Agent Zero

by Jack Mars

  A young male voice answered quickly. “Pap’s, how can I help you?”

  “Ronnie?” One of his students from the year prior worked part time at Reid’s favorite deli. “It’s Professor Lawson.”

  “Hey, Professor!” the young man said brightly. “How’s it going? You want to put in a takeout order?”

  “No. Yes… sort of. Listen, I need a really big favor, Ronnie.” Pap’s Deli was only six blocks from his house. On pleasant days, he would often walk the distance to pick up sandwiches. “Do you have Skype on your phone?”

  “Yeah?” said Ronnie, a confused lilt in his voice.

  “Good. Here’s what I need you to do. Write down this number…” He instructed the kid to make a quick run down to his house, see who, if anyone, was there, and call back the American number on the phone.

  “Professor, are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “No, Ronnie, I’m fine,” he lied. “I lost my phone and a nice woman is letting me use hers to let my kids know I’m okay. But I only have a few minutes. So if you could, please…”

  “Say no more, Professor. Happy to help. I’ll hit you back in a few.” Ronnie hung up.

  While he waited, Reid paced the short span of the awning, checking the phone every few seconds in case he missed the call. It felt like an hour passed before it rang again, though it had only been six minutes.

  “Hello?” He answered the Skype call on the first ring. “Ronnie?”

  “Reid, is that you?” A frantic female voice.

  “Linda!” Reid said breathlessly. “I’m glad you’re there. Listen, I need to know—”

  “Reid, what happened? Where are you?” she demanded.

  “The girls, are they at the—”

  “What’s happened?” Linda interrupted. “The girls woke up this morning, freaking out because you were gone, so they called me and I came right over…”

  “Linda, please,” he tried to interject, “where are they?”

  She talked over him, clearly distraught. Linda was a lot of things, but good in a crisis wasn’t one of them. “Maya said that sometimes you go for walks in the morning, but both the front and back doors were open, and she wanted to call the police because she said you never leave your phone at home, and now this boy shows up from the deli and hands me a phone—?”

  “Linda!” Reid hissed sharply. Two elderly men passing by looked up at his outburst. “Where are the girls?”

  “They’re here,” she panted. “They’re both here, at the house with me.”

  “They’re safe?”

  “Yes, of course. Reid, what’s going on?”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Not yet, no… on TV they always say you have to wait twenty-four hours to report someone missing… Are you in some sort of trouble? Where are you calling me from? Whose account is this?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Just listen to me. Have the girls pack a bag and take them to a hotel. Not anywhere close; go outside the city. Maybe to Jersey…”

  “Reid, what?”

  “My wallet is on my desk in the office. Don’t use the credit card directly. Get a cash advance on whatever cards are in there and use it to pay for the stay. Keep it open-ended.”

  “Reid! I’m not going to do a thing until you tell me what’s… hang on a sec.” Linda’s voice became muffled and distant. “Yes, it’s him. He’s okay. I think. Wait, Maya!”

  “Dad? Dad, is that you?” A new voice on the line. “What happened? Where are you?”

  “Maya! I, uh, had something come up, extremely last minute. I didn’t want to wake you…”

  “Are you kidding me?” Her voice was shrill, agitated and worried at the same time. “I’m not stupid, Dad. Tell me the truth.”

  He sighed. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you where I am, Maya. And I shouldn’t be on the phone long. Just do what your aunt says, okay? You’re going to leave the house for a little while. Don’t go to school. Don’t wander anywhere. Don’t talk about me on the phone or computer. Understand?”

  “No, I don’t understand! Are you in some kind of trouble? Should we call the police?”

  “No, don’t do that,” he said. “Not yet. Just… give me some time to sort something out.”

  She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Promise me that you’re okay.”

  He winced.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah,” he said a bit too forcefully. “I’m okay. Please, just do what I ask and go with your Aunt Linda. I love you both. Tell Sara I said so, and hug her for me. I’ll contact you as soon as I can—”

  “Wait, wait!” Maya said. “How will you contact us if you don’t know where we are?”

  He thought for a moment. He couldn’t ask Ronnie to get any further involved in this. He couldn’t call the girls directly. And he couldn’t risk knowing where they were, because that could be leverage against him…

  “I’ll set up a fake account,” said Maya, “under another name. You’ll know it. I’ll only check it from the hotel computers. If you need to contact us, send a message.”

  Reid understood immediately. He felt a swell of pride; she was so smart, and so much cooler under pressure than he could hope to be.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s good. Take care of your sister. I have to go…”

  “I love you too,” said Maya.

  He ended the call. Then he sniffed. Again it came, the stinging instinct to run home to them, to keep them safe, to pack up whatever they could and leave, go somewhere…

  He couldn’t do that. Whatever this was, whoever was after him, had found him once. He had been supremely fortunate that they weren’t after his girls. Maybe they didn’t know about the kids. Next time, if there was a next time, maybe he wouldn’t be so lucky.

  Reid opened the phone, pulled out the SIM card, and snapped it in half. He dropped the pieces into a sewer grate. As he walked down the street, he deposited the battery in one trash bin, and the two halves of the phone in others.

  He knew he was walking in the general direction of Rue de Stalingrad, though he had no idea what he would do when he arrived there. His brain screamed at him to change direction, to go anywhere else. But that sangfroid in his subconscious compelled him to keep going.

  His captors had asked him what he knew of their “plans.” The locations they had asked about, Zagreb and Madrid and Tehran, they had to be connected, and they were clearly linked to the men who had taken him. Whatever these visions were—he still refused to acknowledge them as anything but—there was knowledge in them about something that had either occurred or was going to occur. Knowledge he didn’t know. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that sense of urgency nag at his mind.

  No, it was more than that. It felt like an obligation.

  His captors had seemed willing to kill him slowly for what he knew. And he had the sensation that if he didn’t discover what this was and what he was supposed to know, more people would die.

  “Monsieur.” Reid was startled from his musing by a matronly woman in a shawl gently touching his arm. “You are bleeding,” she said in English, and pointed to her own brow.

  “Oh. Merci.” He touched two fingers to his right brow. A small cut there had soaked the bandage and a bead of blood was making its way down his face. “I need to find a pharmacy,” he murmured aloud.

  Then he sucked in a breath as a thought struck him: there was a pharmacy two blocks down and one up. He had never been inside it—not to his own untrustworthy knowledge, anyway—but he simply knew it, as easily as he knew the route to Pap’s Deli.

  A chill ran from the base of his spine up to the nape of his neck. The other visions had been visceral, and had all manifested from some external stimulus, sights and sounds and even scents. This time there was no accompanying vision. It was plain knowledge recall, the same way he knew where to turn at each street sign. The same way he knew how to load the Beretta.

  He made a deci
sion before the light turned green. He would go to this meeting and get whatever information he could. Then he would decide what to do with it—report it to the authorities perhaps, and clear his name regarding the four men in the basement. Let them make the arrests while he went home to his children.

  At the drug store, he bought a thin tube of super glue, a box of butterfly bandages, cotton swabs, and a foundation that nearly matched his skin tone. He took his purchases into the restroom and locked the door.

  He peeled off the bandages that he had haphazardly stuck to his face back in the apartment and washed the crusted blood from his wounds. To the smaller cuts he applied the butterfly bandages. For the deeper wounds, ones that would ordinarily require stitches, he pinched the edges of the skin together and squeezed a bead of super glue, hissing through his teeth all the while. Then he held his breath for about thirty seconds. The glue burned fiercely but it subsided as it dried. Finally, he smoothed the foundation over the contours of his face, particularly the new ones created by his sadistic former captors. There was no way to completely mask his swollen eye and bruised jaw, but at least this way there would be fewer people staring at him on the street.

  The entire process took about half an hour, and twice in that span customers banged on the door to the restroom (the second time, a woman shouting in French that her child was nearly to bursting). Both times Reid just shouted back, “Occupé!”

  Finally, when he was finished, he examined himself again in the mirror. It was far from perfect, but at least it didn’t look like he had been beaten in a subterranean torture chamber. He wondered if he should have gone with a darker foundation, something to make him appear more foreign. Did the caller know who he was supposed to be meeting? Would they recognize who he was—or who they thought he was? The three men who had come to his home didn’t seem so sure; they had checked against a photograph.

  “What am I doing?” he asked himself. You’re preparing for a meeting with a dangerous criminal that is likely a known terrorist, said the voice in his head—not this new intrusive voice, but his own, Reid Lawson’s voice. It was his own common sense, mocking him.

  Then that poised, assertive personality, the one just beneath the surface, spoke up. You’ll be fine, it told him. Nothing you haven’t done before. His hand reached instinctively for the grip of the Beretta tucked into the back of his pants, concealed by his new jacket. You know all this.

  Before leaving the drug store, he picked up a few more items: a cheap watch, a bottle of water, and two candy bars. Outside on the sidewalk, he devoured both chocolate bars. He wasn’t sure how much blood he had lost and he wanted to keep his sugar level up. He drained the entire bottle of water, and then asked a passerby for the time. He set the watch and slipped it around his wrist.

  It was half past six. He had plenty of time to get to the rendezvous place early and prepare.

  *

  It was nearly nightfall before he reached the address he’d been given over the phone. The sunset over Paris cast long shadows down the boulevard. 187 Rue de Stalingrad was a bar in the 10th arrondissement called Féline, a dive of a joint with painted-over windows and a cracked façade. It was situated on a street otherwise populated by art studios, Indian restaurants, and bohemian cafes.

  Reid paused with his hand on the door. If he entered, there would be no turning back. He could still walk away. No, he decided, he couldn’t. Where would he go? Back home, so they could find him all over again? And living with these strange visions in his head?

  He went inside.

  The bar’s walls were painted black and red and covered with fifties-era posters of grim-faced women and cigarette holders and silhouettes. It was too early, or perhaps too late, for the place to be busy. The few patrons that milled about spoke in hushed tones, hunched protectively over their drinks. Melancholy blues music played softly from a stereo behind the bar.

  Reid scanned the place left to right and back again. No one looked his way, and certainly no one there looked like the types that had taken him hostage. He took a small table near the rear and sat facing the door. He ordered a coffee, though it mostly sat in front of him steaming.

  A hunched old man slid from a stool and limped across the bar toward the restrooms. Reid found his gaze quickly drawn to the movement, scanning the man. Late sixties. Hip dysplasia. Yellowish fingers, labored breathing—a cigar smoker. His eyes flitted to the other side of the bar without moving his head, where two rough-looking men in overalls were having a hushed but fervent conversation about sports. Factory workers. The one on the left isn’t getting enough sleep, likely a father to young children. Man on the right was in a fight recently, or at least threw a punch; his knuckles are bruised. Without thinking, he found himself examining the cuffs of their pants, their sleeves, and the way they held their elbows on the table. Someone with a gun will protect it, try to conceal it, even unconsciously.

  Reid shook his head. He was getting paranoid, and these persistent foreign thoughts weren’t helping. But then he remembered the strange occurrence with the pharmacy, the recollection of its location just by mere mention of needing to find one. The academic in him spoke up. Maybe there’s something to be learned from this. Maybe instead of fighting it, you should try opening up to it.

  The waitress was a young, tired-looking woman with a knotty brunette mane. “Stylo?” he asked as she passed him by. “Ou crayon?” Pen or pencil? She reached into the tangle of hair and found a pen. “Merci.”

  He smoothed a cocktail napkin and set the tip of the pen to it. This wasn’t some new skill he’d never learned; this was a Professor Lawson tactic, one he had used many times in the past to recall and strengthen memory.

  He thought back to his conversation, if he could call it that, with the three Arabic captors. He tried not to think of their dead eyes, the blood on the floor, or the tray of sharp implements intended to cut whatever truth they thought he had out of him. Instead he focused on the verbal details and wrote the first name that came to mind.

  Then he muttered it aloud. “Sheikh Mustafar.”

  A Moroccan black site. A man who spent his entire life in wealth and power, treading on those less fortunate than him, crushing them beneath his shoe—now scared shitless because he knows you can bury him to his neck in the sand and no one would ever find his bones.

  “I’ve told you all I know!” he insists.

  Tut-tut. “My intel says otherwise. Says you might know a hell of a lot more, but you may be afraid of the wrong people. Tell you what, Sheikh… my friend in the next room? He’s getting antsy. See, he’s got this hammer—it’s just a little thing, a rock hammer, like a geologist would use? But it does wonders on small bones, knuckles…”

  “I swear it!” The sheikh wrings his hands nervously. You recognize it as a tell. “There were other conversations about the plans, but they were in German, Russian… I didn’t understand!”

  “You know, Sheikh… a bullet sounds the same in every language.”

  Reid snapped back to the dive bar. His throat felt dry. The memory had been intense, as vivid and lucid as any he knew he had actually experienced. And it had been his voice in his head, threatening casually, saying things he would never dream of saying to another person.

  Plans. The sheikh had definitely said something about plans. Whatever terrible thing was nagging at his subconscious, he had the distinct feeling it had not yet happened.

  He took a sip of the now-lukewarm coffee to calm his nerves. “Okay,” he told himself. “Okay.” During his interrogation in the basement, they had asked about fellow agents in the field, and three names had flashed across his mind. He wrote one, and then read it out loud. “Morris.”

  A face immediately came to him, a man in his early thirties, handsome and knowing it. A cocky half-smirk with only one side of his mouth. Dark hair, styled to make him look young.

  A private airstrip in Zagreb. Morris sprints alongside you. You both have your guns drawn, barrels pointed downward. You can’t let the t
wo Iranians reach the plane. Morris aims between strides and pops off two shots. One clips a calf and the first man falls. You gain on the other, tackling him brutally to the ground…

  Another name. “Reidigger.”

  A boyish smile, neatly combed hair. A bit of a paunch. He’d wear the weight better if he was a few inches taller. The butt of a lot of ribbing, but takes it good-naturedly.

  The Ritz in Madrid. Reidigger covers the hall as you kick in the door and catch the bomber off guard. The man goes for the gun on the bureau, but you’re faster. You snap his wrist… Later Reidigger tells you he heard the sound from out in the corridor. Turned his stomach. Everyone laughs.

  The coffee was cold now, but Reid barely noticed. His fingers were trembling. There was no doubt about it; whatever was happening to him, these were memories—his memories. Or someone’s. The captors, they had cut something out of his neck and called it a memory suppressor. That couldn’t be true; this wasn’t him. This was someone else. He had someone else’s memories mingling with his own.

  Reid set the pen to the napkin again and wrote the final name. He said it aloud: “Johansson.” A shape swam into his mind. Long blonde hair, conditioned to a sheen. Smooth, shapely cheekbones. Full lips. Gray eyes, the color of slate. A vision flashed…

  Milan. Night. A hotel. Wine. Maria sits on the bed with her legs folded under her. The top three buttons of her shirt are open. Her hair is tousled. You’ve never noticed how long her eyelashes are before. Two hours ago you watched her kill two men in a gunfight, and now it’s Sangiovese and Pecorino Toscano. Your knees almost touch. Her gaze meets yours. Neither of you speak. You can see it in her eyes, but she knows you can’t. She asks about Kate…

  Reid winced as a headache came on, spreading through his cranium like a storm cloud. At the same time, the vision blurred and faded. He squeezed his eyes shut and gripped his temples for a full minute until the headache receded.

  What the hell was that?

  For some reason, it seemed that the memory of this woman, Johansson, had triggered the brief migraine. Even more unsettling, however, was the bizarre sensation that gripped him in the wake of the headache. It felt like… desire. No, it was more than that—it felt like passion, reinforced by excitement and even a bit of danger.