Shadow Maker (16 page)

A
nyone follow you?” asked Scott, checking up and down the hallway as Nick pushed past him into the apartment.

“You mean the girl?”

“I mean the police, the bobbies, Scotland Yard.” Scott checked the hall one more time before he closed the door. “What we just did was highly public and highly illegal. It could be classified as terrorism.”

“You've done a lot worse.”

“Yes, but from the safety of a bunker on the most well-defended military base in America. Out here I feel exposed.”

Geeks
. “Welcome to field ops. Have you spoken to the colonel?”

Scott nodded.

“Katy?”

“She's fine. Walker's man in Germany has her well protected, and he hasn't seen any threats. He said she almost made him in the first hour.”

“That's my girl.” Nick strolled over to Scott's computer station and jiggled the wireless mouse. “Find Kattan yet?”

“I've made some progress,” said the engineer, rushing after him and slapping his hand aside. “A timeline is taking shape.”

Nick knew better than to joust with Scott for control of the workstation. Instead, he retreated to the couch and collapsed onto the cushions. He leaned his head back. “Keep talking.”

“After I rebuilt the subject's digital profile with the videos from IBE, I ran a search against Heathrow's customs files.” As Scott spoke, he bustled back and forth to either end of the couch, adjusting a pair of cigar-sized cylinders fixed to the top of telescoping stands. “My software achieved a ninety-percent match on a passport that came through yesterday from Cairo.”

Nick's head remained a dead weight on the couch cushion. “Giving us an alias that he'll never use again.”

“Yes, but it also gave us a solid starting point for our London timeline.” Scott made a final adjustment to one of the cylinders and then sat down at his workstation. “Look.”

Nick raised his head and saw that the living room wall had become a three-dimensional map of London, projected by the apparatus Scott had set up. Weaving through the digital buildings, a red line connected several dots, each with an associated time.

Scott clicked his mouse and the first dot expanded from Heathrow, growing into a passport photo that seemed to stand out from the wall. The name underneath read Mohammed Jibreel, but Nick recognized the young Masih Kattan from his fleeting appearances in DC and Budapest. He must have suffered many reconstructive surgeries in the years following the strike, but he still bore a resemblance to his father, mostly around the eyes.

“This is a customs hit,” said Scott. “The new digital profile gave me several more shots from Heathrow, but eventually Kattan disappeared into the Tube.” The first picture shrank back into its dot and a new one sprang out of the next, showing Kattan getting into a van. “Our first piece of new data occurs here. Unfortunately, Molly and I can't determine where he got the van. Maybe he rented it—maybe it was left for him. I haven't recovered any shots of the plates. However, we're sure he drove it directly to IBE.” Two video stills appeared. One showed Kattan entering IBE's lobby and the other, several minutes later, showed him leaving with Maharani. Both men carried boxes of equipment. No gun was visible.

“Maharani is a willing hostage,” said Nick, rising from the couch and stepping closer to examine the second still. With the three-dimensional projection, he felt like he could reach out and grab the biochemist—yank him away from the terrorist. If only it were that easy. “There has to be some form of coercion, here, besides brute force. What do the Hashashin have on this guy?”

“Unknown.” The stills shrank back into the map, and the last dot opened out of central London, this one a repeating video of Kattan and Maharani carrying their boxes across a small plaza. “This is where we lose him,” said Scott, frowning as the two men disappeared into an office building. “There were no more hits yesterday.”

“And this morning?”

“I'm still running searches on the last twelve hours.” The chair squeaked morbidly as Scott slowly swiveled around to face the couch. His expression was deadpan. “Nothing so far.”

Nick's phone buzzed. CJ. He put it to his ear and said, “Gimme a sec,” and then covered the receiver and nodded to Scott. “Keep at it. I've got to take this.”

Outside Nick leaned against the balcony rail, gazing across the rolling snowy hills of Greenwich Park to the domed observatory that sat on the Prime Meridian. “Go ahead, CJ,” he said into the phone.

“My team made progress with those pictures you sent.”

“The symbols?”

“Negative. Those are still a mystery, but we found a guy at Georgetown who could translate the calligraphy.”

“Farsi, right?” Nick watched a group of children sledding on the observatory mount. His eyes followed a boy on a blue saucer, spinning in a slow circle as he sailed down the hill.

“Sort of. Our guy said the language was muddled by Turkic influence, but he's confident he got the general idea. I'm sending it to you now.”

Nick put CJ on speaker and opened the file she sent him, turning away from the playing children to lean his back against the rail. There were four stanzas of text on his screen.

THE MESSENGER OF HIS MESSENGER SHALL DECLARE HIS COMING ON THE PLAINS OF THE GREAT EMPIRE,

AND THE MARKETPLACE WILL ERUPT IN TURMOIL SO THAT A LOAF OF BREAD SHALL COST MORE THAN A DAY'S WAGES,

AND PESTILENCE WILL SPREAD AMONG THE UNBELIEVERS, A DISEASE THE LIKES OF WHICH NO MAN HAS EVER SEEN.

THEN THE SUN WILL BE BLOTTED OUT AND MY SERVANT WILL OPEN THE GATE. A GREAT SMOKE WILL RISE UP FROM THE CENTER OF THE WORLD. THE SKY WILL BURN LIKE MOLTEN BRASS, AND FROM THE HIGH PLACE THERE WILL SOUND A DEAFENING NOISE, AS TRUMPETS, ANNOUNCING THE ENTRANCE OF THE MAHDI.

“Reads like the Quran, doesn't it?” asked CJ.

Nick took the phone off speaker and brought it back to his ear. “It's probably a hadith, a saying attributed to Muhammad. A lot of them mirror passages of the Quran.”

“Whatever it is, it ain't good.”

At that moment, one of Scott's laptops made a twittering sound, mimicking R2D2. “What was that?” Nick called into the apartment.

Instead of an answer, he heard a click, and then another, and then a furious stream of them. He poked his head into the room and saw Scott's fingers blazing over the keyboard. “Thanks, CJ,” he said, ending the call before she could respond. Then he stepped into the living room and closed the door behind him. “You get something we can use?”

Scott changed the display projected on the wall. A new video showed Kattan walking across a plaza. When the killer reached the border of the camera's view, the display flashed and another camera picked him up. This one showed Kattan approaching the same office building as before.

Nick watched the assassin casually stroll beneath a concrete awning and disappear. “How long ago did the cameras record that?”

Scott stared up at the display, his hands still hovering over his keyboard. “The software didn't pull that video from the recordings. We're watching the live feed.”

T
he very sight of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral enraged Kattan, the thought of the daily throngs crowding beneath its extravagant portico, gazing mindlessly at the stone idols of the crusaders. The cathedral was not a house of worship. It was a tourist attraction for bloodthirsty Christians.

The assassin lingered in the shadow of a concrete awning a moment longer and then turned and pushed his way through a set of glass double doors. As he descended a flight of carpeted stairs to his temporary headquarters, his anger gave way to rapturous anticipation. Soon the masses would see the cathedral and all others like it for what they were: empty monuments to a false religion.

Soon. Very soon.

At the basement level, Kattan unlocked a heavy wooden door and entered the lab he had constructed for Dr. Maharani. A long table on one side of the room held a variety of electronic instruments, controlled by a pair of laptop computers. Most of the instruments were contained inside a large clean box, along with glass dishes and beakers and the canisters Kattan had brought from Egypt. The biochemist was on the floor a few feet away, completing his afternoon prayers.

“One day soon the Qiyamah will begin, and those rituals will be abolished,” said Kattan as the doctor rose to his feet.

Maharani averted his eyes from his captor. His hands shook as he lifted a lab coat from a cot in the corner and slipped it on. “And this,” he said, as he stepped up to the worktable, “this thing you have asked me to create will hasten that day's arrival?”

“It is a necessary step, yes. It is a sign that must precede the age of peace.”

Maharani pushed his hands into the rubber gloves inside the clean box and carefully grasped the cylinder. “Are there other signs to perform? Is that the reason you are dressed as an electrician, today?”

Kattan looked down at his blue jumpsuit and then back at the doctor. He frowned. Maharani's eyes were clearly not as averted as he pretended; and he was never this talkative before, never this inquisitive. Then the reason dawned on him. The scientist was stalling.

The amiable tone vanished from Kattan's voice. “Do not forget that I am on a schedule. How much longer?”

“I need six more hours.”

“You have three.”

For the first time, Maharani looked directly at Kattan. “You do not understand. There are biological processes at work here. They cannot be rushed.”

Kattan was shocked by the doctor's stern expression. It seemed Maharani needed a reminder. “Do you know what your daughter is doing right now?”

The stern expression fell away in an instant. “Please. I am doing everything you ask.”

“I am told by my people that she is on a train. What do you think would happen if there were an explosion in that tunnel?”

“But the timeline is beyond my control.”

“How terrifying it will be for little Chaya. A flash of fire, incredible pain, then darkness. To which do you suppose she will succumb first? The slow drain of her lifeblood or the crushing press of a thousand tons of concrete?”

Maharani quickly returned to his work, removing a sample from the canister inside the clean box. “I will get it done. See? I am working. You do not have to do this.”

“Three hours, Doctor.”

“Yes. Three hours. You will have your weapon.”

—

Nick left his car in a garage and hurried up Godliman Street toward the courtyard of St. Paul's and the southern access to Paternoster Square—the home of the London Stock Exchange and the location where the camera had caught Kattan a half hour before. In his slacks and overcoat, he mirrored the smattering of London businessmen around him, all rushing back to the office after their long lunches. Most of them carried some sort of portfolio, either a briefcase or a satchel. No one seemed to notice that Nick had two—one for him and one for Drake.

The big operative was racing back from Cambridge to meet him. Thankfully, Drake could push the limits of the Peugeot without much fear of police interference. The Brits relied on speed cameras. Walker could compensate the rental company for the photo tickets later.

As he drove, Drake back-briefed Nick on his conversation with Rami. “Long story short,” he said over the comm link, “Kattan set himself up as the mouthpiece of the Hashashin messiah. They call him the Qaim, the Emissary.”

Nick slowed his pace at hearing Kattan's screen name in the new context. “That doesn't make sense. I see the benefit of controlling the Hashashin, but Kattan should be trying to hide the connection from us, not flaunting it through the chess app.”

A passing Brit glanced Nick's way and gave him a curious look, trying to assess whether the man talking to himself was mentally challenged or simply drunk. Nick put his phone to his ear to make the SATCOM conversation look normal.

“It's a mind game,” said Drake, oblivious to the interruption. “Kattan is overconfident, like his father always was. He's giving you puzzles to break up your focus. Don't get sucked in.”

“Right, mind games.” But Nick wasn't sure he bought the logic. The endgame was right here, right in front of him—infiltrate the building in Paternoster Square, take down Kattan, rescue the biochemist, secure the weapon. The path ahead seemed so cut and dry, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he was missing something.

T
he building in the video, the building where Kattan disappeared, was twelve stories of glass and concrete owned by the financial conglomerate Fishman Zeller—two towers of offices, separated by a narrow glass atrium, standing at the western end of Paternoster Square. Fishman Zeller occupied all of the southern tower, but the company rented out the offices of the northern tower to smaller investment companies. Molly had done a little digging and discovered that one of those companies had a paper-thin corporate veil.

According to the Fishman Zeller records, Kingdom Ventures Incorporated was a ten-year-old Dubai investment company that opened its London offices less than a month before, leasing the entire sublevel of the northern tower—two thousand square feet of office space. Molly cross-checked KVI's tax filings with the City of London and uncovered two classic signs of a front company with a fictional corporate history—minimal transaction volume and earnings that matched to a percentage point year over year. No investment company was that consistent.

Scott had done some digging as well. “I own their cameras, their elevators, whatever you want,” he told Nick over the comm link. “The firewalls to the tower security system were tragically easy to hack.”

Nick nodded as if Scott could see him, his phone still at his ear to mask the SATCOM conversation. From the partial concealment of a Renaissance arch on the southwest corner of the square, he surveiled the entrance between the Fishman Zeller towers. Foot traffic was light, only a few people going in or out. None of them looked like Kattan or Maharani. “Any escape routes besides the obvious?”

“Do you see the big column?”

A gaudy Corinthian column rose out of the northwest section of the square between the towers and the London Stock Exchange. With the gold-plated flaming urn at its top, it reached a height of seventy-five feet or more, and with a base at least twenty-five feet in diameter and twenty feet tall, it blocked Nick's view of the western quarter of the exchange. “How could I miss it? Another monument to the empire.”

“Except it isn't a monument at all,” said Scott. “You're looking at the world's most overdressed exhaust vent. The London Stock Exchange has a basement level that extends out beneath the square, housing a massive server room—literally thousands of networked drives. It takes some heavy-duty air-conditioning to keep all those electronics cool, and that column is really a giant stack that vents the exhaust.”

“And I care about the vent because . . .”

“Not so much the vent as the server room underneath it. There's a thirty-meter utility tunnel connecting it to Fishman Zeller. The access panel is in the front hallway of KVI.”

“Kattan might run that way.”

“He might try. The good news is, the tunnel is a dead end. The exchange side is secured by a steel door, four inches thick. If Kattan tries to sneak out through the crawl space, he'll be trapped.”

“Copy that.” Nick stared at the entrance for a few seconds. He still couldn't shake the feeling that this was coming together too easily. “Be ready to shut down the elevators and the elevator alarms on my call. And when you have that set up, go back and look at all the footage we have of Kattan. Find me something we haven't noticed before.”

“I've already been over that footage several times.”

“And I'm telling you to go over it again, every frame.” Nick's eyes tracked another businessman leaving the Fishman Zeller towers. Like all the others he'd seen so far, this one was young, Caucasian, and not Kattan. From what he could tell, the target had not left the building, but Kattan wouldn't stay in there forever, waiting to be caught. They needed to move. “Nightmare Two, give me an ETA.”

“Thirty seconds ago.” The voice was right behind him, not on the comm link. Drake walked beneath the arch from the cathedral side and joined Nick in the shadows against its eastern wall. “Where's the lawyer?”

Now that he had someone visible to talk to, Nick returned his phone to his pocket, but he kept his eyes on the tower entrance. “By that, you mean where's the hot chick?”

“You know me so well.”

“I put her on a train to get her out of the way and keep her away from you. One day you and Amanda will both thank me.”

“She went willingly?”

“Not really.” Nick slipped the strap of one of his satchels over his head and handed it to Drake. “I brought you something.”

“A European carryall? You shouldn't have.”

“With an old friend inside.”

Drake hefted the satchel, feeling the weight of the MP7. He grinned. “A good friend.” Then he reached into his pocket. “I brought something for you, too, a gift from your old professor.” He handed Nick a small green statuette, jade by the look and feel of it. The figure was a complex geometric shape—two faceted cones that blended together and then tapered down to a narrow base. “Look familiar?”

When Nick shook his head, Drake took the figure and laid it flat in his teammate's hand. “How about now?”

Suddenly Nick made the connection. Viewed in two dimensions, the figure matched one of the Hashashin symbols, the sawtooth with the narrow base.

“What is this thing?”

“A Persian chess piece.”

Drake related the final bit of history that Rami had shared with him. The early Muslim leaders had outlawed traditional chess sets, fearing the lifelike figurines would be worshipped as pagan idols. Cunning adherents to the game revived it by simplifying the pieces. The elephant—the precursor to the bishop—became a double crescent moon, representing the tusks. The two spires of the piece in Nick's hand represented the two heads of chariot horses. Later, the Europeans would interpret them as castle battlements—the rook. Each of the Insari Hashashin symbols represented a chess piece. General Insar had been obsessed with the game.

Drake pulled out his phone and flipped through the symbols, explaining each one. “The overlapping triangles are the knight,” he said, “and the horizontal crescent moon is the queen.” He flipped to the last picture, the crescent moon over the eight-pointed star. “This is Kattan's symbol. Guess which piece it represents.”

“The king,” said Nick, pushing away from the arch and starting across the square. “I guess it's time to take him down and end the game.”

The two operatives were halfway to the tower entrance when Scott spoke up over the SATCOM. “It's the boxes!” he exclaimed. His voice was both excited and nervous.

“We're a little busy here,” said Nick, reaching a hand into his satchel to find the grip of his MP7. “Get ready to shut down the elevators. We'll take the stairs down to KVI and hem them in.”

The engineer ignored the command. “You don't understand. You were right. We missed something in the footage. The boxes, they're empty.”

Nick released his weapon and touched Drake's arm to slow their pace. “You're not making any sense, Four.”

Scott gave a frustrated huff. “When Kattan and Maharani left IBE, pieces of lab equipment were sticking out of their boxes. The tops were only half-closed. When they carried them into Fishman Zeller, the tops were flat. I'm telling you, the boxes were empty.”

Nick came to a complete stop and looked up at his teammate. “Why would they pretend to bring the lab equipment to KVI?”

Before Drake could respond they heard a muted boom like far off thunder. The ground beneath their feet rumbled.

“The seismic alarms in the towers just tripped,” said Scott. “The elevators are locking down on their own.”

Another explosion sounded, and then another and another in rhythmic cadence. The Fishman Zeller towers visibly shook. The pedestrians in the square stumbled back and stared as glass fell from the atrium windows.

“Come on!” shouted Nick, and the two operatives ran toward the buildings.