by Jack Mars
“Of course not,” Riker said superciliously. “We’re sending a car to your location. Watson is in it.”
“Watson?” Last Reid had heard, Agent Watson was on medical leave for a gunshot wound to his shoulder.
“We anticipated you wouldn’t go unless you had someone around you could trust,” Riker explained. “Watson isn’t currently fit for fieldwork, but he’s still quite capable. He’ll see to your girls’ safety. We both know he will.”
Reid glanced at Maria again. The CIA seemed vehement to have him on this case. Even worse, although he told himself over and over again that he couldn’t go, couldn’t possibly leave his girls, a chill of excitement shuddered up the nape of his neck at the thought of returning to the field. The agent side of him craved it. “I… I need a minute,” he said. “I need to think for a minute.”
“You’ve got about five before the car arrives,” said Riker. “We hope you’ll be in it.” The deputy director hung up.
“This doesn’t feel right,” Maria said quietly.
Reid nodded. “I agree. Unless… unless they never intended to keep me out of the field. Maybe this past month was just a way to give me some time without letting me go.” He could hardly believe his own words; it was as if his mouth betrayed his brain. I’m actually considering this. He noted Maria’s pensive stare, her flitting gaze, and he knew what she was thinking. She had always thought he had something of a misplaced sense of duty—not to the agency, but to doing the right thing.
“You can’t,” she told him quietly. “You’re on vacation with your family. You told the girls you’re not in the field anymore…”
“I know,” he said quickly. “I know, you’re right. I can’t.” He shook his head. “But fifty dead, Maria? These people need to be caught. What if Riker is right? What if something in my mind can help find them faster, or stop another attack?”
Maria scoffed. “If this is a ploy by Riker, then she knows exactly which of your buttons to push to make you think twice. How are you going to tell the girls that you’re leaving them right in the middle of your vacation?”
“I knew it.”
Reid looked up and a thin hiss of a sigh escaped his lips. Maya had come out of the fitting room at some point while they were talking and had obviously heard enough. She stood there with her arms slack at her sides and a look of abject disappointment on her face.
“I knew it,” Maya said again. “This was never about family or vacation or ‘surviving together,’ was it?”
“Maya, let me explain,” Reid started. “We just got the call…”
“You lied to us.” She scoffed and shook her head. “Guess we should be used to it by now though.” Maya stormed away towards the entrance of the boutique.
“What’s going on?” Sara exited the second fitting room in time to see her sister hurrying out to the street.
Reid sighed. He had a feeling that Sara was not going to take this well. “There was a call,” he explained gently, “just now. It’s an urgent matter, and they want my help.”
“The CIA?” Sara asked plainly.
Reid nodded. Maria seemed taken aback by the girl’s candor; she didn’t know that he had told his daughters the truth about what he did.
“Yes,” he admitted. “From the CIA. A lot of people were just killed, and they think I might know how to keep them from doing it again.”
Sara said nothing. Instead she too hurried across the small shop towards the door. Reid stood quickly; Maria grabbed up her purse and the two of them followed Sara out onto the street. Maya stood near the curb, facing away from the entrance with her arms folded tightly.
“Fifty people are dead, Maya,” Reid told her, ignorant to passers-by or anyone around them. “Including members of Congress, killed in an explosion. Am I just supposed to ignore that?”
Maya spun on a heel to face him. “You’re supposed to be with us!” she nearly shouted. “You’re supposed to be protecting us! That’s what you said. You promised.”
“I know I did, but this is different—”
“Then it’s always going to be different!” Maya argued. “You’ll make promises, and every time you get a call you’ll break them. You know you will. And what about Sara? She’s finally doing better, finally has some life in her, and you want to run off and leave us?”
“He should go.” Sara took a step closer to them and they both fell silent, looking over at her sharply as if just noticing that she was there on the street at all. “You should go.”
“Sara…” Reid said softly. The conviction in her voice was enough to break his heart.
“If people need you like we needed you, then you should help them,” Sara told him.
Maya shook her head. “Sara, you don’t know what you’re saying…”
“Yes I do,” she insisted. “We both know he can help them. We’ll be okay.”
Reid reached out and took his older daughter’s hand. She tried to pull away, but he held fast. “Hey,” he said, “remember what we talked about the other day? What you said you wanted to do? You said that if you want it to end, the best way to do it is to be part of the people trying to stop it. Right?”
Maya bit her lip and said nothing.
“Like father, like daughter,” Reid pressed. “That’s how I feel right now. That’s how I feel all the time. That’s why it’s so hard to say no to things like this.”
Maya’s hand slipped from his and her arm fell slack at her side. She had no rebuttal for his argument. It pained him greatly to see his daughter standing there and looking so dejected. But it was even more than that; she looked afraid, vulnerable.
“Agent Watson is coming,” he told her. “He’s going to watch over you two and make sure you get home safely. You won’t be alone.”
“It’s not about being alone,” Maya murmured.
Reid felt a hand on his shoulder as Maria said quietly, “The car is going to be here any minute for us.” Then she handed him something, a tiny black rectangle that looked like a capped USB stick.
As soon as he took it he knew what it was; the knowledge was in his brain already and the touch of the stick brought it back to him. He nodded appreciably to Maria and then said, “Maya, come with me a minute.” He led the older girl around the corner from the boutique and checked left and right to make sure that no one was watching. “I know you’re scared…”
“I am not scared,” Maya said heatedly.
“Not for yourself,” he replied quickly. “You’re scared for your sister. And for me. Maria and Todd will take care of me, I promise. Watson will take care of you two. But just in case, take this.” He handed her the tiny black stick.
Maya frowned as she took it. “What is it?”
“This is a tiny stun gun,” he told her. “It’s automatically armed when you take off the cap, so don’t do it unless it’s absolutely necessary. There are two prongs just inside, and it will deliver a one-hundred-thousand volt shock—but it’s only charged for one use.”
Maya’s eyes widened at the description of the seemingly innocuous plastic device. She held it gingerly with two fingers, as if it might shock her just from a gentle touch.
“Keep it on you at all times,” Reid told his daughter. “Somewhere you can grab it quickly if you need to. And don’t trust anyone that isn’t us or Agent Watson. Do you understand?”
Maya nodded. “But what if…”
“No one, Maya.” He wasn’t overtly expecting the girls to run into any trouble, but Agent Zero had a lot of enemies, and if the events of February and March had proven anything it was that there was no such thing as too cautious.
“Okay,” Maya said softly as she pocketed the device.
He drew her into a hug and squeezed her tightly for several seconds. Despite her mood only moments ago, she hugged him back. “Be safe,” he told her. “I love you.”
“Yeah,” she murmured. “Love you too.”
“Hey.” Maria appeared around the corner, startling them both. “Car is here. Ti
me to go.”
A black town car was waiting by the curb, and the familiar form of Agent Watson climbed out of the backseat. He was tall and stoic, African-American, with his right arm still in a sling. “Zero. Johansson.” He nodded to each in turn.
“Hi John,” Reid greeted him soberly. “Thanks for doing this.” He knelt in front of Sara. “I’m going to be back before you know it.”
She nodded and looked down at the pavement, as if she didn’t really believe it.
“You listen to your sister and Agent Watson, okay?”
“I will.”
Reid hugged her. “Love you, kiddo.”
“Bye, Dad.”
He smiled and shook his head. “It’s not bye. It’s ‘see you later.’”
“See you later,” she said quietly.
“I’ll take care of them,” Watson assured him as Maria got into the car.
“I know you will.” Reid had to force his legs to move, to climb into the backseat of the waiting sedan. He pulled the door closed, and watched through the window as they stood on the curb, until the car rounded a corner he could no longer see them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Is it possible that the world’s best CIA agent can be the world’s worst father?” Reid asked once the Gulfstream had reached cruising altitude, leaving from Zurich and heading southeast towards Baghdad and the site of the bombed embassy.
He felt awful for having left his girls again—while on a trip that was supposed to be their time together. And the more he thought about it, the more he hated the agency and Riker for giving him only minutes to make such a decision.
“I’m sorry,” Maria replied, “did you just say ‘world’s best agent’? Did I miss some kind of awards ceremony, or did you get that off a coffee mug?”
Reid smirked slightly. “I’m just going by what everyone keeps telling me.”
Maria let out a short laugh and squeezed his shoulder. “You are not the world’s worst father. You made a difficult decision; someone was going to be disappointed one way or another. If you had a normal life you would still have to balance your family with everything else… this is just a more extreme version of that.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Thanks.” He couldn’t dwell on that now, not when there was work to be done. “So what have we got?”
Maria scrolled through the briefing file on a touch-screen tablet beside him. “Looks like the group that claimed responsibility for the bombing calls themselves ‘the Brotherhood.’ They’re a faction of former Hamas that were ejected from the Gaza Strip and headed east.”
“They were too extreme for suicide bombers and jihadists?” Reid mused.
“Not so much extreme as dirty,” Maria remarked as she read the case file. “Seems they detonated a bomb-making facility when American troops tried to infiltrate it. Killed more than a dozen of their own and far fewer of ours. But no one has heard from them in years, not until…”
“Until what?” he asked, craning his neck to read over Maria’s shoulders. He saw what she was looking at; the group had also been the ones to kidnap a trio of Israeli journalists in Iraq.
“They released a video,” she said quietly as she passed the tablet to Reid. “They put it online. Take a look.”
Reid took the tablet and pressed the screen to play the video. In it, a shaky camera focused on a young Israeli man, his face bloodied, his hands tied behind his back. He appeared to be in some dank concrete cell, or perhaps a basement. The man behind the camera growled harshly at him in Arabic to speak. His voice tremulous, the journalist announced that the Brotherhood was taking responsibility for the bombing of the embassy. That they were led by a man called Awad bin Saddam, and that the Israeli’s two friends had already been killed.
The frightened young man finished by saying that there would be more attacks, and that the Brotherhood would not stop until their “divine purpose” was complete. Then the grainy picture cut out just as abruptly as it began.
“That was my op,” Maria murmured when the video came to an end. “Before I came to see you, I was tracking those journalists. I didn’t find anything.”
“I’m sorry,” Reid offered. He remembered her own words to him, feeling like a lifetime ago: You can’t save everyone.
Maybe not, he had said. But we can try.
Maria sighed. “Is this Brotherhood ringing any bells in your head?”
“Nothing,” Reid admitted. No new memories had returned to him about any operation or run-in that he and Reidigger might have had with these insurgents. “I’ll let you know, though.”
“In the meantime, orders are to rendezvous with Strickland and an attachment of Rangers at the embassy,” she told him. “Hopefully we’ll get some kind of bead on them.” She paused for a moment before asking, “What’s the deal with that, by the way? Strickland asked for you?”
Reid shrugged. “We’re friends now.”
Maria smirked slightly. “This is the same Strickland that was sent to keep you from finding your girls, right?”
Reid nodded. “We came to an understanding.” He leaned back in his seat and added, “Maybe you’d know that if you ever returned any of my calls.”
*
Reid had imagined what they might find when they arrived at the bombing site, but nothing he had conjured in his mind came close to the reality. The former embassy had been a three-story structure the width of nearly half a city block, but in its place now was simply an enormous pile of rubble, each blackened and charred piece of debris nearly indistinguishable from the next.
“Jesus,” Reid murmured. He couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away from the horror of it all, watching as emergency personnel, American and Iraqi alike, worked to sift through the debris. Most of the survivors had been found by now; those that might have been survivors were likely no longer so, not under all the burnt-out detritus. It was difficult to tell those that were doing the rescuing from those that had been rescued, each face soot-streaked and filthy, some bleeding from wounds, others staring vacantly in a way that suggested they had either been in the blast or had seen too much of its effects.
“They sank the whole damn ship just to kill the captain,” Maria murmured.
“What’s that?” Reid asked, hardly hearing her words as he stared at the carnage.
“Whoever these insurgents were, they were definitely thorough in making sure their congressional targets were destroyed.” Maria shook her head, and Reid could tell she was thinking the same as he was—the cold brutality of it all was almost too much to bear.
A familiar figure waved to them as he trotted over. Agent Todd Strickland had on a button-down that might have been blue once, though it was stained in soot and dust. He wore jeans and a Glock holstered on his hip. His military fade-cut was growing out a bit, it seemed, and he had two days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks.
“Zero,” he said as he shook Reid’s hand. “I couldn’t believe it when they said you were en route. It’s good to see you.”
“Likewise,” said Reid. “You remember Agent Johansson?”
“I do.” Strickland shook her hand as well. “Glad to have you two aboard.”
“What do we know so far?” Reid asked, surveying the wreckage of the embassy behind the younger agent.
“Not much,” Strickland admitted. “EOD swept the area and didn’t find any more explosives. The INIS is in full cooperation with us, but they don’t know any more than we do at the moment.”
Reid nodded. The INIS—Iraqi National Intelligence Service—was an organization established in 2004, after Hussein’s regime, in cooperation with the CIA to gather intel on anyone threatening national security. Up until the bombing of the embassy, it seemed the Brotherhood had slipped under the radar.
“We were told we’d be meeting with a detachment of Army Rangers,” Maria noted.
“Yeah. About that.” Strickland’s voice sounded strained. “There’s been a… hiccup.”
Even as he said it Reid noticed someone approaching in
his periphery. A man strode towards the three of them, carrying an AR-15 in his arms—but that was hardly the most disconcerting thing about him.
Reid couldn’t believe the size of him; the guy had to be six-three, if not taller, dressed entirely in black with combat boots on his feet and a ball cap backwards on his head. The muscles in his forearms stood out in sharp relief against the tactical vest over his expansive chest. A quick survey of the man’s equipment told him that he was carrying no fewer than four guns—at least that Reid could see. The lower half of his face was mostly obscured by a thick, dark beard, and on the left shoulder of his black shirt was a triangular gray patch with the black silhouette of a coiled snake.
“The Division,” Maria muttered, making no attempt to hide the disdain in her voice. “I’d recognize that patch anywhere.”
The man paused a few feet from them, glancing at each in turn. “Name’s Fitzpatrick,” he grunted, hefting the AR-15 with the barrel pointed downward.
“Fitzpatrick,” Reid repeated. The man was military, or formerly so at least; the way he held the gun, the stock aloft with his index finger straightened against the trigger guard, the tension slack in his shoulders, suggested he’d had training. “Is that a first name, or a last name?”
“Just Fitzpatrick.”
“Zero,” Reid said, holding his hand out. Fitzpatrick cradled the rifle against a forearm and reached out with his other hand, squeezing Reid’s fingers in a vice-like grip.
“Is that a first name, or a last name?” One corner of Fitzpatrick’s mouth dragged up in a small smirk.
“Last name,” Reid told him. “First name is Agent, to you.” Reid pulled his hand back and flexed his fingers, refusing to be intimidated by the (much) larger man. He gestured to the AR-15. “You really think you need to be carrying that around like that? This is a search and rescue operation.”
“Well.” Fitzpatrick sniffed. “My job is security, Agent Zero. This tends to help keep things secure. You never know if those towelheads will come back around.”
