Trapping Zero (An Agent Zero Spy Thriller—Book #4)

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER NINE

Reid’s fight-or-flight instinct kicked in immediately at the receptionist’s words. And since it was clear to him that he wasn’t going to fight this woman—mostly clear, anyway—he decided to run. But halfway back to the door he heard a loud click.

The doorknob rattled, but did not move.

He spun and saw the woman’s hand beneath her expensive desk. There must be a button. A remote locking mechanism.

This is a trap.

“Let me out,” he warned. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

“I do,” she replied. “And I assure you, you are in no danger. Would you like some tea?” Her tone was pacifying, as if she was dealing with a schizophrenic that had skipped their meds.

Words nearly failed him. “Tea? No, I don’t want tea. I want to leave.” He slammed his shoulder against the heavy door, but it would not budge.

“That won’t work,” the woman said. “Please don’t hurt yourself.”

He turned back to her. She had stood from her desk and held her hands out in a non-threatening manner. But she locked you in here, he reminded himself. So maybe you will fight this woman.

“My name is Alina Guyer,” she said. “Do you remember me?”

Guyer? But Reidigger’s letter said the doctor was a “he.” Besides, Reid was fairly sure he wouldn’t forget a face like that. She was downright stunning.

“No,” he said. “I don’t remember you. I don’t remember ever being here and it was a mistake to come here. If you don’t let me out, bad things are going to happen…”

“My god,” said a hushed male voice. “It’s you.”

Reid immediately put up his fists as he turned towards the new threat.

The doctor—presumably, since he wore a white coat—stood in the threshold of a door to the left of the cocobolo desk. He had to be in his late fifties, if not sixty, though his green eyes were keen and sharp. His entirely white hair was trimmed neatly and impeccably parted. His tie, Reid noted, was Ermenegildo Zegna, though he wasn’t sure how he knew that.

Most important of all, however, was that the doctor looked entirely awestruck by Reid’s presence.

“Dr. Guyer, I presume?” he said breathlessly.

“I always thought you might come back,” the doctor said, a wide smile breaking upon his face. He had a similar Swiss-German accent as his receptionist, who he turned to as he said, “Alina, darling, cancel my appointments. Hold my calls. Keep the lock on. We are closed for today.”

“Of course,” said Alina as she slowly sank back to her chair, her lake-like eyes not leaving Reid.

“Come!” Guyer motioned for Reid to follow. “Please, come. I promise you are in the company of friends here.”

Reid hesitated. “You understand I might be a little distrusting.”

Guyer nodded appreciably. “I understand we have a lot to discuss.” He turned and vanished through the doorway.

This feels wrong. They had a remote door lock, no patients present, and a small fortune in furniture. But he wanted answers, so Reid ignored his instinct to flee and followed the doctor.

Before he went through the doorway the receptionist—who Reid had surmised was Guyer’s wife—glanced up at him with a thin smile and asked, “About that tea?”

“Maybe something stronger, if you’ve got it,” Reid muttered.

The walls of Guyer’s office held an impressive number of framed certifications and diplomas, as well as an array of photographs of various travels and achievements. But Reid barely glanced at them. He didn’t care about anything this doctor had done other than the single procedure Guyer had performed on his head.

The doctor pulled open a desk drawer and took out a notebook and pen, and then sat heavily in his chair, beaming at Reid like he was Christmas morning.

“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.

“I can’t speak for your personal motivations, Agent Zero,” said Guyer. “But you agreed to all of this. I have it on video.” He paused for a moment before asking, “Would you like to see?”

Reid hesitated. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I think I would.”

Dr. Guyer rose from his chair, but even as he did a new memory flashed across Reid’s mind.

You were sitting in this very office. In the same chair.

Beside you is a friendly face with a boyish smile, dark hair neatly parted. Alan Reidigger.

Guyer sits behind the desk with a video camera.

Reidigger nods to you once in reassurance.

“My name is Kent Steele,” you begin. “This video is to confirm that I consent to an experimental neurosurgical procedure to be performed by Dr. Edgar Guyer…”

Reid shook his head. “Forget it,” he told Guyer. “No need for the video.”

The doctor, still standing behind his desk, regarded Reid with eyes wide and attentive. “It happened just now, didn’t it? A memory returned to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Incredible,” Guyer breathed. “Tell me, what was the trigger?”

“Um… a combination of things, I suppose,” Reid said. “The word ‘video.’ Being here in this office, seeing you.”

“Tell me, what other triggers have you experienced?” Guyer sank back into his seat and plucked up his pen.

“It’s usually things I hear,” Reid explained. “But that’s not always enough alone. It’s a blend of things—being in a particular place, hearing something, sometimes even a scent…”

Guyer scribbled furiously in the notebook as he said, “So no single sensory reception is recalling memories? Visual or auditory stimulus alone is not enough… fascinating. Can you give me an example?”

Reid sighed. “Sure. Uh… okay, a couple of months ago I was in France, in a part of Paris I thought I had never been. I smelled a bakery, and I saw a street sign, and suddenly I realized I had been on that exact corner before, and I knew exactly where I needed to go. Well, my feet knew where to go. In my head, I was still experiencing everything new. I guess you could say it’s like the most frustrating version of déjà vu possible.”

“Hmm,” Guyer murmured as he took notes. “What about abilities?”

“Abilities?” Reid asked.

“As an agent, you had combat training, flight training, emergency intervention…”

“Oh, right. Yes, some have come back,” Reid told him. “Those are probably the most confusing to me. Two months ago I couldn’t speak Arabic, Russian, French, Slovak… but if someone speaks to me in a language I know, it all comes back at once, as if it’s unlocked. Suddenly I can speak it as well as I’m talking to you now. The same goes for fighting, or even piloting. It’s as if the familiarity of an instinct kicks in and it all just rushes back.”

“That is very promising,” Guyer said without looking up.

“Why?”

The doctor set down the pen. “You see, Agent Zero—”

“Can you stop calling me that?” Reid interrupted. For some reason being referred to by his CIA handle was getting on his nerves. “Call me Reid. Please.”

“Certainly, Reid. This procedure was extremely complex. It took eighteen hours to complete, because it was about suppressing far more than just memory. For what are abilities if not skills learned through repetition? And repetition itself is based on memory. Even our most basic skills rely on subconscious recollection—walking, speaking, writing, et cetera. I cannot express to you how difficult it was to suppress the knowledge of how to handle a gun without accidentally hindering your ability to hold a pen. To quell the ability of flying an airplane without inadvertently quashing how to drive a car…”

“And I suppose you don’t know what it’s like to climb into a cockpit and suddenly know how to fly a plane,” Reid mused.

The doctor looked to him somberly. “Bewildering and exhilarating, I would imagine.”

Reid scoffed—though he had to admit silently that it was, at times, exhilarating.

“Anyhow,” Guyer continued, “the recollection of abilities is promising because it is not a single memory that learns a skill, yet your mind has a way of collating that data, so to speak. For example, you may not remember precisely where you were or what you were doing when you learned the word bonjour, but your brain—the prefrontal cortex working with the hippocampus and temporal lobe—has ‘bundled’ that information with the rest of your knowledge of the French language, and it would seem that recovering any part of it ‘unlocks,’ as you put it, its entirety. Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” Reid nodded, mostly following what the doctor was suggesting. “But then why doesn’t it work that way with other memories? If I remember one thing about a particular person, why don’t I remember everything about them?”

“While I can’t say with any certainty, I imagine it has to do with the way that our brains process memories,” Guyer told him. “The memory suppressor works by affecting the limbic system. The amygdala, part of that system, plays a large role in processing emotional reactions and social behavior. See, we tend to associate only a few central memories with any given person or even place. To recall more than that requires… well, it requires us to think about it.”

Reid sighed heavily. Everything that the doctor was saying made some semblance of sense, but the simple fact of the matter was that he had come here to have only one question answered.

“Dr. Guyer,” he said, “while all of this is very enlightening, I can’t continue to live like this. There are questions in my mind that I can’t answer. So I need to know: can this be reversed? Can my memory be restored?”

The doctor was silent for a long moment, tenting his fingers on the desk. “Are you certain,” he asked, “that is what you want? You had these memories suppressed for a reason.”

“Yes,” Reid said. “I’m certain.” The past had come back to haunt him in more ways than one, and he couldn’t continue on knowing only half-truths.

Guyer stood from his desk. “Come with me, please.” He led Reid wordlessly out of the office, further down the hall and into a wide white room with dim blue lighting, filled with an array of high-tech medical equipment. Reid recognized an X-ray machine, a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, and an ultrasound generator; there were monitors and computers and carefully laid surfaces of shiny, impeccably clean surgical tools, the purpose of which Reid could only start to guess.

The doctor directed his attention to a large piece of equipment in the corner of the room. It somewhat resembled a cross between an MRI machine and a tanning bed, a large white cylindrical chamber with a circular aperture in the center that held a narrow cot. But before Guyer even began to explain, Reid suspected its objective was more than just imaging.

“In the wake of your procedure,” Guyer explained, “I studied the schematics from Alan Reidigger and the technology behind the memory suppressor with the intention of copying it. But as I mentioned before, there are flaws in its designs. And I came to realize, after some months, that fixing them is unfortunately beyond me. So I shifted my focus, and created this.”

Reid did not say anything, but he raised an eyebrow curiously, wondering how the stolen CIA tech had evolved from an implant the size of a grain of rice to the enormous machine before him.

“As I said, the suppressor works by affecting the limbic system,” Guyer continued. “That is, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the epithalamus, and the hypothalamus—among other parts. It does not affect the four main lobes of the brain, save for a small portion of the medial temporal lobe, which is associated with episodic memory. What that means is that the suppressor does not hinder your ability to create new memories or to turn short-term memory into long-term.”

“It only affects what you already know,” Reid offered. “No offense, Doc, but I don’t need to know the science behind it. I just need to know what it can do.”

“Of course,” said Guyer apologetically. “Essentially, I have spent the last thirteen months reverse-engineering the suppressor’s technology into a way to oppose the device; that is, to affect the limbic system in a manner that will, to use layman terms, ‘encourage’ memory.”

Reid frowned. “I’m not sure I follow. You built this for people that had a memory suppressor implanted?” As far as he was aware, there had been only one suppressor created—and only one person affected by it.

“Oh, it is much more than that,” said Guyer. “If it works the way I hope, this machine could potentially help patients who have suffered memory loss through trauma, long-term drug use, amnesia… all manner of afflictions.”

“If what you’re saying is true, then this could help thousands.” Reid was hopeful that he was right, that some good could come from the memory suppressor’s duplicitous intent.

“Yes,” said Guyer, his tone hushed. “Yet it is my deepest regret and my biggest shame to see this machine every day and do nothing with it. I fear going public because your agency might recognize the stolen technology. It might have traced back to you.”

Reid shook his head. “So you spent months designing and building this machine for nothing?”

The doctor looked away, and Reid suddenly understood.

“No… you built it because you believed I would come back.” He didn’t want to believe that, but the doctor’s expression told him it was true. Guyer was not just preoccupied with the suppressor and Reid’s head; he was obsessed. “This could help people. You have no obligation to me. You don’t owe me protection.”

Guyer frowned deeply. “But I do, Agent—I mean, Reid. Don’t you see? Your mind is the greatest achievement of my career. I understand that your life has been negatively impacted by what I did—”

“That’s a bit of an understatement,” Reid muttered.

“Even so, what we achieved together was impossible before you. Even to the modern world at large, it still is impossible. But…” Guyer’s eyes gleamed. “If we can restore your memory, then that will be an entirely new miracle of modern science. And if you agree to allow me to test my machine on you, and it works—well, then I will have no moral choice but to go public with it.”

Reid stroked his chin as he examined the machine before him. He had come here for answers, but he hadn’t actually expected a viable solution. Yet there it was, in the form of the large white cylinder before him.

“When?” he asked.

“Now.”

“Now?” Reid did a double-take. He glanced at his watch. He still had plenty of time to return to the girls—and he was keenly aware of how ridiculous it would sound to mention that he was on a schedule when they were talking about solving such a serious impact to his life and wellbeing.

“The entire procedure would take under an hour,” Guyer said calmly. “But I understand if you have trepidations. You can think about it, come back another day if you’d like.” It was clear by the doctor’s tone that he did not want Reid to leave.

“I…” If Reid was being honest, he was extremely nervous—not about the procedure, but about what it might mean to have his full memory reinstated. “Is there any recovery time involved?”

“No,” said Guyer. “It is noninvasive, completely safe.”

“Will there be any side effects?”

“I don’t know,” Guyer said honestly.

“Will it be instant? Will I remember right away?”

“I don’t know,” the doctor said again. “If it works properly, then it should be instant, much like the suppressor was. But this is completely new territory, even for me. I can only guess at answers to your questions, and I’m hesitant to even do that.”

Reid looked the doctor in the eye as he asked the most important question. “Can I trust you?”

Guyer smiled warmly. “I imagine that with your vocation and memory issues, distrust is instinctive. Even if I said yes, would you take me at my word?”

“No,” Reid agreed. “I wouldn’t.”

It was long past time for deliberation, he realized. He had told himself so many times that he needed to know, needed a solution—and now it was right in front of him. He was done making excuses.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”