Kitobni o'qish: «Assassin Zero»

Jack Mars

Jack Mars is the USA Today bestselling author of the LUKE STONE thriller series, which includes seven books. He is also the author of the new FORGING OF LUKE STONE prequel series, comprising three books (and counting); and of the AGENT ZERO spy thriller series, comprising seven books (and counting).

Jack loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.Jackmarsauthor.com to join the email list, receive a free book, receive free giveaways, connect on Facebook and Twitter, and stay in touch!

Copyright © 2019 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Jacket image Copyright GlebSStock, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

BOOKS BY JACK MARS

LUKE STONE THRILLER SERIES

ANY MEANS NECESSARY (Book #1)

OATH OF OFFICE (Book #2)

SITUATION ROOM (Book #3)

OPPOSE ANY FOE (Book #4)

PRESIDENT ELECT (Book #5)

OUR SACRED HONOR (Book #6)

HOUSE DIVIDED (Book #7)

FORGING OF LUKE STONE PREQUEL SERIES

PRIMARY TARGET (Book #1)

PRIMARY COMMAND (Book #2)

PRIMARY THREAT (Book #3)

PRIMARY GLORY (Book #4)

AN AGENT ZERO SPY THRILLER SERIES

AGENT ZERO (Book #1)

TARGET ZERO (Book #2)

HUNTING ZERO (Book #3)

TRAPPING ZERO (Book #4)

FILE ZERO (Book #5)

RECALL ZERO (Book #6)

ASSASSIN ZERO (Book #7)

DECOY ZERO (Book #8)

PROLOGUE

I can’t locate Sara.

That was what Todd Strickland had told him over the phone. Zero had barely been home from Belgium for a full day, after exposing the Russian president as the puppeteer behind an attempt to annex Ukraine with American interference, when he got the news. Strickland had been keeping tabs on Sara ever since she had become an emancipated minor and moved to Florida, but now she had seemingly vanished. Her cell service was cut off and location inactive. Even her roommates at the co-op where she rented a room claimed they hadn’t seen her in two days.

Text me her home address, Zero had ordered him. I’m going to the airport.

Just shy of three hours later he stood outside the ramshackle house in Jacksonville, Florida, the place Sara had been calling home for a little more than a year. He marched up the cracked concrete steps and pounded on the front door with the flat of a fist, over and over again without pausing, until someone finally answered.

“Dude,” groaned a lanky blond teenager with tattoos up and down his arms. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Sara Lawson,” Zero demanded. “You know where she might be?”

The kid’s eyebrows knit quizzically, but his mouth curled in a smirk. “Why? You another Fed looking for her?”

Fed? A chill ran up Zero’s spine. If anyone who claimed to be FBI had come around, it could mean she’s been abducted.

“I’m her father.” He stepped forward, shoving the kid back with his shoulder as he pushed into the house.

“Yo, you can’t just barge in here!” the kid tried to protest. “Man, I will call the cops—”

Zero spun on him. “It’s Tommy, right?”

The blond kid’s eyes widened apprehensively, though he didn’t answer.

“I’ve heard about you,” Zero told him, keeping his voice low. Strickland had given him a full briefing while he was en route. “I know all about you. You’re not going to call the cops. You’re not going to call your lawyer dad. You’re going to sit there, on the couch, and shut your damn mouth. You hear me?”

The kid opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something—

“I said shut it,” Zero snapped.

The lanky boy retreated to the couch like a kicked dog, taking a seat beside a young girl who couldn’t have been eighteen if she was a day.

“Are you Camilla?”

The girl shook her head frantically. “I’m Jo.”

“I’m Camilla.” A young Latina girl came down the stairs, dark-haired and wearing entirely too much makeup. “I’m Sara’s roomie.” She looked Zero up and down. “You’re really her dad?” she asked dubiously.

“Yeah.”

“Then… what do you do?”

“What?”

“For work. Sara told us what you do.”

“I don’t have time for this,” he muttered at the ceiling. “I’m an accountant,” he told the girl.

Camilla shook her head. “Wrong answer.”

Zero scoffed. Leave it to Sara to tell her friends the truth about me. “What do you want me to say? That I’m a spy with the CIA?”

Camilla blinked at him. “Well… yeah.”

“For real?” said the blond kid on the sofa.

Zero held up both hands in frustration. “Please. Just tell me where you last saw Sara.”

Camilla looked at her roommates, and then the floor. “All right,” she said quietly. “A few days ago, she was looking to score, and I gave her…”

“Score?” Zero asked.

“Drugs, man. Keep up,” said the blond kid.

“She needed something to even her out,” Camilla continued. “I gave her the address of my guy. She went there. She came back. Next morning she left again. I thought she was going to work, but she never came home. Her phone’s off. I swear that’s all I know.”

Zero almost saw red at these irresponsible kids, barely adults, sending a teenager alone to a drug dealer’s house. But he swallowed his anger for her. He needed to find her.

She needs you.

“That’s not all you know,” he said to Camilla. “I want the name and address of your guy.”

*

Twenty minutes later Zero stood outside a Jacksonville rowhouse with grimy siding and a broken washing machine on the front porch. According to Camilla, this was the dealer’s house, some guy named Ike.

Zero didn’t have a gun on him. He’d been in such a rush to get to the airport that he’d run out the door with nothing but his car keys and his phone. But now he wished he’d brought one.

How do I play this? Burst in, kick ass, demand answers? Or knock and have a chat?

He decided the latter would be a better way to start—and he’d see where things took him from there.

On the third brisk knock, a male voice called out from inside the house. “Hang the fuck on, I’m coming!” The guy that appeared at the door was taller than Zero, more muscular than Zero, and far more tattooed than Zero (who had none). He wore a white tank top with what looked like a coffee stain on it, and jeans that were too big for him, hanging low on his hips.

“Are you Ike?”

The dealer looked him up and down. “You a cop?”

“No. I’m looking for my daughter. Sara. She’s sixteen, blonde, about this tall…”

“Never seen your kid, man.” Ike shook his head. He had a frown on his face.

But Zero noticed the tiny, almost imperceptible twitch of his eye. A flicker on his lips as he willed them not to scowl. Anger. He showed a brief flash of anger at Sara’s name.

“Okay. Sorry to bother you,” Zero said.

“Yeah,” the guy said flatly. He started to close the door.

As soon as Ike was partially turned away, Zero raised a foot and delivered a solid kick just below the doorknob. It flew open, crashing into the dealer and sending him sprawling on his belly to the brown carpet.

Zero was on him in a second, a forearm against his windpipe. “You know her,” he growled. “I saw it in your eyes. Tell me where she went, or I’ll—”

He heard a snarl, and then a blur of black and brown as a thick-necked Rottweiler leapt at him. He barely had time to react other than to take the force of the dog and roll with it. Teeth gnashed and bit at the air, finding purchase on his arm and sinking fangs into flesh.

Zero clenched his teeth hard and rolled once more, so that the dog was under him, and pushed down, forcing his bit forearm into the dog’s mouth even as it tried to clamp down further.

The dealer scrambled to his feet and fled the room while Zero grasped behind him for whatever he could find. The dog wriggled and thrashed beneath him, trying to get free, but Zero pinched his legs together so it couldn’t get upright. His hand found a ratty blanket draped on the leather couch, and he pulled it loose.

With his free hand he delivered a single, snapping blow to the dog’s snout—not enough to hurt it badly, but to stun it enough that its teeth released his arm. In the half-second before the jaws clamped down again, he wrapped the blanket around the dog’s head and relaxed his legs so it could flip over and stand.

Then he whipped the end of the blanket under its body and tied the ends behind its head, wrapped the front half of the Rottweiler tightly in the blanket. The dog thrashed and bucked, trying to get free—and it would, eventually. So Zero scrambled to his feet and dashed after the dealer.

He skidded into a tiny kitchen just in time to see Ike pulling a small, ugly pistol loose from a drawer. He tried to bring it around, but Zero leapt forward and stopped it with a hand, and then snapped it from his grip in a twisting maneuver that definitely dislocated, if not broke, one of the guy’s fingers.

Ike yelped sharply and cowered, holding his hand, as Zero aimed the gun at his forehead.

“Don’t shoot me, man,” he whimpered. “Don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot me.”

“Tell me what I want to know. Where is Sara? When did you last see her?”

“Okay! Okay. Look, she came to me, but she couldn’t pay, so we worked out a deal where she could run my stuff around town—”

“Drugs,” Zero corrected. “You had her running drugs. Just say that.”

“Yeah. Drugs. It was just a few days, and she was doing okay, but then I gave her a big score of pills…”

“Of what?”

“Prescription pills. Painkillers. And she just ghosted me, man. Never showed up, never delivered. My people were pissed. I was out more than a thousand bucks. And she even took one of my cars, ’cause she didn’t have one of her own…”

Zero scoffed loudly. “You gave her a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs, and she ran off with it?”

“Yeah, man.” He looked up at Zero, his hands up near his face defensively. “If you think about it, I’m really the victim here…”

“Shut up.” He gently pushed the barrel against Ike’s forehead. “Where was she going, and what kind of car did she take?”

*

Zero took the black Escalade, which he’d “borrowed” from Ike along with his gun, and used the GPS on his phone to drive as quickly as he could to the drop-off point, all the while looking for a light blue 2001 four-door Chevy sedan.

He didn’t see one before he reached the delivery point, which much to his chagrin was a local rec center. But he couldn’t worry about that in the moment. Instead he thought to himself, What would Sara do? Where would she go?

He already knew the answer before he even finished asking himself the question. It floated to him on the salty scent of the air as easily as recalling a memory.

It was no secret in their family that Kate, Maya and Sara’s late mother, had a favorite spot in the entire world. She had taken the girls there on three separate occasions, the first time when they were only eight and six respectively, and told them: “This is my favorite spot.”

It was a beach in New Jersey, a phrase that would typically make Zero cringe. The beach was too rocky and the water was usually too cold except for two months in the summer, but that’s not what Kate liked about it. She just liked the view. She’d gone there every year when she was a little girl, all through her teens, and had a fond and almost unfounded love for the place.

The beach. He knew that Sara would go to the beach.

He used his phone to find the closest ones and drove there like a maniac, cutting people off and blowing lights and overall generally surprised that no cops zipped out from hiding places to pull him over. The parking lots at the beach were only a few rows, long and narrow and full of cars and happy families. But he didn’t see any vehicles that matched the one that Ike had described.

He searched three of the largest, closest beaches to Sara’s home and work and found nothing. Dusk was falling fast. In the back of his mind he was aware that the US had a new president; the former Speaker of the House had been sworn in that afternoon. Maria was invited there, to the ceremony, and was most likely at some cocktail party by now, full of stuffy politicians and wealthy constituents, sipping champagne and talking idly about a bright future while Zero searched the coast of Jacksonville for his estranged daughter who, last time he’d seen her, had called the police on him and shouted that she never wanted to see him again.

“Come on, Sara,” he muttered to the ether as he flicked the headlights on. “Give me something. Help me find you. There must be a…”

He trailed off as he realized his mistake. He’d been searching public beaches. Popular beaches. But Kate’s beach had been small and sparsely visited. And Sara had a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs. She wouldn’t want to be where people were.

He pulled over to the side of the road and opened the browser on his phone. He frantically searched for less popular beaches, rocky beaches, places that people didn’t often go. It was a hard search, and it didn’t feel like he was making progress until he touched the “images” tab and then he saw it—

A beach that looked remarkably like Kate’s beach. As if it had been molded from his own memory.

Zero headed there at about eighty miles an hour, not caring about police or traffic laws or even other drivers as he swerved around cars going far too slow, people casually heading home for the night and not concerned that their daughter might be dead in the surf somewhere.

He skidded into the tiny gravel parking lot and slammed his brakes when he saw it. A blue sedan, the only car in the lot, parked at the farthest end. Night had fallen, so he left the headlights on and put the Escalade in park right there in the middle of the lot, and he jumped out and ran over to the sedan.

He threw the back door open.

And there she was, looking like both heaven and hell: his baby girl, his youngest daughter, pale-skinned and beautiful, lying prostrate in the backseat of a car with her eyes glazed and half-opened, pills scattered around the floor below her.

Zero immediately checked for a pulse. It was there, though slow. Then he tilted her head back and made sure her airway was clear. He knew that most overdose deaths were the result of blocked airways that resulted in respiratory failure and eventually cardiac arrest.

But she was breathing, albeit shallowly.

“Sara?” he said hoarsely in her face. “Sara?”

She didn’t answer. He hefted her out of the car and held her upright. She was unable to stand on her own two feet.

“I’m so sorry,” he told her. And then he stuck two fingers down her throat.

She retched involuntarily, then again, and vomited into the parking lot. She coughed and sputtered while he held her and told her, “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

He put her in the Escalade, leaving the doors of the sedan still open with pills all over the seats, and drove two miles until he found a convenience store. He bought two liters of water with a twenty and didn’t stick around for his change.

There in the parking lot of a Florida gas station, he sat with her in the back seat, her head in his lap as he stroked her hair, feeding her small amounts of water and watching for any signs that he should bring her to an emergency room. Her pupils were dilated, but her airways were open and her pulse was slowly returning to normal. Her fingers were twitching slightly, but when he slipped his hand into them they closed around his. Zero held back tears, remembering when she was just a baby, when he’d hold her in his lap and her tiny fingers would clench his.

He lost track of time sitting there with her. The next time he glanced up at the clock he saw that more than two hours had gone by.

And then she blinked, and moaned slightly, and said: “Daddy?”

“Yeah.” His voice came out a whisper. “It’s me.”

“Is this real?” she asked, her voice floating to him dreamily.

“It’s real,” he told her. “I’m here, and I’m going to take you home. I’m going to take you away from here. I’m going to take care of you… even if you hate me for it.”

“Okay,” she agreed softly.

And eventually he relaxed enough to realize that the danger had passed. Sara fell asleep and Zero slid into the front seat of the SUV. He couldn’t put her on a plane in this state, but he could drive back, through the night if he had to. Maria would get rid of the vehicle for him, no questions asked. And the local authorities would be paying a visit to the dealer, Ike.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, curled in the backseat with her knees drawn up and her cheek on the soft leather, looking peaceful but vulnerable.

She needs you.

And he needed to be needed.

4 WEEKS LATER

CHAPTER ONE

“You ready for this?” Alan Reidigger asked, his voice low as he checked the magazine on the black Glock in his meaty fist. He and Zero had their backs to a plywood structure, keeping hidden and obscured by the darkness. It was almost too dark to see, but Zero knew that in moments the whole place would be lit up like the Fourth of July.

“Always ready,” Zero whispered back. He held a Ruger LC9 in his left hand, a small silver pistol with a nine-round mag, as he flexed the fingers of his right. He had to stay cognizant of the injury he’d sustained almost two years earlier, when a steel anchor had crushed his hand to the point of uselessness. Three surgeries and several months of physical therapy later, he had regained most of its operation, despite permanent nerve damage. He could fire a gun but his aim tended to track to the left, a minor annoyance that he’d been working to overcome.

“I’ll go left,” Reidigger laid out, “and clear the causeway. You go right. Keep your eyes up and watch your six. I bet there’s a surprise or two waiting for us.”

Zero grinned. “Oh, are you calling the shots now, part-timer?”

“Just try to keep up, old man.” Reidigger returned the grin, his lips curling behind the thick beard that obscured the lower half of his face. “Ready? Let’s go.”

With the simple, whispered command they both shoved off from the plywood façade behind them and split off. Zero brought the Ruger up, its barrel following his line of sight as he slipped around the dark corner and stole down a narrow alley.

At first it was just silence and darkness, barely a sound in the cavernous space. Zero had to remind his muscles to keep from tensing, to stay loose and not slow down his reaction speed.

This is just like all the other times, he told himself. You’ve done this before.

Then—lights exploded to his right, a severe and jarring series of flashes. A muzzle flare, accompanied by the deafening report of gunfire. Zero threw himself forward and tucked into a roll, coming up on one knee. The figure was barely more than a silhouette, but he could see enough to squeeze off two shots that connected with the silhouette at center mass.

Still got it. He climbed to his feet but stayed low, moving forward in a crouch. Eyes up. Watch your six… He whirled around just in time to see another dark figure sliding into view, cutting off the path behind him. Zero dropped himself backward, landing on his rear even as he popped off two more shots. He heard projectiles whistle right over his head, practically felt them ruffle his hair. Both his shots found home, one in the figure’s torso and the second to the forehead.

From the other side of the structure came three tight shots in quick succession. Then silence. “Alan,” he hissed into his earpiece. “Clear?”

“Hold that thought,” came the reply. A burst of automatic fire tore through the air, and then two punctuating shots from the Glock. “All clear. Meet me around the side.”

Zero kept his back to the wall and moved forward quickly, the rough plywood tugging at his tac vest. He spotted a blur of movement up ahead, from the roof of the flat-topped structure. A single well-placed headshot took out the threat.

He reached the corner and paused, taking a breath before clearing it. As he whipped around, the Ruger coming up, he found himself face-to-face with Reidigger.

“I got three,” Zero told him.

“Two on my side,” Alan grunted. “Which means…”

Zero didn’t have time to shout a warning as he saw the human-shaped figure glide into view behind Alan. He brought the pistol up, right over Alan’s shoulder, and fired twice.

But not fast enough. As Zero’s shots landed, Alan yelped and grasped at his leg.

“Ah, dammit!” Reidigger groaned. “Not again.”

Zero winced as bright fluorescent lights came to life suddenly, illuminating the entire indoor training course. Heels clacked against the concrete floor, and a moment later Maria Johansson rounded the corner, arms folded over her white blazer and her lipsticked mouth frowning.

“What gives?” Reidigger protested. “Why’d we stop?”

“Alan,” Maria scolded, “maybe you ought to take your own advice and watch your six.”

“What, this?” Alan gestured to his thigh, where a green paintball had splattered across his pant leg. “This is barely a graze.”

Maria scoffed. “That would have been a femoral bleed. You’d be dead in ninety seconds.” To Zero she added, “Nice job, Kent. You’re moving like your old self.”

Zero smirked at Alan, who furtively gave him the finger.

The warehouse they were in was a former wholesale packing plant, until the CIA purchased it and turned it into training grounds. The course itself was a product of the eccentric agency engineer Bixby, who had done his best to simulate a nighttime raid. The “compound” they had been storming was made of boxy plywood structures, while the muzzle flashes were strobe lights placed throughout the facility. The gunshots were reproduced digitally and broadcast on high-def speakers, which echoed in the huge space and sounded to Zero’s trained ear almost like real shots. The human-shaped figures were little more than dummies molded from ballistic gel and affixed to dolly tracks, while the paintball guns were automated, programmed to fire when motion sensors picked up movement at varying ranges.

The only thing genuine about the exercise were the live rounds they were using, which was why both Zero and Reidigger wore plated tac vests—and why the training facility was only open to Spec Ops agents, which Zero found himself once again being.

After the fiasco in Belgium, in which the two of them had confronted Russian President Aleksandr Kozlovsky and unearthed the secret pact he had with US President Harris, to say that Zero and Reidigger had landed themselves in hot water would have been a monumental understatement. They’d become international fugitives wanted in four countries for having broken more than a dozen laws. But they had been right about the plot, and it didn’t quite seem justified for the two of them to spend the rest of their lives in prison.

So Maria pulled every string she could, sticking her neck out in a big way for her former teammates and friends. It was nothing short of a miracle that she somehow managed to have the ordeal retconned as a top-secret operation under her supervision.

The trade-off, of course, was that they had to return to work for the CIA.

Though Zero wouldn’t admit it aloud, to him it felt like a homecoming. He had been working hard the past month, hitting the gym again, target-shooting at the range daily, boxing and sparring with opponents almost half his forty years. The weight he’d gained in his year and a half absence was gone. He was getting better at shooting with his injured right hand. Maria was right; he was very nearly back to his old self.

Alan Reidigger, on the other hand, had resisted at every turn. He had spent the last four years of his life with the agency thinking he was dead, living under the alias of a mechanic named Mitch. Coming back to the CIA was the last thing he wanted, but given a choice between that or a hole at H-6, he had reluctantly agreed to Maria’s terms—but as an asset rather than a full-fledged agent, hence Zero’s digs of him being a “part-timer.” Alan’s involvement would be on an as-needed basis, providing support whenever able and helping to train up younger agents.

But first that meant that the two of them had to get back into fighting shape.

Reidigger wiped at the green paint on his pants, only serving to smear it further across his thigh. “Let me clean this up and we’ll go again,” he told Maria.

She shook her head. “I’m not spending my whole day in this stuffy place watching you take shot after shot. We’ll pick it up again after the holiday.”

Alan grunted, but nodded anyway. He had been an excellent agent in his day, and even now had still proven himself to be sharp-witted and useful in a fight. He was quick despite the extra weight he carried around his midsection. But he’d always been something of a bullet magnet. Zero couldn’t recall how many times Reidigger had been shot in his career, but it had to be approaching double digits—especially since he’d been tagged in the shoulder during their Belgian escapades.

A young male tech wheeled out a steel-topped cart for their equipment while a team of three others went about resetting the training course. Zero cleared the round from the Ruger’s chamber, popped the magazine, and set all three down on the cart. Then he tore at the Velcro straps of the tac vest and tugged it over his head, suddenly feeling several pounds lighter.

“So, any chance you’ve reconsidered?” he asked Alan. “About Thanksgiving. The girls would love to see you.”

“And I’d like to see them,” he replied, “but I’m gonna take a rain check. They could use some quality time with you.”

Alan didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t need to. Zero’s relationship with Maya and Sara had been severely strained over the past year and a half. But now Sara had been staying with him for the past several weeks, ever since he found her on the beach in Florida. He and Maya had been talking over the phone more and more—she had almost jumped on the very first plane when she’d heard what happened to her younger sister, but Zero had calmed her down and convinced her to stay in school until the holiday. This week was going to be the first time in quite a long time that the three of them would all be under the same roof. And Alan was right; there was still substantial work to be done to repair the damage that had separated them for so long.

“Besides,” Alan said with a grin, “we’ve all got our traditions. Me, I’m going to eat an entire rotisserie chicken and rebuild the engine of a seventy-two Camaro.” He glanced over at Maria. “How about you? Spending time with dear old dad?”

Maria’s father, David Barren, was the Director of National Intelligence, essentially the only man other than the president that CIA Director Shaw answered to.

But Maria shook her head. “My father is going to be in Switzerland, actually. He’s part of a diplomatic attaché on behalf of the president.”

Alan frowned. “So you’re going to be alone on Thanksgiving?”

Maria shrugged. “It’s not a big deal. In fact, I’m way behind on paperwork, thanks to spending so much time down here with you two idiots. I plan on putting on some sweatpants, making some tea, and hunkering down…”

“No,” Zero interrupted firmly. “No way. Come have dinner with me and the girls.” He said it without fully thinking it through, but he didn’t regret the offer. If anything, he felt a stab of guilt, since the only reason she’d be alone on Thanksgiving was because of him.

Maria smiled gratefully, but her eyes were hesitant. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

She had a point; their relationship had ended barely more than a month prior. They had been living together for more than a year as… well, he wasn’t sure what they had been. Dating? He couldn’t remember ever referring to her as his girlfriend. It just sounded too strange. But it didn’t matter in the long run, because Maria had admitted that she wanted a family.

If Zero was going to do it all over again, there wouldn’t be anyone else in the world he’d rather do it with than Maria. But when he took a good introspective look, he realized he didn’t want that. He had work to do on himself, work to repair the relationships with his daughters, work to exorcise the ghosts of his past. And then the interpreter, Karina, had come into his life, in a too-brief romance that was dizzying and dangerous and wonderful and tragic. His heart was still aching from her loss.

Even so, he and Maria had a storied history, not only romantically but professionally and platonically as well. They had agreed to stay friends; neither of them would have it any other way. Yet now he was an agent again, while Maria had been promoted to Deputy Director of Special Operations—which meant she was his boss.

It was, to say the least, complicated.

Zero shook his head. It didn’t have to be complicated. He had to believe that two people could be friends, regardless of their past or current associations.

“It’s a great idea,” he told her. “I won’t take no for an answer. Have dinner with us.”

“Well…” Maria’s gaze flitted from Zero to Reidigger and back again. “Okay then,” she relented. “That sounds nice. I guess I should go get started on that paperwork.”

“I’ll text you,” Zero promised as she left the warehouse, heels clacking loudly on the concrete.

Alan pulled off his own tac vest with a long grunt, and then replaced the sweat-stained trucker’s cap over his matted hair before casually asking, “Is this a scheme?”

“A scheme?” Zero scoffed. “For what, to get Maria back? You know I’m not thinking about that.”

“No. I mean a scheme for Maria to be a buffer between you and them.” For a covert operative who had been living the last four years as someone else, Alan had a brutal candor about him that sometimes bordered on insulting.