Shadow Maker (8 page)

N
ick and Quinn sprinted up a wet cobblestone street, heading for the Vitara. “Lighthouse, I need a patch to NSA reconnaissance right now!”

“Coming up, Nightmare.” The voice in Nick's ear belonged to Molly, manning the SATCOM station at Romeo Seven. A moment later, she connected him to an NSA space-based reconnaissance crew.

“This is Raven Zero One. Send your code and request.”

“Raven, this is Nightmare One, authorization seven zero one, requesting a priority-four retask for your bird.”

A short pause. “Nightmare, you are authenticated and authorized. Go with retask.”

“Do you have my grids?”

“Affirmative.”

In midstride, Nick glanced down at his watch and did some quick math. “I need a two-mile-radius scan. You are looking for a sedan with a blown-out back window.” He didn't bother giving the color. At night, it wouldn't matter. The crew would start the search with synthetic aperture radar, taking rapid, highly detailed radar photos, the best way to find a vehicle with a missing window. Then they would switch to infrared to track it. Neither sensor used true color. “Send me your feed. Lighthouse will pass you my streaming address.”

“Raven copies all. We'll have the bird on target in two mikes.”

—

Nick's foot was on the Vitara's gas pedal before his door had even closed. He took a hard right at the end of the street and then right again on the next one over, working south toward the point where Grendel was run down. “Anytime now, Raven.”

“Copy, Nightmare One, our bird is overhead. Stand by.”

Nick held out an open palm to Quinn and snapped his fingers. “Eyes, please.”

Quinn was ready for him. He placed a compact head-mounted display in Nick's hand, a composite frame with a tiny screen positioned at the edge of the right eye—the military version of Google Glass. Nick put them on and then slapped his smartphone into the kid's chest. “Sync it up and give me Raven's feed. I want to see this guy as soon as they lock him up.”

Quinn busied himself with the phone and a few seconds later, a black-and-white video appeared at the corner of Nick's right eye. A stream of photo-quality radar stills flashed by like pages in a flip book. After drifting southwest over urban Budapest for nearly a minute, the satellite feed settled on a sedan heading west on a two-lane street. The radar return showed every surface of the car in varied shades of light gray, except for the back windshield. That part came through as an empty black hole.

“That's him, Raven.”

“Copy Nightmare. Switching to infrared. The target vehicle is two miles southwest of your current position, heading west toward the river.”

The video switched from radar stills to gray-scale infrared and showed the sedan moving along a two-lane road at moderate speed. The killer paused at the next intersection like any other law-abiding citizen.

Quinn watched the feed on Nick's phone. “He doesn't look like he's in a hurry.”

“He already has a busted rear window. He doesn't want to draw any more attention to himself.” Nick turned west down an unlit street and floored it, but a block later, a brick wall materialized out of the dark. He gritted his teeth and slammed on the brakes. A dead end.

He smacked the steering wheel with his palm. “Get me a street map,” he said, shifting into reverse.

As Nick floored the Vitara backward down the alley, Quinn shrank the satellite video to one side of his heads-up display and added a street map. Nick's blue dot was trapped in a web of city streets. The target's red dot had just reached the wide road next to the Danube. It turned south and accelerated. The killer's lead was growing.

Nick hit the brakes and spun the Vitara 180 degrees on the slick road, coming to a stop at the intersection he had just left. He let it idle.

“Boss?”

“Give me a sec.”

Quinn stared at the feed. “He's getting away.”

“I know. Shut up.”

Nick studied the map. None of the main roads in Budapest were straight. All of them led in big circles except for the winding river road and a four-lane highway that cut diagonally through the web, heading southeast to the airport. A half mile ahead of the red dot, a side street connected the river road to that highway.

Nick shoved the Vitara into gear. He turned left, backtracking for two blocks before hopping a curb and cutting across a grassy park to get to a two-lane road heading northeast.

“You're going completely the wrong way,” said Quinn, gripping the dash as they bounced onto the road. “The target is headed south. He's headed out of town.”

“He's going to turn east.”

“How could you possibly know th—”

“Nightmare, your target is turning east,” said Raven. “He's leaving the river.”

Nick took his eyes off the road long enough to purse his lips at Quinn. “Copy that, Raven. Moving to intercept.”

After continuing two blocks in the wrong direction, Nick turned south onto a four-lane road that made a wide circle around the city. The dots on the map were finally converging again, both heading for the highway to the airport—the blue from the northeast, the red from the west.

Nick reached the highway first, two miles north of the street the killer was on. The engine screamed as he pushed the little SUV's tachometer to the limit.

Seconds later, the target reached the highway, still a mile and a half ahead. The red dot turned southeast and accelerated beyond the speed limit.

“I think he's made us,” said Quinn.

“Impossible. We're too far back.”

“Target is stopping,” said the satellite controller. “He's pulling over, still well short of the airport.”

Just as Raven described, the sedan slowed to a stop on the side of the highway. The killer jumped over the barrier and climbed a set of stairs to a footbridge next to the road. “Zoom out one, Raven,” ordered Nick, and the image blinked to a wider view. The footbridge led across the road and over a small field to a Metro station. Nick's target was about to disappear. “Raven, go optical, now! Get me some details before we lose him.”

The crisp gray-scale image turned to dull black, broken only by a few orange lights on the street and on the train platform. The target ran beneath a dim lamp on the footbridge. He was barely a shadow.

The image flashed back to gray scale. “Negative, Nightmare. There's not enough light. Sticking with infrared. Suspect is wearing a hoodie, dark in color. That's all we got.”

The sedan came up fast, abandoned on the side of the road. Nick skidded to a stop behind it and threw open his door.

“Boss—” said Quinn, but Nick was already out of the car.

He ran across the short grass field underneath the footbridge and half-climbed, half-vaulted over the chain-link fence at the edge of the tracks. By the time he reached the platform, the train doors were closing. There were a number of passengers. Sunrise was approaching and the early commute had begun. As the train pulled out, Nick counted at least six dark hoodie sweatshirts among the passengers near the windows. He let out an angry shout and punched the schedule display. The Plexiglas cover cracked. The few remaining passengers on the platform stared and backed away.

Quinn appeared at Nick's shoulder. “He's gone, boss. We lost him.”

H
e was there, at ground zero.”

Drake looked incredulous. “You sure about that?”

“Absolutely. I spoke to him. It was the same guy.” Nick stared out his cabin window. The sun was just breaking over the eastern horizon, spreading its light across a solid cloud deck far below the aircraft. The two older team members sat facing each other in club seats with a faux wooden table between them. Quinn was across the aisle, sound asleep. Their flight to Turkey would last another hour.

Nick and Quinn had returned to the killer's car to find it completely clean—no papers, no prints, even the VIN had been scratched off. The license plates were stolen. Drake and Scott had fared little better at the apartment. Scott cracked the hacker's laptop and disabled the booby traps on the servers, but the servers did not reveal the Emissary's identity. All he found were some scraps of code that looked like a virus and a second e-mail that went out on the day of the DC bombing. That e-mail had prompted a robbery at Istanbul University, one that had already made the news. They had no other leads.

After a long silence, Nick pressed a switch on his armrest to darken all the cabin windows. Then he glanced across the table at Drake. “I know you did something to make Amanda mad. What was it?”

Drake had started playing with his phone. He kept his eyes on the screen. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Terri Belfacci invited me to coffee. I went.”

Nick nodded. That would do it. Terri was their primary contact at the CIA—striking, flamboyant, and quite open about her designs on Drake. She referred to Amanda as “the grease monkey,” even when Amanda was in the room.

“You're an idiot.”

Drake dropped his hands to his lap and looked up. “I know.”

Before Nick could follow up with all the reasons why Drake was an idiot, the big operative changed the subject back to the Emissary. “So, has our new friend made any more chess moves?”

“He made another one while we were on our way to pick you up last night. So far, he's given me two pawns, sending them up the edges of the board. I'm no chess master, but that's a very unconventional opening.”

Drake shrugged. “So he's just using the app as a conduit to get your attention. He doesn't know a pawn from a pineapple.”

“Maybe.” Nick let his head settle back onto the leather cushion. “Or maybe he's a grand master and he's setting me up to take a beating.”

The door separating the main cabin from the aircraft's aft comm station opened and Scott peeked out. He nodded to Nick. “The colonel's on the line. He wants to speak to you.”

—

Colonel Walker's face was on the workstation's live video feed, his eyes roving the peripheries of the monitor as if he were trapped in the box. The old man spared no expense when it came to the Triple Seven Chase's technology, but he never fully adapted to any of it. He looked out of place using anything that wasn't built before or during the Cold War.

“Go ahead, sir,” said Nick, dropping into a desk chair that was bolted to the aircraft floor.

Walker's scowl abruptly centered on the screen. “Baron?”

Nick rolled his eyes. “Yes. It's me, sir. What did you want to tell me?”

“CJ got herself a warrant to tap into the chess application's servers.”

“And?”

“And they pulled the IP addresses for the Emissary's moves. He made one a couple of hours ago—”

“From a train in Budapest,” said Nick, finishing the colonel's statement.

Walker squinted at him. “No. He made that move from the same place as all the others, from a wireless hot spot at a coffee shop on C Street, two blocks west of the DC bombing site.”

Nick's eyes widened a touch. “That's impossible. I saw the driver who ran down Grendel. The same guy was at ground zero right after the bombing, posing as a responder. He has to be the Emissary.”

“Not necessarily. Someone was at that coffee shop, and that someone is sending out the chess moves. He may be running the operative you saw in DC and Budapest, or he may be working for him.” Walker took a swig from a foam cup of coffee, savoring the bitter liquid for a moment before continuing. “We need more data. Keep playing the game. Keep the Emissary on the hook. CJ is setting up a surveillance van to see if her team can't pinpoint which of the café's patrons is sending the moves. You have anything else?”

“Only the tattoo on the driver's arm,” said Nick, sitting back in his chair. “I sent a drawing to Molly.”

“Dead end. I saw your drawing. It looked common enough. I expected Molly to get a dozen matches, if not a hundred.” Walker shook his head. “She got nothing. There's not a single person in the joint databases—good guy, bad guy, or otherwise—that bears that mark.”

He polished off his coffee and then frowned at the empty cup. “So far, this investigation has netted us little more than a dead hacker and some useless computer files. We're no closer to figuring out who these people are than we were yesterday morning.”

Nick's eyes drifted to the clock at the bottom of his screen. “And no closer to stopping their next attack.”

—

Luke Baron had never flown before. His little ears had never experienced the alarming compression that occurs when an airliner's cabin pressure descends from eight thousand feet to five hundred in the space of twenty minutes. In Katy's admittedly biased estimation, her toddler had endured the bumps and boredom of the grueling eight-hour flight with admirable calm, but the descent into Frankfurt was too much. Luke started to cry. Katy could feel the weighty glances of the passengers around her, all of whom surely regarded her as the worst mother on the face of the Earth.

Nick's dad offered to take his grandson, but Katy shook her head and hugged Luke to her chest. She needed to hold him close right now. She was on the verge of tears herself.

Katy was used to Nick's travels. She was used to worrying when he disappeared for days or even weeks without contact, but she never left home during his trips. Somehow that made this one different. The house in Chapel Point—their home, their life together—sat empty and frozen in time while the two of them ventured off in different directions.

Between baggage claim and customs, it took Kurt and Katy a miserable hour and a half to get from the gate to the curb. Luke squirmed in his stroller the whole time, hungry and tired. Katy knew exactly how he felt. As they waited for the hotel van, she breathed in the crisp air and tried to put a better face on the situation. She was in Europe after all. That was fun. And in two days she would be in the Holy Land. Hadn't she always wanted to see it? She glanced around at the other passengers. None of them looked happy either. Most hunched down into their coats and stared anxiously down the pickup lane.

As her eyes roved the faces, Katy caught one individual looking her way, a short stocky man with a dark complexion and graying black stubble covering the lower half of his face. When she saw him, he cast his eyes down at the curb.

Katy quickly realized that she was now the one staring. She turned and joined the rest in watching for the next van, trying to let the moment pass, but the back of her head burned. Was that man watching her? She had told her husband that he was paranoid, overreacting to this whole thing, but now she wondered. Had she become a target?

After thirty seconds of pretending to look for the van, Katy couldn't take it anymore. She knelt down on the pretext of tucking Luke's blanket around him, and stole a glance behind her.

The short man had disappeared.