The Zero (32 page)

Remy ignored him. He cracked a tiny bottle of gin and downed it.

“Yeah, Brian Remy,” Markham said. “He’s doing some contract work for us.”

Dave settled in at the table. He unwrapped his cloth napkin with a snap of the wrist. “So how is it going, Bishir? Are these minor league spooks treating you okay?”

“Can’t complain,” Bishir said, his mouth full of sole.

Markham slid a plateful of fish in front of Dave, who took a bite and nodded his approval. “So would you mind telling me what this is all about, Brian?” Dave asked. “Why two rogues from the paper department are holding my CI hostage?”

Remy ignored the question. He felt oddly at ease, nonplussed. He would just drink until this all went away. This seemed like a good strategy, although he noticed that the big flake was in front of his left eye again.

Dave waited, and then became agitated. He shot a glare at Markham, who looked away. “I don’t even get an answer?”

“I just want to be left alone,” Remy said.

“Oh, really. You want
us
to stay out of
your
way. Is that it?”

Markham chewed nervously on his thumbnail.

“So you really want to endanger this investigation, the security of the nation, over what…turf?” Dave stared at Remy.

Remy was getting dizzy crouched like this, so he dropped to his knees. Turning back to the drawer of tiny booze bottles, he was momentarily dazed by scale: Gulliver on a bender. He decided on Crown Royal and it went down like an easy compliment.

Bishir broke the icy quiet. “These guys thought I was holed up with an old girlfriend—this chick, March.” He pointed his fork at Markham. “It was a crazy-ass theory, but you know what, if I could’ve warned one person, it might’ve been her. She was a sweet girl. Good lay, too.”

Markham shrugged. “Yeah, we kind of whiffed on that one.”

Dave set his fork down and spun in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Let’s cut to the proverbial chase.”

“You know, I don’t think that’s an actual proverb,” Markham said.

“What?” Dave asked.

“You said proverbial chase. No such proverb.”

Dave stared at Markham with disbelief before turning to Remy. “What is it you guys want…was it, Brian?”

“Yes,” Markham said. “His name is Brian.”

“I told you,” Remy said. “I don’t want anything.”

Dave leaned his head back and his Adam’s apple moved up and down like a freight elevator. “Come on. We both know you didn’t pick up Bishir accidentally. So what do you want?”

“All I want is for this to go away,” Remy said. “All of this. All of you.”

“Oh, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Dave sputtered, his angular face reddening. “Look. We have been piecing together the members of this cell for more than a year. If you think for one second the agency is going to step aside so you can hijack our investigation…” His lips formed a thin scowl. “We need this! You want to screw the bureau, fine. But I don’t think you fully appreciate the pressure we’re under.”

Vodka, Remy thought, and the pattern appealed on some basic level: clear, brown, clear, brown, clear. He cracked the seal, tossed the little cap, and drank it, like rolling a tiny red carpet down his throat. “Leave me alone.”

“Leave you alone?” Dave crossed his arms defiantly and the anger seemed to be percolating in his red ears. “Fuck you, Brian. You want to go over my head, fine. I suppose you think that you’re going find some people on the Hill or some holdover in the media eager to hear that the agency might be operating slightly—” He looked for the words.

“Out of bounds,” Markham contributed.

Dave winced as if those weren’t the words he wanted.

The room was quiet for a moment. When Dave turned back to Remy he was smiling solicitously. “So we’re at an impasse. Okay. But I have to believe we can come to an agreement. Right? That we can work together? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have called us. I mean—we have a common enemy, right? The bureau? So, just tell me. What do you want?”

Remy wanted brown. He opened a bottle of Glenlivet.

“We want our piece,” Markham said from the kitchen, looking at Remy for approval. “We want credit. We don’t want our work to go to waste.”

“And that means—” Dave said.

“Joint task force,” Markham said, still looking at Remy, as if for approval. “Operational, tactical, command…we want our half of the pie.”

“Your
half
? You’re out of your mind,” Dave said to Markham and then turned back to Remy as if he were the reasonable one. “Come on, Brian. You hassle my informant, stumble across a cell we’ve been investigating for months, endanger a deep intel project, and now you expect to get—”

“Joint. Task force,” Markham repeated. “Or we go to Congress. Maybe even the press.”

“Press?” Dave laughed. “Who you gonna call? Morley Safer? Edward R. Murrow? Come on. There is no press anymore.”

“Joint task force,” Markham said. “Final answer.” He untied his apron.

“Wait. I know what this is.”

“Yeah?” Markham said. “What is this?”

Remy drank.

“This is a shakedown,” Dave said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “That’s all, a half-assed, political stab at creating a permanent seat at the table. You’ve finished your mandate and your funding is going away so you’re pulling paper out of garbage cans while you try to get a foothold…turn yourselves into some kind of an actual in
vestigative operation. You’re like the bureau eighty years ago, under that swish Hoover. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to write your funding for next decade. No way. Key investigative assistance,” Dave said. “
My
final offer.”

“Are you serious?” Markham laughed from the kitchen. “‘Key investigative assistance?’ Why not just say we answered the phones? Got coffee for you guys? Come on. You’re offering us a handjob, Dave. You come in here on your knees offering us a handjob? What is that?”

“He’s the one on his knees,” Dave said, pointing to Remy, who was indeed genuflected before the most holy drawer of plastic booze bottles. But then Dave’s mouth twitched and he smiled at Remy, and stepped toward him. He spoke under his voice. “Come on, Brian. Be reasonable here. Take a minute and think about what you’re asking.”

“I am not asking for anything,” Remy said, and he took a plastic bottle of Gilbey’s and drained it. His head felt like it was moving in tiny figure eights. The fleck in his left eye seemed to be growing.

“So, it’s screw-with-the-agency day, is it? Fine. You want to screw with me?
Screw with me?
” Dave’s voice screeched. Then he laughed bitterly and stepped in close, so that he was standing directly over Remy. “I know things, Brian. And I won’t hesitate to start talking about what I know.” When Remy said nothing, he spat, “Do you think I’m bluffing?”

Remy looked up through the flashers and floaters into the flared nostrils of the older man. “I have no idea what you’re doing.”

Dave hissed, “Goddamn you.” But then he stepped away, rubbed his mouth, and looked up at Markham for a long moment, and then back down at Remy. “Okay,” Dave said finally. “I can’t give you Joint Task Force. I just can’t. But here’s what I
can
give you: Cooperating Agency. Solid second chair. You get one suit standing in the back at the presser and you can print up your own release about your involvement. But that’s it. That’s all you get.”

Markham shot a what-do-you-think glance to Remy, who couldn’t seem to get drunk enough fast enough.

“Cooperating agency,” Markham said, pointing with his spatula, “
two
suits at the presser, joint release,
and
our logo on the dais.”

“Your logo!” Dave boomed. “Your fu—!” His jaw fell. “Your…”

Markham continued. “
And
we make it clear that we developed our intelligence on this cell independently, through the Loose Materials section of the Liberty and Recovery Act,” Markham said. “If you think about it, it’s a good deal for you. There might be some information you gathered that might make some people uncomfortable, which we could provide some cover on. Some information that might even be seen as…illegal under the old rules.”

Dave’s eyes narrowed, as if he were considering this.

Markham could see this was his move. “Sure. You can attribute anything…uncomfortable…to us. Take advantage of the temporary latitude we’ve been granted for domestic intelligence gathering.

“And,” Markham continued, “we all still get to fuck the Bureau.”

Remy couldn’t remember if he was on clear or brown, so he went with a tiny bottle of designer raspberry vodka. But it was too sweet. He looked over at Bishir, who was ignoring all of this, concentrating on the pecan fish on his plate.

“But…and this is important…” Markham said. “We get second mike at the press conference.”

“Second mike!” Dave screeched again. “Come on! Be reasonable. Do you want our cars, too? Our sat-phones? Our chopper? You want my office?” He rose out of his chair and bent down so that he could see into Remy’s eyes. “Come on, Remy,” Dave said, all spotty and streaky. “Be reasonable. You got us over a barrel. We both know that. But for the good of the country—”

Markham and Bishir both laughed at this, Bishir choking for a second on his sole.

It was quiet. Dave straightened up, stared off into space, and finally sighed. “Fine. Cooperating agency, but there’s no question that we’re lead, right?”

“No question,” Markham said. “Of course.”

“We maintain operational and tactical control…we’ll provide daily briefings to you on everything. And you can have a guy there when it goes down,” Dave continued. “We make a joint release and you get your”—he choked on the word—“
logo
on the dais. But all I can guarantee is third shot at the mike during the presser. Third mike. That’s all I got, fellas. I’m not giving you our spot no matter what you say.”

Markham glanced over at Remy, who looked away and reached for another bottle. He was dizzy, and his hand missed. He stumbled and fell sideways…and in that moment it was as if something popped behind his left eye: a piercing pain shot through his skull and he leaned forward and clenched his eyes tight. He fell forward, against the minibar, then curled up in a ball, and rolled on the floor, moaning.

“Brian?” Markham asked.

He cried out in pain, his hands covering his face as he crawled across the carpeted floor toward the other wall.

“Fine!” he heard Dave snap above him. “You can talk second at the press conference.”

Remy reached the wall, leaned against it, and opened his eyes. This wasn’t right. There was a big problem with his left eye, a dark shadowy band across the middle of his field of vision. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened only the left one, but the black band was still there, as if the center of the room had been torn away, like a page in a magazine. And then the pain seemed to gather at the base of his skull and make another advance, until it was nearly unbearable and it doubled him over, the anguish blossoming outward and from within, like black water bubbling up from the earth. Like blooms of smoke roiling into a clear day.

“MR. REMY, ARE YOU AWAKE?”
Interesting question. Technically he
had
to be awake, since he’d heard her ask it. And yet, if he really were awake, would she have to ask? Wouldn’t it be obvious? Maybe he’d dreamed the question. How had April described her grief—as a fever dream? A dream—that would help explain the gaps, and the general incongruity of life now—the cyclic repetition of events on cable news, waves of natural disasters, scientists announcing the same discoveries over and over (Planet X, dinosaur birds, cloning, certain genetic codes), the random daily shift of national allegiances, wildly famous people who no one could recall becoming famous, the sudden emergence and disappearance of epidemics, the declaration and dissolution of governments, cycles of scandal, confession, and rehabilitation, heated elections in which losers claimed victory and races were rerun in the same sequence, events that catapulted wildly out of control, like plagues of illogic…as if some faulty math had been introduced to all the equations, corrupting computer programs and causing specious arguments to build upon themselves, and sequential skips—snippets of songs sampled before their original release, movies remade before they came out the first time, victories claimed before wars were fought, drastic fluctuations in the security markets (panic giving way to calm giving way to panic giving way to calm giving way to panic), all of it narrated by fragments of speeches over staged photo ops accompanied by color-coded warnings and yellow ribbons on trees.

“Mr. Remy? Can you squeeze my hand?”

Another tough question. Was he supposed to answer or squeeze? Would a squeeze be an answer? What was it that April said?
I couldn’t walk around pretending any of this made sense anymore
. Perhaps nothing made sense anymore
(the gaps are affecting everyone)
and this was some kind of cultural illness they all shared. But just as Remy was getting his mind around the question, he felt a woman’s hand in his and he became aware of the pain behind his eyes; it roared and squealed into his head like a train pulling up to a platform, lights flashing, brakes screaming, and then it changed, became more specific, like someone nailing his left eye to his skull, hammer blows, cracks against a three-penny, and a pitched agony sought out the vacuum behind his eyes, wiping away the epiphany he was trying to have, just as Remy was putting words to it:
What if I’m the only one aware of this?
A lonely, chilling thought, and he wasn’t sorry to see it slipping away, too—leaving only a momentary impression, like a print in sand, before it blew away. He squeezed the hand.

“Hurts,” he rasped. He saw the usual streaks against the black, squirreling away when he tried to focus on them, but only half as many now, and only on the right side; the left was nothing but this sucking agony, a string of razor wire run through his left eye and into his brain, being tugged from the outside so that it strained everything on the way through. He tried to open his good eye but it was bandaged shut along with the bad one. He was grateful for the remaining flashers and floaters on the right side, so that there was at least something to see.

“I’ll get you something for the pain,” the voice whispered.

“Thank you,” Remy said. He reached up and touched the heavy bandages over his eyes. The tape covered most of his forehead and cheeks.

“And I’ll tell the surgeon you’re awake. He wants to talk to you.”

“What day is this?”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“Oh.” Then he heard her footsteps on the hard floor and Remy
wished he’d asked a different question, a question about April. Wednesday meant nothing to him. For a few minutes there was only the pain and then more footsteps and the smell of briny cologne.

“How are you today, Mr. Remy?” The doctor mispronounced it, with a long
E
, but Remy didn’t correct him. “I’m Dr. Destouches. Orb cutter.” The cologne doctor’s voice was smooth and cool, like a disc jockey on a Sunday night jazz radio show.

“It really hurts,” Remy said.

“I should hope so. That’s the only way I know I’ve done my job.” The doctor adopted the voice of a lecturing professor. “Post-surgical eye trauma presents a truly unique sort of pain, Mr. Remy. It’s not localized, like a broken leg or a burn on your arm. You can’t touch it; it’s a generalized pain—but it’s not an ache. It is, at the same time, both sharp and diffuse.”

Remy just wished the man would stop talking about his pain.

“The body views eye surgery as such a severe violation,” Dr. Destouches continued, “a unique shock on every level. The eye is not designed to be cut into, like the skin; the central nervous system doesn’t know what to make of it when someone goes poking around on the top floors.”

“What was the surgery for?” Remy asked.

“You don’t remember?”

“No.”

The doctor laughed. “Well, since I see your signature right here on the release, I’m assuming that’s the anesthesia speaking and that we didn’t randomly crack open your head and try reattaching your retina without your permission.”

“No,” Remy said. “I’m having trouble keeping track of things. Everything skips.”

“That’s the anesthesia,” the doctor said. “You’ll start to get your bearings back in the next few hours.”

“No,” Remy said again. “It’s been that way for a long time. There are these gaps.”

“Yes, it can seem like that,” the doctor said, “but don’t worry. Once the anesthesia wears off, and the pain medication kicks in, you’ll be clear as a bell.” He shuffled pages again. “As for the surgery, I’m sorry to report that we were unable to reattach the retina. It was too far gone. So the vision in that eye…is severely compromised, Mr. Remy. After we take off the bandages you may still see some blurry images, especially on the edges, but in essence that eye is…gone. Black. Kaput.” He trailed off, but gave Remy little time before speaking again.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen eyes like yours. It’s like reading a textbook. The degeneration and detachment, the thinness of the retinas: remarkable. I’ve never seen such thin, tattered tissue on a human being that wasn’t a cadaver. It’s like mobile home curtains in there, Mr. Remy. It’s like the sheets in an old whorehouse. It’s like—”

“Okay,” Remy said.

“Is there a history of eye disease in your family?”

“I don’t think so,” Remy said.

“Because you have the eyes of a man in his nineties,” said Dr. Destouches. “And I have to ask—did you fly here?”

“Am I still in San Francisco?”

“Yes.”

“Then I flew here.”

“And did your ophthalmologist in New York approve that?”

“No. In fact, I think he told me
not
to fly.”

“Well, so much for your malpractice suit.” Remy could hear papers being shuffled again. “The good news, such as it is, is that you can still see out of your right eye—for the time being. You have a lot of debris in your field of vision…flashers, floaters, that kind of thing.”

“Yes.”

“Well, if you’re one of those people who looks for silver linings in
mushroom clouds, we did manage to cut those in half.” The doctor laughed at his own joke and cleared his throat. “But please, do yourself a favor and take a train or a bus back to New York. Your eyes are as fragile as origami, Mr. Remy. As fragile as a fat girl’s confidence on prom night. As fragile as—”

“I got it,” Remy said. The word
fragile
made Remy think of April; he wondered if she was waiting to see him.

“The change in pressure from flying would be very bad for you,” Dr. Destouches continued. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Remy said, chasing the flecks around his good eye.

“I’m going to put that right here. No flying.” Remy could hear the doctor scratching on a pad. “And a word of advice: You might want to cut back on the liquor. At least while you’re on medication. You had a blood alcohol level of .039. That’s four times the legal limit, Mr. Remy. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No drinking and no flying—”

THE PLANE
shuddered and jerked with the rattle of molded and fitted plastic and the grind of jet engines, strained against the ground’s pull, and when it felt as if it were on the verge of shaking loose its aluminum shell, finally broke with the ground and became still. They were in the air. Remy opened his eyes, but only the right one opened, the left still trapped beneath the gauze. He had a small airplane whiskey bottle in his hand. He looked over to the seat on his left, hoping to see April, but it was Markham, chewing a pencil, his face screwed up over a mostly open crossword puzzle. Markham leaned in. “Okay. Six letters.
Rift
. Last letter m. Third letter might be an h.”

Remy closed his eye and leaned back. He opened his mouth to say
schism
but what came out was—

“THE CELL,”
the agent Dave said slowly, lingering on each word, “from what we have been able to gather over the last few months, is constructed thusly.”

Remy looked around the simple conference room. He and Markham sat behind an oval table in swivel chairs. Dave, the tall, thin agent with the braces, stood in the glow of a big computer screen mounted on the wall in front of them. On the screen were the words
CELL 93
and a chart connecting six silhouetted heads in a small pyramid. Beneath each silhouette was a number: one, two, and three on the bottom row of the pyramid, four and five in the middle, and six at the top. One of the silhouettes, number five, had a red line through it; another, number two, had a question mark over it.

“Thusly?” Markham said to Remy, under his breath.

Dave spun to face them. “What’s wrong with thusly?”

“Nothing. It’s just…nothing.”

Dave faced the wall, and then turned back to Markham again. “Look. You are guests in this operation. The agency does not typically cooperate like this. I’m out on a limb here. So I would appreciate some support. And professionalism.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Markham said. “My bad.”

“Ninety-three is a classic, small, leaderless cell,
sui generis,
” Dave continued, shooting a quick, defensive glance at Markham before going on. “Each of its members is connected to one or two other members, but no one member is aware of more than two others, so that if one person goes down, two or three can escape and the cell can theoretically regrow—like a snake losing a tail. This is why it’s important for us to get to as many members as possible.”

“Why’s it called Ninety-three?” Markham asked.

“We’re not sure. Maybe the group formed in 1993, although most
of the relationships date from much earlier. Another theory, from our analysts, was that the name refers to the ninety-nine names for Allah, and that by subtracting the six members you get ninety-three. Of course, we are also monitoring FM radio stations with that frequency, listening to call letters, dedications, play lists, that sort of thing.” Dave pressed his thumb to the clicker. “Now let’s take a look at the cell members.”

Onto the screen came a black-and-white surveillance photo of a thin Arab man in shiny sweats, talking on a cell phone outside an apartment building. The man’s jaw stuck out in a severe underbite, making it seem as if he were working to keep his teeth from jutting out. “Subject Number One: Kamal al-Hassan, Saudi-born and educated, passionate and intelligent, speaks perfect English…Japanese sports car buff. May have become disillusioned with America as a twelve-year-old after his Taif team was eliminated in the first round of the Little League World Series.”

Markham didn’t look up from his notes. “Position?”

“Second base,” Dave said. “All glove, no bat. Decent range but had an arm that would embarrass a six-year-old girl. As an adult, he moved to Syria and worked as an agent, raising money for jihadist sports clubs under the umbrella of refugee services.” Dave clicked his thumb again and the next slide appeared, another photo of Kamal, this time in a business suit, stepping out of a limousine. “We have reason to believe he has recently made his way into the country, possibly through Canada.”

A photo came up showing a familiar-looking young Arab man in a business suit. Dave said, “Subject Number Two—Kamal’s brother Assan, lives in Miami—”

Remy gasped, but no one seemed to notice. It was the man they’d tortured on the ship outside Miami. Remy looked up at Markham, who shot a quick glance at Remy, scribbled something in a notebook on his lap, and then turned his eyes back to the screen.

“At least Assan
lived
in Miami,” Dave said. “Honestly, we don’t know where he is now. He’s been missing for months. We had believed he was opposed to his brother’s growing radicalism, but he may have gone underground in preparation for something.”

“You said you were going to let him go,” Remy hissed to Markham, who simply stared straight ahead.

“The next member,” Dave said, and Bishir’s picture appeared on the wall, “as…you well know, is the agency’s CI, Tarzan—Bishir. We’ve designated him Subject Number Three, even though obviously he’s providing us with intelligence. Of course, his cooperation gives us a huge advantage over our enemy—the bureau.” He glanced quickly at Markham and Remy. “I don’t mean to brag, but we believe this to be the deepest actual penetration of a terror cell by any U.S. agency.”

Markham gave a polite golf clap.

Dave clicked his thumb again and it took Remy a moment to recognize the next face. “We’ve identified Number Four as the weakest member of the group, Bishir’s brother-in-law—” It was Mahoud, the restaurant owner.

“Oh, come on,” Remy said, incredulous. “He’s not—”

But Markham reached over, grabbed his arm, and shook his head slightly.

“Mahoud Tasneem is a Pakistani restaurant owner here in the city,” Dave said. “We’re not entirely sure of his involvement or his motivation…all we know is that he recently contacted Bishir and volunteered to be involved, possibly in a support role, providing transportation, or a safe house.”

Dave hit the button again and on the wall was an image that Remy recognized: a man lying in a smear of blood on the sidewalk. It was the photo Buff had shown him in the gypsy cab.