Target Zero. Джек Марс
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edge of the bedside table, beyond her grasp. “Someone will come and free you after I’ve gone,” he told her. “But first I have questions. I need you to be honest, because if you’re not, I will come back and kill you. Do you understand?”
She nodded frantically, tears rolling over her cheeks.
“How many other nurses are on this unit tonight?”
“P-please don’t hurt them,” she stammered.
“Elena. How many other nurses are on this unit tonight?” he repeated.
“T-two…” She sniffled. “Thomas and Mia. But Tom is at break. He would be downstairs.”
“Okay.” The name tag clipped to his chest was about the size of a credit card. It had a small photo of Elena, and on the reverse, a black stripe running its length. “Is this a locked unit at night? And your badge, it is the key?”
She nodded and sniffled again.
“Good.” He tucked the second gun into the waistband of the scrub pants and knelt by Elias’s body. Then he tugged off both shoes and wiggled his feet into them. They were somewhat tight, but close enough to make an escape. “One last question. Do you know what Francis drives? The night guard?” He gestured to the dead man in the white uniform.
“I-I’m not sure. A… a truck, I think.”
Rais dug into Francis’s pockets and came out with a set of keys. There was an electronic fob; that would help locate the vehicle. “Thank you for your honesty,” he told her. Then he tore a strip from the edge of the bed sheet and stuffed it in her mouth.
The corridor was empty and brightly lit. Rais held the Sig in his grip but kept it obscured behind his back as he crept down the hall. It opened onto a wider floor with a U-shaped nurses’ station and, beyond that, the exit to the unit. A woman in round spectacles with a brunette bob typed away on a computer, her back to him.
“Turn around, please,” he told her.
The startled woman spun to find their patient/prisoner in scrubs, one arm bloodied, pointing a gun at her. She lost her breath and her eyes bulged.
“You must be Mia,” Rais said. The woman was likely around forty, matronly, with dark circles under her wide eyes. “Hands up.”
She did so.
“What happened to Francis?” she asked quietly.
“Francis is dead,” Rais told her dispassionately. “If you wish to join him, do something brash. If you want to live, listen carefully. I am going to leave through that door. Once it closes behind me, you are going to slowly count to thirty. Then you are going to go to my room. Elena is alive but she needs your assistance. After that, you may do whatever it is you’re trained to do in a situation like this. Do you understand?”
The nurse nodded once tightly.
“Do I have your word you will follow those instructions? I prefer not to kill women when I can avoid it.”
She nodded again, slower.
“Good.” He circled around the station, tugging the badge from the scrub top as he did, and swiped it through the card slot to the right of the door. A small light turned from red to green and the lock clicked. Rais pushed the door open, shot one more look at Mia, who had not moved, and then watched the door close behind him.
And then he ran.
He hurried down the hall, tucking the Sig into his pants as he did. He took the stairs down to the first floor two at a time, and burst out a side door and into the Swiss night. Cool air washed over him like a cleansing shower, and he took a moment to breathe freely.
His legs wavered and threatened to give out again. The adrenaline of his escape was wearing off rapidly, and his muscles were still quite weak. He tugged Francis’s key fob from the scrub pocket and pressed the red panic button. The alarm on an SUV screeched, the headlights flashing. He quickly turned it off and hurried over to it.
They would be looking for this car, he knew, but he wouldn’t be in it for long. He would soon have to ditch it, find new clothes, and come morning he would head toward the Hauptpost, where he had everything he would need to escape Switzerland under a fake identity.
And as soon as he was able, he would find and kill Kent Steele.
CHAPTER FOUR
Reid was barely out of the driveway on his way to meet with Maria before he called Thompson to ask him to keep watch on the Lawson home. “I decided to give the girls a little independence tonight,” he explained. “I won’t be gone too long. But even so, keep an eye out and an ear to the ground?”
“Sure thing,” the old man agreed.
“And, uh, if there’s any cause for alarm, of course, head right over.”
“I will, Reid.”
“You know, if you can’t see them or something, you can knock on the door, or call the house phone…”
Thompson chuckled. “Don’t worry, I got it. And so do they. They’re teenagers. They need some space now and then. Enjoy your date.”
With Thompson’s watchful eye and Maya’s determination to prove herself responsible, Reid thought he could rest easy knowing the girls would be safe. Of course, part of him knew that was just another example of his mental gymnastics. He’d be thinking about it the whole night.
He had to bring the GPS map up on his phone to find the place. He wasn’t yet familiar with Alexandria or the area, though Maria was, thanks to its proximity to Langley and CIA headquarters. Even so, she had chosen a place that she had never been to before either, likely as a way to level the playing field, so to speak.
On the drive over, he missed two turns despite the GPS voice telling him which way to go and when. He was thinking of the strange flashback he’d now had twice—first when Maya asked if Kate knew about him, and again when he smelled the cologne that his late wife had loved. It was gnawing at the back of his mind, so much so that even when he tried to pay attention to the directions he quickly grew distracted again.
The reason it was so bizarre was that every other memory of Kate was so vivid in his mind. Unlike Kent Steele, she had never left him; he remembered meeting her. He remembered dating. He remembered vacations and buying their first home. He remembered their wedding and the births of their children. He even remembered their arguments—at least he thought he did.
The very notion of losing any part of Kate shook him. The memory suppressor had already proved to have some side effects, like the occasional headache spurned by a stubborn memory—it was an experimental procedure, and the method of removal was far from surgical.
What if more than just my past as Agent Zero had been taken from me?
He didn’t like the thought at all. It was a slippery slope; before long he was considering the possibility that he might have lost memories of times with his girls as well. And even worse was that there was no way for him to know the answer to that without restoring his full memory.
It was all too much, and he felt a fresh headache coming on. He switched on the radio and turned it up in an attempt to distract himself.
The sun was setting by the time he pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, a gastropub called The Cellar Door. He was a few minutes late. He quickly got out of the car and trotted around to the front of the building.
Then he stopped in his tracks.
Maria Johansson was third-generation Swedish-American, and her CIA cover was that of a certified public accountant from Baltimore—though Reid thought it should have been as a cover model, or maybe a centerfold. She was an inch or two shy of his five-eleven height, with long, straight blonde hair that cascaded around her shoulders effortlessly. Her eyes were slate-gray, yet somehow intense. She stood outside in the fifty-five-degree weather in a simple navy-blue dress with a plunging V neck and a white shawl over her shoulders.
She spotted him as he approached and a smile grew on her lips. “Hey. Long time no see.”
“I…