Agent Zero

by Jack Mars

  “Son of a bitch!” he shouted in anger. She had taken it; there was no doubt in his mind. He had given her the Walther, and she took the Glock. He was unarmed.

  He yanked open the bug-out bag to make sure everything else was still there: the money, the passports, the clothing, the spare clip for the PPK. It was all accounted for, even the Swiss Army knife, which he took out of the bag and put in his pocket. Not that it would do much good against a gun.

  Reid fumed. How could he have been so stupid? He’d let his guard down and she had taken the gun while he slept.

  And she could have killed you with it, easily, in your sleep. But she didn’t.

  Maybe she didn’t trust him any more than he trusted her.

  Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed as police and emergency personnel were dispatched to the piazza. He snapped out of his reverie, slung the bag over his shoulder, and hurried on his way.

  Morris, he assumed, would not be on the street. He was bleeding badly; he would leave a trail and no doubt draw attention to himself. The younger agent would hide somewhere, treat his wounds, and strike at Kent another day.

  Even so, Reid wanted to be off the street. He decided to take a right at Via di Ambrogio, head south toward the library, where he could hide out for a few hours. Let the heat die down a bit before he tried to move again. He stepped off the sidewalk to cross the street—

  A crack nearly split his eardrums, impossibly loud and devastatingly close. The bullet smacked the street sign behind him. Reid jumped into a crouch; if he hadn’t made a right turn at that precise moment, his skull would be open.

  The avenue broke out into chaos as passersby screamed and ran every which way toward cover. The crowd parted like the Red Sea as Reid scanned left and right.

  “I don’t believe it,” he murmured.

  Morris strode toward him briskly. His square jaw was set in a hard scowl and he was limping slightly on his left leg. His right hand dangled uselessly at his side, dripping blood onto the sidewalk. With his left, he raised the gun again.

  Reid dashed into the street. The light was green; cars came to a screeching halt. A red Fiat nearly struck him, skidding sideways mere inches away. Reid leapt and vaulted over the small car. He couldn’t believe Morris was still on the hunt, out in the open. This is a desperate man. This is a man who has something to lose. And that makes him even more dangerous.

  A Ruger LC9 has a seven-round clip. How many shots did he fire? Five? Six? He couldn’t remember how many times Morris had fired into the apartment while he was hanging on the windowsill.

  Reid sprinted down the next block, skirting around panicked people rushing to get off the street. There had to be somewhere he could go, somewhere he could vanish quickly.

  Subway. Make a left.

  Once again he ran across an intersection with oncoming cars. Drivers honked as they slammed their brakes and swore loudly in Italian. He glanced over his shoulder. Morris looked like the villain out of an eighties slasher flick, striding briskly, not running, but not stopping either. Reid had put some distance between them. The agent wasn’t firing at him, but not because he couldn’t make the shot.

  Maybe he’s out of rounds.

  Or maybe he knows he only has one left.

  He reached the entrance to the Rome Metro tunnel and hurried down the stairs. He vaulted the turnstile, ignoring the wide-eyed Italians who shouted scornfully about metro cards. There was no train at the platform, and he couldn’t very well stand there and wait for one.

  Restroom, he thought. He hurried a little further down the platform, found a men’s room, and shouldered the door open. There was no one inside, but there was no lock on the door either.

  I’ve cornered myself, he thought dismally.

  No. You’ve led him into a trap. Close quarters.

  “Okay,” Reid murmured to himself. “Okay, calm down.” He struggled to control his breathing. Morris was well trained, perhaps nearly as well trained as Kent was, but he was injured. He was either out of rounds or had only one left. Those were good enough odds to take.

  Reid pulled out the Swiss Army knife and flicked the blade open. It was tiny, only three inches long, but in the right place it could still be lethal.

  Disarm him first. Then go for the jugular, in the throat. Or the femoral, in the thigh.

  He flattened himself against the wall behind the door and waited, the knife held at his hip, ready to thrust it forward.

  Someone pushed slowly on the door. It opened wide and nearly hit Reid. He tightened his grip on the knife, waiting to see the barrel of the gun leading in. But no gun came.

  “Oh!” said the startled man as the door swung closed to reveal Reid behind it. “Sorry, didn’t see you there.”

  Reid quickly palmed the knife to hide it from view. The man had no accent—or rather, he had an American accent. His hair was implausibly blond, the result of an obvious and recent bleach job. His eyes were a cold blue. On any other day, Reid might have laughed. The guy couldn’t have looked more American if he was holding a hot dog and draped in the stars and stripes.

  He glanced quizzically again at Reid and then headed to a urinal. There was something about his face, something vaguely familiar, like seeing someone out in public that you’d swear was your friend or your cousin, but upon a second look you realize it’s just a stranger, a near doppelganger.

  Reid didn’t want to draw suspicion, so he pocketed the knife again—keeping the blade open—and went to the sink. He twisted the cold water knob on one of the three faucets and inspected his face in the smudged mirror. His face was still a bit swollen in a couple of places from where the Iranians had beaten him. At least Maria had applied fresh bandages. He still looked like hell. There was two days’ worth of stubble on his chin, and he could swear that it had a grayish tint. It must just be the poor fluorescent lighting, he decided.

  He kept an eye on the door in his periphery. Maybe Morris wouldn’t think to look in the bathroom. Of course he would. He’s a highly trained agent. He may be desperate, but he’s not an idiot. He must have seen come down here.

  “Hey, buddy,” said the blond American at the urinal. “You got the time?”

  “Hmm?” Reid had barely heard him.

  “The time?” the guy repeated as he zipped up.

  “Oh, uh… yeah.” He glanced down at the cheap watch he had bought back in Paris. He had nearly forgotten he was even wearing it. The face was cracked, and the clock had stopped—probably after his and Otets’s dip in the chilly river. “Sorry, I—”

  If he hadn’t been standing in front of a mirror and watching his periphery, he wouldn’t have seen it. But he did—he saw the movement of an elbow as it reached into a jacket pocket.

  In the same instant, the mirror shattered with the impact of two suppressed shots.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Move! Kent’s instincts kicked in so fast it was as if he’d been shoved by an unseen force. He propelled his body backward and hit the white wall of the bathroom as the mirror exploded. Shards of silvery glass rained down on the sink and tiled floor.

  The blond man’s reaction time seemed just as fast as Reid’s. He had a gun leveled at him again in an instant, finger on the trigger.

  Reid froze. The stranger had him dead to rights.

  In that moment, the image of his girls flashed in his mind. As newborns, asleep on his chest while he lay on the sofa. As children, playing tag with Kate in the backyard. As teens, growing up so fast he could hardly keep up.

  In a half second, they would be orphans. They would never know that their father died in a subway bathroom in Italy, his brains dashed across white tile.

  The door to the bathroom swung open.

  The would-be assassin’s gaze flitted to the doorway, just for an instant. But that was all Reid needed. He kicked at the partially open stall door to his left. It swung wide and the steel edge nailed the blond man full-on in the face. His head jerked back and blood spouted from his nose.

  The
newcomer was a portly Italian man in an ill-fitting suit with a newspaper under one arm. He stood in the doorway with his mouth agape as Reid leapt forward and grabbed the blond stranger by the throat and right wrist, forcing the barrel of the gun down toward the floor.

  “Get out!” Reid barked at the Italian. The chubby man did not have to be told twice; he dropped his newspaper and scurried out of the bathroom.

  Reid shoved the blond man against the wall, pinning him between two urinals and pinching his airway partially closed. The stranger did not cry out or even show any sign of distress; he merely stared at Reid, his gaze stoic and flat.

  That face, Reid thought. It seems so familiar. Yet nothing sparked in his memory.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “CIA? Amun?”

  The blond man’s lips curled into a sneering smirk. “You know me,” he rasped.

  “I don’t.” Reid slammed the man’s wrist against the top edge of the urinal. “Drop the gun.”

  “No.”

  He pinched harder, blocking off the trachea. “I will collapse your windpipe, and you will die,” he warned.

  “Do it,” the man choked. His gaze remained stoic. His face was turning an impressive shade of crimson.

  “Just drop the…” Reid trailed off as his gaze momentarily fell on the gun. He recognized it immediately—and then a memory flashed through his mind. It wasn’t a new vision, but rather a recollection of the conversation with Maria just the day before, when she told him about their black-site captives.

  “All three were killed in the same method,” she had said. “Two to the chest, one to the head, from a silenced Sig Sauer.”

  “You’re Amun,” Reid said quietly. “You… you’re the assassin I was chasing. The one that supposedly killed me.”

  The man tried to choke out a few words. Reid relaxed his grip just for a moment. The blond assassin sucked in a breath and then rasped, “Is that what they told your people? That I did it?”

  The door to the bathroom creaked on its hinges as it swung open again, but Reid did not take his gaze off the blond stranger.

  “Let him go, Zero,” said Morris behind him. “And you, Blondie—drop the gun.”

  “You’re empty,” Reid chanced.

  “You want to find that out for sure?” Morris threatened. “Let him go and step away slowly, or I swear to Christ I will blast you in half.”

  “You’re going to shoot me anyway,” Reid countered.

  “True,” Morris agreed, “but I’d rather it not be in the back. Come on now. Off him.”

  The blond man smirked. Reid’s nostrils flared. He slowly loosened his grip on the man’s windpipe and then released his wrist.

  “Hands up, both of you,” Morris ordered.

  Reid put his hands up, near his ears. The assassin did not—nor did he drop his gun.

  “Are you deaf?” Morris shouted at him. “Drop the gun, or I will end you!”

  The assassin chuckled so lightly it was barely a hiss of breath through his teeth. “You must be Agent One. What a pleasure to meet you in person.”

  Panic flashed across Morris’s eyes. “How did you find me?” he murmured.

  The assassin shot him a flat look. “We are many,” he said simply.

  Morris kept his shaky barrel trained on the assassin. Reid knew he could do something, jump in and take him out, but he decided that Morris was the lesser of two evils here. The agent had lost a lot of blood. His grip was tremulous. He most certainly had one or fewer rounds in the clip, and his dilemma was obvious—should he shoot the assassin, or use his last bullet on Kent Steele? As it stood, his attention was on the Amun assassin, so Reid simply took a small step backward and did nothing.

  The blond assassin realized it too. “What should you do, Agent?” he said slowly. “You and I, we are both here for the same reason. We both want Kent Steele dead. We are, as they say, playing for the same team.”

  Morris is working with Amun. That much seemed evident. However, it was equally clear that Morris didn’t trust the assassin, and certainly didn’t want to face him with an empty clip.

  “Morris,” said Reid, “it doesn’t matter, all right? What you do right now, that’s what is going to define you. I know you—or I did. You wouldn’t have been on my team if you weren’t a good person. If you didn’t want to do the right thing.”

  For the briefest of moments, Morris’s gaze became vacant, as if he were remembering something long forgotten. His finger tightened ever so slightly on the trigger.

  But the assassin chuckled softly again. “Morris,” he said thoughtfully. “Agent Morris. Good to know.”

  Morris deflated visibly. The assassin didn’t know his name. Reid had just made the decision for him.

  The agent pulled the trigger.

  The assassin was fast. He saw it coming. He bladed his body sideways to avoid the bullet that would have certainly hit his heart. At the same time he lifted the Sig Sauer and fired three times in less than two seconds.

  Two to the chest. One to the head.

  Blood and brain matter spattered what remained of the broken mirror behind him. For a brief moment, it appeared as though Morris was being held up by invisible strings—his arms aloft but his wrists hanging limply, his head cocked at an odd angle.

  Reid jumped forward as if he was going to catch his former friend, his old teammate. And he did, in a way. He grabbed onto Morris as he fell backward and used the agent’s body as a shield. The momentum of Morris’s fall pushed them both closer to the door.

  The assassin grunted and fired off four more shots. Three hit Morris; the fourth hit the solid wood door as Reid yanked it open. He heard the stranger roar in fury as he dashed out onto the platform.

  There was a train there.

  The doors were closing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Reid sprinted as fast as he could, closing the short distance in only six wide strides, and quite literally leapt through the narrow opening of the doors as they whooshed closed. He nearly ran right into a young couple gripping the steel handles overhead.

  But the doors did not close. He had tripped the sensor at the top of the door, and they slid open again. Reid looked up, his eyes wide with desperation as he saw the assassin emerge from the bathroom, blood running from his nostrils and holding his Sig Sauer at waist level and slightly behind him to obscure it from passersby.

  His gaze was locked tightly on Reid. He could tell that the assassin was weighing his options—board the train and pursue him, or simply shoot through the open doors.

  The blond man started to raise the gun. Reid jumped aside, out of the doorway, but he knew that wouldn’t help much. He could penetrate the glass of the windows, Reid thought, and possibly hit innocent people.

  Then there was a shout, and two police officers came running down the platform. The portly businessman, the one who had barged into the bathroom, pointed and shouted in Italian. “There! That’s him!”

  The blond assassin gave Reid one more sneering, hateful glance as he tucked the pistol into his jacket. The last thing Reid saw as the train pulled away from the platform was the back of his blond head as he sprinted away from the police.

  Reid slung the bug-out bag off his shoulders and set it in his lap as he dropped into an empty seat. He heaved a huge sigh of relief—three times in the last few minutes he had been certain he was about to die. He couldn’t help but wonder if that was what Kent Steele’s life was like all the time. If that was just a part of being Agent Zero.

  As his heart rate finally and mercifully slowed, Reid noticed that the other passengers on the train seemed to be avoiding him; the people to his left and right had abandoned their seats, and no one even wanted to stand close by. At first he thought that it was simply to steer clear of the lunatic who had leapt onto a train.

  But then he noticed that there was blood on his coat, on the sleeves and the lapel. Not his own; it was Morris’s blood.

  Morris was dead. Reidigger was dead. Maria might be dead.
It seemed that anyone connected to him—connected to Kent Steele, that is—was dropping fast. It was almost a small blessing that he barely remembered them as friends. At least it made it a little easier to cope with all the wanton violence that seemed to surround him as Zero.

  Morris and the blond assassin had known each other; that part was clear. There was no doubt in Reid’s mind after what he had just witnessed that Morris had been the mole in the CIA. But there was no trust there; the young agent had shot at the Amun member, had made an attempt to take him out. Maybe it was against his will, Reid thought. Or maybe it was simply greed. He might never know now.

  He took the cell phone out of his pocket, the one Maria had given him. Despite the questions he had about their relationship, both past and present, he found himself hoping that she was all right. Luckily the phone was still intact after that whole ordeal. He scrolled idly through the contacts. There were more than a hundred programmed in there, but it wouldn’t take him long to find the lead.

  Suddenly the phone vibrated in his hands. He nearly dropped it, startled by the sudden sensation.

  The caller was unknown.

  Maria, he thought. She’s alive. She’s safe. She’s reaching out.

  He pressed the green button to answer it, but said nothing.

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

  A chill ran down his spine. It was the code, same as in Reidigger’s apartment in Zurich. This was a call from the CIA.

  Why would they call her? How would they have this number?

  She was disavowed.

  Wasn’t she?

  “But you can’t beat the view,” Reid answered quietly.

  The male voice hissed a long sigh. “Hello, Zero,” he said. Then: “Is she alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Morris?”

  “…No.”

  Another sigh. “Damn. Will you at least tell us where?”

  “Floor of a bathroom in the Rome Metro, just off Via di Ambrogio.” By the time they got to Morris’s body, Reid would be long gone.