Reid took no time to appreciate the beauty of the wondrous city. Funny, he thought, that it used to be the tax-collecting hub of Roman provinces nearly two thousand years earlier, and now one of the world’s financial capitals. If we live through today, maybe we can come back and see it again sometime. Kent’s voice—it was his own inner voice, but the Kent side—teasing him.
The drive to Zurich had taken about seven hours, with only one short break at a rest stop in Luxembourg where the truck driver, as promised, organized a ride for Reid into Switzerland. The second truck was (thankfully) not refrigerated, but the trailer was still chilly with the winter weather. He left his wool blanket behind in the trailer when they arrived in the city.
He checked the address again, and paused to ask for directions to the street. It was a twenty-minute walk from where the truck had dropped him off. The weather was brisk, so he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his bomber jacket, his right fist wrapped around the Glock, as he tried to formulate a plan. He had no idea what he would find there, but he assumed the worst. Another violent faction hiding in plain sight, like the Iranians in Paris? Perhaps a bomb-making depot like Otets’s facility? He couldn’t very well just burst in with a gun drawn. Pretending to be a member hadn’t worked out very well for him last time. No, he would have to scope it out first. He couldn’t go in blind.
The address was an apartment on the southern end of the city, overlooking the Limmat, on the third floor of a white building that looked like it might have been an inn at one point. The year etched into a cornerstone told him that it was about three hundred and fifty years old, but the steel stairs winding up the northern side of the structure were certainly newer. From the street level he could see the entrance to the apartment on the third-story landing, the white paint on the door faded with age.
Reid meandered toward the riverbank and sat on a bench. In his periphery he could see the building and the apartment. From there he would be able to take note if anyone came or went. He admired the view of the river. Across the way was a tall stone cathedral with a sharp, rust-colored spire jabbing heavenward. A handful of geese landed on the water. All the while he kept the apartment in his field of vision, but there was no movement. No one came or went. The door never opened.
After twenty minutes he turned up the fleece collar of his jacket. It was cold; the temperature was in the twenties, maybe less. The few people he saw out and about hurried along toward their destination. A light snow began to fall.
An hour passed before he couldn’t stand it any longer. The waiting and the frigid air were both getting to him and there had been no signs of life.
Reid took the steel stairs up to the third floor with one hand around the gun in his pocket. I’ll have the element of surprise, he told himself. Not like at Otets’s facility. And even then, they thought they had the drop on him and he’d escaped, hadn’t he?
Despite the chill in the air, he felt tiny beads of sweat prickle on his brow, and…
And he realized something. He wasn’t scared. He was nervous, and anxious, and even a little excited, but he wasn’t afraid of what he might find. It was a very strange epiphany—because while that notion scared him, the concept of entering the apartment with unknown factors inside didn’t.
The thought of not being scared was frightening.
He paused outside the door and put his ear to it. He couldn’t hear anything coming from inside. The nearest window was a few feet from the entrance, but too far to reach from the landing. There were only two ways to go from there: inside, or back down the stairs.
He stood outside the door for what felt like several moments too long.
You already know the answer, said the voice in his head. There’s no going back now. There’s nothing to find behind you. Here, there might be something.
Reid reached out and very carefully tried the knob. It was locked. He reared back, lifted his right foot, and kicked hard, planting his boot heel just above the lock. The jamb splintered and the door flew open. He had the Glock up instantly, trained at center mass and pivoting left and right and left again mechanically.
He was staring into a small but cozy kitchen, with an iron-grilled stovetop, cherry cabinets, a white single-basin sink, and a body on the floor.
The smell of death hit him immediately. His stomach turned at both the sight of the body and the fact that he recognized the scent as blood and early decay. It was lying halfway in the kitchen, its lower half over the threshold at an angle in such a way that the torso and upper body were obscured behind the doorway to the next room.
Reid choked down his impulse to gag and kept the gun aloft. Murderers don’t normally stick around, he told himself, but even so, he ignored the body for now and stepped over it as he cleared the rest of the apartment—which, it turned out, was only one other room. Beyond the kitchen was a decently large parlor, with a small round dining table in one corner and a Murphy bed in the wall. Off to the right was a clean white bathroom with a claw-footed tub.
The apartment was empty. Well, mostly.
Reid pocketed the Glock and knelt beside the body. It was a man, face-down in a white collared shirt, black slacks, and black socks. He wasn’t wearing shoes. And he was lying in a wide, liberal pool of dark, sticky blood.
The smell of death was strong; this wasn’t a recent murder. Reid didn’t want to touch the body, so he got down on his hands and knees, careful to avoid any blood, and peered into the puffy, bloated face. This man had been dead at least twenty-four hours, maybe a little more.
And then—a memory flashed through his head like a bolt of lightning. He saw the same face, but alive… a boyish smile, neatly combed hair, carrying a bit of extra weight in his chin and neck.
The Ritz in Madrid. Reidigger covers the hall as you kick in the door and catch the bomber off guard. The man goes for the gun on the bureau, but you’re faster. You snap his wrist… Later Reidigger tells you he heard the sound from out in the corridor. Turned his stomach. Everyone laughs.
“Jesus,” Reid whispered. He knew this man—he used to know this man. No, it was even more than that…
A hotel room in Abu Dhabi. Two a.m. Reidigger looks exhausted as he idly eats a slice of cold pizza. He offers you one. You’re busy cleaning your gun.
“No thanks.”
“Kent,” he says, “I know this is hard, but—”
“No,” you tell him. “You don’t know.”
“We’re worried about you—”
“I’m going to find him, Alan. And I’m going to kill him. If you’re not going to help me, then stay out of the way.”
Reid sniffed once. His emotions were confusing and overwhelming. Tears were stinging in his eyes and he barely knew why. This man had been a friend, but he could hardly recall more than a few memories.
Your wedding. You stand next to Kate and hold both her hands. She’s never looked more beautiful. You both say “I do.” You head down the aisle, holding hands and smiling. Scanning the crowd as they applaud.
Near the back, you spot him. He wasn’t supposed to come—could have blown your cover—but he snuck in anyway. He had to see. He gives you a grin and nods subtly before slipping out the back door…
Reid covered his face with both hands and sighed, trying to get a grip on himself. This man’s name was Alan Reidigger, he knew. He was a friend. And he was an agent of the CIA.
You need to look around. Check his pockets. Find something. Or else this is a dead end.
“I don’t want to touch the body.” He was barely aware that he was talking to himself.
Reidigger hated getting his hands dirty—literally. Check the sink.
In the kitchen cupboard beneath the single-basin sink, Reid found a pair of yellow rubber gloves. He pulled them on up to his elbows, and then, after a moment of hesitation, he carefully lifted Reidigger’s shoulder.
“Good god,” he whispered. The front of the agent’s shirt was completely soaked in blood. He had been stabbed—and not just once. There were small puncture wounds up his thighs, his abdomen, in both arms…
This was not a quick death. Someone wanted information from him.
Reid stood quickly and paced the parlor, taking deep breaths to calm himself. Once he’d worked up the nerve, he checked Reidigger’s pockets. They were empty. He looked around the rest of the small apartment, but he didn’t find a wallet, keys, a cell phone, or a service gun. They had taken it all.
Reid groaned in frustration. He had come this far, from France to Belgium to Switzerland, and for what? To find an old friend that he could barely remember, dead on a kitchen floor with no identification?
A phone rang. It startled Reid so much in the otherwise silent apartment that he spun and crouched into a defensive stance. It rang again. He followed the sound to a gray chaise in the corner. He lifted a pillow and found a black cordless phone beneath it.
A landline? The phone continued to ring in his hand as he decided whether or not he should answer it. The small display on the phone said that it was an unknown caller. He knew he shouldn’t, but he had no other leads. Nowhere to go from here.
He pressed the green button on the phone and held it to his ear, but said nothing.
Someone breathed on the other end of the line for a moment. Then a male voice said, “It must be cold up there.”
But you can’t beat the view. The words spun through his head instantly, as instinctively as he might say “bless you” when he heard a sneeze.
It was a code. This was a call from the CIA—or rather, someone in the CIA. It was a code, and he knew it. But he said nothing.
“Did you hear me?” The voice seemed familiar somehow, but it didn’t trigger any new memories. “I said, ‘It must be cold up there…’ Alan, are you there?”
“Alan’s dead.” He said it quietly, but didn’t try to mask his voice. He had already answered the phone. Now he wanted to see if they recognized him. Besides, he wanted them to know what had happened.
“What? Who is this?” the voice demanded.
“You should send someone.” Reidigger deserved to be brought home and buried.
There was a very pregnant pause. “Jesus,” the voice breathed. “You sound almost like…” And then: “Kent?”
Reid stayed silent.
“I don’t believe this,” said the voice. “You were KIA… is it really you? That’s incredible. Listen, stay there, okay? We’ll send a team to get Reidigger and extract you—”
“Can’t stay here,” said Reid. “And I can’t trust you.”
“Kent, wait, just listen to me a second. Don’t hang up. We’ll come—” Reid ended the call. He muted the phone’s ringer and tossed it back on the chaise.
Whether the mystery caller knew it or not, he had just given Reid three crucial pieces of information. First: he recognized Kent’s voice, which corroborated a lot of what he had learned so far. Second: the man on the line hadn’t seemed nearly as concerned with Reidigger’s death as he was about hearing that Kent Steele was still alive, which raised Reid’s suspicions that things were not on the up-and-up on the agency’s side of things.
Third, and most importantly: they thought he was dead. The voice said he was KIA, killed in action. Did they genuinely think that, or was it deception? If the agency believed him dead, it would mean they weren’t the ones that had put the memory suppressor in his head.
I couldn’t have done this to myself. I wouldn’t have. Even the Kent side of him agreed with that. Someone must have done it. A vision flashed across his mind—the hotel room in Abu Dhabi. Cold pizza. “We’re worried about you.”
Maybe it wasn’t malevolent.
His gaze slowly swept over the room, toward the body lying on the floor.
Maybe it was an act of mercy.
Reid’s heartbeat doubled its pace. One hand covered his mouth as he came to the realization. Someone else, someone besides Kent, must have known about the memory suppressor. The list of people that Kent would have known were on his side must have been a short one.
Reidigger was a friend. He was trustworthy. He would have been on that list.
The Iranians had gotten their information from a different source. They had tortured it out of this man, Reidigger. They had tortured and killed him to get Kent’s location in New York.
Alan Reidigger had died because of him.
He felt something ignite in his chest, a feeling he’d never had before, or maybe just couldn’t remember. It was heat, rising like a steadily fed fire. Anger… no. It was more than that. It was anger, and it was desire, and its kindling was the knowledge and accountability that he could do something about this. It was not the cold, mechanical instinct with which he had killed the Iranians and tortured Otets. It was the opposite—this was a savage ferocity blended with a passion to wrap his hands around the neck of the people that did this and watch the light die slowly in their eyes.
You have to get out of here, and soon. This time it was the Reid Lawson part of his mind urging him. Now that the CIA knew he was there they would undoubtedly send someone, maybe even a team, to the apartment. But despite his few new discoveries, he had no leads; nowhere to go from here.
He quickly tossed the place for any clues of what Reidigger might have been after, what op he was on in Zurich. He rifled through every cabinet and drawer. He checked the call history on the cordless phone, and even lifted the lid of the toilet tank. There was nothing, not even a suitcase—the killers had taken everything but the bloody clothes on Reidigger’s back. It seemed they didn’t want to make it easy on anyone who might have found him to identify the body and alert the proper authorities.
But he was an agent. And a smart one, at that. There’s something here.
If it was me, where would I hide it?
Reid ran his hands along the solid plaster walls, looking for any place where they might have been opened and patched over. He inspected the popcorn stucco ceiling. He looked for air vents or crawlspaces and found nothing.
Down, he thought. Under.
He walked the length of the floor, starting at one end and shifting his weight carefully from foot to foot on the hardwood. Occasionally a board would creak, and he knelt, working his fingertips into the edges to check for loose floorboards.
There were none.
He was starting to get frustrated. Maybe there was nothing to find but a cordless phone.
Or maybe the phone was where it was for a reason.
He had found it under a pillow on the chaise lounge. He couldn’t tell if he was getting paranoid or if he was being thorough, but either way, he shoved the heavy chaise out of the corner and checked the floor beneath it.
Maybe your paranoia is making you thorough, he thought with a grim chuckle as he pried up a loose floorboard. Sure enough, in the space between two thick parallel joists was a small black backpack. He recognized it immediately.
A GOOD bag.
On any long-term op, an agent would have a GOOD bag prepped—a “Get out of Dodge” bag, or as some people called it, a bug-out bag. In the event one had to grab their stuff and run. A GOOD bag would contain all the necessities for up to seventy-hours off the grid, and (in an agent’s case) the means to get to another location or safe house quickly.
He pulled out the bag and unzipped it. Reidigger’s bag was methodical and complete. Inside he found two bottles of water, two MREs, a first-aid kit, a thermal sweater, a change of socks and boxer shorts, a flashlight, duct tape, a Swiss army knife, a length of nylon rope, two road flares, and a trash bag. In the single front pocket were two American passports, an ample fold of cash in both euros and American dollars (for which Reid was most thankful, since his own stack was getting quite low), and a snub-nosed Walther PPK.
He took out the small silver and black pistol. It was a tiny gun in his hand, less than four inches high and one inch wide. Six-round magazine, .380 ACP caliber, non-slip slide surfacing. Also in the front pouch was a spare clip.
Reid put the pistol back in the bag and took out the two passports. He was certain they would both bear some fake name and Reidigger’s photo. The first one featured the former agent with a patchy beard and the alias Carl Fredericks, from Arkansas. He opened the second passport.
He fell back on his rear and thudded against the floorboards, staring in shock.
His own picture was staring back at him.
His face—Reid Lawson’s face—gazed placidly from the ID page of the passport. He was at least five years younger, maybe more, in the picture, but there was no denying it. It was him. The name on the passport was Benjamin Cosgrove.
Ben. The same alias he had given Yuri, the first one that had popped into Reid’s head when he needed a fake name, was here on this passport.
How?
He flipped through the pages to see if there were country stamps, and a small folded slip of paper fluttered out. He snatched it up and opened it—it was a handwritten note, and as soon as he saw it he immediately knew that it was Reidigger’s handwriting.
Hey Zero, the note began.
If you’re reading this, it’s because what we did came back to bite us in the ass. I always thought it might, which is why I’ve been carrying this around ever since. And if I’m not reading this over your shoulder right now, well… I hope it was quick. Take the bag and GOOD. Do what you have to do. I should have let you finish it then. I hope you haven’t had to pay for that now. – Alan
Reid read the note a second and then a third time. What did that mean, “what we did”? What was it that he had to do? Obviously he—as Kent Steele—was onto something. He had arrested the sheikh. He’d learned of the plot, and maybe even about Amun. But what did he know then that he didn’t know now? He desperately wished that Reidigger was still alive to tell him something more, give him some sort of clue as to what he was supposed to do next.
Maybe he had. Reidigger was smart.
If Alan had thought for a second that something would happen to him and Kent would come back to find this, he would have known that a vague note wouldn’t suffice. He had to have given Reid something more to go on.
He stuck the note and the passport back into the bag, and for good measure, he shook out Reidigger’s fake passport as well. Sure enough, something fell out of his, too. It was a photograph, a folded four-by-six, the edges worn and the center crease white from being folded and unfolded dozens of times. It was a picture of the two of them, him and Reidigger, smiling and standing in front of an ornate fountain.
Why did Reidigger have this? He always was the sentimental type—the kind of guy that would break protocol for a picture. Or risk blowing his own cover to sneak into a friend’s wedding.
No, he decided, it was more than that. There had to be a stronger motive for Alan to have kept this particular picture and left that particular note. He scrutinized it, looking past the faces…
I know this place. The Fontana delle Tartarughe—the Turtle Fountain, in the Piazza Mattei. The Sant’Angelo district of Rome, Italy.
He knew it—he knew it as Professor Reid Lawson, since it was a famous Renaissance-era fountain built by architect Giacomo della Porta—but it was more than that. He knew it as Kent Steele. He had been there, which was obvious from the photograph, but the place held a greater significance.
This was a meeting place. If anyone had to go dark, we would reconvene here. A vision flashed through his mind of four people—himself, Reidigger, a younger man with a cocky smile, and the mysterious woman, the gray-eyed Johansson. They had reconned the area. Determined it was a good place for a safe house. There was an apartment building just off the plaza. It’s quiet there, not much foot traffic. A good place to lay low.
He folded the picture again, stuck it in the passport, and tucked it back into the bug-out bag. He replaced the floorboard and pulled the chaise back into position, and then slung one strap of the bag over a shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured to Reidigger’s body. “I don’t know what we did, but I’m certain you didn’t deserve this. I’m going to find out. And I’m going to make it right.”
He pulled the broken door closed as best he could, and then hurried down the steel stairs to the street level. Zurich Hauptbahnhof, the city’s central train station, was a short walk away. And then he’d be on his way to Rome.
The photograph had to be more than just nostalgia, Reid decided. It was a compass. He didn’t know what he might find there, but Reidigger wanted him to follow it.