Brad Meltzer - The Zero Game

“What’re you doing?” Viv asks.

I can barely look her in the eye. “I’m sorry, Viv…”

“What? Now you’re just giving up?”

“I said, I’m sorry.”

“That’s not good enough! You think that takes the guilt off your plate? You got me into this, Harris — you and your dumb frat-boy, I-own-the-world-so-let’s-play-with-it egoism! You’re the reason I’m running for my life, and wearing the same underwear for three days, and crying myself to sleep every night wondering if this psychopath is gonna be standing over me when I open my eyes in the morning! I’m sorry your mentor tricked you, and that your Capitol Hill existence is all you have, but I’ve got an entire life in front of me, and I want it back! Now! So get your rear end moving, and let’s get out of here. We need to figure out what the hell we saw in that underground lab, and right now we’ve got an appointment with a scientist that you’re making me late for!”

Stunned by the outburst, I can barely move.

“You’ve really been crying yourself to sleep?” I finally ask.

Viv pummels me with a dark stare that gives me the answer. Her brown eyes glow through the smoke. “No.”

“Viv, you know I’d never-”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“But I-”

“You did it, Harris. You did it, and it’s done. Now, you gonna make it right or not?”

Outside the building, someone barks safety instructions through a bullhorn. The police are here. If I want to give up, this is the place to do it.

Viv heads up the hallway. I stay put.

“Good-bye, Harris,” she calls out. The words sting as she says them. When I first asked her for help, I promised her she wouldn’t get hurt. Just like I promised Matthew that the game was harmless fun. And promised Pasternak, when I first met him, that I’d be the most honest person he’d ever hire. All those words… when I originally said them… I meant every syllable — but no question, those words were always for me. Myself. I, I, I. It’s the easiest place to get lost on Capitol Hill — right inside your own self-worth. But as I watch Viv disappear in the smoke, it’s time to look away from the mirror and finally refocus.

“Hold on,” I call out, chasing after her and diving into the smoke. “That’s not the best way.”

Stopping midstep, she doesn’t smile or make it easy. And she shouldn’t.

It takes a seventeen-year-old girl to treat me like an adult.

“How’s it look?” Lowell asked as his assistant stepped into his fourth-floor office in the main Justice building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Let me put it like this,” William began, brushing his messy brown hair from his chubby, boyish face. “There’s no Santa Claus, no Easter bunny, no cheerleader who liked you in high school, your 401K is toilet paper, you didn’t marry the prom queen, your daughter just got knocked up by a real scumbag, and y’know that beautiful view you’ve got of the Washington Monument?” William asked, pointing over Lowell’s shoulder at the nearby window. “We’re gonna paint it black and replace it with some modern art.”

“Did you say modern art?”

“No joke,” William said. “And that’s the good news.”

“It’s really that bad?” Lowell asked, motioning to the red file folder in his assistant’s hands. Outside Lowell’s office and across the adjacent conference room, two receptionists answered the phones and put together his schedule. William, on the other hand, sat right outside Lowell’s door. By title, he was Lowell’s “confidential assistant,” which meant he had security clearance to deal with the most important professional issues — and, after three years with Lowell, the personal ones as well.

“On a scale of one to ten, it’s Watergate,” William said.

Lowell forced a laugh. He was trying to keep it light, but the red folder already told him this was only getting worse. Red meant FBI.

“The fingerprints belong to Robert Franklin of Hoboken, New Jersey,” William began, reading from the folder.

Lowell made a face, wondering if the name Janos was fake. “So he’s got a record?” he asked.

“Nosiree.”

“Then how’d they have his fingerprints?”

“They got ’em internally.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Their staffing unit. Personnel,” William explained. “Apparently, this guy applied for a job a few years back.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nosiree. He applied.”

“At the FBI?”

“At the FBI,” William confirmed.

“So why didn’t they hire him?”

“They’re not saying. That one’s too high up for me. But when I begged for a hint, my buddy over there said they thought the application was sour.”

“They thought he was trying to infiltrate? On his own, or as a hired gun?”

“Does it matter?”

“We should run him outside the system — see if he-”

“Whattya think I’ve been doing for the last hour?”

Lowell forced another grin, gripping the armrests of his leather chair and fighting to keep himself from standing. They’d worked together long enough that William knew what the grip meant. “Just tell me what you found,” Lowell insisted.

“I ran it through a few of our foreign connections… and according to their system, the prints belong to someone named Martin Janos, a.k.a. Janos Szasz, a.k.a…”

“Robert Franklin,” Lowell said.

“And Bingo was his name-o. One and the same.”

“So why’d they have his prints over there?”

“Oh, boss-man, that’s the cherry on top. He used to work at Five.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Martin Janos — or whatever his real name is — he used to be MI-5. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.”

Lowell closed his eyes, trying to remember Janos’s voice. If he was British, the accent was long gone. Or well hidden.

“When he joined, he was barely a kid — just out of college,” William added. “Apparently, he had a sister who was killed in a car bomb. That got him sufficiently riled up. They brought him in as a straight recruit.”

“So no military background?”

“If there is, they’re not saying.”

“He couldn’t have been too high on the totem pole.”

“Just an analyst in the Forward Planning Directorate. Sounds to me like he was staring at a computer, stapling lots of papers together. Whatever it was, he spent two years there, then was fired.”

“Any reason why?”

“Insubordination, surprise surprise. They put him on a job; he refused to do it. When one of his superiors got in his face about it, the argument got a little heated, at which point young Janos picked up a nearby stapler and started beating him with it.”

“Wound a little tight, isn’t he?”

“The smartest ones always are,” William said. “Though it sounds to me like he was a powder keg to begin with. Once he leaves, he goes out on his own, finds some work for the highest bidder…”

“Now he’s back in business,” Lowell agrees.

“Certainly a possibility,” William said as his voice trailed off.

“What?” Lowell asked.

“Nothing — it’s just… after Her Majesty’s Service, Janos is gone for almost five years, reappears one day over here, applies to the FBI under a new ID, gets rejected for trying to infiltrate, then steps back into the abyss, never to be heard from again — that is, until a few days ago, when he apparently uses all his hard-trained skills to… uh… to smash the side window on your car.”

Letting the silence take hold, William stared hard at his boss. Lowell stared right back. The phone on his desk started to ring. Lowell didn’t pick it up. And the longer he studied his assistant, the more he realized this wasn’t an argument. It was an offer.