Page 19 of Agent Zero
After the mystery flu, so sick he’d thought he was going to die, he heard different things.Neuroplasticity.Cortical restructuring.Off the charts.Waking weak and shaky, the entire world crystal clear in a way it never had been before, suddenly grasping connections in a way he never had.Agent training, where it was drilled into you:it’s the virus, stupid.Lose the microscopic invaders and you lost your edge.
Was the fog an antiviral?Probably not in aerosol, but still.Had they decided he couldn’t keep the little bastards?
First step was getting out of this hole, then getting offbase.He was already moving.One against five, and they were armed—but there was the jacket, a whole array of chemicals, his knife and the mop.
“Merry Christmas,” he whispered, very softly, and set to work.
* * *
It wasn’t a bad apartment, really.A nice view, even if that meant a chance of being trapped with nothing but glass between him and a six-story fall.There was chrome, and stainless steel, and glass, and leather.It was a stage set more than anything else, but it washis, and no matter how much they cautioned against getting attached to your hidey-hole, it was still where he slept and kept a few things that mattered.
So it was the first place they would send a cleanup team, and if they had already found the bodies he’d left behind at the base, more would be on the way to net him and back the cleaners up, too.
Why?Why are they after me now?
No time to worry.This was what he had trained for.
Now, he bolted down the hall.Everything depended on speed.They’d sent a three-man team to clear the apartment, but again, none of them were agents.The one watching the hall he’d taken silently from behind; now there were just two.
They’d been busy as beavers.Garbage bags, latex gloves, window open because something was smoldering in an ashtray.Probably a passport, but if they could find an item, he could afford to lose it.
There goes the security deposit.On his knees, sliding, hitting the first—a linebacker in a suit—with a crunch.Real gorillas, these boys, but if they were doing this they weresmartmuscle.Both of them would’ve had extra weight on him before the infection, more mass meant he had to apply more force, and he’d almost dislocated his shoulder during the little brawl in the hallway.His eyes still smarted, his cheeks slicked with saltwater, and he could still smell the janitor’s jacket and the battlefield bowel reek as the last soldier in the hallway died hard.
A patriot ought to feel bad about killing his own.
Even a giant went down when a knee was taken out.Splintering crack like greenwood, and the other reason Reese had hit the ground was for the .38 under the glass-and-steel coffee table.Gorilla One dropped like a head-tapped ox, and Reese’s aim was off.The gun roared—just past noon and the complex was usually deserted, but someone might call the cops.
The way his day had been going, it was pretty damn likely.
It was a gutshot instead of a good clean kill, which meant he anticipated even more noise as he hauled himself up and took care of Gorilla One on the floor.Gorilla Two was writhing in shock, sucking in air and trying to scream.Still, Two had presence of mind enough to strike out wildly as Reese was on him.He did not go gently, but the crack of a neck breaking and the foulness of loosened sphincters followed each other almost immediately.
Only three so far.A good thing, lucky as hell.
A glance at the watch told him he had less than ten minutes before he had to jump, probably more like seven.He already had a mental list of what to grab.
Keeping one for questioning had been an option, but he didn’t have time.Getting the hell out of Dodge was his best bet.
I’m not going to make my coffee date.Dammit.
Or so he thought until five minutes later, when he circled the parking garage below the building, pressing the unlock button on the key fob the lookout had been holding.A nice black SUV lit up like a beacon, and as soon as the door opened he saw the files tucked under the driver’s seat.Reese slid inside, closed and locked the doors, and decided he had thirty seconds to do some reading.
Two manila folders.There were no cameras down here; still, he glanced nervously over his shoulder before flipping through the first.
There he was, name and vitals, a good black-and-white of him clean-shaven and walking.Another of him scruffy and slouching, looked like it was on the Krakow job.Now that had been a balls-up, and he hadn’t thought anyone could catch him even with a telephoto.Time to rethink his movement strategy between hides.
The second file...
Reese sat for a moment, his pulse leaping and thudding in his ears.His eyes welled with more hot water, but it was probably just leftovers flushed from whatever they’d pumped inside the sealed room.
Holly Rachel Candless.
Reese scanned each page precisely once, hoping he wasn’t losing cognitive function.Name.Vitals.Marriage and divorce dates.CV and medical précis—looked like she’d lost a lot of weight since her last checkup.Huh.Bloodwork a little odd, but that was two years ago.Maybe they hadn’t been able to pull her recents?
Goddamn them.He’d spent too much time talking to her, and someone with a telephoto lens had noticed.Or there had been a wrong note in his psych eval, or something else.It could be as simple as a random check on agents, easier to do inside the borders of the good old US of A with a camera on every damn corner.
The point was, he’d gotten too close and she was going to pay for it unless he reached her in time.
Unacceptable, Reese.
