Agent Zero

by Jack Mars

Reid shook his head. “I suppose it’s possible, but it wouldn’t add up.” He certainly didn’t trust Cartwright, but the deputy director had tried to get him kicked off the case, had told Hillis that Zero was compromised. That didn’t seem like the kind of play he would do if he was working with Amun.

  The ground will split open with the heels of their feet. It could have been a reference to a god, or a titan… something from mythology, perhaps?

  Maria frowned. “What’s wrong? You look pensive.”

  “I just need some time to think.” Reid paced the small cabin. “The ground will split open,” he murmured. “With the heels of their feet…”

  Gods. Titans. Deities. He ran through basic word association in his head, trying to jar the memory loose. Demigods. Heroes. Epics…

  Suddenly it clicked.

  As they whirled in circles, Mount Hermon and Lebanon split.

  “Mount Hermon,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  “Mount Hermon!” he nearly shouted. “Listen, tell me if this tracks. One of the goons that Amun sent after my girls, as he was dying, he said ‘The ground will split open with the heels of their feet.’ I thought it sounded familiar.” He spoke a mile a minute, gesticulating with his hands as he did. “It’s a line from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian poem… The rest of it goes, ‘As they whirled in circles, Mount Hermon and Lebanon split.’ It’s referring to Gilgamesh’s battle with Humbaba.” Thank you, Professor Lawson, he thought. The reason it had sounded so familiar was because he had taught it once, years ago, when he was an adjunct professor at George Washington University.

  Maria simply shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t get it.”

  “It was a taunt,” said Reid, excited now. “As he was dying, the terrorist recited a line from the epic—probably one that he had heard from a member of Amun. It sounds like a threat, but it’s a taunt, and one that points directly to Mount Hermon, a mountain that straddles the border between Syria and Lebanon. At the top of it is a, uh, a UN buffer zone, an outpost…”

  “And you think they plan to attack the UN post?”

  “I don’t know. But I know it’s a lead. We need to get there, now.”

  “To Syria?” Maria looked dubious. “It sounds like a stretch, but… all right. We’ll need to refuel first.” She strode quickly to the front of the cabin and picked up a plastic corded telephone, a direct line to the cockpit. She told the pilot their plan, and then listened as he relayed a message back.

  “He said it’ll be at least thirty minutes until we can land and refuel,” Maria reported to Reid. “We’re too close to the no-fly zone, so we’d have to circumvent it and go to Bern to refuel—”

  “What no-fly zone?”

  “Over Sion, for the winter games.”

  “Oh, right.” The Winter Olympics were being held in the southwestern Swiss city of Sion. He had completely forgotten they were happening. “Wait a second…” Sion. The word stuck in his mind as if it had been nailed in place. He paced the jet again, up and back, while Maria stared at him blankly.

  “What now? Are we landing, or…?”

  Reid’s mouth fell partially open as a new realization struck him like a bolt of lightning. “The Olympics are in Sion,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah, we know that.” Maria was getting impatient. “What about it?”

  “In the original Hebrew Bible,” he explained slowly, “Mount Hermon was called something else. It was called Mount Tzion—spelled with a t-z, but translators later dropped the t and just called it Zion. But that original spelling, in Hebrew, would have been pronounced like…”

  A gasp of astonishment caught in Maria’s throat. “Like Sion.”

  “Exactly. The taunt wasn’t a clue about Mount Hermon. Maria, it was a direct clue about the pending attack. Sion is the target. The Winter Olympics.”

  He bolted for the white phone at the front of the cabin.

  “Wait! How can we be sure?”

  “We can’t,” he said, “but think about it. It’s a densely packed area, thousands of people from almost every nation on the planet. It could easily be the biggest terror attack in history.”

  “Jesus,” Maria breathed. “We should have seen this sooner.”

  Reid grabbed up the phone. “Don’t land in Italy,” he told the pilot urgently. “We need to land in Sion.”

  “Agent, I can’t land in Sion,” the pilot said. “We’re not cleared for that—”

  “Then you need to get clear, now,” Reid warned. The terrorist that had assaulted his girls never would have given them that clue if the attack wasn’t already in motion. “Something terrible is about to happen, and we may already be too late to stop it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  “We have to tell Cartwright,” Maria said urgently. “Get all available agents to Sion, lock down the location, assess for threats—”

  “No,” Reid interrupted, “I don’t think that’s the right move.” He was fairly sure that Cartwright wasn’t the one leaking intel, but either way, the CIA mole would be on high alert the second the Olympics were locked down. “Amun still knew where my girls were, and the names of the agents that were coming for them. Even if it’s not Cartwright, then it’s someone close to him, someone close enough to have caught wind of our plan. If we loop the agency in on this, there’s nothing keeping that from happening again.”

  Maria shook her head. “We’re talking about the potential for hundreds, maybe thousands of lost lives, on an international scale. We have to tell someone. We have to warn them.”

  “Interpol,” said Reid suddenly. “We alert Interpol, and have them notify Swiss officials and the Olympic Committee. Tell them to start evacuation protocols. Make the call, Maria.”

  “And what do we tell them about us? We’re two CIA agents that can’t report to their own bosses because of suspected leaks?”

  Reid thought quickly, his eyes flitting back and forth. “No… We go over the agency’s head. Contact your father and the National Security Council. Tell him that whoever’s supplying information to Amun is still finding a way to do it. We need the DNI’s sanction to act on this.”

  “Even so, the CIA could lose credibility…” Maria began.

  “Like you said, we’re talking about hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. I think that’s worth a little credibility.”

  Reid could tell that Maria did not at all like keeping the CIA out of the loop, but she nodded tightly and pulled out her phone. She made two calls; the first was to Interpol to alert them of the possible threat and put the Olympic security into motion. Reid heard the taut anxiety in her voice as she mentioned that the CIA was potentially compromised. The second call she made was to her father, to keep the National Security Council and Director of National Intelligence abreast of the situation and get their consent to act.

  Almost as soon as she hung up, the intercom crackled to life in the cabin. “We’ve been cleared to land and we’re going in fast,” the pilot announced. “Buckle up, Agents. Ten minutes to landing.”

  Maria took the seat beside Reid and strapped herself in. “So,” she said, trying, and failing, to keep the unease out of her voice, “just to be clear here, we’re about to interrupt what is arguably the biggest sporting event in the world and bring it to a grinding halt, likely costing millions of dollars in revenue, to look for a needle in a haystack on a hunch from a terrorist that died in New Jersey, and we’re doing all of this without the knowledge of the agency that gives us license to do things like this.”

  “Yes,” Reid confirmed. “That pretty much sums it up.”

  “Just like old times.” He felt her fingers close around his. They were warm and welcome; familiar, yet foreign. It was such a strange feeling to be near her, to simultaneously feel as if she was an old friend while also feeling the electric tingle of something new and exciting.

  He almost missed not trusting her.

  Reid felt it in his belly as the Gulfstream dropped a few hundred feet. Maria squeezed his h
and tighter.

  “Before we do this,” he said, “there’s something I want to know. It’s about what happened before, the reason you and Cartwright thought that Protocol Delta was necessary.”

  “You want to talk about that now?” Maria asked incredulously.

  “It’s important to me,” he insisted. “All I know is that Kent went… no, that’s not right. I did it. You said that I went wild. That I left a horrible, bloody trail. But I can’t remember it, and I don’t know why I did it. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more, there’s something I’m not being told.” He glanced over and looked her in the eye, still holding her hand. “I trust you, Maria. I can say that now. Please, tell me what happened.”

  She shook her head. “I really don’t think this is the right time, Kent…”

  “Look, if I’ve learned anything from teaching history, it’s that we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past unless we learn from them. I can’t learn from something that I don’t remember, and I don’t want to be that guy again. I don’t want to put anyone in harm’s way, and I don’t want to jeopardize everything that’s at stake here. We only have a few minutes until we land, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. This may be the only chance that I get to find out why I stopped being Kent Steele.”

  Maria sighed evenly. “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you.” She sucked in a breath as the Gulfstream dropped several hundred more feet, descending rapidly. “When Kate died, you were inconsolable. You were on an op when it happened. You weren’t there, and you blamed yourself. More than that… you were certain that Amun had something to do with it.”

  Reid frowned. “But she died of an embolism,” he said. “It caused a stroke. There was nothing anyone could do, not even the paramedics.”

  “We tried to tell you there was nothing you could have done, but you wouldn’t hear it. You went hunting for Amun. You were obsessed. The agency tried to call you back, but you went dark. They sent the rest of us—me and Morris and Reidigger—after you. I split off from them to follow another lead…”

  “And you found me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s when we… spent our time together. When the agency found out, they threatened to disavow us both. I went back. You didn’t. And a few weeks later, you were announced KIA.”

  A vision flashed in Reid’s mind—a bridge. Darkness. Water rushing far below. The sensation of falling…

  The Gulfstream dipped again. Through the window Reid could see an airport coming into view, the city of Sion beyond it. There were no skyscrapers, no buildings of glass or brightly lit main avenues; Sion looked as if an ancient village had spread like a puddle, nestled at the base of a mountain range and dwarfed by the peaks.

  Far in the distance, on the opposite side of the city, he could see the grand Olympic Village that had been constructed specifically for the games. Huge domed structures housed indoor events while a luge track and ski slopes had been carefully erected around a pair of smaller mountains, atop which were perched stone castles built hundreds of years earlier. The dichotomy was astounding.

  He still very much had the feeling that Johansson wasn’t telling him everything, but it was too late to question it. They would be on the ground in moments.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For being honest.”

  She looked away.

  “Wheels down in two minutes,” the pilot announced over the intercom.

  “God, I hope we’re not too late,” Johansson murmured.

  “Whatever there is to find, we’ll find it,” Reid said. He tried to sound as confident as possible, but his voice wavered.

  The door to the Gulfstream was open before the plane came to a complete stop on the runway. Waiting on the tarmac of Sion Airport were three Swiss police cars, their lights flashing. Reid and Maria were ushered into the back of one and the motorcade departed immediately, swinging onto the highway and speeding toward the Olympic Village.

  A man in a charcoal gray suit twisted around to address them from the passenger seat. “My name is Agent Vicente Baraf, with Interpol,” he said as he flashed his badge. His accent was Italian, and he sported a pencil-thin black mustache. “My superiors have been in touch with your Director of National Intelligence. We understand the situation and have been instructed not to communicate with your CIA, beyond the two of you.”

  “We appreciate the cooperation, Agent Baraf,” Maria said diplomatically. “Can you tell us what measures are currently being taken?”

  “Interpol is sending more than a dozen of our agents from an economic forum in Davos to come here,” Baraf told them. “But even by plane, that will take a couple of hours. In the meantime, we must work with what we have. Olympic security and Swiss police are evacuating the entire park. However, we’re talking about thousands of people. It is a slow process.”

  “Slow is no good,” said Reid. “We don’t want Amun getting anxious and doing something rash.”

  Maria’s cell phone rang from her pocket. She didn’t answer it; in fact, she didn’t even look at it. They both knew it was likely Cartwright. By now the CIA would have caught wind of what was happening. In fact, with the sheer volume of media coverage at the Olympics, there was a good chance that most of the developed world was aware.

  Agent Baraf fiddled with the touchscreen panel in the dash of the police car. “I’m going to patch you in to a briefing,” he said. “We don’t have time for an in-person meeting, so in a moment you’ll be addressing a room full of Interpol agents, Olympic security officials, and the Swiss Federal Office of Police.” He switched on the car’s Bluetooth and a murmur of voices was suddenly audible through the car stereo’s speakers. “Attention, everyone,” said Baraf loudly. “I’ve got CIA Agents Steele and Johansson en route, and they’re going to share what they know, so listen carefully.” The murmurs fell silent.

  Reid glanced over at Johansson, who nodded. He was suddenly aware that he had never had to brief a room of agents before—at least not that he could remember—and was keenly grateful that he wasn’t there in person.

  He cleared his throat, leaned forward, and said loudly, “This is Agent Steele with the CIA.” Once the words started, they came to him as if he had done this a hundred times before—and it was not lost on him that he likely had. “As you know, we have strong reason to believe that a terrorist organization is plotting an attack on the Winter Olympics. Our intel suggests they’ve been planning this for some time, so it’s likely that we’re not talking about an isolated occurrence, but something intended to target the widest area and largest amount of people possible.”

  He thought back to Otets’s facility, the bombs he had seen. “All available bomb units and canines should be focused on detecting dinitrotoluene, the chemical compound being used as the active incendiary. These bombs will each have a blast radius of about forty to sixty feet, but as I said, we should not believe that this will be isolated; I expect there will be several sites, possibly intended as a chain reaction so that a single detonation can affect a large area.

  “Agent Baraf has informed us that evacuation procedures have already begun. Continue those efforts, but proceed with caution. We don’t want to incite a panic or give the insurgents a reason to detonate early.”

  A male voice spoke up over the speaker. “Sir, is there a specific nationality to which this organization belongs that we should be looking for?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Reid responded. “This particular group has members from all over the world, and they’re well trained. It’s unlikely they’ll look the part, and they won’t be acting in a way that’ll arouse suspicion.”

  Maria tapped his shoulder and pointed to her neck.

  Right, Reid thought. The brand.

  “As you empty the park, make it mandatory that every evacuee shows their face and neck,” Reid told the briefing room. “This organization is called Amun, and their members are marked with a brand, a rectangular burn, in the shape of an Egyptian hieroglyph. Detain anyone with an
y suspicious markings on their face or neck.” He was very much aware that Amun might not have sent their own members to do the detonating; it was more likely that they had recruited some suicide-bombing faction to do it for them, but it was the only thing he had to go on.

  “ETA is eight minutes,” Baraf announced.

  “One last thing,” Reid told the room. “Proceed with extreme caution. These people, Amun, will not hesitate to take lives—their own and others’—for their cause. They are to be considered extremely dangerous. If the perpetrators are positively identified, do not hesitate to use lethal force.”

  “Thank you, Agent,” said Baraf. “You all have your assignments. Dismissed.” He switched off the speakerphone.

  Through the windshield, the Sion Olympic Park came into view; the tall artificial slopes, the twisting luge track, the enormous domed building that likely housed the ice skating rinks. Despite their flashing lights and whooping sirens, the three-car police motorcade was forced to slow as they drew nearer with the astounding flux of people.

  Baraf was right; there were thousands, of every nationality and ethnicity, most sporting the colors of their home country, faces painted with the colors of their banner and holding small flags. They milled about just outside the Olympic Park in huge clusters, blocking streets and sidewalks. Most were confused and looked annoyed at the evacuation. Many were downright irate, waving their arms or shouting at Swiss police.

  “Agent Baraf,” Maria spoke up, “we should get these people a safe distance from the park and the buildings. Amun is smart enough to realize that we might evacuate, and may have taken measures against it.”

  Baraf nodded and relayed the message into a radio. “The problem,” he told them, “is manpower. We have a full security staff and every available agent, but there are simply too many people.”

  Outside the car, Reid could see at least a dozen news crews, maybe more, filming live with the Olympic attractions at their back. He was right; the world was aware that a terrorist attack was pending at the Winter Games… which meant that Amun knew as well.