Target Zero

“My love?” she said cautiously.

“What have I just done?” he murmured. He already knew the answer; he had put a deadly virus in the hands of not Imam Khalil, but two strangers. “What if they do not deliver it? What if they drop it, or open it, or—”

“My love.” Claudette slid her arms around his waist and pressed her head to his chest. “They are followers of the Imam. They will exercise caution and get it to where it needs to be. Have faith. You have taken the first step towards changing the world for the better. You are the Mahdi. Do not forget that.”

“Yes,” he said softly. “Of course. You are right, as always. And I must finish.” If his mutation did not work as it should, or if he did not produce the completed batch, he had no doubt that he would be a failure not only in the eyes of Khalil, but in Claudette’s as well. Without her he would crumble. He needed her as he needed air, food, or sunlight.

Even so, he could not help but wonder what they would do with the sample—if Imam Khalil would test it privately, at a remote location, or if it would be released publicly.

But he would find out soon enough.

CHAPTER SIX

“Dad, you don’t need to walk me to the door every time,” Maya griped as they crossed Dahlgren Quad toward Healy Hall on the Georgetown campus.

“I know I don’t have to,” Reid said. “I want to. What, are you ashamed to be seen with your dad?”

“It’s not that,” Maya muttered. The ride over had been quiet, Maya staring pensively out the window while Reid tried to think of something to talk about but fell short.

Maya was approaching the end of her junior year of high school, but she had already tested out of her AP classes and started taking a few courses a week at the Georgetown campus. It was a good jump toward college credit and looked great on an application—especially since Georgetown was her current top choice. Reid had insisted not only on driving Maya to the college but also walking her to her classroom.

The night prior, when Maria had been forced to suddenly cut their date short, Reid had hurried home to his girls. He was extremely disturbed by the news of Rais’s escape—his fingers had trembled against the steering wheel of his car—but he forced himself to stay calm and tried to think logically. The CIA was already in pursuit and likely Interpol as well. He knew the protocol; every airport would be watched, and roadblocks would be established on Sion’s major thoroughfares. And Rais had no allies left to turn to.

Besides, the assassin had escaped in Switzerland, more than four thousand miles away. Half a continent and an entire ocean spanned between him and Kent Steele.

Even so, he knew he would feel a lot better when he received word that Rais had been detained again. He was confident in Maria’s ability, but he wished he would have had the foresight to ask her to keep him updated as best she could.

He and Maya reached the entrance to Healy Hall and Reid lingered. “All right, I guess I’ll see you after class?”

She glanced back at him suspiciously. “You’re not going to walk me in?”

“Not today.” He had a feeling he knew why Maya was so quiet that morning. He had given her an ounce of independence the night before, but today he was right back to his usual ways. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t a little girl anymore. “Listen, I know I’ve been kind of crowding you a bit lately…”

“A bit?” Maya scoffed.

“…And I’m sorry for that. You are a capable, resourceful, and intelligent young woman. And you just want some independence. I recognize that. My overprotective nature is my problem, not yours. It’s not anything you did.”

Maya tried to hide the smirk on her face. “Did you just use the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ line?”

He nodded. “I did, because it’s true. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if something happened to you and I wasn’t there.”

“But you’re not always going to be there,” she said, “no matter how hard you try to be. And I need to be able to take care of problems myself.”

“You’re right. I will try my best to back off a bit.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Okay.” She stretched on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “See you after classes.” She headed toward the door, but then had another thought. “You know, maybe I should learn how to shoot, just in case…”

He pointed a stern finger her way. “Don’t push it.”

She grinned and vanished into the hall. Reid loitered outside for a couple of minutes. God, his girls were growing up too fast. In two short years Maya would be a legal adult. Soon there would be cars, and college tuition, and… and sooner or later there would be boys. Thankfully that hadn’t happened yet.

He distracted himself by admiring the campus architecture as he headed toward Copley Hall. He wasn’t sure he would ever grow tired of walking around the university, enjoying the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structures, many built in the Flemish Romanesque style that flourished in the European Middle Ages. It certainly helped that mid-March in Virginia was a turning point for the season, the weather coming around and rising into the fifties and even sixties on nicer days.

His role as an adjunct was typically taking on smaller classes, twenty-five to thirty students at a time and primarily history majors. He specialized in lessons on warfare, and often subbed in for Professor Hildebrandt, who was tenured and traveled frequently for a book he was writing.

Or maybe he’s secretly in the CIA, Reid mused.

“Good morning,” he said loudly as he entered the classroom. Most of his students were already there when he arrived, so he hurried to the front, set his messenger bag on the desk, and shrugged out of his tweed coat. “I’m a few minutes late, so let’s jump right in.” It felt good being in the classroom again. This was his element—at least one of them. “I’m sure someone in here can tell me: what was the most devastating event, by death toll, in European history?”

“World War Two,” someone called out immediately.

“One of the worst worldwide, to be sure,” Reid replied, “but Russia fared a lot poorer than Europe did, by the numbers. What else you got?”

“The Mongol conquest,” said a brunette girl in a ponytail.

“Another good guess, but you guys are thinking armed conflicts. What I’m thinking is less anthropogenic; more biological.”

“Black Death,” muttered a blond kid in the front row.

“Yes, that is correct, Mister.…?”

“Wright,” the kid answered.

Reid grinned. “Mr. Wright? I bet you use that as a pickup line.”

The kid smiled sheepishly and shook his head.

“Yes, Mr. Wright is right—the Black Death. The pandemic of the bubonic plague started in Central Asia, traveled down the Silk Road, was carried to Europe by rats on merchant ships, and in the fourteenth century it killed an estimate seventy-five to two hundred million people.” He paced for a moment to punctuate his point. “That’s a huge disparity, isn’t it? How could those numbers be so far spread?”

The brunette in the third row raised her hand slightly. “Because they didn’t have a census bureau seven hundred years ago?”

Reid and a few other students chuckled. “Well, sure, there’s that. But it’s also because of how quickly the plague spread. I mean, we’re talking about more than a third of Europe’s population gone inside of two years. To put it in perspective, that would be like having the entire East Coast and California wiped out.” He leaned against his desk and folded his arms. “Now I know what you’re thinking. ‘Professor Lawson, aren’t you the guy that comes in and talks about war?’ Yes, and I’m getting to that right now.

“Someone mentioned the Mongol conquest. Genghis Khan had the largest contiguous empire in history for a brief time, and his forces marched on Eastern Europe during the years of the plague in Asia. Khan is credited as one of the first to use what we now classify as biological warfare; if a city would not yield to him, his army would catapult plague-infected bodies over their ramparts, and then… they’d just have to wait a while.”

Mr. Wright, the blond kid in the front row, wrinkled his nose in disgust. “That can’t be real.”

“It is real, I assure you. Siege of Kafa, in what is now Crimea, 1346. See, we want to think that something like biological warfare is a new concept, but it is not. Before we had tanks, or drones, or missiles, or even guns in the modern sense, we, uh… they, uh…”

“Why do you have this, Reid?” she asks accusingly. Her eyes are more afraid than they are angry.

At his mention of the word “guns,” a memory suddenly flashed across his mind—the same memory as before, but clearer now. In the kitchen of their former home in Virginia. Kate had found something while cleaning dust from one of the air conditioning ducts.

A gun on the table—a small one, a silver nine-millimeter LC9. Kate gestures at it like a cursed object. “Why do you have this, Reid?”