Chasing zero, p.5
Chasing Zero, page 5
part #9 of Agent Zero Spy Thriller Series
He felt a giddy, tingling sensation in his chest as he said it. Saying it aloud somehow made it so much more real.
Barkley smiled broadly. “That is incredibly great news, Jon. Saudi Arabia has agreed to our terms, as has Iran. With Israel and Palestine, there will be few more pieces of the puzzle remaining.”
Rutledge returned the smile. “This is significant progress, to be sure.”
“Just keep me in mind when you accept your Nobel Peace Prize—”
“When we accept it,” he corrected her. “There will be no crediting me without your name in the same breath, Jo. This is as much yours as mine.” She would be president one day, he had no doubt about that. But he did not say that aloud; he didn’t want to come off as pandering. And she likely already knew it.
“When?” she asked.
“Soon. Very soon. Within the week. It’s going to happen fast. Which means arranging an attaché and security team to Jerusalem...”
He trailed off as Joanna frowned and held up a hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But Jerusalem? Why not here, on US soil? It’s not atypical for such an accord to be signed here in Washington.”
Rutledge nodded. He’d expected that she might have thoughts on this matter. “True. But this is anything but a typical situation. President Dawoud was insistent. He believes it will be symbolic, help unify the people, and to be frank, I’m of the same mind. The prime minister agrees. There’s no other place for it.”
Joanna said nothing further, but her troubled expression spoke volumes. Rutledge stood, his knees cracking a bit as he did, and took one of her hands in both of his. “It’s perfectly safe, Jo. This is in the interest of peace and it will be peaceful. This is a huge and necessary win. The entire world will be watching, and with a little luck, others will follow this example.” He chuckled slightly and added, “Besides, I have the very best security available. Trust me on that.”
Barkley raised an eyebrow. “Your newly minted Executive Team?”
Rutledge nodded. Barkley was his biggest ally, to be sure. But he had another, and one that was just as crucial. If Joanna was the patient hands that worked at the tangle, Agent Zero and his team were the scissors, ready to cut at unruly knots that threatened to halt progress.
Zero would be in Jerusalem for the accord. Rutledge would see to that.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mrs. Zero.
It was a joke. Maria knew it was just a joke and that Alan hadn’t meant anything more by it. But still, with that simple comment came a plethora of thoughts, intrusive ones, uninvited ones.
What would it mean to be his team leader and his wife?
What would his girls think? They knew she had no intention of trying to replace their late mother, Kate. But they were as strong-willed as the man who raised them—maybe more so.
What would it mean for Mischa? Would it mean more stability, or more chaos?
She fidgeted in the hard-backed plastic chair outside Director Shaw’s office. Her lower back was cramping; she’d been sitting there for thirty minutes now and was fairly certain that she was being made to wait on purpose.
So she sat, and she waited, and she tilted her hand left and right and admired the way the diamond caught the light in a thousand dazzling ways in its faceted façade, and instead of being elated she sat there half-terrified and had her intrusive thoughts.
Mrs. Zero.
What if things went wrong again between them, like they had before, more than once?
What if his memory issues came back? He claimed to have them under control, but she always felt like he’d been closely guarded about that part of him.
The ring itself was perfect. He’d told her, two days ago right after he proposed, that he’d chosen it because it reminded him of her: brilliant and beautiful without being ostentatious. That was the word he’d used—“ostentatious.” She could take the professor out of the classroom, but…
But what if he decided he wanted to quit the agency again?
What if he came to despise her for being the one who forced him back in? When he had gone rogue and helped the interpreter, Karina Pavlo, Maria had no choice but to retroactively renew him as an agent so he could avoid a lengthy jail sentence. Now he had no choice but to continue being Agent Zero. Was that even what he wanted?
What if she couldn’t be Kate Lawson? Or Karina? Or the Israeli Mossad agent, Talia Mendel, who made no efforts to hide her obvious attraction to him—
“Johansson.” CIA Director Edward Shaw looked down at her, his spine as straight as if it was made of wood, his mouth grimacing. She’d only ever seen the man smile once, and that was when he was certain he was about to fire her entire team and have charges brought against them.
She rose and wordlessly followed him into his office. He lowered himself into a high-backed leather chair; she remained standing.
“Your team is well?” he asked stiffly.
She knew he didn’t care. Though they still technically worked for the CIA, it meant only that their paychecks were drawn from agency funding. They answered to Rutledge now, and there was no love lost between her and Shaw.
“Let’s skip the pleasantries,” she said plainly. “You took your time with this enough as it is.”
Shaw’s throat flexed but he held back whatever barb he might have prepared. “These things take time,” he said instead, and he pushed a thick folder across the desk to her. “It’s not terribly easy to invent a new citizen.”
Three weeks prior, President Rutledge announced the formation of the Executive Operations Team. That same day—that same meeting, in fact—Maria issued a threat to the CIA director. He would release the girl into her care, or Maria would tell the president, and the press, that the agency was in the habit of illegally detaining minors without due process in secret subterranean holding cells of the George Bush Center for Intelligence in the unincorporated community of Langley, Virginia.
She’d given him a week. He had taken three. Her patience, needless to say, had run out.
“Go ahead,” Shaw prodded. “Ensure it’s all there.”
Maria reached for the folder and opened it.
The first page was a birth certificate issued in the state of Virginia, from a Presbyterian hospital, citing the abandonment of an infant girl. Mother unknown. Name: typical for the child welfare system when dealing with unknown origins. “Foundling child.”
The next few pages were documents from an orphanage that alleged to have harbored the girl until she was nine years old. There she had been given the name Mischa.
The Social Security card that had been issued bore the full name of Mischa Doe, since she had no known parent. She had been with three foster families between the ages of nine and twelve. There were report cards from schools. Immunization records. Even a passport, stamped with a single entry of a trip to Germany, likely the product of a vacation with a foster family.
The only word of it that was real was the name Mischa.
Otherwise, it was one hundred percent fabricated. Yet at the same time it was as real as Maria’s own documentation. The CIA had seen to that. As Shaw had said, they had invented a citizen out of the girl.
The last sheaf of papers was the most important, at least to her. The adoption papers, from the Commonwealth of Virginia, releasing Mischa into the care of one Maria Johansson, making her the full legal guardian of the twelve-year-old. And, on the last page, an official change-of-name allowance.
Mischa Johansson.
Seeing that made it suddenly so real that Maria had to blink away a tear. There was no way in hell she was going to shed one in front of Shaw.
“Is everything to your satisfaction?” he asked.
She nodded. “It is.” Despite herself, and despite how long he’d taken, she added, “Thank you.”
“There’s no going back on this,” Shaw warned her. “Once she walks out of here, she’s your problem entirely. We will disavow any knowledge whatsoever—”
“I know how it works,” Maria interjected curtly. “I’ve been at this longer than you have.”
“Then, if there’s nothing else…”
“There’s not.” Maria turned on a heel and exited the office quickly, tucking the folder under one arm. There was no sense in delaying it further. She moved with purpose, entering the elevator as if Shaw might change his mind and come dashing after her. She swiped her CIA keycard through a vertical slot in the panel just below the floor buttons and pressed the sequence of 4-2-3. The code that would take her down, down below the basement, down even below the Research & Development level where Penny would be hard at work on some new weapon or gadget.
As a former deputy director, Maria knew there were at least four sublevels beneath Langley—at least four, because she was certain there were others that she had not been cleared to know about. There was a saying among them, a joke, that for every secret you learn there are ten more you don’t. Maria knew a lot of secrets. But after today there would be one fewer.
The elevator doors opened on a cinder-blocked corridor painted blindingly white, bright fluorescent bulbs buzzing overhead. The clack of her shoes echoed as she marched to the third steel door on the right, once again swiping her keycard and waiting for the heavy electronic bolt to slide aside.
Ben, the gray-haired security guard, nodded to her. His job description seemed to be to sit behind a beige desk and read back issues of Sports Illustrated. “Ms. Johansson. Nice to see you again.”
She showed him the folder. “Last time in a while, I imagine.”
“You don’t mean…?” He grinned broadly as he shuffled his feet off the desk. “Well, I’ll be damned. Let me get my keys.”
“Hang on. I want to talk to her first. Just for a minute.”
Ben nodded. “Go ahead. Just give a holler when you need me.”
“Thanks.” Maria passed his desk, through another steel door with a security-glassed window that led to a corridor lined on both sides with cells. Each cell was twelve foot by twelve foot, with a floor and ceiling of concrete. Instead of bars, the walls were comprised of two-inch reinforced glass with a grid of half-inch holes in the side facing the corridor. There were no windows—they were, after all, underground—but even worse was that there did not appear to be any door in the cell. It was a psychological maneuver, intended to make a prisoner believe there was absolutely no way out. No one could even attempt to escape if they didn’t see a means by which to do so.
Maria knew that the cells were accessible by a hidden panel in one of the glass facades, carefully hidden by optical illusion and clever engineering. Prisoners here were brought in sedated and woke up in an inescapable glass cage.
The thought made her heart break all over again, as it did every time she was down here. It had only been three days since her last visit—she tried to come at least once a week, twice if she could, because the girl had no other visitors. Hell, there were less than a dozen people on the planet that even knew she was down there.
Maria stopped in front of the final cell on the left side of the corridor, the terminus of which was merely another concrete wall. The cell contained a small cot with blanket and pillow; a tiny, open bathroom area of sink, toilet, and shower head, with a metal grate in the floor below; a single steel chair, bolted to the floor; and in that chair, a twelve-year-old girl, blonde, green-eyed, her expression as flat and passive as ever as she thumbed through a well-worn paperback copy of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground.
She must have read it a dozen times since Maria had brought it to her. On every visit, the girl’s thumb was keeping a different place.
“I could have brought you another book, you know.” Maria’s voice sounded louder than it should have in the empty space, the corridor, the vacant cell block.
“I like this book.” Mischa looked up. Her expression did not change from its blank, passive slate, but she nodded once. “Privyet, Maria.”
Hi. All things considered, it was a small victory that the girl chose to use such an informal greeting. Mischa spoke fluent English, Russian, Chinese, and Ukrainian—the ones Maria knew of—and could not only switch between them flawlessly but could affect an equally appropriate accent when needed. Her language skills were so convincing it was impossible to tell where she actually came from, what language she might have learned first.
Considering she had been a sparrow-in-training by a Russian expatriate and spy, it was not only entirely possible but likely that she had been brought up learning all of them.
Mischa had been an unwitting terrorist. Maria knew that, by virtue of the fact that the girl had tried to kill both her and Zero. She had been a part of the Chinese/Russian squad that initiated attacks on US soil with an ultrasonic weapon. But Maria and her team had agreed not to breathe a word about it in their briefing. The CIA had nothing on her but speculation. They could prove nothing. Mischa was equally silent, not out of solidarity but from indoctrination and training. As far as anyone else was concerned, this was an innocent twelve-year-old girl who had been held in the bowels of Langley for the past four months.
Mischa was deadly. She could fight. She could kill. She could load a gun one-handed and drive a car with the other. But she was just a child, one who never got the chance to know any other sort of life.
“Mischa,” she said, “you’re getting out of here today.”
The girl’s eyebrows twitched. It was almost imperceptible, but as far as Mischa’s expressions went, the girl may as well have dropped her jaw.
“Will you be able to visit me where they send me?” she asked.
The response stunned Maria. She had expected the first question to be where she was going, what would happen to her. It was as if the girl had consigned herself to this glass-walled fate.
“I… no. I mean, yes. I mean—I’m sorry. You don’t understand.”
God, why is this so hard?
Maria had been careful to avoid any mention on past visits about Mischa being released into her care. She didn’t want to jinx it, to get any hopes up only to encounter some bureaucratic stymie. Still, she had dreamed so many times of this moment, what she would say, and now the words seemed to fail her.
She cleared her throat and tried again. “What I mean is, you’re coming home. With me. To my home. Our home.”
Maria didn’t know what she had expected. It wasn’t as if the girl was going to jump for joy or weep or even thank her. But the last thing she had expected was a deep frown to appear on her young face.
“Why?”
And with that, Maria realized her fatal mistake. She’d had the CIA jump through numerous hoops to do this and hadn’t once considered asking Mischa if that’s what she wanted. She had just assumed that anything was better than this.
“Because… I want you to,” Maria said plainly. “I want you to get out of this place and come live with me and…” This was not going as well as she’d hoped. “Mischa, do you remember the game that we played? ‘Never Have I Ever’?”
The girl nodded.
“You told me, then, that you wanted to play soccer. And have friends. Right?”
“Yes. And you want to see the Bahamas and raise a garden.”
Maria smiled. “That’s right. I can do those things, and so can you. If… if you really want to.” She paused to give the girl a moment to respond. But when she didn’t, Maria added, “So do you? Want to?”
Mischa glanced around at her glass walls. She closed her book and held it in both hands.
“Yes. I will go to your home.”
Maria let out a sigh of relief that she didn’t realize she’d been holding. “Good,” she said. “I promise… this will be good for you. For us both.” And she called for Ben and his keys.
*
Twenty minutes later,Maria and Mischa walked out of Langley through the front doors. No one looked twice at them. No one tried to stop them. Mischa had been allowed to have back the clothes she’d been wearing when she arrived, a green sweater and jeans and black sneakers. It was cold out, but the sun was shining and Mischa paused on the front steps, tilting her head upward to let the rays shine on her face for a moment.
They climbed into Maria’s blue sedan and Mischa dutifully clicked her seatbelt. It wasn’t a far drive; the small craftsman bungalow she and Zero had bought together was in the suburbs of Langley, in Fairfax County.
It was real. This was real. Mischa was sitting beside her, in her car, no longer in a glass cell and paper clothes and barefoot.
And Maria was terrified all over again.
What the hell do I do now?
“Um… so we’ll go home first,” she said, trying to sound like she had it all planned out, “and let you get settled in. See the place. We’ll have to get you some clothes. Figure out what food you like. Oh! Speaking of. Do you have any allergies?”
“Yes. Strawberries.”
Maria couldn’t help but chuckle. “Really? Strawberries?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Good to know. Um… it’s already March, so we’ll wait to enroll you in school until the fall semester. I’m guessing your reading and comprehension level is much higher than seventh grade anyway…” She trailed off, noticing that Mischa was staring directly at her. “What is it?”
“I will go to an American school?”
“Well… yes. An education is important.”
“I have been educated.”
“No, you’ve been—” She stopped herself short.
Indoctrinated. That’s what she was about to say. You’ve been indoctrinated. “There are other things you need to know,” she said instead. “Forget it for now. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“What bridge?”
Maria held back a short laugh. “It’s an idiom. It means, we’ll deal with that later when the time comes.”
“Ah. We will cross the bridge when we come to it.” Mischa said it as if she was trying on a new shirt, and then nodded, seemingly satisfied.
