Agent Zero

by Jack Mars

  “What is the plot?” Reid asked again. “What is the connection?”

  Otets glared up at him, his teeth clenched and breaths hissing. Still he said nothing.

  “Have it your way.” Reid held the towel over his face again, pulling it tight. Otets grunted and tried to thrash, but he couldn’t move. Reid poured the water. Otets gagged and choked beneath the towel.

  Reid counted again, staring at the wall. He didn’t want the memory of what he was doing burned into his mind—but the vision came anyway.

  A CIA black site. A captive, bound to a table on a slight incline. A hood over his head. Water, pouring. Not stopping. The captive thrashes so hard he breaks his own arm…

  He shuddered and pulled the towel off again. Otets sucked in a deep, rattling breath. Small flecks of blood came with his exhalation; he’d bitten his tongue.

  “We both know,” Otets sputtered, “I will not leave this cabin alive.”

  “Maybe not,” said Reid. “But we have hours until morning. We can do this over and over and over. And this can get far, far worse. You will tell me what I want to know. It’s up to you how long that takes.”

  Otets gulped and winced. He gazed at the ceiling. He was thinking—and Reid knew that even if he was a killer, even if he was a terrorist, there was still a logical man in there. He knew Reid was right.

  “Yuri used the word ‘conglomerate,’” Reid said calmly. “What did he mean by that?”

  Otets said nothing. Reid motioned with the towel again.

  “Wait!” he cried out hoarsely. “Wait.” Otets took a few panting breaths. “We are… many,” he said at last. He did not meet Reid’s gaze, but continued staring at the ceiling. “Once we were independent of one another, working within our own regions and countries. We called ourselves liberators and activists. You call us extremists, zealots, and terrorists.”

  “What does that mean, many?” Reid asked. “You’re talking about different factions, cells, working together?” Suddenly the sheikh’s words flashed through his mind again: “There were other conversations about the plans, but they were in German, Russian… I didn’t understand!”

  “Unified,” said Otets, “under Amun.”

  “Amun?” Reid repeated. “Who is Amun?”

  Otets scoffed. “Amun is not a who. Amun is a what. As I told you, we each know only enough to keep us involved. Amun promises a new world. Niches for all. Amun has brought us together.”

  Reid shook his head. That name, Amun, sparked something in his memory—but not his new memories as Kent Steele. It was in his academic mind, the Professor Lawson side of him. “Are you talking about Amun-Ra? The Egyptian god?”

  Otets grinned maliciously. “You know nothing of Amun.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” He did know of Amun, or Amun-Ra, as the ancient Egyptian god was called after the New Kingdom was established. But the god had a storied history well before that. Reid had no idea whether this god Amun had anything to do with what Otets was describing, but his brain was churning.

  “Amun started out as a small-time deity in the city of Thebes,” Reid said. “As the city grew, so did Amun’s influence. Eventually Thebes became the empire’s capital and Amun, over centuries, became hailed as the ‘king of gods,’ a creator, much like the Greeks’ Zeus. As Egypt grew, Amun’s deification absorbed other gods, like the Tibetan god of war, Monthu, and the sun-god Ra… hence his rechristened namesake in the New Kingdom as Amun-Ra.

  “Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty brought some changes to Amun’s regime. The pharaoh Amenhotep IV moved the capital from Thebes, and promoted a cult-like monotheistic worship of a god called Aten, along with many strict governmental changes that took power away from Amun’s high priests. It didn’t last long; immediately following Amenhotep’s death, the priests struck the pharaoh’s name from most records, reversed his bureaucratic amendments, and restored worship of Amun.

  “They even convinced the new pharaoh, Amenhotep’s son, to change his name to Tutankhamun—which literally meant ‘the living image of Amun.’

  “For more than two thousand years Amun was the high deity of Egypt, but slowly his influence declined as Christianity, and the Byzantine Empire, spread. That is, until about the sixth century when the last of the ‘cult of Amun,’ as they had come to be known by then, died out.”

  Reid smirked slightly, having proverbially taken Otets to school. The brief lecture had actually made him feel a little more like Reid Lawson again—and oddly, it felt almost foreign to him. He made a mental note to remain wary of that.

  Otets, however, simply raised an eyebrow dubiously. “You know facts,” he said. “But not truth.”

  “And what is the truth?” Reid asked.

  “Amun brings us together, but we are each only a cog. We know only the other cogs we turn—we never see the clock.”

  Reid scoffed. “You’re telling me that you, and others, are working toward some imminent end, but you don’t know what it is?”

  Otets tried to laugh, but it came out as a sputtering cough. “It is brilliant, is it not? My people, we have one job—make explosives and give to Iranians. They, in turn, work with others, who work with others. No one knows the full plan. We do not know names or who else is involved.” His voice croaked. “We know only voices and numbers. Therein lies the difference—in a clock, remove a cog and the whole machine stops working. In Amun, no cog is so important it can take us apart.”

  “So Amun is a group?”

  “Amun is much more. Amun is a force. And soon, this world will know it.”

  “No,” said Reid. Organizing dissenters from around the world under a single banner? What Otets was describing would be impossible. There would be too much dissension among them, too many differing ideologies. But… if it was true that he knew very few of the people involved… “The sheikh said—”

  “I told you, the sheikh knew almost nothing,” Otets spat. “The information he gave you would already be changed by now. He was weak; he was a bank account to us, nothing more. A local faction had a bounty on Mustafar’s head. We agreed to protection, destroyed them, in return for his funding.”

  A new thought sent a fresh chill through Reid—What if that was what I discovered? Did Kent realize he had been fooled by false information, that he’d painted a target on his back? Was that the reason for the memory suppressor? Ever since he had escaped the Parisian basement he had felt that powerful sense of obligation to keep going, to do something about this and discover what he had already discovered—but if Kent had done this to himself, maybe it was because he knew he would never back down otherwise.

  “You called me Zero,” said Reid. “And so did the Iranians. How do you know that name? What does it mean to you?”

  “Agent Zero,” said Otets slowly. “Many of us know you as Kent Steele, but all know of Agent Zero. Like a legend—an urban myth. A name that inspires fear in the most stalwart.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what you did.”

  Reid was growing frustrated with the short answers. “What did I do?”

  “You truly do not remember, do you?” The Russian grinned. Blood stained his teeth. “That is for you to discover. Go ahead and kill me. I am no one of consequence, in the grand scheme.”

  “We’ll see,” said Reid. He dropped the dripping wet towel to the floor. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to call Interpol, and get the CIA involved. I’m going to turn you in. I’m going to tell them everything you’ve told me. But first, I want to know how the Iranians found me, back in New York. You knew they were coming to find me. You sent Yuri to that meeting to make sure I was dead, and to see if I had information on you. Isn’t that right?”

  “Of course,” said Otets plainly. “I had to make sure my facility was not compromised.”

  “But how did they know who I was, and where to find me?”

  Otets finally met Reid’s gaze as he grinned maliciously. “Think about it, Agent. You already know the answer. The only pe
ople who would know where to find you were your people.”

  “My people?” Reid shook his head. “You mean someone in the CIA, working with you? With Amun?”

  “Someone?” Otets chuckled hoarsely. “No. As I said—we are many.”

  Reid’s mind flashed back to the meeting with Yuri. “Before you I met only one other American in our, um… what is the word… conglomerate?”

  Reid grabbed the sopping towel and held it between both fists, mere inches from Otets’s face. The Russian jerked his head back instinctively. “Names,” Reid demanded. “I want names, or we’re going again.”

  “In my jacket pocket,” said Otets. His eyes were wide in fear, staring at the towel.

  Reid tossed it aside and rose. He rifled through the wet charcoal-gray suit jacket. There was nothing in his pockets but a cell phone, and it had been thoroughly submerged in the river. But the SIM card would likely be salvageable, if he could find a…

  There was movement in his periphery. He dropped the phone and spun just in time to see Otets lunging at him with the steak knife.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Reid leapt to the right to avoid the rushing blade. The knife’s tip missed him by inches, but he overcompensated and tripped over the green sofa.

  Otets’s legs were free; while Reid was straddling him, he hadn’t noticed that the binding around his ankles had come loose. The Russian held the knife in both hands, still bound at the wrists. His eyes were wide and bloodshot—standing there in just his briefs, he looked like a maniac.

  Reid scrambled to his feet and put up both hands, palms out. “Don’t,” he said. “You’re still weak from the river. Just drop the knife. No one needs to get hurt.”

  Otets shook his head vigorously, spraying water from his wet hair. “You still do not get it. I told you, I cannot leave here alive. If Amun finds out I gave you information, I am a dead man anyway.”

  “The police will put you in custody, somewhere safe, where no one can get to you—”

  Otets laughed wildly. “Do not be stupid! Do you really believe we cared what Mustafar might have told you? Of course not! We only wanted to know his location… so we could find him and kill him for his betrayal.”

  “Wait—”

  Otets lunged forward, stabbing straight toward Reid’s sternum. He twisted his torso to the left and, before he even knew what he was doing, forced Otets’s elbows straight down. His wrists, straight up. In a motion quicker than Reid’s own shocked thoughts, he drove the knife into Otets’s throat, guided by the Russian’s own two hands.

  A gurgle escaped his lips. A thin fountain of blood arced across the cabin, spattering the wall and floor. Otets collapsed in a heap, leaking liberally on the thin carpet.

  Reid heaved a ragged, breathy sigh. It had happened so fast, and his body simply reacted without thinking. Once again he had someone else’s blood on his hands. He sat heavily on the sofa, holding both hands out in front of him. His fingers did not tremble this time.

  He had no captive to turn over to the authorities now, no one to corroborate his claims. Otets’s bomb-making facility was destroyed, and he doubted the Russian was foolhardy enough to leave evidence or a paper trail. He had four dead bodies in a basement in Paris, a huge hole in the earth in Belgium, and now the possibility that someone—or more than one someone—was actively working against him in the CIA.

  I didn’t do this to myself, he decided. This was done to me. To make me forget what I had learned… so I wouldn’t get in the way.

  He was certain of it. Kent had found something he wasn’t supposed to find—possibly in Sheikh Mustafar—and his own people suppressed his memory. This organization, Amun, must have discovered that he was still alive from the mole (or moles) in the CIA. They found his location and gave it to the Iranians.

  He had never felt so alone as he did in that moment, sitting in a tiny cabin in Belgium with the dead body of a Russian terrorist at his feet. Where would it be safe for him? Could he trust any authorities—or anyone at all, for that matter?

  He had no idea what he was going to do, at least in the long term, but he knew what he had to do next. First, he put his clothes back on, now dried and warmed by the electric stove. He pulled on the sturdy brown boots and his bomber jacket. In the kitchen, he reassembled the Glock and put that in a pocket. He took apart Otets’s phone, saved the SIM card, and crushed the rest of it thoroughly beneath a heel. The broken pieces he flushed down the toilet.

  He put the knife, the extension cord, and the tea kettle back where he found them. He checked the pockets of Otets’s slacks, but found nothing more than the phone. There was no wallet, no identification, no nothing.

  Reid used the wet towel to clean as much of the blood as he could off of the walls and floor. Then he rolled Otets’s body in the threadbare carpet, along with his still-wet clothes.

  In a nightstand drawer of the rear bedroom was a Bible, and he found a pen in one of the kitchen drawers. On the inside front cover of the Bible he scribbled a note—he couldn’t find any paper in the cabin.

  Finally, he took the wool blanket from the cabin’s bedroom. He turned off the lights and the electric stove and left the Bible on the front porch, just outside the door. In the morning, the Belgian woman would come to check on them, and hopefully she would question the book’s placement and at least open the front cover, where she would find several more hundred-euro bills and Reid’s note, written in French:

  I’m sorry.

  I gave you my word that we wouldn’t cause you any trouble, but I was forced to break that. Please do not go into the cabin. The man that came here with me is dead inside. You should call the police. Ask them to get Interpol involved. Tell them that this man goes by a codename of “Otets.” He ran a vineyard across the Meuse. His facility exploded last night. If they dig a little deeper, they’ll find more.

  I’m sorry this happened. I never meant to involve you.

  *

  The very first rays of dawn peeked over the horizon as Reid arrived in Brussels. He had started out by walking from the barley farm to the road, the wool blanket draped over his shoulders and around him. It was a bit scratchy, but at least it kept him warm against the freezing night. The occasional car passed by, and Reid stopped and stuck out a thumb—he wasn’t sure if that was a universal hitchhiking gesture or not, and apparently neither did Kent, since no memory flashed. Eventually a pickup truck stopped for him. The driver spoke Dutch and only a little German, but he understood two things: Brüssel, and the fistful of euros Reid offered him.

  The language barrier made for a quiet two-hour ride to the city. Reid had a lot of time to think. He felt awful about the position he had put the Flemish woman in, but he had little choice; he couldn’t very well hide Otets’s body. He couldn’t have buried it, not with the ground frozen, and even if he could, if it had ever been discovered, the woman would take the blame. The decision to ask her to involve Interpol was a logical one, based on Otets’s dealings. It was likely that the explosion at the facility had been seen or heard by someone and reported. He couldn’t be sure that the local police would be able to separate the bomb components from the factory equipment and machinery.

  He had thought briefly about leaving his name—or rather, Kent’s name. The notion wasn’t for the sake of some haughty claim or taunt, but rather in the hopes that it might reach CIA ears and rattle some cages. Assuming that Otets had told the truth, the mole, or moles, in the organization would likely get nervous and do something brash. Make a misstep. Furthermore, he didn’t want the Belgian woman to take any sort of fall for what he had done. Ultimately, though, he decided against it. He needed to remain incognito for as long as he could.

  He did not mention the name Amun in his note either, simply because he wasn’t fully sure yet what it meant or what it was. If the wrong people thought that he knew, it might cause panic—and he needed answers more than he needed to be evading more bullets.

  He asked the driver to drop him off somewhere downtown. He
got out on Hallenstraat and paid the man. As he looked around, no visions flashed in his head. No memories sparked. Apparently Kent had never been to Brussels, or at least not this part of it.

  The city’s downtown took his breath away. The architecture was stunning; the amount of history on every block was simply awe-inspiring. He had once thought similarly of New York, when he had first moved there, but few structures in the US were more than two hundred years old. Here, in Belgium, he was standing in the center of more than a thousand years of Western civilization. The Professor Lawson side of him would have been downright giddy to explore such a historically rich city.

  With that thought came a tinge of mild panic. He hadn’t even realized it, but the further he delved into this plot, the less he still felt like Professor Reid Lawson. With each new development, with every life-threatening situation, and with all the new memories that returned, he was feeling more and more like Kent Steele.

  He shook the thought from his head. He had two goals here in Brussels, both of which could be accomplished at one place. He paused at a street vendor and asked her in French where he might find the nearest Internet café, and then he followed her directions the six-block distance to a place called Cyber Voyageurs.

  The café was just opening for the day when he arrived. The clerk, a young man wearing round, silver glasses, yawned at him and asked something in Dutch.

  “English?” Reid asked.

  “Yes, English. Can I help you?”

  Reid ordered a coffee and pulled the SIM card out of his pocket. “I dropped my phone in the road and a car ran it over. But I managed to save the SIM. Can you get the information off of this?”

  “That should not be a problem, as long as it is not damaged. Give me a few minutes.” The young man took the card into a back room.

  While Reid waited, he sipped his coffee and sat down at a computer to accomplish his second goal. First he created a new email account with an innocuous address, and then he logged into Skype.