File Zero

I should forewarn you, Dr. Guyer had told him before performing the procedure to bring Zero’s memories back. If this works, some of the things that you recall may be subconscious: fantasies, wishes, suspicions from your past life. All of those non-memory aspects were removed with your actual memories.

Zero had frowned at that. So you’re saying that if I remember things, some of the things I remember may not actually be real?

The doctor’s reply had been simple, yet harrowing. They’ll be real to you.

If that was the case, he reasoned, couldn’t it be possible that he had done something with the documents himself? Could he have imagined that they were here, in this safe deposit box, when really they were elsewhere?

I’m losing my mind.

Focus, Zero.

He pulled the lockback knife out of his pocket, unfolded it, and carefully wedged the razor-sharp tip into the edge of the bottom of the box. He worked it back and forth gently, careful not to scratch it, until the bottom panel came loose.

He breathed a small sigh of relief. Whoever had taken his documents didn’t know about the false bottom he had installed in the box, less than an inch above the real bottom. Nestled beneath it was a single object—a USB stick.

At least they didn’t find the recordings. But is it enough? He wasn’t sure, but it was all he had. He snatched it up, pocketed the knife and the USB drive, and then carefully replaced the false bottom. Then he slid the box back into its narrow vault and closed the door.

When he finished, Zero headed back to the lipsticked teller.

“Excuse me,” he said, “can you tell me if anyone else accessed my safe deposit box in the past two years?”

The woman blinked at him. “Two years?”

“Yes. Please. You keep a log, right?”

“Um… certainly. One moment.” Fingernails clacked against the keyboard for a long minute. “Here we are. There has only been one access to your deposit box in the past two years, and it was only a couple of months ago, in February.”

“It wasn’t me,” Zero said impatiently. “So who was it?”

She blinked at him again, this time in confusion. “Well, sir, it was the only other person authorized to access the box. It was your wife. Katherine Lawson.”

Zero stared at the teller for longer than the woman found comfortable.

“No,” he said slowly. “That’s impossible. My wife passed away two years ago.”

She frowned deeply, the lipsticked corners of her mouth drooping as if they’d been tugged. “I am very sorry to hear that, sir. And that is certainly strange. But… we require photo ID, and the person that accessed the box obviously had it. Your wife’s name wasn’t taken from the box’s lease when she passed.”

Zero remembered putting her name on the lease. Kate hadn’t known about it at the time; he had forged her signature as a joint lease so that someone would know about it in the event of his death.

And only two months prior, someone had pretended to be her, had even gone so far as to create identification that could pass as valid to a bank, and taken the contents of his box.

“I assure you,” the teller told him, “we will look further into this matter. The branch manager just left for the day, but I can have him reach out to you tomorrow. Would you like to report a theft?”

“No, no.” Zero waved a hand dismissively. He didn’t want to get any legal authorities involved and have the safe deposit box flagged in any system that the CIA might see. “Nothing was taken,” he lied. “Let’s just forget it. Thanks.”

“Sir?” she called after him, but he was already at the door.

Someone came here posing as Kate. He knew there was little he could do about it now; the bank might still have the security footage from that day, but they wouldn’t allow him access unless there was an investigation and a warrant.

But who? The agency was the most obvious culprit. With the vast CIA resources, they could have created a passable ID and sent a female agent in under the guise of Kate. But Zero hadn’t accessed the box in years. If they knew about it back then, why would they wait until only two months ago to get into it?

Because I came back. They thought I was dead, and when I wasn’t, they needed to know what I knew.

Another thought flashed through his mind: Maria. Are you sure you never told her about it? Not even in case of an emergency? She was one of the best covert agents he had ever known; she could have found a way. But still he came back to the question of why she would do that now, why wait if she knew about the safe deposit box.

He suddenly felt tired and overwhelmed. He had lost so much of what he had uncovered before, the smallest shred of potential evidence sitting on a USB stick in his pocket. He had no idea how much time he had to get Pierson alone, try to convince him of what was happening, and somehow persuade him to look further into those responsible with almost nothing to go on.

It felt insurmountable. He realized grimly that if he had still been Reid Lawson, trapped in the hell of his partial memories as Agent Zero, he might have given up. He might have scooped up his daughters and whatever they could carry and fled somewhere. The Midwest, maybe. He might have stuck his head in the sand and let things happen as they would. Reid Lawson’s highest priority was his girls.

But Agent Zero had a responsibility. This was not just his job. It was his life. This was who he truly was, and there was no way in hell he was going to sit idly by and watch a war unfold, watch innocent people die, watch American servicemen and Middle Eastern civilians be forced into a conflict that was manufactured for the benefit of a handful of megalomaniacal men to maintain their power.

He heard the footsteps like an echo of his own and resisted the urge to turn around. As he neared his car, parked two blocks from the bank, the heavy footfalls of boots kept pace with his almost stride for stride.

About ten feet behind you. Keeping their distance. They’re walking heavy; definitely a man, probably close to six foot, two-ten to two-twenty.

Zero didn’t stop at his car. He walked right past it to the next corner and turned right onto a side street. As he walked past a flower shop, the same one that he had once bought bouquets for his girls before picking them up from a safe house six blocks to the west, he checked his periphery. It was something that he had instinctually done as Reid Lawson, but with his memories also came back his skills. It was as easy as glancing in a mirror; without averting his gaze from the sidewalk ahead, he focused on the outermost borders of his field of vision.

A man in a black T-shirt was crossing the street toward him. He was large, easily two-fifty, with a neck as thick as his head and heavily muscled arms testing the limits of his shirtsleeves.

So this is how it’s going to be. The hairs on Zero’s arms stood on end, but his heartbeat remained steady. His breathing normal. No sweat prickled on his brow.

He wasn’t being paranoid. They were after him. They knew. And he was more than ready to meet the challenge.

CHAPTER FIVE

Without breaking his stride, Zero turned right again, slipping down a narrow thoroughfare between two buildings. It was barely six feet across, not even wide enough to be called an alley. About halfway down its length he stopped and turned.

At the mouth of the throughway stood one of his two pursuers. The man was around his age, a few inches taller, with a wiry frame and a few days’ worth of coarse dark hair on his chin. He wore black boots and jeans and a black leather jacket.

“Baker,” Zero said instinctively. This man was a member of the Division, a private security group that the CIA occasionally contracted to assist with international affairs. They were veritable mercenaries, the same group that had made a bid for his life not a week ago at the Brotherhood’s compound outside of Al-Baghdadi. The same group that had attempted to jump Agent Watson and kidnap his daughters in Switzerland.

But this man in particular was familiar to him. As soon as Zero saw his face, he remembered: back in 2013, the Division had been called in to help out with a hostage situation between a faction of Al Qaeda and a dozen US soldiers. Baker had been among them.

The mercenary raised an eyebrow. “You know me?”

Shit. Zero scolded himself for blurting out the man’s name. He had shown his hand. He shrugged and tried to play it off. “Some things come back. In pieces.”

Baker smirked. “Sure, Zero. What was in the bank?”

“Money. I made a withdrawal.”

The merc shook his head. “I don’t think so. See, I called it in. You don’t have an account there. But techs noticed a safe deposit box in you and your dead wife’s name.”

Zero saw red for a moment at the offhanded comment about Kate and nearly lost his cool, but he forced himself to remain calm.

“I’m guessing you made a withdrawal,” Baker said, “but not money. What was in the box, Zero?”

Guessing? Either Baker was bluffing, or the agency really didn’t know about the safe deposit box before now. Which meant that the CIA was not responsible for the missing documents. But he could be lying.

Zero heard footsteps behind him and glanced quickly over his shoulder to see the big man from the street corner stepping into view at the opposite end of the narrow causeway. His head was shaved bald but his chin was obscured in a thick brown beard, the bottom lip jutting in a scowl. He looked like he could have been a linebacker or a professional wrestler.

I don’t know him. Must be new, Zero thought wryly.

When he turned back to Baker, the wiry mercenary had one hand inside his jacket. It came back out slowly, and Zero wasn’t the least bit surprised to see it gripping a black Sig Sauer.

“What’s that for? You going to shoot me in broad daylight?” Zero held up his damaged right hand. “I’m unarmed and one-handed.”

“I’ve seen what you can do with one hand,” Baker said nonchalantly as he screwed a suppressor to the barrel of the pistol. “This is for self-defense. What was in the box, Zero?”

Zero shrugged a shoulder. “You’re going to have to shoot me first.” How the hell am I going to get out of this? He wasn’t taunting when he said he was one-handed. He was at a huge disadvantage against one of them, let alone two.

“Our orders are nonlethal force,” Baker remarked. He looked past Zero to his burly cohort. “What do you think, Stevens? A shot to a kneecap isn’t lethal, right?”

The big man, Stevens, didn’t respond—at least not in words. He merely grunted.

Nonlethal force. These two weren’t sent to kill him; they were sent to take whatever he had retrieved from the bank, and likely determine whether or not they should bring him in. It’s too late to kill me now. The powers-that-be needed to know what he knew, and who else he had told. It might not be too suspicious to those not involved in the plot if Agent Zero suddenly ended up dead, but if they had to take out others—Strickland, Watson, Maria—people would start asking the wrong sort of questions and poking around where their dirty laundry might be found.

I need a distraction. “Say, how’s Fitzpatrick?” he asked as casually as he could. He knew he would be goading them, but he needed to buy some time. “Last I saw him he was kind of… smeared, for lack of a better term.”

Baker’s lip curled slightly. The leader of the Division, Fitzpatrick, had been hit by a car in a New York parking deck by Mossad Agent Talia Mendel. As far as Zero knew, Fitzpatrick was still alive, but he didn’t know the extent of his wounds.

“He’s alive,” Baker replied evenly, “despite your friends’ best efforts. Seventeen broken bones, a punctured lung, loss of vision in his right eye.”

Zero clucked his tongue in dismay. “I should really send him some flowers—”

Baker snapped the pistol up in both hands. “That’s enough. It’s been real nice catching up, but if you don’t tell me what was in the box, I am going to shoot you. And then I’m going to have Stevens here drag your bleeding body by the ankle to a nice quiet place where we can hook you up to a car battery until you tell us exactly how much you remember.”

Zero wrinkled his nose. “That sounds unpleasant.”

Baker fired a shot. The gun made a thwip! and a small chunk of the brick façade to Zero’s right exploded, sending small pieces of stone smacking against his face.

His hands were up in an instant. “Whoa! All right. Jesus. I’ll tell you.” Still his pulse hardly quickened.

I have what they want. I am in control here.

“It’s a USB stick. It has information on it.”

“Give it here,” Baker ordered.

“Can I reach into my pocket for it?”

“Slowly,” Baker growled, the Sig Sauer trained at Zero’s forehead.

“Okay.” Zero showed his empty left hand, wiggling the fingers, and then slowly snaked the hand down to his pants pocket. Baker is about five yards away. With his hand in his pocket, he gripped the USB stick with two fingers, pinching it between the index and middle. Stevens is about seven yards away. He palmed the lockback knife with his pinky and ring fingers, securing it with his thumb. Just like the Tueller Drill.

That morning, he would have sworn he had never heard the name Dennis Tueller, but anyone who had ever been trained to bring a knife to a gun fight would know it. In 1983, Sergeant Tueller ran a series of tests to determine how quickly an attacker with a knife could cover a distance of approximately twenty-one feet—and if a defender with a holstered gun could react in time.

Less than two seconds. That was the average time it took an attacker to sprint twenty-one feet—seven yards—to a target. The problem was that Baker’s gun wasn’t holstered.

But Stevens hadn’t drawn yet.

“See?” Zero raised the USB stick, pinched between two fingers, keeping the back of his hand facing Baker.

“Toss it,” Baker demanded. Over the mercenary’s shoulder, a few passersby talked and laughed as they walked by the mouth of the narrow alley. A young man among them glanced down the causeway, but with Baker’s back to them he didn’t see the Sig Sauer. Instead the man just flashed a brief frown and kept right on walking.

I could really use a distraction. But Zero wasn’t willing to call out to anyone, to put anyone else in harm’s way.

Baker shifted the grip on his pistol to one hand and held the other out, palm up, waiting for Zero to toss the USB stick.

So he did. He curled his arm back and tossed the USB drive toward Baker in an underhand motion, flicking it into a high arc. As he released the stick, he slid the lockback knife from his palm to his fingers.

Then he catapulted himself from his mark like a shot, snapping open the knife as he did.

As Baker’s gaze rose from his target to the skinny black drive soaring in an arc through the air, Zero sprinted from his position—but not toward Baker. He hurtled toward the larger man like a shot.

One-point-four seconds. He had performed the Tueller Drill a thousand times, had trained for this exact scenario, even remembered it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. A high-precision radar gun in a CIA training field had clocked him at an average of one-point-four seconds to reach a target approximately seven yards away.

The amount of minute math that crossed his mind in an instant was staggering. It had always been there, ingrained through insane amounts of repetition and study, locked away in the recesses of his limbic system, waiting for the opportunity to burst out again. Average human reaction speed was a half second to three-quarters of a second. Even a professional like Baker required at least a quarter of a second between shots on a semi-auto pistol like the Sig Sauer. And Zero was a moving target.

The big man, Stevens, was not quick. He barely had the pistol free of his holster, his eyes involuntarily widening in surprise at Zero’s speed as he vaulted toward him. The blade was already snapped open. Zero launched himself the last six feet, leaping toward Stevens and sliding the tip of the knife, in and out, one motion, into his throat.

With his wrapped right hand he reached out for Stevens’s big shoulder and, as the knife tip slid out again, Zero slingshot himself around the large man’s body. Two shots rang out behind him—thwip-thwip from the suppressed pistol—and struck Stevens in the chest as Zero landed behind him. Sharp, astounding pain burned in his injured hand, but the adrenaline was there now, coursing through him as he dropped the knife and reached around for Stevens’s pistol before the big man could fall. He snapped it out of the beefy fist and, safe behind his broad human shield, fired two shots at Baker.

He was a good shot with his left hand, though not quite as good as his right. One of the shots missed. Glass shattered somewhere beyond the alley. The second thunderclap of a shot—Stevens’s Beretta wasn’t outfitted with a suppressor—struck Baker in the forehead.

The mercenary’s head snapped back. His body followed.

Zero didn’t wait around or stop to catch his breath. He sprinted ahead again, grabbed up the USB stick that was still lying on the cement, and then ran the opposite way down the alley. He stuffed it in his pocket, along with the bloodied knife, and then took Stevens’s Beretta with him. It had his fingerprints on it.

Somewhere a car alarm whooped loudly. The shattered glass he’d heard must have been a car window. He hoped no one had been hit.

The large man’s chest heaved up and down. He was still alive. But Zero didn’t have the luxury of finishing him off or waiting around; besides, with the knife wound to the throat and two shots to the chest, he’d be dead in seconds.

People shouted in alarm from somewhere nearby as Zero sprinted to the end of the alley, stuffing the gun in the back of his pants as he did. He turned the corner and looked all around in bewilderment, hoping that he looked as much the shocked passerby as anyone else.

As he hurried to the end of the block, he heard the shriek of a woman—no doubt discovering the two bodies in the narrow alley—and then a male shout, “Someone call nine-one-one!”

They had to die. There was no way around it. He had known it as soon as he had accidentally tipped his hand and said Baker’s name. He knew it when he showed them the USB drive he had retrieved from the bank.

Oddly, there was no remorse. There was no “what if?” of whether or not he could have talked them out of trying to take the drive or seeing them from his perspective. It was a situation of him or them, and he decided it wasn’t going to be him. They made their choice, and they chose wrong.

The entire ordeal, from tossing the USB stick to fleeing from the alley, had unfolded in a matter of seconds. But he could see every moment clearly like a slow-motion instant replay in his head. The strange thing was that when Baker had fired the gun mere feet from his head, hitting the brick wall, Zero’s thoughts were not of how close the bullet had come, or that Baker could have easily killed him if he wanted to. It wasn’t of the girls. Instead he was keenly aware of the dichotomous nature of his scholarly mind against his rediscovered memories. Zero was cool, calm, and believed, perhaps due to some hubris or experience or a combination thereof, that he was still in control of this situation.

It was a bizarre sensation. Worse still was how much it frightened and thrilled him at the same time. Is this who I am? Was Reid Lawson a lie? Or have I been living my life for two years with only the weakest parts of my psyche?

Zero strode to the end of the block, looped back around toward the flower shop, and went straight to his car. He could see that a sizable crowd of onlookers was gathering around the corner, many in shock or even crying at the sight of two dead bodies.

No one was paying any attention to him.

He drove casually, maintaining the speed limit and careful not to blow any stop signs or lights. There was no doubt that police were en route, and the CIA would know in moments that shots had been fired and two men had been killed a mere three blocks from the bank that the Division had reported Zero to have been at.

The question was what they would do about it. There was nothing at the scene that could definitively link him to it, and whoever sent the Division mercs after him—Riker, he presumed—wouldn’t be able to admit it openly. Still, he needed help, and more than he could ask of his fellow agents. They would be watched as well. If this was the type of open season it was going to be on Agent Zero, then he needed allies. Powerful ones.

But first, he needed to get his girls to safety.

As soon as he felt he’d made a safe distance from the grisly scene in the alley, he pulled into a gas station and around to the back. He buried the gun, the knife, and the safe deposit key in the dumpster under offensively awful-smelling trash. Then he got back into the car and made the call. It rang only twice before Mitch answered with a grunt.

“Need extraction right away, Mitch. I’ll meet you somewhere.”

“Meadow Field,” the mechanic said immediately. “You know it?”

“I do.” Meadow Field was an abandoned airstrip about twenty miles south. “I’ll be there.”

CHAPTER SIX

Maya parted the blinds of the window near the front door for what must have been the twentieth time since their father had left. The street outside was clear. An occasional car drove by, but they didn’t slow or stop.

It scared the hell out of her to think what her dad might be caught in the middle of this time.

Just for good measure, she crossed the foyer to the kitchen and checked her dad’s phone again. He had left his personal cell behind, on silent, but his screen showed that he had missed three calls since Maya had last talked to him.

Maria apparently was desperate to get in touch with him. Maya wanted to call her, to tell her that something was going on, but she refrained. If her dad wanted Maria to know, he would contact her directly.

She found Sara in the same position she had been in for the last half hour, seated on the sofa in the living room with her legs drawn up beneath her. There was a sitcom on TV, but the volume was so low she could barely hear it, and she wasn’t looking directly at it anyway.

Maya could tell that her sister had been suffering in silence ever since they had been taken by Rais and the Slavic traffickers. But Sara wouldn’t open up, wouldn’t talk about it.

“Hey, Squeak, how about something to eat?” Maya prodded. “I could make grilled cheese? With tomato. And bacon…” She smacked her lips, hoping to amuse her little sister.

But Sara merely shook her head. “Not hungry.”

“Okay. Do you want to talk about anything?”

“No.”

A wave of frustration rolled over her, but Maya swallowed it. She had to be patient. She too was affected by the events they had experienced, but her reaction had been anger and a desire for retribution. She had told her dad that her plan was to become a CIA agent herself, and it wasn’t simply teenage angst talking. She was very serious about it.

“I’m here,” she told her sister. “If you ever feel like talking. You know that, right?”

Sara glanced over at her. A smile very nearly passed her lips—but then her eyes widened and she sat up suddenly. “Do you hear that?”

Maya listened intently. She did hear it; the sound of a powerful engine rumbling nearby. Then it stopped abruptly.

“Stay here.” She hurried back to the foyer and once again parted the blinds. A silver SUV had pulled into their driveway. Her pulse quickened as four men got out. Two of them wore suits; the other two wore all black, with tactical vests and combat boots.

Even from this distance Maya could see the insignia emblazoned on their sleeves. The two black-clad men were from the same organization that had attempted to kidnap them in Switzerland. Watson had called them the Division.

Maya rushed to the kitchen, sliding in her socks, and pulled a steak knife from the bamboo block on the counter. Sara had risen from the couch and hurried to join her.

“Go downstairs.” Maya held the knife out, handle first, to her sister. “Get in the panic room. I’ll be right behind you.”