Shadow Maker (11 page)

Ankara, Turkey

A
yan Ashaq was dead. Amid all his mysterious gloom and doom, Hadad had failed to mention that little tidbit. Although the revelation was nothing earth-shattering, not when taken with the rest of the data Molly had mined out of the Turkish system.

Living to the ripe old age of ninety-seven, Ayan Ashaq had led a quiet, assassination-free life, never traveling far from Ankara. He had died just as quietly not two years before, and he had no male heirs, though his sixty-four-year-old niece, Safa, had retained ownership of the family's ancestral shop in the Ankara Citadel. City records currently listed the shop as closed.

Only one item in all of Molly's results hinted at anything out of place—a close-up photograph of Ashaq dated 1952. The man in the picture, the man who died a senior citizen almost two years ago and bore no male heirs, looked identical to the man Nick had fought on the tower rooftop.

Under a moonless sky, Nick and Drake raced along the high, red stone wall of Ankara's Byzantine Citadel. They wore MultiCam fatigues and steadied equipment satchels and suppressed MP7s slung at their sides as they ran. On their left, a jagged, near vertical slope fell away from the thirty-foot ramparts to the rocks below. On their right, inside the wall, stood a hilltop settlement that traced its origins back to the early Hittites, four thousand years ago. Narrow cobblestone streets wound between two- and three-story houses constructed of dark timber and whitewashed mud brick. The oldest structures were built into the wall itself, constructed of the same ancient red stones. Ashaq's place was one of these.

“Hurry up, you two,” said Scott, his voice tinged with annoyance. The engineer waited in a Renault Clio near the bottom of the hill, monitoring their progress on his laptop. “And someone tell me why I'm sitting in a parking lot and not sitting comfortably at my desk in the hotel room.”

“You're here in case we need the car on short notice,” said Nick. He kept his voice at a whisper, easily heard by the other two in their SATCOM earpieces.

“With Nightmare Three out of commission, you have to fill two jobs,” added Drake. “You get to be wheel man
a
nd
tech geek. No offense.”

Scott sighed into the comm link. “I hate you.”

The shop's tile roof was twenty feet below the top of the wall. Nick looped a camouflage rope around one of several thick spikes meant to keep birds from roosting on the ramparts and secured it with a heavy polymer clip. He gave it a tug to make sure it would hold and then slid down, managing his speed with the grip through the leather pads on his Nomex gloves.

Drake followed him down, and the two of them crept to the front of the roof where Nick installed an early-warning device on a timber that jutted out from the peak. The booger cam—Drake's name for it—was a micro-camera set in a marble of green sticky material. The gum adhered to almost any surface and would hold any angle.

“So what do an undead sniper and a mythical society of assassins have to do with our DC bomber?” asked Drake, watching the street while Nick worked.

Nick waved a hand in front of the camera and checked the corresponding feed on his smartphone. “Ashaq is not undead. This group must keep their male children hidden, raise them outside the system. It's the only explanation.”

Drake raised an eyebrow. “Says you. Either way, how does he relate to the suicide bomber?”

“I don't know.” Nick pushed back from the edge. “Let's find out.”

The structure next door shared a wall with Ashaq's shop, but its roof was four feet lower. Scott's satellite imagery had caught the glint of a window there. Nick and Drake carefully lowered themselves down to the next roof and found a single pane in a two-foot-by-three-foot frame. “It's big enough,” said Nick. “This is where we go in.”

While Drake affixed a suction cup to the mottled glass, Nick pressed what looked like a small cordless drill into the crux of the frame and dragged it along the window's edge. The device generated a high-power laser, outside the visible spectrum; Nick had no indication it was working except for the red LED on the handle and the whisper of micro-fractures forming in the glass.

After Nick completed the circuit, Drake held the suction cup fast and gave the window a light bump with his fist. The whole piece came free. He handed it to Nick with a grin. “Don't drop this.”

One after the other, they slipped into the top floor of the structure and activated the red tac lights on their MP7s, illuminating a smithy from another age. An old wooden table beneath the window was cluttered with iron tools and sticks of soft metal. Next to it was a pedal-powered grinder, and in the back corner, a blackened brickwork stove with a chimney running up through the roof.

“I know what I want for Christmas now,” said Drake. He had moved to the front of the room, and stood over a long bench where several ornate knives lay on a black velvet cloth, their silver and gold inlays shimmering red under his light.

“Don't touch,” said Nick. “We're not here to shop.”

“Yeah, but maybe they have a Web store.”

Nick wasn't exactly sure what they were looking for—records, a recent photo, anything that might help them find the shooter. After the events of the morning, he had a deep desire to spend some quality time with the guy. The two of them panned their lights across every inch of the stone walls and floor, but there were no pictures, no safe, not even a file cabinet.

“I guess we go down,” said Drake, nodding toward a narrow flight of stairs.

They doused their lights and moved cautiously down the steps—Nick first, Drake above him, his weapon leveled over his teammate's shoulder. Nick saw no movement in the dark and flipped his light on again to get a better look. A wide, old-fashioned desk against the opposite wall looked promising. So did a tall gun rack at the back of the room, though its dozen rifle slots were all empty.

“This is more like it,” whispered Drake, joining him at the bottom of the steps, but his optimism turned out to be premature.

While Drake examined a set of black-powder-coated shelves next to the gun rack, Nick searched the desk. Every drawer was empty. A corkboard mounted above it had only a few torn scraps pinned beneath its thumbtacks, as if someone had hurriedly stripped it bare.

“Nothing over here,” said Drake. “The dust pattern tells me these shelves were full recently, but they're empty now. Same with the gun rack.”

“We're too late,” grumbled Nick. “Whoever was using this shop has bugged out.” He shoved the last drawer into place, jolting the desk. There was a light
flap
of paper falling to the floor.

“Find something?” asked Drake.

“Maybe.” Nick bent down and searched the floor, rising a few seconds later with an eight-by-ten photo with one corner torn off, probably a former tenant of the corkboard that got trapped behind the desk when the room was hastily cleared. It depicted an Indian man with thinning gray hair exiting a building. The lettering on the glass doors behind him read
IBE LABS.

Nick switched his tac light to white and took a snapshot with his phone. Then he texted the picture to CJ, with the message
WHO AND WHERE?

As he pressed send, an alarm sounded in his earpiece. Video from the booger cam replaced the text window on his screen. A figure approached the shop door. Nick couldn't tell if it was their shooter, but it certainly wasn't the elderly woman who was supposed to own the shop. He signaled Drake and they took up positions on either side of the door.

“What's happening?” asked Scott, sensing the urgent silence on the comm link.

Before Nick could tell the engineer to shut up, the door swung open. Incandescent bulbs flashed on overhead, filling the room with yellow light. Nick leveled his MP7 at the man's head. “Close the door. Slowly.”

The intruder obeyed. He was the same man Nick had faced on the roof of the university tower, the man who bore such an uncanny resemblance to the old picture of Ayan Ashaq. This time the killer wore black slacks and a green button-down, looking much less like the grim reaper than before. He stepped away from the door. “Don't move,” ordered Drake from behind him. “Show us your hands.”

The sniper understood English, or at least he understood the order from the tone of Drake's voice. He slowly raised both hands. His left was empty. His right, still balled around his keys.

“Who are you?” demanded Nick. “Who do you work for?”

The shooter remained silent and took another step into the room, moving closer to the desk. Nick couldn't read his intentions. That desk was empty, unless there was a hidden weapon he hadn't found. He sure wasn't going to let the shooter get any closer so he could find out. “Do it,” he said to Drake.

Drake had the shooter covered with a stun gun instead of his MP7. He fired it into the man's back from short range and the sniper's face contracted for an instant. Then it relaxed. He took another step toward the desk. Drake pulled the trigger again, pumping another charge into the man's back, but it had no effect at all. The shooter gave Nick a defiant grin and opened his right hand, dropping its contents. Nick could plainly see the black Hashashin symbol on the sniper's palm. He could also see a tin ring with a short pin hanging from the sniper's middle finger. Those were no ordinary keys.

“Grenade!” Nick shouted, backing away and diving to the floor.

A flash filled the room, along with a deafening
boom
, followed by a cloud of foul smoke.

Stupid
. A flash bang. Nick heard Drake coughing in the haze. “You okay?”

“I'm good,” said Drake through his cough. “I had the door. He didn't go that way. Didn't take the stairs either. You got a tally?”

“Negative.”

As the smoke started to clear, Drake materialized near the stairs, but Nick saw no sign of the shooter. He kicked the old desk. “There's no way! Not again!” Then he noticed the Persian rug at his feet. It was actually two pieces, fit together at the middle to form one continuous pattern. He hadn't seen it before, but now the seam was disturbed, one piece slightly above the other. He crouched down and threw both sides back, revealing a wooden hatch in the stone floor underneath. “Here! Come on!”

Nick yanked open the hatch and pointed his MP7 down the hole, ready to shoot first this time, but all he saw was a ladder leading down into darkness.

N
ick dropped down off the ladder into a narrow tunnel hewn from the bloodred rock of the citadel hill. Stone block pillars held the weight of the ceiling, spaced two meters apart along the walls and extending as far as his white tac light could reach in either direction.

“Which way?” asked Drake, dropping off the ladder.

Nick shook his head. “Didn't see him.”

“What's going on, One?” Static shrouded Scott's voice, interference from the tons of earth and stone above them.

Nick covered one ear so that he could hear the engineer better. “The target from the university showed up. He dropped a mini flash bang and disappeared into a tunnel under the shop. Find out what this place is.”

There was a long pause. “I called up the archaeological records of Ankara. You must be in a cellar of some kind. There are no tunnels beneath the citadel.”

Nick squinted at the gloom beyond his light. “I beg to differ.”

“We've got to move if we want to catch him,” prompted Drake, switching his tac light to white as well. “Do we split up?”

“Negative. We take this guy together.” Nick stuck his index finger in his mouth and then held it out into the center of the tunnel for a few seconds. “This way,” he said, nodding to his front. “There's a breeze.” He wiped his finger on his pants, raised his weapon to his shoulder, and started forward.

Drake followed behind. “I can't believe you just did that. Who are you, Daniel Boone?”

“You have a better idea?”

“No.”

“Then shut up.”

After a few paces, Nick's beam illuminated a wall at the end of the arches.

Drake let out a short sigh. “Dead end. You picked the wrong direction, Mr. Boone.”

Nick nodded and began to turn, but then he felt a breath of air tickle the sweat on his neck. He quickly shut off his light, motioning for Drake to do the same.

“That's not a dead end,” he whispered, leading his teammate forward in the dark, feeling his way along the tunnel wall. “It's a ninety-degree turn.”

Without the lights, the crushing weight of the darkness pressed in, and Nick had the unsettling feeling that something waited for them on the blind side of that corner, something accustomed to the dark, something that thrived on it. The air had grown colder. The dank smell it carried had grown stronger. He paused and knelt when they reached the end of the wall, reaching back to tap Drake's boot in slow cadence:
Three
,
two
,
one
 . . .

Nick took the corner low while Drake went high. Both tac lights came on as they twisted and flung their backs against the tunnel's far wall.

A cloaked, hooded figure hovered above them, suspended in midair. Drake fired, spitting two rounds through his MP7's suppressor. Dust exploded from the apparition's chest. A grotesque head rocked forward into Nick's light.

“Hold your fire,” whispered Nick. “It's a body.”

Drake's eyes were pinned to the ghastly thing, hanging from a recess in the tunnel wall. “It's not a body. It's a mummy,” he whispered back. “I hate mummies. They're just zombies with better embalming.”

Nick panned his light down the passage. More bodies hung along the wall in arched alcoves, four feet off the floor. All of them wore tattered black robes, all were mummified so that their skin had turned gray and shrunk tight against their bones. Their eyes and mouths were sewn shut. He smiled at his teammate. “At least we know they can't bite you.”

The passage remained narrow for a short stretch before it opened into a wide chamber. The ceiling rose to a height of at least five meters, supported by columns cut directly from the cave rock. The dead filled the walls, hanging in rows of recessed niches with their heads bowed and their arms crossed. More bodies lay on stone slabs beneath them. Some were empty, perhaps waiting for a future occupant. Directly ahead, at the far end of the chamber, was a large arched portal, leading into a black void. There were no other exits.

They crept forward with Drake in the lead, staying in the narrow aisle between the left wall and the slabs at its base. “A few of these mummies are fresher than others,” the big operative whispered, shining his light on the bodies on the slabs. “I think the Hashashin are still embalming their members.”

His words were followed by a faint
click
that sounded from the darkness to their right. Both men instinctively dropped to the floor, and an instant later, bullets riddled the bodies behind them. Dust and decayed flesh filled the air. Nick's light cracked off the corner of a stone slab as he dropped and it flickered out. Drake's flashed around the room as he scrambled for cover, playing havoc with the shadows of the dead. For a few seconds there was movement everywhere. Then the chamber went silent again. Nick lay prone behind an empty slab. Drake was on his back behind one that was occupied.

Nick glanced up at his partner. “Did you see him?”

“Negative. I've got nothing.” Drake adjusted his position, bumping the mummy. Its hand slipped down and rested on his forearm. He grimaced and tossed the rigid arm back across the corpse's chest.

Nick inched forward so that he could get his barrel around the edge of his slab. Then he waved to Drake, touched his broken light, and pointed outward toward the void at the center of the room.

Drake nodded. He kept low, but he swung his weapon over the mummy, laying it across the corpse to shine his tac light out into the chamber. A cloaked shadow fled from the beam. Nick fired at it through the space between the slabs, emptying his clip.

If the Hashashin was hit, he gave no indication—no scream, not even a grunt. Instead, he responded with another hail of bullets, forcing both operatives to pull back. The mummy's hand fell down and rested on Drake's arm a second time.

Nick pocketed his empty clip and replaced it with a new one. “I don't like this at all.”

“Tell me about it.” Drake tossed the mummy's arm up to its chest again. “I can't stay here. This guy won't keep his hands to himself.”

Another torrent of automatic fire dug into the slabs and bodies, kicking up dust all around them. Nick judged the angle of the incoming rounds by the line between the slab hits and the wall hits. The shooter had moved ahead of them.

“He's trying to flank us at the far end,” he said, firing a blind burst to keep the Hashashin from breaking their line of cover. As he did, more shots came from behind them, near the entrance. Nick rolled over, firing another blind burst to the rear. “Scratch that. There are two of them, and they're trying to flank us on both sides.”

As he spoke, his tac light suddenly flickered on, still pointed behind them. A black figure ducked out of the cone of light. Nick shifted to follow, but all he saw were dozens of black-robed figures. He couldn't tell which were dead and which were alive, and he didn't have the bullets to find out.

Then a solution dawned on him.

“Shine your light at the portal ahead of us. I'll watch our six. If anything enters your beam, shoot it. As long as we keep them away from the ends of these slabs, they can't flank us. Move!”

Both men started crawling, Drake on his belly with his light pointed at the portal, Nick face up, scooting backward on his shoulders so he could keep his light and his weapon trained on the kill zone behind. Spurts of automatic fire tracked along with them, but the slabs deflected the rounds. The killers couldn't get an angle on them. The plan was working.

Until Nick's damaged light flickered out again.

A curtain of darkness closed over his kill zone.

“Go now!”

Drake doused his light and made a break for the large portal. Nick fired two more bursts into the black behind them and then rolled over and followed. Debris kicked up at his feet. Then a long suppressor appeared out of the dark to his immediate right. He let go of his MP7 and pushed the hot cylinder up and away, wincing as a burst of fire shot past his ear. Still fighting for control of the attacker's weapon with his right hand, he grabbed the MP7 with his left and shoved the suppressor up into the man's ribs. He pulled the trigger. The MP7 gave an empty
click
.

The assailant laughed and shouted in a language Nick did not recognize. Immediately, another volley ricocheted off the archway ahead. The Hashashin was trying to guide his partner's shots using the sound of his own voice.

“Quiet, you.” Nick punched the killer repeatedly in the mouth before committing both hands to wresting his gun away. He shot his right hand under the assailant's biceps and then weaved it back up to grab the barrel, making a modified figure four. Then he cranked the trapped arm backward and down, all the way to the floor. He heard the muted pop of a shoulder coming out of the socket. Even then, the Hashashin did not scream, but the machine gun came free.

Nick turned and flipped the weapon around, firing it into the dark with one hand while dragging his attacker backward through the portal by the collar of his robe. His captive fought against him, trying to gain a footing, but Nick put a stream of rounds into his legs to settle him down, finally getting a human response. The Hashashin let out a furious howl.

Two steps past the arch, Nick heard Drake's voice in his ear. “Through here.” Invisible hands took hold of Nick and his captive and dragged them into a side room. A heavy door slammed shut. A bar slid into place. Drake's tac light came on. “You hit?”

“No. You?”

“Not that I can tell. Who's your friend?” The big operative had propped the Hashashin against the wall next to the door. He shined his light in the man's face. He was their original target, the risen Ayan Ashaq. His legs were bleeding profusely and his face was battered. Blood dripped down his chin from both sides of his mouth.

Drake grimaced. “Nice work, boss.”

“Who sent you to kill us?” demanded Nick.

“I am the servant of the Emissary,” said the Hashashin in perfect English. “But you already know that.” The words brought on a fit of coughing and his robe fell open, exposing the green button-down shirt. A red stain grew at the center of his chest. Nick didn't have much time.

“We know you're planning a bio attack. What's the target?”

The Hashashin gave him a grisly smile, showing two rows of bloody teeth. “You don't know anything. You cannot . . . stop . . . the signs . . .” His voice trailed off and his head fell to the side.

“Nick, don't,” warned Drake.

But Nick had already dropped into a crouch next to his captive. He shook the limp body like a rag doll. “I'm not through with you! What is the target?”

Suddenly the Hashashin came to life, lifting his torso off the wall. His eyes opened wide and bloodshot and he screamed with rage. He swung his left fist sideways at Nick's head. Within a quarter of a second Drake put two bullets through the assassin's forehead. The man fell back against the wall again and his hand dropped onto his thigh. It fell open, and a long metal spike rolled to the floor.

“Back away from him, Nick,” ordered Drake, his weapon still trained on the Hashashin.

Nick stayed where he was and patted the man's cloak, looking for pockets. “Relax. I think he's really dead this time.”

“You clearly don't watch enough late-night movies.”

“No wallet. No ID.” Nick stood up. So much for getting some answers. He glanced warily at the door. “I wonder what happened to his friend.”

“My guess is he's watching the door, waiting for reinforcements,” said Drake, searching the small chamber with his tac light. “He'll try to pick us off the minute we step into the tunnel. When more arrive, they'll breach the room.”

Nick stared down at the dead Hashashin. “I was praying that arch would lead us to an exit as I dragged him through. I should have prayed harder.”

After a heartbeat of silence, Drake nudged him and smiled, nodding toward the far corner of the room. He trained his light on a set of footholds cut into the rock wall, leading up to a stone hatch in the ceiling. “I think you did just fine.”