“I wouldn’t call it empty-handed.” Nick told her about their fight in the catacombs. “We found script that may be useful,” he said, plugging his phone into the laptop, “along with some symbols that match our mystery tattoos. I’m sending you the pictures.”
CJ wasn’t impressed. “Cave drawings and mummies, huh?” She shook her head. “You’re slipping, Nick Baron. And another thing—your buddy Senator Cartwright is getting more persistent. I’ve got one of his staffers banging on my door every couple of hours. It’s like they’re taking shifts. I’ve blocked them with special access orders, but that won’t last. He’s on the Intelligence Oversight Committee.”
“My team isn’t under that committee,” said Nick.
“Well, mine is,” she countered. “And I told you about Cartwright’s White House connection. In another forty-eight hours, he’ll have all the clearances he needs.”
Nick didn’t want to hear about the idiot politicians. He pushed her back on track. “I sent you a text from the room where we entered the tunnels. Did you get it?”
She cocked her head. “Random picture with a ‘who and where’ attached? Yeah, I got it. How should I know who that is?”
“I’m tired, CJ.”
“Fine. Be that way. His name is Dr. Nashak Maharani. It took our software under an hour to come up with a match. We also know the where. International Biological Engineering. The good doctor is a molecular biologist.” She paused and leaned closer to the screen. “Nick, he’s noted for his achievements in genetically modified viruses.”
Drake appeared at Nick’s shoulder. “Bingo, we have a winner. That confirms we’re facing a bio-attack.”
A torso in a black suit, made headless by the limits of the webcam, approached CJ’s desk. The suit handed her a note and she looked up and said a few words that the microphone didn’t pick up. Then he moved offscreen again. CJ turned back to the monitor. “We got a video hit on your tattoo from Budapest.”
“Where?” asked Nick and Drake in stereo.
“An airport cam at Heathrow, ten hours ago. Just a glimpse of the mark itself, though, no face. Two significant flights came in around that time, one from Cairo, one from Jordan. My guys pulled the customs feeds, but no dice.”
“Ten hours,” muttered Nick.
“Suck it up, princess,” retorted CJ. “Legitimate government agencies like mine have to follow rules, file paperwork. Ten hours is some kind of record. You should be singing my praises.”
“So do we go after Maharani or Tattoo Guy?” asked Drake.
“Both. The bioresearch firm that Maharani works for is also in London. I’m guessing that’s no coincidence.”
Nick looked back at Scott. “Call our pilot. Have him warm up the jet. Start packing the gear.”
“Hey! I’m not finished.” CJ tapped her screen to reclaim his attention. “Maharani’s a start, but I need more. The picture showing up at the bombing tells me our quarry is someone from your past. You’ve seen his face twice so far. You have to dig down and try to remember him. You have to tell me who we’re up against.”
Nick glanced down at the picture in the corner of the screen. In the photo, he was younger, several years at least. He shook his head. “The man I saw was young, early twenties. If I was chasing him when this picture was taken, then I was chasing a teenager—”
He stopped. That was it. Suddenly he saw the face of the Budapest killer—the face of the mystery man at the DC bombing—in a new light. He knew the identity of the Emissary.
PART TWO
GAMBIT
CHAPTER 26
Yemen
35 kilometers northwest of `Amran
September 2005
Hatchet, this is Zombie One. Confirm you saw the target enter the building?” asked Nick, pressing a button on the fat comm unit hanging from his ear. He turned to Drake, who was lying prone right next to him. “I’m not letting you pick our callsigns anymore.”
They were crammed into a crevice in the side of a sandy hill, watching a mud house in a tiny desert village. Kattan had crossed from Iraq into Saudi Arabia, and then through the desert mountains into western Yemen. They had been on his trail for months. It was hot, it was stuffy, and they were surrounded by some of the biggest flies Nick had ever seen. He wondered if he smelled as offensive to Drake as Drake smelled to him.
“Zombie, affirmative,” said the pilot of the drone circling above, high and out of sight. The CIA Predator-B was a limited production model of the Air Force MQ-9 Reaper, able to carry eight times the munitions of the original Predator. “Your target is inside. There are two sentries. One on the east side of the structure, the other on the west.”
Colonel Walker’s voice interrupted through Nick’s satellite comm link, much more clear and crisp than the voice of the pilot relayed through the Predator-B’s five-watt radio. “Zombie, this is Lighthouse. The risk of collateral damage has been assessed low. A strike on the building is approved. Do not wait for the target to leave. I repeat: do not wait for the target to leave. This is our best chance to take him down.”
Everything had come together for this strike. The CIA asset had confirmed Kattan’s presence, and it was carrying the best surgical strike weapon that current technology could provide—a dual GPS/laser-guided bomb called a GBU-54. The new bomb wasn’t even fielded with regular units yet. At five hundred pounds, it was big enough to do the jobs that a Hellfire missile couldn’t, and small enough to minimize collateral damage in a village like this one.
The numbers, the intelligence, the timing, all the data told Nick that striking now was the right move.
He checked the hardened laptop that Drake held open beside him. The high-definition video feed from the Predator-B showed the house and the two sentries in perfect clarity. “Hatchet, Zombie, I will be your tactical controller for this strike,” said Nick. “Keep your laser cold. I’ll take care of terminal guidance. Your aim point is the center of the house. I want one GBU-54 and one only. Call in with direction.”
“Hatchet copies one bomb and one only. Laser cold.” There was a long pause while the drone pilot lined his aircraft up for the attack run and then, “Hatchet is in from the north.”
Nick checked the video one more time. Then he squinted through the scope of his laser designator, adjusted his crosshairs, and flipped on the beam. “Hatchet, you are cleared hot,” he said into the radio.
The moment Nick spoke those words, the door on the south side of the structure opened and a boy walked toward a nearby water pump. It took Nick a long moment to process the unexpected sight. Instinctively, he backed away from the scope. The wider view with his naked eye confirmed the newcomer was way too short to be one of the sentries.
“Abort, abort, abort!”
“Too late, Zombie. The weapon is away, tracking your laser. Time of flight now twenty seconds.”
Unaware of the danger, the boy went about his business. He hung a pail on the end of the pump and started working the handle.
Nick lost sight of the kid as he returned to his scope and started dragging his crosshairs into the desert. He moved the weapon’s laser aim point toward his own position. It was the only direction he could shift the bomb without endangering another house in the village.
“Ten seconds.”
“Take cover!” Nick reached blindly behind him, motioning for his teammate to move deeper into the crevice. “I’m bringing the bomb closer to our hill.”
“You’re what?”
“Five seconds.” The Reaper pilot’s voice remained even, almost robotic.
“Just get back!”
Nick knew that shifting a GBU was a long shot. The bomb’s flight controls could not handle large changes with the laser spot. If he did not move the aim point far enough away, the house and the kid would still be inside the blast radius. If he moved it too far, too quickly, the bomb’s logic would reject the l
aser signal and revert to GPS.
“Three, two, one . . . ”
The impact shook the earth, threatening to bring the whole hill down on top of them. Debris ranging from small pebbles to softball-sized rocks pummeled Nick’s back and shoulders and glanced off his Kevlar helmet. He kept his head low, waiting for the quaking to settle.
When Nick finally lifted his eyes, all he saw was a uniform curtain of light brown dust. He allowed himself a dirt-caked smile, certain he had successfully dragged the bomb closer to his own hideout.
Then Hatchet shattered the illusion.
“Splash. Direct hit on target building. Stand by for damage assessment.”
With a gust of wind, the curtain of dust swirled apart, confirming Hatchet’s report. The five-hundred-pound weapon had rejected the laser spot and reverted to the original coordinates, obliterating the mud structure.
Nick dropped into his scope and shifted it back to the water pump. At first, he could not see anything—the haze played havoc with his focus. Frantically, he rubbed his eye with a gloved knuckle and looked again.
On that second look, he found him: the young boy, lying still and bloodied in the dust.
CHAPTER 27
15,000 feet over France
Hey, are you awake?” asked Drake, reaching across the Gulfstream’s aisle to poke Nick’s arm.
Nick sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes. “I’m awake. I was just replaying the Kattan strike in my head.”
“We acted on our intelligence,” said Drake. “And we had no choice. That guy engineered attacks in Iraq that killed thirty-four U.S. soldiers and more than a hundred Iraqis. He was going to do it again.”
“His son was twelve years old. He was an American citizen.” Early in the Kattan chase, they had learned about his affair with a woman in New York. They knew about the boy, Masih, but they had no record of him ever going to Yemen.
Drake waved his hands. “Kattan is the one who brought the kid out there. That’s on him. We didn’t know.”
“But we knew afterward. We should have tried to recover the boy’s body. We owed him that much.” Nick laid his head back again and stared up at the cabin ceiling.
The CIA had operated its remotely piloted aircraft in Yemen with the consent of the Yemeni government, but there were compromises in the deal. One of those was the sanctity of Muslim bodies after a strike. The CIA could not touch them. The remains had to be left for the Yemeni authorities to collect for proper burial. All the Agency could do was montior the removal and hope they got enough video to confirm that a target was dead. Once the bodies were out of sight, the word of the local coroner would be highly suspect.
But Nick and Drake were not bound by any international agreement. They were not CIA, and the Yemeni government had no knowledge of their presence. They could have reached the target area before the local authorities arrived. They could have confirmed the death of the child. Instead, still numb from the strike, Nick and Drake had packed up and left.
“I didn’t want to see that boy up close,” said Nick. “I didn’t want that image locked in my head for the rest of my life.”
“I know,” said Drake. “I didn’t either.”
“But if we had, if we had gone down there and checked the bodies”—Nick rolled his head left to look his teammate in the eye—“we would have realized the kid was still alive.”
—
The team left the Gulfstream in a hangar at London City Airport and set up shop in a two-bedroom apartment at Cygnet House, in Greenwich.
“Why do I always get the couch?” complained Scott, setting up a spiny SATCOM antenna on the balcony. Despite the cold, he wore only a lime green T-shirt with his jeans. Block lettering on the front said: I’M SMARTER THAN YOUR BOYFRIEND.
Nick was running the antenna’s cable along the baseboards behind the couch in question. “Because your room has to be the command center, and the command center has to be in the living room. Do you want me to put Drake in charge of your equipment?”
Scott winced. “Absolutely not.”
“Then quit complaining.” Nick secured the cable to the back of one of Scott’s three laptops with a multi-tool and then stood up, slipping the tool into the leg pocket of his cargo pants. He brushed the dust off the long sleeves of his black thermal and turned to face the engineer. “What are we doing about Masih Kattan?”
The engineer cast one more wary look at the frayed couch cushions and then waved Nick back from the computers, out of his way. “While you two were lounging on the plane, I was back in the workstation getting us a head start.” He sat down and tapped at a wireless keyboard, bringing all three laptops to life. Two of the screens showed freeze-frames of their Budapest target, one captured from Raven’s satellite footage and the other from the camera at Heathrow airport. The third screen showed a facial sketch that Scott had built from Nick’s description. “I took what surveillance images we had and fed them into the same program that helped you identify Grendel. Neither caught the subject’s face. For that, I had to depend on our sketch. So the digital profile is much less complete.”
“Nice pick on the digs, boss,” interrupted Drake, emerging from his bedroom. He wore a loud, orange and yellow Hawaiian shirt, the one he called his relaxation shirt. He grinned at Scott. “Who knew you could find a California king in jolly old England. That baby is already calling my name.”
Nick ignored him and pressed the engineer. “So you’re saying our chances of finding Kattan are slim.”
Scott shrugged. “If I set the program to scan the feeds from London’s traffic and rail-station cams, we might get lucky. The tattoo will be the clincher. The software is set to view anyone with the same mark as a dead match. London has a lot of cameras. Kattan can’t hide forever.”
“No, but we don’t have forever to find him. We need to locate this Dr. Maharani and find out what he knows.” Nick grabbed his satchel from the couch and turned toward his room. As he did, the photo he had found at the knife shop fell onto the cushion. He picked it up, and for the first time he noticed a handwritten equation on the back.
632,000 × 0.05 = 31,600
-31,600
600,400
The final number was circled.
“Hey, I know what that equation means,” said Drake, looking over Nick’s shoulder. He pointed to the first number. “This is a population figure before an outbreak. The subtracted amount represents potential survivors. Five percent is the standard estimation of people who will be immune to a virus.”
“How could you possibly know that?” argued Scott.
“Zombie apocalypse,” countered Drake, folding his arms. “Every prepper takes it for granted that he’s part of the five percent. It’s the only hope we have.”
“Finally we get something useful out of your ridiculous hobby.”
“It is not a hobby, it is survival.”
Nick snapped his fingers at his teammates. “Focus, please.” He held the picture in front of Drake’s nose. “What does the last number mean, the one that’s circled?”
Drake shrugged. “That’s the fatality estimate, the number of people the virus will kill.”
Nick pushed past him and slapped the photo down next to Scott’s computers. “I’ve been carrying around the answer to one of our biggest questions for hours, and I had no idea. Scott, how many cities have a population of 632,000?”
The engineer clicked at his keyboard and quickly came up with a result. “A few,” he said, rolling out of the way so that Nick and Drake could see the screen.
Only one result from the short list of cities stood out to Nick. Only one made any sense. “These numbers tell us the target for the bio-attack,” he said, picking up the photograph again. “They tell us it’s Washington, DC.”
CHAPTER 28
Drake regarded his phony Interpol ID with a sour look, rubbing his thumb across the brass s
hield. Crammed into the right seat of the rented Peugeot hatchback, the big operative could easily have passed for Gulliver in Lilliput. Like Nick, he had exchanged his grunge clothes for business attire appropriate to the Interpol persona, and the overcoat he wore only amplified his disproportionate appearance in the small car. “Why Drake Martignetti?”
“It’s Italian. It suits you.”
“I’m Greek.”
“Who can tell? You Mediterranean types all look the same.”
Nick adjusted the dials of a microwave camera sitting on the dash, tuning an image of Maharani’s three-story Kensington row house that a USB cable fed to a tablet computer on his lap. The video feed looked something like an ultrasound, assuming the doctor conducting the ultrasound was drunk. Intel techs often likened interpreting microwave video to interpreting chicken entrails.
“I don’t like this,” said Drake.
“It’s too late to get a new cover name.”
“Not the name, the plan. We need to take a step back and stake this guy out for a couple of days. If the doctor’s working for Kattan, we might be walking into another firefight.”
“We don’t have a couple of days. And there’s no ambush here.” Nick lifted the tablet so that Drake could see. He pointed to a green, vaguely human-shaped blob, undulating across the first floor. “I see one guy, probably Maharani. You have to trust the equipment.”
“Right. Because microwave is so dependable.” Drake flipped the Interpol ID wallet closed with a slap. “I don’t look Italian at all.”
—
Nick rang the bell next to Maharani’s carved oak door and waited. When no one answered, he rang again. After a few seconds, he glanced up at Drake and jerked his chin toward the near end of the joined houses. “Head around back.”
After selecting a bump key, it took Nick less than four seconds to unlock both the dead bolt and the knob and silently push through. He stepped into a hall with dark wood flooring that ran all the way to the back of the house. Up and to the left, an open doorway led to a carpeted living area, and farther down another led to a kitchen. To his immediate right, a stairway led up to the bedroom floors above. He closed the door behind him, pocketed the bump key, and drew his Taser.