Chasing zero, p.12
Chasing Zero, page 12
part #9 of Agent Zero Spy Thriller Series
“All good?” Maria asked as he rejoined them.
He flashed her a thumbs-up.
The walk to the location was like a funeral procession. They went single-file to avoid passersby with the busy foot traffic. None of them spoke, and they kept their heads down. There was no need to, really, since no one knew who they were here. But, Zero mused, maybe the others were thinking the same as he was. That despite the clandestine nature of their visit to Jerusalem, this all seemed so… normal, compared to what they were usually asked to do. Dress nice, pretend to be press, and watch the signing a treaty. Even the city around them was, for lack of a better term, normal; culturally and architecturally there was no pretending they could have been walking down a busy American avenue, but it was certainly a far cry from the desert compound they had stormed a few days prior.
When they were within two blocks of the Generali Building, things began to look a lot less normal. The thrumming helicopters flying lazy perimeters around downtown Jerusalem only added to the scene in front of the building. Sawhorses had been set up at a distance from the front entrance, partially blocking the street and limiting it to one lane. Two officers directed the slow flow of traffic while other Israeli cops corralled the gathering crowd into an orderly line.
Zero and his team fell in place with this line. It seemed that most of the attendees were far better dressed than he was; dignitaries and members of the Palestinian and Israeli governments alike were present, along with attachés and entourages, but as far as the police and security were concerned they were just another body to get safely inside the building.
The first security point was an ID check. A stern-faced officer in a black tac vest and helmet checked Zero’s press badge and American identification, holding it up as he glanced several times between his face and the ID. Finally he handed it back and waved him through.
The second checkpoint was just inside the bright atrium. Metal detectors. Zero took off his watch and belt, and from his pockets took the satellite phone and the wallet that contained his fake ID and some cash. Finally he slipped out of the boots and placed all of the items in a gray bin, along with the tape recorder in his pocket.
He stepped through the detector without incident. On the other side, a white guy in a black suit held up a hand to gesture for him to pause. A second agent peeked into the bin and gave it a once-over.
Zero held his breath as the agent picked up one of the boots. The left one. He bit the inside of his cheek as the agent ran a latex-gloved hand over the sole, around the contour of the underside, and over the toe of the boot.
If that knife was to spring out right now…
But it didn’t. The agent set the boot down again and slid the gray tray over to Zero.
After pulling the boots back on, he headed toward the third checkpoint. Palestinian Presidential Guard by the looks of them, in black uniforms and black berets. They were posted by the door to the auditorium and kept a keen eye on the attendees as they filed past, occasionally pulling someone aside for a brief frisk, checking handbags and waving security wands.
Zero passed them without incident, and the rest of the team followed him inside.
The auditorium was not large. An elevated dais at the far end of the room held a podium bearing the seal of the President of the United States, and a table, the cloth covering of which displayed the flags of Israel and Palestine. Three chairs behind the table indicated where the men of honor would soon be seated for the signing.
Directly before the dais was a press pit, a standing-room-only span of open floor where already more than a dozen cameras were set up, facing the dais as reporters gave introductory reports and traded information with their counterparts back in whatever studio they hailed from. Behind the press pit were rows of seats for the guests of the signing, dignitaries and diplomats and military personnel, the chairs set upon curving elevated rows like an amphitheater.
The five of them filed into the press area and took positions in the order that Maria had dictated earlier. He checked his watch; less than ten minutes before the ceremony would begin. More press members pressed into the pit with them, forcing them nearly shoulder to shoulder. There were tons of media there, from a number of countries, each wanting a good vantage point, a clear shot, and some breathing room when there wasn’t much.
Zero realized the flaw in their plan; as press, they’d have a front-row seat to ensure nothing happened to the president, but maneuvering out of there would be difficult.
“Like sardines in here,” Alan said, his voice a low rumble. He had a knack of reading Zero’s mind in moments like these. They often seemed to think alike. Alan’s instincts in a situation like this were just as keen as his own, and he wondered what his friend was thinking in the moment. If he had the same butterflies in his stomach, congealing into a nervous cocoon of a knot.
Alan brought the digital camera up near his face and turned slowly, as if getting a panning shot of the crowd behind him, but likely scoping the crowd for anyone suspicious or looking anxious—besides Zero, that was.
All the personnel has been carefully vetted, he reminded himself. Security is thorough and tight. There were eight members of the Palestinian Presidential Guard flanking the dais, possibly more elsewhere that he couldn’t see, spanned about eight feet from each other, hands clasped in front of them and eyes straight ahead, automatic pistols slung on straps over their shoulders…
Zero frowned. It seemed an odd choice of weapon for security in a situation like this. He struggled to remember the service weapons of the Palestinians.
“Alan,” he said quietly. “Do you know what the—”
A speaker hummed before he could finish, and a male voice said solemnly over the PA system, “Ladies and gentlemen.” A hush fell over the crowd instantly as the greeting was repeated in Arabic and Hebrew. “The President of the United States of America.”
Applause broke out behind and around him, but Zero did not join them. His muscles were too tense for that.
Here we go.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Stefan Krauss did not like to ask for help. He preferred to do as much as he could on his own, and did not share his ideas or plans with anyone. However, he recognized that sometimes help was necessary, and as he convalesced in a thatch-roofed hut on a white-sand beach at the edge of the world, he was thankful he had allowed himself a few minor concessions to his independent nature.
The thirty-six-year-old German-born assassin reclined on a white cot with steel bars along both sides, watching a small television that sat upon a table at the foot of the bed. Satellite TV—that was another thing for which he was thankful.
That, and being alive.
He still struggled to believe that the man he had fought with on the South Korean boat had been the real Agent Zero. The man just seemed so… austere, to him. Too much so to be the terrifying specter of so many hardened men’s nightmares. Yet he had bested Krauss, had shot him in the back—the bullet had missed his spine by an inch and a half—and had blown up the boat, using its own charge, the plasma railgun, against it.
Sheikh Salman, Krauss’s most recent employer, was dead by an alleged self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Ayatollah of Iran was alive. But so was Krauss.
Agent Zero would certainly not believe it possible. It would have taken a miracle for Krauss to have survived the gunshot, the explosion, the plunge into the icy Atlantic waters with no hope of rescue.
But Stefan Krauss had allowed himself those concessions, to put into place certain measures, contingencies, in the event of failure. He was not a stranger to failure, and was not so haughty or hubristic to believe that such things were impossible. That sort of arrogance was best left to cinematic villains and soon-to-be-dead men.
Krauss was alive.
Stefan Krauss was not his real name; he had abandoned that long ago, at age fourteen, when he was forced to flee his former life for murdering his rapist stepfather. His first kill. Sloppy, emotional, some might even say inefficient. There had been a real Stefan Krauss, a German football player with the Dortmund club. The now-Krauss remembered him well from his boyhood, even if he had only played for one season before being killed in an automobile accident near Dusseldorf.
On the television, the American song played that cued the introduction of the US president. “Hail to the Chief,” it was called. He smiled; they had an anthem for everything, the Americans.
The president spoke a few words, even quoted Einstein. A fellow German. Krauss supposed it was intended to inspire but he failed to relate. A peace treaty? Anyone who believed in treaties hadn’t been paying attention. Did history not prove, again and again and again, that violence was a faster and far more effective path to peace? The Americans had every tool necessary to put a swift and crushing end to violence and infighting in their targeted regions, yet they chose diplomacy and peace talks. Such things were fleeting. Did they genuinely believe it would last? Or were they just pandering?
He flexed the fingers on his left hand and pain shot through them. He had sustained some nerve damage from being in the water for so long. Most likely permanent.
Krauss should have been dead, but he was alive. Thanks to his contingencies. Yes, three weeks earlier he had been shot, and he had been on the boat when the railgun was directed at its bow and fired. He’d been flung many meters, and thrown into the thirty-five-degree water of the Atlantic, a hundred and sixty miles from the American shore.
He had been wearing a neoprene dry suit under his clothes, polar grade. The sort of suit divers wore for dangerous underwater expeditions in the Arctic.
If he had lost consciousness when he hit the water, there was no doubt he would have drowned. But he did not lose consciousness, and clung to a curved fragment of hull, flipping it upside down, creating not only cover but a small, dark pocket from which he had managed to keep his face and hands just warm enough, by his breath and the heat from his own head.
The suit protected him enough from the freezing waters, but Agent Zero had shot a hole in it. Water was seeping in slowly; he could feel it, though he couldn’t feel the bullet wound anymore as he huddled beneath the fragment of hull, slowly succumbing to hypothermia. Freezing to death.
The second molar on his upper right side was an implant. He reached for it, fingers shaking, twisting it slightly to pull it free, though not without some difficulty and several sharp pains. Eventually the fake tooth came loose. It was made not of enamel but of ceramic—he had to be vigilant not to chew hard foods on that side of his mouth—and he bit down on it, hard, with his left molars to activate the tiny device inside. A beacon, a GPS signal.
Stefan Krauss did not like to ask for help, but he recognized that sometimes help was necessary. Someday he would die, probably much sooner than he would like, but he refused to die for Salman’s cause. So he shivered in his dark, watery, frigid little hull hovel and he counted. Minutes stretched like hours and he counted, for lack of anything better to do than shiver and bleed into the ocean. Eighty-four minutes and twenty-seven seconds went by before he heard the thrum of helicopter rotors. It could have been the Americans, come to survey the wreckage and take him prisoner. But no.
One thing that Stefan Krauss had learned early was that people would do almost anything if the price was right. He lived by that notion. He made contracts by that notion. He planned by that notion. And on that day, blue-lipped and bleeding and near-dead, he survived by that notion.
His rescue had been coordinated by a wealthy Belarusian benefactor, one whom Krauss had made immensely wealthier by eliminating two of his fiercest competitors in the cocaine trade. The benefactor owned a yacht with a helipad and had a pilot on standby two hundred and forty miles from the American coast, as Krauss had requested. He’d never fully believed that the railgun would make it to their target destination.
His neoprene suit was cut away on the helicopter, and he was treated for hypothermia and the bullet wound in his back as he was transported to his safe house, first by the helicopter and then by boat and eventually by seaplane.
The Maldives were a non-extradition archipelago, more than seven hundred miles from the Asian continent’s mainland, but neither of those reasons were why he chose it. Less than five people in the world even knew he was there. No, the location was a matter of convenience; there were more than eleven hundred islands in the Maldives, some of them so tiny they could barely even constitute being called such or warrant being given a proper name. The owner of this island was another for whom Krauss had done a job; he’d killed the man’s older brother so that he could inherit their family’s fortune. And in lieu of payment, Krauss had set up a safe house here, a small thatch-roofed hut stocked with nonperishable food, medical supplies, the bed, a television, and satellite signal.
His caretaker was a retired nurse and native Maldivian from Malé he had flown in. People would do almost anything if the price was right, including being on-call for a man with a bullet hole in his back and nerve damage in his extremities, with no questions asked.
The hut was less than thirty meters from the stretch of white sand. He could hear the surf crashing just beyond it, a lullaby that put his mind at ease and helped him to sleep each night. The Maldivian nurse slept in the next room over and checked in on him every hour. She fed him his meals until he could manage it himself. She helped him out of bed to use the restroom when he was again able to walk, and she sponged him clean until he could bathe himself.
He felt no ignominy about his situation. It was necessary. To think it indignant to recuperate properly was best left to those soon-to-be-dead men.
On the live broadcast from Jerusalem, the American president introduced the Palestinian leader, Ashraf Dawoud. He was met by applause, and he too said some words. The camera angled, panning around the auditorium for reactions from the assorted dignitaries present.
Stefan Krauss leaned forward suddenly and with interest. He ignored the pain in his back, in his limbs.
Had he just glimpsed the face of Agent Zero?
No; it was a trick of his mind. It must have been. Although, it would not have been all that difficult to believe he might be there. But in plain sight? Among the press? Unlikely.
It was more likely his own fixation that had caused him to mistake a face. He believed in vendettas—most of his career had been based upon them, in fact, though usually they were those of his clients. What he did not believe in, however, was revenge. It was a silly idea, to pursue and retaliate based solely on the desire to inflict harm for a wrong suffered at their hands.
Besides. There was no money in it.
Krauss preferred the art of subtle manipulation. He had ways of getting information, and he brought that information to those who did not yet know they needed it. He let them believe that his conclusions were their own, and that the plan that was already evident to him had been theirs all along. Case in point: it was he who had discovered the South Koreans’ development of the plasma railgun. It was he who had faked his way onto the research team as security. From there it was a matter of pinpointing the person who would pay the most for his efforts. When the Saudi Arabian king had died, it became perfectly evident who needed it most. The sheikh paid him handsomely, upfront, and the man’s conceit was ample enough that making him believe it had been his work and his plan was simple. Now Salman was dead. And Krauss was alive.
No, Stefan Krauss did not believe in revenge. He had no need for it. Which was why, as soon as he was healthy enough, he would return to the world and find the person who would pay him to find and kill Agent Zero.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Ladies and gentleman,” the voice said over the loudspeaker, “the President of the United States of America.”
“Hail to the Chief” played then, to polite applause as President Jonathan Rutledge stepped out onto the dais from a curtain at the rear of the auditorium. A door, Zero realized, obscured behind the curtain.
Rutledge raised one hand in a slight wave as he approached the podium. He carried himself well, dignified, his suit perfectly pressed and affixed with a pin of the American flag. He had makeup on his cheeks, Zero noticed, and under the flattering soft lights he looked ten years younger.
“Good morning,” said Rutledge into the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great and humble honor to witness this moment in history. Albert Einstein said, ‘Peace cannot be made by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.’ I say that understanding is just the first step. Understanding breeds compassion. Empathy. Camaraderie. Through mutual understanding we can transcend borders and beliefs; we can overcome our differences and realize that we are all one. Though this is but one step of many to achieving true understanding, it is a crucial one, a necessary one, and one that will be written in the annals of history and set a precedent for generations to come.”
Zero winced a little, not only at the president’s speech writers throwing in an Einstein quote, but getting it wrong—it was, “peace cannot be kept by force”—but he quickly reminded himself to stay alert.
“Without further ado,” Rutledge continued, “it is my privilege and honor to introduce the president of the Palestinian National Authority, President Ashraf Dawoud.”
The curtain moved again, and Dawoud emerged to appropriately restrained applause. Dawoud, Zero knew, was fifty-three, fairly fit for a man of his age but softening in his past few years. His neatly trimmed gray beard was flecked with white, and when he turned slightly to face the US president at the podium Zero caught a glimpse of a shining bald spot on his crown.
Dawoud smiled warmly as the two men reached to clasp hands.
An electric jolt surged through Zero’s brain. There was no pain; it was more like a flash of lightning in his head, intense and sudden and bright. And with it, an uncovered memory broke the surface of the ocean that was his limbic system.
