Karina absently touched her left earlobe, caressing the smooth stone there. She had the words that were spoken in the meeting—and in more than just her memory. She had proof of the dangerous knowledge that the American president, an alleged Democratic liberal who had earned the country’s admiration, was being puppeteered by the Russians.
There in the ladies’ room of a downtown bookstore, Karina looked at herself in the mirror as she murmured desperately, “I’m going to need some help.”
CHAPTER ONE
Zero sat on the edge of the queen-sized bed and wrung his hands nervously in his lap. He’d been through this before, had seen it in his mind a thousand times. Yet here he was again.
His two teenage daughters sat on the bed adjacent to his, a narrow aisle between them. They were in a room at the Plaza, an upscale hotel just outside of DC. They had decided to hole up there instead of going home in the wake of the assassination attempt on President Pierson’s life.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
Maya was on the brink of seventeen. She had her father’s brown hair and facial features, and her mother’s sharp wit and biting sarcasm. She regarded him passively, with a shadow of trepidation over such a dramatically foreshadowing statement.
“It’s not easy to say. But you deserve to know.”
Sara was fourteen, still round-faced with youth, teetering at a conflicted age between clinging to childhood and burgeoning womanhood. She had inherited Kate’s blonde hair and expressive face. She looked more like her mother with every passing day, though at the moment she looked nervous.
“It’s about your mother.”
They had both been through so much, kidnapping and witnessing murders and staring down the barrel of a gun. They had stayed strong through it all. They deserved to know.
And then he told them.
He’d played it in his mind so many times before, but still the words were difficult to summon to his throat. They came slowly, like logs drifting on a river. He’d thought that once he started it would get easier, but that wasn’t at all the case.
There 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.
