Recall Zero. Джек Марс
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in the Plaza hotel, with Alan out getting pizza and a sitcom muted on the TV mere feet from them, Zero told his daughters that their mother, Kate Lawson, had not died of an ischemic stroke as had been reported.
She had been poisoned.
The CIA had called a hit on her.
Because of him. Agent Zero. His actions.
And the person who carried out the sentence…
“He didn’t know,” Zero told his daughters. He stared at the bedspread, the carpet, anything other than their faces. “He didn’t know who she was. He had been lied to. He didn’t know until later. Until after.” He was rambling. Making excuses for the man who had killed his wife, the mother of his children. The man Zero had sent away instead of killing him outright.
“Who?” Maya’s voice came out hoarse, a harsh whisper, more of a sound than a word.
Agent John Watson. A man who had saved his daughters’ lives more than once. A man they had come to know, to trust, to like.
The silence in the next few moments was crushing, like an invisible hand squeezing his heart. The hotel room’s air conditioning unit rattled to life suddenly, loud as a jet engine in the otherwise vacuum.
“How long have you known?” Maya’s tone was direct, almost demanding.
Be honest. That was the stance he wanted with his girls. Honesty. No matter how bad it hurt. This admission was the last barricade between them. He knew it was time to tear it down.
He already knew it would be what broke them.
“I’ve known for a little while that it wasn’t an accident,” he told her. “I needed to know who. And now I do.”
He dared to look up then, to look at their faces. Sara cried silently, tears streaming down both cheeks, not making a sound. Maya stared at her own hands, expressionless.
He reached for her. It was the only thing that made sense in the moment. To connect, to hold a hand.
He remembered exactly how it had actually happened. As his fingers closed around hers, she pulled away violently. She scrambled backward, leapt off the bed. Sara jumped, startled, as Maya told him she hated him. Called him every name in the book. And he sat there, and he took it, because it was what he deserved.
But not this time. As his fingers closed around hers, Maya’s hand disintegrated beneath his in a wisp of fog.
“No…”
He clambered for her, a shoulder or an arm, but she vanished under his touch like a column of ash in a breeze. He turned quickly and reached for Sara, but she only shook her head ruefully as she too evaporated before his eyes.
And then he was alone.
“Sara!”
Zero woke with a start and immediately groaned. A headache roared through his forehead. It was a dream—a nightmare. One he’d had a thousand times before.
But it had happened that way, or nearly so.
Zero had saved the day. Thwarted a presidential assassination attempt. Stopped a war before it began. Uncovered a conspiracy. And then he and his girls had gone to the Plaza; none of them wanted to go home to their two-story house in Alexandria, Virginia. Too much had happened there. Too much death.
It was there that he’d told them. They deserved to know the truth.
And then they left him.
That was… how long ago now? Nearly eighteen months, by his best recollection. A year and a half ago. Still the dream plagued him most nights. Sometimes the girls evaporated before his eyes. Sometimes they screamed at him, hurling curses far worse than had actually happened. Other times they silently left, and when he ran out into the hallway after them they had already vanished.
Though the ending varied, the real-life ramifications were the same. He woke from the nightmare with a headache and the grim, despairing reminder that they really were gone.
Zero stretched and rose from the sofa. He couldn’t remember falling asleep in the first place, but it wasn’t surprising. He didn’t sleep well at night, and not just because of the nightmare about his daughters. A year and a half ago he had recovered his memories, his complete memories as Agent Zero, and with them came harrowing nightmares. Recollections would shoulder their way into his subconscious while he slept, or tried to. Heinous scenes of torture. Bombs dropped on buildings. The impact of hollow-point bullets on a human skull.
Worse still was that he didn’t know if they were real or not. Dr. Guyer, the brilliant Swiss neurologist who had helped him recover the memories, warned that some things might not be real, but a product of his limbic system manifesting fantasies, suspicions, and nightmares as reality.
His own reality felt barely just so.
Zero trudged into the kitchen for a glass of water, barefoot and groggy, when the doorbell rang. He jumped a little at the sudden break in silence, every muscle tightening instinctively. He was still pretty jumpy, even after all this time. Then he glanced at the digital clock on the stove. It was almost four thirty. There was only one person it would be.
He answered the door and forced a smile for his old friend. “Right on time.”
Alan Reidigger grinned as he held up a six-pack, a thumb and forefinger looped in the plastic rings. “For your weekly therapy session.”
Zero snorted and stepped aside. “Come on, we’ll go out back.”
He led the way through the small house and out a sliding glass door to a patio. The mid-October air was not yet cold, but crisp enough to remind him that he was barefoot. They took a seat in a couple of deck chairs as Alan liberated two cans and passed one to Zero.
He frowned at the label. “What’s this?”
“Dunno. The guy at the liquor store took one look at my beard and flannel shirt and said I’d like it.” Alan chuckled, popped the tab, and took a long sip. He winced. “That’s… different. Or maybe I’m just getting old.” He turned somberly to Zero. “So. How are you?”
How are you. It suddenly seemed like such a strange question. If anyone other than Alan had asked it, he would have recognized it as a formality and answered with a simple and hasty “Fine, how about you?” But he knew that Alan genuinely wanted to know.
Yet he didn’t know how to answer. So much had changed in eighteen months; not just in Zero’s personal life, but on a macro scale. The US had averted a war with Iran and its neighbors, but tensions remained high. The American government had seemingly recovered from the infiltration of conspirators and Russian influence, but only by cleaning house. President Eli Pierson had remained in office for another seven months after the attempt on his life, but was ousted in the next election by the Democratic candidate. It was an easy victory after Pierson’s cabinet was revealed to have been a veritable nest of snakes.
But Zero hardly cared. He wasn’t involved in any of that anymore. He didn’t even have an opinion about the new president. He barely knew what was going on in the world; he avoided the news whenever possible. He was just a citizen now. Whatever was unfolding in the shadows did so without his influence.
“I’m fine.”
He was stagnating.
“Really. I’m good.”
Alan took another sip, obviously dubious but not mentioning it. “And Maria?”
A thin smile crossed Zero’s lips. “She’s doing well.” And it was true. She was taking to her new position swimmingly. In the wake of the conspiracy coming to light, the CIA had been completely restructured; David Barren, high-ranking member of the National Security Council and Maria’s father, was named interim director of the agency and oversaw vetting of each and every person under its banner until a new director was named, a former NSA director named Edward Shaw.
Maria Johansson had been appointed as deputy director of Special Activities Division—a job that had been formerly held by the now-deceased Shawn Cartwright, Zero’s old boss. She in turn named