Hunting Zero

by Jack Mars

  Reid knelt beside Rais before he could recover and planted one knee firmly on the assassin’s throat, as he had before with the supervisor at Port Jersey. He leaned on the leg, watching Rais’s face turn red and then purple, his green eyes wide and staring up at the night sky. In under a minute it would be over.

  Not just for him. Not just for me. For Kate. For my daughters…

  My daughters.

  It wasn’t over. It wouldn’t be over. The girls were still out there, and even when this was finished he would still have to find them. He couldn’t simply trust that the CIA or Interpol would locate them. He needed something to go on.

  As much as he wanted to end Rais’s life right then and there, the man still had at least one piece of information to give him. He removed his knee from the murderer’s throat and leaned close to his purple, bruised, and broken face.

  “Tell me where they landed,” he said quietly. “My girls. Where were they taken?”

  Rais replied with a wet gasp. Bloody spittle erupted from his lips.

  Reid lifted the assassin’s head with both hands and slammed it down onto the stones. Rais grimaced in agony, his eyes squeezed shut.

  “Where?” He slammed the killer’s head down again, harder this time. “Where?!”

  Rais’s split lips moved as he wheezed, trying form words. “Slo… vah…”

  “Slovakia? What city?” Reid demanded. “Kosice? Bratislava?”

  Rais gasped as he tried to suck in another breath.

  In sheer exasperation, Reid slammed his head down once more, leaving a round, red spatter against the stones. “Give me something,” he snarled through gritted teeth. “How do you contact them? Where are they headquartered? Your death can be slow and horrible. Or I can split your skull quickly.” He leaned closer, hissing into the assassin’s ear. “You took my daughters. You killed my wife, you son of a bitch. You owe me something.”

  “I… I did…”

  “Did what? What did you do?” Reid’s hands shook with rage. “What did you do with them?!”

  “Didn’t,” Rais rasped. He reached up with one shaky hand and gripped Reid’s shoulder, using it to slowly pull himself to a seated position.

  The assassin’s face was a bloody mess, his nose lying crooked and broken, one eye swollen to little more than a crescent. The back and side of his head was slick in the moonlight; his skull was cracked. He was no longer a threat. He was already a dead man. As Reid had threatened, it was only a matter of time.

  “Didn’t…” His voice was croaking and hoarse, and every breath came with a crackling hiss from his damaged throat. “Didn’t… kill her.”

  Reid scoffed and shoved his hand away violently. “You did. You told me you did.”

  “I was… sent.” He coughed and spat a mouthful of blood onto the stone. “But some… someone else… got there first.”

  “No.” Reid got to his feet, standing over the assassin, his fists balled at his sides. “You did it. I remember it now. Tetrodotoxin. You poisoned her.”

  Rais shook his head slowly. “Wish… I did. Would have… cut her throat. But… I don’t… poison.”

  He looked up at Reid and met his gaze with his one good eye. There was no discernible deceit behind it. Reid turned away from that eye, refusing to believe it. He’s lying. After everything he’s said and done… after all the lives he’s taken and the attempts on mine, I know he would say anything.

  But then… Rais had to know, had to feel that he was already dead. Kent Steele had won. The assassin was useless and broken. Reid pressed his fingers to his temples and forced himself to think, to try to conjure a memory of Rais, or anyone from Amun, ever using a poison like TTX.

  None came.

  It’s not his style. He kills with guns, knives, and his bare hands.

  Reid hissed another scoff before turning back to Rais. He grabbed two handfuls of the man’s black jacket and hefted him to his feet. Rais moaned torturously with the sudden movement, but Reid didn’t care. He was incensed, confused, and thoroughly maddened by his fallible memory. The lies. The deceit. The death.

  “Then who?” He shook Rais like a limp doll in his hands. “If it wasn’t you, then who?”

  Rais groaned again. His legs trembled beneath him, threatening to give out. One bloody hand reached up and clasped around Reid’s left fist. The assassin leaned forward, his head nearly coming to rest on Reid’s shoulder.

  “Don’t you know?!” Reid nearly screamed.

  “Yes.” He coughed blood onto the front of Reid’s shirt. “It was… CIA.”

  Before Reid could react, before he could even suck in another breath, Rais pushed both feet hard against the stones beneath them, his full weight leaning against Reid. They fell backward together, hitting the partition between parapets at waist level.

  Still clutching each other, the two men tumbled end over end off of Minceta Tower, falling forty feet through silent darkness to the unforgiving stone below.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  Maya held Sara close to her, one arm hugged around her younger sister’s shoulders as the white cargo van rumbled down a highway. To her right was the brown-skinned girl with the swollen eye from the plane, the one she had been calling Jersey. Across from her, seated on the floor, were three other girls. One of them stared at nothing in particular on the floor, never once lifting her gaze or attempting to communicate.

  The other two were clearly drugged, their eyes barely open or not at all, their heads lolling listlessly with every bump in the road.

  Once the plane from Nova Scotia had landed and the rear hatch opened, the girls had been immediately ushered out and into the back of two waiting vans. There were six men in all, reeking of cigarette smoke and carrying some form of weapon, pistols and submachine guns, and they split the girls into two groups.

  Mercifully, they had kept Sara and Maya together. How long that would last, she didn’t know.

  As soon as she was out of the plane’s hold, Maya stole glances to the left and right. Wherever they were, it was night, and there was no one else on the tarmac. A lonely freight terminal stood at a distance to the plane’s left; to the right, only darkness dotted with runway lights.

  Then the most bewildering thing had happened: Rais, who had accompanied them on the plane, split off from the group and simply walked away. He did not say a word—did not even look at them, not once, as he strode off across the dark tarmac.

  He simply left, and the girls were put into the van.

  Maya’s heart raced with panic as her mind raced with possibilities. It took her a few minutes to work it out, but she was able to make some suppositions from Rais’s abandonment of them. The first, and most crushing, was that they had likely not landed in Dubrovnik at all. Though she had no way of being certain, she was fairly sure that Croatia had been a red herring designed to throw the authorities, and their father, off the trail.

  The second thing she surmised, with no small amount of alarm, was that they had fulfilled their usefulness to the assassin, and he was now handing them over to these Slavic traffickers. They were no longer special; their names and relations meant nothing to these men. They were merely two more faces to do with whatever they had planned for the girls in the van.

  The final thing she had realized was that their father was heading into a trap, one set by Rais. This was based on not only her first two realizations, but also by what she witnessed when she reached the van. The traffickers forced Sara to exchange clothes with the blonde girl from the plane, the one Maya had been thinking of as Oklahoma. They did so, Oklahoma trembling in fear of the unknown and Sara moving slowly, mechanically, and listlessly.

  Sara was still in a stupor, in some state of catatonia that Maya could not break.

  The blonde girl was taken away in the same direction that Rais had stalked off in. Maya knew full well what that meant; though a few years older, she was the same height and relative build as Sara. In her clothes, under the cover of darkness, Oklahoma could pass as her l
ittle sister.

  Then the doors to the van had closed and the two vehicles rumbled away.

  The only light in the rear cabin came through the windshield; there were no windows in the back of the van. The seats had been removed, so the six girls sat on the floor, huddled three to a side. Maya noted as her eyes adjusted to the dimness that the interior latches had been removed; there was no way to open the doors from her position. A grate of steel had been welded between the rear and the front seats, where one man drove and another sat shotgun.

  They had been driving for hours; Maya wasn’t sure exactly how long, but her legs were cramping from being seated in the same position for such a length of time. Still, she hoped against hope that they never reached their destination, because she could only partially imagine what might await them.

  Suddenly the van bounced over a jarring rut in the road. The girl sitting across from Maya, one of the pair who had obviously been drugged, slumped forward. She didn’t even try to stop herself as her head smacked against the metal floor of the van.

  Maya instinctively reached out to help her, touching her shoulder—and then immediately yanked her hand back.

  The girl’s skin was ice cold. As the van passed under the orange glow of a streetlight, Maya caught a glimpse of her face. Both lips were blue.

  Maya drew her knees to her chest and pulled Sara tighter, shuddering from head to toe. She couldn’t tear her gaze from the lifeless girl; it was only a small mercy that her eyes were closed.

  Warm fingers touched her forearm and she jumped again. “Hey.” Jersey, the girl beside her, spoke in a whisper. “It’s okay.”

  Maya shook her head as fresh tears welled in her eyes. Hadn’t she scolded herself more than once for saying the same thing to Sara? “It’s not,” she whispered back. “It’s not. Nothing about this is okay.”

  Jersey bit her lip for a moment, glancing down at the girl on the floor. “At least this way,” she said, “they can’t hurt her anymore.”

  Maya wiped her eyes, finally forcing herself to look elsewhere. It was a horrifically grim outlook to have—though not untrue.

  “Where are they taking us?” she asked.

  Jersey shook her head. “I don’t know. But… there’s something you should know.” She looked past Maya, at the younger girl nestled against her. “They never put us in groups like this unless they’re moving us. When we get to wherever we’re going… there’s a good chance that they’ll—”

  The man in the passenger seat rapped angrily against the steel grate with two knuckles and barked harshly at them in his foreign tongue. Maya didn’t need to know his language to know that he was threatening them into silence.

  Jersey fell quiet, but Maya already knew what she was going to say. They’ll separate us. They’ll take Sara from me. She told herself that she couldn’t let that happen, but she already knew there was little she could do about it.

  She leaned her head against her sister so her cheek was touching Sara’s forehead. In as low a voice as she could muster, she said, “I know you’re in there. I know you can see and hear everything that’s going on. I don’t think your mind wants to admit or process what’s happening, but… but you have to, Sara.”

  It was time to face hard facts. Rais was going after their father, and was going to use another girl as a decoy while they were taken elsewhere, possibly to another country. These traffickers were operating on an international level; they were careful professionals who had done this before, had not yet been apprehended, and would do it again.

  For them, her and her sister, there would be only one thing waiting for them on the other side of this journey—and it was lying at her feet, cold-skinned and blue-lipped. That was the end of their road if they didn’t do something about it, even if that something might mean the same end.

  “You have to be strong,” Maya urged her sister quietly. “You have to snap out of this. The second you see anything that looks like an opportunity, you need to take it. Fight back with everything you have. If you can run, run like your life depends on it. Because… because it does, Sara. Your life depends on it.”

  She looked down into her sister’s face, hoping for any sign of life behind her eyes. And there was one—a single tear rolled down her cheek and spilled onto the pink T-shirt she had exchanged with Oklahoma.

  Sara’s lips moved, only slightly, with no sound, or so little sound that Maya couldn’t hear it. She craned neck so her ear was right next to Sara’s mouth.

  And she heard it: “I want to go home.”

  Maya squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself not to cry. Not while she was telling her sister she needed to be strong. “Me too, peanut. Please listen to me. Be strong. Think of Dad. Think of Mom. Think of whatever you need to, to remind yourself that this isn’t the end—”

  The brakes of the van squealed in protest as it rolled to a stop. Both men got out, and a moment later Maya could hear them chattering with others outside the vehicle. Then the rear doors creaked open and an intensely bright flashlight beam fell across them. Maya shielded her eyes until it was swept away, leaving only the silhouettes of four men.

  One of the men lifted an arm, pointing and speaking brusquely in a Slavic language. Suddenly arms were reaching inside the van, trying to tear Sara away from her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Reid waded through darkness, impossibly slow. Maybe not moving at all—he had no limbs. He was disjointed from his body, somewhere in a black abyss. Or nowhere. There was no sound, no color. No feeling.

  “Kent?”

  A voice. Not far. He looked around—if there even was an around to see. It was a woman. It sounded almost like…

  Kate? He tried to call out to her, but had no voice.

  “Jesus, Kent…”

  The voice again. Kate! He was sure of it.

  A brilliant white light exploded above him. He couldn’t look directly at it, but he knew what it was.

  “Stay with me, Kent!”

  Kate. The light was a beacon. She was calling him home.

  No, he realized—it couldn’t be. Kate didn’t know Kent. She knew Reid. Her husband, father of her children. Accessory to her murder.

  The light went out. Then: warm lips on his. A scent. Flowery. Lavender.

  Next: the pain. Pain everywhere, rushing back into his core, radiating out to his limbs, through his skull. As suddenly as a stroke, as easily as telling a lie, he had a body again. And he knew it because of the pain.

  Reid turned his head, coughed, tasted blood. It was dark out. Bright stubborn spots in his vision impeded his view, but as they slowly dissipated he began to remember. Minceta Tower loomed over him—and another form. A woman. Blonde hair. Gray, worried eyes.

  Maria. He tried to say it, but only coughed violently again.

  “You scared me to death,” she said in a deep sigh. “Don’t try to move until I can figure out what you’ve done to yourself.”

  He didn’t do this to himself. He was lying at the base of the medieval fortress. He had fallen off—no, been pushed off, along with…

  Reid ignored Maria’s warning and rolled to his right, off of the soft object beneath him and onto the cool stone. He turned his head; Rais’s one open green eye returned his gaze. The back of his head was split open, its contents spilled in a gory halo.

  If Reid could have laughed, he might have. He broke my fall. The man who believed it was his destiny to kill Kent Steele had unintentionally saved his life.

  He sat up slowly with a long groan. Everything hurt. He wiggled each finger, flexed his arms and legs. Nothing seemed broken. He wiped his bleary eyes and regarded Maria. She was really there, kneeling beside him, looking terrified and relieved at the same time. In one hand was a small white wand—a penlight. The white light he had seen. It wasn’t a beacon at all; she had checked his pupils for a sign of life.

  He had a thousand questions, but they would have to wait. “Help me up,” he murmured, offering her a hand.

  She frowned. �
�Kent… I think you fell off the tower. Can you even stand?”

  “One way to find out.”

  She scoffed and helped pull him to his feet. He groaned again. I’m not going to get far in this state, he thought irritably. But his legs held, shaky as they were.

  “Listen, if you can move, then we should go,” Maria said quickly. “That dead security guard’s radio was just squawking. It won’t be long until someone comes looking for him.”

  Reid nodded. “Yeah. We should go.” He reached down and grabbed hold of Rais’s left leg.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she insisted.

  He pulled, but he didn’t have enough strength to get anywhere.

  “Kent!” Maria barked. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Throwing his body into the Adriatic Sea,” he muttered. He didn’t have the faculty at the moment to fully explain it to her, but he knew it was what he needed to do before he could leave. This monster wearing a human face had come for his wife, had come for his daughters, and had come for him. Twice he had been left for dead and returned. Even now, with his skull open and his brains spilled on the walls of Dubrovnik, Reid was not going to take any chance at all.

  You’re not thinking straight. You’re concussed.

  I don’t care. I’m doing this.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Had those words been said aloud, or in his head? He wasn’t sure. He turned to Maria. “You can either help me and we do this quickly, or you can watch me struggle.”

  “My god,” she murmured. But then she grabbed onto the other leg and together they dragged the corpse of Rais roughly twenty feet along the wall, where the barrier between stone and sea rose only a few feet high. They heaved his remains onto the ramparts, and then sent him tumbling over the wall.

  Reid leaned over to watch as Rais fell past the recessed spotlights and bounced once off of the slick rocky outcropping below. He watched as the black sea swallowed the body, pulling it out with the tide.