Agent Zero

The bald goon nodded curtly and grabbed onto Reid’s arm again.

“Idiot!” Otets snapped. “Bind him first! Yuri, go to file cabinet. There should be something there.”

Yuri hurried to the three-drawer oak cabinet in the corner and rifled through it until he found a bundled length of coarse twine. “Here,” he said, and he tossed it to the bald brute.

All eyes instinctively moved skyward toward the bundle of twine spinning in the air—both goons, Yuri, and Otets.

But not Reid’s. He had a shot, and he took it.

He cupped his left hand and arced it upward at a sharp angle, striking the bald man’s windpipe with the meaty side of his palm. He felt the throat give beneath his hand.

As the first blow landed, he kicked out his left boot heel behind him and struck the bearded thug in the hip—the same hip the man had been favoring on the ride to Belgium.

A wet choking gasp escaped the bald man’s lips as his hands flew to his throat. The bearded brute grunted as his large body spun and collapsed.

Down!

The twine slapped the floor. So did Reid. In one motion he fell into a crouch and yanked the Glock from the bald man’s ankle holster. Without looking up, he leapt forward and tucked into a roll.

As soon as he jumped, a thunderous report tore across the small office, impossibly loud. The shot from the Desert Eagle left an impressive dent in the office’s steel door.

Reid came out of the roll only a few feet from Otets and propelled himself forward, toward him. Before Otets could pivot to aim, Reid grabbed his gun hand from underneath—never grab the top slide, that’s a good way to lose a finger—and pushed it up and away. The gun went off again, a piercing boom only a couple of feet from Reid’s head. His ears rang, but he ignored it. He twisted the gun down and to the side, keeping the barrel pointed away from him as he brought it to his hip—and Otets’s hand with it.

The older man threw back his head and screamed as his trigger finger snapped. The sound nauseated Reid as the Desert Eagle clattered to the floor.

He spun and wrapped one arm around Otets’s neck, using him as a shield as he aimed at the two goons. The bald man was out of commission, gasping for breath in vain against a crushed windpipe, but the bearded man had loosened his TEC-9. Without hesitating, Reid fired three shots in quick succession, two in the chest and one in the forehead. A fourth shot put the bald man out of his misery.

Reid’s conscience screamed at him from the back of his mind. You just killed two men. Two more men. But this new consciousness was stronger, pushing his nausea and sense of preservation back.

You can panic later. You’re not finished here.

Reid spun fully around, with Otets in front of him as if they were dancing, and leveled the Glock at Yuri. The hapless messenger was struggling to free a Sig Sauer from his shoulder harness.

“Stop,” Reid commanded. Yuri froze. “Hands up.” The Serbian messenger slowly put his hands up, palms out. He grinned wide.

“Kent,” he said in English, “we are very good friends, are we not?”

“Take my Beretta out of your left jacket pocket and set it on the floor,” Reid instructed.

Yuri licked the blood from the corner of his mouth and wiggled the fingers of his left hand. Slowly, he reached into the pocket and pulled out the small black pistol. But he didn’t set it on the floor. Instead he held it, barrel pointed downward.

“You know,” he said, “it occurs to me that if you want information, you need at least one of us alive. Yes?”

“Yuri!” Otets growled. “Do as he asks!”

“On the floor,” Reid repeated. He didn’t take his gaze off of Yuri, but he was concerned that others in the facility might have heard the roar of the Desert Eagle. He had no idea how many people were downstairs, but the office was soundproofed and there was machinery running elsewhere. It was possible no one had heard it—or perhaps they were used to the sound and thought little of it.

“Maybe,” said Yuri, “I take this gun and I shoot Otets. Then you need me.”

“Yuri, nyet!” Otets cried, this time more stunned than angry.

“See, Kent,” said Yuri, “this is not La Cosa Nostra. This is more like, uh… disgruntled employee. You see how he treats me. So maybe I shoot him, and you and I, we work something out…”

Otets clenched his teeth and hissed a flurry of curses at Yuri, but the messenger only grinned wider.

Reid was growing impatient. “Yuri, if you don’t put the gun down now, I’ll be forced to—”

Yuri’s arm moved, just the slightest bit of an indication of rising. Reid’s instinct kicked in like an engine shifting gears. Without thinking he aimed and fired, just once. It happened so quickly that the report of the pistol startled him.

For a half-second, Reid thought he might have missed. Then dark blood erupted from a hole in Yuri’s neck. He fell first to his knees, one hand weakly trying to stanch the flow, but it was far too late for that.

It can take up to two minutes to bleed out from a severed carotid artery. He didn’t want to know how he knew that. But it takes only seven to ten seconds to pass out from blood loss.

Yuri slumped forward. Reid immediately spun toward the steel door with the Glock aimed at center mass. He waited. His own breath was stable and smooth. He hadn’t even broken a sweat. Otets took sharp, gasping breaths, cradling his fractured finger with his good hand.

No one else came.

I just shot three men.

No time for that now. Get the hell out of here.

“Stay,” Reid growled at Otets as he released his hold on him. He kicked the Desert Eagle into the far corner. It skittered under the file cabinet. He had no use for a cannon like that. He also left the TEC-9 automatic pistols that the thugs had; they were largely inaccurate, good for little more than spraying bullets over a wide area. Instead, he shoved Yuri’s body aside with his foot and grabbed up the Beretta. He kept the Glock, tucking a pistol, and his hands, into each of his jacket pockets.

“We’re getting out of here,” Reid told Otets, “you and me. You’ll go first, and you’ll pretend that nothing is wrong. You’re going to walk me outside and to a decent car. Because these?” He gestured to his hands, each stuffed into a pocket and wrapped around a pistol. “These will both be aimed at your spine. Make one single misstep, or say a word out of line, and I’ll bury a bullet between your L2 and L3 vertebrae. If you’re lucky enough to live, you’ll be paralyzed for the rest of your life. Understand?”

Otets glared at him, but he was smart enough to nod.

“Good. Then lead the way.”

The Russian man paused at the steel door of the office. “You won’t get out of here alive,” he said in English.

“You’d better hope I do,” Reid growled. “Because I’ll make sure you don’t either.”

Otets pulled the door open and stepped out onto the landing. The sounds of machinery instantly came roaring back. Reid followed him out of the office and onto the small steel platform. He glanced downward over the railing, looking out over the shop floor below. His thoughts—Kent’s thoughts?—were correct; there were two men working a hydraulic press. One at a pneumatic drill. One more stood at a short conveyor, inspecting electronic components as they slowly rolled toward a steel surface at the end. Two others wearing goggles and latex gloves sat at a melamine table, carefully measuring some sort of chemicals. Oddly, he noticed they were an assortment of nationalities—three were dark-haired and white, likely Russian, but two were definitely Middle Eastern. The man at the drill was African.

The almond-like scent of the dinitrotoluene floated up to him. They were making explosives, as he had discerned earlier from the odor and sounds.

Six in all. Likely armed. None of them so much as looked up toward the office. They won’t shoot in here—not with Otets in the open and volatile chemicals around.

But neither can I, Reid thought.

“Impressive, no?” said Otets with a smirk. He’d noticed Reid inspecting the floor.

“Move,” he commanded.

Otets stepped down, his shoe clanking against the first metal stair. “You know,” he said casually, “Yuri was right.”

Get outside. Get to the SUV. Crash the gate. Drive it like you stole it.

“You do need one of us.”

Get back on the highway. Find a police station. Get Interpol involved.

“And poor Yuri is dead…”

Give them Otets. Force him to talk. Clear your name in the murders of seven men.

“So it occurs to me that you cannot kill me.”

I’ve murdered seven men.

But it was self-defense.

Otets reached the bottom step, Reid right behind him with both hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket. His palms were sweaty, each gripping a pistol. The Russian stopped and glanced slightly over his shoulder, not quite looking at Reid. “The Iranians. They are dead?”

“Four of them,” Reid said. The din of the machinery nearly drowned out his voice.

Otets clucked his tongue. “Shame. But then again… it means I am not wrong. You have no leads, no one else to go to. You need me.”

He was calling Reid’s bluff. Panic rose in his chest. The other side, the Kent side, fought it back down, like dry-swallowing a pill. “I have everything the sheikh gave us—”

Otets chuckled softly. “The sheikh, yes. But you already know that Mustafar knew so little. He was a bank account, Agent. He was soft. Did you think we would trust him with our plan? If so, then why did you come here?”

Sweat prickled on Reid’s brow. He had come here in the hopes of finding answers, not only about this supposed plan but about who he was. He had found much more than he bargained for. “Move,” he demanded again. “Toward the door, slowly.”

Otets stepped off the staircase, moving slowly, but he did not walk toward the door. Instead, he took a step toward the shop floor, toward his men.

“What are you doing?” Reid demanded.

“Calling your bluff, Agent Zero. If I am wrong, you will shoot me.” He grinned and took another step.

Two of the workers glanced up. From their perspective, it looked like Otets was simply chatting with some unknown man, perhaps a business associate or representative from another faction. No reason for alarm.

The panic rose again in Reid’s chest. He didn’t want to let go of the guns. Otets was only two paces away, but Reid couldn’t very well grab him and force him to the door—not without alerting the six men. He couldn’t risk shooting in a room full of explosives.

“Do svidaniya, Agent.” Otets grinned. Without taking his eyes off of Reid he shouted in English, “Shoot this man!”

Two more of the workers looked up, glancing between each other and Otets in confusion. Reid got the impression that these men were laborers, not foot soldiers or bodyguards like the pair of dead goons upstairs.

“Idiots!” Otets roared over the machinery. “This man is CIA! Shoot him!”

That got their attention. The pair of men at the melamine table rose quickly and reached for shoulder holsters. The African man at the pneumatic drill reached down near his feet and lifted an AK-47 to his shoulder.

As soon as they moved, Reid sprang forward, at the same time yanking both hands—and both pistols—out of his pockets. He spun Otets by the shoulder and held the Beretta to the Russian’s left temple, and then leveled the Beretta at the man with the AK, his arm resting on Otets’s shoulder.

“That wouldn’t be very wise,” he said loudly. “You know what might happen if we start shooting in here.”

The sight of a gun to their boss’s head prompted the rest of the men into action. He was right; they were all armed, and now he had six guns on him with only Otets between them. The man holding the AK glanced nervously at his compatriots. A thin bead of sweat ran down the side of his forehead.

Reid took a small step backward, coaxing Otets along with him with a nudge from the Beretta. “Nice and easy,” he said quietly. “If they start shooting in here, this whole place could go up. And I don’t think you want to die today.”

Otets clenched his teeth and murmured a curse in Russian.

Little by little they backed away, tiny steps at a time, toward the doors of the facility. Reid’s heart threatened to pound out of his chest. His muscles tightened nervously, and then went slack as the other side of him forced him to relax. Keep the tension out of your limbs. Tight muscles will slow your reactions.

For each tiny step that he and Otets took back, the six men took one forward, maintaining a short distance between them. They were waiting for an opportunity, and the farther they stepped from the machines, the less likely setting off an inadvertent explosion would be. Reid knew it was only the threat of accidentally killing Otets that kept them from shooting. No one spoke, but the machines droned on behind them. The tension in the air was palpable, electric; he knew that any moment someone might get antsy and start firing.

Then his back touched the double doors. Another step and he pushed them open, nudging Otets along with him with a shove from the Beretta’s barrel.

Before the doors swung shut again, Otets growled at his men. “He does not leave here alive!”

Then they closed, and the pair of them were in the next room, the wine-making room, with bottles clinking and the sweet smell of grapes. As soon as they were through, Reid whipped around, the Glock aimed at chest level—still keeping the Beretta trained on Otets.

A bottling and corking machine was running, but it was mostly automated. The only person in the entire wide room was a single tired-looking Russian woman wearing a green headscarf. At the sight of the gun, and Reid, and Otets, her weary eyes went wide in terror and she threw both hands up.

“Turn those off,” Reid said in Russian. “Do you understand?”

She nodded vigorously and threw two levers on the control panel. The machines whirred down, slowing to a halt.

“Go,” he told her. She gulped and backed away slowly toward the exit door. “Quickly!” he shouted harshly. “Get out!”

“Da,” she murmured. The woman scurried to the heavy steel exit, threw it open, and dashed out into the night. The door slammed shut again with a resonant boom.

“Now what, Agent?” Otets grunted in English. “What is your plan of escape?”

“Shut up.” Reid leveled the gun at the double doors to the next room. Why hadn’t they come through yet? He couldn’t very well keep going without knowing where they were. If there was a back door to the facility, they might be outside waiting for him. If they followed, there was no way he could get Otets into the SUV and drive away without getting shot. In here there was no threat of explosives; they could take a shot if they had it. Would they risk killing Otets to get to him? Jangled nerves and a gun were not an ideal combination for anyone, even their boss.

Before he could decide on his next move, the powerful fluorescent lights overhead went out. In an instant they were plunged into darkness.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Reid couldn’t see a thing. There were no windows in the facility. The workers in the other room must have thrown some breakers, because even the sounds of the machinery in the next room faded and fell silent.

He quickly reached out for the place he knew Otets to be and grabbed onto the Russian’s collar before he could make a run for it. Otets made a small choking sound as Reid yanked him backward. In the same moment, a red emergency light came on, just a bare bulb jutting from the wall just over the door. It bathed the room in a soft, eerie glow.

“These men are not fools,” Otets said quietly. “You will not make it out of this alive.”

His mind raced. He needed to know where they were—or better yet, he needed them to come to him.

But how?

It’s simple. You know what to do. Stop fighting it.

Reid took a deep breath through his nose, and then he did the only thing that made sense in the moment.

He shot Otets.

The sharp report of the Beretta echoed in the otherwise silent room. Otets screamed in pain. Both hands flew to hold his left thigh—the bullet had only grazed him, but it bled liberally. He spat a long, angry slur of Russian curses.

Reid grabbed onto Otets’s collar again and yanked him backward, nearly off his feet, and forced him down behind the bottling conveyor. He waited. If the men were still inside, they would have definitely heard the shot and would come running. If no one came, they were outside somewhere, lying in wait.

He got his answer a few seconds later. The swinging double doors were kicked open from the other side hard enough to smack against the wall behind them. The first through was the man with the AK, tracking the barrel left and right quickly in a wide sweep. Two others were right behind him, both armed with pistols.

Otets groaned in pain and gripped his leg tightly. His people heard it; they came around the corner of the bottling machine with their weapons raised to find Otets sitting on the floor, hissing through his teeth with his wounded leg prostrate.

Reid, however, was not there.

He stole quickly around the other side of the machine, staying in a crouch. He pocketed the Beretta and grabbed an empty bottle from the conveyor. Before they could even turn, he smashed the bottle over the head of the nearest worker, a Middle Eastern man, and then jammed the jagged bottleneck into the throat of the second. Warm blood ran over his hand as the man sputtered and fell.

One.

The African with the AK-47 spun, but not fast enough. Reid used his forearm to shove the barrel aside, even as a fusillade of bullets ripped through the air. He stepped forward with the Glock, pressed it beneath the man’s chin, and pulled the trigger.

Two.

One more shot finished off the first terrorist—since clearly that’s what he was dealing with, he decided—still lying unconscious on the floor.

Three.

Reid breathed hard, trying to will his heart into slowing down. He didn’t have time to be horrified by what he had just done, nor did he really want to think about it. It was as if Professor Lawson had gone into shock, and the other part had taken over completely.

Movement. To the right.

Otets crawled from behind the machine and made a grab for the AK. Reid turned quickly and kicked him in the stomach. The force of it sent the Russian rolling over, holding his side and groaning.

Reid took up the AK. How many rounds were fired? Five? Six. It was a thirty-two-round magazine. If the clip was full, he still had twenty-six rounds.

“Stay put,” he told Otets. Then, much to the Russian’s surprise, Reid left him there and went back through the double doors to the other side of the facility.

The bomb-making room was bathed in a similar red glow from an emergency light. Reid kicked open the door and immediately dropped to one knee—in case anyone had a gun trained on the entrance—and swept left and right. There was no one there, which meant there had to be a back door. He found it quickly, a steel security door between the stairs and the southern-facing wall. Likely it only opened from the inside.

The other three were out there somewhere. It was a gamble—he had no way to tell if they were waiting for him right on the other side of the door, or if they had tried to circle around to the front of the building. He needed a way to hedge his bet.

This is, after all, a bomb-making facility…

In the far corner on the opposite side, past the conveyor, he found a long wooden crate roughly the size of a coffin and filled with packing peanuts. He sifted through them until he felt something solid and hauled it out. It was a black matte plastic case, and he already knew what was inside it.

He set it on the melamine table carefully and opened it. More to his chagrin than surprise, he recognized it immediately as a suitcase bomb, set with a timer but able to be bypassed by a dead man’s switch as a fail-safe.

Sweat beaded on his forehead. Am I really going to do this?

New visions flashed across his mind—Afghani bomb-makers missing fingers and entire limbs from poorly built incendiaries. Buildings going up in smoke from one wrong move, a single misconnected wire.

What choice do you have? It’s either this, or get shot.

The dead man’s switch was a small green rectangle about the size of a pocketknife with a lever on one side. He picked it up in his left hand and held his breath.

Then he squeezed it.

Nothing happened. That was a good sign.

He made sure to hold the lever closed in his fist (releasing it would immediately detonate the bomb) and he set the suitcase’s timer for twenty minutes—he wouldn’t need that long anyway. Then he plucked up the AK in his right hand and got the hell out of there.

He winced; the rear security door squealed on its hinges as he shoved it open. He leapt out into the darkness with the AK leveled. There was no one there, not behind the building, but they had certainly heard the telltale squeak of the door.

His throat was dry and his heart was still pounding like a kettledrum, but he kept his back to the steel façade and carefully eased his way to the corner of the building. His hand was sweating, gripping the dead man’s switch in a death grip. If he released it now, he would most certainly be dead in an instant. The amount of C4 packed into that bomb would blow the walls of the building out and flatten him, if he wasn’t incinerated first.

Yesterday my biggest problem was keeping my students’ attention for ninety minutes. Today he was white-knuckling a lever to a bomb while trying to elude Russian terrorists.

Focus. He reached the corner of the building and peered around its edge, sticking to the shadows as best he could. There was a silhouette of a man, a pistol in his grip, standing sentry on the eastern façade.

Reid made sure he had a solid grip on the switch. You can do this. Then he stepped out into plain sight. The man spun quickly and began to raise his pistol.

“Hey,” Reid said. He lifted his own hand—not the one holding the gun, but the other. “Do you know what this is?”

The man paused and cocked his head slightly. Then his eyes went so wide with fear that Reid could see the whites of them by the moonlight. “Switch,” the man muttered. His gaze fluttered from the switch to the building and back again, seeming to come to the same conclusion that Reid already had—if he released that lever, they’d both be dead in a heartbeat.

The bomb-maker abandoned his plan of shooting Reid, and instead sprinted away toward the front of the building. Reid followed hastily. He heard shouts in Arabic—“Switch! He has the switch!”

He rounded the corner to the front of the facility with the AK aimed forward, the stock rested in the crook of his elbow, and his other hand holding the dead man’s switch high over his head. The sprinting bomb-maker hadn’t stopped; he kept running, up the gravel road that led away from the building and screaming himself hoarse. The other two bomb-makers were gathered near the front door, apparently ready to go in and finish Reid off. They stared in bewilderment as he came around the corner.

Reid quickly surveyed the scene. The other two men held pistols—Sig Sauer P365, thirteen-round capacity with fully extended grips—but neither pointed them. As he had presumed, Otets had made his escape through the front door and was, at the moment, halfway to the SUV, limping along while holding his hurt leg and supported under one shoulder by a short, portly man in a black cap—the driver, Reid assumed.

“Guns down,” Reid commanded, “or I’ll blow it.”

The bomb-makers carefully set their weapons in the dirt. Reid could hear shouts in the distance, more voices. There were others coming from the direction of the old estate house. Likely the Russian woman had tipped them off.

“Run,” he told them. “Go tell them what’s about to happen.”

The two men didn’t have to be told twice. They broke into a brisk run in the same direction their cohort had just gone.

Reid turned his attention to the driver, helping along the lamed Otets. “Stop!” he roared.

“Do not!” Otets screamed in Russian.