Agent Zero

by Jack Mars

  This was not a quick death. Someone wanted information from him.

  Reid stood quickly and paced the parlor, taking deep breaths to calm himself. Once he’d worked up the nerve, he checked Reidigger’s pockets. They were empty. He looked around the rest of the small apartment, but he didn’t find a wallet, keys, a cell phone, or a service gun. They had taken it all.

  Reid groaned in frustration. He had come this far, from France to Belgium to Switzerland, and for what? To find an old friend that he could barely remember, dead on a kitchen floor with no identification?

  A phone rang. It startled Reid so much in the otherwise silent apartment that he spun and crouched into a defensive stance. It rang again. He followed the sound to a gray chaise in the corner. He lifted a pillow and found a black cordless phone beneath it.

  A landline? The phone continued to ring in his hand as he decided whether or not he should answer it. The small display on the phone said that it was an unknown caller. He knew he shouldn’t, but he had no other leads. Nowhere to go from here.

  He pressed the green button on the phone and held it to his ear, but said nothing.

  Someone breathed on the other end of the line for a moment. Then a male voice said, “It must be cold up there.”

  But you can’t beat the view. The words spun through his head instantly, as instinctively as he might say “bless you” when he heard a sneeze.

  It was a code. This was a call from the CIA—or rather, someone in the CIA. It was a code, and he knew it. But he said nothing.

  “Did you hear me?” The voice seemed familiar somehow, but it didn’t trigger any new memories. “I said, ‘It must be cold up there…’ Alan, are you there?”

  “Alan’s dead.” He said it quietly, but didn’t try to mask his voice. He had already answered the phone. Now he wanted to see if they recognized him. Besides, he wanted them to know what had happened.

  “What? Who is this?” the voice demanded.

  “You should send someone.” Reidigger deserved to be brought home and buried.

  There was a very pregnant pause. “Jesus,” the voice breathed. “You sound almost like…” And then: “Kent?”

  Reid stayed silent.

  “I don’t believe this,” said the voice. “You were KIA… is it really you? That’s incredible. Listen, stay there, okay? We’ll send a team to get Reidigger and extract you—”

  “Can’t stay here,” said Reid. “And I can’t trust you.”

  “Kent, wait, just listen to me a second. Don’t hang up. We’ll come—” Reid ended the call. He muted the phone’s ringer and tossed it back on the chaise.

  Whether the mystery caller knew it or not, he had just given Reid three crucial pieces of information. First: he recognized Kent’s voice, which corroborated a lot of what he had learned so far. Second: the man on the line hadn’t seemed nearly as concerned with Reidigger’s death as he was about hearing that Kent Steele was still alive, which raised Reid’s suspicions that things were not on the up-and-up on the agency’s side of things.

  Third, and most importantly: they thought he was dead. The voice said he was KIA, killed in action. Did they genuinely think that, or was it deception? If the agency believed him dead, it would mean they weren’t the ones that had put the memory suppressor in his head.

  I couldn’t have done this to myself. I wouldn’t have. Even the Kent side of him agreed with that. Someone must have done it. A vision flashed across his mind—the hotel room in Abu Dhabi. Cold pizza. “We’re worried about you.”

  Maybe it wasn’t malevolent.

  His gaze slowly swept over the room, toward the body lying on the floor.

  Maybe it was an act of mercy.

  Reid’s heartbeat doubled its pace. One hand covered his mouth as he came to the realization. Someone else, someone besides Kent, must have known about the memory suppressor. The list of people that Kent would have known were on his side must have been a short one.

  Reidigger was a friend. He was trustworthy. He would have been on that list.

  The Iranians had gotten their information from a different source. They had tortured it out of this man, Reidigger. They had tortured and killed him to get Kent’s location in New York.

  Alan Reidigger had died because of him.

  He felt something ignite in his chest, a feeling he’d never had before, or maybe just couldn’t remember. It was heat, rising like a steadily fed fire. Anger… no. It was more than that. It was anger, and it was desire, and its kindling was the knowledge and accountability that he could do something about this. It was not the cold, mechanical instinct with which he had killed the Iranians and tortured Otets. It was the opposite—this was a savage ferocity blended with a passion to wrap his hands around the neck of the people that did this and watch the light die slowly in their eyes.

  You have to get out of here, and soon. This time it was the Reid Lawson part of his mind urging him. Now that the CIA knew he was there they would undoubtedly send someone, maybe even a team, to the apartment. But despite his few new discoveries, he had no leads; nowhere to go from here.

  He quickly tossed the place for any clues of what Reidigger might have been after, what op he was on in Zurich. He rifled through every cabinet and drawer. He checked the call history on the cordless phone, and even lifted the lid of the toilet tank. There was nothing, not even a suitcase—the killers had taken everything but the bloody clothes on Reidigger’s back. It seemed they didn’t want to make it easy on anyone who might have found him to identify the body and alert the proper authorities.

  But he was an agent. And a smart one, at that. There’s something here.

  If it was me, where would I hide it?

  Reid ran his hands along the solid plaster walls, looking for any place where they might have been opened and patched over. He inspected the popcorn stucco ceiling. He looked for air vents or crawlspaces and found nothing.

  Down, he thought. Under.

  He walked the length of the floor, starting at one end and shifting his weight carefully from foot to foot on the hardwood. Occasionally a board would creak, and he knelt, working his fingertips into the edges to check for loose floorboards.

  There were none.

  He was starting to get frustrated. Maybe there was nothing to find but a cordless phone.

  Or maybe the phone was where it was for a reason.

  He had found it under a pillow on the chaise lounge. He couldn’t tell if he was getting paranoid or if he was being thorough, but either way, he shoved the heavy chaise out of the corner and checked the floor beneath it.

  Maybe your paranoia is making you thorough, he thought with a grim chuckle as he pried up a loose floorboard. Sure enough, in the space between two thick parallel joists was a small black backpack. He recognized it immediately.

  A GOOD bag.

  On any long-term op, an agent would have a GOOD bag prepped—a “Get out of Dodge” bag, or as some people called it, a bug-out bag. In the event one had to grab their stuff and run. A GOOD bag would contain all the necessities for up to seventy-hours off the grid, and (in an agent’s case) the means to get to another location or safe house quickly.

  He pulled out the bag and unzipped it. Reidigger’s bag was methodical and complete. Inside he found two bottles of water, two MREs, a first-aid kit, a thermal sweater, a change of socks and boxer shorts, a flashlight, duct tape, a Swiss army knife, a length of nylon rope, two road flares, and a trash bag. In the single front pocket were two American passports, an ample fold of cash in both euros and American dollars (for which Reid was most thankful, since his own stack was getting quite low), and a snub-nosed Walther PPK.

  He took out the small silver and black pistol. It was a tiny gun in his hand, less than four inches high and one inch wide. Six-round magazine, .380 ACP caliber, non-slip slide surfacing. Also in the front pouch was a spare clip.

  Reid put the pistol back in the bag and took out the two passports. He was certain they would both bear some fake name and R
eidigger’s photo. The first one featured the former agent with a patchy beard and the alias Carl Fredericks, from Arkansas. He opened the second passport.

  He fell back on his rear and thudded against the floorboards, staring in shock.

  His own picture was staring back at him.

  His face—Reid Lawson’s face—gazed placidly from the ID page of the passport. He was at least five years younger, maybe more, in the picture, but there was no denying it. It was him. The name on the passport was Benjamin Cosgrove.

  Ben. The same alias he had given Yuri, the first one that had popped into Reid’s head when he needed a fake name, was here on this passport.

  How?

  He flipped through the pages to see if there were country stamps, and a small folded slip of paper fluttered out. He snatched it up and opened it—it was a handwritten note, and as soon as he saw it he immediately knew that it was Reidigger’s handwriting.

  Hey Zero, the note began.

  If you’re reading this, it’s because what we did came back to bite us in the ass. I always thought it might, which is why I’ve been carrying this around ever since. And if I’m not reading this over your shoulder right now, well… I hope it was quick. Take the bag and GOOD. Do what you have to do. I should have let you finish it then. I hope you haven’t had to pay for that now. – Alan

  Reid read the note a second and then a third time. What did that mean, “what we did”? What was it that he had to do? Obviously he—as Kent Steele—was onto something. He had arrested the sheikh. He’d learned of the plot, and maybe even about Amun. But what did he know then that he didn’t know now? He desperately wished that Reidigger was still alive to tell him something more, give him some sort of clue as to what he was supposed to do next.

  Maybe he had. Reidigger was smart.

  If Alan had thought for a second that something would happen to him and Kent would come back to find this, he would have known that a vague note wouldn’t suffice. He had to have given Reid something more to go on.

  He stuck the note and the passport back into the bag, and for good measure, he shook out Reidigger’s fake passport as well. Sure enough, something fell out of his, too. It was a photograph, a folded four-by-six, the edges worn and the center crease white from being folded and unfolded dozens of times. It was a picture of the two of them, him and Reidigger, smiling and standing in front of an ornate fountain.

  Why did Reidigger have this? He always was the sentimental type—the kind of guy that would break protocol for a picture. Or risk blowing his own cover to sneak into a friend’s wedding.

  No, he decided, it was more than that. There had to be a stronger motive for Alan to have kept this particular picture and left that particular note. He scrutinized it, looking past the faces…

  I know this place. The Fontana delle Tartarughe—the Turtle Fountain, in the Piazza Mattei. The Sant’Angelo district of Rome, Italy.

  He knew it—he knew it as Professor Reid Lawson, since it was a famous Renaissance-era fountain built by architect Giacomo della Porta—but it was more than that. He knew it as Kent Steele. He had been there, which was obvious from the photograph, but the place held a greater significance.

  This was a meeting place. If anyone had to go dark, we would reconvene here. A vision flashed through his mind of four people—himself, Reidigger, a younger man with a cocky smile, and the mysterious woman, the gray-eyed Johansson. They had reconned the area. Determined it was a good place for a safe house. There was an apartment building just off the plaza. It’s quiet there, not much foot traffic. A good place to lay low.

  He folded the picture again, stuck it in the passport, and tucked it back into the bug-out bag. He replaced the floorboard and pulled the chaise back into position, and then slung one strap of the bag over a shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured to Reidigger’s body. “I don’t know what we did, but I’m certain you didn’t deserve this. I’m going to find out. And I’m going to make it right.”

  He pulled the broken door closed as best he could, and then hurried down the steel stairs to the street level. Zurich Hauptbahnhof, the city’s central train station, was a short walk away. And then he’d be on his way to Rome.

  The photograph had to be more than just nostalgia, Reid decided. It was a compass. He didn’t know what he might find there, but Reidigger wanted him to follow it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Deputy Director Shawn Cartwright took a deep breath before knocking twice on the oak office door. The message he had received only moments earlier had been explicit: Come straight to the director’s office. ASAFP.

  He hadn’t even finished his coffee yet.

  He pushed the door open a few inches. “Director Mullen? You wanted to see me, sir?”

  “Cartwright, yes! Come in. Have a seat.” Mullen sat behind his desk and smiled, but his nostrils flared. That was never a good sign—the pleasantry was likely a ruse.

  Cartwright entered the office and closed the door behind him. At forty-four, he was considered relatively young in the hierarchy of the Central Intelligence Agency—at least he still had all his hair, though he did take to dyeing it black last year to hide the oncoming gray. He had spent five years heading up the Special Operations Group, which (as he liked to joke) was a fancy way of saying that he wasn’t allowed to tell his wife how his day was. Eighteen months ago, he had been promoted to Deputy Director, overseeing the Special Activities Division in all international affairs. He was a man who built his reputation on efficiency, though his predecessor had mucked up so poorly with leaked documents and exposed field agents that it made it easy for him to look good.

  Despite his advancement and general success, Cartwright had some trepidation in dealing with CIA Director Mullen. His superior was an expert at subterfuge and pretense, concealing his emotions while reading others’. Mullen’s days in the field were long past him, but he still kept himself sharp with his daily interactions. Cartwright had to resort to the tiniest idiosyncrasies and mannerisms to detect the director’s current mood—hence the flared nostrils, and the sinking feeling in his gut as he took a seat opposite Mullen.

  “Good morning,” said Mullen. He somehow managed to make the greeting sound spirited and joyless at the same time. He tented his fingers. He was a discerning man, fifty-six, his bald pate shining and waxed and ringed by a ridge of gray hair from ear to ear. “Did you happen to hear any whispers this morning, Cartwright?”

  “Whispers, sir?” He had indeed heard whispers, in the elevator, and there was no use in trying to hide it from Mullen. “I might have heard some… rumblings. Something about an explosion in Belgium—a possible munitions factory?”

  “Incendiaries,” Mullen corrected. “At least that’s what Interpol is saying at the moment. Hell of a blast; people saw it from miles away, on the highway. The facility was fronting as a vintner—”

  “Vintner, sir?”

  “Winemaker.”

  “Ah.”

  “And that’s all you’ve heard?” Mullen asked casually.

  “Yes, sir, that’s all I’ve heard.”

  Mullen pursed his lips and nodded. “Then I suppose I get to be the one to tell you about the dead Russian found at a farmhouse about twelve miles away. Stabbed in the throat with a steak knife.”

  “Jesus,” said Cartwright. “Connected?”

  “Undoubtedly,” Mullen replied. Cartwright was struggling to see why this meeting was between just the two of them, rather than a team briefing, when Mullen added, “There’s more. Alan Reidigger is dead.”

  Cartwright stared in stunned shock. “Reidigger? Christ.” When Cartwright was head of Special Ops Group, Reidigger had been one of his field agents. Alan hadn’t been the most physically fit guy, or even the most cunning, but he was likeable, able-bodied, and very good at blending in. “How?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” said Director Mullen. He touched the screen on a tablet in front of him and opened an audio application. “This came from Steve Bolton, curr
ent head of Spec Ops, about eight minutes ago. Reidigger hadn’t checked in for more than twenty-four hours, so he took a chance and called him. Here, give it a listen.”

  Mullen pressed the play button. “Alan’s dead,” said a male voice, tinny and distant. “Can’t stay here. And I can’t trust you.”

  Cartwright shook his head in confusion. “Sir, I’m not sure I follow.”

  “No?” said Mullen. “Try again.” He pressed play on the audio clip.

  “Alan’s dead.”

  “Can’t stay here. And I can’t trust you.”

  The voice sounded familiar, but Cartwright was struggling to place it. Mullen played the clip again, watching the deputy director carefully. He played it again.

  On the fourth time, Cartwright’s eyes widened with both realization and sheer dread.

  “No…” he said quietly. “No, there’s no way.” He avoided Mullen’s discerning gaze. “He’s dead. Zero is dead.”

  “He is certainly supposed to be,” Mullen agreed. “It was your job to oversee that.”

  “And I did,” Cartwright insisted. “This must be someone else, someone that knew him, or maybe wants us to think he’s alive…”

  “We’re running a full voice analysis on this,” said Mullen. “But I don’t think we need to.” The director folded his hands and leaned forward in his chair. “Cartwright, do you know how many bodies they’ve pulled out of that fire so far in Belgium? Six. And forensics is saying that every single one of them was already dead. Then we have tracks that led to an SUV at the bottom of a river—a goddamn sixty-foot drop! And last but not least, a dead Russian with his throat cut. That sound like anyone in particular to you, Deputy Director?”

  Cartwright could do little more than shake his head and stare blankly at a coffee ring on Mullen’s desk. It certainly sounded like someone they knew—someone they had known. Near the end, Zero had gotten reckless, unpredictable, wild even. One of the higher-ups had referred to him as “feral.”

  “But he’s dead,” was all Cartwright could say.