Vengeance zero, p.1
Vengeance Zero, page 1
part #10 of Agent Zero Spy Thriller Series
V E N G E A N C E Z E R O
(AN AGENT ZERO SPY THRILLER—BOOK 10)
J A C K M A R S
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 six books; and of the AGENT ZERO spy thriller series, comprising eleven books.
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 © 2020 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 oOhyperblaster, 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)
PRIMARY VALOR (Book #5)
PRIMARY DUTY (Book #6)
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)
CHASING ZERO (Book #9)
VENGEANCE ZERO (Book #10)
ZERO ZERO (Book #11)
Agent Zero – Book 9 Recap
A foreign president is murdered. A convincing doppelganger takes his place. When the American president is lured onto foreign soil under the pretense of a historic peace treaty and taken hostage, there is only one man who can get him back: Agent Zero. But the president’s captors have laid a clever web of deception, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, diversions, and clues in the hopes that only Zero can unravel them. A deadly game of cat and mouse reveals their ultimate plan: to assassinate not only the president, but Zero alongside him.
Agent Zero: After proposing to Maria, Zero made a new friend out of Seth Connors, the only other agent to have had a memory suppressor installed in his head. But Connors could offer him no clues about a potential cure for his failing memory. Zero thwarted the body double of the Palestinian president and his faction in their efforts to spark a war and rescued the president, but at the cost of his friend Agent Chip Foxworth, whom Zero had recruited personally. As Chip’s sacrifice weighed heavily on his mind, he discovered that Connors had taken his own life—but not before leaving behind a single clue for Zero to follow.
Maria Johansson: The soon-to-be Mrs. Zero continued to struggle with her newfound domestic life—not only the pending wedding and being the stepmother to Maya and Sara Lawson, but also the recent adoption of Mischa, a twelve-year-old (at the time) former spy, all of which Maria must balance with being the leader of the newly formed Executive Operations Team.
Maya Lawson: Having returned to West Point to finish her studies, Maya was catching up and on track until the dean of the academy put her on the case of a campus forger who was providing fake but convincing documents to cadets. After following a dangerous trail, Maya found the forger—only to learn that it was all a test from Dean Hunt to see if she was ready for an experimental CIA junior agent program. Having passed her test, Maya is returning to Virginia for the program and the pursuit of her dream to be the youngest agent in CIA history.
Sara Lawson: Finding the women’s trauma group Common Bonds provided Sara with a plethora of abusive men to find and seek vengeance on. Being charged with babysitting Mischa while her dad and Maria were away seemed like a disadvantage, but when Sara got in over her head with a gun-wielding abuser, Mischa swept in to save her. Now knowing more about her future stepsister’s sordid past, Sara and the younger girl have bonded, with a promise from Mischa to teach her how to defend herself.
President Jonathan Rutledge: The president’s ongoing quest for peace between the US and the Middle Eastern countries was nearly sidelined by his capture by the fake Palestinian president, but his rescue at the hands of Agent Zero and the EOT only strengthened his resolve to unite these divisive fronts—even if it requires a show of force to do so.
Chip Foxworth: The former pilot turned EOT agent was recruited by Agent Zero for their new team, rounding it out to five members. He proved to be a valuable asset in many ways, but none so much as his own sacrifice to save Zero’s life.
Stefan Krauss: Little is known about the German-born mercenary and assassin, other than his disdain for Zero and desire for vengeance. But Krauss doesn’t do anything for free, and as a master manipulator, Krauss has found a way to get what he wants while also making it a job—by uniting fractious dissidents in their fear and hatred of Rutledge’s executioner, Agent Zero.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
“There can be no peace!” said the Tall Man, for what must have been the fifteenth time. But this time he punctuated it with a sharp slap of a fist on the table, causing the ashtray to jump, as if he was tired of making the point over and over—all the while not offering any viable solution, Fitzpatrick noted.
The Tall Man was lanky, his limbs spindly, a long beard elongating his angular face. Fitzpatrick pegged him to be in his early fifties. There were nine others in the room, including himself; mostly Iranians as far as he knew, certainly Arabs. They’d tried sharing their names, all of them Ahmad This or Mohammad That—the Johns and Williams of the Middle Eastern world. He’d given up trying to even remember. Instead they were the Tall Man, the Scrawny One, the Ugly Guy, Scar Man.
Scar Man was by far the most interesting; he stood in the corner, sullen, his arms folded, a dark shadow over his face and a pink scar running beneath his left eye, sweeping across his cheek to his ear like a fishhook. Men who looked like that had stories. Whether they were real or not didn’t matter. It could have been that Scar Man’s scar was from a knife fight or a combat mission. It could have been from tripping over his own two feet or getting kicked in the face by a donkey. The truth didn’t matter; Fitzpatrick would bet money that whatever story he might share would be more aligned with the former anyhow.
Men who looked like that had stories, and he knew because he was a man like that. His own face, his body, was a roadmap of cicatrices, though the truth behind it was far less interesting than anyone might guess.
“Our resources are limited,” said Ugly Guy, apparently picking up on the Tall Man’s habit of stating the obvious. Ugly Guy’s face was pockmarked, pitted, and his nose came to a bulbous end bright red with burst capillaries. “We lack time, we lack manpower—”
“The greatest attack on US soil was carried out by fewer men than we, armed only with box cutters,” argued another, his appearance so unremarkable that Fitzpatrick had not yet come up with a nickname for him yet.
“They planned for years!” Ugly Guy argued. “We have but days. And since then security measures have been significantly increased. You know this. What we need is ingenuity. We need—”
“Money.” This came from Scar Man, the first word Fitzpatrick had heard the man utter, and he had to resist the natural urge to raise an eyebrow, to show that he was listening. “That is what we need, is it not? We lack time, and we lack people. The obvious solution is money.”
Fitzpatrick scratched idly at his beard, pretending he did not understand. The nine other men in the room had been speaking in Arabic, under the assumption that he did not understand. But he did. He’d picked up some of the language on tours in Iraq and Iran years ago, but it wasn’t until he’d founded the Division that he’d realized the necessity of it. Much of his former group’s work had involved the Middle East and North Africa; staging small coups, putting down rebel uprisings, assassinating troublesome tribal leaders.
He understood every word, but he pretended not to, and instead lit a cigarette from the crumpled pack in the breast pocket of his black T-shirt.
This place, this ramshackle building in which they had set up a temporary headquarters, used to be a food-processing plant and still smelled like it. It sat in a small industrial complex not three kilometers from the Sabzevar bazaar, a city formerly known as Beyhagh, in the Razavi Khorasan Province of northeastern Iran, approximately six hundred sixty kilometers from Tehran.
Sabzevar was a pleasant enough city, as far as cities in this shithole of a country went. Fitzpatrick had certainly been in far worse. At least here he could walk the streets freely, even identify as an American, without much trouble. Though that could speak as much for his muscled, six-foot-four frame as for the relative safety of the city.
Yet this place, the former food-processing plant, this was not a pleasant enough place. It stank. It was poorly ventilated. Too hot in the daytime and drafty in the night. Scar Man was, unfortunately, right; the group had no money. What little funding they had was from a sheikh whom the Tall Man had blackmailed for certain indiscretions that involved underage boys, the details of which Fitzpatrick had not asked and did not want to know.
He had few scruples. But fucking around with kids was unforgivable. The less he knew about the sheikh, the better, or he’d be inclined to put a bullet in the man’s head.
“The obvious solution, you say.” Ugly Guy raised a thick eyebrow at Scar Man. “If money is so obvious, how do you propose that we procure it? And what would we do if we had it?”
Scar Man’s lip curled. Clearly he had no plan but was simply frustrated at their situation. “We would be unfettered!” Scar Man argued. “We could buy weapons! Drones… explosives… We would not be sitting around and bickering about what paltry scheme we might be able to perform under these limitations!”
The Tall Man pointed a crooked finger at Scar Man. “There is nothing paltry about what we are doing here—”
But Scar Man just pointed one right back. “You least of all should have a seat at this table!” He was shouting now, his face reddening. “We talk about resources? You wasted our funds on this… this American dog! You dare to bring him here, to discuss our plans with him? You expect us to put any trust in him?”
“He knows things,” said the Tall Man, and Fitzpatrick held back a chuckle.
But Scar Man did not. “Ha!” he spat derisively. “Of what does he know? He is a contract killer. A fighter-for-hire. And by the looks of it”—Scar Man sneered in Fitz’s direction—“he lost his last fight.”
He said nothing, just continued to stare down at the tabletop. Scar Man wasn’t wrong; Fitzpatrick hadn’t always been this handsome. He kept his beard trimmed short these days because of the long white scar that intersected his chin, where hair refused to grow. From around his right eye and orbital bone spider-webbed a network of lines, creases in his face that would never go away.
And those were just the visible ones. Beneath his black T-shirt and dark cargo pants were more, many more, where the doctors had surgically reset bones and put his insides back where they belonged.
Fitz took a long drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray before speaking. And then: “I’ll tell you the story of my scars,” he said in near-flawless (though heavily accented) Arabic, “if you tell me yours.”
No one spoke. The Ugly Guy’s mouth fell slightly open, revealing a few empty sockets. Scar Man narrowed his eyes, seething, as he slowly took a step forward.
There was nothing overtly threatening about the way in which he advanced, but his body language spoke volumes. Shoulders back, elbows slightly cocked, jaw clenched.
Fitz had been expecting some pushback to his presence since the meeting had begun. His left hand rested on the hilt of a black-handled Ka-Bar. He pulled it, making sure that everyone in the room heard the sound of unsheathed steel before he set the wickedly sharp knife down on the table before him.
“You may be thinking you have something to prove,” said Fitzpatrick, his gaze boring holes into Scar Man, “but I promise that if you try, I’ll make your face nice and symmetrical again.” He drew a line across his own cheek, swooping around to his ear, miming the line of the man’s long scar.
Scar Man said nothing. He tensed—but after a moment he slowly set himself down on a wooden stool.
“Good.” Fitz switched to his native Oklahoma dialect. “Now then, I’m gonna go ahead and speak in English for a while, ’cause nothing personal but your language makes me feel like I’m chewing on a sunbaked goat turd. I know not all y’all speak it, but you can translate for your buddies later.”
He glanced around, again expecting some contentious words, but none came. He had his audience, at least the ones who could understand him.
“Y’all have paid a pretty penny to have me here, and I haven’t been sitting on my thumbs. I’ve been thinking. As I understand it, y’all want to put the fun back in fundamentalist, is that right?” He was playing on his southern roots, exaggerating it almost to the point of parody, but it was worth it; these men were likely cringing internally at the very notion of listening to an American, let alone a yokel.
“The Ayatollah is misguided,” said the Tall Man in English. “His peace with the US is a grave error. Already we have witnessed trade agreements and economic sanctions that threaten to bring westernization to our country to the point of—”
Fitz held up a hand. “I get it, man, one McDonald’s in Tehran is one too many. Y’all don’t want a Walmart coming in next, or there goes the neighborhood.”
“We want to strike a blow to the psyche and pride of their nation,” the Tall Man said forcefully. “While simultaneously demonizing Iran in the eyes of Americans again. There can be no peace!”
“You mentioned that,” Fitz mused. “Right, so whip up some good ol’-fashioned Islamophobia like back in the early aughts.” It sounded so strange on the surface; these men wanted to vilify their own country in order to save it. They, a small contingent of less than a dozen, assumed they were the mouthpiece of a nation, the true heroes that would do what they needed to do, whatever was necessary to keep Iran from becoming anything like the Big Bad West.
That sort of loyalty could easily be seen as unfounded, even insane. But Fitzpatrick could understand it. After all, he’d been a Marine for more than a decade.
Oo-rah.
“And you know how to do this?” Ugly Guy asked.
“I got an idea. Pass me that tablet.”
The Tall Man slid the tablet toward him and Fitzpatrick navigated to YouTube. He typed a keyword into the search bar and waited—“Wi-Fi sucks here,” he muttered—and then tapped on a video thumbnail. It took an irritatingly long time to buffer, but when it finally played, he turned the screen so everyone present could see. They drew in closer, the nine of them, bunching up shoulder to shoulder as their brows furrowed in confusion.
On the screen was an old man. He sat in a preschool classroom with a picture book in his lap and a circle of children seated around him as he read a story about a family of ducks trying to cross a busy street. The old man wore a US Army ball cap and a checkered flannel shirt and jeans. He had deep laugh lines creased around his still-bright blue eyes, though his hair had long since gone white. He hunched over the book and read slowly, all the while keeping a genial smile on his weathered face.
