Jack Mars - Agent Zero

A Moroccan black site. A man who spent his entire life in wealth and power, treading on those less fortunate than him, crushing them beneath his shoe—now scared shitless because he knows you can bury him to his neck in the sand and no one would ever find his bones.

“I’ve told you all I know!” he insists.

Tut-tut. “My intel says otherwise. Says you might know a hell of a lot more, but you may be afraid of the wrong people. Tell you what, Sheikh… my friend in the next room? He’s getting antsy. See, he’s got this hammer—it’s just a little thing, a rock hammer, like a geologist would use? But it does wonders on small bones, knuckles…”

“I swear it!” The sheikh wrings his hands nervously. You recognize it as a tell. “There were other conversations about the plans, but they were in German, Russian… I didn’t understand!”

“You know, Sheikh… a bullet sounds the same in every language.”

Reid snapped back to the dive bar. His throat felt dry. The memory had been intense, as vivid and lucid as any he knew he had actually experienced. And it had been his voice in his head, threatening casually, saying things he would never dream of saying to another person.

Plans. The sheikh had definitely said something about plans. Whatever terrible thing was nagging at his subconscious, he had the distinct feeling it had not yet happened.

He took a sip of the now-lukewarm coffee to calm his nerves. “Okay,” he told himself. “Okay.” During his interrogation in the basement, they had asked about fellow agents in the field, and three names had flashed across his mind. He wrote one, and then read it out loud. “Morris.”

A face immediately came to him, a man in his early thirties, handsome and knowing it. A cocky half-smirk with only one side of his mouth. Dark hair, styled to make him look young.

A private airstrip in Zagreb. Morris sprints alongside you. You both have your guns drawn, barrels pointed downward. You can’t let the two Iranians reach the plane. Morris aims between strides and pops off two shots. One clips a calf and the first man falls. You gain on the other, tackling him brutally to the ground…

Another name. “Reidigger.”

A boyish smile, neatly combed hair. A bit of a paunch. He’d wear the weight better if he was a few inches taller. The butt of a lot of ribbing, but takes it good-naturedly.

The Ritz in Madrid. Reidigger covers the hall as you kick in the door and catch the bomber off guard. The man goes for the gun on the bureau, but you’re faster. You snap his wrist… Later Reidigger tells you he heard the sound from out in the corridor. Turned his stomach. Everyone laughs.

The coffee was cold now, but Reid barely noticed. His fingers were trembling. There was no doubt about it; whatever was happening to him, these were memories— his memories. Or someone’s. The captors, they had cut something out of his neck and called it a memory suppressor. That couldn’t be true; this wasn’t him. This was someone else. He had someone else’s memories mingling with his own.

Reid set the pen to the napkin again and wrote the final name. He said it aloud: “Johansson.” A shape swam into his mind. Long blonde hair, conditioned to a sheen. Smooth, shapely cheekbones. Full lips. Gray eyes, the color of slate. A vision flashed…

Milan. Night. A hotel. Wine. Maria sits on the bed with her legs folded under her. The top three buttons of her shirt are open. Her hair is tousled. You’ve never noticed how long her eyelashes are before. Two hours ago you watched her kill two men in a gunfight, and now it’s Sangiovese and Pecorino Toscano. Your knees almost touch. Her gaze meets yours. Neither of you speak. You can see it in her eyes, but she knows you can’t. She asks about Kate…

Reid winced as a headache came on, spreading through his cranium like a storm cloud. At the same time, the vision blurred and faded. He squeezed his eyes shut and gripped his temples for a full minute until the headache receded.

What the hell was that?

For some reason, it seemed that the memory of this woman, Johansson, had triggered the brief migraine. Even more unsettling, however, was the bizarre sensation that gripped him in the wake of the headache. It felt like… desire. No, it was more than that—it felt like passion, reinforced by excitement and even a bit of danger.

He couldn’t help but wonder who the woman was, but he shook it off. He didn’t want to incite another headache. Instead he set the pen to the napkin again, about to write the final name—Zero. That’s what the Iranian interrogator had called him. But before he could write it or recite it, he felt a bizarre sensation. The hairs on the nape of his neck stood on end.

He was being watched.

When he glanced up again, he saw a man standing in Féline’s dark doorway, his gaze locked on Reid like a hawk eyeing a mouse. Reid’s blood ran cold. He was being watched.

This was the man he was here to meet, he was certain of it. Did he recognize him? The Arabic men hadn’t seemed to. Was this man expecting someone else?

He set the pen down. Slowly and surreptitiously, he crumpled the napkin and dropped it into his half-empty cold coffee.

The man nodded once. Reid nodded back.

Then the stranger reached behind him, for something tucked in the back of his pants.

Reid stood with such force that his chair nearly toppled. His hand immediately wrapped around the textured grip of the Beretta, warm from his lower back. His mind screamed at him frantically. This is a public place. There are people here. I’ve never fired a gun before.

Before Reid drew his pistol, the stranger pulled a billfold from his back pocket. He grinned at Reid, apparently amused by his jumpy nature. No one else in the bar seemed to have noticed, except the waitress with the rat’s nest of hair, who simply raised an eyebrow.

The stranger approached the bar, slid a bill across the table, and muttered something to the bartender. Then he made his way to Reid’s table. He stood behind the empty chair for a long moment, a thin smirk on his lips.

He was young, thirty at best, with close-cropped hair and a five o’clock shadow. He was quite lanky and his face was gaunt, making his sharp cheekbones and jutting chin look almost caricature-ish. Most disarming was the black horn-rimmed glasses he wore, looking for all the world as if Buddy Holly had grown up in the eighties and discovered cocaine.

He was right-handed, Reid could tell; he held his left elbow close to his body, which likely meant he had a pistol hanging from a shoulder holster in his armpit so he could draw with his right, if need be. His left arm pinned his black suede jacket closed to hide the gun.

“ Mogu sjediti? ” the man asked finally.

Mogu…? Reid didn’t immediately understand the way he had with Arabic and French. It wasn’t Russian, but it was close enough for him to derive the meaning from context. The man was asking if he could sit down.

Reid gestured to the empty chair across from him, and the man sat, keeping his left elbow tucked all the while.

As soon as he was seated, the waitress brought a glass of dark amber beer and set it before him. “ Merci ,” he said. He grinned at Reid. “Your Serbian is not so good?”

Reid shook his head. “No.” Serbian? He had assumed the man he would be meeting would be Arabic, like his captors and the interrogator.

“In English, then? Ou francais? ”

“Dealer’s choice.” Reid was surprised at how calm and even his voice sounded. His heart was nearly bursting out of his chest from fear and… and if he was being honest, at least a shred of anxious excitement.