Agent Zero

by Jack Mars

  Before today, Agent One’s intel had always been sound. It had helped Amun stay one step ahead of the CIA in the past, to feed them false information and dead-ends, to throw other agents off their scent. But now—Kent Steele was alive.

  With two fingers, Rais gently touched the dark, jagged scar that ran diagonally from just below his left nipple, down over his sternum, almost all the way to his belly button. Nearly two years ago, he had been personally assigned to kill Steele. But it had not gone well for him, not that time. His brethren had found him half-dead and holding in his own innards. Amun’s doctors struggled for hours to keep him alive. Five months it had taken Rais to recover.

  He began applying the bleach mixture to sections of his short, dark hair with a brush.

  Agent One’s intel had always been sound, except for a single instance: when he told Amun that Steele was dead. He promised he had taken care of it himself.

  Yet Kent Steele was alive.

  If it was anyone else, even Rais, Amun would act swiftly and mercilessly. Agent One would be dead within the hour for his transgression. But they needed him, and the agent knew it.

  The call had come less than an hour earlier.

  “Kent Steele is alive,” Agent One told him over the phone, by way of greeting.

  Rais prided himself on control over his emotion, but he found himself wavering as shock and fury washed over him. How strange that four seemingly simple words could inspire such bloodlust. His hand absentmindedly touched the scar on his chest.

  Rais had been silent for a long moment. “That would be impossible,” he said at last, evenly, keeping his voice from betraying his scorn. “Because you killed him.”

  “Thought I did,” the agent said simply, as if merely thinking one had done something was to will it into existence. “Seemed he had some help from another, someone I thought was on my side. That guy’s dead now, though, thanks to your people.”

  “Are you certain?” Rais asked. He chuckled so lightly it came out as barely a hiss of breath. “You seem to have some trouble telling the difference between dead and alive.”

  Agent One scoffed through the phone. “Look, your people told me you’re the guy that gets things like this done, right? And I hear that you’ve got something of a personal, uh, rapport with Steele.”

  “Do you know where he is?” Rais asked.

  “No, but I think I know where he’ll be,” the agent said. “There’s only one place for him to go, and I’m going to catch him there. But if he’s smart enough not to go there, that’s where you come in.”

  “How will I know where to find him?” Rais asked.

  “There’s a way to flush him out. I don’t like it much, but it might be necessary.”

  “Which is?”

  “Hell no,” Agent One snapped. “It’s only a last resort. If I fail to get him, I’ll tell you. I’m just putting you on alert.” Then he hung up.

  Rais let the color set for twenty minutes, sitting on the closed toilet lid and thinking. The bleach mixture made his scalp itch, but he ignored it. After the agent’s call, Rais had immediately set to changing his appearance so that he might not be recognizable to Kent Steele. Back when they had last encountered each other, Rais had a thin beard, which he had shaved off. He bleached his dark hair, and while he waited for the color to set he put blue contacts in his eyes to hide his emerald-hued irises.

  What the snarky Agent One did not know was that Amun had already put Rais on alert. Four of the Iranians were found dead in a Parisian basement after failing to check in at the appointed time. The explosion at the Russian’s facility was all over the news—though according to the media, a gas pipeline had been responsible for destroying the vineyard. There was no mention of bomb-making or connections to any radical extremist groups.

  Rais switched phones, flipping open an ancient Nokia, and made a call. On any given day he used up to five different phones and changed them out regularly. He fully realized that some might call him paranoid. He thought of himself as thorough.

  The man on the other end of the call answered but did not speak.

  “We are tracking Agent One’s movement?” Rais asked quietly.

  “Yes,” came a hoarse whisper.

  “I want to know where he goes.” Rais snapped the phone shut. He was sure the agent would fail again, and when he did, Rais would find Steele and make absolutely certain that he was dead.

  He touched the glyph on his right bicep. It was rectangular, no larger than a quarter, the skin there raised and pink where the symbol had been seared into his flesh. It was an incredible honor to be marked with the glyph of Amun. The physical and mental trials one had to perform to become a member of the inner circle would, and often did, send most men to madness or suicide.

  The mark on Rais’s arm, however, was not as visibly apparent as so many others. It was common to have the glyph branded on the neck, to wear and display it proudly, but Rais’s position required an amount of subterfuge, the ability to blend into a crowd and not be easily identifiable. His superiors understood that and had allowed the brand on his arm, rather than his neck.

  Some of his peers, on the other hand, did not understand and a few had even gone so far as to mock him and question his devotion to the cause. Rais had an elementary solution to the chastisement: he had put both his thumbs into the eye sockets of the last man who had questioned his loyalty.

  Once the bleach had set, Rais washed his hair in the dirty, ringed tub. He wondered where Steele might go next. It would be impossible to track his whereabouts without the annoying agent first making a move. Rais had no choice but to wait. He was a patient man—a trait not often shared by many of his background. Others who had denounced the culture and heritage of their birthplace might have been inclined to forget it, to push it from memory and focus on the present, but not Rais. It was important for him to remember where he came from. It reminded him of his motivations and strengthened his resolve.

  Rais had earned his mark, though his position within Amun compelled him to hide it when necessary. His formative years of military training and subsequent time spent stealing on the streets of Egypt served him equally well as an assassin. He had gained prominence among his brothers. He had found purpose.

  And then Kent Steele entered the picture.

  It had been an epic confrontation. Just thinking about it raised the hairs on Rais’s arms. He had very nearly bested the agent—had him on his back with a gun to his head. But it misfired. A faulty trigger pin, just a tiny oblong of metal, had made the decision between life and death for him. Steele had a knife in his boot, and he opened Rais from navel to pectoral, and then he left him to die slowly, holding his own insides.

  Five months it took him to fully recover. Five torturous, grueling months of negative-pressure wound therapy and vacuum-assisted closure, of medical corsets and necrotic tissue.

  Rais checked himself in the mirror, content with his clean-shaven cheeks, bleach job, and blue eyes. To him, he still looked like himself, like Rais, but he hoped it would be enough to dupe Steele, at least temporarily—enough for him to get close, and to plunge a knife between the agent’s ribs. He would not fail this time.

  He pulled on a black T-shirt and left the bathroom. The living room smelled like smoke again; the other three were sitting at the small round table, sharing cigarettes and playing dominos. Rais scowled. These men, this trio of Serbians, they were not Amun. They were a faction of some liberation movement that Amun had gathered into the fold in order to assist with their grand scheme. Rais had been assigned to this place, this rural, ramshackle house in eastern Spain, to keep tabs on these three. They were responsible for tracking and noting flight paths going to and from Sion, but Amun thought them to be somewhat unreliable—and based on what Rais had seen so far, they were right to be concerned.

  These fools, they thought they were Amun. That was the promise: join us, become us, and enjoy the fruits of the new world alongside us. Gain your own foothold in the earth. A piece for
everyone, and everyone is a piece.

  These men had no idea.

  The largest of the three, a bearded, imposing man named Nikola, glanced up and immediately let out a snort at Rais’s altered appearance—his clean cheeks, blond hair, and blue eyes.

  “What is this you are doing?” he asked in accented English. “You look like, eh, movie star.” His two cohorts laughed.

  Rais smirked. “I am going to kill someone. So I must reestablish my Western credentials.”

  Nikola frowned. “What does this mean?”

  Rais strode over to their small, round table and plucked up the silenced Sig Sauer that sat in its center. Without a moment’s hesitation, he fired three quick shots, each a sharp thwip of compressed air, into the foreheads of the three Serbians.

  “Useless,” he muttered. He rubbed his prints from the gun and set it in the center of the table. He took the SIM cards from each of their phones and crushed them. Then he set about wiping the place clean of any indication he had been there.

  He made a call to alert Amun to the unfortunate demise of the three Serbians. Then he grabbed his bag and left the house, headed toward Barcelona. Amun was tracking the agent, and the agent was tracking Steele. The irritating turncoat Agent One feeding them information—he would fail. It would be Rais who struck the final blow.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Kent?”

  The shattered remains of the teacup lay between them—Reid, just inside the door to the apartment, and the woman, the gray-eyed Johansson from his memory, just beyond the small adjacent kitchen. Her face drained of color. Her bottom lip trembled.

  “You…” She shook her head, and her blonde hair shook with it. “You’re dead.”

  People keep telling me that, he thought, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t know this woman. Maybe he had, once, but he didn’t now.

  “I don’t… I just…” she stammered, at a loss for words. “Is it really you?”

  He didn’t know what to say. He decided on the only thing that made sense to him in the moment: “Yeah. It’s me.”

  “God. You look like hell.” She let out a short laugh. “Kent, I just can’t believe this!” She moved to take a step forward, but Reid held up both hands. She froze, an eyebrow raised.

  He pointed down at the floor. “Glass.” Her feet were bare on the tiled floor.

  She looked down quizzically, as if only now noticing that a cup had broken, and then she leapt deftly over the shards toward him. Before he could even get his hand out of his pocket, she flung her arms around him and pulled him close, burying her head in his neck.

  “God, I can’t believe it! You’re alive! Why didn’t you reach out, try to contact me? Jesus, you’re alive!”

  Reid let her hug him, but he didn’t hug her back. Still, there was something about her, just the sight and feel of her, that stirred something inside him. Before, it had been passion and excitement. This time it was warmth, a feeling bordering on joy, like seeing an old friend come through the gate of an airport—maybe more than that. He could smell her hair, a fruity shampoo, lavender skin lotion, and…

  The two of you sit at the bar in a dive joint in Malta. The place is packed, but no one else matters. The light of the neon sign in the window dances in her gray eyes. Your fingers touch, just barely. You lean toward her. She does too…

  He grunted as a headache came on again. It felt like an intense pressure in his head, as if something was in his skull and trying to escape.

  Johansson pulled away. “Are you okay?” she asked in alarm. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s… kind of a long story,” he groaned.

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “Yeah,” he said simply.

  “Were you followed here? Have you seen any of the other—”

  “Wait.” The pain subsided and he shrugged away from her grasp. “Just wait a second. How do I know I can trust you?”

  She took a step back and furrowed her brow. “What are you talking about? It’s me. Maria. Of course you can trust me. You know me.”

  “No. I don’t.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Like I said. It’s a long story.”

  “Well, I want to hear it,” she insisted.

  He scrutinized her. She seemed sincere, in both her concern about him and her desire to help. Reid Lawson might not have been all that great at reading people, but he trusted that Kent Steele was, and there were no alarm bells going off in his head.

  Even so, he had questions. “You say I can trust you, but you’re holed up in a safe house?”

  “It’s not what you think,” she said. “I’m… well, I’m squatting, on the US government’s dime.” She frowned. “You don’t remember?”

  “No.” Reid looked her up and down. There was nowhere on her slight figure she could have been hiding a gun. At the same time, he couldn’t help but notice that her skin was flawless, not a discernible scar anywhere. Her hair fell in glossy waves around her shoulders, so bright and perfectly blonde it seemed nearly luminescent. The feeling stirred inside him again—one of longing, of desire.

  Snap out of it, he scolded himself.

  “You,” he said. “You’re CIA.”

  “I was. Not anymore. I haven’t been for a little while now. Shortly after you… well, after you died, I was disavowed.”

  Disavowed. She went rogue. The agency denied all responsibility or even knowledge of her as an agent.

  “Why?”

  She pushed the door fully closed behind him, stepped over the glass remains of the teacup, and waved him inside. “I went looking for what you were looking for,” she said vaguely. “Then I refused to come back when they called me. So I was disavowed.”

  Johansson disappeared for a moment into the kitchen and emerged again with a thin broom and a plastic dustpan. She knelt to clean up the broken cup.

  Reid decided to trust her, at least until she gave him a reason not to. He slowly took his hand out of his pocket as he stepped into the living room. “And you’re sure we’re safe here?” he asked, looking around.

  “No one else knows about it besides the four of us.”

  “The others, Reidigger and Morris… they didn’t come looking?”

  Johansson snorted. “No, Kent. Disavowed means that active agents forget your face. Yeah, they were friends, but they’re still on the job, far as I know. If the agency caught wind they had found me, they’d be up shit’s creek, too.”

  Reid shook his head. He wanted very much to tell her about Reidigger, but he didn’t feel it was the right time. He wanted answers first.

  But so did she. As she stood again, she said, “Christ, Kent, where have you been? And what is going on with your head? Why are you acting like you don’t remember any of this?”

  “Because I don’t.” He dropped Reidigger’s bug-out bag on the sofa, and then carefully peeled the butterfly bandage from his neck and turned slightly to show her the wound where the Iranian interrogator had sliced the small, grain-like device out of him.

  “Oh my god,” she breathed. “That looks like it’s getting infected. Come with me.” She grabbed his hand and led him into a small bathroom off the kitchen with frosted glass windows and white fixtures. “Sit.” He did so, sitting on the toilet lid while she rummaged in a cabinet for first-aid supplies. “I’ll clean this up,” she said, “but you’re going to have to tell me everything.”

  “I will,” he promised.

  *

  He started at the most logical place, the beginning. Reid told her about sitting in his study in New York, close to midnight, when the three Iranians came for him. He told her how they drugged him and put him on a cargo plane to Paris. He told her about the basement, and the interrogator, and cutting the tiny rice-like device out of his neck.

  “He called it a memory suppressor.” He winced as Johansson pressed a warm, damp washcloth to the wound.

  “Jesus,” she murmured. “How did yo
u even get your hands on one of those?”

  He looked up sharply. “You know about it?”

  “I know a little. I’ve heard things.” She rubbed the dried blood from the edges of the wound, and then squeezed pink water from the washcloth into the sink. “The agency’s been obsessed with memory control as far back as anyone can remember. Suppressing memories, altering memories, accessing memories… I’m sure there’s some really bizarre stuff going down in some underground clean-room somewhere.”

  “But this is real,” he said, “obviously. I didn’t remember anything at all about being Kent.”

  “And the memories didn’t come back when they cut it out?” she asked.

  “No. I mean, a little. They were fuzzy at first, strange and disjointed. They’ve been coming back a bit at a time, especially when I see something or hear certain words, it triggers a vision in my head. It’s like flipping through channels on a TV, and just getting a brief glimpse of what’s on.” He looked her in the eye. She didn’t. “What have you heard about it?”

  She sighed. “I know it was highly experimental, potentially dangerous. It supposedly works based on cognitive therapy—”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that after they put it in you, someone’s there to tell your brain what to forget,” she explained. “Sort of like hypnosis—power of suggestion and that kind of stuff.” She squeezed some ointment onto a cotton ball and dabbed at his neck.

  “So you’re saying I couldn’t have done this to myself.”

  “No,” she replied. “That would have been impossible.”

  “This whole situation is impossible,” he muttered. “Three days ago I thought I was a European history professor living in the Bronx with my kids. Now I’m a CIA agent who was killed in action for trying to uncover a terrorist plot. How can that be?”