Agent Zero

by Jack Mars

Just stay awhile. Her voice, from his dream, echoed in his head.

  “Tell me,” he demanded.

  Still she said nothing. Her gray eyes refused to meet his. A vision of the dream flashed through his mind again—Kate, distraught and terrified, dissolving into Maria, holding him, begging him to stay…

  Reid felt heat rise in his face. “Tell me!” His arm lashed out, seemingly on its own, and swatted the mug off the table. Maria winced as it shattered against the wall, the dark coffee leaving streaks down the white plaster.

  “There you are,” she said quietly. “There’s the Kent I know.” Her gaze lifted slowly to meet his. “I bet you’re feeling more like him every day.”

  Reid turned away quickly—not out of anger as much as embarrassment. He had never lashed out like that before, at least not as Reid Lawson. She was right. This new personality—or old personality, as it were—was eking back into him, little by little. He had no idea how to stop himself from becoming Kent again, or if he even wanted to.

  He stared out the kitchen window. In the piazza below, water bubbled from the turtle fountain. Across the way, the sun peeked from behind the Hotel Mattei.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s not like me.”

  She rose from the sofa and stood beside him, staring out the window as well. “Yes, it is. You just don’t know it yet. You’re becoming obsessed again.”

  “I can’t help how I feel. I just… I need to do this, to see this through. It’s coming. It’s going to happen soon, I can feel it. And right now, I don’t even know what it is, let alone how to stop it.”

  “You can’t.”

  Reid looked up at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

  Maria bit her bottom lip pensively. “You want to know what I found out? I’ll tell you. This thing, this Fraternity… It’s big, Kent. Too big to take on alone. I spent months chasing down leads. Half of them were fake. The other half, I’d get a name. Just a name, or sometimes a location. And if that wasn’t a dead end, it would just lead to another name—another link in a very, very long chain. They have spent years collecting factions from all over the world. It’s not just Europe. It’s not just the Middle East. It’s liberation movements in Africa. It’s guerrilla fighters in South America. It’s even at home…”

  “Our own people,” he finished. “Yeah. I heard that too.”

  “That was when I stopped, when I learned that. I got in too deep and the Fraternity caught wind of it. They tried hard to get to me. I was sure they were going to kill me. I was disavowed—I was one person with no one at my back and no one I could trust, not even the agency.”

  “So you just gave up? Hid out here?” Once again his words came out harsher than intended.

  She turned on him, her gaze angry and hard. “I did not just give up!” she said firmly. “I saved my own life! I came to realize what you were too goddamn stubborn to understand! You were obsessed with chasing down one man, your next lead. But what you failed to realize—the thing that we all thought got you killed—was that even if you found him, it would be nothing but disappointment. The only thing he would give you, if anything, was one more name. One more link in the chain. Much as it pains me to admit it, the Fraternity set it up brilliantly. No one knows who’s at the top; all they know is who they work with directly. It’s just like it was before, two years ago… we can chase down every lead and at the end of the day we’ll still have nothing but another name.”

  “Eventually that chain has to end,” he countered. “There’s someone at the top. There always is. Sooner or later, we’d find it.”

  “Ever the optimist.” Maria shook her head and smiled sadly. “You’re right. But it would be a lot later than sooner. It would be too late. That’s what they’ve done.” She scoffed. “Do you remember that thing in the eighties, that publicity stunt called Hands Across America? It was something like six million people, all holding hands, forming a human chain across the country. Imagine you’re standing in New York, and you’ve got a person to your left, and a person to your right. That’s all you know. That’s all that matters to you. You’re doing your part. You’re linking the chain. You have no idea who the links are in Illinois, or Arkansas, or California. It doesn’t matter what their name is, or what your differences might be, what kind of person they are—but you know they’re there, doing the same thing you are. Linking the chain. All of you, united in a single cause. It’s like that. That’s what they’ve done. And that’s what I realized, Kent. They won’t ever let you get to the top. You’ll be dead long before that.”

  Reid sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Then what would you have me do?” Her words from the dream came to him again. Just stay awhile. “We can’t just let this happen. People will die, Maria. I’m going to keep following, with or without your help. And it’s not because of Kent’s obsession or sense of duty. It’s because I have two girls at home that are scared out of their wits right now, in hiding, with no idea if they’ll ever see me again or not. No one should live that way, ever. And if Amun had their way—”

  Maria looked up sharply. “Amun?”

  Dammit! he scolded himself. His tongue had slipped and in his haste to convince her to give him the lead, he’d shown his hand.

  “How do you know that name?” she demanded.

  “I…” He had already let it slip; he might as well be honest. “I heard it from the Russian in Belgium. It’s what they call themselves, the Fraternity. I think it’s sort of the nucleus of the group, like the glue holding them all together—”

  Maria smacked him in the arm, hard enough for him to wince. “Christ, Kent, why didn’t you say that earlier?!”

  “Because I didn’t think I could trust you!” he blurted out.

  She threw her hands up in frustration as she marched to the back bedroom.

  “Where are you going?”

  She emerged again a moment later, a cell phone in hand. “My last lead, before I quit,” she explained as she scrolled the screen, “came from a low-level thug in Jordan. He thought he was tough, but after I pulled off a few fingernails—”

  “Jesus, Maria…”

  “—he gave me an address, and the name ‘Amun.’ He said I’d know it was him by a scar, a burn mark, on his neck…”

  “A brand,” Reid confirmed. “I’ve seen it a few times now. It’s a hieroglyph of an ancient Egyptian god.”

  She looked up briefly enough to shoot him an irritated glance at just how much he’d kept from her, and then continued scrolling. “Anyway, the guy’s place must have been tapped, because I was intercepted en route. That’s when they told me about moles in the agency. Their network. I gave up, I came here. But if this guy is Amun, then…god, I might have been a lot closer than I thought!”

  “From what I gathered,” Reid told her, “Amun isn’t one person. It’s a group. Saying that he’s Amun might be the equivalent of someone saying they’re American or Catholic or Republican. What’s with the phone?”

  “I saved all the addresses in my contacts under fake names,” she explained. “This one was in Eastern Europe. Slovenia, if I recall…”

  She didn’t get the chance to find it.

  A jarring crash startled them both as the door to the apartment splintered and flew open.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Reid’s instincts kicked into gear instantly. He didn’t have time to get a look at his assailant; as soon as he saw the black suppressed barrel of a pistol, he leapt to the right. Maria leapt to the left, toward the kitchen.

  The gun barked sharply twice, both shots striking the window overlooking the Fontana. Reid tucked into a roll, almost hitting the wall by overshooting in the tiny living room. He came up in a crouch and scooped up the largest shard of the shattered coffee mug, its pieces still strewn over the carpet.

  Two more shots rang out. Reid threw himself back to the floor just in time and the bullets smacked against plaster, sending chips of it flying in his face. He grabbed the edge of the coffee table, hurled it upright, and too
k cover behind it. He’s using nine-millimeter rounds. This is two and a half inches of wood. It should hold. As soon as he thought it, a shot splintered the wood right in front of him, center mass.

  Thankfully, the table held.

  The assailant fired off two more shots, but not at Reid. Maria gasped in pain. Reid winced; she was hit.

  “Good to see you again, Zero,” said a taunting yet familiar male voice. “Come on out of there, and I won’t kill her.”

  Reid hazarded a peek around the edge of the coffee table. The assailant had his gun trained on Maria, but he was staring at Reid. He was in his early thirties, square jawed, five o’clock shadow and a cocky half-smirk on his face. Morris, his brain told him. Your former teammate.

  Maria held her right bicep with her left hand, blood between her fingers. It looked like the bullet had only grazed her.

  “Don’t,” she told him.

  Reid gripped the ceramic shard tightly, obscuring it in his palm as he stepped out from behind the upturned coffee table.

  “There he is.” Morris’s smirk widened. “You’re looking well for a dead guy.”

  “Why?” Reid demanded. He already knew the answer—or at the least the possibilities. Either Morris was an Amun mole in the CIA, or the agency had sent him to take Kent out. He just didn’t know which.

  Morris rolled his eyes. “Come on, Kent. We’re not going to stand here and do the big monologue thing. I just wanted to get a good look at you.” He shook his head, and for a moment his gaze softened, as if he was genuinely disappointed. “Alan was such a fool. None of this had to happen.”

  He aimed the pistol at Reid.

  As soon as the gun was off of her, Maria reached for her back pocket. In the same moment, she lunged forward, bringing up a slender, curved blade—a black-handled fillet knife.

  Before Morris could squeeze off a shot, Maria swung the blade upward and sliced through the muscle of his forearm, about five inches above the wrist.

  “Ah! Bitch!” Morris screamed in agony as the gun slipped from his grip. Maria kicked the pistol—but not toward Reid. It skittered across the tile and under the kitchen table.

  Morris lashed out with his good arm and struck a solid blow across Maria’s cheek. Reid surged forward and swung his elbow upward, into the younger man’s solar plexus. A blow like that should have stunned him, knocked the wind right out of him, but Morris was trained. He caved his torso inward, moving with the strike so that it barely glanced against his ribs, and responded in kind with a vicious right hook.

  Reid took the hit on the chin. His head jerked back. Stars swam in his vision. For a moment, he was barely cognizant of Morris’s good arm, coming back around for a second strike aimed at his windpipe.

  He barely got his arm up in time to feebly block the attack. He staggered backward. Morris reached behind him for something on his belt—presumably he had another gun on him.

  Get it together! the voice in his head demanded. This isn’t how you go out.

  Reid gritted his teeth and surged again. This time he grabbed onto Morris’s arm—his right arm, the one Maria had wounded—and squeezed it tight.

  Morris threw back his head and howled in pain.

  Reid’s other hand still gripped the ceramic shard. He swung it in an arc and sliced superficially across Morris’s forehead. The wound bled amply and quickly, blood running into Morris’s eyes before he could wipe it away.

  Reid grabbed the younger man by the collar and belt and dropped to one knee, at the same time using his leverage to pull down on one arm and push up with the other. Morris flipped ass-over-teakettle; for the briefest of moments his body was completely off the ground, and in that half-second of weightlessness Reid twisted his body, shoving Morris in a judo-throw.

  The body struck the kitchen window. Glass shattered into a thousand pieces as Morris flew out over nothing. A hand lurched out and, somehow, impossibly, grabbed the window frame.

  Morris howled again. He had caught himself, but a small shard of glass pierced his hand. His other arm flailed wildly, still reaching for the spare pistol at the small of his back.

  A woman screamed. Down in the piazza, a middle-aged tourist couple had witnessed the ordeal—the shattered window, Morris catching himself. The man quickly pulled out a cell phone, presumably to call the police. Reid deliberated for a moment—he could force Morris off the window frame and drop him down to the pavement with a single blow. The drop couldn’t have been more than sixteen feet or so—likely not enough to kill him, but probably enough to shatter his legs. But he wanted answers. He wanted to know who had sent him.

  Maria climbed to her feet from where she’d fallen on the kitchen floor. Her cheek was already swollen and her bicep bled amply, but it looked like the cut was superficial. “Do it!” she said urgently. “Drop him. He won’t stop otherwise.”

  Reid shook his head. “I need to know why he came, what he knows—”

  Maria groaned in exasperation. “Then what’s your plan B?”

  Lead him away from here. Away from Maria. Into a more public place where he can’t just shoot openly.

  “I have to go.” Reid grabbed the bug-out bag and his bomber jacket from the sofa. “Don’t follow me. It’s me he’s after. I’ll divert his attention, lead him elsewhere…”

  A gunshot cracked the air. They both ducked instinctively. Morris had loosed his other gun and fired indiscriminately into the apartment. He couldn’t see where he was shooting. Down in the piazza, the two tourists screamed and scurried for their lives.

  Maria shoved Reid hard, through the open door and into the hall. He stumbled back and hit the opposite wall. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “We can go together, track the next lead…”

  He shook his head. “No. I’d be better off on my own—”

  Another shot clapped like thunder. Maria took cover around the corner and flattened herself against the wall. Reid hazarded a peek into the apartment, just as Morris’s head appeared in the window frame. He looked demonic, like a man possessed, his teeth clenched and eyes furious, blood running down his face.

  “Steele!” he howled. He took aim, but the barrel was shaky. Reid ducked. The bullet struck plaster. Maria’s arm snaked around the corner of the door frame and yanked him back out into the hall with her.

  “Take this.” She shoved her cell phone into his hands. Her blood smeared across the screen. “The address is in there. Slovenia. Find it.”

  “I will,” he promised. He quickly opened the bug-out bag and pulled out Reidigger’s Walther PPK. He gave it to Maria. “Here, just in case. How will I find you again?”

  She gestured to the blood-smeared cell phone. “I’ll find you. Now go!”

  He ran. Down the hall and taking the stairs two at a time, he pulled the bomber jacket over his shoulders and gripped the black nylon backpack in his fist. More shots rang out above him. If the tourists hadn’t called the police, someone else in the building certainly would have by now.

  He reached the courtyard but didn’t slow. As he entered the piazza, his boots pounding the pavement, he hazarded a glance over his shoulder.

  Morris did too, still hanging by one hand from the window frame. Blood ran over his knuckles and soaked his sleeve. His right hand would be ruined, the forearm sliced and the palm pierced. His other gripped a silver pistol—a Ruger LC9, by the look of it.

  He scowled at Reid with an avarice so deep he felt it in his core. Reid expected him to take aim, try to fire across the piazza, but he didn’t.

  Instead, Morris let go.

  A vision flashed suddenly and swiftly across Reid’s mind—a bridge. Night. The air rushes in your ears as you plunge toward the water below…

  Morris bent his legs as he struck the concrete and tucked into a roll. He came up on one knee and took aim with his left hand. The barrel was shaky, his grip tremulous, but he had a clear line of sight.

  Reid darted to the right as the thunderclap of the shot boomed in his ears. He was nearly out of the piazza,
zigzagging left and right in a serpentine pattern. Another shot rang out. A marble turtle atop the Fontana exploded.

  He had to get out of the piazza, get to somewhere public where he could lose himself in the crowd. Somewhere that Morris couldn’t open fire.

  Reid glanced over his shoulder once more before he rounded the corner to the street. Morris climbed to his feet and gave chase.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Reid exited Piazza Mattei and ran a short distance down Via dei Funari. Despite the cold February weather, there were quite a few people out—and many of them had either paused, puzzled by the sound of nearby gunshots, or hurried along to get to shelter. There were cell phones in hands everywhere he looked. Too many.

  He had no idea how Morris could even be walking after dropping from the window like that, let alone running after him. He had to remind himself that this was not a foot soldier or terrorist lackey, but rather a well-trained field agent—perhaps as well-trained as himself.

  Reid slowed to a brisk walk, trying to appear inconspicuous. But his heart rate did not slow. He felt as if it might pound out of his chest. Morris was an active agent, and he had tried to kill them. Or at least he had tried to kill Kent—he wasn’t sure if Maria had also been a target.

  I probably led that maniac right to her, he thought glumly. He found himself hoping that she was all right. Whether he could fully trust her or not, she had fought back and helped him escape. She had given him her phone, which had the address, the lead to Amun in Slovenia.

  But…

  But she had kicked the gun underneath the kitchen table, instead of kicking it to him.

  It was the heat of the moment. She wasn’t thinking straight.

  And she didn’t reappear when Morris started shooting in the piazza.

  She might have been hit.

  The Kent side of him wanted to trust her. They had a history. But Reid did not. There were still more questions than answers.

  He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket… and then he broke his stride in bewilderment. He turned both pockets inside out. The Glock—it was gone.