Zero’s eyes narrowed. “Meaning he won’t do anything.”

  Alan hesitated. “Well, Todd’s by the book, and you know what the book says.”

  Zero’s hands curled into fists. He knew all too well what the book said.

  Todd, you bastard.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s on an op in Tanzania. Near Kilimanjaro. She activated an emergency beacon I gave her after… well, after everything. Based on the data I was able to retrieve, she appears to have been captured by some sort of insurgent group in the region. I’m not sure who. I’m going to call some friends and see if they can give me an idea what we’re looking at. In the meantime…” He sighed. “Look, I understand why you left. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. You were trying to keep your family safe. The problem is that they’re not safe. I hate to ask this, man, but I’m out of shape, Sara’s out of this life, and Mischa… Well, she can handle the fighting part, but I don’t know if she’s up to the other stuff yet: intelligence gathering and all that.”

  Zero didn’t answer right away. He took a deep breath and pushed it slowly through his nose. A lot of emotion roiled through him, but the strongest was anger.

  Why was Todd making the same damned mistake he made the last time with Zero and Alan? Why was Maya on her own in an op in Tanzania? Where was her backup? Where was her plan? Why was Alan so out of shape that he couldn’t go rescue Maya when her life quite literally depended on it?

  The answer to all of those questions was, “It doesn’t matter.” His daughter was in danger. He thought that hiding would keep her safe. It hadn’t. She needed help now, and he was the only one who could provide it.

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Thank God. Do you need me to come get you?”

  Zero thought for a moment. "No. I'll make my way to Africa. In the meantime, I need you to get equipment ready for me. Also, an identity and currency. The standard loadout. Any resources you think I'll need to find Maya and bring her home safely."

  “I’ll look into it.” Alan paused a second, then added. “It’s good to hear your voice again.”

  Zero hated that he had to lie to his friend so soon, but he did it anyway. “It’s good to hear your voice too.”

  “I’ll be in touch, Zero.”

  The connection ended. Zero stood where he was for a moment. He searched himself for any trace of Masveriyaa, but the Fisherman was gone, dead and forgotten. The life he’d left behind two years ago had come forward and swallowed him despite his best efforts to avoid it.

  He set the shortwave down and quickly packed his bags. Thirty minutes after waking, he had everything he needed to leave the island save for one thing.

  His raft wasn’t designed for the open ocean, but it would be good enough to get him to Melé. From there, he could find his way to Maya.

  By the time the sun rose over the Indian Ocean, Zero pushed his raft out to sea and sailed away from the island he’d called home for the past two years.

  He didn’t look back.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Katerina Solnechno lifted the glass to her lips and sipped. The vodka she drank was a far cry from the bitter jet fuel the masses imbibed. This bottle of Beluga Epicure was one of only one thousand ever bottled. It was distilled with Siberian well water and malted wheat, flavored with honey and vanilla, and packed in a bespoke crystal decanter created by the framed French Lalique concern. It was clear, crisp and slightly sweet with a mellow body provided by the wheat. It was luxurious, expensive and the best possible vodka one could buy.

  Everything Katerina owned was the best possible of its kind. The twenty-two-year-old owner of the eighth-largest business concern—legitimate or otherwise—on Earth would accept nothing less.

  She sipped more of the vodka and lifted herself from her bespoke leather office chair and walked around her Parnian Executive desk—a two-hundred-thousand-dollar unit—and walked to the window of her penthouse office suite on the eighty-ninth floor of the Lenin Building overlooking Neva Bay. The recently completed Lenin Building was the tallest building in Europe, thirty-seven feet taller than the previous record holder, the Lakhta building, visible through another of Katerina’s windows.

  Once more, Katerina had insisted on the best. Once more, she had obtained it.

  The business empire she controlled owned seven different holding companies throughout the world. Those companies operated no fewer than one hundred twenty-four operational entities. Those entities combined provided an annual income of three hundred seventy-four billion dollars. Only one of those operational entities was known to any legitimate government.

  Sunshine Realty had undergone a massive overhaul after its leader, Mr. Bright, was discovered murdered in his home in West Virginia. Unfortunately for the company, he was also discovered to be the leader of a multinational terrorist operation that involved several high-ranking members of the United States government and the orchestrator of a plan to set off six fifty-megaton nuclear devices at multiple locations around the world.

  Needless to say, the company’s reputation took an enormous hit. It took a great deal of work to restore the company’s public face, and had that face not been the smooth, youthful skin, brilliant blonde hair and emerald-green eyes of a businesswoman just old enough that the men who controlled most of the world could lust after her without feeling guilty, it was likely that it would have gone under.

  Not that it would have mattered much. It would have been easy for Katerina to start a new company, throw a few hundred million into establishing it and completely severed ties with anything related to the man that no one knew was her father.

  But Katerina didn’t want that. She wanted Sunshine Realty to survive. She wanted Agent Zero to lose that little contest. She wanted that one little corner of his victory to be incomplete.

  It wasn’t much. It was far from the best result, which meant it was far from enough. But it was a start. It was proof to Katerina that with enough time and enough patience, she could defeat this specter that had ruined everything her father had worked for. She could make Agent Zero suffer for what he did to Mr. Bright.

  She didn’t believe for a moment that Agent Zero was dead. She couldn’t understand how anyone could have believed it. They had found no body. Blood, yes, but no body. If there was no body, then that body was still alive somewhere, in hiding like a snake, planning its next strike, venom dripping from its fangs—

  She realized that she was gripping her vodka glass tightly enough to risk crushing it. She set it on the marble counter near her window and walked to her private restroom to regard herself in the mirror.

  She was beautiful. One hundred seventy-three centimeters tall, fifty-five kilograms of taut, supple muscle, a perfect hourglass figure, full lips, the aforementioned hair and gemstone eyes, and fingers that she knew from experience could inflict exhilarating pain and unbearable pleasure with equal skill.

  She took pride in her beauty. It was exceptional, like everything else about her. She was the pinnacle of human achievement. She had been born that way. In school, she had proven it, graduating at the top of every class she attended, even classes led by people who weren’t obsessed with her beauty.

  In her two short years in business, she continued to prove it, growing Mr. Bright’s enterprises so that they were now the largest criminal enterprise in the world by a substantial margin. She had control of thirty-nine different crime syndicates, “mobs” to the uncouth. She had control of an equal number of terrorist organizations along with many corrupt elements in governments ranging from that of Fiji to that of the United States of America with many more in between.

  The best part was that none of those elements knew who their leader was. None knew of their connection to anyone else. Most thought that Mr. Bright’s conglomerate had dissolved after his death and that their current leaders were a fragment of that entity.

  None except a few very close trusted associates knew that Katerina Solnechno was the most powerful woman on Earth and at least at the same tier as the most powerful men. None knew that this little girl who looked like she should be blushing as she accepted her college diploma and stepping out with an awkward and equally youthful young man was in fact able to order the deaths of world leaders with nothing more than a phone call.

  And still, she couldn’t find Agent Zero. It was beyond frustrating, almost as if the man really was a ghost.

  Deep in the recesses of her mind, a kernel of doubt insisted that he could, in fact, be dead, and she could be wasting valuable time and money looking for him. She dismissed that doubt. He couldn’t be dead for the simple fact that she wanted him alive and wanted his death to come slowly and painfully at her own hands. She always got what she wanted. She was born to be the best, and the best was exactly what she was going to achieve.

  A soft chime from her office indicated an important call. These calls were never related to legitimate business matters. Katerina had others to handle that. If a call reached her, it was due to an illicit question that she would prefer to answer herself rather than allow an underling to address.

  She left the restroom, noting that her graceful stride was also superior to that of any other woman alive. She pressed her palm to a sensor embedded within her desk and spoke. “Yes?”

  The voice that spoke was male, deep, husky, and professional. Boris, her right-hand man. “An American satellite has crashed near Kilimanjaro.”

  She frowned. “Yes, I know this. Why are you calling me about it?”

  “Because the CIA has sent agents to investigate.”

  Katerina raised an eyebrow. That was interesting. It wasn’t common knowledge, but satellites fell from the sky all the time. Usually, they burned up in the atmosphere, but it wasn’t unheard of for remnants to impact the Earth every now and then. It certainly wasn’t the sort of problem the United States’ foreign intelligence service needed to bother itself with.

  Unless, of course, there was something on that satellite they considered valuable. Something they were desperate to keep out of the hands of others.

  “I see. Do we have any information on the satellite?”

  “No. Our contact was only able to confirm that it was American and that field agents from the Executive Operations Team were sent to investigate.”

  That was even more interesting. The Executive Operations Team was the most elite CIA paramilitary unit. They were used to address urgent, ultra-high-risk national security threats that other units weren’t capable of handling. Each EOT agent was expected to be able to achieve decisive success when every single metric pointed against them having even the slightest chance of achieving that success.

  If the CIA had sent multiple agents from that elite team to look at this downed satellite, then there was definitely something there worth finding.

  “Very well. Send a team of Dragons to investigate.”

  The Dragons were Katerina’s private intelligence and security force. She was quite proud of them. She had created the unit before her father’s death, when she was still responsible for only a fraction of the empire she now ruled. They were highly trained, extremely capable, and unflinchingly loyal to her and her alone.

  “As you wish. One more thing, ma’am.”

  “Yes?”

  “It appears that the Waswahili Liberation Front may have reached the crash site already.”

  Katerina frowned. “May have? Did they or did they not, Boris?”

  “I don’t have confirmation, ma’am, but I believe they did.”

  “Are they a threat to the Dragons?”

  “Some prudence will be required, but no, we shouldn’t have trouble.”

  Katerina thought a moment. The Waswahili Liberation Front was known to her. They served as middlemen for certain South Asian cartels, transporting drugs from India and the surrounding nations to distributors in Europe. None of Katerina’s enterprises had ever worked with them, but they had a reputation for ruthlessness, especially toward those of Western ethnicity.

  What interest could they have in satellite data, though? Would they even know what to look for or what to do with it if they found it? Or were they working for others? Perhaps it would be better to wait and see what the Front planned before they swooped in and took everything for themselves.

  “For the time being, instruct the Dragons to observe and report back to me,” she said. “I’ll decide how to proceed once I have more information.”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  Boris hung up without waiting to be dismissed. He alone knew her well enough to know when a conversation was finished without being informed.

  Katerina returned to her chair and crossed long, supple legs. The silk skirt she wore fell deliciously around those legs, the design allowing the fabric to reveal just enough to tantalize but not enough to scandalize.

  So the CIA was active again. For the past two years, they had been relatively quiet, putting out small fires here and there but in general dialing back on the police work and focusing on long-term intelligence operations. It seemed that this satellite situation was urgent enough to cause them to throw their weight around again.

  Perhaps even serious enough to cause him to show his face.

  She thought of Zero and the trail of blood he’d left behind next to her father’s body. Perhaps, after so long, she had finally caught a whiff of that scent.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Consciousness snapped back to Trent like a head-on collision with a brick wall. His eyes snapped open, his lungs sucked air in, and after a final stab that burst in his right eye and traveled down his spine, his pain ceased.

  He lay on his back and stared up at the night sky. At first, he didn't know why he was there. Then the memories came flooding back, one at a time, but rapidly enough that he felt increasingly dizzy as he recalled everything.

  He was in Tanzania. He and Maya were on an assignment to retrieve a data core from a DoD satellite that contained the launch codes for the OWL satellite. They had parachuted from a business jet, crashed into some tall trees, then somewhat uncarefully cut through their parachute and fallen to the ground. They'd trekked through the jungle for a few hundred yards and found the satellite crash site. Then something hit him on the head hard.

  He winced and lifted his hand to the right side of his forehead. Sure enough, he had a welt there the size of an apricot. It was sensitive to the touch and dried blood had trickled down his temple and matted the side of his wavy light brown hair a little.

  So they had been attacked, and he had been left for dead. As for Maya.

  Maya!

  He jumped to his feet, and the pain that had receded a moment ago returned, piercing his eye like a red-hot poker.

  “God damn it,” he muttered. “Holy shit.”

  He leaned against the wreckage for a moment. He must have been more seriously hurt than he thought.

  You’ll have to deal with that later. Maya needs you.

  He almost tapped his earpiece to call her, but he stopped when he considered his situation. He’d been knocked unconscious and fallen into the crater. He doubted seriously he had managed to fall in just the right way to be completely hidden from view.

  He looked around. He doubted even more that his rifle had rolled to a stop, so it rested on its buttstock with the barrel carefully leaned against the satellite's gutted fuselage.

  So Maya had moved him. Then she had…

  Had what? He doubted like hell she’d leave him. She certainly wouldn’t move him out of the way then leave him.

  Unless there was a large force of enemy attackers and she was leading them away, so they didn't find him in a compromising position.

  He opened his pack—also conveniently placed nearby-and pulled out his first aid kit. As he dressed his head wound, he thought about his next steps.

  Maya had led the attackers away. He didn’t know how long he’d been out, but it must have been a little while because he heard no signs of battle anymore.

  The attackers were gone. Maya was gone. If she had beaten them already, then she would call him to see if he was awake. If she was still fighting them, then she wouldn’t be able to answer. If she had fought and lost, then she was either dead somewhere or captured.

  In no case was radioing her a wise decision. At best, it would alert the enemy to his own survival. At worst, if Maya was hiding somewhere nursing her own injuries and trying to think of a way back to him, the radio noise might alert the enemy to her position. Their earpieces did a good job of keeping noise to a minimum, but not a perfect job.

  And she really would have called him. She knew he was alive because she pulled him out of harm’s way and ensured his equipment was within easy reach. So she intended to come back for him later.

  She just hadn’t yet. Was that because she was still engaging with the enemy, or was that because she couldn’t come back for him?

  While he waited for his limbs to loosen and his head to stop pounding, he examined the wreckage of the satellite. It had burnt on impact, and possibly prior to impact. Much of the soft metal that formed the heat shields had shattered on impact, and the hard metal behind it had twisted and sometimes melted so that everything was now bent and warped beyond recognition.

  More concerning was the absence of anything that looked electronic. No data core. Had the terrorists taken that too?

  Who else, dumbass?

  He pulled his satellite phone from his pocket. It was one a.m. local time. He couldn’t remember when they had reached the crater, but it couldn’t have been after midnight because they jumped at ten-thirty.

  So he had been unconscious for two hours, give or take. That was more than enough time for Maya to defeat the enemy or be defeated by the enemy. She hadn't come back, so that meant that she had been defeated.

  He shivered, and not from cold. The fact that Maya had lost didn't necessarily mean that she was dead. She could have made a tactical retreat, and circumstances could just make it difficult for her to get to him. She could have learned something about the data core that necessitated immediate action, even if it meant leaving Trent behind.

 

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