Recall Zero

by Jack Mars

  Interpol had caught up with a known forger who had ties to domestic terrorism in France. He’d been apprehended leaving Cologne, Germany, and after questioning, gave up his destination and that he was meeting two Americans. What should have been a routine sting dissolved into an outright mess involving shots fired in a busy train station, several injuries, and an entire train being hijacked. Interpol sent the photo from the station’s security cameras, the clearest image they could get, and the CIA tagged it immediately.

  Maria forced herself to spread her fingers over her face and looked down at the grainy black-and-white photo. If she squinted, it hardly looked like him. But there was no mistaking it. The photo showed Kent, mid-stride across the station’s floor, his head turned slightly as he looked over his shoulder and his face in full view of the camera’s lens. He had the woman by the hand, pulling her along.

  It was that last part that really stabbed at Maria. That personal edge to it. She knew all too well herself how such a gesture would be meaningless and miles from romantic when fleeing from Interpol agents and eluding police. But now she understood all too well how hurt Kent must have been by her admission about the Italian arms dealer. To her it had been a cold, mechanical thing to do, a part of her job. But now, looking down at the photo and feeling like her heart was being squeezed in her chest, she understood.

  It had happened in Dusseldorf, which meant that she could no longer delay CIA involvement. If it hadn’t been before, this was now definitively an international matter. She’d already dispatched a team of three agents to find him.

  She hadn’t sent Strickland. For one, she didn’t think he would actually act against Kent. And secondly, if anyone could find him, it was Todd… and if she was being honest with herself, she didn’t want him to be found that easily.

  Besides, she had another task for Todd. Kent had gotten the interpreter out of the country without anyone knowing, and while the CIA and FBI were scrambling to discover how, Maria knew all too well.

  She looked down at the photo again and heaved a heavy sigh. At any point in the past it would have been her at his side, not this interpreter. Maria would have marched through hell itself for him. What changed? she asked herself.

  She knew the answer. You did.

  There was a knock at her office door, and then Strickland peered in. “You wanted to see me, ma’am?”

  “Don’t call me ‘ma’am.’ It’s weird. Just come in. Close the door.”

  He did so, and then stood in front of her desk at halfhearted attention. He was a good guy, a great agent, and had been a terrific friend to both her and Kent—but he was also Army trained, which meant that despite their friendship it was difficult for him not to view her as a superior.

  “Have they found him yet?” Strickland asked.

  “Interpol? No. But our people are en route to Germany.”

  Todd raised an eyebrow. “I think we both know that by the time they get there, he won’t be in Germany.” His gaze lowered to the photo sitting blatantly on her desk, and when he looked at her again, his expression had changed.

  Don’t look at me like that, she wanted to say. It resembled something near pity, and she was feeling enough of that for herself already.

  “You know,” he offered, “if you sent me, I could find him.”

  “I know you could,” was all she said by way of reply. Strickland had cut his teeth tracking Al Qaeda operatives through the desert for years with the Rangers. “I have something else I want you to do for me. There’s a place called Third Street Garage in Alexandria. A mechanic works there by the name of Mitch. He’s a bigger guy, beard, usually in a trucker’s cap. I want you to bring him here.” Kent getting out of the country completely under the radar had Alan Reidigger’s name all over it—at least it did to her.

  Strickland frowned. “I remember the place. That’s where we planned the op to rescue Pierson, right?”

  “That’s right.” Maria had forgotten that Strickland had been there before, but not while Reidigger was also there. At the time, Alan had been in a Nebraska safe house, keeping watch over Kent’s daughters.

  “Who’s the mechanic?” Todd asked.

  “He’s… an asset,” Maria told him. It wasn’t totally a lie. “But he’s completely off the books. More of a personal asset than an agency one. So don’t hurt him.”

  “Don’t hurt him?” Todd repeated. “Should I expect this guy to be combative?”

  “No,” she said quickly. Then just as quickly she added, “Not necessarily. But maybe.” She wished she could go in person, but her absence in a time of crisis might look suspicious, and she certainly didn’t want anyone following her to Alan. But if she sent him a text or called him to say, “Hey, just so you know, I’m sending an agent to pick you up,” Reidigger would be gone in an instant.

  “Just be careful,” she told Todd. “Tell him I want to see him personally, and that he’s not in any trouble. And don’t hurt him. Please.”

  Strickland was obviously uncertain, but he nodded. “Yes ma’am—sorry. You got it, Maria.” He started for the door, but then paused. “Oh, I almost forgot. You know President Kozlovsky left today, right?”

  Maria nodded as she checked her watch. “I heard the doctors cleared him for flying.” Apparently the altercation with Kent and the interpreter had taken two of Kozlovsky’s fingers right off his hand. “He would have gotten on a plane, what, about an hour ago?”

  “Right. But I was grabbing a coffee and one of the techs from downstairs told me that Kozlovsky’s flight plan got changed last-minute. Like very last-minute.”

  “So?” Maria asked pointedly. It wasn’t that uncommon for flight plans to change when it came to heads of state, or for entirely fake flight plans to be registered.

  “So, it could be nothing, but his new flight plan has a layover in Germany. Specifically, Frankfurt.”

  “Hm.” Now that was a bit strange. Layovers in general were quite atypical for someone like Kozlovsky, and if it was necessary at all it would be at Zurich or Charles de Gaulle. Stranger still was that Frankfurt was barely a hundred miles from Dusseldorf. “What are you thinking?”

  “I just think it’s strange is all,” Todd said. He wasn’t about to say anything that might resemble an accusation about a sitting president, even a Russian one—at least not inside the walls of Langley. “Maybe something to keep an eye on.”

  “Yeah,” Maria murmured. “Thanks. Now go pick up Alan, would you?”

  Todd frowned. “Thought you said his name was Mitch.”

  Shit! “Yes. Mitch. Sorry, I’m exhausted and I was thinking about something else. The mechanic’s name is Mitch. Thanks, Todd.”

  He nodded and left the office. Maria rubbed her face and groaned. She wasn’t thinking clearly in her worried, sleep-deprived state. She genuinely hoped that little slip-up wouldn’t come back to bite her later.

  More curious was Kozlovsky’s little side trip to Germany. She was certain that his plane would land, refuel, and then head on to Moscow—but who would still be on it? Or who might they be hoping to gain?

  What if this interpreter is right, and it’s happening again? Maria glanced down at the photo once more, but instead of Kent, she scrutinized the dark-haired woman whose hand he gripped tightly. She was pretty, and in this photo she looked anxious but not scared.

  Who the hell are you? What do you know? Whatever it was, it was enough for Kent to agree to all of this in the first place.

  Maria picked up her phone and dialed a number.

  “Fisher,” answered the agent. He was lead on the op to track Kent, along with two others were on a Learjet hurtling toward Europe at that very moment.

  “It’s Johansson,” she told him. She was still accustomed to addressing agents that way, often forgetting to include her title of deputy director. “Listen, there’s something else I want you to look in on in Germany. Keep it quiet, but I have intel that President Kozlovsky and his attaché are landing in Frankfurt.”

  “Ma’am?
” Fisher sounded confused. “Are you asking us to… to track Kozlovsky’s movements?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Not him specifically. But his people… just keep your eyes open. I don’t think I need to tell you that we’re far from the only ones looking for these two.”

  But we need to be the ones that get to them first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  After the leap from the moving train, Zero and Karina backtracked to Dusseldorf International Airport as quickly as they could under the cover of darkness. They kept their heads down and their eyes open, though the police presence seemed to have waned there.

  “The authorities must think we fled the train and are hiding out in the countryside,” Zero noted. “That’ll make it easier.”

  “Make what easier?” Karina asked as they circumvented the central terminal.

  “Stealing a car.” He led her to the airport’s long-term parking lot as casually as if they belonged. Zero chose an older model, a gray sedan with no alarm system, and after making sure the coast was clear, broke out a back window with an elbow. They rolled down the other windows to make it less suspicious, paid the man at the gate, and drove away without incident.

  As they headed away from the airport, Zero realized that he knew these roads. It was still a strange sensation; despite having his memories back, there were still some things that he couldn’t recall until he thought about them, much in the same way that any ordinary brain would not evoke specific memories unless triggered by a stimulus. He took Route 44 to the southwest, the autobahn carrying them past small cities like Grevenbroich and Eschweiler, and finally to Aachen.

  Karina catnapped as he drove, slipping in and out of semi-consciousness as if she were afraid to fully let her guard down. She did not fully wake until he pulled into the far corner of a fast-food restaurant’s parking lot a stone’s throw from the border.

  “Where are we?” she asked as she rubbed her eyes. “Near Poland?”

  “No. Near the Netherlands.” He braced himself for the reaction he expected to come.

  Karina frowned deeply, her lips parting in disbelief. “We’ve gone completely the wrong direction!”

  “We’re not going to Kiev,” he told her simply. “Interpol knows that it was us in Dusseldorf, which means that the CIA does too, and likely the Russians. Anyone who’s anyone is going to guess we’d head to Ukraine. I’d bet anything they’re waiting to cut us off at the German/Polish border. So instead, we’re going the opposite way. We’re going to Belgium.”

  “But Veronika—”

  “No one knows about Veronika,” Zero said firmly. “She can travel freely; we can’t. I don’t really want to hang around in Germany while they’re looking for us, and I don’t think they’ll be looking for us in Belgium. As soon as we’re across, we’ll contact Veronika and have FIS come to us.”

  Karina shook her head. Clearly she did not like it, but as she mulled it over, she seemed to come around. “Fine,” she acquiesced at last. “Then what do we do now? How do we get across into Belgium?”

  “We ditch the car here. Pull the license plate so it’s more difficult to track as stolen from Dusseldorf. And then we find a mark.”

  Karina blinked. “A what?”

  “Someone who looks gullible enough to take us across the border.”

  They left the car behind, hiked across the street to a petrol station, and took a seat on a bench outside the station, but they did not have to wait long. About fifteen minutes later a man pulled in towing a horse trailer and parked at a pump.

  Karina raised an eyebrow. “I believe I’ve spotted a mark.” She stood first. “Follow my lead.”

  “Oh, I’m following you now?” Zero smirked, but did as she asked as they approached the bald man with the horse trailer.

  “Hello!” Karina said brightly. She was not using her fake American accent but rather her natural Ukrainian voice, which to an untrained ear sounded quite a bit like a Russian accent. “Can you help, please?”

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Help with what?” He was Dutch, but replied in English.

  “My husband and me,” she gestured to Zero, “we are tourists here, from Russia, and we have lost our passports.”

  Zero had to hold back a grin. She was exaggerating her accent, pretending her English was not as good as it was, in the hopes of inspiring some amount of pity. And to her credit, it worked; Karina sweet-talked the man into believing that they needed to get to Brussels and the embassy there, which was much closer than Berlin but required crossing the border.

  Whether or not the Belgian man believed it didn’t matter; he accepted the lie and the two hundred US dollars they offered him for his troubles and he agreed to take them as far as his destination of Liège. They rode in the trailer, sitting on the floor of it between two snorting horses with the scent of manure in their nostrils.

  Security at the European land borders tended to be lax; the officers between Germany and the Netherlands checked the driver’s ID, asked where he was going, and shined a flashlight into the trailer at eye level until the beam fell upon the face of a horse, while Zero and Karina lay flat beneath the two beasts. They were granted passage without incident, and the truck rumbled onward through the southernmost tip of the Netherlands, a span of only a few miles that stretched down like a spike between Belgium and Germany.

  “I feel as if I should once again comment on the glamorous nature of our travel accommodations,” Karina noted wryly at one point during their brief journey.

  “Only the best for international fugitives,” Zero said with a chuckle, or an attempt at one, since the scent of the trailer nearly gagged him.

  Less than twenty minutes later the truck stopped again, and the Dutch man opened the rear of the trailer and let them out just outside the city of Liège on the Meuse River. They thanked him and he continued on his way, with Zero hoping that he and his horses would forget they ever saw the two alleged Russian tourists with no passports.

  “Wow,” Karina said quietly as she marveled at the sight of the riverside hub, the lights sparkling against the night sky. “It’s quite pretty.”

  “It sure is,” Zero agreed, though he had some difficulty fully appreciating the view. They had arrived in Belgium, but they were still forty-something miles from Brussels (and therefore, the nearest airport) with no vehicle, no identification, and almost no plan. The entire trip from airport to Liège had taken barely more than an hour and a half, but it was getting late. Local time was after nine p.m. They were both exhausted, aching, and smelled of livestock.

  A minor saving grace was that no one was looking for them in Liège, so they could walk about freely. The first order of business was a phone with which to contact Veronika to let her know about the change of plan. It did not take long to find a department store with a sign in the wide front windows that stated “We Accept Dollars,” not an uncommon occurrence in cultural hubs and places where American tourists might shop.

  “Let’s see if they have burners,” Zero suggested.

  “I’m not familiar with that term,” Karina admitted.

  “Oh. It’s just a cheap phone that you prepay with minutes,” Zero explained. “Something you can use to make calls without being traced, and throw away afterwards.”

  Karina smiled. “Marks, burners… it feels like you’re teaching me another language.”

  Zero laughed lightly as they headed inside. A woman passed by them as they entered, making no attempt to hide her wrinkled nose in their direction. He leaned close to Karina. “I think we might smell like horses.”

  They lingered in the department store for just a bit longer than was necessary—or perhaps precisely as long as was necessary, considering that this was a brief reprieve in what had been and would likely continue to be a harrowing experience. There they purchased a change of clothes, a few toiletries, and two burner phones. With the exorbitant twenty percent exchange tax, the total was more than two hundred dollars; their cash supply was dwindling fast, but Zero d
idn’t think twice about it. It might not matter soon anyhow, he reasoned, if they were arrested or found before they could rendezvous with FIS.

  As soon as they were out of the store, Zero peeled one of the burners out of its blister pack and powered it on. It held a small charge, enough to make a phone call with. Then he gave it to Karina to make her call.

  “Veronika,” she said into the phone. “It’s me.” She spoke in English, and Zero wondered if it was for his sake. Even if it wasn’t, he appreciated being privy to at least one side of the talk. “Yes, I am safe. We are safe. Zero is with me. We cannot go east to Ukraine; Interpol is aware of us. They will be watching the borders. Instead we went west, to Belgium.”

  Karina told her sister about Liège, and asked how soon she could get there. Zero waited patiently as Karina murmured a series of yes and no answers, and then said a quick “I love you” in Ukrainian before ending the call.

  “Veronika will secure a jet,” Karina told him. “She and her FIS team will fly to Brussels, and from there they will come for us. She asked that we remain here and lay low. It may be six to eight hours before she can arrive. Then we will both be taken back with her to Kiev.”

  Zero nodded. He didn’t like the idea of waiting around, but there were far worse places than Liège to do so in.

  “It would seem,” Karina said with a half-smile, “that your part in this is nearly over, Zero.”

  “I guess it is.” He didn’t want to think about what would happen after all of this was said and done. There would come a time to answer for the things he had done—it was either that, or stay on the lam forever.

  Karina motioned toward the shopping bag in her hand. “I suppose six to eight hours is plenty of time to find a place with hot water and comfortable beds?”

  He smiled. “I suppose you’re right.”

  Walking around Liège with a pair of shopping bags almost made them forget that they were international criminals on the lam from every major law enforcement agency in the world. The city was a stunning blend of history and modern culture, remnants of medieval era architecture alongside contemporary design. They were in no rush; they walked leisurely as if they were simply a couple of people on vacation.