Jack Mars

Jack Mars is the USA Today bestselling author of the LUKE STONE thriller series, which includes seven books. He is also the author of the new FORGING OF LUKE STONE prequel series, comprising three books (and counting); and of the AGENT ZERO spy thriller series, comprising seven books (and counting).

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Copyright © 2019 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Jacket image Copyright GlebSStock, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

BOOKS BY JACK MARS

LUKE STONE THRILLER SERIES

ANY MEANS NECESSARY (Book #1)

OATH OF OFFICE (Book #2)

SITUATION ROOM (Book #3)

OPPOSE ANY FOE (Book #4)

PRESIDENT ELECT (Book #5)

OUR SACRED HONOR (Book #6)

HOUSE DIVIDED (Book #7)

FORGING OF LUKE STONE PREQUEL SERIES

PRIMARY TARGET (Book #1)

PRIMARY COMMAND (Book #2)

PRIMARY THREAT (Book #3)

PRIMARY GLORY (Book #4)

AN AGENT ZERO SPY THRILLER SERIES

AGENT ZERO (Book #1)

TARGET ZERO (Book #2)

HUNTING ZERO (Book #3)

TRAPPING ZERO (Book #4)

FILE ZERO (Book #5)

RECALL ZERO (Book #6)

ASSASSIN ZERO (Book #7)

DECOY ZERO (Book #8)

PROLOGUE

I can’t locate Sara.

That was what Todd Strickland had told him over the phone. Zero had barely been home from Belgium for a full day, after exposing the Russian president as the puppeteer behind an attempt to annex Ukraine with American interference, when he got the news. Strickland had been keeping tabs on Sara ever since she had become an emancipated minor and moved to Florida, but now she had seemingly vanished. Her cell service was cut off and location inactive. Even her roommates at the co-op where she rented a room claimed they hadn’t seen her in two days.

Text me her home address, Zero had ordered him. I’m going to the airport.

Just shy of three hours later he stood outside the ramshackle house in Jacksonville, Florida, the place Sara had been calling home for a little more than a year. He marched up the cracked concrete steps and pounded on the front door with the flat of a fist, over and over again without pausing, until someone finally answered.

“Dude,” groaned a lanky blond teenager with tattoos up and down his arms. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Sara Lawson,” Zero demanded. “You know where she might be?”

The kid’s eyebrows knit quizzically, but his mouth curled in a smirk. “Why? You another Fed looking for her?”

Fed? A chill ran up Zero’s spine. If anyone who claimed to be FBI had come around, it could mean she’s been abducted.

“I’m her father.” He stepped forward, shoving the kid back with his shoulder as he pushed into the house.

“Yo, you can’t just barge in here!” the kid tried to protest. “Man, I will call the cops—”

Zero spun on him. “It’s Tommy, right?”

The blond kid’s eyes widened apprehensively, though he didn’t answer.

“I’ve heard about you,” Zero told him, keeping his voice low. Strickland had given him a full briefing while he was en route. “I know all about you. You’re not going to call the cops. You’re not going to call your lawyer dad. You’re going to sit there, on the couch, and shut your damn mouth. You hear me?”

The kid opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something—

“I said shut it,” Zero snapped.

The lanky boy retreated to the couch like a kicked dog, taking a seat beside a young girl who couldn’t have been eighteen if she was a day.

“Are you Camilla?”

The girl shook her head frantically. “I’m Jo.”

“I’m Camilla.” A young Latina girl came down the stairs, dark-haired and wearing entirely too much makeup. “I’m Sara’s roomie.” She looked Zero up and down. “You’re really her dad?” she asked dubiously.

“Yeah.”

“Then… what do you do?”

“What?”

“For work. Sara told us what you do.”

“I don’t have time for this,” he muttered at the ceiling. “I’m an accountant,” he told the girl.

Camilla shook her head. “Wrong answer.”

Zero scoffed. Leave it to Sara to tell her friends the truth about me. “What do you want me to say? That I’m a spy with the CIA?”

Camilla blinked at him. “Well… yeah.”

“For real?” said the blond kid on the sofa.

Zero held up both hands in frustration. “Please. Just tell me where you last saw Sara.”

Camilla looked at her roommates, and then the floor. “All right,” she said quietly. “A few days ago, she was looking to score, and I gave her…”

“Score?” Zero asked.

“Drugs, man. Keep up,” said the blond kid.

“She needed something to even her out,” Camilla continued. “I gave her the address of my guy. She went there. She came back. Next morning she left again. I thought she was going to work, but she never came home. Her phone’s off. I swear that’s all I know.”

Zero almost saw red at these irresponsible kids, barely adults, sending a teenager alone to a drug dealer’s house. But he swallowed his anger for her. He needed to find her.

She needs you.

“That’s not all you know,” he said to Camilla. “I want the name and address of your guy.”

*

Twenty minutes later Zero stood outside a Jacksonville rowhouse with grimy siding and a broken washing machine on the front porch. According to Camilla, this was the dealer’s house, some guy named Ike.

Zero didn’t have a gun on him. He’d been in such a rush to get to the airport that he’d run out the door with nothing but his car keys and his phone. But now he wished he’d brought one.

How do I play this? Burst in, kick ass, demand answers? Or knock and have a chat?

He decided the latter would be a better way to start—and he’d see where things took him from there.

On the third brisk knock, a male voice called out from inside the house. “Hang the fuck on, I’m coming!” The guy that appeared at the door was taller than Zero, more muscular than Zero, and far more tattooed than Zero (who had none). He wore a white tank top with what looked like a coffee stain on it, and jeans that were too big for him, hanging low on his hips.

“Are you Ike?”

The dealer looked him up and down. “You a cop?”

“No. I’m looking for my daughter. Sara. She’s sixteen, blonde, about this tall…”

“Never seen your kid, man.” Ike shook his head. He had a frown on his face.

But Zero noticed the tiny, almost imperceptible twitch of his eye. A flicker on his lips as he willed them not to scowl. Anger. He showed a brief flash of anger at Sara’s name.

“Okay. Sorry to bother you,” Zero said.

“Yeah,” the guy said flatly. He started to close the door.

As soon as Ike was partially turned away, Zero raised a foot and delivered a solid kick just below the doorknob. It flew open, crashing into the dealer and sending him sprawling on his belly to the brown carpet.

Zero was on him in a second, a forearm against his windpipe. “You know her,” he growled. “I saw it in your eyes. Tell me where she went, or I’ll—”

He heard a snarl, and then a blur of black and brown as a thick-necked Rottweiler leapt at him. He barely had time to react other than to take the force of the dog and roll with it. Teeth gnashed and bit at the air, finding purchase on his arm and sinking fangs into flesh.

Zero clenched his teeth hard and rolled once more, so that the dog was under him, and pushed down, forcing his bit forearm into the dog’s mouth even as it tried to clamp down further.

The dealer scrambled to his feet and fled the room while Zero grasped behind him for whatever he could find. The dog wriggled and thrashed beneath him, trying to get free, but Zero pinched his legs together so it couldn’t get upright. His hand found a ratty blanket draped on the leather couch, and he pulled it loose.

With his free hand he delivered a single, snapping blow to the dog’s snout—not enough to hurt it badly, but to stun it enough that its teeth released his arm. In the half-second before the jaws clamped down again, he wrapped the blanket around the dog’s head and relaxed his legs so it could flip over and stand.

Then he whipped the end of the blanket under its body and tied the ends behind its head, wrapped the front half of the Rottweiler tightly in the blanket. The dog thrashed and bucked, trying to get free—and it would, eventually. So Zero scrambled to his feet and dashed after the dealer.

He skidded into a tiny kitchen just in time to see Ike pulling a small, ugly pistol loose from a drawer. He tried to bring it around, but Zero leapt forward and stopped it with a hand, and then snapped it from his grip in a twisting maneuver that definitely dislocated, if not broke, one of the guy’s fingers.

Ike yelped sharply and cowered, holding his hand, as Zero aimed the gun at his forehead.

“Don’t shoot me, man,” he whimpered. “Don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot me.”

“Tell me what I want to know. Where is Sara? When did you last see her?”

“Okay! Okay. Look, she came to me, but she couldn’t pay, so we worked out a deal where she could run my stuff around town—”

“Drugs,” Zero corrected. “You had her running drugs. Just say that.”

“Yeah. Drugs. It was just a few days, and she was doing okay, but then I gave her a big score of pills…”

“Of what?”

“Prescription pills. Painkillers. And she just ghosted me, man. Never showed up, never delivered. My people were pissed. I was out more than a thousand bucks. And she even took one of my cars, ’cause she didn’t have one of her own…”

Zero scoffed loudly. “You gave her a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs, and she ran off with it?”

“Yeah, man.” He looked up at Zero, his hands up near his face defensively. “If you think about it, I’m really the victim here…”

“Shut up.” He gently pushed the barrel against Ike’s forehead. “Where was she going, and what kind of car did she take?”

*

Zero took the black Escalade, which he’d “borrowed” from Ike along with his gun, and used the GPS on his phone to drive as quickly as he could to the drop-off point, all the while looking for a light blue 2001 four-door Chevy sedan.

He didn’t see one before he reached the delivery point, which much to his chagrin was a local rec center. But he couldn’t worry about that in the moment. Instead he thought to himself, What would Sara do? Where would she go?

He already knew the answer before he even finished asking himself the question. It floated to him on the salty scent of the air as easily as recalling a memory.

It was no secret in their family that Kate, Maya and Sara’s late mother, had a favorite spot in the entire world. She had taken the girls there on three separate occasions, the first time when they were only eight and six respectively, and told them: “This is my favorite spot.”

It was a beach in New Jersey, a phrase that would typically make Zero cringe. The beach was too rocky and the water was usually too cold except for two months in the summer, but that’s not what Kate liked about it. She just liked the view. She’d gone there every year when she was a little girl, all through her teens, and had a fond and almost unfounded love for the place.

The beach. He knew that Sara would go to the beach.

He used his phone to find the closest ones and drove there like a maniac, cutting people off and blowing lights and overall generally surprised that no cops zipped out from hiding places to pull him over. The parking lots at the beach were only a few rows, long and narrow and full of cars and happy families. But he didn’t see any vehicles that matched the one that Ike had described.

He searched three of the largest, closest beaches to Sara’s home and work and found nothing. Dusk was falling fast. In the back of his mind he was aware that the US had a new president; the former Speaker of the House had been sworn in that afternoon. Maria was invited there, to the ceremony, and was most likely at some cocktail party by now, full of stuffy politicians and wealthy constituents, sipping champagne and talking idly about a bright future while Zero searched the coast of Jacksonville for his estranged daughter who, last time he’d seen her, had called the police on him and shouted that she never wanted to see him again.

“Come on, Sara,” he muttered to the ether as he flicked the headlights on. “Give me something. Help me find you. There must be a…”

He trailed off as he realized his mistake. He’d been searching public beaches. Popular beaches. But Kate’s beach had been small and sparsely visited. And Sara had a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs. She wouldn’t want to be where people were.

He pulled over to the side of the road and opened the browser on his phone. He frantically searched for less popular beaches, rocky beaches, places that people didn’t often go. It was a hard search, and it didn’t feel like he was making progress until he touched the “images” tab and then he saw it—

A beach that looked remarkably like Kate’s beach. As if it had been molded from his own memory.

Zero headed there at about eighty miles an hour, not caring about police or traffic laws or even other drivers as he swerved around cars going far too slow, people casually heading home for the night and not concerned that their daughter might be dead in the surf somewhere.

He skidded into the tiny gravel parking lot and slammed his brakes when he saw it. A blue sedan, the only car in the lot, parked at the farthest end. Night had fallen, so he left the headlights on and put the Escalade in park right there in the middle of the lot, and he jumped out and ran over to the sedan.

He threw the back door open.

And there she was, looking like both heaven and hell: his baby girl, his youngest daughter, pale-skinned and beautiful, lying prostrate in the backseat of a car with her eyes glazed and half-opened, pills scattered around the floor below her.

Zero immediately checked for a pulse. It was there, though slow. Then he tilted her head back and made sure her airway was clear. He knew that most overdose deaths were the result of blocked airways that resulted in respiratory failure and eventually cardiac arrest.

But she was breathing, albeit shallowly.

“Sara?” he said hoarsely in her face. “Sara?”

She didn’t answer. He hefted her out of the car and held her upright. She was unable to stand on her own two feet.

“I’m so sorry,” he told her. And then he stuck two fingers down her throat.

She retched involuntarily, then again, and vomited into the parking lot. She coughed and sputtered while he held her and told her, “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

He put her in the Escalade, leaving the doors of the sedan still open with pills all over the seats, and drove two miles until he found a convenience store. He bought two liters of water with a twenty and didn’t stick around for his change.

There in the parking lot of a Florida gas station, he sat with her in the back seat, her head in his lap as he stroked her hair, feeding her small amounts of water and watching for any signs that he should bring her to an emergency room. Her pupils were dilated, but her airways were open and her pulse was slowly returning to normal. Her fingers were twitching slightly, but when he slipped his hand into them they closed around his. Zero held back tears, remembering when she was just a baby, when he’d hold her in his lap and her tiny fingers would clench his.

He lost track of time sitting there with her. The next time he glanced up at the clock he saw that more than two hours had gone by.

And then she blinked, and moaned slightly, and said: “Daddy?”

“Yeah.” His voice came out a whisper. “It’s me.”

“Is this real?” she asked, her voice floating to him dreamily.

“It’s real,” he told her. “I’m here, and I’m going to take you home. I’m going to take you away from here. I’m going to take care of you… even if you hate me for it.”

“Okay,” she agreed softly.

And eventually he relaxed enough to realize that the danger had passed. Sara fell asleep and Zero slid into the front seat of the SUV. He couldn’t put her on a plane in this state, but he could drive back, through the night if he had to. Maria would get rid of the vehicle for him, no questions asked. And the local authorities would be paying a visit to the dealer, Ike.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, curled in the backseat with her knees drawn up and her cheek on the soft leather, looking peaceful but vulnerable.

She needs you.

And he needed to be needed.