Target Zero (An Agent Zero Spy Thriller—Book #2)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Reid was astonished to find the Athens Grand Hotel completely barricaded by the time they returned. Their pursuit of the Syrians had taken no more than twenty minutes, yet in that small window of time the five-star hotel had turned into an absolute madhouse.

Greek authorities had shown up in force, no doubt tipped off by Interpol about the suspected presence of the virus and Syrian terrorists. Several police cars choked the valet parking area, lights flashing. A WHO containment unit was on-site, donning containment suits as police evacuated angry guests out of the building and ushered them across the street.

“Well,” said Dr. Barnard quietly from the back seat, “I suppose the proverbial cat is out of the bag now.” He pointed; several members of the media had already shown up, reporting on the incident.

Watson double-parked the SUV and the three of them hurried to the entrance to find it swarming with bodies. It took three minutes to find Maria and Carver, the former of whom seemed to be in a heated discussion with a man in a blue suit. Interpol, Reid assumed. They likely wouldn’t be happy that the CIA had somehow made it here first.

“They showed up just minutes ago,” Carver told them as they approached. “The police right after them.” The voices of frustrated guests nearly drowned him out. All of Europe had temporarily shut down international travel, and there seemed to be plenty of irate people wondering where they were supposed to go if not home or the evacuating hotel.

Maria stormed over to them, obviously irritated. “So much for cooperation between agencies,” she muttered. “Interpol charged in here and took over the place like we were nobodies. I tried to tell them we found no evidence of the virus, but they’re insistent on sweeping the entire hotel.”

“I’m betting they’re not too happy with us right now,” said Watson, shooting a glance Reid’s way.

He ignored it. “Did you get into the room? What did you find?”

“Let’s get out of here first.” Maria started toward the waiting SUV.

“So you found something?” Reid pressed.

“Tell you on the road.”

“And what about sharing what we know with Interpol?” Watson asked.

Maria paused, annoyed. “We’ll share with Baraf. We know him and we trust him. Look around you. Interpol shows up with the WHO in hazmat suits? There won’t be any misconceptions about what this is or what it could be, and I don’t want to be standing here when this crowd becomes a mob.”

Reid hurried after her. She was right—and, he had to admit, so was Cartwright. This was why he wanted to keep the op small and quiet. People tended to start asking questions, if not panicking, when a dozen agents showed up… let alone the police and the WHO.

Watson drove, with Barnard between Reid and Carver in the rear. “What’d you find?”

“There wasn’t anyone else in the room,” Carver told them. “And I checked the guest log at the front desk; there were only two people registered for the suite.”

“The two we went after,” Reid guessed.

“And?” Carver asked.

“They’re dead now,” he replied flatly.

If Carver had anything to say about it, he kept it to himself. He was Watson’s former partner, so Reid had few misgivings that they might share the same mentality.

“But I got this.” Reid pulled the Syrian’s phone from his pocket. It was a simple flip phone, no internet connectivity or GPS—likely a burner, but that would hardly be a hindrance. He flipped it open and navigated the menu with a thumb. “There’s nothing saved in here, no contacts or names or messages… but there’s a number. Just one, and it looks like it called them once a day for the past eleven days.”

“The student from Stockholm, Renault, was murdered eleven days ago,” Barnard noted.

“Exactly.” Reid passed the phone to Carver. “Send that number to Langley to trace.” If the caller was also on a burner phone, they wouldn’t be able to get a name—but they could trace the last call to a location, and as long as the phone was on, they could find it using cell tower relays.

Reid almost smirked. Ordinarily he could hardly figure out how to program a new contact into his cell phone, but a working knowledge of call-tracing was suddenly there when he needed it. Curious, he thought. He would have to test the returning knowledge when he had a moment. After we find the virus, and the jihadist behind it, of course.

“So we’ve got two dead Syrians and a cell phone number.” Watson sighed. “It’s not much, but I guess it’s something.”

“We also have this.” Maria reached for the small of her back and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “We tossed the room before anyone else got there. There was hardly anything out of the ordinary—but there was one thing that stood out. Here, take a look.” She passed it behind her to Reid.

The page was folded in thirds, well-worn and crinkled as if it had been opened and closed several times. Barnard peered over Reid’s shoulder as he unfolded and scrutinized it.

On the page were a number of black circles, drawn in marker, in no discernible pattern or order. There were no labels or words or numbers; just small circles, hand-drawn in such a way that to Reid it looked like a game of connect-the-dots. There were twenty-five in all, many of the circles crowded closely together in the lower left corner of the page, with a number of others spanned further out along the right side.

“What is this?” he asked.

“No idea,” Maria told him. “Like I said, it was the only thing that looked strange, so we took it.”

“Did you share that with Interpol?” Watson asked.

“Not yet. I snapped a photo; I’ll send it to Baraf.” She twisted slightly in her seat and added, “But if we happen to figure out what it is first, that would be very helpful.”

“Barnard?” Reid murmured. “What’s your take?”

“I can honestly say I am at a loss, Agent.” The doctor pushed his silver glasses up his nose. “Perhaps the dots connect to form a shape, or a symbol, or… or a map?”

“A map.” Reid stared at the page until his eyes lost focus. Dots on a map. “Like the Manstein Plan,” he muttered.

“Sorry?”

“In the early forties, German war plans were transmitted in pieces,” Reid explained quickly. “If any single piece was intercepted, it wouldn’t make any sense. But together, they formed a complete plan of attack. This could be a piece of their attack, their jihad.” He shook his head. “But if this is a map, it’s not anywhere I recognize. Once we’re on the plane, we could try overlaying it against maps of Europe, start with the Iberian Peninsula where the first outbreak began and see if we come up with anything that makes sense—”

“Good lord,” Barnard interrupted suddenly. His eyes widened behind his owlish glasses. “Agent Steele…” He snatched the page from Reid’s hands and flipped it around. “What does this look like to you now?”

Reid lost his breath for a moment. Suddenly the arrangement of the dots made a lot more sense—but not at all in the way he had hoped. “It’s the western half of the world,” he said quietly.

Maria twisted again in her seat. “What?”

“Here.” Reid traced his finger along the cluster of dots now in the upper-right corner. “Europe. If this dot is Barcelona, then this would be Paris, London, Brussels, Berlin…” He ran his finger along the page to the other side, now on the left, over the dots that were spanned further apart.

“The United States.” Barnard’s voice was slightly tremulous, and for good reason. Fourteen of the twenty-five dots were focused in what would be the US on the map, from Miami up to New York, and several more on the West Coast.

Reid’s throat ran dry. He couldn’t tell if it was coincidence or purposeful, but the largest of the dots was unmistakably over where the nation’s capital would be. Washington, DC, was a target—and only a twenty-minute drive from his new home, just over the Potomac from his daughters. He didn’t want to imagine the horror of his girls falling ill with such a fatal virus. His mind reeled back to Barnard’s description of the symptoms—fever, nausea, internal bleeding. Fall sick in the morning and be dead before sundown.

If the virus found its way to the United States before he could stop it, and it was released in DC, his own children could be dead before he even returned.

“Maria, we need to get that photo to Langley and to Baraf,” Reid said suddenly. “Every city on this map needs to be aware that they’re a target.”

“Already on it.”

“Barnard, I want you to get on the phone to the CDC and tell them what we’ve found.”

“Of course.” He gulped. “What… what should I tell them? We don’t know when this will happen, or how—”

“I overheard the two Syrians in the hotel right before they ran,” Reid explained. “One of them mentioned the Imam, and said that ‘today is the day.’ Now I don’t know what that means exactly, but we have to assume the worst.”

“Another attack,” said Watson.

“Right. So we can only relay what we know and try to be ready for anything…”

“And now we have a deadline to find our Mahdi,” Maria added ruefully.

Carver’s phone chimed. “We’ve got a location. The last call came from Marseille.”

Reid blinked in surprise. “Southern France?” He shook his head. “No, that can’t be right.” Marseille was barely three hundred miles from Barcelona. Reid had assumed that the perpetrators would be as far away from the virus as possible, and that the virologist would have long fled from France. Either he had been wrong, or they were being fed another red herring, much like his suspicions with Barcelona. Was this Mahdi just that smart, or simply a lunatic?

Maybe both, he thought. If that was the case, they had mere hours to locate and interrogate an intelligent psychopath armed with twenty-four vials of a deadly virus he intended to unleash on the entire western world.