Shadow Maker (12 page)

W
hile Drake climbed the footholds to test the stone hatch, Nick's eyes drifted around the dark chamber. The walls were flat and bare. There was no furniture except for a wide circular pedestal that rose from the floor, perhaps serving as a table. He moved closer and knelt next to it, running his fingers along the side. He felt the indentations of script spiraling down from top to bottom.

“What've you got?” asked Drake, pressing his shoulders up against the heavy stone.

“I don't know. Verses of some kind.”

Drake let out a long grunt. The hatch moved, but not far. He relaxed and it settled back into place. “Verses from the Quran?”

Nick used the glow of his smartphone screen to examine his find. “I don't think so. Usually Quranic verses are written in Arabic. This appears to be Farsi.”

“You mean Iranian.”

“I mean Persian, and that's not a language in my skill set.” He walked around the table, taking pictures. “We'll have to get these translated.”

When he finished with the verses, Nick moved his light to the top of the pedestal. There were more carvings—a series of five symbols, four at the points of the compass and a larger one at the center, worn smooth and partially erased by time. Each was a simple shape or combination of shapes within a circle. Two of them matched the tattoos Nick had seen on his Hashashin targets.

He recognized the nearest of the four minor symbols as the double crescent moon worn by the incarnation of Ayan Ashaq, now lying dead a few feet away. The next around the circle was a combination of two triangles with their points overlapping, and the next a sort of sawtooth with a narrow base. The fourth symbol was nothing more than a horizontal crescent moon, its points directed downward.

Nick also recognized the fifth symbol, the larger one at the center of the table. Despite the wear of the stone, he could see the remnant of a crescent moon and an eight-pointed star, just like the tattoo on the man from Budapest and the DC bombing. Its honored position on this pedestal solidified what Nick already suspected. The man bearing that mark was in charge. He had to be the Emissary.

“Hey, professor,” said Drake, growing impatient in his awkward perch. “We can move this hatch if we both push together. You coming or what?”

—

No one spoke when the team finally reached its three-room hotel suite in downtown Ankara. Against the objections of his teammates, Nick had kept them out an additional hour after they escaped from the catacombs, driving a preplanned surveillance-detection route to make sure they weren't followed.

Nick went straight to his room and shut the door, dropping his gear on the floor and collapsing onto his bed without bothering to undress.

He slept fitfully, his dreams full of half-decayed corpses in black robes, reaching for him out of a murky black ether. When he woke in the dim hour before sunrise, he couldn't move, trapped in that place where the mind is awake but the body is not. The feeling of an evil presence weighed heavily on his senses. The curtain fluttered. The silhouette of a hooded man materialized in the corner next to the window, its edges bleeding into the shadows around it.

Though he tried to call out, Nick could not speak. He could not utter a sound. His MP7 lay on the floor, not three feet from his left hand, but he could not move to grab it.

The shadow glided to the foot of the bed, reaching into its cloak with a skeletal black hand.

Nick fought against his paralysis until all at once his voice and body broke free. He cried out with something between a growl and a scream and rolled over to grab his weapon.

When he rolled back to fire, he saw nothing but an empty wall.

Drake burst through the bedroom door with his Beretta in hand, but he stopped short, his eyes flitting from the weapon in Nick's hands to the blank wall under his crosshairs. He blinked. “You . . . um . . . have a call on Scott's video setup. It's CJ.” The big operative watched Nick until he lowered the MP7. Then he slid his Beretta into his waistband and walked out of the room.

Both Scott and Drake eyed Nick with curiosity as he crossed the suite to their temporary computer station. Nick said nothing. He did not want to discuss it.

He sat down in front of a live telecom image of CJ on the center of three laptops. “You have something for me?”

“You look like death warmed over,” said the FBI agent, scrunching up her face.

“It's the SATCOM link. It adds ten years. Come on. Don't keep me in suspense.”

The FBI agent squinted at Nick for a second longer, but then she clicked her mouse and a photograph replaced her face on the screen. “We had to outsource to some folks at the National Archives,” she said, “but we finally restored that photograph from the bombing.”

Nick took in a breath. Except for some small discoloration and fading, he could swear he was looking at an unburned photo. He would never have thought that kind of restoration possible, not after seeing the damage done to the original.

The picture was clearly a surveillance photo, from the chest up, taken with a telephoto lens. The younger version of Nick was looking off camera. He tried to place the drab urban scene in the background, but the flat mud structures looked like any number of villages in the Middle East.

“Ring any bells?” asked CJ.

Nick shrank the picture with his mouse and moved it into the corner of the screen. “Give me a little time. It will come to me.”

“Time is something we don't have. The president is certain that another attack is imminent, and I have nothing to give him. Please tell me you haven't been gallivanting around Eastern Europe for two days only to come up empty-handed.”

“I wouldn't call it empty-handed.” Nick told her about their fight in the catacombs. “We found script that may be useful,” he said, plugging his phone into the laptop, “along with some symbols that match our mystery tattoos. I'm sending you the pictures.”

CJ wasn't impressed. “Cave drawings and mummies, huh?” She shook her head. “You're slipping, Nick Baron. And another thing—your buddy Senator Cartwright is getting more persistent. I've got one of his staffers banging on my door every couple of hours. It's like they're taking shifts. I've blocked them with special access orders, but that won't last. He's on the Intelligence Oversight Committee.”

“My team isn't under that committee,” said Nick.

“Well, mine is,” she countered. “And I told you about Cartwright's White House connection. In another forty-eight hours, he'll have all the clearances he needs.”

Nick didn't want to hear about the idiot politicians. He pushed her back on track. “I sent you a text from the room where we entered the tunnels. Did you get it?”

She cocked her head. “Random picture with a ‘who and where' attached? Yeah, I got it. How should I know who that is?”

“I'm tired, CJ.”

“Fine. Be that way. His name is Dr. Nashak Maharani. It took our software under an hour to come up with a match. We also know the where. International Biological Engineering. The good doctor is a molecular biologist.” She paused and leaned closer to the screen. “Nick, he's noted for his achievements in genetically modified viruses.”

Drake appeared at Nick's shoulder. “Bingo, we have a winner. That confirms we're facing a bio-attack.”

A torso in a black suit, made headless by the limits of the webcam, approached CJ's desk. The suit handed her a note and she looked up and said a few words that the microphone didn't pick up. Then he moved offscreen again. CJ turned back to the monitor. “We got a video hit on your tattoo from Budapest.”

“Where?” asked Nick and Drake in stereo.

“An airport cam at Heathrow, ten hours ago. Just a glimpse of the mark itself, though, no face. Two significant flights came in around that time, one from Cairo, one from Jordan. My guys pulled the customs feeds, but no dice.”

“Ten hours,” muttered Nick.

“Suck it up, princess,” retorted CJ. “Legitimate government agencies like mine have to follow rules, file paperwork. Ten hours is some kind of record. You should be singing my praises.”

“So do we go after Maharani or Tattoo Guy?” asked Drake.

“Both. The bioresearch firm that Maharani works for is also in London. I'm guessing that's no coincidence.”

Nick looked back at Scott. “Call our pilot. Have him warm up the jet. Start packing the gear.”

“Hey! I'm not finished.” CJ tapped her screen to reclaim his attention. “Maharani's a start, but I need more. The picture showing up at the bombing tells me our quarry is someone from your past. You've seen his face twice so far. You have to dig down and try to remember him. You have to tell me who we're up against.”

Nick glanced down at the picture in the corner of the screen. In the photo, he was younger, several years at least. He shook his head. “The man I saw was young, early twenties. If I was chasing him when this picture was taken, then I was chasing a teenager—”

He stopped. That was it. Suddenly he saw the face of the Budapest killer—the face of the mystery man at the DC bombing—in a new light. He knew the identity of the Emissary.

Yemen

35 kilometers northwest of `Amran

September 2005

H
atchet, this is Zombie One. Confirm you saw the target enter the building?” asked Nick, pressing a button on the fat comm unit hanging from his ear. He turned to Drake, who was lying prone right next to him. “I'm not letting you pick our callsigns anymore.”

They were crammed into a crevice in the side of a sandy hill, watching a mud house in a tiny desert village. Kattan had crossed from Iraq into Saudi Arabia, and then through the desert mountains into western Yemen. They had been on his trail for months. It was hot, it was stuffy, and they were surrounded by some of the biggest flies Nick had ever seen. He wondered if he smelled as offensive to Drake as Drake smelled to him.

“Zombie, affirmative,” said the pilot of the drone circling above, high and out of sight. The CIA Predator-B was a limited production model of the Air Force MQ-9 Reaper, able to carry eight times the munitions of the original Predator. “Your target is inside. There are two sentries. One on the east side of the structure, the other on the west.”

Colonel Walker's voice interrupted through Nick's satellite comm link, much more clear and crisp than the voice of the pilot relayed through the Predator-B's five-watt radio. “Zombie, this is Lighthouse. The risk of collateral damage has been assessed low. A strike on the building is approved. Do not wait for the target to leave. I repeat: do not wait for the target to leave. This is our best chance to take him down.”

Everything had come together for this strike. The CIA asset had confirmed Kattan's presence, and it was carrying the best surgical strike weapon that current technology could provide—a dual GPS/laser-guided bomb called a GBU-54. The new bomb wasn't even fielded with regular units yet. At five hundred pounds, it was big enough to do the jobs that a Hellfire missile couldn't, and small enough to minimize collateral damage in a village like this one.

The numbers, the intelligence, the timing, all the data told Nick that striking now was the right move.

He checked the hardened laptop that Drake held open beside him. The high-definition video feed from the Predator-B showed the house and the two sentries in perfect clarity. “Hatchet, Zombie, I will be your tactical controller for this strike,” said Nick. “Keep your laser cold. I'll take care of terminal guidance. Your aim point is the center of the house. I want
one
GBU-54 and
one only
. Call in with direction.”

“Hatchet copies one bomb and one only. Laser cold.” There was a long pause while the drone pilot lined his aircraft up for the attack run and then, “Hatchet is in from the north.”

Nick checked the video one more time. Then he squinted through the scope of his laser designator, adjusted his crosshairs, and flipped on the beam. “Hatchet, you are cleared hot,” he said into the radio.

The moment Nick spoke those words, the door on the south side of the structure opened and a boy walked toward a nearby water pump. It took Nick a long moment to process the unexpected sight. Instinctively, he backed away from the scope. The wider view with his naked eye confirmed the newcomer was way too short to be one of the sentries.

“Abort, abort, abort!”

“Too late, Zombie. The weapon is away, tracking your laser. Time of flight now twenty seconds.”

Unaware of the danger, the boy went about his business. He hung a pail on the end of the pump and started working the handle.

Nick lost sight of the kid as he returned to his scope and started dragging his crosshairs into the desert. He moved the weapon's laser aim point toward his own position. It was the only direction he could shift the bomb without endangering another house in the village.

“Ten seconds.”

“Take cover!” Nick reached blindly behind him, motioning for his teammate to move deeper into the crevice. “I'm bringing the bomb closer to our hill.”

“You're what?”

“Five seconds.” The Reaper pilot's voice remained even, almost robotic.

“Just get back!”

Nick knew that shifting a GBU was a long shot. The bomb's flight controls could not handle large changes with the laser spot. If he did not move the aim point far enough away, the house and the kid would still be inside the blast radius. If he moved it too far, too quickly, the bomb's logic would reject the laser signal and revert to GPS.

“Three, two, one . . . ”

The impact shook the earth, threatening to bring the whole hill down on top of them. Debris ranging from small pebbles to softball-sized rocks pummeled Nick's back and shoulders and glanced off his Kevlar helmet. He kept his head low, waiting for the quaking to settle.

When Nick finally lifted his eyes, all he saw was a uniform curtain of light brown dust. He allowed himself a dirt-caked smile, certain he had successfully dragged the bomb closer to his own hideout.

Then Hatchet shattered the illusion.

“Splash. Direct hit on target building. Stand by for damage assessment.”

With a gust of wind, the curtain of dust swirled apart, confirming Hatchet's report. The five-hundred-pound weapon had rejected the laser spot and reverted to the original coordinates, obliterating the mud structure.

Nick dropped into his scope and shifted it back to the water pump. At first, he could not see anything—the haze played havoc with his focus. Frantically, he rubbed his eye with a gloved knuckle and looked again.

On that second look, he found him: the young boy, lying still and bloodied in the dust.