LITMIR.BIZ

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tents, and the canvas canopy.

      Then he lit the fire. The blaze went up quickly and instantly, sending black, oily smoke roiling skyward. Cheval climbed into the jeep with the steel sample box and drove away. He did not speed, and he did not look in the rearview mirror to watch the site burn. He took his time.

      Imam Khalil would be waiting. But the young Frenchman still had much to do before the virus was ready.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Reid Lawson peered through the blinds of his home office for the tenth time in less than two minutes. He was growing anxious; the bus should have arrived by now.

      His office was on the second floor, the smallest of the three bedrooms of their new home on Spruce Street in Alexandria, Virginia. It was a welcome contrast to the cramped, boxy closet of a study he had in the Bronx. Half of his things were unpacked; the rest were still in boxes that lay scattered across the room. His bookshelves were constructed, but his books lay stacked in alphabetical order on the floor. The only things he had taken the time to completely build and organize were his desk and computer.

      Reid had told himself that today was going to be the day that he finally got it together, nearly a full month after moving in, and finished unpacking the office.

      He had gotten as far as opening a box. It was a start.

      The bus is never late, he thought. It’s always here between three twenty-three and three twenty-five. It’s three thirty-one.

      I’m calling them.

      He snatched his cell phone from the desk and dialed Maya’s number. He paced as it rang, trying not to think of all the awful things that could have happened to his girls between the school and home.

      The call went to voicemail.

      Reid hurried down the stairs to the foyer and pulled on a light jacket; March in Virginia was considerably more favorable than New York, but still a bit chilly. Car keys in hand, he punched in the four-digit security code on the wall panel to arm the alarm system to “away” mode. He knew the precise route the bus took; he could backtrack it all the way to the high school if he needed to, and…

      As soon as he pulled the front door open, the bright yellow bus hissed to a stop at the end of his driveway.

      “Busted,” Reid murmured. He couldn’t very well duck back into the house. He had undoubtedly been spotted. His two teenage girls stepped off the bus and down the walkway, pausing just shy of the door that he now blocked as the bus pulled away again.

      “Hi, girls,” he said as brightly as possible. “How was school?”

      His eldest, Maya, shot him a suspicious look as she folded her arms across her chest. “Where you going?”

      “Um… to get the mail,” he told her.

      “With your car keys?” She gestured to his fist, which was indeed gripping the keys to his silver SUV. “Try again.”

      Yup, he thought. Busted. “The bus was late. And you know what I said, if you’re going to be late, you have to call. And why didn’t you answer your phone? I tried to call—”

      “Six minutes, Dad.” Maya shook her head. “Six minutes isn’t ‘late.’ Six minutes is traffic. There was a fender-bender on Vine.”

      He stepped aside as they entered the house. His younger daughter, Sara, gave him a brief hug and a murmur of, “Hi, Daddy.”

      “Hi, sweetheart.” Reid closed the door behind them, locked it, and punched in the code to the alarm system again before turning back to Maya. “Traffic or not, I want you to let me know when you’re going to be late.”

      “You’re neurotic,” she muttered.

      “Excuse me?” Reid blinked in surprise. “You seem to be confusing neurosis with concern.”

      “Oh, please,” Maya retorted. “You haven’t let us out of your sight in weeks. Not since you’ve been back.”

      She was, as usual, right. Reid had always been a protective father, and he had grown more so when his wife and their mother, Kate, died two years earlier. But for the past four weeks, he had become a veritable helicopter parent, hovering and (if he was being honest) perhaps being a tad overbearing.

      But he wasn’t about to admit that.

      “My dear, sweet child,” he chided, “as you blossom into adulthood, you’ll have to learn a very hard truth—that sometimes, you are wrong. And right now, you are wrong.” He grinned, but she didn’t. It was in his nature to try to diffuse tension with his kids using humor, but Maya wasn’t having it.

      “Whatever.” She marched down the foyer and into the kitchen. She was sixteen, and staggeringly intelligent for her age—sometimes, it seemed, too much so for her own good. She had Reid’s dark hair and penchant for dramatic discourse, but lately she seemed to have gained a proclivity toward teenage angst, or at the very least moodiness… likely brought on by a combination of Reid’s constant loitering and obvious misinformation about the events that had occurred the month before.

      Sara, the younger of his two, trudged up the stairs. “I’m gonna get started on my homework,” she said quietly.

      Left alone in the foyer, Reid sighed and leaned against a white wall. His heart broke for his girls. Sara was fourteen, and generally vibrant and sweet, but whenever the subject came up of what had happened in February she clammed up or quickly vacated the room. She simply didn’t want to talk about it. Just a few days earlier, Reid had tried to invite her to see a therapist, a neutral third party that she could talk to. (Of course, it would have to be a CIA-affiliated doctor.) Sara declined with a simple and succinct “no thanks” and scurried out of the room before Reid could get another word in.

      He hated keeping the truth from his kids, but it was necessary. Outside of the agency and Interpol, no one could know the truth—that barely more than a month ago he had recovered a portion of his memory as an agent in the CIA under the alias Kent Steele, also known to his peers and enemies as Agent Zero. An experimental memory suppressor in his head had caused him to forget all about Kent Steele and his work as an agent for nearly two years, until the device was torn from his skull.

      Most of his memories as Kent were still lost to him. They were in there, locked away somewhere in the recesses of his brain, but they trickled in like a leaky faucet, usually when a visual or verbal prompt jarred them loose. The savage removal of the memory suppressor had done something to his limbic system that prevented the memories from returning all at once—and Reid was, for the most part, glad for it. Based on what little he knew about his life as Agent Zero, he wasn’t sure he wanted them all back. His biggest trepidation was that he might remember something that he wouldn’t want to be reminded of, some painful regret or awful act that Reid Lawson could never live with knowing.

      Besides, he had been extremely busy ever since the activities in February. The CIA helped him relocate his family; upon his return to the US, he and his girls were sent to Alexandria in Virginia, a short drive from Washington, DC. The agency helped to secure him a position as an adjunct professor with Georgetown University.

      Ever since then had been a whirlwind of activity: getting the girls enrolled in a new school, acclimating to his new job, and moving into the house in Virginia. But Reid had played a large part in keeping himself distracted by creating plenty of busywork for himself. He painted rooms. He upgraded appliances. He purchased new furniture and new school clothes for the girls. He could afford to; the CIA had awarded him a healthy sum for his involvement in stopping the terrorist organization called Amun. It was more than he made annually as a professor. They were delivering it in monthly installments to avoid scrutiny. The checks hit his bank account as a consulting fee from a fake publishing company that claimed to be creating a series of forthcoming history textbooks.

      Between the money and his copious amounts of free time—he was only doing a few lectures a week at the moment—Reid kept himself as busy as he could. Because pausing for even a few moments meant thinking, and thinking meant reflecting, not only on his fractured memory, but on other equally unpleasant things.

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