Trapping Zero

“Please,” he said. “Have a seat, Agent Zero.” Guyer sighed. “I always suspected you might return here. I just didn’t know when. I assumed the implant would eventually fail—if you survived—but only two years? That is simply shoddy craftsmanship.” He chuckled as if he had told a joke. “Now that you’re here, I have a thousand questions. But I’m afraid I don’t know where to start.”

Reid lowered himself into a chair opposite Guyer’s desk, keeping his guard up and his periphery on the door behind him. He glanced down at his watch and saw a message from Maya: Sara bought it. You’d better be here when the movie is over.

Right, he thought. No matter what happened here, he couldn’t forget that he was on a schedule. “I know where to start,” Reid said. “What do you mean the implant would eventually fail?”

“You know where this technology was acquired, yes?” the doctor asked.

Reid did. Alan Reidigger had stolen it from the CIA; in fact, the eccentric tech engineer Bixby was a co-inventor of the memory suppressor. “Yes,” he answered.

“Well, your friend Mr. Reidigger made me a deal,” said Guyer. “He did not only bring me the memory suppressor, but also the schematic upon which it was built so that I might attempt to copy its technology. However, upon studying it, I saw the flaw in its design. It was, after all, just a prototype. I estimated that it would begin to fail after five or six years.”

“Begin to fail?” Reid repeated. “So these memories would have come back to me eventually anyway?”

“Well… yes,” the doctor said blankly. “Is that not why you’re here? You have started to recover the memories that were suppressed?”

“Not quite. Iranian terrorists tore the implant out of my head.”

Dr. Guyer’s expression fell slack. “Oh,” he said empathetically, “that is most unfortunate. You poor man… Your mind must be a jumbled mess.”

“It is. Thanks,” Reid said flatly. “What about the other part? You said ‘if I survived.’ What does that mean?”

Guyer looked at his desk as if there was something very interesting there. “I think that question would be best answered by your colleague Mr. Reidigger.”

“He can’t answer,” Reid told him. “He’s dead.”

Guyer seemed extremely troubled by the news. He folded his hands reverently on the desk with his brow furrowed, the creases in his forehead aging him several years. “I am very sorry to hear that,” he said quietly. “He seemed a good man. He went to great lengths to help a friend.”

“That may be so, but he’s not here,” Reid said simply. “I am. And you didn’t answer my question.”

The doctor nodded. “Yes. Well. It is no simple answer, nor one you may want to hear…”

“Try me.”

Guyer sighed. “You and Mr. Reidigger wanted your memories suppressed so that you might live out your days with your family, blissfully unaware of the hardships you had faced. But both of you thought that your agency would find you eventually and… and silence you.”

What? Reid could not believe what he was hearing. This entire time he had thought that the purpose of the suppressor was for him to return to a normal life, away from the CIA and everything that had come with it. “You’re suggesting that I knew, or thought, I would be killed? And I still agreed to this?”

“That is correct, Agent Zero.”

Reid shook his head. Why would I do that? Why would I take away anything that would have given me a fighting chance? It felt as if he had condemned himself to some sort of memory hospice. He never imagined he would ever think it, but the Iranians’ intrusion into his home on that night in February was suddenly welcome. Without it, he never would have remembered his sordid past, or the truth about his wife’s death, or anything about the conspiracy…

Then he realized. That was exactly why he did it—so that whatever time he had remaining wouldn’t be lived in heavy secrets and lies. Everything he knew, everything he had shared with his girls and everything he still kept from them, felt as if it was slowly eating away at him. If he had truly believed that the agency would eventually take him out anyway, then the suppressor would have allowed him to live without the weight of his past on his shoulders.