on the second floor of the house, the smallest of the bedrooms that he had outfitted with his desk, shelves, and impressive book collection. He should have been preparing his lecture for Monday on the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. As an adjunct professor of European history at Georgetown University, Reid’s commitment was hardly more than part-time, but still he craved the classroom. It represented a return to normalcy, much like he wanted for his girls. But that task would wait.
Instead, Reid reverently laid a dark disc on the spindle of an old phonograph in the corner and lowered the needle. He closed his eyes as Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 began, slow and melodic, like a springtime thaw after the long winter’s freeze. He smiled. The machine was more than seventy-five years old but still worked perfectly. It had been a gift to him from Kate on their fifth wedding anniversary; she had found the ramshackle phonograph at a flea market for an asking price of six dollars, and then paid more than two hundred to have it refurbished to nearly its former glory.
Kate. His smile faded to a grimace.
You’re at the black site in Morocco, nicknamed Hell-Six. Interrogating a known terrorist.
There’s a call for you. It’s Deputy Director Cartwright. Your boss.
He doesn’t mince words. Your wife, Kate, was killed.
It happened as she was leaving work, walking to her car. Kate had been given a powerful dose of tetrodotoxin, also known as TTX, a potent poison that caused sudden paralysis of the diaphragm. She suffocated on the street and was dead in less than a minute.
In the weeks since Eastern Europe, Reid had revisited the memory many times—or rather, the memory had revisited him, forcing its way into the forefront of his mind when least expected. Everything reminded him of Kate, from the furniture in their living room to the scent that somehow still lingered on his pillow; from the color of Sara’s eyes to Maya’s angled chin. She was everywhere… and so was the lie that he withheld from his girls.
He had tried several times to remember more, but he wasn’t actually certain that he knew any more than that. After his wife’s murder, Kent Steele had gone on a dangerous rampage across Europe and the Middle East, killing dozens that were associated with the terrorist organization Amun. Then came the memory suppressor, and the subsequent two years of oddly blissful ignorance.
Reid went to the closet in the far corner of the room. Inside it was a small black duffel bag, what CIA agents called a bug-out bag. In it was everything that an operative would need to go dark for an indeterminate amount of time, should the situation call for it. This particular bag had belonged to his former best friend, the now-deceased Agent Alan Reidigger. Reid had few memories of the man, but he knew enough to know that Reidigger had helped him in a time of need—and had paid for it with his life.
Most importantly, in the bag was a letter. He pulled it out, the third-length creases well worn with time and rereading.
Hey Zero, the letter began prophetically. If you’re reading this, I’m probably dead.
He skipped a couple of paragraphs down the sheet.
The CIA wanted to bring you in, but you wouldn’t listen. It wasn’t just because of your warpath. There was something else, something you were close to finding—too close. I can’t tell you what it was because even I don’t know. You wouldn’t tell me, so it must have been heavy.
Reid believed he knew what Reidigger was referring to—the conspiracy. A brief flash of memory he had recovered while tracking down Imam Khalil and the smallpox virus had shown him that he knew something before the suppressor was implanted in his head.
He closed his eyes and returned to the memory:
The CIA black site in Morocco. Designation H-6, aka Hell Six. An interrogation. You pull the fingernails from an Arab man for information about the whereabouts of a bomb maker.
Between screams and whimpers and insistences that he doesn’t know, something else emerges—a pending war. Something big coming. A conspiracy, designed by the US government.
You don’t believe him. Not at first. But you couldn’t just let it go.
He knew something back then. Like a jigsaw puzzle, he had started to put it together. Then Amun happened. Kate’s murder happened. He got distracted, and while he vowed to return to it, he never got the chance.
He read over the rest of Alan’s letter:
Whatever it was, it’s still there, locked away in your brain somewhere. If you ever need it, there is a way. The neurosurgeon that installed the implant, his name is Dr. Guyer. He was last practicing in Zurich. He could bring back everything, if you choose. Or he could suppress them all again, if you wanted to do that. The choice is yours. Godspeed, Zero. —Alan
Reid could not recall how many times he had sat in front of the computer or on his phone and tried to motivate his fingers to type Dr. Guyer’s name into a search bar. His desire to have his memory restored—no, his necessity to have it back was growing more intense with every passing week, to the point that it felt urgent that he know just how much he didn’t know. He needed to be able to recall his own past.
But I can’t leave the girls. In the wake of the incident, there was no way he could just up and go to Switzerland. He would be downright neurotic about their safety, even with the tracking implants. Even with Agent Strickland watching over them. Besides, what would they think? Maya would never believe it was for a medical procedure. She would think he was doing field work again.
So bring them. The thought entered his head so easily that he nearly laughed at himself for not thinking of it before. But then he discounted it just as quickly. What about his job? What about Sara’s therapy sessions? Hadn’t he just tried to convince Maya to return to school?
Don’t overthink it, he told himself. Wasn’t the simplest solution usually the right one? It wasn’t like anything else had worked to snap Sara out of her funk, and Maya seemed intent on being headstrong, as usual.
Reid pushed Reidigger’s bug-out bag back into the closet and scrambled to his feet. Before he could convince himself to change his mind he strode down the hall to Maya’s room and knocked rapidly on her door.
She opened it and folded her arms, clearly still unhappy with him. “Yeah?”
“Let’s go on a trip.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Let’s go on a trip, the three of us,” he said again, pushing past her into the bedroom. “Look, I was wrong to bring up the incident. I see that now. Sara doesn’t need to be reminded of it; she needs the opposite.” He was ranting, gesticulating with his hands, but he pressed on. “This past month all she’s done is lie around and dwell on what happened. Maybe what she needs is a distraction. Maybe she just needs to make some pleasant memories to be reminded of how good things can be.”
Maya frowned as if struggling to follow his logic. “So you want to go on a trip. To where?”
“Let’s go skiing,” he replied. “Remember when we went to Vermont, about four or five years ago? Remember how much Sara loved the bunny slope?”
“I remember,” Maya said, “but Dad, it’s April. Ski season is over.”
“Not in the Alps, it’s not.”
She stared at him as if he had lost his mind. “You want to go to the Alps?”
“Yes. Switzerland, to be specific. And I know you think this is crazy, but I’m thinking clearly here. We’re not doing ourselves any favors stagnating around here. We need a change of scenery—especially Sara.”
“But… what about your work?”
Reid shrugged. “I’ll play hooky.”
“No one says that anymore.”
“I’ll worry about what to tell the university,” he said. And the agency. “Family comes first.” Reid was mostly certain the CIA wasn’t going to fire him over demanding some time