Trapping Zero

by Jack Mars

  “You too, sir,” Reid murmured.

  Pierson paused at the door. “Oh, by the way. There’s going to be a parade in Manhattan the day after tomorrow, in mourning of the congressional delegation that was killed in Baghdad. I’ll be speaking there. How would you and your daughters like to attend as my guests? First-class accommodations, I promise.”

  “That’s very generous of you,” Reid said, “but my girls just got back to school after a… an incident. I wouldn’t want to pull them out again. But thank you for the offer.”

  “No worries. You take care of yourself, Kent.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Reid watched as the president exited the conference room.

  He rubbed his face and groaned, replaying the scene in his head, making sure he had heard correctly, that he hadn’t misinterpreted the subtext of Pierson’s words.

  Eventually he joined Maria and Strickland in the hall outside the conference room, where they waited for him just beyond the doorway. “What was that about?” Maria demanded.

  Reid was hesitant to say. His paranoia and distrust might have caused him to misconstrue the president’s intentions—though he doubted it. “It was nothing,” he said at last. “Just a personal congratulations. I guess him and I have a history that I’m unfortunately not aware of.” He headed down the corridor and away from the conference room.

  If Strickland or Maria detected his lie, neither of them let on. But at the moment, lying to his friends was the furthest thing from his mind.

  He was fairly certain that Pierson had just attempted to bribe him with a position on the National Security Council.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  The Brotherhood was decimated. Their compound had been seized; their numbers were depleted. Their assets, frozen.

  Everything was going according to Awad bin Saddam’s plan. Well, nearly everything; there had been one significant hitch, though it hardly mattered now.

  Awad had monitored news of the event online on Al Jazeera. When he saw that the bombing attempt on the USS New York had been thwarted, he was at first enraged. Usama had utterly failed. He was to pose as Awad bin Saddam and stall the Americans with the wired tugboat until the drone reached the battleship, and then detonate. He had not detonated, nor had the submersible UAV reached its target. Awad tasted the bitterness of knowing that his perfect plan could be so tainted by the ineptitude of his brothers.

  But then he read further in the report, and learned that the undersea detonation was estimated to have been more than enough to sink the destroyer. That was all he wanted. The New York was a red herring; it was not the target, but rather a testing ground for the Libyan’s weapon. And though it did not hit its target, he now knew that they would serve their ultimate purpose.

  Awad stood on the bow of the small ship, a fishing vessel they had procured in Haifa thanks to the joint efforts of the now-detained Tunisian hacker and the hostage Israeli. The journalist was at the helm currently, in the wheelhouse guarded by two brothers. He foolishly believed that like his friend, he would be set free once they arrived at their destination—and in a way, he would be, when Awad unceremoniously dumped his body into the sea.

  So far their voyage across the open Atlantic Ocean had been a fairly calm one, though as Awad heard rapid footfalls approaching behind him he had the distinct impression that it was about to become choppy.

  “Awad,” Hassan said urgently, his voice hushed. “I’ve just learned our accounts have been frozen. They know about us, about me. We have nothing!”

  “Calm yourself, Hassan.” Awad flashed him a smirk. “All has been prearranged. We have everything we need…”

  “Everything we need?” Hassan threw up his lanky arms in dismay. “I am ruined! Everything my father worked for is gone! Do you not understand?”

  Awad drew a long breath, struggling to keep his temper under control. “Abdallah did not work for money. He worked for the Brotherhood, and for the sake of our goals. Need I remind you that he blessed my plan before his death?”

  Hassan did not meet Awad’s steady gaze as he shook his head. “I think we both know that’s not true,” he muttered. “I never should have stepped in and lied for you. You are leading us to ruin and death. Our brothers are dead or detained; only five of us remain, yet you stand here as if nothing is wrong—”

  Awad’s fury spiked quickly. He lurched for Hassan, grabbed him by two fistfuls of his shirt, and slammed him down onto the gunwale. Hassan yelped as his taqiyah spun from his head and into the water below.

  “Who are you to question me, hmm?” Awad hissed. “You were but a bank account, a means to my ends. The only reason you still draw breath is because I deem it so, but now you are forcing me to reconsider.”

  “Awad, please!” Hassan gulped, his body hanging half from the bow, teetering precariously in the younger man’s grip.

  Awad held him there for a moment, truly considering if it might be for the best to simply let him go, send Hassan into the dark, freezing depths below them—but lucky for the son of Abdallah, Awad needed him. He needed five to execute his plan. He could not spare another of the Brotherhood’s ranks.

  He hauled Hassan back to his feet and released him. Hassan panted with relief as he trembled. “I… did not mean to question you,” he said quietly. “My anger got the best of me…”

  “Trust that I know what I’m doing,” Awad snarled. “There is a reason I do not share my plan with you.” He took a step closer, lowering his voice. “Do you know what that reason is?”

  Hassan stared at the floor of the ship and shook his head.

  “I will tell you. I do not share my plan with you because I cannot trust that you would keep it to yourself.”

  “But I would!” Hassan protested. “I would not tell anyone…”

  “You would tell the Americans,” Awad insisted, “if you were captured. They would make you talk, Hassan. Would you like to know how? They have places for people like us, horrible dark places where no one can hear your screams.” He grinned maliciously, enjoying the trembling Hassan before him. “First, they would pull loose your fingernails, one by one. If still you did not talk, they would cut away your fingers by each knuckle, until your hands are little more than useless palms hanging from your wrists…”

  “Awad, please,” Hassan murmured.

  “They would do the same with your toes,” he pressed on. “If somehow still you did not talk, they would pierce your flesh with red-hot pokers. They would take out your eyes from your skull. Pull your teeth from their sockets—”

  “Stop!” Hassan cried.

  Awad leaned close to the squirming man and whispered, “You cannot even bear to hear it, much less endure it. That is why I don’t tell you my plan.”

  The color had drained from Hassan’s face at the very notion of being tortured as Awad described. He realized that he ought to give bin Abdallah something, some inkling of what to expect; Awad could not afford to have any of the brothers desert him or, worse, attempt to mutiny against his leadership.

  “I will tell you this,” he said, smoothing the front of Hassan’s wrinkled shirt. “Our destination is Ireland Island, in the Atlantic…”

  “Ireland?” Hassan frowned. “What is in Ireland for us?”

  “Not Ireland,” Awad corrected. “Ireland Island, a tiny islet in the Bermudan archipelago. There we will meet with another ship. We will sink this one, kill the Israeli, and continue on to our final destination.” Awad smirked. “America.”

  Hassan blinked in astonishment. “We are going to infiltrate the United States? How? By what means?”

  Awad held up a finger for silence. “All will be revealed, Hassan. For now I need your faith. Trust that I will lead us to our glorious purpose.”

  Hassan nodded once. His gaze still seemed uncertain, but there was nothing more that Awad was willing to divulge. “Go now,” he said. “Tell the others what I have told you. We should arrive at the island by nightfall.”

  Hassan shuffled off towards the cabin o
f the fishing vessel. Awad watched him go, wondering if Hassan’s weakness might disrupt his plan. He knew that the money trail would lead back to the compound; he knew that Tarek would cave easily under the Americans’ pressure. He had hoped that Usama would succeed, but he too had failed.

  No more failures, he promised himself. At Ireland Island they would transfer onto the small freighter Awad had previously arranged, and obtain counterfeit identification and Western-style clothing. The ship was bound for the Chemical Coast with a legal manifest declaring an ethanol delivery; the Brotherhood would be disguised as crewmen. From there, they would head northeast, to their penultimate destination—to retrieve the truck loaded with the stock Awad had purchased from the Libyan.

  Hassan had little reason to fret. The Americans thought that the threat was past; they believed the attack on the USS New York to be the masterstroke of his plan. What they did not know was that the Brotherhood had not purchased one submersible drone from the Libyan.

  They had purchased four, and the other three were lying in wait, already in the US.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Reid entered the elevator alone on the first floor at Langley. He swiped his ID badge and pressed the down arrow to access the subterranean levels of the George Bush Center for Intelligence.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation he had had with President Pierson. He’d recounted it entirely several times in his head, each time fortifying his belief that the president was trying to bribe Reid to his side. Pierson was, after all, a businessman before he was a politician, and such men tended to believe that anyone could be bought.

  Reid chided himself for not considering it earlier. He had been so fixated with who among his superiors in the CIA might be involved in the plot that he hadn’t stopped long enough to consider that there must be others—military leaders and politicians at the very least, possibly members of other government agencies. Much like he had wondered how many times he had met the president before, he now wondered if he knew this, or at least suspected it before.

  But he couldn’t answer that question for himself, which was exactly why he was heading underground.

  The elevator dinged and the doors open onto a hall with windowless cinderblock walls painted gray, the corridor lit with long white florescent lights. Reid strode quickly down the hall to a steel door, and again he slid his ID card through the electronic lock. The door opened inward on the covert research and development center of the CIA—or what agents colloquially referred to as “the lab.”

  The huge, hangar-sized room was as stark white as a pharmaceutical clean room and as bright as midday thanks to powerful halogen bulbs spanned every ten feet in the ceiling. Long arrays of complex equipment were arranged on tall shelving units in the shape of a huge letter H. He couldn’t begin to guess at the function of half of the machinery in the lab, though he was fully aware that a majority of the collection were things that the general public had no idea even existed.

  Usually there were at least three or four engineers working in the lab, but today it seemed oddly quiet. But there was one man that Reid knew would be here, in his underground home away from home.

  “Bixby?” he called out. “Are you down here? It’s Kent.”

  “Zero!” called out a cheerful voice. Reid rounded the corner of the tall, thick shelving units to find the eccentric but brilliant CIA technical expert bent over something that appeared to be a sleeker version of the Mars Rover.

  Bixby stood, grinning wide, and tugged off his latex gloves. He was pushing sixty, though his attitude and physical aspect were equally robust for his age. His gray hair, usually parted neatly to one side, was sticking up slightly; with his black horn-rimmed glasses it gave him the appearance of an aging punkster. He was dressed in a purple linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his forearms dotted with what was either eczema or minor electrical burns.

  He pumped Reid’s hand vigorously in his sweaty palm. “Well, it’s been a while!” Bixby said enthusiastically. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again. They told me you were transferred to NRD.”

  “I was,” Reid told him, discreetly wiping his hand on his pants. “They reinstated me as an agent—at least temporarily. But that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Oh?” Bixby raised an eyebrow. “So this is a social call?”

  “In a way,” Reid started. “I was hoping to talk to you…”

  “Hold that thought,” Bixby said excitedly. “Let me show you something real quick. A couple of things I’ve been working on. Come on.” He led Reid away down the row of machinery. Bixby was a lot of things—brilliant, obliging, pleasant, and very easily distracted.

  He showed Reid to an antechamber of the lab partitioned off in a dozen or so workstations, each with long stainless steel tables and glass partitions between them. Upon one of the tables was a significant assortment of tools, wires, and component, but of everything laid out, Reid was surprised by what Bixby wanted to show him.

  “Here,” said the tech as he dropped it into Reid’s palm. “This is my newest venture.”

  Reid examined the device—if it could be called that. It looked like a poker chip, but heavier, as if it was solid metal. The surface was painted matte gray and there did not appear to be any buttons or dials or knobs on it anywhere.

  “…What am I looking at?” Reid asked.

  “You’re familiar with EMP, yes?”

  Reid nodded. “Sure. Electromagnetic pulse. It, uh, disables anything electronic within a certain range, right?”

  “Precisely,” Bixby said. “This is an EMP grenade.”

  “This?” Reid almost laughed. “This is a grenade?”

  “In a way. See, the weight you’re feeling is a powerful magnet inside the chip. To activate it, you twist the two halves and throw it. Trust me, it’ll stick to just about any metallic surface it encounters. Then you’ve got five seconds before it shuts down anything in a twenty-five-foot radius of it. All the EMP, without the worry of blowing out your own cell phone.”

  “Huh.” Reid couldn’t exactly imagine the applications of the device, but Bixby seemed excited by it. “So you just twist the halves, like this?”

  “Whoa, whoa!” Bixby shouted. “Don’t set that off in here, you’ll blow half my data!”

  “Sorry.” Reid quickly set the device down.

  “It’s okay.” The engineer grinned devilishly. “Hey, you want to try it out for me somewhere?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you have nosy neighbors or somebody you want to get back at?” Bixby handed him the chip again. “Take it with you. I haven’t finished field-testing yet. Let me know how it works.”

  “You want me to use this on someone?” Reid asked blankly.

  “Sure! I made a baker’s dozen of ‘em. Take it. Our little secret.”

  “Okay,” Reid shook his head and pocketed the EMP grenade. “Why not.”

  “Oh! Got something else to show you. Come on.” Bixby hurried off again, past the partitioned glass workstations and towards another entranceway.

  Reid held back his groan and followed, wondering when he’d be able to get around to the reason for coming down there in the first place. He followed through the doorway into a long, narrow room, the purpose of which he immediately recognized: it was a shooting range, albeit a short one, about twenty-five yards long and ending in several humanoid dummies crafted from pale ballistic gel.

  “Let’s see here…” Bixby tugged on a steel handle embedded in the wall and a drawer slid out. Reid balked; inside it was a variety of guns, ranging from the tiny LC9 that he personally favored up to the oddly-shaped and futuristic-looking Vector submachine gun, each weapon set into molded black foam.

  “Here we are.” The gun that Bixby took from the drawer was a familiar one—a Glock pistol. “This is the Glock 17 Gen 4. Semi-automatic, seventeen round cartridge, four-point—”

  “Four-eight-inch barrel,” Reid finished for him, the knowledge of it suddenly present
in his head. “I’ve seen it.”

  “Of course you have,” Bixby grinned. “And you’ve seen the biometrics.” He turned the gun sideways to show the small, smooth rectangular pad on each side of the pistol, just behind the trigger guard.

  Reid had seen the biometrics before, on a Glock 22 model. The smooth pad was a fingerprint scanner for the user’s thumb and acted as a safety; the trigger would be locked unless the right thumbprint was on the pad. Reid was hesitant to be all that excited about the technology; on the one hand, it had once kept an insurgent from turning his own gun against him, but on the other, the gun had failed for him when his hands were coated in dirt and blood.

  “Here’s what’s different.” Bixby flipped the pistol around and handed it to him. “This particular one is coded to my prints. Go ahead, try it.”

  “I know it won’t work,” Reid said as he took the pistol.

  Bixby shrugged. “Try it anyway.”

  Reid sighed and took the gun. He put his thumb to the pad, aimed it down range, and pulled the trigger.

  An electrical charge leapt up his arm in an instant. “Ouch!” He dropped the gun, his skin continuing to tingle even after he had released it. “What the hell, Bixby?!”

  The engineer couldn’t help but laugh. “Like that? Not only will it disallow use, but it’ll give a nice little shock—a hundred and twenty volts at about ten amps, not that different from touching the leads on an outlet.” He laughed again. “You okay?”

  Reid shook the sensation out of his arm. It hadn’t hurt as much as it had surprised him. “Yeah,” he muttered, “I’m fine.”

  “Okay, okay. Here, give me your thumb.” Bixby held up a digital tablet and Reid pressed his right thumb to it. When he pulled it away, his thumbprint remained, glowing blue on the tablet’s surface. “That’s another nifty feature I developed recently—each pistol can be coded for up to three unique users. It’s on the network, so a team could re-code a gun on the fly, if need be.” He gestured towards the pistol, still on the floor. “Give it another go.”