Jack Mars - Target Zero

Her fingers lingered on his. It felt good. No, it was more than that—it felt right. He chuckled nervously, but his grin faded to a perplexed frown as a bizarre notion struck him; that Maria still called him Kent.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing. I was just thinking… I don’t even know if Maria Johansson is your real name.”

Maria shrugged coyly. “It might be.”

“That’s not fair,” he protested. “You know mine.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t my real name.” She was enjoying this, toying with him. “You can always call me Agent Marigold, if you prefer.”

He laughed. Marigold was her code name, to his Zero. It was almost a silly thing to him, to use code names when they knew each other personally—but then again, the name Zero did seem to strike fear into many he’d encountered.

“What was Reidigger’s code name?” Reid asked quietly. It almost stung him to ask. Alan Reidigger had been Kent Steele’s best friend— no , Reid thought, he was my best friend —a man of seemingly unyielding loyalty. The only problem was that Reid barely remembered anything about him. All memories of Reidigger had gone with the memory implant, which Alan had helped coordinate.

“You don’t remember?” Maria smiled pleasantly at the thought. “Alan gave you the name Zero, did you know that? And you gave him his. God, I haven’t thought about that night in years. We were in Abu Dhabi, I think, just coming off an op, drunk at some hoity-toity hotel bar. He called you ‘Ground Zero’—like the point of a bomb’s detonation, because you tended to leave a mess behind you. That shortened up to just Zero, and it stuck. And you called him—”

A phone rang, interrupting her story. Reid instinctively glanced at his own cell, lying on the table, expecting to see the house number or Maya’s cell displayed on the screen.

“Relax,” she said, “it’s me. I’ll just ignore it…” She looked at her phone and her brow knitted perplexedly. “Actually, that’s work. Just a sec.” She answered. “Yes? Mm-hmm.” Her somber gaze lifted and met Reid’s. She held it as her frown grew deeper. Whatever was being said on the other end of the line was clearly not good news. “I understand. Okay. Thank you.” She hung up.

“You look troubled,” he noted. “I know, I know, you can’t talk about work stuff—”

“He escaped,” she murmured. “The assassin from Sion, the one in the hospital? Kent, he got out, less than an hour ago.”

“Rais?” Reid said in astonishment. Cold sweat immediately broke out on his brow. “How?”

“I don’t have details,” she said hastily as she stuffed her cell phone back into her clutch. “I’m so sorry, Kent, but I have to go.”

“Yeah,” he murmured. “I understand.” Truthfully, he felt a hundred miles away from their cozy table in the small restaurant. The assassin that Reid had left for dead—not once, but twice—was still alive, and now at large.

Maria rose and, before leaving, leaned over and pressed her lips to his. “We’ll do this again soon, I promise. But right now, duty calls.”

“Of course,” he said. “Go and find him. And Maria? Be careful. He’s dangerous.”

“So am I.” She winked, and then hurried out of the restaurant.

Reid sat there alone for a long moment. When the waitress came over, he didn’t even hear her words; he just waved vaguely to indicate that he was fine. But he was far from fine. He hadn’t even felt the nostalgic electric tingle when Maria kissed him. All he could feel was a knot of dread forming in his stomach.

The man who believed it was his destiny to kill Kent Steele had escaped.

Adrian Cheval was still awake despite the late hour. He sat upon a stool in the kitchen, staring blurry-eyed and unblinking at the laptop computer screen in front of him, his fingers typing away frenetically.

He paused long enough to hear Claudette padding softly down the carpeted stairs from the loft in her bare feet. Their flat in Marseille was small but cozy, an end unit on a quiet street a short five-minute walk from the sea.

A moment later her slight frame and fiery hair appeared in his periphery. She put her hands on his shoulders, sliding them up and around, down his chest, her head coming to rest upon his upper back. “ Mon chéri ,” she purred. “My love. I cannot sleep.”

“Neither can I,” he replied softly in French. “There is too much to be done.”

She bit him gently on the earlobe. “Tell me.”

Adrian pointed at his screen, displayed on which was the cyclical double-stranded RNA structure of variola major —the virus known to most as smallpox. “This strain from Siberia is… it is incredible. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. By my calculations, the virulence of it would be staggering. I am convinced that the only thing that might have stopped it from eradicating early humanity thousands of years ago was the glacial period.”

“A new Deluge.” Claudette moaned a soft sigh in his ear. “How long until it is ready?”

“I must mutate the strain, while still maintaining the stability and virility,” he explained. “No simple task, but a necessary one. The WHO obtained samples of this same virus five months ago; there is no doubt that a vaccine is being developed, if one hasn’t been already. Our strain must be unique enough that their vaccines will be ineffective.” The process was known as lethal mutagenesis, manipulating the RNA of the samples he had acquired in Siberia to increase virulence and reduce the incubation period. At his calculations, Adrian suspected the mortality rate of the mutated variola major virus could reach as high as seventy-eight percent—nearly three times that of the naturally occurring smallpox that had been eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980.

Upon returning from Siberia, Adrian had first visited Stockholm and used the deceased student Renault’s ID to access their facilities, where he ensured that the samples were inactive while he worked. But he could not linger under someone else’s identity, so he stole the necessary equipment and returned to Marseille. He set up his laboratory in the unused basement of a tailor’s shop three blocks from their flat; the kindly old tailor believed that Adrian was a geneticist, researching human DNA and nothing more, and Adrian kept the door secured with a padlock when he was not present.

“Imam Khalil will be pleased,” Claudette breathed in his ear.

“Yes,” Adrian agreed quietly. “He will be pleased.”

Most women would likely not be terribly keen to find their significant other working with a substance as volatile as a highly virulent strain of smallpox—but Claudette was not most women. She was petite, standing only five-foot-four to Adrian’s six-foot figure. Her hair was a fiery red and her eyes as deep green as the densest jungle, suggesting a certain irascibility.

They had met only the year prior, when Adrian was at his lowest. He had just been expelled from Stockholm University for attempting to obtain samples of a rare enterovirus; the same virus that had taken his mother’s life only weeks earlier. At the time, Adrian had been determined to develop a cure—obsessed, even—so that no one else would suffer as she did. But he was discovered by university faculty and summarily dismissed.

Claudette found him in an alley, lying in a puddle of his own desolation and vomit, half-unconscious from drink. She took him home, cleaned him up, and fed him water. The next morning Adrian had awoken to find a beautiful woman sitting at his bedside, smiling upon him as she said, “I know exactly what you need.”