“On my way.”
Nick slapped a lid on his coffee and started for the door, leaving the sandwich languishing in its wrapping. Chaya scrambled out from behind the table to follow. “Your friend has something?”
“I have to get to Piccadilly Circus.”
As soon as Nick hit the sidewalk, he extended his stride, forcing the short lawyer into a stilted jog. The Strand and Kingsway were crowded with lunchtime foot traffic, and he weaved his way through the oncoming droves, picking the path of most resistance. He could hear the uneven click of Chaya’s power heels behind him, her panting apologies as she bumped into the people he sidestepped. Nick found it difficult not to smile.
When they came within sight of Holborn station, he felt the lawyer’s fingers graze his back, grasping for him. “You’re taking the Tube?” she asked, out of breath. “It will be packed at this hour. We should walk it.”
“No time. The Tube is still faster. Besides”—he stepped onto the steep escalator descending into the station—“I’m a government employee, remember? I have to support the public-transit system.”
Chaya clutched the arm rail on the step above him, gasping for breath. “You’re not an employee of our government.”
A cloud of static grew on Nick’s comm link as the escalator took them deeper underground. “I’m going to piggyback on the Tube’s cell-phone repeaters to keep the link open,” said Scott through the interference. “Once you’re on the train, give me an execute signal. After that you’ll have only a ninety-second window, encompassing both stages. Will that be enough?”
“Should be.”
Chaya looked up from straightening her rumpled coat. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
Chaya’s concerns about the noontime traffic proved to be well-founded. The platform was packed. Nick jostled his way to the map on the back wall. “Which train?”
“All of them, you stupid Yank,” said Chaya, scrunching her nose. “All the trains that pass this platform go to Piccadilly Circus.”
“The next one,” answered Scott through the earpiece. “It arrives in forty-seven seconds. Get on it, even if you have to crowd out other passengers. The rush at the up-channel station is beginning to slow. The following train will have too much open space.”
Exactly forty-seven seconds later, the next train pulled into the station. The doors opened and a bright feminine voice warned, “Mind the gap.” No one did. The masses crammed themselves into the already loaded cars. Nick herded Chaya ahead of him, shouldering a lanky teenager with green hair and studs in his eyebrows out of the way. As the cheerful voice advised them to mind the doors, he took a sip of his coffee and winked at the angry teen still standing on the platform. The kid slapped the door.
A moment later, the train lurched into motion and the crowd swayed as one body. Chaya gripped a vertical bar with white knuckles. The passengers around her engulfed her tiny form. She leaned a shoulder into Nick to gain a little space from a gristly, hairy individual. The man seemed all too content to have his oversized gut pressed against a pretty girl. As the train reached full speed, Nick took a final sip of coffee. It was much too sweet for his taste, and it had grown tepid. Perfect. He held the cup low and removed the lid. “Go,” he said through his teeth.
“Executing,” said Scott. “Three, two, one . . .”
The brakes locked, sending a terrific squeal ripping through the train. The passengers fell into one another. The lights flickered. With a little extra guidance, Nick’s coffee flew from his open cup. A flying wall of brown liquid hit Chaya in the back of the head.
Her hands flew up in shock and surprise. “Ugh!”
“I am so sorry. What a klutz.” Nick wiped her back with the sleeve of his coat, and her heavyset admirer joined in from the other side, a model of English chivalry. She batted them both away.
Scott’s voice sounded in Nick’s ear again. “Stage two in three, two, one . . .”
Every light in the car brightened and then popped. Sparks showered down. The passengers screamed.
—
Moments later, Chaya was still trying to get the coffee out of her hair, her fingers dripping. The dark and the screaming passengers did not concern her nearly as much as the horrible, sticky liquid.
The train operator made a desperate announcement over the PA system. “Remain calm, everyone. Please remain calm. We’ve only had a little power surge. Do not attempt to open the doors. The train will begin moving again shortly.”
He was right. The train jerked into motion again, but the lights never came back, blown out by the surge. The big man next to Chaya patted her sleeve, leaving his hand there a little too long. “Don’t worry none, darlin’. You’re safe with me.”
Right.
Chaya felt behind her back for Nick, but her hand went straight to the door. He was gone.
—
Nick emerged from a utility stairwell into daylight on Russell Square. He felt a pang of guilt at leaving Chaya alone in the dark with her chivalrous friend, but only a small pang.
After all, she was blackmailing him—was being the operative word. He glanced down at the paper in his hand to make certain he had lifted the right one from her peacoat. Then he crumpled it up and tossed it into a recycle bin. So much for the fake warrant and Chaya’s adoring magistrates.
CHAPTER 34
Anyone follow you?” asked Scott, checking up and down the hallway as Nick pushed past him into the apartment.
“You mean the girl?”
“I mean the police, the bobbies, Scotland Yard.” Scott checked the hall one more time before he closed the door. “What we just did was highly public and highly illegal. It could be classified as terrorism.”
“You’ve done a lot worse.”
“Yes, but from the safety of a bunker on the most well-defended military base in America. Out here I feel exposed.”
Geeks. “Welcome to field ops. Have you spoken to the colonel?”
Scott nodded.
“Katy?”
“She’s fine. Walker’s man in Germany has her well protected, and he hasn’t seen any threats. He said she almost made him in the first hour.”
“That’s my girl.” Nick strolled over to Scott’s computer station and jiggled the wireless mouse. “Find Kattan yet?”
“I’ve made some progress,” said the engineer, rushing after him and slapping his hand aside. “A timeline is taking shape.”
Nick knew better than to joust with Scott for control of the workstation. Instead, he retreated to the couch and collapsed onto the cushions. He leaned his head back. “Keep talking.”
“After I rebuilt the subject’s digital profile with the videos from IBE, I ran a search against Heathrow’s customs files.” As Scott spoke, he bustled back and forth to either end of the couch, adjusting a pair of cigar-sized cylinders fixed to the top of telescoping stands. “My software achieved a ninety-percent match on a passport that came through yesterday from Cairo.”
Nick’s head remained a dead weight on the couch cushion. “Giving us an alias that he’ll never use again.”
“Yes, but it also gave us a solid starting point for our London timeline.” Scott made a final adjustment to one of the cylinders and then sat down at his workstation. “Look.”
Nick raised his head and saw that the living room wall had become a three-dimensional map of London, projected by the apparatus Scott had set up. Weaving through the digital buildings, a red line connected several dots, each with an associated time.
Scott clicked his mouse and the first dot expanded from Heathrow, growing into a passport photo that seemed to stand out from the wall. The name underneath read Mohammed Jibreel, but Nick recognized the young Masih Kattan from his fleeting appearances in DC and Budapest. He must have suffered many reconstructive surgeries in the years following the strike, but he still bore a
resemblance to his father, mostly around the eyes.
“This is a customs hit,” said Scott. “The new digital profile gave me several more shots from Heathrow, but eventually Kattan disappeared into the Tube.” The first picture shrank back into its dot and a new one sprang out of the next, showing Kattan getting into a van. “Our first piece of new data occurs here. Unfortunately, Molly and I can’t determine where he got the van. Maybe he rented it—maybe it was left for him. I haven’t recovered any shots of the plates. However, we’re sure he drove it directly to IBE.” Two video stills appeared. One showed Kattan entering IBE’s lobby and the other, several minutes later, showed him leaving with Maharani. Both men carried boxes of equipment. No gun was visible.
“Maharani is a willing hostage,” said Nick, rising from the couch and stepping closer to examine the second still. With the three-dimensional projection, he felt like he could reach out and grab the biochemist—yank him away from the terrorist. If only it were that easy. “There has to be some form of coercion, here, besides brute force. What do the Hashashin have on this guy?”
“Unknown.” The stills shrank back into the map, and the last dot opened out of central London, this one a repeating video of Kattan and Maharani carrying their boxes across a small plaza. “This is where we lose him,” said Scott, frowning as the two men disappeared into an office building. “There were no more hits yesterday.”
“And this morning?”
“I’m still running searches on the last twelve hours.” The chair squeaked morbidly as Scott slowly swiveled around to face the couch. His expression was deadpan. “Nothing so far.”
Nick’s phone buzzed. CJ. He put it to his ear and said, “Gimme a sec,” and then covered the receiver and nodded to Scott. “Keep at it. I’ve got to take this.”
Outside Nick leaned against the balcony rail, gazing across the rolling snowy hills of Greenwich Park to the domed observatory that sat on the Prime Meridian. “Go ahead, CJ,” he said into the phone.
“My team made progress with those pictures you sent.”
“The symbols?”
“Negative. Those are still a mystery, but we found a guy at Georgetown who could translate the calligraphy.”
“Farsi, right?” Nick watched a group of children sledding on the observatory mount. His eyes followed a boy on a blue saucer, spinning in a slow circle as he sailed down the hill.
“Sort of. Our guy said the language was muddled by Turkic influence, but he’s confident he got the general idea. I’m sending it to you now.”
Nick put CJ on speaker and opened the file she sent him, turning away from the playing children to lean his back against the rail. There were four stanzas of text on his screen.
THE MESSENGER OF HIS MESSENGER SHALL DECLARE HIS COMING ON THE PLAINS OF THE GREAT EMPIRE,
AND THE MARKETPLACE WILL ERUPT IN TURMOIL SO THAT A LOAF OF BREAD SHALL COST MORE THAN A DAY’S WAGES,
AND PESTILENCE WILL SPREAD AMONG THE UNBELIEVERS, A DISEASE THE LIKES OF WHICH NO MAN HAS EVER SEEN.
THEN THE SUN WILL BE BLOTTED OUT AND MY SERVANT WILL OPEN THE GATE. A GREAT SMOKE WILL RISE UP FROM THE CENTER OF THE WORLD. THE SKY WILL BURN LIKE MOLTEN BRASS, AND FROM THE HIGH PLACE THERE WILL SOUND A DEAFENING NOISE, AS TRUMPETS, ANNOUNCING THE ENTRANCE OF THE MAHDI.
“Reads like the Quran, doesn’t it?” asked CJ.
Nick took the phone off speaker and brought it back to his ear. “It’s probably a hadith, a saying attributed to Muhammad. A lot of them mirror passages of the Quran.”
“Whatever it is, it ain’t good.”
At that moment, one of Scott’s laptops made a twittering sound, mimicking R2D2. “What was that?” Nick called into the apartment.
Instead of an answer, he heard a click, and then another, and then a furious stream of them. He poked his head into the room and saw Scott’s fingers blazing over the keyboard. “Thanks, CJ,” he said, ending the call before she could respond. Then he stepped into the living room and closed the door behind him. “You get something we can use?”
Scott changed the display projected on the wall. A new video showed Kattan walking across a plaza. When the killer reached the border of the camera’s view, the display flashed and another camera picked him up. This one showed Kattan approaching the same office building as before.
Nick watched the assassin casually stroll beneath a concrete awning and disappear. “How long ago did the cameras record that?”
Scott stared up at the display, his hands still hovering over his keyboard. “The software didn’t pull that video from the recordings. We’re watching the live feed.”
CHAPTER 35
The very sight of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral enraged Kattan, the thought of the daily throngs crowding beneath its extravagant portico, gazing mindlessly at the stone idols of the crusaders. The cathedral was not a house of worship. It was a tourist attraction for bloodthirsty Christians.
The assassin lingered in the shadow of a concrete awning a moment longer and then turned and pushed his way through a set of glass double doors. As he descended a flight of carpeted stairs to his temporary headquarters, his anger gave way to rapturous anticipation. Soon the masses would see the cathedral and all others like it for what they were: empty monuments to a false religion.
Soon. Very soon.
At the basement level, Kattan unlocked a heavy wooden door and entered the lab he had constructed for Dr. Maharani. A long table on one side of the room held a variety of electronic instruments, controlled by a pair of laptop computers. Most of the instruments were contained inside a large clean box, along with glass dishes and beakers and the canisters Kattan had brought from Egypt. The biochemist was on the floor a few feet away, completing his afternoon prayers.
“One day soon the Qiyamah will begin, and those rituals will be abolished,” said Kattan as the doctor rose to his feet.
Maharani averted his eyes from his captor. His hands shook as he lifted a lab coat from a cot in the corner and slipped it on. “And this,” he said, as he stepped up to the worktable, “this thing you have asked me to create will hasten that day’s arrival?”
“It is a necessary step, yes. It is a sign that must precede the age of peace.”
Maharani pushed his hands into the rubber gloves inside the clean box and carefully grasped the cylinder. “Are there other signs to perform? Is that the reason you are dressed as an electrician, today?”
Kattan looked down at his blue jumpsuit and then back at the doctor. He frowned. Maharani’s eyes were clearly not as averted as he pretended; and he was never this talkative before, never this inquisitive. Then the reason dawned on him. The scientist was stalling.
The amiable tone vanished from Kattan’s voice. “Do not forget that I am on a schedule. How much longer?”
“I need six more hours.”
“You have three.”
For the first time, Maharani looked directly at Kattan. “You do not understand. There are biological processes at work here. They cannot be rushed.”
Kattan was shocked by the doctor’s stern expression. It seemed Maharani needed a reminder. “Do you know what your daughter is doing right now?”
The stern expression fell away in an instant. “Please. I am doing everything you ask.”
“I am told by my people that she is on a train. What do you think would happen if there were an explosion in that tunnel?”
“But the timeline is beyond my control.”
“How terrifying it will be for little Chaya. A flash of fire, incredible pain, then darkness. To which do you suppose she will succumb first? The slow drain of her lifeblood or the crushing press of a thousand tons of concrete?”
Maharani quickly returned to his work, removing a sample from the canister inside the clean box. “I will get it done. See? I am working. You do not have to do this.”
“Three hours, Doctor
.”
“Yes. Three hours. You will have your weapon.”
—
Nick left his car in a garage and hurried up Godliman Street toward the courtyard of St. Paul’s and the southern access to Paternoster Square—the home of the London Stock Exchange and the location where the camera had caught Kattan a half hour before. In his slacks and overcoat, he mirrored the smattering of London businessmen around him, all rushing back to the office after their long lunches. Most of them carried some sort of portfolio, either a briefcase or a satchel. No one seemed to notice that Nick had two—one for him and one for Drake.
The big operative was racing back from Cambridge to meet him. Thankfully, Drake could push the limits of the Peugeot without much fear of police interference. The Brits relied on speed cameras. Walker could compensate the rental company for the photo tickets later.
As he drove, Drake back-briefed Nick on his conversation with Rami. “Long story short,” he said over the comm link, “Kattan set himself up as the mouthpiece of the Hashashin messiah. They call him the Qaim, the Emissary.”
Nick slowed his pace at hearing Kattan’s screen name in the new context. “That doesn’t make sense. I see the benefit of controlling the Hashashin, but Kattan should be trying to hide the connection from us, not flaunting it through the chess app.”
A passing Brit glanced Nick’s way and gave him a curious look, trying to assess whether the man talking to himself was mentally challenged or simply drunk. Nick put his phone to his ear to make the SATCOM conversation look normal.
“It’s a mind game,” said Drake, oblivious to the interruption. “Kattan is overconfident, like his father always was. He’s giving you puzzles to break up your focus. Don’t get sucked in.”
“Right, mind games.” But Nick wasn’t sure he bought the logic. The endgame was right here, right in front of him—infiltrate the building in Paternoster Square, take down Kattan, rescue the biochemist, secure the weapon. The path ahead seemed so cut and dry, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something.