Jack Mars - Agent Zero

No, it was more than that. It felt like an obligation.

His captors had seemed willing to kill him slowly for what he knew. And he had the sensation that if he didn’t discover what this was and what he was supposed to know, more people would die.

“Monsieur.” Reid was startled from his musing by a matronly woman in a shawl gently touching his arm. “You are bleeding,” she said in English, and pointed to her own brow.

“Oh. Merci .” He touched two fingers to his right brow. A small cut there had soaked the bandage and a bead of blood was making its way down his face. “I need to find a pharmacy,” he murmured aloud.

Then he sucked in a breath as a thought struck him: there was a pharmacy two blocks down and one up. He had never been inside it—not to his own untrustworthy knowledge, anyway—but he simply knew it, as easily as he knew the route to Pap’s Deli.

A chill ran from the base of his spine up to the nape of his neck. The other visions had been visceral, and had all manifested from some external stimulus, sights and sounds and even scents. This time there was no accompanying vision. It was plain knowledge recall, the same way he knew where to turn at each street sign. The same way he knew how to load the Beretta.

He made a decision before the light turned green. He would go to this meeting and get whatever information he could. Then he would decide what to do with it—report it to the authorities perhaps, and clear his name regarding the four men in the basement. Let them make the arrests while he went home to his children.

At the drug store, he bought a thin tube of super glue, a box of butterfly bandages, cotton swabs, and a foundation that nearly matched his skin tone. He took his purchases into the restroom and locked the door.

He peeled off the bandages that he had haphazardly stuck to his face back in the apartment and washed the crusted blood from his wounds. To the smaller cuts he applied the butterfly bandages. For the deeper wounds, ones that would ordinarily require stitches, he pinched the edges of the skin together and squeezed a bead of super glue, hissing through his teeth all the while. Then he held his breath for about thirty seconds. The glue burned fiercely but it subsided as it dried. Finally, he smoothed the foundation over the contours of his face, particularly the new ones created by his sadistic former captors. There was no way to completely mask his swollen eye and bruised jaw, but at least this way there would be fewer people staring at him on the street.

The entire process took about half an hour, and twice in that span customers banged on the door to the restroom (the second time, a woman shouting in French that her child was nearly to bursting). Both times Reid just shouted back, “ Occupé! ”

Finally, when he was finished, he examined himself again in the mirror. It was far from perfect, but at least it didn’t look like he had been beaten in a subterranean torture chamber. He wondered if he should have gone with a darker foundation, something to make him appear more foreign. Did the caller know who he was supposed to be meeting? Would they recognize who he was—or who they thought he was? The three men who had come to his home didn’t seem so sure; they had checked against a photograph.

“What am I doing?” he asked himself. You’re preparing for a meeting with a dangerous criminal that is likely a known terrorist , said the voice in his head—not this new intrusive voice, but his own, Reid Lawson’s voice. It was his own common sense, mocking him.

Then that poised, assertive personality, the one just beneath the surface, spoke up. You’ll be fine , it told him. Nothing you haven’t done before. His hand reached instinctively for the grip of the Beretta tucked into the back of his pants, concealed by his new jacket. You know all this.

Before leaving the drug store, he picked up a few more items: a cheap watch, a bottle of water, and two candy bars. Outside on the sidewalk, he devoured both chocolate bars. He wasn’t sure how much blood he had lost and he wanted to keep his sugar level up. He drained the entire bottle of water, and then asked a passerby for the time. He set the watch and slipped it around his wrist.

It was half past six. He had plenty of time to get to the rendezvous place early and prepare.

It was nearly nightfall before he reached the address he’d been given over the phone. The sunset over Paris cast long shadows down the boulevard. 187 Rue de Stalingrad was a bar in the 10th arrondissement called Féline, a dive of a joint with painted-over windows and a cracked façade. It was situated on a street otherwise populated by art studios, Indian restaurants, and bohemian cafes.

Reid paused with his hand on the door. If he entered, there would be no turning back. He could still walk away. No, he decided, he couldn’t. Where would he go? Back home, so they could find him all over again? And living with these strange visions in his head?

He went inside.

The bar’s walls were painted black and red and covered with fifties-era posters of grim-faced women and cigarette holders and silhouettes. It was too early, or perhaps too late, for the place to be busy. The few patrons that milled about spoke in hushed tones, hunched protectively over their drinks. Melancholy blues music played softly from a stereo behind the bar.

Reid scanned the place left to right and back again. No one looked his way, and certainly no one there looked like the types that had taken him hostage. He took a small table near the rear and sat facing the door. He ordered a coffee, though it mostly sat in front of him steaming.

A hunched old man slid from a stool and limped across the bar toward the restrooms. Reid found his gaze quickly drawn to the movement, scanning the man. Late sixties. Hip dysplasia. Yellowish fingers, labored breathing—a cigar smoker. His eyes flitted to the other side of the bar without moving his head, where two rough-looking men in overalls were having a hushed but fervent conversation about sports. Factory workers. The one on the left isn’t getting enough sleep, likely a father to young children. Man on the right was in a fight recently, or at least threw a punch; his knuckles are bruised. Without thinking, he found himself examining the cuffs of their pants, their sleeves, and the way they held their elbows on the table. Someone with a gun will protect it, try to conceal it, even unconsciously.

Reid shook his head. He was getting paranoid, and these persistent foreign thoughts weren’t helping. But then he remembered the strange occurrence with the pharmacy, the recollection of its location just by mere mention of needing to find one. The academic in him spoke up. Maybe there’s something to be learned from this. Maybe instead of fighting it, you should try opening up to it.

The waitress was a young, tired-looking woman with a knotty brunette mane. “ Stylo? ” he asked as she passed him by. “ Ou crayon? ” Pen or pencil? She reached into the tangle of hair and found a pen. “ Merci .”

He smoothed a cocktail napkin and set the tip of the pen to it. This wasn’t some new skill he’d never learned; this was a Professor Lawson tactic, one he had used many times in the past to recall and strengthen memory.

He thought back to his conversation, if he could call it that, with the three Arabic captors. He tried not to think of their dead eyes, the blood on the floor, or the tray of sharp implements intended to cut whatever truth they thought he had out of him. Instead he focused on the verbal details and wrote the first name that came to mind.

Then he muttered it aloud. “Sheikh Mustafar.”