Recall Zero

by Jack Mars

  Zero skidded to a stop. Now what? He really didn’t want to fight his way out; it would just give Interpol more time to intervene.

  But Karina seemed to be one step ahead. She shrieked loudly, clutching at Zero’s shoulder and her expression contorting to horror. “Gewehr!” she shouted at the security officers as she pointed toward the café. “Gewehr!”

  Gun!

  The bewildered guards pulled revolvers of their own as they entered the café, or attempted to, because at the same time the two Interpol agents that Zero had disarmed were trying to exit, and they ran smack into each other with shouts and threats of stopping and putting hands up and proving identification.

  Zero grabbed Karina’s hand and pulled her along behind him as they hurried toward the terminal’s row of glass doors that led outside. “Nicely done,” he murmured.

  “Thanks,” she replied breathlessly.

  “That was sarcasm. Why in the hell did you attack that agent?”

  “As I told you,” she hissed, “I will not turn myself in to anyone but FIS. We cannot afford to get caught now. We’ve come too far. As you said before, we’re still in the woods.”

  “Not out of the woods yet,” he corrected under his breath. If they stopped moving for even a moment, it wouldn’t take long for the Interpol agents to catch up to them, to call for backup, or to convince the security team that it was them they should be after—

  “Whoa!” Zero backpedaled suddenly, one hand on a glass door’s crossbar. Through it he saw three German police cruisers parked right outside and five uniformed officers rushing toward the entrance. “This way!”

  He and Karina ran back the other direction. There was another exit on the other side of the station that emerged onto a parallel street, but there would likely be cops there too. To their left was an escalator heading down to a sublevel train platform. He headed for it with Karina in tow.

  “There!” a voice shouted to the right of them. The two Interpol agents were on the station floor, surrounded by the white-uniformed security guards, pointing right at Zero. “Those two, there!”

  “Down!” Zero instructed as he pulled her toward the escalator. He let go of her hand and reached for the small of her back, tugging the Beretta from the waistband of her jeans. “Just gonna borrow this real quick.” He tucked the gun under his armpit, concealing it as best he could, and fired twice from the crook of his shoulder.

  The shots were impossibly loud, echoing in the vast station. Both struck a narrow advertising kiosk. Glass exploded and people screamed, scattering, having no idea what direction the shooting was coming from. Zero ducked his head amid the frothing sea of fleeing station-goers as the two of them reached the escalator and hurried down.

  “We can’t exactly get on a train!” Karina followed closely behind him as he elbowed people out of the way.

  “Sure we can,” he replied. He stopped abruptly when they reached the bottom of the escalator; two more security guards were hurrying toward the stairs.

  Karina grabbed one of them by the shoulder. “Up there,” she said quickly in German. “Two men are shooting! They are posing as police! Hurry!”

  The guards thanked her and rushed up the escalator, one of them drawing a revolver while the other radioed what she’d said. Zero was impressed; though he didn’t have time to say it in the moment, it seemed that she was quite good at sowing confusion.

  They jumped the turnstile and hurried toward the nearest platform just in time to see a sleek white metro train pulling into the station. The disembarking passengers had no idea what was going on, and didn’t even seem to notice that the platform was empty besides the two of them. Anyone who had been waiting for the train had fled at the sound of the gunshots.

  “Zero, what are we doing?” Karina protested as they stepped onto the train.

  “Act casual,” he told her, hiding the Beretta in his jacket. A few passengers seated on the three-quarters full train glanced up at them, but then looked away just as quickly in disinterest.

  “We have nowhere to go!” she hissed quietly.

  Come on, he thought impatiently, waiting for the doors to close. Come on, come on…

  Through the window of the train, he saw the two Interpol agents, several security guards, and a handful of police dashing onto the platform.

  The doors still hadn’t closed.

  One of the agents spotted Karina through the train’s window. He pointed, shouting something that Zero couldn’t hear but didn’t need to.

  Shit! He had to think fast—which, he already knew, usually meant he was about to do something reckless and impulsive.

  He raised the Beretta over his head, barrel at an angle toward the ceiling, and fired once. The blast was deafening and sparks showered from the broken lights. The reaction was instant; passengers leapt or even fell out of their seats, dozens of heads snapping in the direction of the gun, as if it was an animate object and not being held by a man.

  “Off the train!” he bellowed.

  Karina picked up the command in German. “Steigt euch dem Zug aus!”

  Given the choice between remaining on the train with a gun-wielding madman or following the order, the people on the train unanimously seemed to come to the same conclusion. They rushed the doors so quickly that several people were knocked down, some crying out as four or five people at a time jammed the doors and squeezed through.

  The agents and officers trying to get to the train were suddenly swept up in the flood of passengers hurtling the other way. Zero saw at least one security guard vanish beneath the crowd, and one of the Interpol agents was shoved roughly against a concrete column.

  Zero strode to the front of the train car, threw open the door, and fired another shot. “Off! Off the train!” More than half of the next car had already emptied, having heard the gunshot. “Come on!” he called to Karina as they continued onward toward the front.

  The train emptied quickly, some people leaving behind their bags and personal items as Zero pushed through another car. Finally, mercifully, the doors hissed closed and the train began to roll forward, a recorded female voice announcing the next three stops in both German and English.

  Automated, Zero thought with a sigh of relief. The train system was automated—which meant that it knew to leave the station, but could likely be stopped remotely as soon as it was confirmed that they were aboard. They didn’t have much time.

  Through the window of the car, he saw one of the Interpol agents from the café reach the train and smack the glass angrily as they pulled away from the platform.

  He let himself relax then, at least a little, the tension leaving his shoulders and taking what felt like the first breath since the inspector had revealed himself in the café.

  He felt a hand on his waist as Karina stepped toward him, her hands under his jacket as if she was going to hug him. For a moment, he was terribly confused—but then she stepped back, and the silenced Sig Sauer was in her hand.

  She aimed just past his left arm and fired once, behind him. As Zero spun, he heard a yelp. A German officer had snuck onto the train with them and reached their car. The bullet hit him in the thigh; he dropped his pistol as his leg buckled, both hands pressing over the bleeding wound.

  “Thanks,” he murmured.

  “Mm-hmm. Trade?” She offered him back the Sig in return for the Beretta, and then she retrieved the cop’s gun from the floor as he groaned. Karina leaned over him and said, “Hang in there. They’ll stop us soon.” Then she looked up at Zero as if the message was meant for more than just the officer.

  He nodded. There was no way they would let the train get as far as its next stop. “They’ll gather whoever they can and try to cut us off somewhere in the open, somewhere they can surround the train and minimize potential casualties.” But he didn’t know Dusseldorf well enough to assume where that might be, let alone the train’s route.

  In the window he saw his own translucent reflection, and beyond it the darkness of the night and the road t
hat ran parallel to the tracks. He saw the blue flashing lights of several police cruisers as they sped along, past the train, toward whatever destination they would inevitably stop. Then the tracks curved downward, staying at ground level while the road rose in an overpass.

  “Ideas?” Karina asked.

  “Just one.” He raised the Sig Sauer and fired twice at the oblong window. The safety glass splintered into a spider-web pattern but held in the frame. Zero stood on a bench seat, lifted a foot, and kicked at the window. The first two kicks warped the window in its frame; on the third kick the glass gave and fell away in one piece, tumbling into the darkness.

  The idea had sounded like a much better one in his head before he saw the landscape speeding by below him. Even so, he turned to Karina and said, “We’re going to jump.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “You must be kidding,” Karina said flatly.

  “This is a commuter train.” Zero glanced out the window as cool air whipped by. “We can’t be going more than… fifty, maybe fifty-five miles an hour.” And there was grass along the train tracks on the stretch of rails between the airport and the city proper, which was preferable to concrete.

  Karina muttered a slew of curses in both Polish and Ukrainian, weaving in and out of the two languages in such a way that Zero only got the gist of her rant, which seemed to vaguely amount to “I honestly have no idea how I’m still alive after following this man,” but despite her protests she got up on the bench seat and swung a leg over the window frame, clutching the top of it from the inside with one arm.

  “Listen,” he told her, “when you hit the ground, bend your knees and let yourself roll into it, or else you might break your legs.”

  “Great,” she said flatly. She looked dubiously down at the darkness rushing by below, hesitating to make the leap.

  Suddenly the brakes on the train let out a protesting squeal. They were being slowed. “We have to go now!” he said urgently.

  Karina didn’t hesitate further. She swung her other leg out so that she was momentarily perched on the narrow window frame, and then she pushed herself out. Zero saw her hit the ground, saw her tuck into a roll, but then she vanished quickly as the train barreled onward.

  He clambered out of the window himself, ready to jump. But the wheels of the train locked suddenly. The entire car lurched, and before he knew what was happening he was tumbling over the side. There couldn’t have been more than a single second elapsed between the time he fell and the time he struck the ground, but in that briefest of brief moments he thought of Sara, his young daughter—not the way she was now, sixteen and red-haired and angry, but the way she had been, innocent and young and sweet. If he tried to pinpoint the precise moment that the innocence of her youth had been stolen from her, he would guess it was a moment just like this one, when she had thrown herself from a moving train to flee from traffickers and rapists. She’d broken her arm in the process. But if he had to speculate, he would say that her spirit had broken in that fall as well.

  Then he hit the ground hard. Luckily he hit feet-first, but his angle was off and he pitched forward, instinctively throwing out both arms to stop himself. Pain rocketed up his hands, wrists, elbows, to the shoulders as he struck the grass, and then he was tumbling end over end, two full rotations before coming to an abrupt stop on his back.

  He was seeing stars—both the literal stars in the night sky overhead and the swimming sort that came with a knock to the head. Everything hurt, and even though the brakes continued to squeal on the train as it hurtled past him, all he wanted was to lie there for a while.

  But then Karina’s face filled his field of vision, her dark hair hanging around it as she looked down at him pitiably. “That was a terrible jump.”

  “I fell.”

  “Uh-huh. Come on, we have to move.” She held out a hand to help him up. He took it, but even the slightest of tugs from her sent searing pain through his left shoulder.

  He grimaced and let go of her. “Shoulder,” he said through clenched teeth. “Must have dislocated it in the fall.” He climbed to his feet without her help, noting that his shoulder was far from the only part of him in pain. But the train was slowing, and in the darkness little more than a quarter mile ahead he saw the flashing lights of police and other German emergency vehicles as they brought the train to a stop. It would not take long for them to discover that the two of them were not on it.

  “We’ve got to find a place to lay low.” He started away from the tracks, across a stretch of grass and some dark structures ahead. To his right he could see the multitude of lights from the airport and train station; in the distance to his left was the city of Dusseldorf. This span between them appeared to be largely rural and open—which did not work in their favor.

  “We have bigger problems,” Karina said as she followed. “Your friend obviously sold us out.”

  “No,” Zero said adamantly. “This wasn’t Alan’s doing. He wouldn’t do that.”

  “Anyone can be bought,” Karina insisted. “With the right leverage, anyone can be threatened—”

  “Not him.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  He spun on her irritably. How could he explain it to her? It wasn’t enough to say that Alan was a friend, a confidant, a man in which Zero had put his own life numerous times. He couldn’t tell her how Alan had given up his own shot at a normal life for his sake. He couldn’t very well just put in words how Alan had put Zero’s family over his own well-being on more than one occasion.

  “I just am,” he said finally. “I’m certain. It must have been the forger. He was probably on Interpol’s radar and tried to exchange his most recent clients for leniency.” He was limping slightly; his right ankle was aching. “Those Interpol agents, that inspector, they didn’t know who we were. If they did, they wouldn’t have approached us with only three men.”

  “Which means that both the Americans and Russians will soon know we are here,” Karina added somberly.

  “If they don’t already.” Zero looked toward the police blockade of the train tracks in the distance. “And as soon as they realize we’re not on that train, they’re going to backtrack all the way to the airport. We can’t be anywhere near here when they do.”

  “So we should go to the last place they would expect us to go,” Karina said simply.

  Zero nodded. As insane as it sounded, heading back to the airport would be their safest option, “safe” being a very loosely applicable term. The authorities would expect them to flee, not turn around.

  “I don’t like it much,” he admitted, “but you’re right. We’ll make it work.” His body hurt all over and his dislocated shoulder throbbed. “But no more attacking Interpol agents. No more shooting cops. Okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I panicked.”

  “Well…” He looked into her eyes, those soft brown eyes that appeared amber in the starlight.

  Don’t, he told himself. He didn’t know her. She was just another mysterious and potentially dangerous woman in his life.

  “We need to move,” he said finally.

  “Of course.” Her grip tightened on his hand. Before he knew what was happening, Karina tugged his arm upward, perpendicular to his torso, and gave it a solid yank.

  The breath caught in his throat as his shoulder popped back into socket. He pulled away from her instinctively, pain searing through his arm and radiating into his chest.

  She grinned. “Now we can go.”

  He followed along behind her, rubbing his sore joint and glaring. “You could have warned me first.”

  He didn’t say it in the moment, but one thing was clear. Though Karina had proven herself resourceful in their escape from the train station, she was obviously not going to stop for anyone or anything until she made it to her sister. Whatever was in her head was valuable enough for her to risk her life again and again to get it into safe hands. Zero would get to the bottom of it, just as soon as they found a place to rest e
asy for a short while—assuming they weren’t caught first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Maria sat behind the desk in her office at the George Bush Center for Intelligence, the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and rubbed her tired eyes. On the desk before her was a hard copy of the photo, a black-and-white printout of the digital still image that Interpol had sent not twenty minutes earlier.

  She hadn’t slept at all the night before, and the day had been a long one of meetings and phone calls and conferences. The higher-ups, among them the new CIA director (Maria’s direct boss) and the new Director of National Intelligence (Maria’s own father), were very concerned about what they called “this Zero situation.” They were worried about what might happen if a top former operative with a head full of national secrets turned on them. They were nervous that he’d joined forces with a renegade Russian interpreter with national secrets of her own. They were troubled that Zero had become paranoid and assumed that these new administrations must be hiding something, must be just as bad as the ones they had replaced. Their unease and perturbation were such that David Barren, both the DNI and Dad to her, was inspired to hop a flight to New York and pay a visit to Maya Lawson, apparently not entirely trusting Maria’s word when she said that the young woman had nothing to do with Zero’s sudden disappearance and actions over the past forty-eight hours.

  They weren’t showing it, but the superiors in the CIA were panicked. Maria, on the other hand, was more concerned about what would happen to him and why he had done this in the first place. Last night and that same morning she had done all she could to delay the agency from taking action—but then the photo came.