Target Zero

In the back of Cicero’s all-terrain jeep were two rectangular red gasoline canisters. It would take only one for him to reach civilization again. The other he dumped liberally over the clean room, the four neoprene tents, and the canvas canopy.

Then he lit the fire. The blaze went up quickly and instantly, sending black, oily smoke roiling skyward. Cheval climbed into the jeep with the steel sample box and drove away. He did not speed, and he did not look in the rearview mirror to watch the site burn. He took his time.

Imam Khalil would be waiting. But the young Frenchman still had much to do before the virus was ready.

CHAPTER ONE

Reid Lawson peered through the blinds of his home office for the tenth time in less than two minutes. He was growing anxious; the bus should have arrived by now.

His office was on the second floor, the smallest of the three bedrooms of their new home on Spruce Street in Alexandria, Virginia. It was a welcome contrast to the cramped, boxy closet of a study he had in the Bronx. Half of his things were unpacked; the rest were still in boxes that lay scattered across the room. His bookshelves were constructed, but his books lay stacked in alphabetical order on the floor. The only things he had taken the time to completely build and organize were his desk and computer.

Reid had told himself that today was going to be the day that he finally got it together, nearly a full month after moving in, and finished unpacking the office.

He had gotten as far as opening a box. It was a start.

The bus is never late, he thought. It’s always here between three twenty-three and three twenty-five. It’s three thirty-one.

I’m calling them.

He snatched his cell phone from the desk and dialed Maya’s number. He paced as it rang, trying not to think of all the awful things that could have happened to his girls between the school and home.

The call went to voicemail.

Reid hurried down the stairs to the foyer and pulled on a light jacket; March in Virginia was considerably more favorable than New York, but still a bit chilly. Car keys in hand, he punched in the four-digit security code on the wall panel to arm the alarm system to “away” mode. He knew the precise route the bus took; he could backtrack it all the way to the high school if he needed to, and…

As soon as he pulled the front door open, the bright yellow bus hissed to a stop at the end of his driveway.

“Busted,” Reid murmured. He couldn’t very well duck back into the house. He had undoubtedly been spotted. His two teenage girls stepped off the bus and down the walkway, pausing just shy of the door that he now blocked as the bus pulled away again.

“Hi, girls,” he said as brightly as possible. “How was school?”

His eldest, Maya, shot him a suspicious look as she folded her arms across her chest. “Where you going?”

“Um… to get the mail,” he told her.

“With your car keys?” She gestured to his fist, which was indeed gripping the keys to his silver SUV. “Try again.”

Yup, he thought. Busted. “The bus was late. And you know what I said, if you’re going to be late, you have to call. And why didn’t you answer your phone? I tried to call—”

“Six minutes, Dad.” Maya shook her head. “Six minutes isn’t ‘late.’ Six minutes is traffic. There was a fender-bender on Vine.”

He stepped aside as they entered the house. His younger daughter, Sara, gave him a brief hug and a murmur of, “Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, sweetheart.” Reid closed the door behind them, locked it, and punched in the code to the alarm system again before turning back to Maya. “Traffic or not, I want you to let me know when you’re going to be late.”

“You’re neurotic,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?” Reid blinked in surprise. “You seem to be confusing neurosis with concern.”

“Oh, please,” Maya retorted. “You haven’t let us out of your sight in weeks. Not since you’ve been back.”

She was, as usual, right. Reid had always been a protective father, and he had grown more so when his wife and their mother, Kate, died two years earlier. But for the past four weeks, he had become a veritable helicopter parent, hovering and (if he was being honest) perhaps being a tad overbearing.

But he wasn’t about to admit that.

“My dear, sweet child,” he chided, “as you blossom into adulthood, you’ll have to learn a very hard truth—that sometimes, you are wrong. And right now, you are wrong.” He grinned, but she didn’t. It was in his nature to try to diffuse tension with his kids using humor, but Maya wasn’t having it.

“Whatever.” She marched down the foyer and into the kitchen. She was sixteen, and staggeringly intelligent for her age—sometimes, it seemed, too much so for her own good. She had Reid’s dark hair and penchant for dramatic discourse, but lately she seemed to have gained a proclivity toward teenage angst, or at the very least moodiness… likely brought on by a combination of Reid’s constant loitering and obvious misinformation about the events that had occurred the month before.

Sara, the younger of his two, trudged up the stairs. “I’m gonna get started on my homework,” she said quietly.

Left alone in the foyer, Reid sighed and leaned against a white wall. His heart broke for his girls. Sara was fourteen, and generally vibrant and sweet, but whenever the subject came up of what had happened in February she clammed up or quickly vacated the room. She simply didn’t want to talk about it. Just a few days earlier, Reid had tried to invite her to see a therapist, a neutral third party that she could talk to. (Of course, it would have to be a CIA-affiliated doctor.) Sara declined with a simple and succinct “no thanks” and scurried out of the room before Reid could get another word in.

He hated keeping the truth from his kids, but it was necessary. Outside of the agency and Interpol, no one could know the truth—that barely more than a month ago he had recovered a portion of his memory as an agent in the CIA under the alias Kent Steele, also known to his peers and enemies as Agent Zero. An experimental memory suppressor in his head had caused him to forget all about Kent Steele and his work as an agent for nearly two years, until the device was torn from his skull.

Most of his memories as Kent were still lost to him. They were in there, locked away somewhere in the recesses of his brain, but they trickled in like a leaky faucet, usually when a visual or verbal prompt jarred them loose. The savage removal of the memory suppressor had done something to his limbic system that prevented the memories from returning all at once—and Reid was, for the most part, glad for it. Based on what little he knew about his life as Agent Zero, he wasn’t sure he wanted them all back. His biggest trepidation was that he might remember something that he wouldn’t want to be reminded of, some painful regret or awful act that Reid Lawson could never live with knowing.

Besides, he had been extremely busy ever since the activities in February. The CIA helped him relocate his family; upon his return to the US, he and his girls were sent to Alexandria in Virginia, a short drive from Washington, DC. The agency helped to secure him a position as an adjunct professor with Georgetown University.

Ever since then had been a whirlwind of activity: getting the girls enrolled in a new school, acclimating to his new job, and moving into the house in Virginia. But Reid had played a large part in keeping himself distracted by creating plenty of busywork for himself. He painted rooms. He upgraded appliances. He purchased new furniture and new school clothes for the girls. He could afford to; the CIA had awarded him a healthy sum for his involvement in stopping the terrorist organization called Amun. It was more than he made annually as a professor. They were delivering it in monthly installments to avoid scrutiny. The checks hit his bank account as a consulting fee from a fake publishing company that claimed to be creating a series of forthcoming history textbooks.

Between the money and his copious amounts of free time—he was only doing a few lectures a week at the moment—Reid kept himself as busy as he could. Because pausing for even a few moments meant thinking, and thinking meant reflecting, not only on his fractured memory, but on other equally unpleasant things.

Like the nine names that he had memorized. The nine faces he had scrutinized. The nine lives that had been lost because of his failure.

“No,” he murmured quietly, alone in the foyer of their new home. “Don’t do that to yourself.” He didn’t want to be reminded of that now. Instead he headed into the kitchen, where Maya was digging through the refrigerator for something to eat.

“I think I’ll order some pizza,” he announced. When she said nothing, he added, “What do you think?”

She closed the fridge with a sigh and leaned against it. “It’s fine,” she said simply. Then she glanced around. “The kitchen is nicer. I like the skylight. Yard is bigger, too.”

Reid smiled. “I meant about the pizza.”

“I know,” she replied with a shrug. “You just seem to prefer avoiding the topic at hand lately, so I figured I would too.”

He recoiled again at her brashness. On more than one occasion she had pressed him for information about what had happened when he disappeared, but the conversation always ended in him insisting that his cover story was the truth, and her getting angry because she knew he was lying. Then she would drop it for a week or so before the vicious cycle began anew.

“There’s no need for that kind of attitude, Maya,” he said.

“I’m going to go check on Sara.” Maya spun on her heel and left the kitchen. A moment later he heard her feet pounding up the stairs.

He pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. It was times like these that he missed Kate the most. She always knew just what to say. She would have known how to handle two teenagers who had been through what his girls had been through.

His willpower to continue with the lie was growing weak. He couldn’t bring himself to recite the cover story yet again, the one the CIA had supplied him with to tell his family and colleagues where he had vanished to for a week. The story went that federal agents had come to his door, demanding his assistance on an important case. As an Ivy League professor, Reid was in a unique position to help them with research. As far as the girls were aware, he had spent most of that week in a conference room, poring over books and staring at a computer screen. That was all he was allowed to say, and he couldn’t share details with them.

He certainly couldn’t tell them about his clandestine past as Agent Zero, or that he had helped stop Amun from bombing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He couldn’t tell them that he had singlehandedly killed more than a dozen people in the course of only days, each and every one a known terrorist.

He had to stick to his vague cover story, not only for the sake of the CIA, but for the sake of the girls’ safety. While he was away dashing madcap all over Europe, his two daughters were forced to flee New York, spending several days on their own before being picked up by the CIA and brought to a safe house. They had very nearly been abducted by a pair of Amun radicals—a thought that still made the hairs on Reid’s neck stand on end, because it meant that the terrorist group had members in the United States. It certainly lent to his overly overprotective nature as of late.

The girls had been told that the two men who tried to accost them were members of a local gang that was abducting children in the area. Sara seemed slightly skeptical of the story, but accepted it on the grounds that her father wouldn’t lie to her (which, of course, made Reid feel even more awful). That, plus her total aversion to the topic, made it easy to skirt the issue and move on with life.

Maya, on the other hand, was downright dubious. Not only was she smart enough to know better, but she had been in contact with Reid via Skype during the ordeal and had seemingly gathered enough information on her own to make some assumptions. She herself had witnessed firsthand the deaths of the two radicals at Agent Watson’s hand, and she hadn’t been quite the same since.

Reid was at a complete loss about what to do, other than to try to continue with life with as much normalcy as possible.

Reid took out his cell phone and called the pizzeria up the street, putting in an order for two medium pies, one with extra cheese (Sara’s favorite) and the other with sausage and green peppers (Maya’s favorite).

As he hung up, he heard footfalls on the stairs. Maya returned to the kitchen. “Sara’s taking a nap.”

“Again?” It seemed that Sara had been sleeping a lot during the day lately. “Is she not sleeping at night?”

Maya shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe you should ask her.”

“I tried. She won’t tell me anything.”

“Maybe it’s because she doesn’t understand what happened,” Maya suggested.

“I told you both what happened.” Don’t make me say it again, he thought desperately. Please don’t make me lie to your face again.

“Maybe she’s scared,” Maya pressed on. “Maybe because she knows her dad, who she’s supposed to be able to trust, is lying to her—”

“Maya Joanne,” Reid warned, “you want to choose your next words carefully…”

“Maybe she’s not the only one!” Maya didn’t seem to be backing down. Not this time. “Maybe I’m scared too.”

“We’re safe here,” Reid told her firmly, trying to sound convincing even if he didn’t fully believe it himself. A headache was forming in the front of his skull. He retrieved a glass from the cupboard and filled it with cold water from the tap.

“Yeah, and we thought we were safe in New York,” Maya shot back. “Maybe if we knew what was going on, what you were really into, it would make things easier. But no.” Whether it was his inability to leave them alone for twenty minutes or her suspicions about what had happened didn’t matter. She wanted answers. “You know damn well what we went through. But we have no idea what happened to you!” She was nearly shouting now. “Where you went, what you did, how you got hurt—”

“Maya, I swear…” Reid set the glass on the counter and pointed a finger of warning in her direction.

“Swear what?” she snapped. “To tell the truth? Then just tell me!”

“I can’t tell you the truth!” he yelled. As he did, he threw his arms out at his sides. One hand swept the glass of water off the countertop.

Reid didn’t have time to think or ponder. His instincts kicked in and in a rapid, smooth gesture he bent low at the knees and snatched the glass out of the air before it could crash to the floor.

He immediately sucked in a regretful breath as the water sloshed, barely a drop spilled.

Maya stared, wide-eyed, though he didn’t know whether her surprise was at his words or his actions. It was the first time that she had ever seen him move like that—and the first time he had ever acknowledged, out loud, that what he told them might not have been what had happened. It didn’t matter if she knew it, or even just suspected it. He had blurted it out, and there was no taking it back now.

“Lucky catch,” he said quickly.

Maya slowly folded her arms across her chest, with one eyebrow raised and her lips pursed. He knew that glare; it was an accusatory look she had inherited directly from her mother. “You may have Sara and Aunt Linda fooled, but I’m not buying it, not for a second.”

Reid closed his eyes and sighed. She wasn’t going to let him off the hook, so he lowered his tone and spoke carefully.

“Maya, listen. You are very intelligent—definitely enough to make certain suppositions about what happened,” he said. “The most important thing to understand is that knowing specific things could be dangerous. The potential danger that you were in for that week I was away, you could be in all the time, if you knew everything. I can’t tell you if you’re right or wrong. I won’t confirm or deny anything. So for now, let’s just say that… you can believe whatever assumptions you’ve made, so long as you’re careful to keep them to yourself.”

Maya nodded slowly. She stole a glance down the hall to make sure Sara wasn’t there before she said, “You’re not just a professor. You’re working for someone, government-level—FBI, maybe, or CIA—”

“Jesus, Maya, I said keep it to yourself!” Reid groaned.

“The thing with the Winter Olympics, and the forum in Davos,” she pressed on. “You had something to do with that.”

“I told you, I won’t confirm or deny anything—”

“And that terrorist group they keep talking about on the news, Amun. You helped stop them?”

Reid turned away, glancing out the small window that looked out over their backyard. It was too late, by then. He didn’t have to confirm or deny anything. She could see it on his face.

“This isn’t a game, Maya. It’s serious, and if the wrong kind of people knew—”

“Did Mom know?”

Out of all the questions she could have asked, that one was a curveball. He was silent for a long moment. Once again his eldest had proven herself too smart, maybe even for her own good.

“I don’t think so,” he said quietly.

“And all that traveling you did, before,” Maya said. “Those weren’t conferences and guest lectures, were they?”

“No. They weren’t.”

“Then you stopped for a while. Did you quit after… after Mom…?”

“Yes. But then they needed me back.” That was enough of a partial truth for him to not feel like he was lying—and hopefully enough to sate Maya’s curiosity.

He turned back toward her. She stared at the tiled floor, her face etched in a frown. There was clearly more she wanted to ask. He hoped she didn’t.

“One more question.” Her voice was nearly a whisper. “Did this stuff have anything to do with… with Mom’s death?”

“Oh, god. No, Maya. Of course not.” He crossed the room quickly and put his arms around her tightly. “Don’t think like that. What happened to Mom was medical. It could have happened to anyone. It wasn’t… it had nothing to do with this.”

“I think I knew that,” she said quietly. “I just had to ask…”

“It’s okay.” That was the last thing he wanted her to think, that Kate’s death was somehow linked to the secret life he had been involved in.

Something flashed across his mind—a vision. A recollection of the past.

A familiar kitchen. Their home in Virginia, before moving to New York. Before she died. Kate stands before you, every bit as beautiful as you remember—but her brow is furrowed, her gaze is hard. She’s angry. Shouting. Gesturing with her hands toward something on the table…

Reid stepped back, releasing Maya’s embrace as the vague memory spurned a dull headache in his forehead. Sometimes his brain tried to recall certain things from his past that were still locked away, and the forcible retrieval left him with a mild migraine at the front of his skull. But this time was different, stranger; the memory had clearly been one of Kate, some sort of argument they had that he couldn’t recall having.

“Dad, you okay?” Maya asked.

The doorbell rang suddenly, startling them both.

“Uh, yeah,” he murmured. “I’m fine. That must be the pizza.” He looked at his watch and frowned. “That was really quick. I’ll be right back.” He crossed the foyer and glanced through the peephole. Outside was a young man with a dark beard and a half-vacant gaze, wearing a red polo shirt bearing the pizzeria’s logo.

Even so, Reid checked over his shoulder to make sure Maya wasn’t watching, and then he snaked a hand into the dark brown bomber jacket that hung on a hook near the door. In the inside pocket was a loaded Glock 22. He clicked the safety off and tucked it into the back of his pants before he opened the door.

“Delivery for Lawson,” the pizza guy said, monotone.

“Yup, that’s me. How much?”

The guy cradled the two boxes with one arm as he reached for his back pocket. Reid instinctively did too.

He saw movement from the corner of his eye and his gaze flitted left. A man with a military buzz cut was crossing his front lawn in a hurry—but more importantly, he was clearly wearing a holstered gun on his hip, and his right hand was on the grip.

CHAPTER TWO

Reid held up his arm like a crossing guard stopping traffic.

“It’s okay, Mr. Thompson,” he called out. “It’s just pizza.”

The older man on his front lawn, with his graying buzz cut and slight paunch, stopped in his tracks. The pizza guy glanced over his shoulder and, for the first time, showed some emotion—his eyes widened in shock when he saw the gun and the hand resting upon it.

“You sure, Reid?” Mr. Thompson eyed up the pizza guy suspiciously.

“I’m sure.”

The delivery guy slowly pulled a receipt from his pocket. “Uh, it’s eighteen,” he said, bewildered.

Reid gave him a twenty and a ten and took the boxes from him. “Keep the change.”

The pizza guy didn’t have to be told twice. He jogged back to his waiting coupe, jumped in, and screeched away. Mr. Thompson watched him go, his eyes narrowed.

“Thank you, Mr. Thompson,” Reid said. “But it’s just pizza.”

“I didn’t like the look of that guy,” his next-door neighbor growled. Reid liked the older man just fine—though he thought Thompson took on his new role of keeping a watchful eye on the Lawson family just a bit too seriously. Even so, Reid decidedly preferred having someone a bit overzealous to someone lackadaisical in their duties.

“Never can be too careful,” Thompson added. “How are the girls?”

“They’re doing fine.” Reid smiled pleasantly. “But, uh… do you have to carry that around in plain sight all the time?” He gestured to the Smith & Wesson at Thompson’s hip.

The older man looked confused. “Well… yes. My CHP expired, and Virginia is a legal open-carry state.”

“…Right.” Reid forced another smile. “Of course. Thanks again, Mr. Thompson. I’ll let you know if we need anything.”

Thompson nodded and then trotted back across the lawn to his house. Deputy Director Cartwright had assured Reid that the older man was quite capable; Thompson was a retired CIA agent, and even though he’d been out of the field for more than two decades he was clearly happy—if not a tad eager—to be useful again.

Reid sighed and closed the door behind him. He locked it and activated the security alarm again (which was becoming a ritual every time he opened or closed the door), and then turned to find Maya standing behind him in the foyer.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing. Mr. Thompson just wanted to say hi.”

Maya crossed her arms again. “And here I thought we were making such good progress.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Reid scoffed at her. “Thompson is just a harmless old man—”

“Harmless? He carries a gun everywhere he goes,” Maya protested. “And don’t think I don’t see him watching us from his window. It’s like he’s spying on—” Her mouth fell open a little. “Oh my god, does he know about you? Is Mr. Thompson a spy too?”

“Jeez, Maya, I am not a spy…”

Actually, he thought, that’s exactly what you are…

“I don’t believe this!” she exclaimed. “Is that why you have him babysit us when you leave?”

“Yes,” he admitted quietly. He didn’t have to tell her the unrequested truths, but there wasn’t much point in hiding things from her when she was going to make such accurate guesses anyway.

He expected her to be angry and start throwing accusations again, but instead she shook her head and murmured, “Unreal. My dad is a spy, and our next-door nut-job is a bodyguard.” Then, to his surprise, she hugged him around the neck, almost knocking the pizza boxes from his hand. “I know you can’t tell me everything. All I wanted was some truth.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Just risking international security to be a good dad. Now go wake your sister before the pizza gets cold. And Maya? Not a word of this to Sara.”

He went into the kitchen and took out some plates and napkins, and poured three glasses of soda. A few moments later, Sara shuffled into the kitchen, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

“Hi, Daddy,” she mumbled.

“Hey, sweetheart. Have a seat. Are you sleeping okay?”

“Mm,” she murmured vaguely. Sara plucked up a piece of pizza and bit off the tip, chewing in slow, lazy circles.