Recall Zero

“Careful,” Reidigger warned with a grin. He gestured toward Zero’s midsection and the speed-bump of a paunch that was developing there.

“Yeah, yeah.” So he’d gained a few pounds in his semi-retirement. Ten, maybe fifteen. He wasn’t sure and certainly wasn’t about to step on a scale to find out. “Look who’s talking.”

Reidigger laughed. He was a far cry from the round-faced agent Zero had known four years earlier, with his boyish looks and stubbornly thick torso. In order to obscure his appearance after his faked death, and to assume his alias of a mechanic named Mitch, Alan had put on at least forty pounds, grown out a bushy beard flecked with gray, and perpetually wore a trucker’s cap pulled low on his forehead, the brim of it permanently stained with both sweat and dark oily thumbprints.

The cap had become such an omnipresent accessory that Zero wondered if he wore it to bed.

“What, this?” Reidigger chuckled again and slapped his stomach. “This is all muscle. Y’know, I go down to the gym twice a week. They’ve got a boxing ring. The young kids, they love to talk trash to the older guys. Right before I whip their asses.” He took a sip and added, “You should come sometime. I usually go on—”

“Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Zero finished for him. Alan made that offer every week too.

He appreciated the effort. He appreciated that Alan came by so often to sit around on the patio with his old friend and shoot the breeze. He appreciated the check-ins and the attempts to get him out of the house that were growing more halfhearted with every visit.

The truth was that without the CIA or teaching or his daughters around, he didn’t feel like himself, and it had led to a sort of sickness settling into his brain, a general malaise that he couldn’t seem to overcome.

The sliding glass door opened suddenly then, and both men turned to see Maria step out into the October afternoon. She was dressed smartly in a crisp white blazer with black slacks and a thin gold necklace, her blonde hair cascading around her shoulders and dark mascara accentuating her gray eyes.

It was strange, but for the briefest of moments it was jealousy that swept through Zero at the sight of her. Where he had stagnated, she had flourished. But he pushed that down too, pushed it down into the murky swamp of his stifled emotions and told himself he was glad to see her.

“Afternoon, boys,” she said with a smile. She seemed in good spirits; her mood upon arriving home from work tended to be as varying as the odd hours she kept. “Alan, it’s good to see you.” She bent at the waist to give him a hug.

“Astonished” wasn’t quite the term that came to Zero’s mind when Maria discovered that Alan was not only still alive, but holed up in a garage not thirty minutes from Langley. But she took the news in stride—a bruising punch to his shoulder and a harsh rebuke of “you should have told us!” was seemingly all the catharsis she needed.

“Hi, Kent.” She kissed him before grabbing a beer from Alan’s sixer and joining them. “Good day?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Good day.” He didn’t elaborate, because the only elaboration he could have offered was that he’d spent the day watching old movies, napping, and vaguely thinking about returning to the waiting and still unfinished basement. “You?”

She shrugged. “Better than most.” She tended not to talk too much about work with him—not only because of security clearance, of which Zero currently had none, but also out of the unspoken fear (at least Zero presumed) that it might trigger him, jar some old memory, or otherwise inspire him to get back in the game. She seemed to like him where he was. Though his suspicion about that was another matter entirely.

“Kent,” she said, “don’t forget that we have dinner plans.”

He smiled. “Right, of course.” He hadn’t forgotten about the guest they’d be hosting that evening. But he was actively trying not to think about that.

Kent.

She was the only one who still called him that.

Agent Kent Steele had been his alias in the CIA, but now that was nothing but a memory. Zero had been his call sign, started as a joke by Alan Reidigger—who still called him Zero. And ever since he’d gotten his memories back, that was the name that he usually thought of himself by. But he wasn’t either of those anymore, Kent or Zero, not really. He wasn’t Professor Lawson anymore. Hell, he barely felt like himself, his real self, Reid Lawson, father of two and history professor and covert CIA operative and whatever other thing he identified himself as. Even though eighteen months had passed, he still bitterly recalled the shadowy conspirators dragging his name through the mud, releasing his image to the media, calling him a terrorist and attempting to pin the would-be assassination attempt on him. He was, of course, completely exonerated of those charges, and he had no idea if anyone else even remembered it. But he did. And now the name felt foreign to him. He avoided being known as Reid Lawson whenever possible, to the extent that the house, the bills, even the cars were all in Maria’s name. No mail came for him with his name on it. No one ever called asking for Reid.

Or Kent.

Or Zero.

Or Dad.

So just who the hell am I?

He didn’t know. But he knew that he had to discover it for himself, because the life he was leading was no life worth living.

CHAPTER TWO

Zero was glad he didn’t have to talk about them. But Alan knew better than to ask about the girls.

Reidigger stuck around for about forty-five minutes before rising from the deck chair, stretching, and in his usual fashion, announcing he’d better “hit the ol’ dusty trail.” Zero gave him a brief hug and waved as he pulled the pickup truck out of the driveway and silently thanked him for not asking about his daughters, because the truth was that if Alan had asked how they were, Zero couldn’t answer.

He found Maria in the kitchen, wearing an apron over her work clothes as she chopped an onion. “Good visit?”

“Yeah.”

Silence. Just the rhythmic tock of the knife against the cutting board.

“You ready for tonight?” she asked after a long moment.

He nodded. “Yeah. Definitely.” He wasn’t. “What are you making?”

“Bigos.” She dumped the cutting board’s contents into a large pot on the stove that already contained simmering kielbasa, cabbage, and other vegetables. “It’s a Polish stew.”

Zero frowned. “Bigos. Since when do you make bigos?”

“I learned from my grandmother.” She smirked. “There’s still a lot you don’t know about me, Mr. Steele.”

“I guess so.” He hesitated, wondering how best to broach the subject on his mind, and then decided direct was best. “Um… hey. So tonight, do you think you could maybe try not to call me Kent?”

Maria paused with the knife hovering over a dried mushroom. She frowned, but nodded. “Okay. What do you want me to call you? Reid?”

“I…” He was about to agree, but then realized that he didn’t really want that either. “I don’t know.” Maybe, he thought, she should just avoid calling him anything.

“Huh.” It was obvious from her expression that she was concerned, wanted to push further into whatever was going on in his head, but it wasn’t the time to unpack all that. “How about I just call you ‘pookie’?”

“Very funny.” He grinned in spite of himself.

“Or ‘cupcake’?”

“I’m going to get changed.” He headed out of the kitchen even as Maria called after him, laughing to herself.

“Wait, I got it. I’ll call you ‘honeybunch.’”

“I’m ignoring you,” he called back. He appreciated what she was trying to do, attempting to diffuse the situation with humor. But as he reached the top of the short staircase that led to the loft, the anxiety bubbled up within him again. He’d been glad for Alan’s visit because it meant he didn’t have to think about it. He’d been glad Alan didn’t ask about the girls because it meant he didn’t have to face facts or memories. But there was no avoiding it now.

Maya was coming to dinner.

Zero inspected his jeans, made sure they were free of holes or errant coffee stains, and traded his lounging T-shirt for a striped button-down.

You’re a liar.

He ran a comb through his hair. It was getting too long. Slowly turning gray, especially at the temples.

Mom died because of you.