Jack Mars - Target Zero

“How are you feeling tonight, sir?” the overnight nurse asked politely as she entered his hospital room. Her name was Elena, he knew, and she was Swiss, though she spoke to him in accented English. She was petite and young, most would say pretty, even, and quite cheerful.

Rais said nothing in response. He never did. He merely stared as she set a Styrofoam cup on his bedside table and set about carefully inspecting his wounds. He knew that her cheerfulness was overcompensation for her fear. He knew that she did not like being in the room with him, despite the pair of armed guards behind her, watching his every move. She did not like treating him, or even speaking to him.

No one did.

The nurse, Elena, inspected his wounds cautiously. He could tell she was nervous being that close to him. They knew what he had done; that he had killed in the name of Amun.

They would be a lot more afraid if they knew how many , he thought wryly.

“You’re healing nicely,” she told him. “Faster than expected.” She told him that every night, which he took as code to mean “hopefully you’ll leave here soon.”

That was not good news for Rais, because when he was finally well enough to leave he would likely be sent to a dank, horrible hole in the ground, some CIA black site in the desert, to sustain more wounds while they tortured him for information.

As Amun, we endure . That had been his mantra for more than a decade of his life, but that was no longer the case. Amun was no more, as far as Rais knew; its plot in Davos had failed, its leaders had been either detained or killed, and every law enforcement agency in the world knew about the brand, the glyph of Amun that its members burned into their skin. Rais was not allowed to watch television, but he got his news from his armed police guards, who talked often (and at great length, often to Rais’s annoyance).

He himself had sliced the brand from his skin before being taken to the hospital in Sion, but it ended up being for naught; they knew who he was and at least some of what he had done. Even so, the jagged, mottled pink scar where the brand had once been on his arm was a daily reminder that Amun was no more, and so it only seemed fitting that his mantra change.

I endure.

Elena took the Styrofoam cup, filled with ice water and a straw. “Would you like something to drink?”

Rais said nothing, but he leaned forward slightly and parted his lips. She guided the straw toward him cautiously, her arms fully extended and locked at the elbows, her body reclined back on an angle. She was afraid; four days earlier Rais had tried to bite Dr. Gerber. His teeth had scraped the doctor’s neck, not even broken the skin, but still it warranted a crack across the jaw from one of his guards.

Rais did not try anything this time. He took long, slow sips through the straw, enjoying the girl’s fear and the tight anxiousness of the two police officers who watched behind her. When he’d had his fill, he leaned back again. She audibly sighed with relief.

I endure.

He had endured quite a bit in the past four weeks. He had endured a nephrectomy to remove his punctured kidney. He had endured a second surgery to extract a portion of his lacerated liver. He had endured a third procedure to ensure that none of his other vital organs had been damaged. He had endured several days in the ICU before being moved to a medical-surgical unit, but he never left the bed to which he was shackled by both wrists. The nurses turned him and changed his bedpan and kept him as comfortable as they were able, but he was never allowed to rise, to stand, to move around of his own volition.

The seven stab wounds in his back and one in his chest had been sutured and, as the night nurse Elena continuously reminded him, were healing well. Still, there was little the doctors could do about the nerve damage. Sometimes his entire back would go numb, up to his shoulders and occasionally even down his biceps. He would feel nothing, as if those parts of his body belonged to another.

Other times he would wake from a solid sleep with a scream in his throat as searing pain ripped through him like an angry lightning storm. It never lasted long, but it was acute, intense, and came irregularly. The doctors called them “stingers,” a side effect sometimes seen in those with nerve damage as extensive as his. They assured him that these stingers often faded and stopped entirely, but they could not say when that would happen. Instead they told him he was lucky there was no damage to his spinal cord. They told him he was lucky to have survived his wounds at all.

Yes, lucky , he thought bitterly. Lucky that he was recovering only to be thrust into the waiting arms of a CIA black site. Lucky to have had everything he worked for torn away in the course of a single day. Lucky to have been bested not once, but twice by Kent Steele, a man whom he hated, loathed, with every possible fiber of his being.

I endure.

Before leaving his room, Elena thanked the two officers in German and promised to bring them coffee when she returned later. Once she was gone, they resumed their post just outside his door, which was always open, and resumed their conversation, something about a recent football match. Rais was fairly well-versed in German, but the particulars of the Swiss-German dialect and the speed with which they spoke eluded him at times. The day-shift officers often conversed in English, which was how he got much of his news about the goings-on outside his hospital room.

Both men were members of the Swiss Federal Office of Police, which mandated that he have two guards on his room at all times, twenty-four hours a day. They rotated in eight-hour shifts, with an entirely different set of guards on Fridays and the weekend. There were always two, always; if one officer had to use the restroom or get something to eat, they would first have to call down to have one of the hospital’s security guards sent to them, and then wait for their arrival. Most patients in his condition and this far along in their recovery would likely have been transferred to a lower-level trauma center, but Rais had remained in the hospital. It was a more secure facility, with its locked units and armed guards.

There were always two. Always. And Rais had determined that it could work to his advantage.

He had had a lot of time to plan his escape, especially in the last several days, when his medication levels were decreased and he could think lucidly. He ran through several scenarios in his head, over and over. He memorized schedules and eavesdropped on conversations. It would not be long before they discharged him—a matter of days, at most.

He had to act, and he decided he would do it tonight.

His guards had grown complacent over the weeks posted outside his door. They called him “terrorist,” and they knew he was a killer, but besides the minor incident with Dr. Gerber a few days prior, Rais had done nothing but lie there silently, mostly unmoving, and allow the staff to perform their duties. If no one was in the room with him, the guards barely paid any attention other than to occasionally glance in on him.

He had not tried to bite the doctor out of spite or malice, but out of necessity. Gerber had been leaning over him, inspecting the wound on his arm where he had sliced off the brand of Amun—and the pocket of the doctor’s white lab coat had brushed the fingers of Rais’s shackled hand. He lunged, snapping his jaws, and the doctor leapt back in fright as teeth grazed his neck.

And a fountain pen had remained firmly clutched in Rais’s fist.

One of the officers on duty had given him a solid smack on the face for it, and in the moment the blow landed, Rais slid the pen under his sheets, stowing it beneath his left thigh. There it had stayed for three days, obscured under the sheets, until just the night before. He had taken it out while the guards chatted in the hall. With one hand, unable to see what he was doing, he separated the two halves of the pen and removed the cartridge, working slowly and steadily so the ink did not spill. The pen was a classic-style gold-tipped nib pen that came to a dangerous point. He slipped that half back under the sheet. The back half had a gold pocket clip, which he carefully pried back and away with his thumb until it snapped off.