Shadow Maker (27 page)

Paphos International Airport, Cyprus

S
ee anything?”

“Not yet.”

Nick and Drake stood on an empty white beach a hundred meters south of the CIA refueling point, scanning the black waves for their transport to Israel. They had been on Cyprus for hours. The wait was maddening.

Unlike Farnborough, the Agency hangar on Cyprus was as rusty and dilapidated on the inside as it was on the outside, nothing but four corrugated steel walls, a big rubber fuel bladder, and a drywall bathroom with a reeking, stopped-up toilet. When they first arrived, Nick had found a quiet corner of the hangar—as far from the bathroom as possible—and made several calls. He tried to contact his family, but his efforts were futile. Katy had no phone. The older Baron was not answering his cell. Why should he, after the way Nick had left things?

Nick left messages on his dad's phone, at both hotel rooms, and the front desk. Never once did he get an actual human being on the line.

After his attempts at direct contact failed, Nick tried another tack. He called Walker and convinced him to try his contact at the Mossad. The result was disappointing. The colonel refused to tell the Israeli that a nuke was entering his country. Such a warning, if incorrect, had massive consequences, and the Triple Seven's evidence was merely circumstantial. Instead, Walker told the Mossad agent that a bomb was headed for Jerusalem. The contact actually laughed. There was always a bomb headed for Jerusalem. The man thanked Walker for his call and told him that with the usual daily threats and with the massive influx of tourists for the eclipse, the Mossad did not have time to hunt down a dotard American professor and his daughter-in-law.

Later Walker had informed Nick that he and CJ had a lead on the virus. Scott had figured it out. Nick was relieved that the engineer had recovered, but he sensed that Walker was holding something back. When he asked about it, the colonel cut him off. Heldner's CDC team was ready to roll. He had to go. That was the last Nick had heard from headquarters, more than an hour earlier. Now, standing on the beach in his bare feet with Drake, his phone rang again, but this was a call he expected, and it was not from Romeo Seven.

“Go.”

“Nightmare One, this is Rawhide Two. Light your firefly.”

Nick kept the phone to his ear and removed a clear, one-inch-by-one-inch acrylic cube from his pocket, sliding a little black switch on the side forward with his thumb. The electronics within began to tick, once per second.

“Rawhide Two is visual. Cover.”

Nick slipped the cube into his pocket. The fabric of his canvas pants partially muted the infrared flash it gave off with each tick, otherwise the powerful little beacon would block out half the coastline on Rawhide's night-vision goggles.

Drake raised his own night-vision monocle, holding it with two hands like a pirate with a spyglass. “I don't see him.” The big operative panned the monocle from the left all the way to his right until he was looking down at Nick. “Your pants are flashing, though. Very hip.”

“You're hilarious.”

“Nightmare One, Rawhide Two is padlocked on your position. Stop firefly.”

“Nightmare copies. Firefly off.”

Even with the monocle, Drake was not able to pick up the SEAL raiding craft until it was fifty yards from the beach. Nick did not see it until it was half that distance. The Navy man drove the black dinghy right up onto the beach and then jumped out to hold it still in the sloshing tide. No one spoke. Nick and Drake ran to him, helped him push it back out into the waves, and hopped in.

White spray kicked over the side as they built up speed. Despite its power, the outboard motor was quiet, and when their squat, stocky coxswain finally spoke, he barely raised his voice above a conversational tone. “Gentlemen. My name is Chief Morales.”

Nick could not see much of his face in the moonless dark, only the silver droplets of saltwater glistening on his bushy black mustache.

“I'm not supposed to ask who you are,” continued the SEAL, “but you must have some serious connections to drag us all the way out here.” He flipped his NVGs down in front of his eyes and adjusted the boat's course to the east. “Rawhide One is thirty meters off the bow and already under way. We're going to join up hot, so you'll want to keep your heads down.”

Nick and Drake bent forward, but Morales shook his head. “I mean way down.”

With his chin behind the bow rail, Nick could see little on the dark horizon. It didn't help that he had to keep wiping the sea spray from his eyes. Then a silhouette formed ahead, racing to meet them—a black trapezoid rising just above the water's surface. Nick dropped his head below the rubber hull and braced for impact.

The starlit floor of the dinghy went completely dark as it slid into the small rear bay of its mother ship. As soon as the bay doors closed behind them, Nick felt the larger craft rise up and rapidly accelerate, bouncing on the choppy sea. Dim blue lights flashed on, and the water in the bay drained out, allowing the dinghy to settle onto rubber rails, giving them all a little more headroom. Nick glanced around at the angular gray walls. He allowed himself a smile. He had just caught a unicorn—or at least, it had caught him.

The M80C Dagger was the Sasquatch of the maritime community—rumored to exist, occasionally sighted, only seen in grainy videos shot from a great distance. The stealth boat was sleek and thin, with a faceted structure and an M-shaped hull that rose out of the water at speed and sank at idle so that it could hide amid the waves. If anything could get them into Israel undetected, the Dagger could.

The chief led them forward through a corridor barely wide enough for one man. While the two Triple Seven operatives steadied themselves against the walls, the squat SEAL walked unaided, despite the pitch and roll of the boat. He led them up to the cockpit where the boat commander sat at controls, his face illuminated by the white glow of a wide forward screen. He was big, almost as big as Drake, with a square jaw and dark features, as if he had some Native American in the nearer branches of his family tree.

“Lieutenant Jonathan Lighthart,” said the SEAL, his voice also carrying a Native American flavor. “Welcome aboard and thanks for ruining my day off.” Lighthart's eyes never left the forward screen. At the speed it was cutting through the waves, the Dagger could not be left to an autopilot.

“Happy to be aboard,” said Nick.

“Always a pleasure to ruin a Navy man's day,” added Drake.

Like the Triple Seven's M-2 Wraith, the Dagger had no windows. Sensors embedded in the hull fed the forward screen. A grayscale, enhanced-infrared image showed them a clear picture of the waves ahead. Across the bottom, a six-inch-tall strip displayed close-in sonar returns. Flecks of blue and purple appeared and disappeared as the system found contacts and quickly dismissed them as small biologicals.

Drake pointed to a pair of small blue boxes floating on the horizon. “What are those, Lieutenant?”

“Radar tracks.” Lighthart used his trackball to move crosshairs over one of the contacts. All of its data appeared on the screen, including its type—a container ship—and its name and destination. “We use position data and ship size to correlate targets with a real-time database. If she can see a boat, the Dagger can tell you who it is.” He glanced back. “So? What do you boys think of her?”

Nick patted the gray wall. “She's a real beauty.”

“All except the callsign,” said Drake. “Rawhide? Couldn't you come up with something a little less landlocked?”

Lighthart returned his eyes to the screen. “Dolphin or Sea Lion would be too obvious.”

“Have you considered Sea Monkey?”

As Nick slapped his teammate's arm with the back of his hand, his phone chimed. He had come to dread that sound. He fished the device out of a wet pocket, praying the alert meant a text from his dad, knowing, fearing, that it was something else. His fear proved justified.

The black box with the ivory letters waited for him on the screen.
TheEmissary has taken your queen. Your move.

An icy hand gripped Nick's chest. His queen.
Katy
.

On cue, the phone rang—just like with Scott.

He put the phone to his ear and turned toward the seclusion of the aft bay. “What happened? Is Katy okay?”

“Hey there, Nick Baron.” The voice was CJ's. She sounded weak. “Don't know about Katy, but I'm feeling a little peaked, myself. You might not have to buy me an expensive dinner after all.”

Slowly, and with effort, the FBI agent explained what had happened at the pump station. Her team stopped the Hashashin from infecting the water supply, but the terrorist had already injected himself with the virus. He had planned to throw himself into the reservoir. The blood he coughed up infected her instead.

Nick steadied himself against the corridor wall, partly because of the bounce and roll of the Dagger, but mostly because of the flood of neurochemicals assaulting his system. The revelation that the lost queen was not Katy, the guilt of his relief, and the impotence of knowing that Kattan had wounded, perhaps killed, another friend while he had yet to even touch the man all combined and conflicted, weakening him to the edge of collapse.

“CJ, I—”

“Don't blame yourself, Nick. This is part of the job. Every agent knows it.”

Nick pounded the wall with his fist. “This was
not
your job. It was a game, Kattan's stupid chess game. You were the queen, a piece to be taken. Somehow he knew you would be at the pump station.”

“The queen. I like the sound of that.” Her voice was fading. “Nick, I'm tired. I'm going to transfer the line to the doc.”

“CJ, wait—” But the line clicked over.

“Nick? It's Pat.”

Nick closed his eyes. “How long does she have?”

Dr. Heldner was cold, analytical. “Twenty-four hours. Maybe less. This bug is an accelerated version of the black pox, the hemorrhagic form of smallpox. It will kill her too quickly for us to synthesize a vaccine in time.” She paused. “The infected Hashashin called himself the third and final sign, Nick. The
final
sign. What if this nuke is a wild goose chase to keep you off Kattan's trail until he disappears for good?”

“You want me to abandon the search for the nuke. Go after Kattan directly to get the vaccine he's carrying.”

“It would shorten our timeline from days to hours.”

Nick processed the idea for a moment and then rejected it. “No. Whatever that guy said, the nuke is real. Going after it is our best hope on all fronts. Kattan wants revenge, a very personal revenge against me. He'll be there in Jerusalem, and he'll have the vaccine with him.”

“You'd better hope so,” said Heldner. “Because CJ and the pump station weren't the only targets for this virus.”

Washington, DC

A
t nine
P.M.
, after much deliberation with his advisers and six minutes after the seven-hundredth case of the black pox was diagnosed, the president of the United States held a press conference to declare a federal state of emergency. Before he finished eloquently delivering what CNN declared a presidency-defining speech of hope and comfort, fifty-two more cases appeared. The spread of the virus was accelerating. The FEMA disaster area encompassed half of the eastern seaboard, from Virginia to Vermont.

Helicopters flew over the capital, their spotlights searching for looters. The National Guard patrolled the streets in Humvees and hazmat gear. On the great green lawn of the Washington Mall stood a glowing white tent that rivaled Barnum and Bailey. The eastern wing housed the CDC's main conference room.

Dr. Heldner paused in a narrow hallway formed from undulating white laminate. She needed a moment to gather her wits before jumping into the shark tank. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and then pushed through the plastic flap.

A barrage of questions hit her the moment she stepped into the room. A few of the voices sounded angry, all of them sounded scared. As Heldner stepped up to a freestanding smartboard, she held up her hands for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen, please. I'll answer your questions
after
I complete my briefing.” She picked up a remote from the smartboard's tray and pointed it at the screen. Nothing happened. She scowled at a tech standing at the back of the room. “Could we?”

While the kid hunted for the source of the problem, Heldner scanned the worried faces at the long folding table—doctors, generals, politicians. Several wore latex gloves. Two of them, including Senator Cartwright, wore surgical masks over their faces.

She snorted. “This bug isn't airborne, Senator. You don't have to wear a mask.”

The senator's cheeks rose beneath the blue covering, in what Heldner presumed was a smile. “I find this mask very comfortable, Doctor,” he said in his Virginia drawl. “I think I'll keep it for a while.”

The kid in the back found the problem, and the smartboard lit up, showing Heldner's first slide. There were gasps all around the room, a reaction to the massive numbers on the screen. She held up her hands again. “Take it easy. This is the might-have-been. I wanted you to see it because I want to stress the lethality of the weapon these terrorists have produced.” She used the laser pointer in the remote to highlight her figures. “Had they succeeded in getting this virus into the DC water supply, a half million people would have died within the first forty-eight hours. And there is little we could have done to save them. Even if we had had a vaccine, we could not have reproduced it fast enough on that scale. Consequently, another one and a half to two million would have died before we got control of the outbreak.”

“We don't need the might-have-beens, Doctor. We need the here and now,” said Cartwright.

Heldner directed a frown at the politician and then continued. “By stopping the terrorist at the pump station, our tactical response blocked a major portion of the attack. However, they were smart. There was an additional means of distribution for the virus.”

The doctor flipped to a new slide, a map of Washington, DC. Dozens of red dots populated the screen, showing diagnosed cases. The spidery branches were clearly centered on Union Station, twelve hundred meters from the very tent they were meeting in. One branch leading away from the station was thicker than the others. Heldner pressed her remote and a map of the DC Metro system overlaid the first. The heavier branch of smallpox cases coincided with the Metro line running from Union Station up to a stop near Salem Park.

“He used the rail system, and that wasn't just for lack of a car. Look.” Heldner expanded the map until it showed the upper East Coast. There were now hundreds of tiny red dots, and their branches centered on the train stations along the line from Albany to New York City to Washington, DC.

“We found a spent vial on the train the terrorist took from New York City to Union Station. CDC doctors are using the remains to synthesize a cure, but that cure is seventy-two hours away, at best. It may be ninety-six, and every hour we lose has an exponential consequence.” Heldner pressed her remote again, and the red dots grew outward at an exponential rate until the spidery arms stretched as far south as the Carolinas and as far west as the Mississippi.

“Is that your worst case, Doctor?” asked Cartwright.

Heldner shook her head. “This is our best case. Even if we have a working vaccine in three days, reproduction and dissemination will still be a nightmare. Many won't respond to treatment. There will be riots that slow us down. Within a week, twelve thousand Americans will die. Within two weeks, twenty thousand.”