Agent Zero

by Jack Mars

Johansson shrugged. “We all have our cover, Kent. According to most of the world, I’m a CPA from Baltimore. I can even do your taxes. We’re well trained. We lead two lives. That’s the way it’s always been.”

  He shook his head. “But I would have gaps in my memory. If I was here before, as Kent, where would I have thought I was as Reid?”

  “Your mind fills it in,” she said simply. “Our brains are pretty amazing. We think in terms of reality. You must have been somewhere, so your brain makes up the details for you.” She tore open the paper packaging on a fresh bandage. “It’s like this study that was done a few years ago, on insurance claims. This company interviewed a dozen witnesses of a car accident, and they asked, ‘What color was the driver’s hat?’ Only a couple of people actually remembered, but not a single person said, ‘I don’t know.’ Their brains filled in the detail, and they were all sure of themselves. The insurance company got five different answers.”

  “So you’re saying that not only do I have Kent’s memories, but some of my memories as Reid might not even be real?” Jesus, he thought, that’s the last thing I need, to start doubting what I thought was certain.

  “I don’t have all the answers. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.” She pressed the bandage over the wound on his neck and smoothed the edges with her fingertips. Her hands felt warm. Something stirred again, deep inside him. He definitely noticed that she was leaning over his shoulder, the low neck of her tank top forming shadows between her breasts. He could feel her soft breath near his ear.

  “These visions… have you had any about me?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Not really,” he said candidly. “I know you were a part of my team. Maybe even… a friend.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. I’m sorry. I don’t know why, but every time you cross my mind, the memory fades and I get this intense headache, like a migraine that only lasts for a minute or so.”

  “Hmm.” She straightened and chewed her lower lip, thinking. “Could be a side effect of the way they cut it out of you. I can’t imagine that was good for your limbic system. I hope it’s not permanent.” Then, quietly, she added, “I’d like you to remember me.”

  They were silent for several seconds, both staring at the white tiled floor. Then Johansson cleared her throat and said, “Take off your pants.”

  “What?”

  “Take off your pants.” She pointed. A small amount of blood had soaked through his jeans. Apparently the super glue he’d used to close the knife wound on his thigh hadn’t held.

  “Oh. Yeah. Okay.” He slid out of his bomber jacket and then took off his jeans, draping both over the tub. He sat again on the toilet and Johansson knelt on the floor in front of him, poking at the wound.

  “Super glue, Kent?” She scoffed. “Anyway, back to Paris. The Iranians in the basement. What happened with them? How’d you get out?”

  “I killed them.” He scanned her for any physical response to his statement, but there was none. She was impassive.

  “I’m going to need tweezers for this,” she muttered. “And then…?”

  “Then I went to a bar.” He told her about the meeting with Yuri, the car ride to Belgium, and escaping Otets’s compound.

  She chuckled lightly. “You know, when I heard about that, my first thought was of you. It had ‘Kent Steele’ written all over it.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “And how did you hear about it?”

  “I read about it in the news, online,” she said simply.

  She read about an explosion at a vineyard and thought of me? Strange.

  “I didn’t see a computer when I came in,” he countered.

  Johansson rolled her eyes. “On my phone. Jeez, you’re being paranoid.”

  Don’t tell her about Reidigger, his mind whispered to him. Only Amun and the CIA knew about that. If she brought it up, he would know she was still on the inside.

  “So how did you know to come here?” she asked.

  He winced as she tugged dried super glue from his cut with a pair of tweezers. “I saw a fountain in Belgium,” he lied. “It triggered a memory.”

  “Odd,” she said. “You wouldn’t have known I was here.”

  “But I knew the safe house was. Speaking of, why are you here?”

  “Like I said, I’m squatting.” She flashed a smirk. “You and Reidigger set this up a while back,” she explained. “We were on an op that was going to take us to Milan. The two of you signed a five-year lease on the place under the alias of a wealthy entrepreneur from California. You hid it in the expense report as an armored transport and ammunition.”

  Okay,” he said slowly, “but what I meant was, how did you end up here? You said you went looking for what I was looking for.”

  “I’m guessing you don’t remember that part,” she said softly. “You were looking for someone, a member of the Fraternity—”

  “The Fraternity?”

  “That’s what we called them. The terrorist collective.”

  Should I tell her about Amun?

  No. Not yet. Wait and see what she knows first.

  “Did you find him?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, not hiding the disappointment in her voice. “Guy’s a ghost.”

  “What’s so important about him?” Reid pressed.

  “To you? He was a lead. To me?” She was quiet for a moment. “He’s the one they said killed you.”

  “Well, obviously not, if I’m here—ow!” He hissed as Johansson pulled the last bit of glue from the cut. “How long have I been dead?”

  “Um…” She bit her lip again and looked upward. “It’ll be nineteen months next week.”

  “Nineteen months,” he repeated wistfully. That was certainly odd, that she knew the anniversary of his death down to the week. He had the distinct feeling, and the inkling of memory, that the two of them had been more than just teammates or friends. “I was on to something—we were on to something,” he said. “A plot, by this ‘Fraternity,’ that’s been in the works for a while… a couple years, maybe more. What do you know about that?”

  She shrugged as she cleaned the wound on his thigh. “Only what we found out together.”

  “Remind me.”

  Johansson sighed. “All right.” She took another bandage from the cabinet and unwrapped it. “A little more than two years ago, the NSA intercepted some suspicious emails. They were to an Iranian-born engineer living in Virginia. The guy was clean, but the emails weren’t—the engineer was trying to talk his brother out of doing something, begging him to go home, and the replies were chock-full of threats and ‘death in the name of Allah’ kind of stuff. We got involved, and traced the IP to Spain…”

  “The Ritz, in Madrid,” Reid said knowingly. “The suitcase bomber.” The vision flashed through his head again. 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.

  “Exactly,” said Johansson as she carefully pressed the bandage over his thigh. “You were the one that nabbed him. Guy was young, and scared out of his mind. He was a sleeper for an Islamic radical group that had just been inducted into the Fraternity, but we didn’t know that yet. He could only give us two names, a couple of his associates. It took us a while, but we tracked them to an airstrip in Zagreb…”

  “Trying to board a plane.” Reid had had that vision too, of him and Morris chasing down the two Iranians on the tarmac.

  “…Right,” said Johansson slowly. “Are you sure you lost your memory? You seem to know a lot of this.”

  “In the basement, in Paris, they asked about all of these places,” Reid explained. “Some of it came back to me. But like I said, it was all disjointed and muddled.” But it’s starting to come together now.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “those two were tougher nuts to crack. Believe me, we tried.”

 
; Another familiar vision flashed through Reid’s mind, the same one that had come to him when he was waterboarding Otets— 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 shook the awful sight out of his head.

  “Ultimately it was the plane itself that gave us the next lead,” Johansson told him. With his wound clean, she sat on the floor in front of him, her knees drawn up near her chest. “It was owned by a holdings company out of Tehran. After a little digging we found out it was a shell corporation used for money laundering. The owner was a wealthy sheikh—”

  “Mustafar.” You know, Sheikh… a bullet sounds the same in every language. He had said that, at the CIA black site in Morocco.

  “Right. He was bankrolling the Iranians, who were funneling the money to the Fraternity—that’s the first time we heard about them, and that’s where they made their mistake. The sheikh had everything to lose, and he spilled his guts. He gave us names, locations, dates…”

  “But they turned out to be false leads, right?” Reid interjected. “The sheikh didn’t actually have anything valuable.”

  “The few things he did know were dead ends, literally. The Fraternity knew we’d gotten to the sheikh and they tied their loose ends quickly,” said Johansson. “It was a trail of cold bodies with no evidence. Then it got worse. That first guy, the suitcase bomber from Madrid? Someone got to him. A member of the Fraternity managed to infiltrate a secure black site just to kill him.” She shook her head. “I mean, the guy had already given us the little info he had. But they still wanted him dead. To risk that much just to silence one man… it’s lunacy.”

  “And the other two?” Reid asked. “The would-be pilots from Zagreb?”

  “Same. By the time we discovered the first guy dead and put in the alert, they’d already been done. And you had a hunch about that.”

  “I did?”

  She nodded. “All three were killed in the same method—two to the chest, one to the head, from a silenced Sig Sauer. We thought it was a general MO for Fraternity assassins, but you had the bullets analyzed. It turned out they came from the same gun. Same guy did all three, in the span of six hours.”

  Reid had another hunch now, though he didn’t share it with Johansson. Based on what he now knew, it seemed to him that Amun had used the Iranians as scapegoats to throw the CIA off their own trail. It made some sense, considering America’s track record with the Middle East. It could have been that the sheikh himself was little more than a red herring for them to follow.

  Instead he asked, “So that was the lead I chased? The assassin?”

  “Yeah. You went alone, without telling us. You must have found him… because last I heard was that he killed you.”

  “Why would I have gone without you? I mean, without the team.” He thought he might already know the answer—because I didn’t think I could trust you—but he wanted to hear her take.

  “I don’t know,” she said simply. “By that point, you were, uh, personally invested.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She shrugged. “If I’m being honest? You got obsessed. You got reckless. You were leaving bodies behind with no explanation and no probable cause. The agency was an inch away from disavowing you, but then word came down that you were KIA.”

  Reid rubbed his face and sighed into both hands. “But I wasn’t. And like you said, I couldn’t have done this to myself—someone put that suppression chip into my head.”

  “You think it was them.” It didn’t sound so much like a question as a statement. “The agency, you think they did this to you? It would have been much easier to just kill you.”

  He blinked in shock. “Jesus. Do we—do they do that?”

  “It’s not unheard of.”

  He shook his head. He had no idea if he should believe her or not; after all, Reidigger had obviously known that Kent was still alive, had even planned for it, and he was still CIA, right up until his untimely death. Johansson could have been lying to him. Yet every physical indicator, every response she gave, seemed sincere. She had appeared genuinely shocked to see him alive, and genuinely intending to help.

  But she had been well trained. Deception was undoubtedly part of that.

  “After my death,” he said, fully aware of how strange that phrase sounded, “you said you went looking for what I was looking for. The assassin?”

  “Yeah. But I never found him.”

  “Any leads come out of that?” he asked.

  “Nothing substantial enough to follow.”

  Her eyes, her large gray irises, they flitted to the right for just a split-second, almost imperceptibly. Almost. She was lying, Reid knew. Unless—unless she’s giving you an obvious tell so that you believe everything else.

  Dammit.

  That complicated things. Either she was being completely honest about her story up to the point of finding a lead, or she was extremely cunning and intentionally misleading him. He really hoped it was the former; she already had a leg up on him simply by virtue of having her memory. She knew him far better than he knew her, which was barely at all.

  Johansson climbed to her feet and soaked a cotton ball in hydrogen peroxide. “Let me take a look at that cut over your eye.” She dabbed it gently. He winced at the sharp sting of chemicals. “You’ve been on the run for days,” she said softly. “You should really get some sleep.”

  “I can’t stay here.” I’m not even sure I can trust you.

  “Yes you can. You trusted me before. Even if you can’t remember, I know you can feel it. Trust me again.” She touched his rough cheek, lifting his stubbled chin and looking him in the eyes.

  “Johansson, I—”

  “Maria,” she said. “My name is Maria.” She leaned in and kissed him. Her lips were soft, moist, and… and familiar. A yearning rumbled inside him, but it wasn’t new or unknown. He remembered the feel of her lips on his. His hands had explored the curve of her hips, her soft thighs, the scent of her hair…

  He pulled away. “I don’t know you,” he said quietly.

  “But I know you.” She ran her fingers through his hair, down the back of his head, her fingernails gently trailing down his neck. A pleasant tingle ran down his spine. It had been a long time since anyone had touched him intimately—at least that he could remember. “Just stay a while. Let’s figure this out together.”

  She kissed him again, more passionately this time.

  He didn’t pull away.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Morris peered through the scope of the rifle. There was still no movement.

  He yawned, absently stroking the smooth butt stock of the modified HTR 2000. It was a truly beautiful machine, as stunning to him as the loveliest woman. Bolt-action, American-made, twenty-eight-inch barrel with 0.8 minute of arc and an effective firing range of 800 feet—not that he needed that kind of distance on this job, but he certainly wasn’t going to use a Barrett or an Armalite to shoot through a window.

  He’d acquired the rifle from an ex-Israeli Special Forces member and modded it himself with a suppressor and tripod rig. He named it Betsy, after his first high school girlfriend, a leggy cheerleader who had taken his virginity in the bed of a Ford F-150.

  He wondered how Betsy was doing these days.

  Then he realized how incredibly bored he was.

  Morris had arrived hours earlier, while it was still dark out. When he had gotten the call from Deputy Director Cartwright that Kent Steele was somehow believed to be alive, he had immediately hopped on a plane from Barcelona to Rome. No, that wasn’t quite true; first he trashed his hotel room in a fit of blind rage, shouting obscenities and cursing his own stupidity and breaking anything he could break. Then he’d gotten on a plane to Rome. No, that wasn’t quite true either; after his fit, he’d made the call and put Amun’s wild dog on alert.

  Then he’d gotten on a plane.

  He stationed himself in a
room on the fourth floor of the Hotel Mattei and insisted to the front desk that he required a room with a view of the Fontana delle Tartarughe. His first course of action was a drink from the mini bar, and his second was setting up the tripod and sighting in Betsy on the second-floor window of the apartment directly across the piazza.

  Of course he knew that Johansson was there. He’d known for a few months, but by the time he’d discovered that she was crashing at their former safe house, she was no longer a threat. She had called off her hunt. Morris had, admittedly, always been fond of her. She was tough, an expert at subterfuge, and probably smarter than any of them. More importantly, she didn’t let any of that on until she needed to. He respected that.

  When morning came, he peered through the scope and saw that Johansson was awake. He watched as she passed by the window in his sights. She was making herself some tea.

  Then, mere moments later, there he was. The man of the hour. Agent Zero himself.

  Kent Steele had done exactly what Morris thought he would do and stupidly returned to the safe house.

  Morris had a clear line of sight on Steele as he entered the piazza and roamed around it, trying his best to appear casual. But Morris knew better. Kent could feel the barrel on him. The man always had a great sense about him, an instinct that seemed to border on precognition.

  Morris could have put a bullet in Kent’s skull right then and there. He could have reloaded, adjusted aim to the kitchen window, and popped off Johansson before she ever even knew that Kent was just outside her apartment.

  But he refrained.

  He had another opportunity just a few minutes later, through the window, when Kent entered the apartment. Johansson turned the corner and froze in shock. She dropped her teacup. Her back was to Morris, and over her shoulder, in the doorway, was Kent—a clear center mass bead from Betsy to his somehow-still-beating heart.

  But still, Morris refrained.

  Then the two of them vanished into the rear of the apartment, where Morris knew the bathroom and small bedroom were, and hadn’t come out since. Possibly catching up on some sleep, Morris assumed. Or catching up on each other.