Page 1 of Agent Zero
ONE
Fourteen hoursafter the hit he was out of the stink and the heat of Mosul, stitched up and stinging from the antiseptic, and the debrief was going...well.Or as well as could be expected, in this airless white-painted concrete-floored room with the one-way mirror on the east wall.There wasn’t anyone behind the mirror—Reese would have outright smelled an onlooker—but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a camera.Recording him and combing frame by frame might give them an edge, and they weren’t stupid.
Stupid couldn’t build agents—civilian eggheads were required for the drafting and drill instructors to do the training—but it could certainlyrunthem.
Which explained Bronson, sort of.
“And that’s it,” Reese heard himself say, dully.Now that he was coming down out of redline, he felt the little vicious nips and bites all over him.Scrambling over scorching clay rooftops to avoid mujahideen and other surprises, not to mention getting almost blown out of the safe house because his contact was compromised...it could have been much worse.The deepest of the cuts had already closed, with the almost painful itch of wounds sealing themselves faster than they should.“Target, secondary target, collateral.”
“Collateral.”Bronson was a hatchet-faced, bespectacled wall, but that’s what they wanted in wrap-up.He’d debriefed Reese several times now, and it was always the same.No surprise, no affect at all.Bad skin, probably from the fried food coming off him in invisible waves, but a great poker face.Even his ties were all the same, a maroon that looked dirty under fluorescents.
If Reese hadn’t been able to smell the fear on the man, he might even have believed him unaffected.“Nobody told me there’d be guests.”Armed, nasty guests.As well as not-so-armed, innocent ones.
“Ah.”A single syllable, that was all.
Reese decided to prod a little more.“In other words, I took out the entire installation.”
“And?”Bronson’s tone plainly said he considered that the whole point of the job, which was reasonable enough.From an operations point of view, that was.
Not from an agent’s, but who ever asked one?
And if I needed a psych eval, now would be the time for you to suggest it.The physical evals had been daily during training, the psych ones every other day.Looking for a weak spot, checking for breakdown, degradation, a sign that the virus wasn’t going to play nice forever.
There was a brassier note in the fearsmell now, and Bronson’s eyelids flickered once.His blood pressure was probably spiking, if his pulse was any indication.Reese’s was normal, nice and low.They wouldn’t get anything from his vitals, not even if they had him strapped in—as long as he had enough spare concentration to keep everything flatline.Just another benefit from the happy little invaders.
Most of all, he suspected, they were looking for agents having trouble with the idea of infection.It did funny things to your head after a while, even if the Gibraltar virus was what gave you an edge.
Bronson glanced down at the file in front of him.“We didn’t have intel on the guests.”
The hot wet scent of a lie smacked Reese in the face.What the hell, it wasn’t like it mattered.“Sure.”He took the water bottle, considered it.A whole lot of things were possible, if you got them going fast enough.He could ghost this idiot and get out the door.Go to ground.Become the Invisible Man.
They had to know he would be thinking about it, right?When you train a dog to dig, he goes and digs.Simple logic.
An obvious corollary to that was that the people who built him were the enemy, too.Or so close to enemy it didn’t matter.
Bronson nodded, tapped a paper clip on the tabletop.One of his little tells, meaning he was almost done.Probably unconscious, like most patterns, but if he was doing debriefs for program agents, or even just for any shadow-side operative, he obeyed the rules and had a classified box inside his head.“You’re scheduled for eval in two days, but we can move it up for tomorrow?—”
“Two days is fine,” Reese answered with just the right note of rawness, giving them what they expected.How many other agents were there?It was a question he sometimes considered during long transit times, waiting to touch down in a whole new locale and begin causing havoc.“I’d have to come back for blood draws anyway, might as well have it then.I’d like some rest.”
“Any, ah, headaches?Physical degradation?Unwelcome thoughts?”
“No.”A long swallow of water.He could tear the bottle open, get some sort of flimsy edge.There was the table, too.No great task to go straight over it, or even apply enough force to send the man against the bare concrete wall hard enough to rupture or break something internal.There was that paper clip, too, and Bronson no doubt had a pen.Reese’s guns were checked, but he had the ceramknife and his hands.As well as strength, and speed, and apparently the ability to not let little things bother him.“No more than usual.”
That got a response.“What?”
Weren’t you listening?“No physical degradation.No unwelcome thoughts other than the usual.You know, the ones that spring from killing people for my country.If I didn’t have those thoughts, I’d be a program failure, now wouldn’t I.”
“Emotional noise is also a variable, agent.”
“Then consider me at the lowest level of static.”He eyed the brown paper of the file cover.How many of those had he seen so far?Each one full of dates and death.The question of when one of them would have his own dates and death was pretty much academic.He’d never expected to survive any of this.“Are we done?”
“You know this is just wrap-up.We had confirmation of the kills before you left the country.They’ll be too busy fighting each other to give us trouble for a little while.”
Probably not as long as you think.“Good.”He pushed himself up, and Bronson actually flinched.The movement, small but definite, almost managed to get through the deadly exhaustion weighing down Reese’s every nerve.As it was, he just set it aside for future thought.Like so much else.“Two days, blood drop.”
“Try not to get into any trouble.”The light winked off Bronson’s steel-rimmed glasses, a sharp headache-making dart.
“Yessir.”A sketched salute, and the door opened for him.Whoever was taping behind the one-way mirror must have thought he was all right to leave, too.
