and into the moonlight—and then immediately staggered backward again as a fist came sailing down, a sizeable chunk of stone within it.

  The rock missed his skull by fractions of an inch and glanced off his shoulder instead. Reid responded in kind, twisting his body to the left and landing a solid jab to Rais’s nose. It flattened beneath his fist and the assassin fell backward.

  The top of Minceta Tower was a wide, circular stone rooftop surrounded by slotted parapets. Typically it served as one of the most popular vantage points in Dubrovnik, if not all of Croatia, but on this night, it would serve only as the site of death for one of the two men who fought with their last ounces of strength atop the seaside fortress.