Scar Man contemplated it for a moment further, and then nodded once. “I still think you are an American dog,” he muttered. “Though maybe… more like wolf.”
Fitzpatrick grinned at that.
Two and a half years ago he had been the head of his own company, leader of the private security organization called the Division. At least that’s what the general public and IRS thought they did. In reality, they ran covert ops that even the CIA wouldn’t touch. They loaned themselves out to any banana republic government with an open wallet and in need of a few guns. He and his men toppled regimes and turned the tides of wars.
Then came that day in New York City, a fairly unremarkable afternoon just before the attempted bombing of the Midtown Tunnel. All Fitz and his guys had to do was stall Agent Zero for a little while. But then that Israeli bitch had crashed the party. The Mossad agent with the lesbian haircut had hit him with a car.
He suffered seventeen broken bones that day. A punctured lung. A loss of vision in his right eye that had only partially returned. He was laid up for four months. He had to relearn how to walk. How to shoot a gun. There was permanent nerve damage in his spine and limbs. The former deputy director who had hired him, Ashleigh Riker, had disavowed any connection to the Division and was later imprisoned. Fitz had been lucky in that regard; he avoided prison, but the medical bills bankrupted him. The few remaining members of the Division abandoned him. For the last two years he had no one and nothing.
Except… he still had connections. People still talked, and that chatter had led him here, to a group of people who couldn’t be more different from him but still shared at least one thing in common. They too were willing to do whatever was necessary to regain some sense of control, to salvage whatever they could of what used to be.
They would take lives if they had to. Just like he would. Just like he had before.
After everything he’d done for his country, they had turned their back on him. Dissolved his company, disavowed him. He’d lost everything. But this… this was a way to get it back.
Was taking one life worth getting back what remained of his?
Yes, he told himself. It certainly is.
CHAPTER ONE
“Fascinating,” Dillard murmured as he examined the CT scans of Zero’s brain, clipped to a horizontally mounted illuminator box on the otherwise white wall of the examination room. “Simply fascinating.”
Real glad my rapidly deteriorating brain has your interest, Zero wanted to say. But he held his tongue; the man was only trying to help.
“Look here.” The neurologist pointed at one of the backlit scans, to (what looked to Zero to be) a nebulous blob in the southeastern quadrant. “This is a scan from April, your third visit with me. And this,” he pointed to the same spot on the scan beside it, “is from yesterday’s scan. As you can see, the cholinesterase inhibitors seem to be working.”
It wasn’t exactly apparent to Zero, but he nodded anyway as if it was.
“They’re not stopping the progression, mind you,” Dillard said, “but they do seem to be slowing it.”
“I must admit, I am a little embarrassed,” said Dr. Guyer from the computer screen on the table beside them. The Swiss neurologist was joining them via video conference from Zurich. “I had considered a course of treatment akin to that of an Alzheimer’s patient, but wasn’t confident in the efficacy without further tests. I see now that it was well worth the attempt.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Doctor,” said Dillard, “this is as unique a case as it gets.” He removed a pen light from his white lab coat pocket and shined it in Zero’s left eye. “Follow the light, please. Any episodes lately?”
“None,” Zero said honestly as tears formed in his eye from the blazing light. On any other day, to any other person, he might have lied when he said “none”—but this time it was the truth.
“Any impediments to motor function?” Dillard asked as he blinded Zero in the other eye. “Physical dysfunction of any kind?”
“None,” Zero told him, and again it was the truth. Frankly, he felt great. “Well… there is the one impediment.” He held up his right wrist and shook it, jangling the silver medical alert bracelet he wore there.
Dillard smirked. “As long as you’re my patient, you’ll be wearing that at all times. Especially in your line of work. The last thing I need is for you to be unconscious and have someone try to administer benzodiazepine. And you’re taking the memantine regularly?”
Zero nodded. “Like clockwork.”
“Good. That regulates the activity of glutamate, which is important for information processing and retrieval in your brain. Any headaches, constipation, dizziness lately?”
“Yes, no, and no.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how bad are the headaches? One being a minor inconvenience and ten being you’ve been shot in the head.”
“Hard to say, I’ve never been shot in the head,” Zero quipped. Only everywhere else.
Dillard gave him a pointed look.
“I’d say never worse than a four or five.”
“Good. Very good.” Dillard made some notations on a clipboard chart.
Dr. Eugene Dillard was easy to like. He was only forty-eight, less than a decade Zero’s senior, yet held himself with confidence and was highly respected in his field. He had a shock of dark curly hair that hadn’t even begun to gray, and kept his face clean-shaven. Despite his age he ran daily and spoke of it often; Zero was made aware on more than one visit that Dillard ran at least one marathon annually and never twice in the same city.
Five and a half months ago, in mid-March, Zero had been devastated to find Seth Connors dead. Connors had been the only other CIA agent to have the memory suppression chip installed in his head, and even though they had really only had one conversation Zero had started to think of him as a friend—or at the very least, a kindred spirit.
But ultimately Connors had been unable to reconcile the man he thought he was with the fragmented memories of his former life that were constantly invading his thoughts, especially that of the untimely death of a daughter for which Connors blamed himself. It was Zero who had found him, as well as an apologetic note that ended with a cryptic one-word sign-off: “Dillard.”
Seth Connors would never know it, but his second-to-last act, just before the self-inflicted gunshot wound, would represent a new beginning for someone else.
It hadn’t taken long to find Dillard. Two days after finding Connors, Zero followed the lead and discovered that Dr. Eugene Dillard was the head of the Department of Neurology at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. Dillard and Connors had never met in person, but had spoken on the phone a few times, and the doctor had tried each time to have Connors come in, to no avail.
By Zero’s third visit to Dillard he realized that the doctor could be trusted, and he divulged his full story. To his credit, the neurologist took it all in stride and never once doubted it as the truth. Perhaps the doctor was used to bizarre medical anomalies, or perhaps he’d heard this song before. A tale as old as time, Zero’s: CIA agent blames himself for wife’s murder; best friend steals an experimental chip from an agency lab that suppresses memories; two years later Iraqi terrorists kidnap him and tear it out of his head with needle-nose pliers.