Shadow Maker (24 page)

Y
oussef offered up the use of his car, a white VW Golf from the early nineties. Nick protested, warned him he might never get it back, but the priest gave it anyway.

The drive across the Thames to Fleet Street was uneventful. The bobbies were still out in good numbers, but there were no checkpoints blocking the roads. Nick anticipated as much. A big city in a free society could not sustain checkpoints through rush hour. That could be a blessing or a curse, depending on which side you were playing for on a given day. This morning it was a blessing.

“The Jamatkhana is on the southeast corner of Whitefriars and Fleet,” said Drake, hanging over the seats between Nick and Rami and flicking his finger across his phone. “Satellite photos show a courtyard behind the building, blocked in by the surrounding structures. Exits from the courtyard are to the north and west, with additional escape routes through the buildings on each side.” He spread his fingers on the screen, zooming in. “I can see only one door from the mosque to the courtyard. Blocking that will effectively plug all those leaks.”

“Plug away. You watch the back door. Rami and I will go in through the front.”

They parked two blocks south and a block east in a garage off Victoria Embankment. The Hashashin would have lookouts who knew their faces, and Nick did not want to spook Kattan. But when the three of them turned the corner onto Whitefriars on foot, Nick got the feeling that lookouts didn't matter anymore. Up ahead, men in white
taqiyah
skullcaps poured by ones and twos out of the western entrance to the mosque's hidden courtyard.

“Uh-oh,” said Drake.

Nick quickened his pace. Then a gunshot rang out. He started running. “We're too late! Come on!”

As they raced up to the archway, Nick motioned Drake and Rami to head around front, and then he fought his way through the fleeing crowd. The courtyard was divided into two sections by a low fence that ran right up to the double glass doors of the inner mosque. A smaller group of women in colorful
hijab
head scarves fled through the northern archway on the other side of the fence. Men still trapped in the courtyard by the bottleneck on their side jumped the fence and knocked some of the women down to get at the less crowded exit.

Once Nick was in the courtyard, getting through the glass doors into the mosque presented no problem. The interior had already cleared and nobody else wanted to get inside. As soon as Nick burst through the door, a short man in a suit and a gold-and-white taqiyah charged him, wagging his finger and chattering in a familiar but unintelligible Turkic dialect. Nick brushed past him, searching for the source of the gunshots.

Aside from a lectern near the rounded protrusion of the mihrab, most of the interior prayer room was wide-open space—green and gray carpet beneath a low ceiling, lit by six octagonal skylights that cut through the three floors above. Nick saw no sign of the shooter, and no cover where he might be hiding. He thought the room was empty except for the chattering imam, until he saw the shooter's victim lying on the floor.

A sporadic trail of dark spots led from a door in the western wall to the center of the room, where Dr. Maharani lay at the intersection of two circles of sunlight, bleeding out into the cheap industrial carpet.

“Kattan was here,” said Nick as Drake and Rami appeared. “He fled the scene. Find him!”

The big operative turned back toward the front door. “On it!”

The imam stayed right at Nick's shoulder as he crossed the room to Maharani, still chattering away. Nick pushed him away, shouting, “Call an ambulance!” But the little man kept coming. With the imam ranting in one ear and Drake calling for satellite support in the other, Nick crouched over the fallen scientist. “Where is it?” he demanded, grabbing Maharani by his bloody shirt. “Where is the bioweapon?”

Maharani stared up at him with wild eyes. “Smallpox,” he gasped. “Hemorrhagic. Resilient form.”

Nick raised him off the floor by his shirt. “Listen to my question!
Where
is it?”

“Gone. Courier came . . . last night. My daughter . . . in danger.”

Maharani didn't know his daughter had worked for the Hashashin. “Your daughter is safe,” Nick lied, softening his tone. “Where is Kattan?”

Maharani's lips were turning blue. “He kept me here to make a vaccine. He . . . took it with him. Formula . . . on the computer . . . downstairs.”

“Stay with him. I'll get it,” said Rami.

“Delivery method!” demanded Nick, trying to get anything he could out of the doctor before he faded completely.

Maharani's eyes fluttered closed, “My . . . daughter . . . ”

“I told you. Your daughter is fine,” said Nick, slapping the biochemist's cheek to wake him up.

The doctor's eyes opened. “D . . . C . . . ” Then his pupils lost their focus. With his last desperate breaths he made W sounds, trying to form a word that never came.

Drake reported in. “We've got nothing on satellite or the street cams. Kattan is gone.”

Nick laid the lifeless Maharani down on the carpet. Then he turned on the chattering imam. “I know you speak English, you little—”

A blast ripped through the mosque. Smoke billowed out from the stairwell where Rami had descended. Forgetting the babbling imam, Nick rushed into the choking cloud. “Rami! Rami, where are you?”

The carnage that greeted him when he reached the base of the stairs was too much for Nick to take. His eyes burned, but forcing them open, he saw that the blast in the confined space had been devastating. There was no broken body, no graceful, silent form like the girl the night before. There was nothing left of his friend and mentor but small, half-recognizable pieces.

Nick trudged back up the stairs, numb. Halfway to the top, his phone chimed. With a shaking hand, he checked the screen. The ivory letters in the black box taunted him.
TheEmissary has taken your bishop. Your move.

N
ick emerged from the stairwell in a trance, the walking dead. Visual and auditory cues could not make it through the wall barring the way to his conscious mind.

The little imam met him at the top of the steps and resumed his barrage of unintelligible chatter. He fell in step, right at Nick's shoulder, completely oblivious to his own peril.

In his semiconscious state, Nick could not hear the grating buzz of the imam's chatter nor see the constant wagging of his finger. He might not have noticed him at all, despite the little man's complete disregard for the sanctity of personal space, but then the imam took hold of his arm.

The reaction was instantaneous and supremely violent. Nick came out of his trance with an angry roar, lifting the imam off the carpet by the lapels of his jacket and slamming him into the wall so hard that his shoulder blades broke through the drywall. The taqiyah skullcap fell to the floor. “You permitted this!” Nick shouted. “You hid the devil in your church, and now you're going to pay!”

The shock at Nick's sudden outburst quickly wore off, and the imam's surprised expression melted into a sneer. “The signs of the Mahdi are preordained,” he said in perfect English. “You cannot stop his coming.” Then he spat in Nick's face.

Nick let out another roar and hauled back his fist, but a strong hand caught his arm before he let the punch fly.

“We have to get out of here,” said Drake.

The sound of sirens and screeching tires close at hand broke through the wall in Nick's senses, but he refused to let go of the imam. He dragged him across the prayer room by his collar instead. A growing crowd of bobbies pounded on the front door. Drake had thrown the dead bolts to keep them at bay.

“Leave him!” called Drake holding the courtyard door open.

“No! He's one of them!”

The little imp screamed and flailed and dug his heels into the carpet like a stubborn child. Then he gained his feet and managed to turn and bite Nick's wrist, digging his teeth deep into his flesh. Nick let out a guttural cry and let go. The imam ran toward the door and the policemen. Drake grabbed Nick's arm and pulled him out the opposite side.

The next sixty seconds were a blur. Nick saw little besides Drake's broad back ahead of him—an iron gate kicked in, flashes of cobblestone and pavement, a narrow street and a honking horn. There was a short tunnel of gray stone and then sunlight again and a crumbling cherub above a pair of tall oak doors, cracked and weathered. One of the doors opened and Drake pulled him onward, until he dragged him down a set of worn stone steps into darkness.

The two of them stood panting side by side in the gloom for a few seconds, and then Nick exploded.

“Get away from me!” He shoved Drake backward into the shadows beyond the foot of the stairs. The big operative fell against the opposite wall and something shifted in the dark. Stone ground against stone.

Drake recovered his balance, pushing off the object and holding out his palms. “Take it easy, boss.”

Nick did not heed the warning. “I said, get away!” He lunged at his teammate, throwing a right hook at the face he could barely see.

Drake raised his forearms to block the right as well as the left that followed. Then he wrapped Nick in a clinch and held him fast, his big hands pressing down on the back of Nick's skull.

Nick struggled to free himself, driving uppercuts into Drake's ribs, but his teammate only grunted and tightened his iron grip.

“He's gone, boss,” wheezed Drake, clearly pained by the blows. “Come on. Pull it together.”

After a few seconds, Nick stopped swinging and Drake relaxed his grip. Nick jerked himself free. He let out an angry scream that echoed in the chamber. “Don't you get it? I can't beat him. This game ends with me dead. There's no other outcome, and anyone who stands with me is a target.” He pressed his phone into Drake's face to show him the list of messages from the chess app. “First Quinn, then Scott, and now Rami. Kattan has anticipated every move.” He shook his head. “No, he's shaping the moves, working me like a puppet. This whole thing is just another game of chess to him, and he's picking off my pieces one by one.”

Nick sat down on the steps and hung his head, lowering his voice. “Go home. Or go see your cousins in California, I don't care. Just get away from me. If you don't, you
will
be the next piece to fall, and there's nothing I can do to stop it.”

Drake sat down next to his teammate. He leaned back and rested his elbows on the steps. “You done?”

Nick breathed heavily for a few moments and then leaned back too, tilting his head back into the light that tumbled down the stairs from the church above. “Yeah, I'm done.”

During their few minutes in the subterranean chamber, Nick's eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. He glanced around. Long shelves were carved out of the far wall and the wall to their right, and each shelf held a stone coffin. This was a crypt, beneath an old church in the heart of London. A coffin on the far wall had shifted when Drake bumped into it, likely the only action the corpse had seen for centuries.

“How did he do it?” asked Drake, staring up at the ceiling. “I mean, I get that he used the knife to get us to Ankara, and he lured us to Paternoster Square with the security cams, but the mosque was our idea. How did he know we were going to be there?”

Nick didn't answer for a few seconds. Then he turned and looked at his friend. “You ever hear of Dynamic Evaluation Lookahead?”

Drake shook his head. “Sounds complicated.”

“It's not. We all use it. DEL is our ability to predict outcomes, anything from catching a pop fly to knowing it's a bad idea to tell a girl that her butt looks big in those jeans.”

Drake smiled to see Nick's sense of humor returning. “And chess,” he offered.

Nick sat up and let out a long breath. “Right. Chess. That's the most common example. People with a natural ability to see outcomes tend to be good at chess. A grand master may be one person in every five million. Then you've got your top quarterbacks and your superinvestors. Now we're talking one person in a hundred million. The top day traders in that group can see complex outcomes hours in advance.”

“Hours?” said Drake. “Kattan had our moves laid out
days
in advance. How many people can do that?”

Nick closed his eyes. “One person in a billion—one in two billion. Something like this has never been documented. I think Masih Kattan can predict outcomes on a level the world has never seen.”

“So you really can't beat him.”

“No, I can't.” Nick settled back and looked up into the light again. “But I still have to try.”

Canada, 20 miles south of Montreal

S
amir Abbas slowed his aging Chevy delivery truck to a stop on a snow-packed side road, hidden in the trees off Canadian Route 15. He let the motor idle, kept the doors locked, and did not turn off the headlights. This seemed an especially creepy spot to meet his cargo, but under the circumstances he could see why it was necessary.

Sammy's Vegetables—that's what it said on the side of the truck—usually dealt in peppers, tomatoes, and squash of several types. Usually. On this trip up to Montreal, Samir had already delivered his cargo of fresh produce to the small groceries on his docket. At this point he would normally return to his greenhouse in Warrensburg, New York, with an empty truck, but not today. On this trip, Samir would bring something back across the border.

The imam had made it clear that this favor constituted a holy deed of charity—a valuable commodity for an imperfect Muslim. At sixty-one, Samir had never made the hajj, and he could not fathom how he would meet this obligation before he died. How many vegetable farmers could afford to go all the way to Mecca? Without the hajj, and with a less-than-ideal record of
jum'ah
prayer at the mosque, where did that leave him on Allah's scales? Certainly, helping a young student at the behest of his imam might tip the balance in his favor.

Samir jumped at the startling sound of a fist pounding on his passenger door. He clutched his chest and leaned over to peer out the window. The face that stared back at him through the glass looked innocent enough, and young. The kid could not have been more than twenty, wearing a parka that dwarfed his stick-figure neck, and blue jeans that hung from his waist like curtains.

Samir pushed open the door and smiled. “You must be Mahmoud.” He held out a hand to help the young man climb into the cab. “And you must be freezing.”

“Shukran jazilan,”
said Mahmoud, climbing up and setting his backpack on the floor. He pulled the passenger door closed and rubbed his hands together in front of the heating vent. “Before this trip, I had never left Egypt. I never imagined such a cold.”

Samir glanced over at Mahmoud's bare hands and down at his soaked tennis shoes. He suddenly worried that this cargo might not survive the journey south. He pulled off his gloves and pressed them into the young man's hands. “You are underdressed. You will need these. I would give you my boots but I must get out at the border, and how would that look? Me in my socks?” He tilted his head back toward the box trailer. “You must make the trip back there. The border guards that work the graveyard shift know me well, and they no longer bother to ask me for identification, but they would certainly ask for yours.”

After Mahmoud thawed out a bit, Samir led him to the back. He eyed the backpack slung over Mahmoud's shoulder. “Is that all you've brought for a new life in America?”

“I have family in New York. They will provide all that I need.
Insha'Allah
.”

“Insha'Allah,”
agreed Samir.

Mahmoud shifted his feet on the packed snow as Samir unlocked the roller door. “What if the border guards ask to look in the back?”

“They won't.” Samir raised the door halfway and shined a flashlight into the cargo space. There was a stack of blue plastic crates at the front end. “If they do, just hide behind those. There are blankets as well. Wrap yourself up.” He shined the flashlight on Mahmoud's feet and chuckled. “And when you are settled, take off those shoes. Better to wrap your feet in a blanket than leave them soaking in ice water.”

As Mahmoud climbed into the back, his parka rode up, exposing the black grip of a compact automatic tucked into his waistband.

Samir's heart skipped a beat. He saw the officers who manned the border station more often than he saw his cousins in Albany. They were practically family. What fool had given this child a gun? “Please,” he said, trying not to let on that he had seen the weapon. “Stay calm when we reach the border. As I said, they will not check in here.”

Mahmoud turned to face him and set his bag down behind the crates. In the half light at the edge of the flashlight's beam, the boy's face looked much older than it had before.
“Insha'Allah,”
he said.

Samir nodded, lowering the flashlight for fear that Mahmoud would see his hand shaking. “Yes.
Insha'Allah
.”