Shadow Maker (7 page)

A
well-execut
ed snatch-and-grab required weeks of planning. A CAT, a covert abduction team, might burn a hundred or more man-hours documenting a subject's routine—learning his habits and clearing away the chaff of random daily occurrence to isolate predictable behaviors. Nick didn't have a team. He had Quinn, and he had the time span of a drive across Budapest to plan the abduction, using nothing but a smartphone and a bar receipt.

In ad hoc situations like this one, common sense dictated that the team at least take the subject at a point with no potential witnesses and with easy access for the abduction vehicle. The satellite imagery on Nick's smartphone showed that the Black Dog—Grendel's favorite nightclub—offered neither.

“Maybe we could wait for Grendel to come out and then follow him,” said Quinn, eyeing the steroid-pumped bouncer outside the bar as he and Nick approached on foot. The Black Dog was a basement bar, with its primary entrance in a stairwell on an otherwise dark and narrow cobblestone street. In addition to the bouncer, there were three large men hanging out at the edge of the alley, chatting up a couple of bleach blondes in tight jeans.

“We can't afford the time,” replied Nick. “We don't even know if he's in there. You want to stand out here all night?”

“What if the bouncer pats us down?”

“He won't.”

As Nick led his young teammate into the alley, the girls broke from their conversation to cast flirtatious taunts in their direction, alternating between stunted English and only slightly better German. A muted, pulsating beat emanated from the stairwell—club music stripped of everything but the bass by the heavy black door.

The bouncer pushed off from his post against the brick wall and barred their path, his hands gripping the lapels of his black leather jacket. His eyes shifted from Nick's blue irises up to his blond hair and back. “This is Hungarian bar. We don't take dollars or euros here.”

“Kak naschet rubley?”
asked Nick in cool Russian, roughly pressing a thousand-ruble bill against the brute's chest.

The bouncer smiled. He took the bill, the Russian equivalent of a U.S. fifty, and stepped aside.
“Naslazhdaytes', ser.”

A blast of heat greeted Nick as he opened the door, and a cacophony of digital tones joined the thumping bass. Dim red light glowed through a haze of cigarette smoke. He and Quinn cut through the sparse crowd of dancers, making for one of the shiny black couches that lined the walls. A few of the patrons looked their way, but no one challenged them. They had already passed the gatekeeper at the top of the stairs. That was enough.

“How did you know to bring rubles?” asked Quinn once they had settled onto a secluded stretch of overstuffed vinyl.

“In this country, rubles almost always grease palms better than dollars,” said Nick, slipping his hand into the inside pocket of his coat, but he immediately removed it again as a fair-skinned girl with raven hair approached the table. She was young, far too young to be dressed as she was, in a thigh-length minidress that might have been cut from the same cheap vinyl as the couch.

The girl bent down with a tray of drinks and said something in a sultry voice that did not fit her young features. Her eyes flitted over to Quinn.

Nick didn't pick up all the Hungarian, but he could gather the gist of what she said. The thought made him ill. He selected a pair of dark beers from the tray and replaced them with a wad of rubles, letting his hard expression tell the girl that he and his young friend were there for drinks and nothing more. She didn't press him, almost looked grateful. She straightened and turned back toward the bar, wobbling on her stiletto heels as she did.

Nick watched her go for a moment. He knew what she was, and he could easily reconstruct how she got there. He wanted to drag her back to the airport and put her on the team's Gulfstream, send her home to DC where she could be a barista instead of a barmaid, but his team wasn't here for her.

Quinn also watched the girl walk away, likely with different thoughts. “Snap out of it, junior,” said Nick. “Let's find our boy and bag him.”

He reached into his coat again and withdrew his phone, a slim unit a little larger than an iPhone. The device consolidated both his civilian and company needs into one unit, with a firewall that separated the more interesting functions from the mundane. Walker had placed only two restrictions on apps for the personal side. No Facebook. No Twitter. No big loss.

Nick had Angry Birds, though. Everyone had Angry Birds.

The program he used now came from Scott rather than the App Store and resided on the classified side of the firewall. The engineer had pulled the screen saver from Grendel's laptop, trimmed it to just the face, and transferred it to Nick's phone. The app identified the subject's key features: skin tone, hairline, bone structure. Then an algorithm built a three-dimensional predictive model.

Nick held the phone flat between them so that Quinn could see, showing him the screen as if showing pictures to his friend, working it with his thumb. He wore a ring on his left hand—titanium, bulky. There were three square black stones across the top. The middle square housed the lens of a micro-camera that fed video to the phone. He scanned the room with subtle movements of his hand, combining them with the natural movements of his body.

Nick paused on each group of patrons while the software went to work. It placed a red X over the faces it rejected, working quickly on the girls, taking more time with the men, but not much. Most of them were too big, with flat foreheads and square jaws. Their faces screamed Bratva, Russian mafia, and their eyes were glancing his way. Nick looked up for a moment and noticed his young teammate staring stone-faced at the phone.

“Pick up your drink and smile a little,” he said through his teeth. “Or you're going to get us killed.”

“I quit drinking a while ago. You know that.”

The kid had been a passenger in a drunk-driving accident during his special ops training. He was too blasted to save the life of the driver, his best friend, despite being a qualified medic. He hadn't tasted a drop since.

“That doesn't mean you can't hold a beer in your hands.” Nick didn't drink either, but for completely different reasons. He let out a laugh, big enough to be seen by anyone watching and subtle enough to appear legitimate. “Quit acting like you're at work. This is a nightclub, not Kandahar.”

Quinn picked up his beer and responded with a fake laugh of his own. “At least in Kandahar there was no pretending. Everyone was as miserable as we were. Where is this guy?”

Nick continued to pan the camera around the room. Brick pillars rose from the floor at wide intervals, topped with arched buttresses that supported the building above. Each had a circular cushion of cheap vinyl surrounding its base, and most of those were occupied by two or three patrons. Nick's program rejected them all, until the camera finally fell on a young man sitting alone in a recess in the far wall. A pair of spent beer bottles and a full tumbler of liquor sat on the black lacquer table in front of him. The software chewed on him for a while, with tiny white circles dancing over his features, but it couldn't make up its mind. Then the subject leaned out into the red light to signal a waitress. Instantly, a green box surrounded his face. A number below it proclaimed him a ninety-two-percent match for Grendel.

“Time to go,” said Nick.

There were no direct exits on Grendel's side of the club, but the waitresses occasionally moved in and out of a swinging door behind the bar. As Nick and Quinn crossed the floor, Nick wrapped an arm tightly around the kid's shoulders and shook him, leaning close to his ear as if sharing a drunken joke. “If Grendel bolts, stay between him and the entrance. I've got the door behind the bar.” Then he pushed Quinn away again and reached into his pocket to palm a fresh CO
₂
injector.

The skinny hacker didn't notice the two foreigners approaching. He was preoccupied with getting a passing waitress to keep him company, the same one who had brought Nick and Quinn their drinks. He called after her using the haranguing tone universal to twentysomething males with a little too much alcohol and way too much confidence.

The girl rattled off a curt response and punctuated it by spitting on the floor.

Grendel would have none of it. He shouted at her and slammed his fist on the lacquer table, knocking over one of the beer bottles. His rant caught the attention of the indoor bouncer, the same size as the man outside. The big Hungarian came out from behind the bar.

“Back off,” said Nick, touching Quinn's arm. “This window is closing.”

As they turned toward the bar, a drunk stumbled past, bumping hard into Quinn and loudly excusing himself. The stench of old booze assaulted Nick's nostrils. Grendel looked up from his confrontation and stared. His eyes locked on Quinn's midsection. The jostling from the drunk had knocked the kid's jacket open. The butt of his forty-five was exposed. They were blown.

G
rendel upended his table with both hands, launching the bottles and the full tumbler at the bouncer, who reeled back into Nick and Quinn. As Nick caught the big Hungarian, the hacker scrambled over the bar and vanished through the swinging door.

“Get to the street,” grunted Nick, shoving the bouncer back to his feet. Quinn obediently headed for the entrance while Nick took off in pursuit, leaving the bouncer standing alone in utter confusion. He reached the bar in two strides and vaulted over. His low foot caught a whiskey bottle and sent it flying into the mirrored backdrop. Glass and booze showered down.

Nick shouldered his way through the swinging door into a red-carpeted hallway, bound on one side by a brick wall and on the other by a row of rooms. A stunned waitress came out of one and then screamed and retreated back inside, slamming the door. The rest were closed, but the door at the far end of the hallway stood open. Immediately behind it there was another that opened the opposite direction. That one hung loose on its hinges. The dead bolt had been knocked through, splintering the old wood frame.

The buildings here were pressed against each other, with varying heights but with shared walls. Pairs of doors like these connected their cellars. Nick touched his ear. “Nightmare Three, he's headed southeast through the sublevels. He'll have to surface when he reaches the end of the row. Get in front of him.”

“Copy, One. I'm on it.”

As soon as Nick opened the second door, a heavy shelving unit came crashing down from his right. He jumped back. A shadow flitted away across a dark storeroom.

“We just want to talk,” Nick called after him, clambering over the half-fallen unit, but Grendel kept running, toppling more shelves before escaping through a heavy door. Dim blue light spilled in from the other side.

“He's coming to you, Nightmare Three. I think he's in an outside stairwell.”

Nick made quick work of Grendel's obstacle course and hit the door's push bar hard. He expected to slam into the wall of a stairwell on the other side. Instead, he almost plunged headfirst off a narrow concrete platform.

“I don't see him,” said Quinn.

“Scratch my last. We're in the subway. I'm turning southwest.” A few dim fluorescents lighted the narrow platform. There were no travelers. Nick spotted the hacker at the far end and drew his Beretta. “Stay where you are!”

The clacking rush of an approaching train drifted into the platform—one of the express lines that served the main stations in the off hours. The hacker raised his hands and slowly turned, but his eyes shifted down to the tracks. He sidestepped closer to the edge.

Nick raised his gun and advanced. “That's a bad idea, kid.”

As the rush grew louder, a growing light shined from the tunnel behind Grendel. The hacker lifted his eyes to meet Nick's. There was fear in them, but Nick could see something else. A taunt. A half second later, Grendel flashed a smile and jumped down to the tracks, fleeing toward the oncoming train.

A horn blared. Lights flickered and brakes locked with an earsplitting shriek. Nick leaned out over the tracks to see what had happened, but he had to jerk back again as the train blew by. Inertia carried it six car lengths into the station before the driver got it stopped.

“He jumped in front of a train,” said Nick, hopping down to the tracks and racing toward the cab.

“He what?”

“He jumped down onto the tracks and ran into the tunnel in front of the Metro.”

“I see the street entrance, One. I'm coming down.”

At the front of the train, Nick holstered his weapon and bent down to examine the bumper. The bewildered driver shouted a stream of Hungarian through the Plexiglas above. Nick didn't look up. He ran his hand along the dirty aluminum and then held it up in the light of the cab's left headlamp, rubbing the grime between his thumb and fingertips. “Negative. Hold your position. There's no blood here.”

He jogged down the other side, bending down every few paces to look beneath the cars for body parts. He saw none. Above him, the late-night passengers peered out their windows. A few shouted and pounded on the glass.

During the course of his career, Nick had witnessed two suicides at close range. He had stood face-to-face with a suicide bomber in Bagram, and he had watched a Pakistani ISI agent pitch himself off a cliff to avoid capture. Of the two, the bomber had smiled, but not like Grendel. The hacker's face did not show the same placid acceptance of death. Nick stood up and ran, turning sideways and pushing against the car as he squeezed past tunnel supports. “Is my locator breaking the surface, Three?”

“Affirmative.”

“Follow my signal. Stay above ground.”

Twenty feet down the track from the far side of the platform, he saw it—an alcove cut into the tunnel wall beneath a faded emergency-exit sign. “I'm turning east.” He pushed through the exit into a long low passage. As soon as he was in, he heard the echo of a door clicking closed on the other end. “He's out! Find him!”

“Working on it. I had to divert around some buildings.”

Nick raced down the passage, up a flight of stairs, and slammed through another heavy door into cold night air. It had started snowing again. Big, airy flakes fell lazily down through the yellow cones of light beneath the street lamps. Quinn came running around the corner a half block away and pulled up short. The two stared blankly at one another. “Where is he?” shouted the young operative.

The row of buildings between them faced a small park. Nick spotted movement among the bare trees. “There!”

Both men broke into a run, and Quinn pulled ahead as they crossed into the park. The young operative had his forty-five out. With the long, fat suppressor fixed to its nose, the bulky XDm looked about as subtle as an RPG. Nick was thankful that the area was deserted.

Quinn stopped at an old-school carousel and rested his forearms on the rail, leveling his weapon. “He's making for the buildings across the street. Let me shoot him.”

“Cleared hot. One to the calf. I don't want him bleeding out.”

“Copy that.”

Nick never broke stride as he raced past, just right of the line of fire. He had complete faith in the kid's aim.

At the same moment the muted
thud
of the shot reached Nick's ears, Grendel stumbled. He cried out and pitched headlong onto the snow-dusted grass, but he did not stay down for long. Nick had to give him points for tenacity. The hacker got up, pinballed off a tree, and limped on, leaving a crimson trail through the snow.

Nick was closing the distance now. “Give it up,” he called, drawing his Beretta again.

The hacker only quickened his pathetic gait, letting out small cries of pain with every other step. He looked back over his shoulder. No taunting smile this time, only fear. He limped past the trees at the edge of the park and turned south onto the street, where a black sedan plowed right through him.

Grendel's body flipped over the hood like a rag doll, glanced off the windshield, and slammed down into the gutter at Nick's feet. His head hit the curb with a hollow
thock
. Blood and gray matter spattered across the snow. The driver's window was down and he locked eyes with Nick as he passed. The young face looked oddly familiar, and there was something else—a tattoo on the left forearm, a simple geometric shape set within a circle, a crescent moon with an eight-pointed star nestled in its bend.

Where had he seen that mark before? An image flashed in Nick's mind—the drunk at the Black Dog, the one who had stumbled into Quinn and outed them to Grendel. Then a second image overpowered the first—the same youthful face under a ball cap, asking if Nick needed help, a green medical kit slung under his arm.

Nick raised his weapon and fired, but the sedan was already at the next intersection. His rounds blew out the back windshield and sparked off the bumper as the killer fishtailed around the corner. Then he passed behind a building, out of range.