Shadow Maker

  He twisted and fell flat backward as a line of rounds passed above him. The first bullet parted his hair. In mid-fall, he zeroed in on the shooter and pulled the trigger.

  The rider’s visor was probably Lexan—bullet-resistant—but he had lifted it to see better in the dark corridors. Nick put two rounds through his right eye. Then his back hit the ground, knocking the wind from his lungs.

  The light wavered in the corridor with the stuck bike. The motor revved up. The other assassin had worked it free. The sound and the light retreated from the alley.

  “You still there, Two?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m clear.”

  “Great. Come and get me.”

  “It’ll take a while. Find a good hiding spot and hunker down.” Nick struggled to his feet and kicked the dead assassin, just to make sure. Then he dragged him into an alcove and propped him up, working in the light from the remaining motorcycle. The man’s sleeve had crept up his forearm, revealing a tattoo. Nick recognized the design from the catacombs and from Drake’s chess pictures—one triangle overlapping another within a circle, a Hashashin knight.

  “Lighthouse says we’ve been played,” said Nick, dropping the arm and unzipping the assassin’s jacket. “We’re at square one and Kattan is done with us. I’d say recent events support his theory. We’re vacating London before this gets any worse.”

  “That’s why Chaya tried to kill me. Kattan used us, and now he’s tying up loose ends.”

  Tying up loose ends. Nick stopped rifling through the assassin’s jacket and stood up. “Two, was Chaya standing there when I told you about Rami?”

  Drake took a while to consider the question, then answered slowly, “Yeah, I think she was.”

  “Then you’re going to have to wait a little longer.” Nick walked around the corner and gazed down at the idling motorcycle. “I have to go to Cambridge.”

  CHAPTER 49

  Nick sped past the Golden Hinde on the assassin’s motorcycle and kept on going. He wore the assassin’s gear—helmet, jacket, and gloves—to protect himself from the still-falling sleet. “Four, change of plan,” he said over the SATCOM.

  Scott did not reply. Molly came up instead, from her station at Romeo Seven. “Nightmare One, this is Lighthouse. Four is off-line. We have the comms now. No changes. Your orders are to get to the airport.”

  “Molly. Good. I need a phone patch.” Nick swerved around a pedestrian pylon, nearly losing control on the slick pavement and sending his helmet askew. He growled as he straightened the bike and then jerked the helmet back into position. He had discarded the helmet liner in the alley because it was sticky with the Hashashin’s blood and brains. Without it, the helmet didn’t sit right.

  “Nightmare One, we lost the GPS feeds in the transfer. Please state your position and the nature of the change.”

  “Who are you? OnStar? Just give me that phone patch.” Nick settled out heading north on the London Bridge and punched the gas, weaving through the late-night traffic.

  “Fine. What’s the number?”

  It only took Molly a few seconds to run the patch, but the line went straight to voice mail. “Rami, get out of the house,” said Nick, hoping the scream of his engine wouldn’t drown out the message. “The Hashashin are coming for you. Get somewhere safe. I’m on my way.”

  “You can’t be on your way to Professor Fuad’s,” said Molly as soon as she cut the patch. “No delays. The Brits are preparing to shut down noncommercial departures from the airports. You have forty-five minutes before the Gulfstream is grounded. The pilots have been instructed to take off, with or without you.”

  “Then leave me behind. Tell the others to get out of here.”

  “No good.” Drake’s voice came up on the link, almost a whisper. Nick could hardly hear him over the whine of his engine. “I’m on the other side of the city, surrounded by cops. Four will never get to me in time to make the plane. If you’re staying, so am I.”

  A plan started to form in Nick’s mind. As he slowed to pass a blue-and-yellow police car, he reached down to check that the thumb drive was still safe in his pocket. He started looking for an appropriate spot to stash it. “That leaves Four only one pickup to make before he leaves. Molly, get him up on comms. Drake, stand by.”

  A short distance off the road, Nick saw what he was searching for. With the cop safely out of view behind him, he hopped a curb and slid to a stop in a small open square. After dismounting and checking the area, he bent down and feigned tying his boot, using the move to shove the plastic evidence bag into a crevice underneath a wooden crate. Then he jumped back on the bike and returned to his northeast course. “Nightmare Four, you up?”

  “I’m here. Currently at the Golden Hinde and following the situation. Looks like I’m going home alone.”

  “Correct, but first you need to grab the thumb drive. Come north over the London Bridge to Brushfield Street. I left the package for you under the goat.”

  “Did you say you left it under the goat?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence. Then, “What if the goat moves?”

  Nick grinned despite the circumstance. “We’re talking about a statue, a goat on top of some crates. Somehow it’s art. Whatever. The drive is in a plastic bag underneath the crates.”

  “A goat.”

  “A statue of a goat.”

  “Lighthouse copies the plan,” said Molly impatiently. “Goat and all. The colonel isn’t going to like this. You two have no way out of the country.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” grunted Nick, fighting to keep control as he took a half right onto the A1208. He straightened out and gunned the engine, accelerating toward Cambridge. “We always do.”

  CHAPTER 50

  The sleet stopped near the end of the ride. That was something. But it left a freezing remnant hanging in the air that chilled Nick to the core. He fought back shivers as he hung his helmet on the handlebars and then crawled over the low stone wall next to Latham Road, on the southern end of the university grounds.

  Nick had stayed with Rami before, and he knew the property well. The professor’s two-story cottage stood well back from the road, surrounded by an ancient circle of elms and chestnuts. A long gravel drive led straight from the road to the front door, but Nick stayed away from it, moving in a wide arc and keeping to the edge of the trees. His black gear kept him well hidden in the shadows.

  He approached the house from behind Rami’s one-car garage—little more than a brick shed at the edge of the drive—and when he reached the heavy oak front door, he found it cracked slightly open. He saw a wet glint on the frame, catching the faint light reflecting off the overcast above. He looked closer. Blood.

  Nick raised the Vector to his shoulder and pushed the door inward with the suppressor. It creaked and then thumped against something soft on the floor.

  A young woman—eighteen, maybe twenty—lay in Rami’s entry, her blood spreading in a wide pool beneath her, seeping into the herringbone pattern of the old brick floor. Nick winced and gently shunted her aside with the door until he had enough room to slip through. He did not bend down to check the girl’s pulse. No need. Her throat was slashed, her eyes open and lifeless, staring at the thick beams above.

  There were no sounds in the house. No sounds at all. If Nick remembered correctly, the kitchen and the dining room were to the right, the study and the sitting room with its spiral staircase to the left. At this hour, the professor—a notorious insomniac—should be in his study, poring over the plans of a pyramid or the writings of Champollion.

  Nick tried to block out the mental image of Rami, facedown and bleeding all over an ancient text, as he crept toward the study entry at the back of the hall. The sliding wood door was wide open. He cleared the corner, slicing the pie with the Vector still up and ready.

  Empty. No dead professor.
br />   Nick let out a short breath.

  A heavy book lay open on the desk, next to an eggshell teacup and saucer. Rami’s beautiful lapis lazuli globe was on the floor, broken in three pieces. Nick removed a glove and dipped a finger into the cup. The tea was warm.

  A floorboard creaked above. Nick set the glove next to the saucer and moved toward the open portal that led to the sitting room. He placed each step with a slight roll of his foot, silent. Then, as he crossed into the room beneath the spiral staircase, a shadow appeared at the bottom step.

  “Hands up, now!” ordered Nick, uncertain if the figure was friend or foe. The shadow gave no hint of surrender. It turned to face him and raised a matching Vector.

  Nick fired a burst on full auto and the intruder quivered with the impacts, staggering back into the front window, a black silhouette against the luminescent curtain. But the Hashashin did not fall. He was wearing armor like the others. And like the others, he had an uncanny ability to absorb pain.

  Suddenly a panel in the oak wall to Nick’s right opened. Rami darted out of a hidden space beneath the stairs and raced across the room between Nick and the intruder.

  The Hashashin took full advantage of the distraction and sprayed rounds at Nick’s head, forcing him to dive back into the study. Bullets dug into the woodwork and thudded against the books on the shelves.

  Lying prone on the floor, Nick rolled back into the open and emptied his clip at the shadow’s head.

  The curtain fluttered. Glass shattered. But if Nick so much as grazed the Hashashin, his enemy didn’t show it, and now he had no more bullets, and nowhere to go.

  The assassin dropped his smoking silencer ten degrees, adjusting for the lower target.

  Before he could squeeze the trigger, a deafening report obliterated the quiet of the covert battle. The intruder’s head exploded, spraying deep red across the glowing white curtain behind. The silhouette slowly sank to the foot of the window and melted into the inky black beneath the frame.

  CHAPTER 51

  Nick flipped on a standing lamp next to Rami’s antique couch, and found the professor standing by the end table a few feet away, a fat, snub-nosed Colt revolver hanging loose from his fingers.

  The assassin had crumpled into a bleeding heap below the window. This one wore a black balaclava over his face, but his leathers matched those of the riders Nick had encountered earlier. He guessed that the Hashashin’s motorcycle was somewhere in the woods near the gate.

  “I ran,” said Rami quietly. “There was nothing I could do.”

  Nick crossed in front of the couch, took the .357 from the professor’s hand and laid it on the table. “No, Rami. You didn’t run. You turned and fought and you saved my life.”

  Rami looked over at Nick. Tears welled up in his eyes, betraying the sorrow behind the steady calm of his voice. “Not you. Her. Myra. The life saved does not redeem the one lost.”

  He lowered himself onto the couch. “I never heard him come in. I never heard a thing. I told her to go to bed, call it a night, but she insisted on making me a sandwich. He was standing over her body when I came out of the study. He saw me. I ran.”

  “Who was she?” asked Nick, returning to the stairs and inspecting the open panel in the wall. It concealed a priest hole—a hidden room used to hide priests during England’s anti-Catholic period. Rami had never shown it to him.

  “I have to tell her mother.”

  Nick closed the panel and knelt next to the dead assassin. He pulled the sleeve up the left forearm. This one bore the double crescent-moon tattoo, the same as the sniper from Istanbul—a Hashashin bishop. “Rami, who was she?” he repeated, adding some command to his voice.

  “A no one. A Copt, like me.” Rami put his head into his hands. “One less in the world for the Islamists to hunt. Her mother is a friend. Myra lived here and worked as my aide. In exchange I paid her tuition.”

  The assassin’s pockets offered Nick no more clues than the others. He carried only a knife and a burner phone with no records of calls made or received. Nick had to assume they checked in periodically. More Hashashin might already be on their way. Not to mention the cops. He tossed the phone on the dead man’s lap and stood up. “Someone will have heard that shot. We have to get out of here.”

  “What about Myra?” asked Rami, lifting his head.

  “The police will take care of her.” Nick dragged the professor up from the couch by the arm. “Come on. We have to leave.”

  Rami pulled his arm away and headed into the study. “Wait. There’s a book we must bring with us.”

  —

  Nick and Rami left Cambridge in the professor’s ’65 MGB hardtop. The little green MG coupe had some pickup with a V8 under the hood, but there was no shoulder room. The claustrophobia Nick experienced in the team’s rented Peugeot was nothing compared to this. “How do you drive this thing?” he asked, breaking a long silence. “I keep banging my knee with the gearshift.”

  “Jokes are not going to help.”

  “I’m sorry about Myra. I’m sorry I brought you into this.”

  Rami stared out his window at the empty fields passing by. “You did not slit her throat. She was killed by an extremist deceived by a false religion, and she will not be the last.” The professor was quiet for another long stretch. Then he straightened in his seat and folded his arms. He smiled wanly. “I know the MG is small, but I like how she corners. Besides, not many cars will fit in my garage.”

  Drake was in and out of contact throughout the drive. Partly because he was keeping quiet as he evaded the police, and partly because he was moving in and out of the dead zone caused by Chaya’s still active jammer. The good news was that the jammer also affected police communications in the area.

  By the time they arrived in West Central London, Nick had not heard from his teammate for a good twenty minutes. At his last communication, he was near Warwick Square, a tiny park west of the flat, just beyond the police boundary. Nick planned to drive right in and grab him.

  That proved easier said than done.

  When he finally rolled to a stop next to the park, after a number of backtracks and reroutes thanks to the heightened police presence, he saw no sign of his teammate. Across the street, a single bobby walked along a line of three-story row houses, heading away from them, shining his flashlight on doorsteps and down into window wells. Ahead and slightly left, blue and yellow lights flashed through the park’s trees. They could not wait here long.

  “Stay here,” said Nick, watching the bobby round the corner at the end of the block. “If anyone questions you, tell them you were my hostage.”

  “That hardly seems plausible.” Rami pulled the front of his jacket aside, exposing the revolver tucked into his waistband.

  Nick frowned. “Shove that in the glove box . . . if it will fit.”

  At that moment a pair of large hands slapped the passenger window, and the startled professor jerked the revolver out of his waistband. Nick grabbed Rami’s wrist to steady him as Drake’s face appeared outside the glass.

  “We need to go,” said the big operative, crawling awkwardly into the back, his effort to squeeze into the tiny car pressing the professor up against the dash. As soon as he was in, Rami dropped his seat heavily back into position and slammed the door. “I almost shot you, young man.”

  Drake ignored him. “We need to go, now!”

  Even as he spoke, a pair of high beams flashed on behind them.

  CHAPTER 52

  Nick cranked the engine and shoved the gearshift into first, his tires squealing as the MG lurched forward. Ahead, a police Saab raced backward into view with its lights flashing and screeched to a halt in the intersection, blocking their path. Nick kept his foot on the gas and tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

  “You might want to fasten your seat belt, Professor,” said Drake, though he could not do the
same. He had to sit sideways in the tiny backseat.

  Nick accelerated for another fraction of a second and then muscled the wheel hard over, counting on the MG’s low center of gravity and the slick road to keep him from tipping over. His foot never came fully off the gas.

  The little car reversed course nicely, and as soon as the tires found their grip again, Nick accelerated straight past the vehicle that had crept up behind them. “This is your town, Professor,” he shouted over the blare of the sirens behind them. “What’s the best way out of it?”

  “Take Kings Road.”

  Nick squinted through the windshield, searching for street signs that were not there. “And that would be . . .”

  “West! Head west as soon as you can!”

  A cross street was coming up, but a pair of police motorcycles approached from the west, blocking Nick’s intended path. He turned the other way.

  “East it is,” exclaimed Drake, gripping the seats as Nick fishtailed through the ninety-degree turn.

  Nick’s route was chosen for him at every turn as more police vehicles appeared at each intersection. He jinked right and left to avoid a pair of oncoming bikes, turned onto a straightaway, and ended up staring into the headlamps of a civilian Fiat. The driver beeped a puny horn and slammed on his brakes.

  Rami pressed himself back into his seat rest. “Left side! We drive on the left side in this country!”

  “Dumb rule,” grunted Nick, swerving around the hatchback and pressing the accelerator to the floor. “Makes no sense at all.”

  “Nightmare One, this is Lighthouse,” said Molly, coming up on the SATCOM. “I thought you might like to know the police intentionally steered you onto that straightaway. They laid down a spike strip.”

  A faint strip of black stretched across the road ahead. Without Molly’s warning, Nick would have never seen it.